I want to admit to you that I undertook this memoir for mercenary reasons. It is actually the first piece of work, in the line of writing, that I have undertaken for material profit. But I want to tell you, too, that soon after I started upon the work I forgot the financial angle and became more and more pleasurably involved in this new form, undisguised self-revelation.
This whole book is written by something like the process of “free association,” which I learned to practice during my several periods of psychoanalysis. It concerns the reportage of present occurrences, both trivial and important; and of memories, mostly much more important. At least to me.
I will frequently interrupt recollections of the past with an account of what concerns me in the present because many of the things which concerned me in the past continue to preoccupy me today.
Whether or not it will be acceptable to you will depend in part upon your tolerance for an aging man’s almost continual scuttling back and forth between his recollections and his present state.
This “thing,” as I have come to call it, will need your interpretation. I have to ask you to remember what you can of the history of the man who wrote it.
In the course of the book I will talk a great deal about love and much of the talk will be about carnal love as well as spiritual love. I have had, for a man so nearly destroyed so often, a remarkably fortunate life which has contained a great many moments of joy, both pure and impure.
“That sensual music …”
I still hear it clearly.
Is this book, then, with its rather unusual structure, a professional matter? Has any of my writing been “a professional matter”? I have always written for deeper necessities than the term “professional” implies, and I think that this has sometimes been to the detriment of my career. But more of the time to its advantage. Career? The wrong word. I should have said—no, nothing so pretentious as “vocation.” But truly, I never had any choice but to be a writer.
And so what’s next on the agenda? Or, quoting Anna Magnani, “What is the program now?”
Success in the theatre came to me pretty late by prevailing standards, but whether good fortune comes to you early or late, if it comes at all, you have to know you’ve been lucky. And the rest is a question to be put to “the dog.”
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
—William Butler Yeats
MEMOIRS
1
To begin this “thing” on a socially impressive note, let me tell you that one recent fall, before the leaves had fallen, I happened to be weekending at one of the last great country houses in England, an estate so close to Stonehenge that one of the stones was dropped on the lady’s estate before it got to that prehistorical scene of druidical worship and, probably due to collapse or revolt of slave labor, it was not picked up but allowed to rest where it fell, and this bit of information has only the slightest and most oblique connection with the material which follows.
It was bedtime and the lady of the manor, giving me a sharp look, inquired if I didn’t want to retire with a good book since she knew I was a restless sleeper. “Go in the library and pick out something,” she advised me, pointing to a huge, chilly room in the left wing of the Palladian mansion. Since she was already on her way upstairs, I had no recourse but to follow her suggestion. I entered the library and discovered it to contain almost nothing but very large leather-bound volumes of an ancient vintage almost comparable to that stone which didn’t quite make it to Henge. Incidentally, I also discovered a secret doorway, floor to ceiling, rather amateurishly disguised by false book fronts, and this was not the only touch of deception that I encountered. There was a real book in there which was titled International Who’s Who or something of the sort. Quite naturally I snatched it out of its case and turned immediately to the index to see if I had made that scene. I was gratified to discover that there was considerable data upon that nonexistent personage who bears my professional name: the data contained a number of harmless inaccuracies but one of those inaccuracies was distinctly unfortunate in its effect upon my humor.
Among the list of my honors and awards was the astonishing announcement that in a certain year of the early forties I had received a grant of one thousand dollars, yes, what is called a “big one,” from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is the year, not the donor, of the alleged grant that stands out so prominently in my mind, for that was the year (several years before my life was changed irrevocably by the success of The Glass Menagerie) in which I had to hock literally everything I owned, including an old borrowed portable typewriter and everything else old and new and portable, including all clothes except a dirty flannel shirt, riding breeches and a pair of boots which were relics of a term in the study of equitation I had taken in preference to regular ROTC at the University of Missouri. And it was the year when I was bounced from lodging to lodging for nonpayment of rent, which was a minimal rent, and it was the year when I had to go out on the street to bum a cigarette, that absolutely essential cigarette that a living and smoking writer must have to start work in the morning. And it was even the year when I usually had what the French call “papillons d’amour” because I did not have the price of a bottle of Cuprex, the standard pubic pesticide in those days, and when I was once embarrassed by this outcry on a crowded street corner in daylight, “You bastard, you gave me crabs last night!”—an outcry which cut short my social season in the French Quarter of New Orleans and sent me packing—well, packing is hardly the word, since I had no luggage—on my thumb to Florida. And presenting upon the highways such a spooky appearance that motorists would push their accelerators to the floorboards when they sighted me in the light of day and so I had to try to catch rides mostly at night. I have journals to prove these specific recollections of that year when I was supposed to be the hilarious recipient of that “big one” from the institute of which I am now a tolerated member.
