Milking the Moon
Introduction: Eugene in the Details
Edgar Allan Poe and “The Gold-Bug”
The Break-Your-Balls-and-All-for-the-Dollar World
An Orchestra Seat at a Comic Opera
Milking the Moon:
A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet
By Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark
Copyright 2014 by Katherine Clark
Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
Katherine Clark is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 2001.
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Also by Katherine Clark and Untreed Reads Publishing
Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story
Milking the Moon
A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet
Eugene Walter
as told to Katherine Clark
Foreword
Eugene Walter is one of those personages who turn up in life and leave, well, an indelible impression in which all personal characteristics—manner, speech, dress, and so on—are memorably distinctive. The first time I saw him was in the spring of 1952—an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped
Paris Review
office on the rue Garancière. He was wearing a faded linen suit, the kind plantation owners traditionally wore, at least in the movies, set off with a white panama hat. Actually, I don’t recall a hat, but the rest of the ensemble was exact. He posed in the doorway to let all this sink in. He was there because he had submitted a short story to the fledgling literary enterprise—indeed it was one of the first submissions received—and to our delight it was quite wonderful, a Eudora Welty-ish tale entitled “Troubadour.”
We had summoned him to give him the news. His first words on hearing our delight were, “Ah, Tum-te-tum”…a curious, drawn-out triad of sounds that stuck in one’s mind. Indeed, we referred to him as such (“Tum-te-tum is coming in to confer”) and I wrote notes and letters to him as “Dear Tum-te-tum,” though in fact he preferred to be known as Professor James B. Willoughby. That was how he signed his letters, under the phrase “mille fleurs.” The reference to flowers was appropriate since he was an expert on the decorative arts—costume and set design. He pressed a number of his drawings on us at the
Paris Review,
including one of courtiers illustrated as different vegetables; his influence was such that Archibald MacLeish, who had taught a number of the editors and early contributors in his famous English S course at Harvard, wrote me in his capacity as an advisory editor, wondering if the magazine was getting a bit fey. He might have been even more concerned had he known Eugene often spoke about starting up a magazine entitled
The Druids’ Home Companion.
The monkey was his favorite animal. The highest accolade he pressed on the girls around the Café Tournon, across from the Hôtel Helvétia where he lived, was that they were just a step or two below being “Queen of the Monkeys.” They adored him. He invited them in for candlelit suppers in his tiny one-room apartment, the light reflecting on the gold stars he had pasted on the walls. He knew a lot about Southern culinary delights, gumbos, and so forth, but he was poor, and so for all the intended elegance of these little suppers, he did miracles with no more than an onion, a carrot or so, and some oysters. A remarkable stew would come of this, not much of it for sure; one truly learned that taste was far more important than volume.
In the room he had a stuffed monkey under a glass bell jar that he packed and took with him whenever he moved. It went with him when he left Paris to take up residence in Rome. I saw it there when I visited him on the way to Africa one year. His rooms were quite substantial—cats and plants everywhere in the moist rain-texture of the place—certainly substantial compared to the little room in the Helvétia, where there wasn’t enough room, as he put it, “to swing a cat…”
I saw him once or twice in Mobile when I was in the area doing research for an oral biography on Truman Capote. He knew Truman as a boy, of course, and had stories about him. He knew some of the folks up in Monroeville where Truman spent his early life—Harper Lee, of course, and he had stories about her. What I remember especially about my trips to Mobile, though, was his despair at the ruination of Government Avenue, the sea captains’ houses that stood in rows torn down to make way for malls and gasoline stations, and especially the disappearance of the shade trees, which he said were a requirement in the summer because it was always ten degrees cooler when you went and stood under them.
Anything of beauty or antiquity (the two were synonymous) being threatened was to cause him anguish. Modernity, the future seemed of little interest. One of the reasons he wrote less than he could have, and perhaps should have, was his suspect view of what was going on around him; playing in movies, and there were so many of them, especially roles with exotic costumes, provided him with a wonderfully agreeable escape. I remember asking Louis Auchincloss, who wrote Jamesian novels, which century he would revert to given the chance, and he said, wisely if somewhat surprisingly, “Anything after novocaine.” I think Tum-te-tum would bypass the threat of pain to eagerly embrace an era of seventeenth-, even sixteenth-century gentility and grace, at least as long as troubadours were about, and harlequins, and courtiers wearing vegetable hats, and surely a monkey dressed in red pantaloons sitting in a golden cage.
George Plimpton
New York, New York
Introduction: Eugene in the Details
I first met the extraordinary Eugene Walter when I moved to Mobile, Alabama, in 1987. I remember a plump, avuncular figure with a cheerfully protruding belly and missing teeth who beamed at me through glasses that magnified his eyes into giant jelly beans and paid me much more attention than I had expected him to. Eugene was, after all, Mobile’s reigning “character,” the city’s Grand Old Man. I knew of his illustrious past, the decades spent in Europe as a bon vivant, the involvement with the
Paris Review,
and the roles in Fellini films. But he seized on me as if I were the celebrity: “Honey chile, tell me all about yourself.” I later learned that, for Eugene, the capacity to be interested in others was one of the hallmarks of a truly great individual. Eugene himself had a boundless curiosity for the other people with whom he shared “life on this planet.” That first night he quizzed me endlessly about my Alabama background, my Harvard education, and the upcoming publication of my first book,
Motherwit,
which was an oral biography of a black granny midwife.
