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.
TWENTY-ONE
Over the years I suppose that I exchanged more letters with Tennessee’s other honest savage, Paul Bowles, than ever I did with the Bird whose wisdom—now so terminally late in the game—I appreciate. For some reason Paul and I got into the habit of reversing names. He was Luap Selwob and I Erog La-div.
We first met in the forties in New York City when he was composing music for plays, among them Streetcar. Yes, in those days plays were literally melo-dramas; dramas with musical accompaniment somewhat on the order of the Warner Brothers movie music of the day which drove Bette Davis wild. During the shooting of Dark Victory, Geraldine Fitzgerald was on the set when Davis, having gallantly seen her husband off to New York and then planting a number of irises while going blind from some sort of fatal movie disease, makes her way, unsteadily, to the staircase. Out of view, the grips and everyone else nearby (was Ronald Reagan on hand? He plays a drunken playboy in the film; and is very good) gathered to watch Davis make her last climb up those stairs and to her stoic death.
Fitzgerald told me that “halfway up the stairs Bette stopped and turned to fix the director, Irving Rapper, with her famed steely gaze. ‘Now tell me, Irving, before I waste any more time on acting, who is going up these stairs to die, me or Max Steiner?’ ” Like most of the great actresses she hated the schmaltzy movie music that was added later by some director-editor in order to nudge—shove—the audience into sobs or laughter. “What that awful music does,” Davis said to me when she was playing in The Catered Affair, the first film that I ever wrote for MGM, “is erase the actor’s performance, note by note,” which was certainly true of Steiner’s lush orchestrations but hardly true of the more evocative music that Bowles and Virgil Thomson and other “real” composers composed for the immediate postwar theater and films. But soon original theater music was dropped; union costs were too high for so precarious a medium where a single journalist on the warpath could shut down a production and often did, particularly in the case of the Bird and any other writer thought to be a same-sexualist. The fifties inaugurated an all-out war on the fags, which did much harm to the theater, an institution already besieged by movies and then swamped by television.
I have no clear memory of meeting Paul Bowles. Doubtless, it was when he was working on one of Tenn’s plays. He was fifteen years older than I. A vivid blond with blue eyes. He had gone briefly to the University of Virginia; then fled to Paris to be a poet; was taken up—or was it taken in?—by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Bluntly, Gertrude told him he was not a poet. So he became a composer, and studied with Aaron Copland. He was a descendant of Samuel Bowles, the pro-Lincoln New England publisher (I was already investigating American history and told Paul more than he ever wanted to know about his interesting connection). Apolitical, he had briefly been a Communist as was the custom in those days in New York art circles. But he was deeply bored by the party and soon lost all interest in politics, unlike the Bird who awakened, after a decade’s slumber, and said to me, “Gore, I think I slept through the sixties.” I told him, “Bird, you didn’t miss a thing but, if you were really asleep, God knows how you’re going to deal with what’s coming.” But the Bird, undaunted, promptly joined the anti–Vietnam War movement.