Follies of God Read online

  Remembering the conversation—and the woman—Hunter began to laugh, a lovely, girlish laugh, then a boisterous, full-throated one. “What are the odds?” she asked me and her husband. “What are the fucking odds? He’s living with Dorothy Hart Drew. Sometimes I don’t think life is a mystery at all. It’s a slapstick comedy constantly replayed, over and over! And here we are again!”

  Tenn and I discussed all of these things—and all of these people—on one afternoon in New Orleans. Clearly inspired, he returned to his hotel room and composed a poem about our conversation, and he showed it to me, some parts typed, some handwritten, lines crossed out, written over, inserted, transposed. I could not read it, so Tenn read it aloud to me, and I wrote it down.

  When I was very young, I would sit, alone and in the darkness,

  Facing a first day of school, or a funeral, or a baptism,

  And I would not know what to expect or how to behave.

  And I would think of you.

  You were the memory I called on.

  I don’t know why I had this ritual, alone and in the darkness,

  But I was afraid, and I believed that some ritual, like all the rituals,

  Would help me to make some sense of what was to come.

  And I would think of you.

  You were the memory I called on.

  Nothing beneath this cruel and blind sky can ever hurt a person,

  Who has seen the light and the color and the heat that comes from this sky.

  And you saw the gifts and the blessings in the funeral, the baptism, the beating.

  Anything can be altered with kindness, a scent, a reading from Crane or a Sousa waltz.

  If I can’t imagine any of these things,

  If I can’t recall the horns of that Gershwin record,

  Or the poem about creative manifestation,

  Or the scent of my baby’s back, scrubbed, smooth, touched by breeze and affection.

  I’m going to think of you.

  You’re going to be the memory I call on.

  When I was very young and sat alone and in the darkness,

  I could not have known that you would be a part of my life, invested in my heart.

  I imagined you on those dark nights, and that was my ritual.

  Creating friends, partners, who would know what to say and how to feel.

  Who would dance in a cloud of perfumed powder,

  Who would write a sentence about love that could help me accept that I had seen it,

  Who would display it toward another person so that I could accept that it was real.

  Who would give to me, just hand it to me, and say “I love you.”

  I’m thinking of you.

  You are my memory.

  There seemed so much time then, when I dreamed you, in the darkness.

  I was frightened of time, then, not knowing what it would introduce or take away.

  But I’m afraid now as I watch it recede, slink away, droop like a drunken come-on or an old man’s neck.

  I want to bring it back and tell it what I’ve seen, through your eyes.

  I want to bring it back and sing it the songs I’ve heard from your lips.

  I want to bring it back and take care of it, as you took care of me.

  When the curtains lifted and brought us the scent of sand and salt.

  When the words came easy and often so that we could tell each other how lucky we were.

  When we could talk and no one was alone and in the darkness.

  I will always think of you.

  You are always a part of my memory.

  Because of you there will be hope for the frightened child in the dark.

  They haven’t met you yet, but they will.

  They may have to dream you into existence, but they’ll find you.

  Traces of you will be in their happy memories.

  The days may dawn as a judgment—of our souls, our work, our right to live,

  And the nights may press down on us like a bad debt,

  But I go back to the young person I think I once was,

  The young person who dreamed you up and then found you.

  I will always think of you.

  You are my memory.

  Tenn told me that he wrote the poem as if imagining a sturdy, bare piece of tapestry. Julie Harris was a large and strong needle, made of gold, and Frances Sternhagen was a strong string of brilliant thread, multicolored, that he used as he plunged the needle through the tapestry and created the poem. Kim Hunter was a bright and luminous white thread, needed to set off the colors around it.

  I closed my book, hugged Tenn in Jackson Square, found my car, and drove home.

  Eleven

  I HAD NOT BEEN home for more than thirty minutes when the telephone rang. It was Tenn, and he was apologetic: he felt he had terminated our conversation far too abruptly. Might he explain why?

  I propped the receiver against the left side of my head and wrote what he said, but he was speaking to me from a location full of voices and music and clattering plates and cutlery, and his thoughts raced about madly. My notes are full of dashes and dots, an improvised shorthand that make it impossible for me to quote him directly. Here is the essence of what he told me that night in that phone call.

  The discussion of Carson McCullers and the pairing of his mind with that of another writer had led his thoughts to William Inge. The life and death of William Inge weighed upon Tenn tremendously, and the prayers and rituals he had cobbled together to help him write and learn to live by the lies that fuel our days, the “manic and masturbatory steps and apologies for surviving,” were always accompanied by an image of Inge’s haunted and beautiful eyes, clear and long-lashed; his arms, which Tenn remembered as lightly furred and warm and strong; and that high forehead, like something out of a Tenniel drawing by way of an Arrow shirt advertisement.

