Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (27 page)

! A lot of this may be only the strain of work—without the satisfaction of knowing the work is good. Perhaps you’re only imagining F. matters that much.

In a poem written around this time, “Faint as Leaf Shadow,” Williams evoked Merlo’s slow withdrawal:

Faint as leaf shadow does he fade

and do you fade in touching him.

And as you fade, the afternoon

fades with you and is cool and dim . . .

And then you softly say his name

as though his name upon your tongue

a wall could lift against the drift

of shadow that he fades among . . .

“When I see him enjoy so much more the company of others . . . it is naturally a bit hard on me, since I believe that I love him,” Williams confided to Windham about Merlo. But if Williams was able to hide his jealousy for the most part, Merlo was capable of shows of stroppy displeasure when other lesser lights, like Britneva, who joined them on holiday that summer, claimed his lover’s allegiance. “Frank is possessive and destructive of every relationship Tenn has, which is bad, for an artist [like] Tenn needs some impetus—happiness or unhappiness—not just the nervous reactions of a horse,” Britneva wrote in a competitive snit in her July diary. She also noted a change in her friend. “There is a curious listlessness and lack of spark in him,” Britneva wrote in her diary that June, referring to Williams as “a fish on ice.” “His eyes are puffy and tired tired tired. He said he felt ‘a hundred years old.’ ” She continued, “He seems very detached somehow, like something that is running down, unwinding itself.”

Uncertain of the success of his heart or his art, Williams worked fitfully on two projects: a short story and a play titled “Stornello,” an “Italian name for a type of dramatic-narrative song,” Williams explained in his outline for Wood, which was “usually in dialogue form between a male and female singer.” But he put the play on the back burner. “This may turn out to be foolish,” he wrote to his publisher, “but I don’t seem to have any choice in the matter.” In the story, adapted from a discarded play and expanded between March and June into a novella, which he intended as a film vehicle for Greta Garbo, Williams faced up to his own emotional and artistic impasse. The tentative title, later re-titled
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, was “Moon of Pause.” His heroine, Karen Stone—a widow and once-renowned actress—is caught up in the expatriate entropy that Williams dubbed “the drift.” In a petulant and mercurial gigolo named Paolo she sees a last chance to reclaim her own desires. Mrs. Stone was modeled on the writer and artist Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, Williams’s occasional traveling companion for whom he had posed that year for a large fresco. (After the story was published, she reportedly destroyed the painting.) “Eyre de Lanux is a woman who was a
great
beauty, is now about 45,” Williams wrote to Laughlin, underestimating her age by a decade. “I think she has recently had her face lifted while she was mysteriously away in Paris. She has a young Italian lover, a boy of 25, startlingly beautiful and the only real rascal that I have met in Italy. Her blind adoration of him is shocking!” He went on, “Eyre’s boyfriend, Paolo, recently brought her a two-year-old infant that he claims to be his bastard child and wants her to take care of him. It has no resemblance to him. It is obviously a trick of some kind.”

With coffee at work

Onto the facts of Eyre de Lanux’s situation Williams projected his own psychic reality. Mrs. Stone, who has retired from the stage and who has hit the unnerving milestone of fifty (Williams was approaching forty), is acutely aware of loss—loss of beauty, talent, career, and direction. She feels “stopped” and finds herself taking refuge in the consoling beauty of Rome, “leading an almost posthumous existence.” She, like Williams, is obsessed with the diminution of her magic: “Mrs. Stone
knew
it. She did not fail to discover this creeping attrition and to do everything in her power to compensate for it by increased exercise of skill.” When she is buttonholed by a bossy American female friend who is appalled by her promiscuous ways and who tells her that “you can’t retire from an art,” Mrs. Stone replies, “You can when you finally discover you had no talent for it.” Like Williams, who referred to himself that winter as a “wounded gladiator,” Mrs. Stone saw her career as a perpetual battle, a competitive slog driven by the infantile desire to be “King On The Mountain”:

