Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (26 page)

Frank Merlo on Navy leave in San Francisco, 1943

Williams appointed Merlo his personal secretary and factotum; Merlo, however, was clear-eyed about his function. When he and Williams went to Hollywood in the summer of 1949, after almost a year together, so that Williams could lend a hand to the screenplay of
The Glass Menagerie
, the Hollywood mogul Jack Warner asked Merlo, “What do you do?” “I sleep with Mr. Williams,” Merlo replied. He also ran social interference for the shy playwright. Williams’s hysterical outbursts, his paranoia, his hypochondria, his infuriating vagueness were nothing compared to the mayhem of the real battles that Merlo had lived through. “He gave me the connection to the day-to-day and night-to-night living,” Williams said. “He tied me down to earth.” “He kept his wig on—that is, he was a man who kept cool, even when he and Tennessee were exposed to the most appalling pressures of social and professional life,” Christopher Isherwood said of Merlo. “He was no goody-goody. He was just plain good.” Merlo was “the cleft in the rock,” the safe harbor for which Williams had prayed both onstage and off.

Paul Bowles

On December 1, 1948, Merlo, Williams, and Paul Bowles boarded the steamer SS
Vulcania
, bound for Gibraltar and a two-week stay in Morocco with Bowles and his wife, the novelist Jane Bowles. Britneva, who decided to remain in New York, accompanied the threesome to the dock. At the time, the bond between Williams and Merlo was just forming. “My sexual feeling for the boy was inordinate,” Williams wrote. “Every evening I would cross to his bunk in the stateroom. Aware of my sexual intemperance and what its consequences could be, I began to entertain a suspicion that something was going on between Frankie and Paul Bowles. Nothing was, of course, except friendship.”

Despite the companionship of close friends and the pleasures of “the most charming ship I’ve ever voyaged upon,” Williams found himself sinking into a depression that the hectic merry-go-round of rehearsals, productions, and celebrity had kept at bay for the previous year. Britneva was the apparent cause. In her intemperate way, she had confided to Laughlin that she thought Williams was “Finit.” “She meant as an artist,” Williams wrote in his logbook of the journey. “She said that I had exhausted my material, my old material, and that my life, particularly my circle of friends and ‘contacts,’ was too narrow and special for me to discover new or more significant subjects. . . . That I associated so much with special cases or freaks that men like Arthur Miller—for whom I had expressed a great admiration—did not feel at ease with me and could make no vital contact: that I was building a barrier between myself and the real world and its citizens.” Williams continued, “I felt it was honestly meant and there was a grain of truth in her warning. . . . The fault, the danger which she had partially correctly foreseen, lies in the over-working of a vein: loneliness, eroticism, repression, undefined spiritual longings: the intimate material of my own psyche is what I have filled my work with, and perhaps built it on, and now I have got to include, perhaps predominantly, some other things, and what are they? There is a dilemma, but I am not refusing to face it, and this Cassandra is a little bit premature in her cries of Doom!” Nonetheless, for nearly two months, Williams cold-shouldered Britneva.

With Merlo in tow, Williams shuttled from Morocco to Rome, then to Sicily to meet Merlo’s relatives, before returning to the United States ten months later. Williams’s wanderings matched his aimless spirit. Almost immediately after Williams arrived for his second extended stay in Rome, an un-mooring entropy, a sort of emotional fog, settled over him. “The simple truth is that I haven’t known where to go since ‘Streetcar,’ ” Williams wrote to Kazan and his wife, Molly, from Rome in mid-July 1949, summarizing the first half of his embattled year. “Everything that isn’t an arbitrary, and consequently uninspired experiment, seems to be only an echo.” When he re-read “The Big Time Operators,” the rough sketch of what he considered the theatrical project with the most potential, Williams heard the unmistakable tropes of his old work and his old self. He had tapped into his memories of his father and their Oedipal struggle and shoehorned them into an intended political melodrama about the oil industry:

GLADYS: Your son misses you, Pere.

PERE: That’s likely.

GLADYS: In your mind you have branded him a sissy, and that’s what’s come between you.

PERE: Does he still have on them little velvet knee britches?

GLADYS: He’s an adorable little fellow. You mustn’t hold that against him. But you do. You resent the fact that he—resembles his mother.

As Williams rightly saw, the play was “a ghost of an idea.” “It doesn’t seem very like me,” he said. “It seems forced, outside my real sphere of interest and aptitude.” Williams couldn’t make himself care about the characters or find any verve in the writing. However, “The Big Time Operators” did have something new to it: in a rudimentary way, it raised the issue of moral attrition, of a sense of spiritual atrophy, which was an altogether new strain of regret in the theatrical conversation that Williams had with himself. “You are really washed up,” one character tells another. “You can’t break into the world of glamour and now it’s too late for you to become a normal, ordinary person which you should have been satisfied to be in the first place. No, it’s too late now. You’re too spoiled. You’re ruined.” The dialogue was haphazard; the fear behind it wasn’t.

“The trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my own success and the fame that surrounds it and what people expect of me and their demands on me,” Williams wrote. “They are forcing me out of my natural position as an artist so that I am in peril of ceasing to be an artist at all.” But who was doing the forcing? The Liebling-Woods took the hit, but Williams himself was the culprit. Attention and glory, with their attendant “little prides and conceits,” had changed him. He likened the spiritual effect to sunstroke—“the baleful sun of success”—which causes the brain to lose blood, and leaves the mind and the will unable to mesh. “Talent died in me from over-exposure,” he wrote. “I’m not going to hit another jack-pot anytime soon. Until the heart finds a new song and the power to sing it.”

