Follies of God Page 6

  “This is a good sign,” Tenn whispered. “A rosary with no Christ indicates that He is already on the job. This is very portentous.” Tenn purchased the rosary—against the shocked, strong objections of the clerk, who called it damaged and ineffective—gave it to me, and we walked into the cathedral proper. When Tenn entered, he dramatically genuflected and made the Sign of the Cross. He remained in the position for some time, and I began to wonder if he was able to lift himself. I was not a Catholic, and I did not know the time allowed or required for such a gesture, but I also did not want to interrupt what might have been a sacred or obligatory rite. As I was considering which action to take, he lifted himself and grabbed my arm. He walked with purpose toward an array of red votive candles and looked for one that “reminded” him of Maureen. He chose one high and in the center, was unable to reach it, and asked me to light it.

  Tenn surveyed the pews, looking for the perfect one, the absolute right one, for our purposes. “We must move quickly,” he told me in a whisper. “We must do this before the candle has been extinguished.”

  We finally found a pew, fifth from the main altar, in the center of the cathedral, and we sat, or rather I sat and Tenn fell to his knees. He lowered his head to begin his prayer, but paused, turned to me, and said, “Write this down. I want you to take this to Maureen.”

  I pulled out my blue book and pen and waited.

  In a few seconds, Tenn began to pray aloud.

  “I found my voice, which is to say my salvation, in the dark, with a radio, or the voices of neighbors, and a pure hatred in my heart, and a prayer that I would be transported. I pray that you and others who dream, in a literal and a spiritual darkness, are transported, and I pray, and I know, that they will, on the other side of a stage or a backyard fence or on the farthest reaches of understanding, find a listener, some recognition, some feeling of usefulness.

  The garden behind St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, with its statue of Christ throwing a shadow upon the building where Tennessee claimed he found Christ, sobriety, and the courage to continue (illustration credit 2.3)

  “We wait here, Jesus, in a confluence of crises for voices to rise up. I pray that the fears that cripple the young eventually force them to walk when they can find no other progress; when their only movement is purely emotional, I pray that their artistic limbs will take them to people hungry for what they’ve observed, on the sidelines, silent and seeing.

  “I pray that the world will always want a story to be told, and I pray that they will always be able to trust themselves and others strongly enough to hear and accept what others have experienced, lived through, and strained to turn into art that can be subsumed by the willing.

  “I pray that we will care to be big—of heart, of soul, of pocket, of industry, of daring—to magnify who and what we are through whatever means we have—in art, in living, in being. This is a great undertaking; it has value; it has saved so many; it is dying, but it is always in the process of dying, and is always rescued by those who recognize its frailty, its grandeur, and its necessity. Our greatness often lies in saving something that will be of use to souls unknown to us.

  “I pray that this boy finds these women, these struggling, wonderful agents of change and creation, and learns not only to dream but to love and to apply and to give and to matter.

  “I pray that I have mattered to some, and that I will matter again. I offer this candle to Maureen in the belief that its light will serve primarily to remind her that she, more than so many, has loved, applied, given, and mattered.

  “I am, God help us all, a writer, and I have nothing else but my voice, for which I offer up, to my enduringly patient God, my heartfelt thanks.

  “Amen.”

  Tenn sat upright, leaned into me, and sighed. We looked at the altar, bathed in lovely amber light, and focused on the inscription ECCE PANIS ANGELORUM: Behold the bread of angels.

  No more words were spoken. People came and prayed and left.

  Tenn patted my hand, we got up, and I delivered him to his hotel. I drove back to Baton Rouge, with one blue book full, a menu covered with scribbles, and an assignment.

  Three

  A LONG ENTRY.

