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TWENTY-EIGHT

I first knew Rome in 1939, a city where peasants, reeking of garlic, came to market rather like their counterparts (less the garlic) in Washington, D.C., while Mussolini’s Blackshirts were everywhere. Then there was the Rome of 1948–1949 inhabited by Tennessee and Frederick Prokosch, a poet-novelist, while such composers as Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber were to be found at the American Academy. Life was still wartime austere but the dollar exchange rate was all in our favor which made life easy for us if not the Romans. Tennessee took a ground-floor flat in the Via Aurora a block or two from Via Veneto and the gardens of the Villa Borghese. I stayed nearby in the Hotel Eden, living off the fortune I’d earned from
The City and the Pillar
, a vast $20,000. Although I was supposed to have gone to Harvard after I got out of the army in 1946, joining many of my Exeter classmates, I had decided that after a lifetime of being institutionalized (imprisoned is more like it) in a half-dozen boarding schools, summer camps, the awful Los Alamos Ranch School where each boy had his own horse (mine was an ambulatory boneyard aptly called Two-bits)—the Ranch School was seized by the army and became the birthplace of the atomic bomb—then after nearly three years in the army, the thought of four years at Harvard was unbearable. Former Exeter classmates thought I was plainly doomed (I had no trust fund). I would “live by writing,” I said. And so I did to their amazement—even chagrin since many of them had literary ambitions but some of the most talented had lost their nerve in the war. Though “nerve” is hardly the word. “Will” is possibly better. A friend at school, Bob Bingham, was energetically ambitious prewar, but when the war ended and he tried his hand at novel-writing somehow he was out of focus. He had had a bad time of it in the infantry in France where Lewis Sibley, another classmate, was killed: Sibley was already a distinguished poet at seventeen. A year ago I read some of his poems over WBAI radio in New York. The response was as wonderful as it was sad. The infamous “Battle of the Bulge” in France during winter must have been a particular horror for barely trained eighteen-year-old soldiers. Later, I was shown some of Sibley’s letters. The army with its unerring gift for placing people where they would be least useful and most vulnerable had made the nearly blind Sibley a scout. His reported adventures began when his only pair of glasses was broken and the army’s difficulty in supplying him with a new pair reduced his utility as a scout in freezing weather. That he should not, near-blind as he was, have been placed in the infantry was a sign of the general madness of that Good War as it lurched toward a victorious conclusion thanks to Soviet ground troops. Eisenhower, for political reasons, had held back General Patton’s army so that the British Montgomery could at least look competent and the Russians could get to Berlin first, all of which did nothing much for American morale. Anyway, Sibley, wearing new glasses, was duly massacred just as another schoolmate—from St. Albans, not Exeter—was being embraced in a foxhole on Iwo Jima by a Japanese with grenades on his belt that democratically blew out both their stomachs. It is my impression that the so-called “best and brightest” were routinely killed off which might explain the notoriously low level of those now in political life and, to be fair, in the arts as well. Recently, I looked through the 1943 yearbook of our graduating class. As I looked at the pictures, trying to figure out who was who, I was struck by how old we all looked. For the most part, our graduating class averaged seventeen years old; yet there was a photo of three seniors standing side by side; they look as if they are in their early forties. Of course within months of graduation we would all be in the war and so it is possible that kindly fate was telescoping for us the selves that we might have become. Since a number of us would soon be dead, we were being allowed by a jocular nature—or by a magic Kodak—to see ourselves not only grown up but middle aged as well. There is a picture of Bingham and me on a lawn in back of Langdell Hall where I roomed. I am lying on the grass with a book, he is standing over me. We were both editors of the
Exeter Review
, the school’s literary magazine which gave rise, under Bingham’s managing editorship, to more intricate rows than any I was ever to encounter, grown up, on the board of
Partisan Review
. In a way it was nice of fate to give us all a preview of what we were not apt to live long enough to experience for real. Bingham ended up as an editor at Max Ascoli’s
The Reporter
and, later, as a sort of managing editor at
The New Yorker
. We saw little of each other, once grown. Then, one day I got a letter from him to announce that he had a brain tumor and it looked as if he was going to precede me into the long night. Bob and his wife came to Rome but I was away and Howard took them out to dinner. I asked Howard for details. “Well, it was like they had made themselves up to look older, with gray hair and all that.” Rather the way the 1943 yearbook had added a dozen or more years to those of us perhaps most vulnerable to an early death and so presumably curious to get a preview of what we might have become.