  “Bill and I were rubes,” Tenn told me. “Rustic and golden by way of the fire of ambition and sexual fear, and both somewhat retarded, in a tertiary manner, by means of our time spent in the Midwest, a dry and flat terrain in which secretive souls such as ours could never hide and touch and dream and compose the life we hoped to live.” Tenn had benefited from his time in the South, “full of shadow and moist heat and the forced intimacies born out of a need to remain cool, to get through the night.” The South had been the “great rock” for Tenn, the rock upon which he felt he could build his new identity, and he liked to think that he was able, fitfully, to provide Bill Inge some shadow time beneath his rock, a “splotch of darkness in which he could relax and reveal himself to me, to himself. Call me St. Peter,” Tenn quipped, “and from beneath my rock, Bill Inge began to be built.”

  Tenn and Bill Inge met in St. Louis in 1944, when he considered himself a “raw and angry” person, bruised by the reaction of Boston critics and audiences to Battle of Angels, and conflicted about his brief time in Hollywood, where he had loved the weather, the money, the easy physicality and humor of his Italian lover, and access to MGM and routes and locales that held so many memories for him of films he had loved. Foremost on his mind, however, was that he was a failure as a writer. “I felt terribly old,” he told me, remembering himself at thirty-three, “the words and the characters so close to the surface, so ready to be exposed and shared, and yet I knew I hadn’t been fully free with whatever talent I might have had.”

  Inge, himself a frustrated writer, was working as a reporter and critic for the St. Louis Star-Times and requested an interview with Williams, “a young and promising playwright sprung from our own environs,” as Tenn remembered it laughingly. “As you know,” Tenn told me, “and as I keep saying, I am very disingenuous when I am being feted.” Tenn agreed to the interview and remembered the electric current that coursed between and around the two men, who began their time together in great propriety, sitting in separate spaces in the famed S curve taught to aspiring models and proper young ladies at the John Robert Powers school, smoking, smiling—emblems of professionali
sm. This pose broke down in what Tenn recalled as less than an hour, and they became “fast and rampant,” exchanging “sensations and fluids, and vowing to each other a devotion to a prepared and examined death.” Tenn paused for a moment and told me to be sure and write the words as a title: A Prepared and Examined Death.

  William Inge, a natural playwright, but a man, according to Tennessee, utterly alien in the world, afraid of virtually everything. They were only comfortable in Inge’s apartment, discussing art, theater, and music. (illustration credit 11.1)

  “I won’t hide anything from you,” Tenn said. “I’ll tell you everything. Perhaps it will be of some help to you.”

  When Tenn first walked into the small apartment kept by William Inge in St. Louis, he noticed a piece of onionskin paper, folded in half and taped to the wall above his typewriter. On the page was written “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.” The translation: “The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.” The quote came from Mallarmé, a poet unknown to Tenn.

  “I was taken by this man instantly,” Tenn remembered, “but I began to feel far more passionate as I looked about his monkish little apartment, the important books, the stark devotion to work, and this quote, in French. Here was a man like me: a frightened rube, tiptoeing toward his work, his passions, himself. Straining so hard in every direction, tight and tense and ready to fire if only a target existed.”

  Tenn and Inge also shared a belief—morbid but embraced with a brio that made it appear joyous—that they were each on a short-term lease on Earth, and everything needed to be consumed and burnt off in pursuit of the few works they could manage before they fulfilled the destiny of a prepared and examined death.

  In the midst of a pusillanimous America in the midst of a World War, Tenn and Inge had cast their minds back to the avant-garde 1920s, a “great flowering of aberrant minds,” the “diseased diaspora” of restless Americans who settled in Paris and threw off the trappings of the puritanical states that had shaped and rejected them. “We were much taken by Harry Crosby,” Tenn told me, “and we wanted to latch on to some of the fire he had harnessed. We knew the great burning would come for us eventually, but we wanted the white heat of the fire, the illumination of the flames, before we were engulfed.”

  Crosby, the son of great Bostonian wealth, had witnessed carnage and death as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and as Tenn would later learn in conversations with Malcolm Cowley and others who had known the young man, he had created, in the grey and wet hills of France and the blood-slicked halls of army hospitals and tents, his own religion, one that would best fill the emptiness he now felt, with so many young men like himself maimed so quickly, so senselessly. “He wanted grandeur,” Tenn recounted, “and he found it, initially, in the religion he fashioned in which he worshipped the sun, which might ignite some life inside the deadly shell he now inhabited. Looking upon the blanched corpses of young soldiers, he imagined the sun, angry at times, but also pulsing with life, beaming over their bodies, and he wrote, ‘Lost things were warm with beauty,’ and ‘The sun is our God and … death is our marriage.’ ” Marriage for Crosby, as Tenn intuited him, existed between men and women, men and men, men and literature, men and art, men and the locales they lived in, and the people fate and their own will had determined would be their neighbors or friends. Everything moved according to the cycles of the sun: the farmer knew to turn his soil according to solar charts; the sea responded to its mighty determination; and death, prepared and examined, should be timed to guarantee one’s deliverance, one’s ascendancy to the sun. “Fly into the sun,” Tenn remembered Crosby urging all artists. “Sun/​Speed/​Darkness/​Death—these are the cycles of life as we know it. Inhabit the sun, be a person of light, burn out fast.” Crosby founded the Black Sun Press, which published Hart Crane, the poet who most influenced Tenn’s own thoughts and approaches to writing. “In those early years,” Tenn remembered, “I never began notes on a play, a poem, a short story, without rereading all of Hart Crane, thinking of him, trying to be with him on the deck of that ship from which he slipped from us forever. He fell to the bottom of the sea, but I think he was actually flying into the sun, seeking to find his ultimate membership among those who might understand him, those who, like him, could only be destroyed on this planet.” In life the mind of Hart Crane raced and scattered, but Tenn imagined that there was calm and quiet “and no jarring distractions or rejections” on the cool floor of the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters had always been a part of Tenn’s life, the source of frolics on vacations or fear when storms arose, and which was now the final resting place for his favored poet. Tenn had kept a jar of water from the Gulf on his writing desk for years, and even as he hocked typewriters and changed addresses, the cloudy water traveled with him. Tenn’s lover Pancho Rodriguez, when told of the provenance of the water, replied that he had always thought it was holy water, blessed in some way. “It is,” Tenn replied, “and it was.”

