The Trip to Echo Spring (22 page)

There is probably not an episode described in
Memoirs
that did not happen at some time, to some one, in some way, but more likely than not to a different person, at a different time, with different details. Curtain after curtain of ambivalence has descended in his life.

Not forensic evidence, then, but instead a very precise record of the kind of stories an alcoholic tells himself: confused, self-lacerating and resolutely bedded in denial.

According to this lubricated testimony, in 1960 Frank began to lose weight and suffer from mysterious spells of tiredness. While he was in New York for tests, Tennessee invited a young painter to stay at the Duncan Street house. A friend of Frank's warned him about the interloper, and so he flew home from hospital, and sat in the corner of the living room, watching the two men with what Tennessee described as great, baleful eyes. Then, without warning, he dashed across the room ‘like a jungle cat' and grabbed the painter by the throat. The police were called, and took him to a friend's (Frank was as popular
with the Key West police force as he was with everyone else he ever met). The next morning he returned as Tennessee was loading all his papers into the car. ‘He watched in silence for a while and then as the motor started ran down the path I was standing on, saying: “Are you going to leave me without shaking hands? After fourteen years together?”'

It's dreadful, reading this, reading between the lines, imagining someone tearing out the foundations of their life. It seems to me a classic example of the alcoholic's desire to self-harm by hurting those who are most dear, demonising and then banishing them, as if that will achieve anything at all. An undated letter to Maria St. Just sounds the same punitive note: ‘The Horse has done just about all in his power to shatter me and humiliate me, so I must find the courage to forget and put away a sick thing.'

In the spring of 1962, Frank insisted on a meeting in New York. Tennessee brought his agent, and it was agreed that Frank would remain on salary – an unpleasant word in the context of the end of a fourteen-year relationship. Ten minutes after he left the building, Frank rang and begged to continue the conversation in private. They went to a nearby bar, and Tennessee said something he claimed to remember word for word more than a decade on. He said: ‘Frank, I want to get my goodness back,' though if that was true it's hard not to feel he was going cold turkey on precisely the wrong thing.

Silence for a while. Then – in this version of events at least – in 1963 a friend rang to say Frank had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He had surgery in New York but the tumour was too close to his heart and so the doctors sewed him up and sent him home to Key West. For a few months he was full of beans. He went out dancing
– that wild lindy hop – and was accompanied everywhere by Gigi, Tennessee's bulldog. When he got weaker he moved back into Duncan Street, sleeping in his and Tennessee's old bedroom, while Tennessee and his new boyfriend, a poet nicknamed Angel, took the room downstairs. At some point they returned to New York, leaving Angel alone in the south. Frank's weight had dropped below a hundred pounds, and he looked ‘like the skeleton of a sparrow', though he remained fiercely independent. At night he locked his door, and in the afternoons he watched television, side by side on the love seat with the old dog, their expressions, Tennessee observed, almost identically stoical.

All that summer he kept going in and out of hospital. Tennessee visited most days, displaying the exquisite generosity and tenderness that was as much a part of his nature as the lodestone of depression, the crushing paranoia. On 21 September Frank had trouble breathing, and there was a delay before anyone brought oxygen. When he finally fell asleep Tennessee went out to a gay bar with some friends and got drunk and when he came home the phone rang and Frank's best friend told him the Little Horse was dead. ‘As long as Frank was well, I was happy,' he wrote in
Memoirs.
‘He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn't create a life for myself.' And in a letter, written to Windham early in 1964: ‘next to my work, Frankie was my life.'

The hell with it. I walked away from the Duncan Street house then and down to the beach. I wanted to swim, to wash away some of the sadness these stories stirred in me. A red-faced man with a ponytail
called out: ‘I hope your day is as beautiful as you are,' which made me bark a laugh. There was something calming about walking through the quiet streets, full of the sound of mourning doves and starlings chattering invisibly in the trees. Around the corner there was a school, and then a community garden, planted with nasturtiums, ruby chard, fennel and bright blue stars of borage.

