Follies of God Read online

  The book is subtitled “A Technique of Thinking” and was written by Lucius Humphrey and published in 1936 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. (It has since been reprinted as a paperback and “gift idea.”) Tenn never mentioned the book to me by name, but Le Gallienne’s vivid recollection of what it entailed—not to mention her scorn—led me to believe that much of what he remembered as his mother’s “survival tips” derived from this book, and what he took from multiple readings he shared with many of the actresses I would ultimately meet.

  For all of his dependence on psychoanalysis and its attendant prescriptions, all of the illegal substances ingested, the liquor, and the “happy subsuming” into the Roman Catholic Church in the late 1960s, many of Tenn’s core beliefs concerning his mental rejuvenation stemmed from this book’s teachings on creativity.

  Tenn’s obsession with work, and his fear that he might never again work well, was calmed by remembering what he called “the Creative Principle.” In chapter 4, entitled “Be Ye Doers,” there is a description of the division of the mind of man into three component parts, or phases. Each of these phases has distinct qualities peculiar to itself; each complements the activities of the others; and each is an extension of, and one with, the Creative Principle.

  The first and foremost phase is Creative Principle—God. It is the embodiment of all the known laws of creation, and not only expresses itself in the other two phases but also constitutes the highest phase of intelligence, our Super Mind, symbolized as the Father.

  The second phase, the “Christ Mind,” manifests its distinct and peculiar quality in that it is at once conscious both of our God phase and also of the human phase. It is the conscious link between the two, and is symbolized as the Son.

  The third phase, our human mind, or the Habitual Mind, is distinct and peculiar in that it can, with understanding, use all three phases for the purpose of fulfilling its desires, or it can, by its ignorance, deprive itself of the privileges of the higher phases. Nearly all of us are motivated exclusively by the restricted ideas which arise from the limited understanding of Habitual Mind. This Habitual Mind is the individual’s accumulated consciousness—the aggregate of experiences arising from the reactions of inherited tendencies to environment and education. By relying solely upon habitual thinking we deprive ourselves of experiences we might otherwise have. In fact, most of us are running our lives today on one cylinder. I can of mine own self do nothing.

  Tenn spoke often of the Habitual Mind, whose description he found in Humphrey’s book, and of the Mortal Mind, which is a term attributed both to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and Phineas Quimby, the healer from whom, it is suggested, Eddy found her inspiration. Several times Tenn told me that the human race is governed by its imagination, a quote of Napoleon’s that appears in the Humphrey book, preceding the following paragraph, one frequently quoted by Tenn to me and others: “By means of our thoughts and feelings we can unite ourselves with, and direct, Creative Energy. Therefore we should understand the vital necessity of forming the habit of thinking upon our thoughts and controlling them. Nothing in the world is more important than considered thinking. It is the practical means of consciously producing whatsoever we desire.”

  Eva Le Gallienne epitomized for Tenn the art of considered thinking. So too did Stella Adler, Edith Evans, Ruth Gordon, and a series of other actresses who served as a unique section of his redesigned Rosary, because the memory of them, the “habit of thinking upon their thoughts and actions,” kept Tenn sane and balanced deep in the real and imagined night of his confusion: Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Elizabeth Wilson, Frances Sternhagen, and Marian Seldes.

  Le Gallienne held a high place among those actresses because she was tough and outspoken, and because she shared with Tenn the additional bonus of creating, of tapping into Creative Energy, while also carrying the secret and, as he imagined it, the shame of being “inverted.” (I had never heard that term applied to a homosexual, and Tenn explained to me that it was the term his mother preferred. “She felt it was more sympathetic to their plight,” Tenn said, “and it stated their sexual preference as if it were brown eyes or a cleft chin—or a cleft palate. An accident, a trick, of nature.”)

