Milking the Moon (30 page)

La Table Ronde
had given the
Paris Review
a small room in their offices in the rue Garancière, but it was not big enough to put everybody in. So early in the morning—like ten—we often met at the Deux Magots, not the Tournon, so that all the other people wouldn’t hear what we were talking about. Because the French meet in a café to do business or to be friends. There are probably people in Paris who have been doing business for years who have never seen the inside of each other’s offices. They meet at the Flore, the Deux Magots, the Montparnasse. I’ve seen big executives of the Gallimard publishing house and prominent lawyers spending two or three hours doing their business in a café. So strong is the tradition of “See you at the Flore.” All cafés have some kind of grill, and you can get a hot sandwich of this or that or an omelet with heated French bread, butter, a piece of cheese, and some good red wine. And everybody has a secret café on some back alley. If they don’t want somebody to see that they are discussing such and such a deal, they all have some other café or other restaurant or little bistro that they can walk to. So we met more often at the Deux Magots.

I don’t think there ever was a meeting when everybody was there. It was a very loose-jointed editorial policy. Everybody was always coming and going, coming and going. George was the factor. George was the hitching post, and it was a portable hitching post. They were unofficial editorial meetings. Like “We are supposed to have everything at the printer next week and we haven’t chosen the short stories” or “Did you have something you wanted to show?” I’d say, “Well, I got a real good one in my file.” And George would say, “Well, Pati Hill has a new story. Maybe we ought to put that in.” And somebody else would say, “Well, I got a story from Iowa the other day. I thought it was real good, and it has a lot of humor.” Then, you know, “Well, what about poetry?” “Well, Donald Hall, you know, is at Harvard now, and we haven’t heard from him. He did send us some things we didn’t use last time.” Somehow it got to the printer. I have a photograph of a
Paris Review
editorial meeting with Bee Dabney and George Plimpton and Alfred Chester and myself with our balloons at the Café des Deux Magots, having a serious editorial meeting. Serious. But we were not at all not doing our jobs. The
Paris Review
was a genuine publication of a salon, not a publication of a board of directors.

We might have all committed suicide if we thought we were doing something of global significance. Our whole point was the here and the now, Americans in Paris, in the tradition of Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and all the Americans who were in Paris in the twenties. That sense of tending the fire of culture in the Old World. Here we are making sparks; that’s why it was fun. Who knows what significance something has when they are doing it? Those Wright brothers really wanted to see what the shoreline looked like from the sky: the seagulls’ point of view. They weren’t out to revolutionize the world. They wanted to see what the seagull saw. And I think that Edison must have burned his fingers once too often striking matches to light a lamp. People who are doing earthshaking things often don’t realize that. Anne Frank didn’t know she was going to be an international name when she wrote in her diary. Proust thought he was doing
salon littéraire
gossip. Faulkner just had this sense about life in the provincial South. We were simply being a part of the here and now, Americans in Paris. Any group that would include South meets North and North meets South—by the time you shake that up in the popcorn popper, naturally you are going to have something lighthearted.

We thought we were trying to put out a readable and lively and first of all intelligent review that need not necessarily be defined as literary. I think all the people involved had a certain scorn for certain professorial literary circles in America, and I think they all had a sense of delight in the
salon littéraire,
which is such a different thing. The professorial get together to bitch.
Salon littéraire
gets together to gossip. It’s as simple as that.

“Did you hear So-and-so had a book accepted at Doubleday?”

“Well, Doubleday, you know, that’s not…”

“He thought he was going to go to Harcourt Brace.”

“Harcourt Brace kept it for a long time, but then they sent it back to him.”

“Well, he never would really finish it properly.”

“That ending. He’s got to do something with that ending. The last fifty pages…”

“Well, anyway, Doubleday is taking it. I guess he’s happy.”

“Yeah, but you know, Mary Louise says she’s leaving him. She says she was ready to dry his tears until he got something published, but now she’s going on to do her own thing.”

