The Trip to Echo Spring (24 page)
Read The Trip to Echo Spring Online
Authors: Olivia Laing
Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group?
The best I can say for myself is that I worked like hell.
I am old and ugly and that is abhorrent, but in a different way. My disease is abhorrent, but in a different way.
I remained a kind person, or at least a person who respected kindness and struggled to retain it, for a long, long time.
It was around this time that Truman Capote satirised him in his wicked, sometimes wickedly funny, novel
Answered Prayers,
which he never finished, despite all his boasts, and which was published after his death, though sections of it ran in the late 1970s in
Esquire
and led to the exodus of a great number of his friends. The Williams character is a playwright called Mr. Wallace, who lives in a disgustingly filthy room at the Plaza hotel, with laundry everywhere and âdog shit all over the place, and drying puddles of dog piss marking the rugs' â a picture Tennessee's journals confirm as accurate. He has âa way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet-potato pie . . . a voice jingling with ginslurred giggles', and he shivers as he bolts his Scotch. âAlcoholics,' the narrator P.B. Jones confides, âreally despise the taste of alcohol' â a fact Capote, of all people, ought to know.
Mr. Wallace talks in looping circuits of paranoia, hypochondria and self-pity, a tone instantly recognisable from the last hundred pages of the diaries. Musing blearily to the naked stranger in his bed, he comments that he feels safe:
As safe as a hunted man can feel. A man with murderers on his trail. I'm liable to die very suddenly. And if I do, it won't be a natural death. They'll try to make it look like heart failure. Or an accident. But promise me you won't believe that. Promise me you'll write a letter to the Times and tell them it was murder.
In fact, Tennessee did write a letter very similar to this to Dakin. Then there's a lot about how Mr. Wallace is in love with his own heroines, who are basically versions of himself, and how he's self-obsessed and incapable of taking in the existence of anybody else. It ends with him asking Jones, who is a kind of failed-writer-cum-rent boy, to strip and spread himself. When he demurs, Mr. Wallace says in his sloppy, sugary voice, âOhhh, I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar.'
I hated that story, though perhaps it says more about Capote than Williams. It didn't sound like his style: not the cruelty, anyhow, though it's true he objectified trade and was capable of violent fits of temper, often cutting friends and lovers out of his life for minor, imagined slights. Still, if you read it you need to hold for balance the version of Williams reflected back by Marlon Brando, who played Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Tennessee never thought Brando liked him, but he did, and this is what that big, silent man, who had his own problems in life, had to say about him. He wrote:
You have been as brave as anybody I've known, and it is comforting to think about it. You probably don't think of yourself as brave because nobody who really has courage does, but I know you are and I get food from that.
It was still true, even in the last years of his life. In January 1979 he was attacked in the streets of Key West by what the town police blotter records to have been four or five white males in the 500 block of Duval Street. They punched his friend in the jaw (the same friend, as it happens, who interviewed him for the
Paris Review),
then threw
Tennessee to the ground and kicked him. A lens fell out of his glasses, but he was otherwise unharmed. They knew who he was, but he didn't let it bother him. âWhy not?' an interviewer asked a few months later, and he replied, stalwart as ever: âBecause, baby, I don't allow it to.'
That summer, he wrote
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
, which was staged at the Cort Theater in New York the following spring. On the opening night the audience leapt to their feet for Williams, dapper and grizzled in the royal box. It was his sixty-ninth birthday, and he attended the cast party in a blaze of pleasure. For a buoyant moment it seemed like the play might be a success, though it had already failed two preview runs in Washington and Chicago. Then the reviews trickled in. âStructurally wasteful', the
New York Times
reported, concluding: âthe finest playwright of our time has spent his evening trying hard, much too hard, to sound like other people.'
It got worse. At the end of March, a blizzard hit Manhattan, and at one minute past midnight on 1 April, the city's transport workers went on strike. The vast, intricate mechanism of New York seized up and theatre takings crashed. At the end of each performance the producer went on stage to rally the crowd, begging them to come again, to bring their friends. This play will run forever, he promised, but on the evening of 16 April he didn't appear and the cast understood their play was finished. Miserably, they gathered their things. Geraldine Page, who had been playing the hawk-eyed, unlovable Zelda, even took the flowers from her dressing room and packed them in her suitcase.
A day or two later, the set was taken to an incinerator in New Jersey and burned. Among the props were a tent made of silk streamers; a set of black gates; the façade of a triple-storeyed building, the upper
windows barred; and a bush hung with leaves of red cellophane, designed to look as if it was licked with flames. There's something immensely distressing about this fire, for a play so obsessed with the burning out of promise, the conflagration of both hope and talent. Horribly ironic, too, that the simulacrum of Zelda's madhouse should also be incinerated, when days before Geraldine Page had stood in front of it and described her death, her transformation into a little heap of indistinguishable ash.
While the fire was taking place, Tennessee headed back to Key West, to swim out his disappointment and distress. I imagined him padding past the church on his way to the beach, thinking about the ghosts he'd summoned so briefly to the stage. Not easy, raising the dead â or, for that matter, looking in the mirror and recording what you see there. I thought about what lay ahead: two more years of incessant travel, and then the night in the Elysée. He never actually set down the codicil to his will, and so Dakin buried him in the cold ground of St. Louis, next to his mother, the armfuls of yellow roses on his coffin insufficient compensation for the loss of that last, long-cherished dream.
Sometimes it's better to look back. And for a second I saw him very clearly: the Tennessee of the early 1950s; on a good day, Frank at home. A short, handsome man with a slight paunch, tanned brown as a nut, his Ray-Bans on, in madras shorts and tennis pumps. The day's work is done, the afternoon clear and clean, all his. I imagined him cruising the pretty boys on Dog Beach, and then walking out past them into the little greeny waves, giving himself up to the current, tomorrow's words just starting to rise, to bite.