  Le Gallienne and I did not discuss her sexuality at great length, but she did not feel that it was a burden to be carried, nor did she feel that she had brought it forth often as a matter of pride or embarrassment. But Irene Worth told me that during their work together, Le Gallienne had told her, in confidence and with great tenderness, that she was a lesbian. “She thought I should know about it,” Irene remembered, “as if it were narcolepsy or memory lapses—something that would impact our working relationship, our time together on the stage. It didn’t matter to me at all,” she continued, “but I did feel that she needed to tell people, some people.”

  Tenn believed that Le Gallienne escaped the many problems he had experienced with his homosexuality—or rather his homosexual relationships—because of her strict ordering of her life and her emotions. He spoke of her many journals filled with her tiny, elegant, spidery script, noting her thoughts, her readings, her activities, her plans. Le Gallienne did not let the “accumulated consciousness,” the “garbage that clutters our minds and drags us down,” as he saw it, to alter the Creative Principle. Their shared homosexuality could be categorized, via Humphrey, as “the reactions of inherited tendencies,” and Tenn believed that Le Gallienne had trumped them, or had at least compartmentalized them, by virtue of her dogged discipline, her noting of every thought or action.

  “What is religion?” Le Gallienne asked me. “A series of acts and intentions meant to honor, most of the time, one man: Jesus Christ. He is to be our example. What should Tennessee’s religion have been? Writing. And what is writing comprised of? Words. He should have been in the habit of worshipping, collecting, studying words all the time.”

  When Tenn would meet with Le Gallienne, and in their phone calls in the last few years of his life, they would discuss writers and their works. The subject of Ibsen would be brought up. “I would quote Ibsen in his native tongue,” Le Gallienne recalled, “and I would then translate it, noting the intention of the words, their placement, their meaning. There are no accidents in Ibsen, and if you divine his intentions, you can begin to see how a great writer thinks.”

  Tenn would follow this line of thinking for a time, and would even entertain Le Gallienne’s request that he take apart his own works in this way. “He could then explain, with great clarity,” Le Gallienne remembered, “what Blanche was doing and thinking, what her intentions were, and how the brutal swirl of circumstances delivered her to her safest, desired place.”

  But Tenn’s mind would wander; he would grow tired of searching for the foundations and scaffolding of great works. His Habitual Mind would take over, and he would be hungry for gossip, for ideas, for affirmation.

  “I would be fascinated in the beginning,” Tenn told me, “of Le Gallienne telling me to begin each play with the title page, the name of the author, the date of publication.” Stella Adler discussed plays in this manner as well, but she was far more passionate, far more sympathetic to the artistic temperament than Le Gallienne, who had about her, Tenn said, “the pure rigidity of a devoted teacher.” Tenn liked, however, what the deconstruction of plays revealed. “Line upon line, word upon word, you see the bones,” he marveled. “You see the intention, and it must be what musicians feel when they take notations—chords and notes on a page—and transform it into a piece of music, and it’s a piece that makes you think of your mother, or a lover, or the sun on your young arms.”

  Recalling a conversation with Le Gallienne, and how she implored him to think of the words he wrote—that anyone wrote—as strings that were literally attached to people or ideas, Tenn became animated and emotional.

  “I am seduced by the strings—in songs as well as in plays. The strings we attach to the people we love, the people who are in our works. The strings are feelings and memories�
�our memories. But they must be heard musically; they have to sound like orchestral strings to have their effect. The sound is what I imagine in moments of extreme intensity and vulnerability. I pray to have the ability to evoke through words what wonderful orchestral music can accomplish—or even tawdry jukebox ditties that pull out a string to move a person. I can recall times in my life when I would be walking down a street—a street in El Paso or Provincetown, Hollywood or New Orleans, Dallas or New York—and from a bar or an open window I might hear the sound of strings and with it a voice that competed with its cry, its teasing wail. It’s a sound that stops me cold, literally. I stand there and I’m transported to another time in my life when I had a similar feeling, when my heart hurt so much, from longing or hunger or rage. I can remember being in that bed, in the dark, in St. Louis, sent to bed hungry by my father, my radio removed from my night table and hidden, and through the open windows all around our house, I could hear Jack Benny and The Shadow and Lux Presents Hollywood and strings! And those strings were saying to me that life was rotten, small, and worthless, but life, this life, could be escaped. Follow the strings.

