Follies of God Read online

  Inge found drama and death in household appliances and daily toiletries. His older brother, Luther, recalled by the playwright as young and handsome and recently married, had nicked himself while shaving, introducing into his body a rare blood poisoning that took his life. Inge had desired Luther, a fact that filled him with considerable dread, even as he admitted spying on his brother as he showered and shaved. The act of watching Luther shave was Inge’s first memory of erotic pleasure, as he sat on the closed toilet seat and watched his older, naked brother at the bathroom mirror. Inge had resented Luther’s leaving the family to marry, and now he had left the earth altogether, his body a waxy off-white in the coffin, “the color of maggots,” as Inge described it to Tenn. “Bill Inge wondered his entire life if his eroticization of his brother’s shaving had infused it with some horrible and evil power,” Tenn told me, and in Inge’s novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver, he wrote what Tenn considered to be one of his most honest sentences: “Sex was as fearful as black magic to all of us.” Sex—both the act of intercourse and the pursuit and deification of various acts—had destroyed Harry Crosby, and perhaps Hart Crane. These were erotic, inverted men—amatory mentors to Inge and Tenn. Sex, therefore, had to be denied, repressed, rerouted. Little Billy Inge, as he was known, took to imitation, dressing up as a refined dowager or one of the female film stars he loved, doted on by his mother, detested by his father, held like a treasured doll by his older sister, Helene. “Performance trumped consummation,” Tenn surmised.

  Tenn discovered his love of imitation, shared with his mother, Edwina, in the sickbed, as they pored over comic books, movie magazines, and gossip columns in various newspapers. “My mother would become the columnist, the film star,” Tenn remembered, “and this was extraordinary, because the films were silent. We did not know the caliber or timbre of Constance Talmadge’s voice; we could only assume that Garbo was deep-voiced. So we improvised, often attributing to a film star—say, Pola Negri or Lillian Gish—the voice of the church pianist or the girl at the grocery store with a harelip. I must say we got the voices right more often than not.”

  Tenn’s fantasies were fostered in the darkness of the illnesses that visited him as a child, which he told me included scarlet fever, “virulent rashes,” and “breakdowns of nervous and digestive systems.” Tenn admitted that he welcomed, even feigned, outbreaks of illness when he dreaded school or encounters with his father, and off he would be whisked to his sickbed. “There was no threat of the radio being taken by my father in the darkness of sickness,” Tenn told me, “and my mother liked to take care of me, to get away from her own barren life by laughing and performing with me.”

  Both mothers hated their husbands and resented the skimpy, hateful lives they had provided. Inge grew up in a Kansas that was becoming an oil metropolis, and Harry Ford Sinclair had become a millionaire from his investments in oil exploration, creating the famed Sinclair Oil, whose logo haunted Billy Inge: it was the wealth and the freedom he hoped for, for himself and his mother. Rumor had it that Sinclair had shot himself in the foot in order to gain an insurance settlement, which he then invested in oil. Inge and his mother fantasized about a perfectly placed bullet—in a foot or a thigh or an elbow—that might produce for them a chunk of money that would make their lives better. Or, maybe, a deadly bullet sunk into the body of the hated father, Luther Sr. The thought of this, as well as of the plans that would be necessary, would send Billy and his mother into gales of laughter, which were often silenced by the barbed statements of the intended victim.