I recall in grade school that often a class would vow that in twenty years we would all meet again to see what time had done. But at Exeter, even without the devouring war in wait to pounce, we had no time for such sentimentality. Although most of my relationships with classmates were fairly amiable, once the war was done, I saw Bingham only a few times over the years with another classmate, A. K. Lewis, who had worked with me in the summer of 1942 at a Camden, New Jersey, factory where molded plywood wing tips for fighter planes were made. I was hopeless at the work; he was not. Years later he wrote the script for a wonderful movie called
Klute
. At Exeter we had made a schoolboy bet about which one of us would lose his hair first. Thirty years later, in Hollywood, he paid me the $100 that he owed me and I spent it on our dinner.

Bob Bingham is standing; I am on the grass—outside Langdell Hall where I lived at Exeter. We are about to quarrel over which stories were to appear in the next issue of the
Exeter Review
which we coedited much of the time, a nice preparation for later serving on the board of
Partisan Review
.

I have not gone to any of our class reunions. I can’t think why.

Back to Rome in the sixties. Like Venus, Myra Breckinridge rose or rather leapt from her sea of yellow legal pads. Meanwhile, Roman life agreed with both Howard and me. All sorts of people that we knew and did not know came through town: memorable was Isherwood on his way back from a first visit to India whose Vedanta texts he had written so much about. Overwhelmed by the subcontinent’s proverbial teeming millions, he foresaw, with some equanimity, the eventual dying out of the fragile white race. “But we must,” he said solemnly, “set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and so on. They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”

I gave the completed
Myra
to my editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown—a Boston publishing house. I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.

TWENTY-NINE

My very first publisher, E. P. Dutton, was run by a White Russian called Nick Wreden. When I was still in uniform, he had taken
Williwaw
, my novel about an army ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war. An ursine figure of jovial disposition, during the days of my blackout by
The New York Times
Wreden loyally kept on publishing me. While I was busy writing plays for television, movies, theater, Wreden had moved on to Little, Brown and despite several published obituaries of me as a novelist (apparently, once lost to television that was indeed the end of someone who’d been thought promising), I told Nick that when I got back to novel-writing I’d come to him. But when, like General MacArthur, I did return, Nick was dead, and his place at Little, Brown had been taken by Ned Bradford. I have never needed an editor in the sense of a Max Perkins who was so necessary, we are assured, to salvage the likes of Thomas Wolfe, by neatly shaping long flowing works into simple commercial slices. All I ever needed was an intelligent first reader and, later, a good copy editor. Bradford proved to be ideal. When he read the manuscript of
Julian
his only comment was embarrassingly to the point: “You forgot to tell us
why
he became a Christian apostate.” I promptly provided the missing link. The three novels that I published with Little, Brown were each despite (or because of) the blackout a number-one bestseller on all such lists except that of the self-styled “newspaper of record.” Unfortunately, for Little, Brown and, in the long run, for me, I was persuaded to leave my Boston publisher for the New York–based Random House; there was also
The New York Review of Books
for whom I’d been writing since their first issue in 1963. As the co-editor, Barbara Epstein, was a friend it made sense to be nearby. In those days Howard and I still lived, despite our first long Roman interlude, on the banks of the Hudson River at Barrytown. I’ve already noted how hard it is to get out of politics; perhaps I should have added how hard it is to get politics out of oneself; almost as difficult as to get prose out of one’s system if one is primarily a novelist reconstructed as a dramatist, something quite other. Each has its satisfactions but the autonomy of the novelist, when not impeded by interested parties, can result in the making of worlds whose anterior form is like that of the primal biblical myth, chaos. For the absolute dramatist like Tennessee the written play is a sort of Eden, lacking only living actors to reenact Adam and Eve and the idea of Lilith as well as the entrance of the snake to start the drama going, rather as God did. The Glorious Bird—the name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally, with him, too. But to acknowledge me as a namer of Beasts diminished him as Supreme author. So, who was
I
then? He found the phrase in a letter to me where I am addressed as “Fruit of Eden,” a many-layered image, of course, at whose core there is what the first couple was forbidden ever to sample, knowledge. Thanks to the serpent’s crafty malice Eve fell upon knowledge if not wisdom and thus paradise was lost.