On South Street a man was out painting his house, and further down someone was coaxing a motorbike, muttering ‘son of a bitch' when it coughed into life. The sound of a chainsaw, the
sussshsh
of leaves, the smell of jasmine, there for a moment and then gone. On the boardwalk at Clarence Higgs Beach there was a stretch of shining black stone. As I got closer I realised it was the Key West Aids Memorial. It was engraved with a map of the islands, and underneath were the names of the dead – Richard Cahil. Steve Vanney. Edgar Ellis. Troy Aney.

It was very hot. The sea was slapping right against the boardwalk, the sun splintering off it in quick, dangerous sparkles. A homeless woman made a feint towards a glossy green cockerel. I slogged on past the big hotels to Dog Beach, stripped down to my swimsuit, and waded out past a raft of black seaweed. There were a few sharp rocks – coral, maybe – and then sand packed in hard ripples that felt very pleasant beneath my feet. Little twigs and branches of kelp kept floating by. The water was warm and opaque, addled with sand. I waded out until I was chest deep and then let go into it, pulling hard towards the buoys.

Everything was looser out here, more dissipated. The stories I'd been turning over scared me, because I sensed in some small part of myself how pleasurable it might be to let alcohol unhinge you, to take you down into an unreachable, sunken place, where sounds are very muted.
Drowning your sorrows, that's the phrase. And I remembered then, floating on water the exact greenish-yellow of Gatorade, that one of Tennessee's most persistent fantasies was about being buried at sea. In
Memoirs,
he described a codicil to his will in which he asked to be ‘sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped over board, twelve hours north of Havana, so that my bones may rest not too far from those of Hart Crane'. Hart Crane, the alcoholic poet. Something about that fantasy of liquidity, of deliquescence, underpinned the story about Frank, though once again I wasn't sure I knew how or why. None of it was clear to me, but when I got back to the guesthouse I rang round all the boat companies until I found one that would take me out the next morning and let me swim in the deep, mixed waters of the Gulf, where Tennessee had hoped his body would end up.

I got up just after dawn and went into town by way of Harry Truman's Little White House. There was an ice cream shop open by the harbour, and I bought coffee and a bagel, and sat in the sun eating it and trying not to think about sharks. The night before, in a frenzy of anxiety, I'd Googled ‘shark attack Florida' and come up with a man in Marathon who'd died after his thigh was bitten to the bone. I'd been reading through the plays too, looking for sea-burials, and I steered myself back to them now, swerving forcibly away from the image of a fin breaking water.

In the final scene of
Streetcar,
Blanche is in the bathroom, preparing herself for a departure she's disastrously misunderstood. She's been through the worst of it now: been raped by Stanley, been rejected and exposed by Mitch. She comes out into the bedroom, hair freshly washed, barely footed in reality, and gets to rattling on about a dirty grape.

I shall eat an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean. I will die – with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. ‘Poor lady', they'll say. ‘That quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.
[The cathedral chimes are heard.]
And I'll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard – at noon – in the blaze of summer – and into an ocean as blue as
[chimes again
] my first lover's eyes.

The same image, borrowed loosely from a short story by Chekhov called ‘Gusev', is repeated in
The Night of the Iguana,
one of Williams's last critical and commercial successes. All that bad year of 1961, when Frank was starting to deteriorate, and he was responding by whirling away into affairs and drinking himself silly, he was at the same time hard at work on his most compassionate and explicitly hopeful play. It's strung with painful, almost embarrassingly urgent questions about appetite and punishment, sex and corruption; about the cost of making art, and whether one can be good, or find a way of living that doesn't mean being torn to pieces – a counter, in that respect at least, to the profoundly bleak
Suddenly Last Summer
, the play he'd written during his analysis, in which the predatory poet Sebastian Venables is torn apart and eaten by a gang of urchin children he's been buying for sex.