  “A writer must admit to everyone—but primarily to himself—when he is unable to write, when he is unable to communicate, which is to say when he is unable to care. I have suffered no known incidents or accidents of the brain. I am unaware of any neurological maladies that might have pressed negatively upon my nerves or arteries, creating any blockage of feeling or movement. And yet I face the task of writing—not to mention the task of living—with a profound sense of apathy and anger, and they often alternate their entrances. A day may begin with my rage at the fog not coming over my mental boards, or it may begin lethargically, with my feeling that it might be best if the fogs remain offshore. But I write. I face the task every day. Pen to paper or keys to paper. Word upon word.

  “I told you that I do not consider myself a religious man. I do not understand or try to understand the mysteries of Scripture or dogma or superstition or holy tradition. I use them. I try to understand them. I believe that if I count, as so many Catholics do, the injuries seared into the flesh of Jesus, count them, see them, feel them, adding them up, imagining their depth, they might be transformed into words.

  “I imagine that words can become like the beads on the rosary, and I can count them, hold them in my hand and hold them in my mind, and hold them in my heart, and they can become images too. Images can become words, and words can become stones or steps that can lead me to a play.

  “A woman appears only when images she deserves appear. My goal is to get to the images, to make my mind and my heart care enough to imagine a woman in a situation from which she must escape, and I can then hold out a means to do so for her.

  “Which I can’t do, because the essential act of caring has left me.

  “This gives me no comfort.

  “When I think of words as stones or steps, I’m reminded of another woman. Not a woman who ever inspired the fog, not a woman who ever altered the idea of theater for me, but a woman who altered my sense of what a writer could be.

  “She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper, and I can now imagine, from a distance, armed only with memory and imagination, that she can do this for me again.

  “Tough and sad and funny and angry and lonely. Lovely and ugly and elegant and rustic. A born pilgrim who built—stone by stone, word by word, step by step—an artist.”

  This was Tenn’s description to me of Eva Le Gallienne.

  I NEVER MET Eva Le Gallienne in person, and only spoke to her on the telephone twice, calls that were arranged by Kim Hunter during my first year in New York.

  Le G, as she asked me to call her, had no interest in seeing anything Tenn had said about her, and she let out a derisive snort when I offered to show her notes on other actresses Tenn had mentioned to me.

  “No time for all that,” was what she told me. Le Gallienne could not be bothered to consider or “imagine” anything; she was, however, ready to be of assistance. “If I can help you,” she told me, “I’ll do it. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t want to talk about things that I can’t understand or that I have no interest in trying to understand. I can talk about Tennessee, and I can talk about me. So.”

  Le Gallienne had a habit—at least with me—of ending sentences with that one word, and it sounded as if it were both a firm conclusion—closing a subject—and also, with its slight lilt, a cue to move on to the next question or comment. While Tenn had warned me that she was formidable and often curt, my impression was of a curious, alert woman eager to analyze and argue.

  Eva Le Gallienne, circa 1920, perpetually working—on herself, on designs—for her Civic Repertory Theatre, which the young Tennessee followed with great interest (illustration credit 3.1)

  “If I may,” she said to me early in our first phone call, “might I suggest that you never easily
accept the conclusions of others when it comes to your work. I’m sure that Tennessee meant very well by telling you about his experiences and his impressions, but those should not be impressed upon you to such a degree that you begin to feel that his was the only way, or that his are the only opinions that are truthful.

  “He was a great writer,” she continued, “but he was a flawed man. Emulate the writer, not the man.”

  This laconic introduction was one that I had been prepared to expect from Le Gallienne, because it mirrored the odd but important relationship Tenn shared with her. “She never bored me,” Tenn had said to me, “even when I expected her to do so. Even when I expected the worst from her—judgments and self-aggrandizing attitudes and bitterness over spent gifts. But it never happened that way. She had a mind that was like a tough, tall broom that swept everything before it away, and what was left was a clean, bare floor, a screen, and you could then project onto it whatever you needed to rethink something, to begin again.”

  The first meeting between Tenn and Le Gallienne—or at least the one that Tenn could recall—had not gone well. Tennessee Williams was already a successful playwright—both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire had been produced and published—and Le Gallienne admired his work, had studied it, and had, she admitted, taken notes.

