Milking the Moon (2 page)

The qualities and characteristics that made Eugene so special are the same ones to be found in his favorite animal: the monkey. A creature of subtropical climates, the monkey is noted for its capering, its chattering, its mischief making, and its high jinks, frivolity, and caprice. Eugene was just such an animal. Throughout his book of poetry,
Monkey Poems,
he celebrates life as lived by the monkey. “I’ll celebrate all wayward things,” he proclaims in the first poem. In the last, he declares, “O, I am monstrous proud / This life to live, this joy to laugh out loud.” He was, like the title of one of these poems, “The Socrates Monkey, seen dancing in midair, amidst Sun, Moon, Stars and Field Flowers.” He was bawdy, funny, irreverent, mischievous, flamboyant, and impish; at the same time he was shrewd, incisive, learned, and knowing. He was a rare combination of sage philosopher and monkey clown.

The many of us who knew and loved Eugene always assumed that he would one day write a memoir about the remarkable life he had lived in and out of the South. After all, Eugene was a writer who had won a Lippincott Prize and an O. Henry citation, among other awards for his poetry, short stories, and novels. Eugene himself assured us regularly that he had every intention of writing such a memoir. But as the years went by, it gradually dawned on me that no such book was forthcoming. Part of the reason, I’m afraid, is that Eugene engaged in too many daily sessions with a certain “Dr. Jim Beam.” But the larger reason, I think, is that Eugene’s true artistic genius went into creating the moment—into living life itself—and for him, capturing those past moments in print would have been only a second-best achievement. As for Oscar Wilde, so for Eugene: he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his writing. I think he knew this.

So, gradually, the idea of doing an oral biography with Eugene dawned on me. It was exactly the kind of project that appealed to my love of Southern culture. Unique though he was, Eugene’s personality and voice were so classically Southern as to be archetypal. And in Southern literature, the autobiographical narrative of a native Southerner’s coming of age in the South and then embarking on a journey of exile and return is no less an archetype. To me, Eugene was the living embodiment of so much of Southern culture that should not be allowed to pass away with him. It had to be preserved. When I tentatively broached the subject with him, he said, “Darling, I can see it on your resume now:
Motherwit
and
Daddyshit
.”

Happily, this was Eugene’s way of saying yes. As I planned for our project, the beauty of it struck me more and more. An oral biography was really the ideal medium for Eugene’s life story. This was the way to capture Eugene’s ability to create the moment through his conversational genius and the power of his personality as he performed his stories for an audience. It was not Eugene the writer, but Eugene the consummate Southern raconteur who needed to recount his autobiography. So, in the summer of 1991, I spent three hours every day from the beginning of May till the end of August tape-recording the stories of Eugene Walter in that same cat-free room where I had awaited my first meal with him.

*

The mere facts of Eugene’s life are quite impressive. Born in Mobile in 1921, he was virtually orphaned in his early teens. He embarked on life with no family, no money, no connections, no college education. Yet in the course of his seventy-six years, he was a writer, a poet, an actor, an editor, a translator, a cryptographer, a puppeteer, and a gourmet chef. The list could actually go on. His 1954 novel,
The Untidy Pilgrim,
was awarded the Lippincott Prize by judges Jacques Barzun, Bernard DeVoto, and Diana Trilling.
Monkey Poems,
published in 1952, won the author a Sewanee-Rockefeller Fellowship. He also wrote the bestselling cookbook
American Cooking: Southern Style,
compiled for the Time-Life
Foods of the World
series. He was one of the founding contributors to the
Paris Review
;
his short story “Troubadour” appeared in the magazine’s first issue and was later awarded an O. Henry citation. For many years he served as editor for the important multilingual journal
Botteghe Oscure,
published in Rome by the American-born Princess Marguerite Caetani. As an actor, he appeared in over a hundred films, including several by Fellini, most notably
8½.

Despite the apparent drawbacks of his background, Eugene lived a charmed existence. By pure serendipity, he always managed to be at the right place at the right time. In the late forties he lived in Greenwich Village when it was coming alive as a famous community of artists. He was in Paris in the early fifties, when the second wave of American expatriatism was sweeping the city. And he was in Rome in the sixties, during the golden age of Italian cinema. In each of these places, Eugene was a part of what was happening and knew the people who were making it happen. He was one of those people himself.

But Eugene and I did not put together his oral biography in order to document his achievements or provide an exhaustive portrait of the postwar period in New York, Paris, and Rome. What we are offering is the madcap narrative of one happy-go-lucky Southerner’s adventures of “life on this planet.”

The themes of Eugene’s own life story are the same ones generated by his prize-winning novel and best-known work,
The Untidy Pilgrim.
In the novel, the protagonist is a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. But after this unnamed pilgrim arrives in “the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts and musicians, and sweet lunacy’s county seat,” he is soon seduced away from his beaten career path and set on what he calls a “zigzag course” through life.

Eugene’s notion of “the untidy pilgrim” is juxtaposed against the image of those industrious Puritan pilgrims who arrived in the bleak world of New England to found our American society. They imparted to our culture its grim, inexorable work ethic, along with a certain nose-to-the-grindstone singleness of mind and purpose. It is they who spawned that Yankee breed of “cutters and dryers who already have their lives mapped out when they’re six years old.” In the “green and crazy land” of the South, however, there are only “untidy pilgrims” and “monkeys.”

An untidy pilgrim is a product of a culture which is cut off from the mainstream of American society and the iron grasp of the Puritan work ethic. An untidy pilgrim is one who has been transformed by the lush, sensuous, prodigal landscape of the South, where life is erratic, erotic, eccentric, and exotic. The ruling forces are those of “chaos, craziness, and caprice,” which Eugene calls “the Three-Eyed Goddess.” In his novel’s Mobile, which lays claim to the oldest Mardi Gras in America, the permanent atmosphere of Carnival takes the place of any work ethic. Throughout the novel, the author celebrates this culture and its inhabitants, who inevitably forsake the straight and narrow, conventional and predictable road to Success in order to embark on an untidy pilgrimage of adventure and exploration through life and the world at large.