Soon after, Eugene invited me to lunch at his house. Despite our previous encounter, the invitation took me by surprise: Eugene Walter and I really did not know each other. But this was precisely why he invited me. I have since realized that Eugene operated on this particular principle of hospitality all his life, and this is one reason his life was so full of interesting people, whether in Mobile, where he grew up, or in New York, Paris, or Rome, where he spent a combined total of over thirty years. He knew few people when he first arrived in these cosmopolitan capitals, but by the time he left, his friends and acquaintances included some of the more extraordinary individuals of the time in each of those places. In Rome, where he lived for over twenty years, he “kept the nearest thing to a salon,” the writer Muriel Spark tells us, and “all roads led to him.” Wherever he lived, Eugene sought out people the way others seek money or career advancement. If he happened to meet someone who struck his fancy, he did not wait for chance to provide a second meeting. He quickly planned either a lunch, a dinner, a picnic, or a party. And so I found myself, a young woman in her mid-twenties, going to have lunch at the house of a gentleman in his late sixties whom I did not know.
I had been told the experience would be unique, but little did I realize just how much so. Now, after working so closely with Eugene’s account of his life, I know that what I felt when I crossed the threshold of his house had been experienced by hundreds of others in all the different places where Eugene had lived. It was like entering another world, a magical universe of Eugene’s creation. It wasn’t just the books everywhere, cramming the shelves and piling up on the floors; or the cats draped over the sofas and chairs and lounging among the dishes on the dining room table; or the paintings and objects of art accumulated from a lifetime, jamming the walls. It was also the absence of any sense of time. I had stepped out of the nine-to-five workaday world where a living must be earned and so many things must be done, into a place where good food, good wine, good conversation, and human companionship took precedence over anything else. Eugene would have called the otherworldliness of his environment simply “civilization.”
I was immediately handed a glass of sherry to “whet the appetite.” There was an hour of conversation, interrupted occasionally by Eugene’s stirring of pots in the kitchen while I absorbed the exotic atmosphere of the “cat-free” room, filled with Eugene’s most treasured relics, off-limits to the cats’ prying claws. As the conversation evolved (and the sherry went to my head), a strange transformation seemed to take place. The soul expanded. The worries and anxieties of daily life now seemed trivial and far away. I found myself discussing transcendent subjects, like my favorite books or Eugene’s memories of Europe. Throughout the lunch, of Southern food and French wine and cats crawling on the table, I felt as if I had entered a higher level of existence, where the transcendent had superseded the everyday. This was made possible not so much by the unaccustomed alcohol I was consuming at midday as by the clock-free rhythm of Eugene’s household, which allowed a person to slow down and thus achieve depths of thought and feeling not possible in the nine-to-five race to get things done.
After lunch there was a glass of port, “to aid the digestion, dahlink.” By the time I left, a wonderful new friendship had been formed. Actually, I now felt closer to Eugene after just one visit than I did to some of my so-called close friends I had known for years. Instead of just grabbing a drink or a quick bite to eat, we had spent real time together and had been able to truly share our different selves. As I stepped back outside, that workaday world was in my face again like an unexpected brick wall. For one thing, it was still so bright. Lunch had lasted three hours, which is long for lunch, but it seemed longer. Was it really the same day? Was I really the same person as when I first arrived? No. All was changed. Not only was there a new friendship, but there was a new world opening up, a slightly new me.
From that moment on, my friendship with Eugene progressed rapidly. He called me often for small favors, usually rides to the grocery store, since he didn’t have a car. I was always happy to oblige; indeed, I was flattered to be asked. There were many others he could call on to perform these services. I felt chosen. And I was always rewarded, if not by a lunch or one of his “squiggle” drawings, then just by the sheer pleasure of his company. And it was such a pleasure. Taking Eugene to the grocery store was not just a trip to the grocery store. For that matter, taking Eugene anywhere or just being with Eugene was, again, like inhabiting a different universe.
His conversation was his greatest gift, the means through which he transformed the everyday world into a comic spectacle for anyone in his presence. It might just be a running commentary on the passing landscape: “Have you ever noticed how the Baptist churches have the smallest steeples? I hate those little-prick Baptist churches.” It might be a tragicomic tale of woe about a recent visit to the dentist or a run-in with a benighted city official. Or it might be a reminiscence about an important event or personage from his years outside the South. But just to greet Eugene with a conventional “How are you?” was to invite the unexpected. “Oh, I don’t know, darling,” he replied to me once. “I’m fat, I’m bankrupt, and I’ve got fleas.” Eugene was nothing less than a walking one-man show, always on, always delivering an impromptu dramatic monologue that never failed to amuse, delight, challenge, stimulate, fascinate, and educate all at the same time.