  “I felt that his talent was great enough to bear repetition of experience,” Le Gallienne told me. “I cannot think of a greater thing that could be said to a writer, but I don’t think he understood my statement. He looked bemused, even a little bored, but I wanted to tell him that those plays had altered me, had—now how can I say this?—uncomfortably forced me to accept some things about myself and about others that I might not have. This was great praise as I saw it, but I got the impression that it angered him, that he believed me to be a critic who wanted to show him where he needed improvement.”

  Tenn admitted that the meeting was tense and “decidedly odd.” Tenn looked upon Le Gallienne, who was perhaps fifty years old when the meeting took place, as “ancient, of a different time,” although he had great admiration for her work with the Civic Repertory Theatre, her championing of writers, and her own writing skill, which he knew from her autobiography, At 33. Tenn also held in great esteem what he called her “blunt-force sleekness” in handling her lesbianism, which she carried not as a burden or a dysfunction, but as another attribute she chose not to deny and which contributed to her work, just as much as her talent, her beauty, and her intelligence.

  “I was not terribly educated about lesbians,” Tenn admitted to me. “I had only a tertiary understanding of their trials through Radclyffe Hall and Mrs. Danvers [Judith Anderson’s Sapphic servant in the Hitchcock film of Rebecca], and I had a not much better understanding of what we called the male homosexual. I was still in a bit of a maze in that regard, and Miss Le Gallienne appeared neither deranged nor incomplete.”

  Le Gallienne was, however, intimidating to Tenn: She was intelligent, a fact she chose not to hide, and she was opinionated, unafraid, in Tenn’s eyes, to speak her mind to anyone. After she had made her remarks about studying Tenn’s plays and making notes in their margins, Le Gallienne asked the young writer what he thought of Ibsen. This was of no small concern to Le Gallienne: she adored Ibsen, translated his works, studied him intently.

  Recalling the encounter years later, Tenn could not help laughing. “I am a terrible reprobate, I’m afraid,” he said. “I could not help myself, for I felt that a stern, spinsterish Shaker woman had taken it upon herself to emend my plays. I told her I had, indeed, read the plays of Mr. Ibsen, had seen them in numerous productions, and found them to be quite like the act of eating a box of soap flakes, when they were not like two months of Sundays in church.”

  Tenn cackled at the memory of his comment, but he also recalled that Le Gallienne did not dismiss or scorn him. Instead, they continued their discussion, and when they met again, years later, they picked up their friendship, such as it was, and kept talking.

  “He was a child,” Le Gallienne remembered, “and a nervous one. I knew he was performing for me, trying to be smart. I also felt he wanted an argument, a defense, from me. I refused to offer one. I wanted to talk about his work, about work in general.

  “If you want to know about me,” she told me, “you’ll need to know that I want to work, and work is what motivates everything I do.

  “So.”

  Tenn believed that Eva Le Gallienne’s autobiography, At 33, began with the following paragraph:

  “At seven in the morning of January eleventh, 1899, a lusty and hideous baby was brought into the world to artistic parents. Bow bells sounded for the cockney baby, because, as is well-known, no baby born to bow bells can be anything but cockney. Thus began my first year.”

  That is not the first paragraph of At 33, but Le Gallienne liked it. “In some ways,” she laughed, “it’s better, it’s tighter.”

  Tenn and Le Gallienne shared a love of dramatic entrances—and alliteration.

  “My God,” she once said, after I had recounted something he had said, “he really gets caught in the circle, doesn’t he? I do it, too, searching for a rhythm.”

  Le Gallienne sympathized with Tenn’s desperation for order, for a plan, a metaphor—anything onto which he could depend to get to the act of writing. However, she had never been able to display any patience—or to hold her barbed opinions—when Tenn began talking about rivers and streams and steps and stones.