In the course of my early years as a skimpy youth infatuated with a theatre which was hugely oblivious of him, I knew and associated closely with a good many other young writers and/or artists and all of us were disregarding the small craft warnings in the face of which we were continually sailing our small crafts, each with his crew of one, himself that crew and its captain. We were sailing along in our separate small crafts but we were in sight of each other and sometimes in touch, I mean like huddling in the same inlet of the rocky, storm-ridden shoreline, and this gave us a warm sense of community, not too different from that which has been felt in recent years by kids called “longhairs” whom the inclement weather of society backed into what are called communes.
To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn’t, and it was sometimes a matter of what’s called luck and sometimes a matter of having or not having the gift to endure and the will to. I mean that none of us were voluntary dropouts, just occasional push-outs, and none of us had breath to waste on the totally fruitless complaint that we were not being fed with spoons of precious metal.
I am sure that when we had time to think of it, we must have suspected that a society whose elite was so grossly affluent, I mean a society that numbered its billions of dollars as we counted our nickels, could have and possibly should have exhibited a bit more concern for the fate of its young artists who might plausibly be expected, if they chanced to mature, to have some influence on the (very protean) culture of a nation which was then, as it remains now, a nation ruled by that numerically tiny gang which has fitted itself on the top of the totem pole and is scared of getting dizzy if it glances down.
Now to be fair, there were, in the forties, certain fabulously fat pocketbooks that scattered bits of much-publicized dole to young talents. There were the Guggenheim fellowships to be had, sometimes at the last ditch by such a tremendous and yet fragile artist as Hart Crane. Perhaps it could never have come early enough to have saved Hart from his own dest
ruction, but it came, when it did, much too late. And there were in the thirties the WPA projects, and, oh, God, did I ever try to make that scene in Chicago and New Orleans and was I ever slapped down! And a bit later, there were the Rockefeller grants of a thousand dollars with a possible but improbable future increase by half the original big one. That one and its half-size addition did come my way, eventually.
The very rich have such a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums.
I should have put that observation in quotes rather than italics since it is not a remark of my own but one of (the legendary) Paul Bigelow’s most succinct comments on the godly handouts, tax-exempted no doubt, of our Babylonian plutocracy.
It is only now, in retrospect, at a great distance of time, that I speak of these celebrated benefactors of the young and gifted in a tone that is something less than pietistic, but you can put that down to the acidity of oncoming age. When I was one of the young and gifted and living among others of that kind, there was no self-pity among us, at least no degree of it that distinguished us from the rest of humankind. Of course we all know that something that passes for self-pity is one of those root emotions of the human race. But we had no time and most of us had no inclination to indulge in it much. What I observed far more, among artists of my generation, was a feeling of self-respect, sometimes carried to an excess of pride, and I have observed and have felt and still feel and observe a lot more self-respect, sometimes carried to that excess, than I’ve felt or observed self-pity, which is, after all, only a slight variation of self-contempt, a feeling that’s better left to the naturally contemptuous.
In 1939 I found myself employed as a feather picker on a squab ranch in one of those little communities on the periphery of Los Angeles, which I’ve heard described as a lot of villages in search of a city. This job of squab picking was not very lucrative, but it had its compensations of a nonmaterial sort. Several times a week a group of young men and boys would gather in “the killing shed.” The squabs were executed by slitting their throats and holding them by their frantically twitching legs over a bucket in which to bleed out their lives. For each squab that each of us plucked and prepared for the L.A. markets we would drop a feather in the milk bottle that bore our particular name and we were paid according to the number of feathers in our bottles when we knocked off for the day. It was, for me, a distasteful thing: the compensation, besides the small pay, was the wonderful rapping among us feather pickers in that shed, and I remember, never to forget, a homely bit of philosophy that was voiced by one of the more sophisticated kids.
“You know,” he said, “that if you hang out long enough on a corner of this coast, sooner or later a sea gull is going to fly over and shit a pot of gold on you.” (I have quoted this line a couple of times, once in a play and once in a film script, but have yet to hear it delivered from stage or screen. However—)
While I was out there at that occupation, a great piece of luck did hit me. I received a telegram from the Group Theatre in New York informing me that I had received a “special award” of one hundred dollars for a group of one-act plays called American Blues. This wire was signed by Harold Clurman, Irwin Shaw and the late Molly Day Thacher Kazan.
Most people no longer remember that a hundred dollars in the late thirties was a pretty big slice of bread, since now, you know, you can hardly get a good girl to spend the night with you on it. But at that time it was not only a big slice of bread but it was a huge piece of encouragement and boost of morale and, even in those days, encouragement in my “sullen craft and art” was far more important to me than anything convertible into cash.
You know, I can never be a true misanthrope, looking back on the totally sincere and nonenvious congratulations which I received from my colleagues and also from my employers on the squab ranch. They all knew that I was a writer, and consequently a kook, and here, all of a sudden, this sea gull had flown over my corner and crowned me with this heavenly manna, and I had not even been waiting out there on that particular corner for a long time.