You know. That’s exactly what the French
salon littéraire
is. Gossip on a very high level. Whereas American professors theoretically discuss English ritual and all that, but they are really discussing salaries and tenure and who’s been called up for fondling a student. It’s not about books and manuscripts.

Ink and Paint

All the time I was working hard at my own stuff. I write always. I have always lived in a world of tablets, lined pages, and number 2 pencils. And I was always writing. Even before I could read, I was grabbing the colors and writing in my grandmother’s ledger book. I can remember lying on my tummy on the floor, scrawling in one of her bookkeeping books. I couldn’t read or write; I was just scrawling. And she laughed and laughed and said, “What are you writing?” I said, “I’m writing an opera called
Dialogue of the Tulips
.”
So she got drawing pads and little notebooks and started teaching me to read the next day.

From the moment I was born, I knew that I wanted to write poetry and plays and that I wanted to use colors. There was just something about the idea of words. Words, words, words, words, words, words, you know. And making rhymes. If I were locked in jail, I would have a very long novel in two months. I just never thought of being anything other than ink and paint. I think I was ten when I wrote my first poem. It was printed in the public school
Courier.
I published regularly from my sophomore year. I did a column that was in every issue of the school newspaper. In my last year of high school, I won a prize for the best column written by a high school student in the United States. And I did a short story they published called “The Weird Sisters,” about this woman and her maid who hate each other. But when the woman dies, a week later the maid dies because they can’t live without their enmity. In the
Register,
I published some tiny little articles about the actress Alexandra Dagmar and Edmond de Celle, the painter. So I was always in print somewhere, little by little, from the beginning.

In New York I used to get up early before I would set out for the library and sit at my table and write. When I finished my first novel and looked back at it, I knew where it belonged: in the circular file on the floor. It was too close to gloom and doom. It’s about a man who hates his parents and hates his wife and goes off for this long weekend and comes back and kills his wife. I was thinking of a news item I had read, and I wanted to contrast the kind of Baptist puritan small town with Mardi Gras. There was a famous story about this guy who vanished and then came home many years later and killed his wife, saying, “Think how many years you kept me here when I could have been in New Orleans.” But murder is not my thing. I’m triple Sagittarius with a healthy liver; I couldn’t do gloom and doom. It just ain’t in me.

Although I love the works of Faulkner, there had been too many novels emulating him that were gloom-doom novels, almost as if the writer were insisting on gloom doom. William Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
is a perfect example. I call it
More and More Darkness.
It’s all going straight for the fall. From the first sentence you are on the way to the cemetery. Whereas it seemed to me that the human scenery contains more than the sustained note of gloom. People still tell jokes at funerals. Styron was part of the
Paris Review
crowd, and I liked him personally. He’s a fine writer, but his books were too gloom doom for me. I never really got to know him or have a conversation, because what he wrote made me nervous.

I didn’t consciously set out to write an antidote to the gloom dooms, but by just the way I feel about life and the fact of Carnival and the fact of the Gulf Coast, that’s how it turned out. One night in New York, I came home late from one of the plays I was working on, had a steak and some red wine, and went to that Remington typewriter and wrote, “Down in Mobile they’re all crazy.” It just came from nowhere, outer space, five thousand years of ghosts of cats and monkeys saying, “Let’s help Eugene.” It didn’t become a novel until about page ten. Then it wrote itself. I’d done my apprenticeship, in a sense. My theme was the difference of the Gulf Coast from the rest of the world—a little pocket of something special. I had about a hundred pages when I left New York; just shoved them in the trunk with all the stuff I needed for Paris. I’d been in Paris about six months when I put some paper in the Remington and picked it up again. Then when I had about two hundred pages, I sent it off to the Lippincott Prize novel contest.

