Paul is terribly squeamish about any physical contact with anything not Arab and not under 15 and he looked like a Moroccan camel with a mouthful of the spiniest and most indigestible plants that grow on the desert.
To Christopher Isherwood he writes from New York:
I was in the Blue Parrot last night, the gayest bar on the bird-circuit. The queens were packed in so tight there wasn’t even room to grope. They just stood like a weird assortment of animals that had fled to the banks of a river from a forest fire.
Riding in a cab with Herr Issyvoo through a London pea-souper, they fantasise that they are the dreaded fog queens and respectable citizens cross themselves as they ride by. Richard Nixon, beginning to surface in these years, ‘looks like the grade-school bully that used to wait for me behind a broken fence and twist my ears to make me say obscene things’. Of the social set he meets in Texas, he writes:
All the energy and colour seems to have gone into the Dallas females and the poor husbands look as if they had donated entirely too much blood and to the wrong cause. They just sit around holding glasses with a look which is far away but not dreamy, while the women rock and roar in one continual effusion.
His judgments of people can be prescient too. He compares the young Brando, then in his pride, to Brick in Cat as being ‘homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment’. ‘He hasn’t cracked up yet but I think he bears watching. He strikes me as being a compulsive eccentric.’ While of the 24-year-old Gore Vidal he says:
I wonder if any living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal. He has a mania for bringing out one book a year. They are now stacked up like planes over an airport waiting for the runway.
Tennessee is himself just as dedicated but in a more highly strung and self-critical fashion: ‘Working is life, the only real true life, the rest is incidental. People are shadows except when I am trying to put them on paper. So I am a bastard, and have been ever since I started writing.’ His first companion during these years, Pancho Rodriguez, complains that Tennessee treats him like a servant. The second, Frank Merlo, complains that all Tennessee wants is a yesman. He is not, I think, much surprised by their resentment: ‘I committed myself completely to the life of the artist. I froze out almost everything else. I have not made a success of life or of love. And if my work peters out, I am a bankrupt person.’ That too was a true prophecy to be fulfilled in a haze of booze, pills and solitude, and a sad story to be told in the final volume. I would rather leave him here, a great playwright certainly but also something even rarer, an enchanter with a heart.
Oberon Books, 521 Caledonian Road, London N7 9 RH, Tel: 020 7607 3637
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