Point to Point Navigation

FORTY-NINE

“When did you fall out with Tennessee?” is a question that the odd specialist in such arcana asks me, to which there is no answer. “When did you fall in?” might be more to the point. But I am now navigating several volumes of his letters and conversations with him and it is a dizzying experience. What I used to call his night-blooming paranoia is often on display and strange stories crop up in the oddest places. The strangest concerned the first novel of Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, which I had got to John Lehmann in England when a publisher declined it because “it was not a novel.” In the forties there were many people who regarded themselves as specialists in what was and what was not. I recall a concert of Bowles’ where one critic complained that the music was not music and Paul responded by explaining that the score and the instruments combined proved that it could not be anything other than music by any standard. The Bird wanted to be helpful to The Sheltering Sky so he asked The New York Times to let him review it. They did. Then there was some mix-up about getting the proofs to the Bird which he immediately surmised was a rejection of his review which began with a cheery assault on Truman Capote and me whose “frisky antics” though “precociously knowing and singularly charming” (doubly would have been a more telling adverb) could not be counted on “for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind.” When galleys of this review did not arrive the Bird assumed that I had used my great influence at The New York Times to suppress his review entirely. He was not one to pay much attention to the sad tales of others. If he had, he would have known that I had no influence in this quarter. Later he writes Donald Windham that he had done me an injustice. But there was worse to come. He greatly admired one of Windham’s novels. He had also read the manuscript of a novel that I have never published. He even sent it on to Jay Laughlin at New Directions as my best work. Then his paranoia like a great branch of bougainvillea starts blossoming. Apparently, the manuscript of mine bears a suspicious resemblance to Windham’s novel. Another great flower unfolds. Windham wonders how I could have read it since it was not yet published? A riot of blooms. Apparently I was in his literary agent’s office where I found a carbon copy which I either copied then and there or memorized on the spot in order to plagiarize at my leisure. Windham, somewhat deficient in humor, reports in his notes to the Williams-Windham correspondence that he was, for this publication, obliged to read my early novels and found no trace of himself in those inimitable works. The thought of me sitting in a literary agent’s office looking for texts to plunder shows how close to madness these two troubled friends had sailed. I was also aware that in his letters the Bird always tried to please the recipient and because Windham had a “bitchy” side the Bird would decorate his text with unpleasant tales about friends and foes, calculated to give pleasure. In one of the letters the Bird notes that “I got five sets of notices on the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman. Five different people sent them. It is hard to analyze one’s feelings about the triumphs of another artist. There is likely to be a touch of the invidious in your feelings which makes you feel cheap and shameful. I liked the play when I read it, but I must say the great success of it is a surprise…I think Gadge must deserve more credit than the notices give him.” In a letter to our friend Maria St. Just the Bird writes in 1960, rather sadly, apropos the success of my play The Best Man: “It looks as if this is Gore’s year.” But despite masses of bougainvillea over the years we usually got on largely because the same things—and people—made us laugh. On the other hand, his queenly entourage really got on my nerves. But with time they defected and there we were occupying at times the same midsummer night’s dream. Fairies away! as proud Titania once yelled.

I began this memoir in Los Angeles on the last day of 2004. Now it is September 2005 and I am in Ravello, Italy, with no telephone, the result of a series of storms due to global warming: the principal fact of our lives even though, as they say in Washington, the jury is still out on whether or not such a thing is taking place. Meanwhile television is still working and we can observe the catastrophe that has left most of New Orleans under water. The Italians are astonished at the casualness with which the American government goes about saving those clinging to life atop the roofs of buildings. Tact keeps the local press from noting what every American knows: those who have been abandoned by lifesavers belong to our permanent underclass: the African Americans. The failures of the administration to save lives in the drowned city is further proof that any first-world militarized nation can easily defeat the United States in a modern war. We are not set up to survive a serious attack. Excuses fill the establishment press. Because of our altruistic leadership states like Louisiana and Mississippi have sent their National Guardsmen abroad to bring freedom and democracy to two countries that we were obliged to smash to bits so that they might one day enjoy true freedom, et cetera. Now the changed climate is doing to us what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan and are planning to do to Iran and other oil producers.