Scrambling, pushing, kicking and scratching had been replaced by ostensibly civilized tactics. But Mrs. Stone’s arrival at the height of her profession, and her heroic tenacity with which she held that position against all besieging elements or persons, with the sole exception of time, could not fail to impress Mrs. Stone as having a parallel to the childhood game on the terrace. At certain unguarded moments, those moments when the cultivated adult self . . . receives a transmission from its original, natural being, she had intercepted the inner whisper of these exultant words:

Mrs. Stone’s surname indicated the gravity of her retreat from that battle. “Security is a kind of death,” Williams had written in 1947. A theatrical workhorse who has put herself out to pasture, she finds herself with financial freedom, thanks to her late husband, but no purpose. “Being purposeless was like being drunk,” Williams writes. “She was free to drift for hours in no particular direction.” Deprived of output and acclaim—the hubbub of success that once surrounded her—Mrs. Stone is overwhelmed by intimations of emptiness.

She had been continually occupied with more things than a single existence seemed sufficient to hold, and for that reason, the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward from its orbit, Mrs. Stone was removed for a long time from the void she circled. . . . Mrs. Stone knew, in her heart, that she was turning boldly inward from the now slackened orbit, turning inward and beginning now, to enter the space enclosed by the path of passionate flight. . . . And being a person of remarkable audacity, she moved inward with her violet eyes wide open, asking herself, in her heart, what she would find as she moved? Was it simply a void, or did it contain some immaterial force that still might save as well as it might destroy her?

Paolo, the perfectly formed young Italian hustler who picks up Mrs. Stone, is for her a kind of unexplored territory. Seeing him undressed and sunning himself on a cot beside her, Mrs. Stone “could not bear to look at him. He was too lustrous.” Her marriage with the late Mr. Stone was essentially asexual: “Their marriage, in its beginning, had come very close to disaster because of sexual coldness, amounting to aversion, on her part, and a sexual awkwardness, amounting to impotence, on his,” Williams writes, describing how the marriage would have broken up had not Mr. Stone broken down and “wept on her breast like a baby, and in this way transferred his position from that of unsuccessful master to that of pathetic dependent.” Williams goes on, “Through his inadequacy Mr. Stone had allowed them both to discover what both really wanted, she an adult child, and he a living and young and adorable mother.”

The fillip of emotional substitution lent longevity to the Stones’ marriage; it also invested the relationship with a ghostly quality—desires were unspoken and loneliness was disguised behind a performance of civility, in which “they exchanged their eagerly denying smiles at each other and their reassuring light speeches.” Until her Roman spring—a time that coincides with her menopause—Mrs. Stone enacted seduction onstage; her sexuality, however, was dormant. (In the tentative play outline on which the novella was based, Williams wrote, “Her effort to express a tenderness is . . . difficult. For scenes like this she always has lines memorized!”) Like Edwina Williams, with her Puritan terror of the flesh, Mrs. Stone associated sex with dread; menopause puts an end to that:

What she felt, now, was desire without the old, implicit distraction of danger. Nothing could happen, now, but desire, and its possible gratification. . . . It had been the secret dread in her, the unconscious will

to bear. That dread was now withdrawn.

This sudden liberty accounts for her “emotional anarchy” with Paolo. In the game of cat and mouse that she and Paolo play, Mrs. Stone refuses to be the aggressor; she is flirtatious but not active. “Mrs. Stone knew, as well as Paolo knew it, that to become the aggressor in a relationship is to forsake an advantage,” Williams writes. “She, too, had once held the trump card of beauty. . . . Her social manner and procedure were still based upon its possession. She showed as plainly as Paolo that she was more used to receive than to offer courtship.” Paolo’s fecklessness is intentionally confounding: “I will call you in the morning, he would say, or ‘I will pick you up for cocktails.’ Rarely anything at a fixed point on the clock. Sometimes he failed to appear at all.” Nonetheless, the mercurial behavior inspired Mrs. Stone’s “incontinent longings,” an auto-erotic thrill in which absence created the currency of desire.

