Follies of God Page 22

  Alma Winemiller has at her core a young woman named Julie Harris.

  The prologue to Summer and Smoke begins in the park near the angel of the fountain, at dusk. It is May, in the

  first few years of this century.… Alma, as a child of ten, comes into the scene. She wears a middy blouse and has ribboned braids. She already has the dignity of an adult; there is a quality of extraordinary delicacy and tenderness or spirituality in her, which must set her distinctly apart from other children. She has a habit of holding her hands, one cupped under the other in a way similar to that of receiving the wafer at Holy Communion. This is a habit that will remain with her as an adult. She stands like that in front of the stone angel for a few moments; then bends to drink at the fountain.

  I brought a copy of Summer and Smoke to my meetings with Tenn, and he took the book and pulled the pages back, cracking the spine, and reading it as if it were something he had forgotten, or a work he had only heard of and had finally obtained. He read and reread passages, and pointed to the prologue. “If I spaced this differently,” he said, “and added a few things, it could be a poem. Was I imagining Julie Harris when I wrote this? When I showed my pages to Carson—and she showed hers to me—did my Alma mingle and mate with her Frankie Addams?”

  Tenn could not answer that question, but he recalled that when he was introduced to Harris prior to the premiere of The Member of the Wedding, he felt he was seeing a version—short-haired, blunt-fingered, and freckled—of his Alma. “There is a radiation of goodness and urgency that surrounds Julie Harris,” Tenn told me. “She is fervent and fulsome, and there is an element of hysteria that never fully develops into anything dangerous or destructive, because, I believe, once she steps toward the lip of oblivion or unwise action, her love of life and people, her basic decency, pulls her back, and she again walks among us.”

  This element of hysteria gave to Harris a sheen of sadness that Tenn could always sense and identify. When he later learned that Harris had lost a brother to suicide—as Tenn had lost his sister to medical tampering and madness—he felt a stronger bond with her, and whenever he witnessed Harris in a scene that called for a sense of attraction to or dependency on another person, he was moved to write “strongly and well.” Harris transmitted to Tenn both a sense of attachment and the “shattering sense of disorientation we all know and feel when we are snatched from home, or our concept of home. She has the most incredible ability to make me feel the utter barrenness of life that has lost its bearings, and then she can smile or begin again, and I want to live another thirty years and see what might happen.”

  Julie Harris was clear of prejudice and pretension, wise, and unafraid to tell Tennessee how to improve his work and his life. Watching her rehearse as Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding was, for Tenn, a master class in acting, writing, living. (illustration credit 10.2)

  Tenn joked that I was “the King of Prefaces,” but he labeled himself, among other things, “the Regent of Revisions”: he loved nothing more than the act of deconstructing an earlier play, short story, or essay. Maria St. Just recounted how she had once found him, in his studio in Key West, revising an essay he had written for the New York Times to commemorate the opening of Orpheus Descending. When St. Just pointed out what she saw as the absurdity of revising, “tampering with,” a piece that had been published months before and was now lining cages or had itself been revised into pulp or mulch, Tenn’s response was quick and blunt: “It is never absurd to try to get it right.”

  Words on a page and thoughts in one’s mind, Tenn believed, should always be revised, improved, analyzed, explained. A writer’s work could always be improved, a thought clarified. Revisions were “metaphysical and spiritual” as well as literary, and he was heavily influenced by the working habits and writing style of McCullers, a woman Tenn admitted could be difficult, but who worked “with the ferocity of a demon and the delicacy of an angel,” and under whose spell Tenn had finalized the script of the play.

  At lunch one day in the French Quarter, Tenn thought it best to invoke his friend and “geographical collaborator” Carson McCullers by quoting from memory (so “ruined but still holding the greatest of the gems”) the lines of her prose that had meant the most to him. With the exception of the opening line from her Ballad of the Sad Café (“The town itself is dreary”), it is impossible to find any of Tenn’s quotes in the collected works of Carson McCullers. It is also possible that McCullers would resent the synopses Tenn offered of her novels and short stories; but in the months and years following my time with Tenn, as I read and reread works he had told me to study and emulate, as I looked through stacks in libraries and private collections, it became clear that Tenn had deeply personal relationships and reactions to works that moved him, and he reshaped and rewrote their words to suit his own needs.

  The Member of the Wedding began, for Tenn, with this paragraph:

  I wonder if you can remember that green and crazy summer when Frankie turned twelve years old and realized that she was a person who was joined to nothing at all. It was a terribly long summer, as all seasons are unbearably long to the young, when time is abundant and choices are few, and she could see that during the weeks of that summer she had belonged to no club, was a member of nothing, and was not even comfortable with her position in her odd and small family. Frankie’s mother was dead and her father was absent, forgetful, busy, and like most adults around children, uncomfortable, impatient, unfeeling unless there was some extremity of emotion. The trees that summer were dizzying in their color and their size—Frankie wanted to feel, and to be, as rich and as ripe as those trees. The sun would hit those trees and you could be blinded. The same sun would bear down on the grey sidewalks of the town and they would glitter like glass or the baubles Frankie had won one earlier, better summer at the State Fair. Dizzying, dazzling. Lovely words. Lovely ideas. Would they ever apply to Frankie?