  TENN FELT for a brief time that he and Bill Inge might be able to bond and become a working and loving unit—bold writers drawing words from the sun and throwing them back up and toward their fiery source. “We wanted so much to love and be loved, to meld with someone who loved as we did. We could transgress in spirit. We wanted to change things; we wanted to blow away the plays that we found boring, that didn’t speak to us; we were queer and finding ways to be so openly and freely and with some sense of enjoyment. In those ways we were pushing against things as they were, but our work was very simple and orderly in comparison with the men who were fueling our dreams.”

  Both Tenn and Inge felt old and failed when they met, but Inge was on the cusp of thirty-one, and Tenn was thirty-three. “We were much older than our years,” Tenn admitted. “We had ambition, but we were mentally and physically slack.”

  Tenn was not typically attracted to a man with Inge’s attributes, but he assured me that the sexual response he felt for the writer was instant and genuine. This response grew as he observed Inge at work and realized that he possessed a sense of discipline that was as strong as his confidence was weak. “He wrote and wrote,” Tenn remembered, “and then he shredded and burned. I have no idea how many reams of paper he filled with plays and stories and then destroyed. He could walk proudly and erect toward an idea, but then he flinched and fell away when he began to read it over and consider it.”

  Tenn thought of the characters in his plays as being observed from a great height, and he confessed to Lillian Gish that what helped him the most in moving toward his strongest female characters was watching, over and over, those D. W. Griffith films in which his brilliant cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, risking life and limb, rose high above the sets and the actors and most of the lot, to reveal the characters, all of humanity, scrambling like ants across “this sticky plate we call Earth, soiled with our plans and our beliefs.” Tenn could close in on his female protagonist and race toward a conclusion once he could imagine the situation in which she was placed and see it, God-like, from a great height, the “seat of Fate, which carries in its cushion foresight and perspective,” and then, once we know that she seeks a rescue from the reality that keeps battering her (Blanche), love and relocation that are both forever out of her grasp (Alma), and identity that will give her a secure perch in her environment (Serafina), he could zoom in tight on the woman, allowing us to better see her place and her predicament.

  William Inge, on the other hand, had no sense of distance or great height: he saw the situation in which his female characters were set in small, mincing steps “from the toaster to the sink,” as Tenn put it, from the utterly sexless twin bed to the lavatory, from the phone to the back porch where a dog was pitifully called, pudgy thighs patted in the hopes that the dog (youth, love, promise) would come bounding out of the hedge and life could return to a schedule easily managed and freckled with affection.

  There were no sweeping panoramas from which we could see where Lola and Doc Delaney of Come Back, Li
ttle Sheba lived or had been or where they were headed. We discovered their biographies and their grievances and regrets at the pace one would find while reading faded, frequently folded letters, the kind that the mothers of both playwrights saved, tied with ribbon, collected, pulled from beneath beds as vindication or damning evidence. “Bill Inge’s mother referred to letters from her husband, her beaux, her children, bill collectors, as if they were Scripture,” Tenn told me. “Her placement in the world could be proven or solidified by a letter from a handsome man from 1935. She was very much like my mother, encased in a past that was both real and fantasy, a terrible mixture of what might have been, what was imagined, and what should have been given to them. Their sense of entitlement—or rather their outrage at entitlements snatched away from them—was epic, horrible, and Bill and I both grew up suffocating on this scent of rot and retribution.”

  Inge was literally frozen in his actions, having been so coddled and watched over by his mother, Maude, that he had a habit of looking around for permission or physical clearance if he simply needed to rise from a chair, even if he was alone. Tenn could remember pretending to be asleep and watching Inge, in his own apartment, move with the careful steps and exaggerated quietude of a burglar or a “man made of glass, awaiting the next loud noise or powerful movement that might shatter him.” Tenn assumed he moved with such quiet agility as a courtesy to his presumed sleep, but even when preparing a meal or showing him pages of a play, he moved with an irritating slowness that tried Tenn’s patience.