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TWENTY

In addition to plays and fiction (that season it was Summer and Smoke and several stories), Tennessee was busy writing letters which I am now, fifty-seven years later, reading for the first time in a New Directions volume. Tennessee was a wonderful letter writer tailoring his text to the recipient’s likes and dislikes. In the spring of 1948 I was twenty-two and my third book, The City and the Pillar, was a bestseller. The remittance crowd was not friendly, to riot in understatement, nor were certain far-flung recipients of the Bird’s letters. He was drawn to what I called monster women of which the most demanding and paranoid was Carson McCullers whose work I admired and often praised: the opening lines of Reflections in a Golden Eye reveal the American manner at its most perfectly focused. But she, alas, disliked me almost as much as she did Truman Capote whose Other Voices, Other Rooms was a greater success than anything Carson was to publish, but whose success she was convinced was entirely due to his unacknowledged borrowings from her work as well as from that of Eudora Welty. It was as if he, too, wanted to be a great Southern lady writer, and so raided their work for notions and pretty things. When Shelby Foote showed Eudora some of the passages from Delta Wedding that Truman had lifted for Local Color, she was serene. “Well,” she said, “at least he took the things I liked best.” Jane Bowles, another difficult serious lady, was also revered by the Bird. I only saw her husband, Paul, when she was otherwise engaged with her remittance men or her lady from the Tangier market who may have poisoned her, with datura leaves, bringing on a debilitating stroke.

Jane and Paul Bowles, having third and fourth thoughts.

One of Tennessee’s earliest letters in this collection is to Carson McCullers. She was still seething over Capote. He introduces me warily. He and I had met at a party for Samuel Barber in the American Academy, I was staying at the Eden Hotel; he’d rented an apartment in the Via Aurora. “…Gore Vidal is here…Vidal is twenty-three [actually I was twenty-two] and a real beauty. His new book The City and the Pillar I have just read and while it is not a good book it is absorbing. There is not a really distinguished line in the book and yet a great deal of it has a curiously life-like quality. The end is trashy, alas, murder and suicide both.” Thus he sets her mind at rest about the competition. Then, like a skilled matador, he lunges for the kill: “But you would like the boy as I do his eyes remind me of yours.” With one shrewd thrust, starting with “beauty” and ending with the ultimate hemorrhage of life’s blood on the subject of eyes, golden and otherwise, he ensured for me her lifelong loathing; yet I remained a public admirer of hers until the end though I do not love her better after death (to reprise a favorite poem of Tennessee’s), nor did I feel too deeply the absence of her company over the ensuing years. In 2003 I attended a seminar at Yale to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The City and the Pillar, sometimes noted in academic circles as the basis for a new discipline called “Queer Studies.” The “trashy ending” had been modified over the years to a fight and a rape. No murder, there was also never a suicide…I was in my youthful way trying to emulate Romeo and Juliet except that each lover was a boy. In other words, the ideal title should have been “The Romantic Agony” but that title had already been used for a collection of essays by the Italian critic Mario Praz.

The Bird was a good critic but he seldom read novels if he could help it. Late in life he finally read The Aspern Papers and marveled at how close the story was to his own Lord Byron’s Love Letter.

I think that what he once said of his own plays was also a factor in his reading: “I cannot write without a character for whom I do not feel sexual desire.” Tennessee would occasionally give me stories he had written and I would do the same with him. Each was brutally frank with the other. I with his “Rubio y Morena,” he as we have seen in the letter to Carson. Of the ending he had also told me, “I don’t think you realized what a good book you had written.”

After Tennessee died, Jay Laughlin his publisher at New Directions asked me to introduce a volume of his short stories, starting with, I think, a bit of juvenilia published in something like Weird Tales and ending with one of his last stories about an old writer racing literally from death as scraps of poems fall from his pockets. As I read the stories I realized that his talent and obsession was playwriting and the magical transference of text from written page to real actors who brought to life his true world both imagined and recalled. I also noticed the profound change in his work which mysteriously coincided with his change of name from Thomas Lanier Williams to Tennessee Williams. The style absolutely changes from…well, rather trashy naturalistic prose to that of a totally different voice quite unlike Thomas Lanier’s.

I have just read a letter from the Bird to Oliver Evans, a poet-critic who thought, in his innocence, that Anaïs Nin was a great novelist. The Bird had just read The Judgment of Paris. With this seventh novel I had, without knowing it, much less planning it, found my voice: certainly, there was no dramatic change of name though publishing friends had assured me that the notoriety of The City and the Pillar would exclude me from serious attention and so perhaps I should pick a new name. I did: for three mystery novels that were glowingly reviewed in The New York Times. A decade later when I republished all three in a single volume over my own name, the Times attacked the three that they had so recently hailed as by someone else. But the Bird had, in his vague intuitive way, sensed something was happening when he read Judgment. On February 20, 1952, he wrote Evans who had complained about the book, “I am impressed by Gore’s new book. I cannot quarrel with your analysis of it, but I am deeply impressed by the cogency of the writing and the liquid smooth style. And I think your article proves that you can do a piece on him. Give him my love. Say that the Bird gives her blessing.” Thank God, poor Oliver left me alone. The Judgment of Paris and its successor Messiah has each had a long underground life, particularly Messiah. But by 1954 I had written my first play for television and Tennessee who had always thought me intended for dramatic writing was proved correct based on no evidence at all except his own peculiar intuitions. On January 30, 1950, he had written Laughlin that I had been in Key West and written “a really excellent story, the best thing he has ever done in my opinion”; “Three Stratagems” was published in the New Directions anthology 12 (1950) and also in a collection of stories called A Thirsty Evil. Tennessee then mentions an odd book that I think I had dictated as an experiment, the tale of a street hustler called Some Desperate Adventure. Since I have completely forgotten it I’ve sent away to Harvard for a copy. Tennessee is proving more and more on target as the years pile up between us. “It was the most honest expression of Vidal that he has yet offered. I am encouraging him to do it as a play. It could be terrifying as a study of the modern jungle. Vidal is not likable, at least not in any familiar way, but he and Bowles are the two most honest savages I have met. Of course Bowles is still the superior artist, but I wonder if any other living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal?”

Well, thanks, Bird, from way up here in the awful year 2005.