  Finances were tight in both the Inge and the Williams household. Tenn’s father never shared the bulk of his paychecks with his family, so Edwina took on a variety of “suitable and respectable” means of bringing extra funds into the house. She was also not above writing to well-off relatives for financial aid, citing illnesses that did not exist or departures from her husband, which were hoped for but had not yet been scheduled. Inge’s mother took in boarders for extra income, and she and her son obtained extra entertainment, laughing at the predilections of certain men and women who took up residence with them. Some tenants drank, others had odd eating habits and squirreled away chocolates or maple candy, which Billy and his mother would find and consume when they snooped in the rooms. Inge first encountered pornography in the bureau drawers of a male tenant. His mother snatched the pictures away from him and replaced them beneath the socks and shirts, but Inge returned and looked at the blurred black-and-white images and saw for the first time the male form in its fullness and its beauty. He would later see it in its all-too-real state of decline when he watched the man whose magazines and photographs he had purloined: he had an enormous inguinal hernia, which he would forcefully push from his groin up into its proper placement, then attach a truss, a contraption with wires and heavy laces, which he would ask Billy to help him pull tightly and into place. Inge was always aware that there was incipient “decay, decline, and disappointment” waiting to visit the body. Inge could never imagine that his own body could give another pleasure, and Tenn recalled that their times together were awkward and would never have advanced except for the fact that he became aggressive and all but demanded sex. “The exception,” Tenn recalled, “was when liquor was introduced,” at which time Bill was amorous and skillful and bold. But with the morning, and sobriety, guilt would set in, the furtive movements would return, the cat burglar would tiptoe into the bathroom, where tiles and sinks and strops and razors presaged death, where the kitchen held the prospect of odd boarders or angry encounters with his father. “His life,” Tenn told me, “his very apartment, his every step, was haunted by phantoms, bogeymen who might beat him or ask him to help him into a truss or show him pictures of naked men, or his mother, ready to dress him in her Sunday finery and put on a show. It amazes me now that he could even get up in the morning and get things done.”

  Tenn and Bill liked to lie in bed naked, smoking and reading and talking. They both knew large swatches of Hart Crane by memory, and because each was influenced by films and drew inspiration from repeated viewings of those they liked, they loved this section from The Bridge:

  I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

  With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

  Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

  Foretold to other eyes on the same screen …

  “I think,” Tenn told me, “that we took this as a sign from our poet that we were not misguided in seeking comfort and impulse from the cinema.” Both of them would re-create scenes from films they had seen over and over, and they thought of films as ephemeral, burned away in an instant. In the days before television, and in cities that did not harbor a revival house or a curious university, films came and disappeared. You could often find an abbreviated and recast version of a film you’d liked on Lux Radio Theatre or Academy Award Theater, then recline in the dark, breathing in the nicotine and the musk on a lover’s neck and reveling in having Bette Davis or Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert emanating from the radio by your bed. These were among the happiest times with Bill Inge, laughing and remembering films or deconstructing plays.

  “We knew that the hymen had not yet been broken on the twentieth century,” Tenn said. “Eugene O’Neill had his greatness, but he was very much of the previous century, and so many of the other plays being done were British and pale and careful, or American and written in the British style. Aborted babies encased in amber or framed in gilt. Lifeless. Here we were, a nation at war, and here we were, two queers under the influence of rebels who worshipped the sun and appetites and new ways of speaking and writing, and we were also too careful. We weren’t smart enough to blow the conventions of the theater, but I think we were creeping toward something.”

  Tenn believed that the revolutions lurking within him and Bill Inge were not so much structural as emotional. You could keep your characters in the kitchen or the living room, talking things out, arguing about grocery bills and prom dresses and typing classes, but th
e subtext, the ground on which they all stood and argued and dreamed, was loaded with land mines and shards of glass, and every corner hid shadows and secrets. Watching Bill Inge creep around the city of St. Louis, his own apartment, his own bed, navigating his own body with apology and fear, Tenn came to see that Tom in The Glass Menagerie was a perfect blending of the two men who had found each other—frightened, hesitant queers who lost themselves in movies and booze, and could only enjoy the flesh of another man while tipsy and in the shadows of an ornate alcove of a movie theater, accompanied by the sounds of Barbara Stanwyck or Gary Cooper or the music of Miklós Rózsa. Sexual acts in balconies or alleyways managed to blur in the account ledger Tenn kept of conquests and adventures; they allowed him the pleasure of men and movies, but they failed to be real, so they failed to disappoint. He expected only a quick blast of warmth and pleasure, and then came the parting. In Hollywood, he had enjoyed the openness of his time with his Italian on Vista, but he had also known that the time was limited—he would be called away from his odd temporary assignment at MGM and have to face the work that still felt thin to him. With Bill Inge, he knew he needed to get back to work on Menagerie and make it work and salvage the reputation he felt had been soiled by the failure of Battle of Angels, but he allowed himself time to observe both Inge and his own reactions when he was with him.