Williams understood that he needed to make a change; he also knew that a change of content and of style amounted to a change of metabolism in him, and that took time. “The trouble is that you can’t make any real philosophical progress in a couple of years,” he wrote to Brooks Atkinson in June 1949. “The scope of understanding enlarges quite slowly, if it enlarges at all, and the scope of interest seems to wait upon understanding. In the meantime there is only continued observation, and variations on what you’ve already observed.” He continued, “I have noticed that painters and poets, and in fact all artists who work from the inside out, have all the same problem: they cannot make sudden arbitrary changes of matter and treatment until the inner man is ripe for it. . . . The great challenge is keeping alive and growing as much as you can; and let the chips fall where they may!”

During these distracted months in Rome, he felt himself a sleepwalker, floating in an unreality like “gauze hung over gauze,” as he wrote in his poem “The Soft City.” Part of his ennui was due to the narcotic pleasures of Rome. In the afternoons, after a frustrating day at the typewriter, Williams steered his red Buick, nicknamed “Desiderio,” through the narrow back streets, “slowly with great pomp and everybody shouts ‘Que Bella Macchina!’ and only Tyrone Power cuts a more important figure here,” he wrote to Wood. The Roman skies were clear—“one long blue and gold ribbon always unwinding and giving you an illusion of permanence”; however, his literary vista was overcast.

For the best part of the year, Williams was driven by an
idée fixe
: “The fear that I am repeating myself, now, have totally exploited my area of sensibility and ought to retire, at least publicly, from the field.” “There is no point in hiding from the stark fact that the fire is missing in almost everything I try to do right now,” he wrote in May. “Is it Italy? Is it age? Who knows. Perhaps it is just the lack of any more deep need of expression, but I have no satisfactory existence without it. Without it, I have nothing but the animal life that is so routine and weary, except for the moments with F. when we seem close.”

In addition to his anxiety over the idea of being written out, Williams had a new anxiety: the idea of being outwritten. “I received today five complete sets of Arthur Miller notices, more than I ever received for any play of my own,” he wrote to Wood in February 1949, about
Death of a Salesman
. “Everybody seemed most anxious that I should know how thoroughly great was his triumph.” Throughout the spring, with the Broadway disappointment of
Summer and Smoke
just behind him and, looming ahead, the Hollywood fiasco of
The Glass Menagerie
, which was being systematically mangled by Warner Brothers’ screenwriters—“the cornball department,” as he called them—Williams felt un-stimulated and stuck. Instead of having gold and glory to look forward to, Williams saw only the prospect of ignominy. He was cast down in a “ridiculous state of gloom.”

Even his bond with Merlo, which had seemed so promising, had begun to fray. At first, things were jolly enough. In public, Merlo was alert, buoyant, and generally full of fun. He had a natural warmth that drew people to him. That year, the New Jersey boy who had dreamed of being in the cultural swim, found himself on location with Luchino Visconti, at dinner with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and on a first-name basis with Anna Magnani, W. H. Auden, and Truman Capote. The Italian press referred to Merlo as Williams’s “interpreter”; Williams called him “my little secretary,” and, as early as February, he was trying to negotiate a permanent place for him in his life and his budget. “I do hope that I can manage, however, to accumulate enough money to bring me in a good monthly income, say, four or five hundred a month,” he wrote to Wood, “on which I could keep myself and a small Secretary and a big car.”

But by the end of March, Williams’s moodiness had created trouble in paradise. He was, he said, “a sorry companion.” “I am not alone, but in a way I am lonelier than if I were,” he confided to McCullers. “Do you understand what I mean? Yes, I know you do.” Capote, writing from Ischia, where he and his partner, Jack Dunphy, were staying in late March, noted that Williams and Merlo had “latched onto us like barnacles” and dished the noticeable strain in their relationship. “Taken in tiny doses I’m really very fond of them both, but darling I can’t tell you what it’s been like,” Capote wrote. “Frankie nags T.W. all day and night, and T.W. I have discovered is a genuine paranoid.”

THE STRAIN OF being a factotum by day and an intimate by night also took its toll. Merlo soon found himself oppressed by the imperialism of his doting friend’s fame. Williams had the name, the calling, and the money. He was the ticket; Merlo was the passenger. “He hates the dependence involved in our relations,” Williams wrote in March. Being the object of desire didn’t protect Merlo from the little stings of humiliation that came with the job. “Frankie’s passion is clothes and this week we have been on a haberdashery kick,” Williams noted in April. “This evening Frank said he needed a dozen suits of underwear. Then I blew up and I said, Honey, you should have married Harry Truman before he went into politics. And he is now looking quite sheepish and has washed his old jockey shorts and hung them all over the bathroom to dry.”

By May, cracks appeared in the relationship. “Picked up Frank who had a temperamental fit of some kind—disappeared from the supper table and is still at large,” Williams noted on May 23. Almost two weeks later, the accumulated tension of the previous months finally led to an explosion, which Williams described in his journal:

Violent (verbally) scene on the streets, with shouts of four-letter words a bit reminiscent of the late unlamented ordeal by Pancho, but we talked it out and though I guess the basic tension is still there, indissolubly, I now feel better for the explosion. . . . I suspect that we are only temporizing. I’ve never made a go of it for very long. The loneliness is rooted too deep in me. And F’s a member of a darker race. To admit to myself that I can never be loved? Is that a necessity? Perhaps only a woman could love me, but I can’t love a woman. Not now. It’s too late. The wise thing now is to draw my heart slowly back into my cage of ribs. Is it? Watch for a while, wait.