Bob Bingham is standing; I am on the grass—outside Langdell Hall where I lived at Exeter. We are about to quarrel over which stories were to appear in the next issue of the Exeter Review which we coedited much of the time, a nice preparation for later serving on the board of Partisan Review.
I have not gone to any of our class reunions. I can’t think why.
Back to Rome in the sixties. Like Venus, Myra Breckinridge rose or rather leapt from her sea of yellow legal pads. Meanwhile, Roman life agreed with both Howard and me. All sorts of people that we knew and did not know came through town: memorable was Isherwood on his way back from a first visit to India whose Vedanta texts he had written so much about. Overwhelmed by the subcontinent’s proverbial teeming millions, he foresaw, with some equanimity, the eventual dying out of the fragile white race. “But we must,” he said solemnly, “set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and so on. They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”
I gave the completed Myra to my editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown—a Boston publishing house. I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.
TWENTY-NINE
My very first publisher, E. P. Dutton, was run by a White Russian called Nick Wreden. When I was still in uniform, he had taken Williwaw, my novel about an army ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war. An ursine figure of jovial disposition, during the days of my blackout by The New York Times Wreden loyally kept on publishing me. While I was busy writing plays for television, movies, theater, Wreden had moved on to Little, Brown and despite several published obituaries of me as a novelist (apparently, once lost to television that was indeed the end of someone who’d been thought promising), I told Nick that when I got back to novel-writing I’d come to him. But when, like General MacArthur, I did return, Nick was dead, and his place at Little, Brown had been taken by Ned Bradford. I have never needed an editor in the sense of a Max Perkins who was so necessary, we are assured, to salvage the likes of Thomas Wolfe, by neatly shaping long flowing works into simple commercial slices. All I ever needed was an intelligent first reader and, later, a good copy editor. Bradford proved to be ideal. When he read the manuscript of Julian his only comment was embarrassingly to the point: “You forgot to tell us why he became a Christian apostate.” I promptly provided the missing link. The three novels that I published with Little, Brown were each despite (or because of) the blackout a number-one bestseller on all such lists except that of the self-styled “newspaper of record.” Unfortunately, for Little, Brown and, in the long run, for me, I was persuaded to leave my Boston publisher for the New York–based Random House; there was also The New York Review of Books for whom I’d been writing since their first issue in 1963. As the co-editor, Barbara Epstein, was a friend it made sense to be nearby. In those days Howard and I still lived, despite our first long Roman interlude, on the banks of the Hudson River at Barrytown. I’ve already noted how hard it is to get out of politics; perhaps I should have added how hard it is to get politics out of oneself; almost as difficult as to get prose out of one’s system if one is primarily a novelist reconstructed as a dramatist, something quite other. Each has its satisfactions but the autonomy of the novelist, when not impeded by interested parties, can result in the making of worlds whose anterior form is like that of the primal biblical myth, chaos. For the absolute dramatist like Tennessee the written play is a sort of Eden, lacking only living actors to reenact Adam and Eve and the idea of Lilith as well as the entrance of the snake to start the drama going, rather as God did. The Glorious Bird—the name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally, with him, too. But to acknowledge me as a namer of Beasts diminished him as Supreme author. So, who was I then? He found the phrase in a letter to me where I am addressed as “Fruit of Eden,” a many-layered image, of course, at whose core there is what the first couple was forbidden ever to sample, knowledge. Thanks to the serpent’s crafty malice Eve fell upon knowledge if not wisdom and thus paradise was lost.
THIRTY
In rereading and writing about the Bird I am often surprised at how much Christian imagery, Old and New Testament, kept leaking into his work. But then—his sister, Rose, to one side—his maternal grandfather, Dakin, an Episcopal clergyman, was his favorite relative. The old man often joined him in Key West where, in due course, I met him. Recently an archivist at Harvard came across a short story that I had written about the old man, based on an anecdote that Tennessee had told me. When Tennessee was in his adolescence, visiting his grandparents in Mississippi, two men came one day to see the Reverend Dakin. He was, Tennessee later discovered, being blackmailed for an adventure with a boy. Apparently, this was not their first visit but it was the last. The Reverend gave them what he had in the bank and then, when they were gone, he took all his sermons out onto the front lawn and burned them. I found this story hard to forget and it was the eighth and last of the short stories that I was to write in my first phase as a prose writer. When it came time to include it in a volume entitled A Thirsty Evil, collegiality required me to show it to the Bird who said I must not use it. Since his grandfather was nearly blind and not apt ever to come across a New Directions anthology of contemporary literature…But, the Bird stopped me right there and hissed, “There is always Edwina,” known to the world as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. I did point out that since she had not sued her son for his portrait of her in that first play she would hardly take up arms to protect her father. But the Bird was firm even after I changed boy to girl. And so the story was obliged to wait half a century for publication by Harvard.
In the Bird’s last years I seldom saw him. The barbiturate Nembutal and vodka are a lethal combination and they did his brain no good. But the writing was often still marvelous; also, more adventurous than before. Many critics hoped, even prayed that this was a final falling off from his so unbearable to so many of them greatness. But the talent endured. Medications were only harming, for a time, his memory; he was also having hallucinations: one involved an unpleasant encounter with someone in Spain, only to discover the next day that the offending person had not been in the country. His brother put him away to dry out. “It was not so bad in the bin,” the Bird told me later. “I played a great deal of bridge and discovered that some of our best unsung actors are on the television soap operas.”