This is exactly what Eugene Walter did throughout his own life. He eschewed any straight and narrow career path and spent his life wandering from one place to another without clear direction or a fixed destination. Not only did he never obtain a college education, but he never even formed any definite plans for his life. He simply set out and went wherever his whimsy led him. Yet his life was one of extraordinary excitement and fulfillment. His life story is the flip side of the traditional American success story, which involves achieving money, power, and status. For Eugene, success meant the ability to enjoy and celebrate life. It is probably no coincidence that the kind of success he did achieve was more possible in Europe than in America. His is the tale of someone who simply followed his heart and lived in the moment and was rewarded with a transcendent life of art and culture. The book’s title,
Milking the Moon,
is intended to convey just that image of someone who traveled far and wide to squeeze all the life out of life. This title was inspired by a song Eugene wrote called “Go Milk the Moon” for Fellini’s film
Juliet of the Spirits.

Milking the Moon
traces Eugene Walter’s life from his childhood in Mobile, to his three years as an air force cryptographer in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, to his years in New York, then Paris, then Rome, and then back again to Mobile. Fittingly, the trajectory of Eugene’s life did not follow a straight line from one fixed point to another, but formed an untidy circle, which ended up almost, but not exactly, where it had begun, as the Mobile Eugene returned to was not the same Mobile where he had grown up. In part one, “Mobile,” Eugene describes with poignant lyricism his beloved hometown of banana trees and oak trees, subtropical heat and humidity, old houses and front porches. His evocation of the porch life and the Southern household routines of gardening, cooking, shopping, eating, napping, visiting, and gossiping forms a classic portrait of Southern life. This first section is also a portrait of the artist as a young man in his small but exotic Southern town. In its concentrated description of the special hothouse environment which produced our untidy pilgrim, the first section differs somewhat from the others, which trace the “zigzag” path of that pilgrim after he leaves his Southern home and launches himself into the world at large. In their episodic progression from one adventure to another, these sections become a picaresque narrative depicting our rogue hero in action as he meets important people and becomes involved in important events. Again, this progression does not have a climactic or culminating moment, but travels a circular course where there is always another adventure right around the bend.

Knowing that the journey was all, Eugene relished every detour and seized every opportunity for being sidetracked along the way. “Sagittarians are interested in so many things,” he says of himself, “that when we head out for California, we end up in Florida.” Eugene’s stories are the same way. He says of Alice B. Toklas that she “had the true classical gift of the parenthesis”—she always finished her parenthesis, and she always returned to her original subject. According to this definition, Eugene Walter also had “the true classical gift of the parenthesis.” Readers of this quintessentially Southern narrative by this quintessential Southern storyteller must assume the virtue, if they have it not, of a Southern audience, which has all the time in the world and, of course, absolutely nothing better to do than sit out on the porch and swap stories.

*

One of the first things readers will want to know as they encounter Eugene’s fantastical tales about real people like Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, T. S. Eliot, and many more is: “Are they true?” This was the same question I was asked repeatedly before I began my collaboration with Eugene: “Do you think he will tell you the truth?” Invariably, my reply was: “I certainly hope not.” I was not after “the truth” of Eugene’s life, whatever that was in terms of facts. I wanted his stories. The ones I had been hearing, and he had been telling, for years and years. After all, these stories were the central and most important “truth” of Eugene’s life. It was through storytelling that he invented himself and created a life for himself out of nothing. Therefore, I felt, his life story should reflect this storytelling and its central truth.

So in response to inevitable questions like “Did Eugene Walter really get three pubic hairs from Tallulah Bankhead?” I answer with a question of my own which indicates my approach to fact-checking Eugene’s anecdotes. How can we ever know? I also have three words of advice for the reader of this narrative: Just enjoy it. Eugene is best understood and appreciated as a mythmaker, as a teller of tall tales, as a yarn spinner from the Southern oral tradition. As such, he never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good story.

However, this is not to say that Eugene had no regard for factual accuracy. When I arrived at his house every morning for our daily interview, it was not so much the “Monkey Poet” who welcomed me as it was a sober and earnest schoolboy intent on making all the right answers on his upcoming exam. Eugene approached our project with more seriousness than I thought he possessed. Throughout the summer, he made a monumental effort to recall the events of his life with as much accuracy as possible. But when it came to his favorite stories, he was like a great jazz improvisationist. These were familiar riffs and staples of his repertoire, and he never played them the same way twice.

Eugene’s own philosophy of storytelling can be pieced together from various things he said over the years. One of his grandmother’s favorite sayings, which he was very fond of quoting, was, “Gossip is no good if it doesn’t start from fact.” This was Eugene’s conviction as well: A story was no good if it didn’t start from fact. My very strong sense is that Eugene’s stories are essentially accurate in their basic foundation. He met the famous people he says he met; what he says transpired is probably a fair approximation of what really happened. In other words, Eugene was not primarily a fabricator. He embroidered. He embellished. At a certain point in his very best stories, the actual gives way to the apocryphal. This isn’t the mark of a fraud; it’s the mark of a great storyteller.

In one of our interviews, Eugene himself said, “The mark of a good storyteller is: Have a whole shelf full of shoeboxes of details. Take out one detail one time, one detail another. Otherwise, if you tell the same story over and over, it gets stale. You have to have a new detail which you bring out each time. It’s like those ballad singers at the Scottish lords who improvised new verses for those ballads every night and forgot some others.”