7
THE CONFESSIONS OF MR. BONES
IT TOOK ME SIX DAYS
to get from Key West to Port Angeles, slogging from the south-eastern corner of America all the way up to its north-western extremity, a journey of almost 5,000 miles. I drove to Miami, flew to New Orleans to reclaim my case, slept a night there and then got on a train bound for Chicago. From the plane I'd watched the weather coming in, the flocks of cumulus driving hard across Carolina. I'd overtaken them, but now the sky was darkening and the forecast promised T-storms.
On the outskirts of New Orleans we passed a run of boarded-up houses, all derelict, and then a boat wedged into the branches of a tree, a relic of Katrina. We followed the Mississippi north as the afternoon ebbed away. For miles the plain was filled with burned or poisoned trees, their bark blackened, rising out of a swamp that caught the sky and gave it back in little flustered eddies. I ate applesauce from a plastic carton and watched a heron capped with bright blue feathers pick its way through brackish water. There was a turtle down there too, and as soon as I noticed it I saw there were hundreds of them,
crammed on every floating branch. Then houses again, and a billboard extolling the virtues of laser lipo.
Beehives in the forest, grazing horses, red earth. The wind had gotten up, driving the dust in chutes. The light pulsed, electric. Big clouds were gathering, and there was a yellowish cast to the west, the colour of old piano keys, old teeth. The streetlights clicked on, and then the overhead lights in the carriage. âNobody hit the Powerball, I guess,' a man said. âWell, that's good. It's up to 30 million.' Then the clouds clamped down like a lid, the sky turned a funny burnished green and rain started pummelling against the windows until the glass was corrugated. In a few seconds the world outside was obliterated. Low rolls of thunder, and every few seconds a flicker of lightning.
I hadn't seen rain in the longest time. I could smell it; the sweet, replenished scent of earth. âA heck of a rainstorm,' someone said into their phone. âIs it raining there? It really got dark and then it came down . . . I'm pretty close to Jackson.' By six it was light again. The rivers were brown with mud and the streets were brown too and slick with water. I watched the day unfold, flare out. We ran for a long time across a single field, the red mark where the sun had set small as a hearth fire against the acres of ploughed earth.
That night I ate dinner with two strangers, both very shy. âI hope you two ladies don't mind,' the man said, âbut where I was raised we ate fried chicken with our fingers.' Then, exhausted by the mileage I was clocking up, I went back to my seat and fell asleep, rocked to and fro by the train.
I woke at five, just as the sun was rising. We'd crossed by night into the Grain Belt and now we were running up Illinois, through mile after
mile of stubbled corn, punctuated by metal grain silos and graveyards for abandoned trucks and cars. I put Sufjan Stevens on my iPod and watched the colourless world well up with light. The fields seemed endless, a sea that shifted as the sun rose from lead to pewter and then to gold.
People were waking, passing up and down the aisle with cups of coffee. There are moments in a journey that can never be predicted in advance: not their richness, nor the effect they have on one's heart. The light fell equably, agreeably, on Harvey Christian Bookstore, Stewart Roofing and Harvey Fire Department; on children waiting for yellow school buses; on wooden houses, brick churches and country platforms. Hope, it said, unmistakably, and as the train wailed its low, harmonious cry I lay back in my seat and opened a book with the cheerful title of
Recovery
.
Recovery
is an unfinished novel by John Berryman, the poet whose father shot himself on Clearwater Island on 26 June 1926. In the wake of that catastrophe John's mother and his new stepfather moved the family to New York to start their lives afresh. Two years on John was sent to South Kent, a spartan Connecticut boarding school, of which he remembered later an entire class being made to crawl on their knees across a gravel terrace, reading their history books as they went. He didn't mind that particular punishment, but school in general was a torment. As a boy, Berryman was gawky and scrawny, in thick glasses, his face livid with acne. Useless at football and far too clever to be well liked, he didn't thrive until he left at the age of seventeen for Columbia, New York's Ivy League university.
Academia was at once a refuge and an intoxication. In his first year he was far too excited by the social possibilities, particularly the proximity of all those beautiful Barnard girls, to pay much attention to his classes. Dating, dancing and writing poetry ate up his time and he did poorly in almost all his first year courses. He took a leave of absence and returned with renewed seriousness in the spring. A friend at the time, Dorothy Rockwell, remembered him then as:
. . . thin and gratingly intense â kind of grim-jawed but every now and then his face would split into a fiendish grin. He was going to be a poet and was Van Doren's protégé, and this put him a cut above the rest of us if we thought about it.
He was a nervy boy, and sometimes threatened suicide (Lionel Trilling, who was teaching at Columbia at the time, recalled considering him affected). There was no doubt, though, as to his brilliance. By 1935, he was regularly publishing poems in the
Columbia Review,
one of which was reprinted in the
Nation.
His academic work also sharpened, helped by his habits of obsessive nocturnal study. In 1936 he was rewarded with a scholarship to Cambridge. The habit was set. For the rest of his ranging life, he'd remain anchored in academia.
In Cambridge he attended lectures by T.S. Eliot and Auden, met Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and worked on Shakespeare late into the night. After a period of âunwilling monkhood', he fell in love with an English girl with the appropriate name of Beatrice. But despite what would be a lifelong Anglophilia, he returned to America in 1938, leaving Beatrice behind. He wanted to get a job as a professor, though
it didn't prove as easy as he'd hoped. In the end, his old professor Mark Van Doren supplied a reference (âhe is to my certain knowledge both brilliant and promising: a fine poet, a fully equipped critic, and insatiable reader, and â though you must know this â an engaging person'), and with that in hand he finally swung a job in the English department of Wayne State University.