  “He had the talent,” she all but shouted. “He had the gift. This was demonstrable; that could not be disproved. What he lacked, and what I believe he always lacked, was the foundation of discipline and respect that everyone needs to remain balanced and to function. When he was young and strong, he could fly on lots of dreams and little maintenance, but when I last saw him [a meeting Le Gallienne believed occurred in 1980], he was adrift, sad, diminished.” Tenn had told her during that last meeting that he felt distracted. “He was the distraction,” Le Gallienne quipped. “Tennessee Williams was the only thing that could destroy Tennessee Williams. And he did.”

  Could anything destroy Eva Le Gallienne? I was prompted to ask this question because Tenn had told me that she and her Civic Repertory Theatre had been launched with great fanfare and hope, only to fail. Le Gallienne’s face and hands had been severely damaged in a fire at her home in Connecticut, and she had constructed ways to conceal both the scars and the nerve damage that had resulted. A film career that she had pursued, primarily for funds to continue working in the theater, had not prospered. After each of these setbacks—heavily chronicled and intently watched by Tenn—Le Gallienne had returned to her home in the country, regrouped, pondered, thought about things. “I am amazed at her resilience,” Tenn told me. “I wish I had it.”

  “To live is to be destroyed,” Le G told me. “There is no other way to get through life. We have to have hopes and we have to witness them being shattered; we have to love and we have to lose; we have to fail; we have to find ourselves depleted of faith. I have been destroyed repeatedly, but I have been able to recuperate; I have been able to mend myself; to love and to be loved; to find some other way of working.

  “And this was absent in Tennessee Williams,” she continued, “who believed in writing, and who once could write, but when that gift had been altered by his self-destruction, he could not recuperate, because he had never learned how to survive on his own. He used sex and liquor and drugs and amusements where he ought to have applied love and faith and work.

  “I haven’t worked—fully—as an actress in years, but this has not prevented me from finding other ways of being of some use and of some purpose.” When she offered this summation of her life as an actress, Le Gallienne was ninety years old, and she felt that her ability to act “fully and freely” had disappeared some thirty years before our call took place, at some point in the early 1960s, when she launched another version of her repertory theater and tried yet again to take challenging works to people all acr
oss the country.

  I was amazed that Le Gallienne had used that phrase “being of some use and of some purpose,” and I told her that Tennessee had used it frequently, to the point where other actresses in whom he confided used it as well.

  “It was first uttered by my father,” Le Gallienne told me, referring to Richard Le Gallienne, a poet who worried that the bounties of nature and affection would pull him from his writing table. “He instilled in me the love of languages, the love of work, the love of nature,” Le Gallienne said, “and he taught me that we needed to know our histories, to know everyone’s histories. We are all perpetual students, and we are all perpetually ignorant—of something.”

  When we ended our first phone call, Le Gallienne told me that our conversation, as well as Tennessee’s words I’d read to her from my notes, had reminded her of a little poem her father had written, and which was among the first she had memorized.

  At last I got a letter from the dead,

  And out of it there fell a little flower,—

  The violet of an unforgotten hour.

  “This is what you’ve given me,” Le Gallienne told me, “a violet from a fabled time; a gift from a great writer.”

  It was Eva Le Gallienne who instilled in Tenn a love for the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in their earliest visits, Tenn could talk about Emerson and draw a line toward his interest—capricious at best—in Christian Science, Religious Science, and “a damnable tendency toward Christian positivism,” as Le Gallienne remembered.

  “His mother had given him a book once,” Le Gallienne recalled, “and it was called It Shall Be Done Unto You, and with all that he should have been remembering and doing, snatches of that book stayed within his mind.”

  It took me many years and many searches of used bookstores to find a copy of It Shall Be Done Unto You, which, as Le Gallienne’s memory has it, was given to Tenn not long after the success of The Glass Menagerie. “To keep him centered,” Le Gallienne remembered. “On the straight and narrow.”