  It was McCullers, Tenn claimed, who wrote the following:

  Do not search for the human soul. It moves with alacrity and capriciousness, and it does not wish to be located, looked over. It operates best when its owner is in doubt, plagued with questions, stranded. Some believe that it hovers above a person, visible to mystics and saints and people trained in the dark arts, but more believe that it is deep within, and you can feel it react and constrict when tragedy approaches or when great happiness is felt. Part of the soul atrophies in moments of great extremity, and if it is subject to too much, it dies. The soul cannot endure too much sadness or happiness. Its ideal home is one of equilibrium. No one has yet determined what the soul actually does for a person, but like an appendix or tonsils, it lies there, thought of, written about, pondered over, waiting to explode or disappear.

  These words, these thoughts, which Tenn believed derived from his friend, often kept him focused and hoping to write. McCullers’s influence on Tenn was, in his own words, formidable—she was a writer of extremity, as he was, and her ability to “observe, fully and painfully, a person in isolation” was her greatest gift as a writer. Her greatest gift as a housemate—and as a person who shared his writing space—was her painstaking approach to each and every word, every single sentence and paragraph, even though she was adapting a work that had already worked well as a novel, and whose contours and shadows she knew well.

  “She approached the work as one totally new to her,” Tenn remembered, “and she agonized over the placement of words, emphasis, the ideal place for a blackout or a dash of humor or a sparkle of violence or melodrama.” McCullers loved melodrama, but only if it was earned. “She used to say to me,” Tenn continued, “that if you show a reader or an audience a baby-sized casket, and ten minutes later the group begins to tell jokes or sing a hymn, that’s melodrama, but it’s earned. People need to live again, to begin again, and they reach for whatever represents for them life or color or the dazzle. ‘Dazzle’ to my mother meant nice soap or perfume, gorgeous flowers in a bed outside or in her best vase or o
n her bosom. Carefully applied powder and dinner with a nice man. Life continues. The dazzle returns.” For Carson it was the company of a sympathetic listener, or a reader who had been moved or altered by her work. She was devastated by failure, even if it was imaginary, anticipated. She was convinced that the critics would savage her for being lazy by adapting her novel to the stage, so she typed and she smoked and she sighed. Her most comfortable position was a crouch in which she was warding off blows, and the blows were always forthcoming, and they were always earned. She would reread her work and wonder why she’d written a scene or a character as she had. While she could exhibit pride in certain sections of her work, more often than not she wished she could rewrite each book line by line. This obsession was one she shared with the man who sat opposite her at that table, keys clacking and pages coming at a fast pace.

  Carson McCullers (right) was the only writer whose company Tennessee could tolerate when he was working, and his visit with her, in Nantucket, remained one of the handful of happy times he could recall. McCullers hosted a party in her Nyack home in 1959 for Isak Dinesen (seen here, left), an occasion that was a bit grander than the “fun squalor” of her times with Tennessee—but, she told him, his name came up often during the festivities. (illustration credit 10.3)

  “We could never have been so close for so long,” Tenn said, “if we had been working on original pieces, but adaptation could survive the presence of another. Carson was moving her novel to the stage, and I was finalizing a play that had been in at least three different earlier versions. Carson would stop me every hour or so and ask me to read what she had done, and I would show her my pages. I knew that I was doing right by Miss Alma if Carson sniffled or if she told me that I was ‘killing’ her. And Frankie was the tomboy Alma might have been if she had not been raised in that oppressive, doily-infested house.”

  Tenn had made the acquaintance of Carson McCullers by writing her a fan letter, one as fulsome and sweet as the one I had written to him. “And mine was successful,” he remembered, “as yours was. She could feel in me, as I did in you, a sympathetic reader, a seeker, someone lost and worth finding, someone with a soul contracting.” Their earlier meeting, perhaps in 1946, was in Nantucket, and Tenn remembered those times as deliriously happy, full of “the dazzle”: gorgeous weather, abundant food, the pages of pale judgment filling up daily, the company of people who fulfilled all mental and physical needs. Tenn was in love with “buoyant, brown” Pancho Rodriguez at that time, and the house at 31 Pine Street was full of laughter and argument and the scent of crab boil and patchouli, on which Carson was overly dependent. “The house was always full of patchouli clouds,” Tenn recalled, “and the pocked wooden floors held a thin layer of patchouli dust. Our footprints were visible on the floor at all times, and every breeze, every move, sent it up in a sweet-smelling cyclone.” In the kitchen on Pine Street, Carson experimented with odd dishes, like a soupy version of mashed potatoes into which were blended olives and onions, and Tenn, Carson, and Pancho would eat the concoction while reading aloud the works of Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov. “We would eat and drink and smoke and read,” Tenn told me, “until Pancho would tug at the cuff of my pants, and then it was time to fuck.” The curtains were light and made of linen and they floated on a breeze. “It was like the time on Royal Street,” Tenn reminded me, “with the right breezes and good music—we had a record player on Pine Street, too—and soft, warm skin in the night. And cats.” While the cats of Royal Street had mewled from below waiting for food, on Pine Street a rainstorm and a broken window convinced a pregnant cat to take up residence on Carson’s bed, where she delivered her brood. “We cared for the kittens,” Tenn said, “and to everything else, we could add tenderness to the season.”