  “A friend lost his mother a few years ago,” Tenn remembered. “She died in a nursing home that reeked of death and disinfectant, and my friend felt haunting in the halls, spirits discarded. When my friend’s mother had been young, she had worn Mitsouko and Bellodgia, and her clothes, her handkerchiefs, the air that swirled around her, always carried these scents. My friend hated to see his mother in this condition, smelling of shit and unguents and pine oil. When my friend’s mother died, he went to the nursing home to spend a few moments with her body, to bury her and any ill will he had harbored, to spend himself of some tears and some resentments. She was tiny and withered and fully dead, but the air hummed with energy and Mitsouko, and I wondered, my friend wondered, if the smell returned as she returned to her desired self, or if he felt compelled to remember her, even in an olfactory manner, as he knew her in happier times, and as he knew she would prefer to be. That is writing; those are strings. The strings tug at our hearts musically, and they also pull us, tightly and closely, to those things we’ve loved, those things we’ve lost, those things we pray will return—those things that are, God help us, who we are. That is what I hope the Creative Principle can be.”

  When I read those words to Le Gallienne, she cried, and she announced that I had been in the presence of a writer. “He still could do it,” she said, “if he had wanted to. Tell me, where did those gorgeous images go?”

  I had no idea if he eventually wrote them down, or if he ever took them to a pad of paper or a typewriter. He never mentioned those images to me again in our short time together—but they effortlessly came forth when he took thoughts he had, analyzed the feelings they generated, and expressed them in words that meant something to him.

  “You see,” Le Gallienne said, “if he had just gotten himself to a piece of paper, if he had just begun the act of capturing his feelings, he would have been able to write a play we would now be producing and loving and discussing. But what did he do instead?”

  There was drinking and praying and talking and circular walks in the Quarter, and on every corner a search for the writer he had once been.

  “He didn’t believe in the pragmatic habit,” Le Gallienne continued. “He was like that other Tom—the Tom in The Glass Menagerie, who wanted magic, who got lost in dreams. We all know what happens to people who descend into magic, don’t we?”

  No, I said.

  “They disappear,” she said.

  Four

  “MEMORY, OF COURSE, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity.”

  That is the note I was given as Tenn and I began to walk around New Orleans one morning.

  Tenn and I spent part of our second day together on foot and in my car, and because of the amount of time I spent behind the wheel, my notes were sporadic, composed at rest stops and when I returned home that evening. Tenn wanted to talk, exhume memories, and he needed someone to tell them to. He asked me to be that person.

  I drove Tenn to the corner of Coliseum and Constantinople streets and parked in front of an ornate house, a whirl of pastel meringue. In this house he had been young and handsome and much appreciated. Promise was, he recalled, “written” all over him, and he was loved by the married man who lived here with his wife. Tenn was also liked by proper people who did not mind that this young and awkward writer often needed money and encouragement to keep heading to his writing table, which held a typewriter that was often pawned, and so intermittent handwritten pages would accumulate, and the secretary to this man—he was a professional man, very successful—would type up these notes and they were pristine, crisp.

  Tenn learned to write during this fall he was remembering, during the war, but before he left for Hollywood, at the urging of his agent, Audrey Wood, to make enough money so that he would not need the love, prodding, and secrets of this married man.

  “It wasn’t a long-lived memory,” Tenn recalled. “We met at an art gallery in the French Quarter, long gone, on Royal Street. It was an odd assemblage of people—the people who wanted the arts, enjoyed the arts, wanted to be artists, visual and verbal. He was handsome, softly handsome, which means that his looks weren’t immediately present—they became evident through his kindness, his ability to be gentle. That’s rare in a man—married or not—the ability to be gentle, the courage to move slowly and softly across the contours of a young queer.”