  “I allowed myself to be slow with him,” Tenn remembered. “I wanted to see all that there was of Bill Inge, and primarily there was fear.”

  When they discussed Hart Crane, Inge obsessed over the fact that Crane was coddled and fawned over and pressed upon by his mother. Born to wealth (“They were rich in chocolate,” Tenn told me), he had no material worries, other than those his sexual desires presented. “He seemed to know at an early age that he wanted to be with men,” Tenn said, “and he knew at an early age of the risks this presented. He was ridiculed and beaten frequently.” Crane’s mother was an adherent of Christian Science, a religion that was first presented to Tenn through his study of the poet. Inge was horrified at the thought that Crane’s mother, seeking to heal her son of his desires for men and liquor, had poisoned him against his own passions by continually telling him that God had not created him in this aberrant image. There was no man but perfect man, and perfect man does not lie down with another. In notes that Tenn made for a play he was considering about Crane, he wrote of a mother physically holding her son down and asking him to deny all that he was and all that he felt. “Both of our mothers did this to us, in their way,” Tenn said, “but neither of them secured the services of God or Divine Mind to set us straight, so to speak. We were simply told to be good and respectable gentlemen, to present good and noble faces to the public. We could dress up and camp up in privacy with our mothers, but the world needed to see two men who may have been writers, but who could have passed for members of the Rotary Club.”

  Tenn spent only a short time with Bill Inge in St. Louis, in that apartment of good books and posters and a Scottie dog named Lula Belle, who may have been the only creature around whom Inge felt any sense of comfort. Inge would later have to give up the dog when he moved to another locale (one not predisposed to animals), and Tenn would recall that he received calls of despair from Inge about this. “Thus was born Sheba,” Tenn said, referring to the lost dog for whom Lola Delaney pines and calls on that forlorn back porch. “Bill believed that all of his life he had been abandoned and betrayed by everyone,” Tenn continued, “but with the relinquishment of his beloved dog, he was finally a member of the betraying class.” Within all of those rooms of the houses he built for his plays, with their memories and soiled furniture and seemingly mundane daily activities that could kill, Inge now added the ghosts of pets abandoned or dead, and his characters were haunted by pillows where they once sat or felt phantom sensations on legs they had once rubbed against. “I am an obsessive person myself,” Tenn concluded, “but Bill worked the dog angle longer than was necessary, in my opinion.”

  Bill Inge visited Tenn both in Chicago and in New York, to see the new shape of The Glass Menagerie and to spend more time together—in and out of bed. “He had been teaching a lot of dumb coeds,” Tenn remembered, “and writing reviews of touring productions and local dramatic societies, and his mind was becoming sclerotic.”

  Openly enthusiastic about Tenn’s writing, he no longer considered him a promising playwright, but a genius, and he began to talk to Tenn about his literary future. “I was in my own particular hell with Menagerie, so I was probably dismissive. I know that I pushed Bill away, as well as his script. I just couldn’t be bothered, and I was not in a mind in which I wanted to read someone’s work and figure out how to improve it: I was trying to improve my own.” Tenn preferred that they spend lazy mornings in bed, reciting poetry. “It was an aimless, wasted time,” he recalled, “but I was happy while I was in it. It was only when he was gone that I saw that there was nothing gained from the time. It was selfish snuggling, really. I drained the little affection from Bill that he could share, and then I wanted to get back to the play. I was looking for a lover, and I got an apprentice.”

  Time passes and a play, Farther Off from Heaven, is sent to Tenn. It is from Bill Inge, and it is a “sepia-toned Valentine,” a sweet and slight little play that will later become The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a family drama about overdue bills and an absent and unfaithful husband, confused adolescents, sudden death—all played out within and about a seemingly perfect midwestern home in a postcard-ready town. “But poison pulses in the blood of all the characters,” Tenn told me. “No one is to be trusted; appearances are both deceiving and wicked and carefully constructed, like the piecrusts of the worn and defeated mother. I did not care for it, but I passed it along to Audrey Wood, who passed on it.”