I had been in Paris nine months when I read the news in the
Figaro
that Nicolas Nabokov and I’ve forgotten who else were doing a festival of twentieth-century music at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysees. I saw that Stravinsky was going to conduct his
Oedipus Rex,
this fabulous soprano from the state theater in Brussels was going to sing all three soprano parts of
Socrates,
and a production was coming from Juilliard doing Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s
Four Saints in Three Acts.
And I thought, Oh, God, I wish I had the money to buy tickets. Then I got this telegram saying “To what address should we send your check? You have won the Lippincott novel contest.”

Three weeks later the announcement was in the
Figaro:
Tickets go on sale at eight o’clock, Tuesday the so-and-so, for the twentieth-century festival. I bought a folding chair and a thermos bottle and a picnic basket and filled it with goodies from a fancy food shop. I had a notebook with little three-by-five cards. At midnight the night before, I went to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysees and I sat by the door closest to the box office. I stayed there all night. ’Long about three, a lot of students turned up. I didn’t say anything. I just wrote numbers and gave them out. Because the French—nobody stays in line, they push, they climb over trodden dead bodies of other people in the queue, so I just wrote numbers and handed them out. I grunted when they asked things, so they just thought I was a rude French official. When the doors opened there was quite a mob, but since the line had stretched and formed itself correctly at least twenty back, those who would have rushed were held back by those who were numbered.

So I was the first. They had the floor plan of the theater, and I said, “First row balcony, these two seats for the first performance of EVERYTHING.” It was like a few hundred dollars. Oh, God, how I loved it. I would always wait until the last minute and say to some friend, “Oh, incidentally, tomorrow night. What are you doing tomorrow night? Would you like to go to the first night of
Four Saints in Three Acts?” “What?
You have seats? How’d you get them?” Three-by-five note cards, a pencil, and a folding chair. Coffee in a thermos and a picnic basket which you could use as a blunt instrument if you had to.

My stock went up a great deal at the Tournon after the Lippincott. It was announced, I think, in
The New York Times,
and somebody who knew I was part of the
Paris Review
had clipped it and mailed it to George or Peter or somebody. There was a little hush when I went into the Tournon one night. I played it cool, of course. Is there any other way? They were all delighted, because naturally, the more fuss members of the
Paris Review
were making in the world, the better for the
Paris Review.
But everybody there was publishing things and winning prizes and getting contracts, and we were congratulating each other constantly. It was fun.

*

In New York, I had gone to every museum. At great leisure. Like do the Metropolitan for two months. Just do two or three pictures and get out. Just forever and forever and forever and forever. So I didn’t get around to the Museum of Natural History until much later. Dinosaur bones or dinosaur reproductions have never meant much to me. King Kong, yes. Dinosaurs, no. But finally, one day, I didn’t have a museum left. I’d done them. So I thought, Well, I’ll just go and look at that Museum of Natural History that’s off of Central Park.

Well, I saw some bones and some dinosaurs, and they had a model plane that was doing something funny—I’ve forgotten what. Then I wandered into the habitat groups. I looked at some hartebeests and thought, Oh, the dear things. And went on and saw some giraffes and the double-humped camel. And I thought, Well, yes, camels. Then I turned this corner and here were these most elegant monkeys. The white-mantled colobus. I mean elegance. Black, black, black with a dead white cape of silk fringe on their backs. The kind of black that is not the absence of color, but is the world of shadow and soot in a chimney, which is another concept. The white-mantled colobus was soot black with these perfect opera capes of snow-white fringe. They all looked as though they were going to the opera. Rather long tails. Delicate wrists and delicate hands, feet. And pure white eyelids in a black face. The little label said they rarely descend to ground level. It said they could inform each other when certain trees are ripe or when certain beetles they consider a great delicacy are available in their vicinity. They can communicate with other white-mantled colobus monkeys as far as half a mile away by employing a kind of Morse code which they blink. With those white eyelids and black face, they just do their own perfect monkey Morse code. You know, like “Get over here quick. The wild pomegranates are falling off the trees. Those green beetles are back in town. Get over here quick. Have a party tonight.” You know. I flipped.