Mrs. Stone’s pining for the elusive Paolo offered Williams a fictional situation onto which he could project his own agitated emotions. Mrs. Stone’s complaint about Paolo was also Williams’s about Merlo: “When we’re alone together you’re so lazy and sulky that you’ll barely talk, but the moment you find yourself in front of a crowd, you light up.” Merlo’s temperamental scenes—his walk-outs, his walkabouts, his vituperative rants—as well as his occasional good moods, were duly noted in Williams’s diary. “Frankie and I have been happy lately in Rome,” Williams noted on May 30. “I am particularly glad that
he
is.” The jealousy, the frustration, the adoration, the lust, even the peace offerings of Williams’s relationship found their way into Mrs. Stone’s story. “
Stai tranquillo
”—the words with which Mrs. Stone calmed herself after Paolo’s bad behavior—were the same words Williams addressed to himself when exasperated with Merlo. He wrote in his notebook on May 29:

I love F.—deeply, tenderly, unconditionally. I think I love with every bit of my heart, not with the wild, disorderly, terrified passion I had for K[ip] that brilliant little summer of 1940. But doesn’t this finally add up to more? If it doesn’t it is only because of the mutations—time—in me.

But it is amazing that I who’ve become so calm and contained about other matters could feel as much as I do when F. is sleeping beside me. If only I could give F. something beside clothes and travel—something that would add to the content of heart and life, make a difference in his state of being. If he left me, and perhaps he will, I would go on living and enduring and I suppose turn him into a poem as I’ve done with others. But the poem is already there in his actual presence—Enough. I said to Paul [Bowles] “I am afraid it will end badly.”—Will it? The best way is to let everything alone—as it is—accept—and give—

.

For both Williams and his fictional alter ego, a world without love was a dark, vacant place, but also a probability. Throughout Mrs. Stone’s passionate pursuit of Paolo, she herself is stalked—by a man who vaguely resembles him. (He is “somewhat taller than Paolo, but of the same general type.”) At the opening of the story, the man is just a handsome, threadbare, stealthy figure standing hunched near the Spanish Steps, looking up at Mrs. Stone’s palazzo terrace, who seems “to be waiting to receive a signal of some kind.” Over the course of the story, the shadowy figure takes on an aura of menace. Staring into a shop window, Mrs. Stone sees his reflection and hears him peeing behind her. Later, in another chance encounter, the anonymous man exposes himself to her. A predatory figure, an apparition of anonymity and the negative, he at first causes Mrs. Stone to flee. However, by the end of the story, after she has violently broken off her affair with Paolo, Mrs. Stone wanders alone in her large apartment, overwhelmed by the imminence of nothingness—“Nothing could not be allowed to go on and on and on like this!” she thinks.

Action is the antidote to angst; Mrs. Stone, for the first time, becomes an agent of her own desire. On the terrace of her apartment, she feels something stir inside her. “It was nothing that she had planned or wanted to happen, and yet she was making it happen,” Williams writes. Her stalker—the man waiting for a signal outside—now receives one. Mrs. Stone wraps her apartment keys in a handkerchief and throws them down to him. The gesture is a semaphore of absence: emptiness beckoning nonentity. With this histrionic gesture, the tale also becomes a parable of “the occult reasons” of Williams’s heart, the knowing that “does not need to be conscious knowing.” The figure, who stoops to pick up the keys, is not described as a person; he is an “it” rather than a “he.” “It looked up at her,” Williams writes, “with a single quick jerk of the head, and even now it was moving out of sight, not away from her but towards her.”

The story leaves Mrs. Stone on the brink of an embrace. “Yes, in a few minutes now, the nothingness would be interrupted, the awful vacancy would be entered by something,” she says, in the penultimate paragraph. In seizing the moment, Mrs. Stone is also reclaiming the fantasy of her lost love. The encounter holds out the prospect of both emotional survival and self-destruction. “
Look, I’ve stopped the drift
!” she says in the story’s ambiguous last line. By throwing the keys down to a menacing, anonymous figure, she does what Williams did from the stage: she shares herself—puts herself at risk—with her audience by inviting it in. “I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you,” Williams’s spokesman Chance Wayne says to the audience in the final lines of
Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959). A decade earlier, Mrs. Stone asked for the same thing.