  Wood’s rejection of the play sent Inge into a torrent of anger and depression—and voluminous drinking. “I was already myself something of a drinker,” Tenn told me, “and I was amazed with the amount of drinking he was doing.” Inge visited Tenn in New York around this time—right as Tenn was completing A Streetcar Named Desire—and “Bill was a mess.” Not only was Inge drinking heavily, but he was engaging in that “laughable series of tricks” long employed by alcoholics—frequent showers, copious quantities of the powder used in barbershops, chewing gum, and Sen-Sen—all in a vain attempt to diminish the odor of alcohol and sweat that was oozing from his pores. “He had grown flabby,” Tenn remembered, “and lined. His eyes were ancient, witness to God knows how many trials and horrors.” Tenn was now involved with Frank Merlo, but he still arranged for trysts with Inge. “I wanted the comfort I had once known with him,” Tenn said, not happy with his admission. “I wanted the warmth and the sweetness, but he was now weak and girlish and passive. He slept and he smelled and he whined.” Tenn pulled away from Inge and wondered if he would have to “suffer the sad declivity he had become” any longer.

  Farther Off from Heaven found a home with Margo Jones and her theater in Dallas, creating a rift between Tenn and Jones. “Now our conversations included Bill,” Tenn said, “and I didn’t like that. I’m dying with Summer and Smoke, for instance, and Margo keeps telling me about the new play Bill is writing. I seemed incapable of transmitting to Margo how little I cared about any of this.”

  The play Inge was working on was Come Back, Little Sheba, and after a production at the Westport Country Playhouse that Tenn heard about from a number of people, including Eva Le Gallienne, it came to Broadway, where it was a success. Inge had built a home of rooms full of phantoms and dangerous memories, and a couple, Lola and Doc, defeated and desiccated because they had succumbed, as we often do, to the transitory glories of youth—muscles and taut flesh and dewy faces. Romance renders us blind to all that we can lose when we fall into a bed under which rests a ticking clock and a few explosives. Babies are lost and replaced by a dog, Sheba, upon whom Lola can bestow the love that Doc now finds repellent. An impotent alcoholic, he had been forced to abandon his plans for medical school
and has become a chiropractor, a trade that Tenn remembered was a notch or two above witch doctor or back-alley abortionist at the time Inge wrote his play. Doc serves the lower middle class, who often cannot pay, so he barters, coming home with poultry and vegetables and crocheted afghans. To boost their finances, Doc and Lola rent out a room to a young college student, who is pretty and bright and ambitious—a young Lola, brought right into that house to haunt and humiliate them. A boyfriend visits, and he is handsome and muscular and he can throw the javelin—long and hard and thick and strong—farther than anyone else, causing it to land in the ground with a groan and quiver. “I introduced the ambulatory penis in the form of Stanley Kowalski,” Tenn told me, “and Bill brought it onstage in the form of a piece of athletic equipment. The good-looking guy was an aside, but the talk of his arms and his javelin … well, the point was made.”

  So much youth, so much sex, and the Delaney household is again full of the resentments that had been hidden beneath heavy meals, mindless chatter, alcohol, and that damned dog, which—Inge told the actress who created the part, Shirley Booth—was frequently dressed in clothes and held as if it were a baby. All masks are ripped away, and Doc drinks the sherry that Lola, in an act of simpleton cruelty, has kept in the kitchen cupboard. He lunges at her with a knife, hoping, as Inge told Tenn, “to cauterize, at long last, this cancer, this Lola, from his life, from the horrible, sagging body that once housed a brain and a soul.”

  “The play worked,” Tenn admitted, sounding surprised as he said so, “and I must admit I was surprised, and not a little envious. It had never occurred to me that Bill could write, or that he would find success. I was not entirely sure how I should react, and I doubt that I did anything honorable or direct. I’m sure I felt threatened. I know that I was told I should feel threatened. So many people told me I had someone gaining on me. But I must admit that I had one primary thought as I watched that play, and as I read it several times: I had lost a sweet lover and gained a dangerous rival.”