I could, of course, have purchased a bus ticket immediately and directly to Manhattan and had enough left over for a week or two at the “Y,” but instead I bought for less than ten dollars a secondhand bicycle which was in good shape, and the lighthearted nephew of the squab ranchers bought a bike too and, to celebrate, we set out southward on a highway called the Camino Real and we pedaled our way from Los Angeles County—Hawthorne, to be exact—down to and across the Mexican border. We went to Tijuana and to Agua Caliente, both of which were quite primitive in those days. The places were primitive and we were innocent and in a border-town cantina we met with—well, let’s say we discovered that the little kewpie-type god has a predatory nature, sometimes, and we were considerably less enchanted with Mexican can-tinas and their clientele when we started back north on the camino very real. In fact, we no longer had the price of nightly lodging along the way, but there were comfortable fields to sleep in under big stars.
Then in a canyon near Laguna Beach—a lovely town in those days—we happened to pass a chicken ranch at the entrance of which was a sign that said “Help Needed.” And since we needed help, too, we turned onto the dirt road and presented ourselves to the ranchers, an elderly couple who wanted to hire custodians for their poultry for a couple of months while they went on vacation somewhere. (I don’t know why I was so committed to occupations involving poultry in those days; no analyst has ever explained that to me.)
The old, respectably married couple of chicken ranchers had not struck it rich on the ranch, in fact they were barely able to keep the chickens in feed, and they said, with touching apologies, that all they could offer us in the way of remuneration was the occupancy of a little cabin at the back of the chicken run. We assured them that our passion for poultry was quite enough to make the job attractive, and they set out on their vacation and we moved into the cabin and established friendly relations with the chickens the first time we scattered their feed.
I don’t know what the beach of Laguna is like now but in the thirties it was a fine place to pass summer days. There was constant volleyball, there was surfing and surfers, there was an artist colony and there was so on and so forth and all of it was delightful. It seems to me that the best part of all was riding our bikes up the canyon at first dark in those days when the sky was still a poem. And dogs at every ranch along the way barked at us, not threateningly, but just to let us know they were on duty.
I suppose that summer was the happiest and healthiest and most radiant time of my life. I know that I kept a journal, then, and in this journal I referred to that season as Nave Nave Mahana, which is the title of my favorite (Tahitian) painting by Gauguin and which means “The Careless Days.”
So it went that way till the month of August, which is the month when the sky goes crazy at night, full of shooting stars which undoubtedly have an effect on human fate, even when the sun’s up.
To put it in two words: disaster struck. It struck first the chickens and caromed off them onto us. We came out of our cabin one crystal-clear morning to discover about a third of this feathered flock lying on their backs and sides with legs extended in a state of rigor mortis, and the survivors of this flash epidemic were not in much better condition. They were wandering dizzily about their enclosure as if in shock of sorrow for their defunct companions and now and then one of them would squawk and fall over and not get up again. We never did learn what the disease was. But this was the end of Nave Nave Mahana.
My friend had somehow legitimately acquired a beat-up old Ford and late that day of disaster he split the scene and I was alone with the plague-stricken poultry, and almost envied their lot. This was, I believe, the longest time in my life that I went hungry. I went without nourishment for about ten days except for some remnants of dried peas and some avocados that I stole now and then from a grove in the canyon. I subsisted on these meager rations, since the heroically surviving but diseased chickens did not appear fit for the frypan or stewp
ot, and I myself was afflicted with a curious inertia that made me disinclined to leave the ranch, and anyhow I hadn’t a dime left on me, nor even postage for a letter of supplication if I had been in the mood for such an embarrassing thing.
I learned, however, that after about three days of semistarvation you stop feeling hungry. The stomach contracts, the gastric spasms subside, and God or somebody drops in on you invisibly and painlessly injects you with sedation, so that you find yourself drifting into a curiously, an absolutely inexplicably, peaceful condition, and this condition is ideal for meditation on things past and passing and to come, in just that sequence.
After a fortnight in that condition, mostly horizontal, I heard my friend’s scatter-bolt sputtering with exhaustion toward the cabin and he entered grinning casually as if he had left ten minutes before.
During his absence he had played his clarinet in a night spot near L.A., had received a week’s salary, and that sum was sufficient to get us into the San Bernardino Mountains for a time of recuperation from our respective ordeals.
I was receiving letters that summer from various agents on Broadway who had seen my name in the theatre columns as winner of that Group Theatre “special award.” One agent said she was not interested in serious plays but was looking for a good “vehicle.” I wrote her that the only vehicle I had to offer was a secondhand bike. But another lady, Audrey Wood, expressed a more serious interest, and on the advice of Molly Day Thacher Kazan I chose Miss Wood to represent me, and this dainty little person whom her husband called “The Little Giant of the American Theater”—both of them were of small physical stature—took me on, sight unseen, as a client and she continued to represent me for a long, long time.