I'd watched the film of
Iguana
in bed in my own flat, not long before I left England. Ava Gardner as Maxine, in her tight jeans, playing the role Bette Davis had on stage: a widowed hotel proprietor, tough, broke and cheerful, though she's freefalling without any kind of safety net. Richard Burton as Reverend Shannon, the
defrocked priest, alcoholic and seducer of teenaged girls, teetering into a breakdown while leading a tour party of church ladies through the tropics of Mexico. He's terrified of a thing he calls ‘the spook', and Deborah Kerr as Hannah Jelkes sits with him through the long hot night on the hotel terrace, teaching him by her own hard-won calm that there are demons inside us with which we can learn to co-exist.

It's all very close to the bone. Hannah's version of the spook is ‘the blue devil': a term Tennessee had been using in his journals since his early twenties, and which he once compared to ‘having wildcats under my skin'. Like Cheever's cockroach or
cafard,
the blue devil signified anxiety, depression, an intolerable swamping of fear and shame. Asked how she won the battle, Hannah says simply: ‘I showed him that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance . . . Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect.' Later, she delivers one of the most beautiful lines in all Williams's work: ‘Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.' So much of him is in that statement: tolerant, non-judgmental, determined to drag out into the light all the shameful clutter of psychopathology our species has evolved.

The line about the burial comes around the midpoint of the play, which runs over a twenty-four hour period with the same unity of setting that made
Cat
so claustrophobic and compelling. Maxine is telling Shannon about her husband's recent death. His last request, she says philosophically, was ‘to be dropped in the sea, yeah, right out there, in that bay, not even sewed up in canvas, just in his fisherman's outfit'. A few years after writing that line, Tennessee reiterated his desire for the same thing, noting in his journal:

I wish a Greek Orthodox service: then a return to the States and the burial at sea (a day North of Havana) where my idol Hart Crane, feeling his work finished (as did Mishima at the end, and as do I), found refuge only in that vast ‘mother of life'.

I looked out at it, anxiety mixing with the usual swimmer's lust. The cat was riding light, bouncing a little on the waves. People were gathering on the quay. It was time to board. I joined the crowd weaving in single file across the ramp. Right away there was a hitch. The dreadlocked captain announced that we wouldn't be going to the coral reefs. The weather was off, the waves too big. Instead we'd be heading south-west, in the rough direction of Havana. ‘We're getting what Mother Nature has for us,' he said irritably. ‘It's what you make it, guys. So everyone knows what they're getting into? A nice boat ride out, a nice swim, a nice boat ride back in the afternoon?'

Fine by me. It was rough. As soon as we left the harbour the swells started up. I sat on the starboard deck, watching the water rushing out from under the prow, the light scattering in the wake. The air smelled of gasoline and salt. I leaned over, looking down at the glossy blue-green water and then out, towards the horizon. No sign of Cuba, sixty miles away, through water that swarmed with sharks. A flying fish breached and flagged impossibly upward, crashing down in a spurt of foam.

It was somewhere out here that Hart Crane drowned in 1932. One night, travelling back by steamer from Mexico to New York, he was beaten up by a sailor he'd tried to seduce. The next morning, he jumped from the fantail, 275 miles north of Havana and ten miles off the coast of Florida, and though the captain stopped the engines immediately his
body was never recovered. Williams often travelled with copies of Crane's books and letters, and liked to use his poems as dipping pans for titles, though he wasn't sure he understood so much as a single line. No matter. He got the impact, the heady sense of being glutted by imagistic language. One of the last plays he ever wrote,
Steps Must be Gentle,
was a two-hander in which ghost versions of Crane and his mother Grace air their grievances, just as Hemingway and Fitzgerald did in
Clothes for a Summer Hotel.
In it, Crane recounts the events on the
Orizaba:
how his face was disfigured in the row and how he came out on to the deck in pyjamas and a coat, which he folded neatly over the stern rail before stepping out.