The Trip to Echo Spring (23 page)

Beneath the biographical dressing, the play is recognisably a rearrangement of the old bones of
The Glass Menagerie,
written forty years before. There's something profoundly distressing about realising that even in the very last years of his life Williams still felt compelled to write about young men desperate to escape their mothers. This time, though, there's no coffin trick, no whirling through cities like dead leaves. Even five fathoms beneath the sea, Crane has not travelled beyond the reach of his mother's suffocating devotion and need.

By coincidence, Crane also played a role in Cheever's inner life. As a young man he'd met the poet, who was friends with his old mentor Malcolm Cowley. Cowley's wife Peggy was Crane's travelling companion on the
Orizaba,
and Cheever liked to tell a bitchy story in which Crane killed himself because Peggy had been too busy in the ship's beauty parlour to comfort him after the attack. Despite his flippancy, the poet's death loomed large in Cheever's mind. It represented all too clearly the consequences – violence, rejection, humiliation, death – that might follow a public admittance of homosexual desire.

Both of these stories seemed to move beneath the surface of the
water; both freighted with the kind of sorrows one might wish to drown. The boat had anchored seven miles from shore. The crew were tossing boxes of facemasks and flippers on to the deck. I pulled on my gear and staggered down the yellow steps into rocking glass-blue waves that were smashing against the sides, tossing streamers of spray into my face. The ropes tensed then slackened. I stepped off, gasping, and kicked my way out.

There wasn't much to see. Sand, a few plants, some lumps of reddish coral in balls like polystyrene. The sun fell in shafts. I breathed audibly, as slowly as I could. Tiny grains of debris were raining past my mask, like static on a screen. ‘Liquor and swimming,' Tennessee said in an interview in the 1960s, ‘is all that keeps me going: Miltown, liquor and swimming.'

It had struck me a long time back that the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. I'd been collecting them up, these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death. Some were healthful: antidotes to a kind of felt dirtiness gathering elsewhere. In a fairly weak mid-period short story called ‘The Swimmers', Fitzgerald wrote about immersion as a literally life-saving practice for a man trapped in an unhappy marriage.

When difficulties became insurmountable, inevitable, Henry sought surcease in exercise. For three years, swimming had been a sort of refuge, and he turned to it as one man to music or another to drink. There was a point when he would resolutely stop thinking and go to the Virginia coast for a week to wash his mind in the water. Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child's dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon.

This pleasant activity recalls John Cheever, who made Neddy Merrill say in ‘The Swimmer' what he himself so ardently believed, that: ‘To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition.' It sounds delicious, but in that story there's an explicit link between the desire for buoyancy, and the need to drive away difficulties with a measure of gin. Even the phrase ‘resumption of a natural condition' bears some hint of regression: recalling the naked swimmer of the womb, irresponsible and free-floating in his purely liquid realm.

By the end of Neddy's journey home, he's exhausted and ill from the two kinds of plunges he's been taking. Even the structure of the story is swimmy, jolting uncertainly through time, like the party scenes in
The Great Gatsby,
which proceeds in a surge of unconnected frames, made jazzy and modern by the splicings of Nick Carraway's blackouts.
As for the mapping of an alcoholic's descent by way of his ability to move through water – wasn't that repeated in
Tender is the Night
, where Dick Diver begins as the graceful, competent king of the Riviera beach and ends by nearly killing himself while tumbling off an aquaplane, botching a trick he could pull off perfectly two summers before?

I was drifting away from the boat. I took two or three sharp strokes, let go again. There was more. A letter Hemingway wrote in 1950, in which he described diving off the deck of
Pilar
, somewhere in this same luminous region of the Gulf. He'd gone way down in waters that were a mile and a half deep, and on some black impulse emptied his lungs of air. Suspended in the warm half-light, he thought about letting himself drown, and it was only the memory of his three boys that made him kick fiercely to the surface.

Another. In the Dream Song ‘Henry's Understanding', John Berryman recalled a night on holiday in Maine, aged thirty-two or so. His wife is asleep, his friends Richard and Helen are asleep, but he – or rather the Henry-he, that ever-diminishing mask – is wide awake and reading. He thinks of putting down the book, undressing, climbing into bed, and then it occurs to him:

This isn't quite a fantasy of death. You don't walk forever, dead. Instead, it's a dream of entering some other realm, both protective and
destructive: an underwater world, where you are naked, unreachable, and entirely alone. The island at the end of the lawn was P'tit Manan, visible from Richard's house, though it's not perhaps irrelevant that when his father shot himself they were living on Clearwater Island, out in the Gulf of Mexico.

I swam back to the boat then and struggled up the steps, dumping my gear on the deck and showering under a hose of sun-warmed water. The sky was blue, whitened with little scuds of cirrus. A few snorkellers were still in the sea, splayed like starfish, their arms akimbo. ‘Let's go!' the captain shouted. ‘Come back to the boat!' and they herded obediently in.