  Tenn had been deeply affected by Carson’s second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, for which he would later write an introduction. He made no attempt to quote from it, but he spoke at great length about the descriptions of Private Ellgee Williams, the soldier who stoked the desires of the sleepy Southern town.

  “I felt she had found out about me,” Tenn told me, “and was writing about someone I recognized. It felt as though portions of my journal had been purloined by this young girl, and I was amazed and embarrassed.” While Tenn could criticize the fact that Reflections, like Ballad of the Sad Café, opened with a statement of the locale’s dullness, he exulted over the descriptions of the town’s foliage and the eyes and thoughts of its characters:

  The soldier in this affair was Private Ellgee Williams. Often in the late afternoon he could be seen sitting alone on one of the benches that lined the sidewalk before the barracks. This was a pleasant place, as here there was a long double row of young maple trees that patterned the lawn and the walk with cool, delicate, windblown shadows. In the spring the leaves of the trees were a lucent green that as the hot months came took on a darker, restful hue. In late autumn they were flaming gold. Here Private Williams would sit and wait for the call to evening mess. He was a silent young soldier and in the barracks he had neither an enemy nor a friend. His round sunburned face was marked by a certain watchful innocence. His full lips were red and the bangs of his hair lay brown and matted on his forehead. In his eyes, which were of a curious blend of amber and brown, there was a mute expression that is found usually in the eyes of animals. At first glance Private Williams seemed a bit heavy and awkward in his bearing. But this was a deceptive impression; he moved with the silence and agility of a wild creature or a thief. Often soldiers who had thought themselves alone were startled to see him appear as from nowhere by their sides. His hands were small, delicately boned, and very strong.… Private Williams did not smoke, drink, fornicate, or gamble.

  Although Tenn did not attempt to quote this passage from Reflections in a Golden Eye, he laughingly recalled that at the time the novel was written, he was certainly engaged in the four qualities that held no interest for his literary doppelgänger. “Oh, we smoked, and we drank, and we fornicated, and we gambled. Oh, how we gambled!”

  In what way? I asked.

  “In the only way that matters,” Tenn replied. “With our hearts planted on the pale judgment, risking exposure and ridicule. Gambling it all, line by line, in a cloud of patchouli dust.”

  Tenn applied tiny but decisive cuts and the occasional “bloodletting” to the 1949 revision of Summer and Smoke. He gave to Alma a more delicate entrance, allowing her to build slowly toward her neurasthenia, which he felt had been too obvious in the premiere production, something that might have been attributable to the actress, Margaret Phillips, who created the role. “She was a lovely but certifiably insane woman,” Tenn told me. “She accepted direction as if it were a dagger to the heart. She took everything personally, instantly. Her Alma was ready for the hat factory in scene 1; there was no layer of Southern proprietary holding in this cascade of illness and regret and passion that was building and boiling. She was oozing—no, she was drenched—once the lights were up.”

  When I met with José Quintero, the director who staged the revival at Circle in the Square four years after the failed Broadway production, he remembered the alterations to the play as thematic rather than as literary, and his recollection was that Tenn wrote the original version of Summer and Smoke in the presence of McCullers, not the revision, which was actually brought forth in the rehearsals for the revival, which now featured a young and brilliant actress named Geraldine Page.

  “I think you need to realize something,” Quintero told me. “Tenn’s chronology is very romantic, and he revises it as often as he does his work. I understand that he needs to think of that time with Carson as the time during which he improved or ‘saved’ Summer and Smoke, but the play was pretty much set by the time I was called in to direct it. We altered a lot, and the name Julie Harris was bandied about a lot by Tennessee, much to the annoyance of Gerry, who was convinced that we wanted her to emulate Julie. Tenn needed to destroy the memory of the original production, which I had seen, and
which was not good, so he began to speak of the ‘restoration,’ as he called it, in much larger terms, with entire acts and whole pages ripped out and apart. But the script did not change much. The emphasis changed entirely, but I don’t recall great changes in the text.”

  José Quintero, the passionate and incisive director of the off-Broadway revival of Summer and Smoke. Tennessee felt comfortable with Quintero, and allowed him to make suggestions and revisions to his play. “I think it can be said that José improves people,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.4)

  Tenn’s notes for Summer and Smoke are exacting, and Quintero did his best, in the cramped playing space of the original, downtown Circle in the Square, to accommodate them. Tenn wrote:

  As the concept of a design grows out of reading a play I will not do more than indicate what I think are the most essential points.

  First of all—The Sky. There must be a great expanse of sky so that the entire action of the play takes place against it. This is true of interior as well as exterior scenes. But in fact there are no really interior scenes, for the walls are omitted or just barely suggested by certain necessary fragments such as might be needed to hang a picture or to contain a doorframe.