  Tenn’s memories of this man included gifts of a Royal typewriter on which he had written portions of Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, and Streetcar. Tenn tapped his wrist and recalled another gift: his first good watch, shiny and large and not his style, and pawned in Los Angeles, when he needed extra money to woo and impress a young Italian he met on the set of a Lana Turner film he remembered with laughter.

  “Shiny toys for shiny boys.” Tenn laughed. “I am at my most extravagant in pursuit of love and affection, and at my most niggardly in accepting either. And that,” he said, pointing to my blue book, “is a point worth noting: a memory of value, if not comfort.”

  Los Angeles in 1943 was Tenn’s next mental destination. On the corner of Coliseum and Constantinople, Tenn found himself instead mentally on Fountain Avenue, in front of the El Palacio Apartments, an explosion of broad strokes and architectural overstatements, enormous trees and hedges, overgrown and overheated. He was drawn there by its gaudy glamour and was dismayed that its cost was beyond his reach, even as it was close to so many men he had met and for whom he had fallen. (“Everybody,” he told me, “has had a lover on Fountain Avenue.”) Tenn would close his eyes and remember being driven around Hollywood or driving in a borrowed car up Fairfax until it passed Hollywood Boulevard and then crept up the hills, blooming into a series of zigzagging streets, and it was there that he knew a wealthy young man, an inheritor of money, who had come to what he always called “the Dream Factory” and whose house bulged with beautiful men, premium alcohol, and drugs. There did not seem to be a war raging anywhere, no shortages of any kind. The fabrics of the house were rich and clean, the food was abundant, and it was there that Tenn first tasted cocaine, which the host bought from a dealer out on Crenshaw, when he didn’t buy it out of a slab of limestone on Argyle, or had to make a call—a long-distance call, the ultimate extravagance—to someone in the art department at Columbia who had connections, and who also, deep in the night, utilized the sets of the Three Stooges’ soundstage to make high-end pornographic films with hopeful starlets and beautiful men, mostly black and Latin, “supremely sculpted” and frequently available to those, like the generous host, who wanted his guests happy in every way. High in those hills (“in every sense, I assure you!”) you could stand in a curve, on the soft shoulder of that street, with its fragrant, rich name, and look out over all of downtown Los Angeles, and you could see it twinkle, and the lights were bright but they carried no sound, and everything seemed bathed in a lovely blue sha
de of night.

  “No sound from the city,” he remembered, “but so much from behind me, where the house hummed and trilled.” Records were turned and dropped, and each cut would propel an emotion, a memory from one of the guests. “Little Brown Jug” was played over and over, and the guests danced.

  Each time a record fell, Tenn could feel that a word dropped into his mind, then fell upon his mental stage, waiting to be accepted or rejected by whatever woman waited in the wings. Each time an ice cube dropped into his glass, an idea was stored away for future use, a sound or a smell catalogued for future reference. In his pants pocket were coins, and he rubbed them like worry stones, the ridges of quarters and dimes calming him, helping him in conversations with men, all so burnished and poised, all of them unaware of time and resources slipping, fading.

  “You drop the word,” Tenn said, “and it happens. You follow, word by word, brick by brick, bead by bead.”

  Tenn was happier at the parties of other struggling writers, hopeful actors. They had “pads” on Olive and Cherokee and Ivar, and the booze wasn’t premium, but the talk was pitched at a higher level, and Tenn might wake up the next morning with someone who had a mind and an opinion of Clifford Odets or Ferenc Molnár or what might be coming up in a production that did not feature Lana Turner.

  Tenn’s favorite apartments were on Havenhurst, right off Sunset, which he urged me not to confuse with the Havenhurst Apartments, which were grand in the 1930s, but which by 1944 were already beginning to fade and to draw into their environs a number of retired, unwanted, or cash-strapped contract players, and a couple of sad bachelors who had also come to play in the Dream Factory, but had stayed too long for too little and now invited the young Tennessee Williams to their rooms to talk about past glories and to gently kiss him and hold him in their beds until he could sneak out and walk along Hollywood Boulevard, wondering when things would happen for him.