As we sailed back to Key West the crew handed round trays of beer. I took a cup, the plastic beaded with condensation. People were sprawled all over the deck, their bodies glistening with sunscreen, palpably relaxed after their swim. My hair had worked itself into spectacular tangles and I was unravelling them with my fingers when all of a sudden there were three, four, five fins in the water. ‘Dolphins! Dolphins! Dolphins!' the prettiest cabin boy shouted. Atlantic bottlenoses, leaping beside the boat, lifting their clean, beaming faces to the sun. They shot back under, leeing east, and as they ducked I remembered another line, this time Fitzgerald's, which riddled in with the rest: ‘All good writing is
swimming under water
and holding your breath.'

There was one last thing I wanted to do in Key West. I'd been walking past St. Mary's Star of the Sea two, sometimes four times a day. It was on Truman Avenue, a big Spanish-looking building with two spires
like pointed hats. On my final morning in town, I went inside. All of the doors were open, and the big room was flooded with light. The prayer book was open on Psalm 139: ‘Oh Lord you have searched me and known me.' Underneath was the Spanish: ‘Señor, tu me examinas y conoces.'

Hemingway's youngest son, Gregory, was baptised here on 14 January 1932, and it was here too that Tennessee Williams made his conversion to Catholicism, slap-bang in the worst period of his life. After Frank died in 1963, he went to see Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr. Feelgood, who treated his patients with intramuscular injections of vitamins, painkillers and amphetamines, the so-called ‘miracle shots'. This was the beginning of Tennessee's Stoned Age, which lasted right through the 1960s. During that whole irredeemable period, he was far gone and out, barely perpendicular against the current, buoyed on a diet of coffee, liquor, Doriden, Mellaril, barbiturates and speed. Hardly any wonder he found it hard to speak and kept toppling over in bars, theatres and hotels. Each year, he put on a new play, and each year it failed, rarely lasting more than a month before it closed.

In January of 1969, his brother Dakin came to visit and became convinced Tennessee was about to die. A Catholic himself, he organised the conversion, hoping at the very least to ensure his brother didn't wind up in hell. Years later, in the
Paris Review
interview of 1981, Tennessee recounted a hazy memory of meeting a Jesuit father who seemed ‘very lovely' and who decided, probably wisely, that Mr. Williams was not capable of learning catechisms. Instead, he received extreme unction, which is reserved for the very sick, before being pronounced a Catholic. The baptism took place in this airy blue and white room. I imagined him listing up the aisle, supported by his housekeeper and Dakin, parroting
the responses beneath a stained glass image of Our Lady, standing in the midst of the ocean, the sun setting behind her in bars of red and gold.

It didn't help, perhaps because he was barely conscious of where he was or what he was saying. Dakin's next intervention was more extreme. In September of the same year, Tennessee got up to make himself coffee and somehow either sat on the stove or fell down and spilled the Silex of boiling water over his body, getting what he recounted at different times as either second or third degree burns. He rang a friend, raving, and she contacted Dakin. This time he took his brother back with him to St. Louis, the place Tennessee hated most on earth, and had him admitted to St. Barnes Hospital, where he remained on a locked ward for three months. Tennessee never forgave Dakin for this realisation of his greatest fear, though it undoubtedly saved his life.

Dakin . . . just threw me into Barnes Hospital (St. Louis), right into the psychiatric ward, which was
incredibly
awful. They suddenly snatched away every pill I had! The injections went too. So I blacked out. It was cold turkey, baby. They tell me I had three brain concussions in the course of one long day, and a coronary. How I survived, I don't know. I think there were homicidal intentions at work there. I was in that place for three and a half months. The first month I was in the violent ward, although I was not violent. I was terrified and I crouched in a corner trying to read. The patients would have terrible fights over the one television set. Someone would put on the news, and another patient would jump up, yelling, and turn on cartoons. No wonder they were violent.

Writing to a friend from this uncertain sanctuary, he recalled the Silex and the fits but seemed bewildered as to how they fitted together: ‘The rest is not blank but is too fragmented and chaotic to be sorted out so far . . . I can only lie on my right side these interminable nights without sleep for more than an occasional lucky bad dream hour. (“Death, how do you like your beautiful blue-eyed boy?”) It's sort of fun writing you. This typewriter haunts me.'

Immediately after his release he went on the David Frost show. You can see a clip on YouTube. Tennessee looks thin and dapper in a sweater and dark trousers. He's still very handsome, his moustache neatly trimmed. ‘Ah'm on the wagon now,' he says, so drunk he can hardly work the words free. Everyone laughs, and he pokes his tongue out coquettishly and drawls: ‘I allow myself o-one drink a day.' Frost asks him about his homosexuality, as if it's another affliction he might have overcome, and Williams gets off a one-liner that has the audience eating out of his hand. ‘But I've covered the waterfront,' he giggles, and flings himself back in the chair to a great storm of applause.

Back at liberty, he resumed the obsessive cycle of production. In the course of the 1970s there were six new plays, one novel, one volume of poems, one collection of stories and
Memoirs
, which became a bestseller. In the spring of 1979, he took up his long-neglected diary again, this time titling it
Mes Cahiers Noir
. It begins with a long, raving entry full of disconnected aphorisms.