THIRTY

In rereading and writing about the Bird I am often surprised at how much Christian imagery, Old and New Testament, kept leaking into his work. But then—his sister, Rose, to one side—his maternal grandfather, Dakin, an Episcopal clergyman, was his favorite relative. The old man often joined him in Key West where, in due course, I met him. Recently an archivist at Harvard came across a short story that I had written about the old man, based on an anecdote that Tennessee had told me. When Tennessee was in his adolescence, visiting his grandparents in Mississippi, two men came one day to see the Reverend Dakin. He was, Tennessee later discovered, being blackmailed for an adventure with a boy. Apparently, this was not their first visit but it was the last. The Reverend gave them what he had in the bank and then, when they were gone, he took all his sermons out onto the front lawn and burned them. I found this story hard to forget and it was the eighth and last of the short stories that I was to write in my first phase as a prose writer. When it came time to include it in a volume entitled
A Thirsty Evil
, collegiality required me to show it to the Bird who said I must not use it. Since his grandfather was nearly blind and not apt ever to come across a New Directions anthology of contemporary literature…But, the Bird stopped me right there and hissed, “There is
always
Edwina,” known to the world as Amanda in
The Glass Menagerie
. I did point out that since she had not sued her son for his portrait of her in that first play she would hardly take up arms to protect her father. But the Bird was firm even after I changed boy to girl. And so the story was obliged to wait half a century for publication by Harvard.

In the Bird’s last years I seldom saw him. The barbiturate Nembutal and vodka are a lethal combination and they did his brain no good. But the writing was often still marvelous; also, more adventurous than before. Many critics hoped, even prayed that this was a final falling off from his so unbearable to so many of them greatness. But the talent endured. Medications were only harming, for a time, his memory; he was also having hallucinations: one involved an unpleasant encounter with someone in Spain, only to discover the next day that the offending person had not been in the country. His brother put him away to dry out. “It was not so bad in the bin,” the Bird told me later. “I played a great deal of bridge and discovered that some of our best unsung actors are on the television soap operas.”

Howard and I were in Rome when the papers revealed that Tennessee Williams, a recent convert to Catholicism, had come there to obtain the Pope’s blessing. The story sounded a bit crazy to me but the Bird was always highly dramatic in his effects. We did not see him on that trip but, later, we heard all about the visit from Jesuit friends. Father Navone was an Italo-American professor at Gregorian University. Although Navone had seriously failed to attract me to the Scarlet Woman of Rome (as WASPs still sometimes refer to the original Christian Church) we had remained amiable acquaintances and through him I met many interesting Jesuits—in fact, the most interesting ones were soon to leave the church in the later backlash to the liberalism of Pope John XXIII and the reformations of the Second Vatican Council.

The Glorious Bird and his shifty-eyed dog arrive in Rome to discuss spiritual matters with the Pope.

Navone offered to be of service to the Bird who repeated that he would indeed appreciate an audience with the Pope (could it have been the arid Montini?). Navone played the Bird like some golden pre-evolutionary fish. The Pope was not possible considering the Bird’s tight Roman schedule. But the Black Pope would be happy to receive him. Tennessee was delighted, visualizing a black Pope singing “Ole Man Tiber” and looking like Paul Robeson. Actually the “Black Pope” is the name given the head of the Jesuit order, an order usually at delicate odds with whomever occupies the See of Peter. A time was ordained for this historic meeting. There would be a cocktail party where the Bird could flap about amongst his new co-religionists. Navone, a resourceful well-organized man who had noted the Bird’s tendency to vagueness about time and place and, indeed, people, promised to pick up Tennessee in time to take him to the party. The time came. The Bird was napping. He’d just had his daily swim. Drowsily he begged off. He was too exhausted. Tell the Black Pope some other time. Navone rushed to the telephone and rang the Black Pope’s secretary, a formidable Englishwoman. She got the Bird on the phone and in a voice more commanding than that of even Edwina told him that Father Navone would presently deliver him, ready or not, to the cocktail party and that he was not allowed to be one minute late.

So it was that the grandson of the Episcopal Reverend Dakin was delivered into the lair of the Black Pope where a dozen or two fascinated Jesuits were waiting for him. The Bird, need I say by now, really hammed it up. As Jesuits crowded about him he intoned, “Ever since I became a Catholic, I feel this astonishing
presence
all about me.” (He’d been led into this by, I think, his brother Dakin.) Now the one thing that professionally religious people most hate is listening to laypeople go on about their religious experiences as Bernadette was to discover back in Old World Lourdes. Somewhat taken aback, a Jesuit politely asked, “Is this ‘presence’ a
warm
presence?”

The Bird fixed him with a beady gaze: “There is no temperature.”

“How,” asked a helpful Jesuit, “do you write a play?”

“I start,” said the Bird, “with a sentence.” Presumably, during this dialogue, the Holy Father fled to Avignon.

The last time I saw Tennessee we were on the Kupcinet TV interview program in Chicago. A lady author was discussing her book. The Bird leaned back in his chair to the right of Kupcinet and shut his eyes. He remained like this for quite a while. Finally, the host nudged him. No response. “Tennessee, are you asleep?” “No,” said the Bird, “but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.”

We parted in the Chicago street below. I noticed he had a rosy butterfly across the bridge of his nose, known to the bibulous French as a
papillon
. We never met again.