The Luck of Friendship Read online

  The Luck of Friendship

  The Letters of

  Tennessee Williams

  and James Laughlin

  EDITED BY

  Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  TO

  Ian S. MacNiven

  AND

  Arturo Noguera

  Contents

  Introduction by Peggy L. Fox

  Notes on the Text by Thomas Keith

  Acknowledgments

  Letters

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  The Long and the Short of It:

  Four Decades of One of the Most Unlikely Friendships

  in American Literature

  JAMES LAUGHLIN always maintained that meeting Tennessee Williams at Lincoln Kirstein’s Manhattan apartment in December 1942 was pure happenstance. The improbably tall (six feet six) Laughlin and the rather shy, much shorter (by more than a foot) playwright bonded over their veneration of Hart Crane’s poetry, and a friendship was off and running that would last until Tennessee’s death in 1983. If one were to judge by the letters in this volume, that scenario is at least possible. But was it just a chance encounter?

  Laughlin, whose family’s fortune derived from the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation of Pittsburgh, had begun New Directions, a small literary publishing venture, only seven years earlier while a sophomore at Harvard. And although he still retained a whiff of the enfant terrible who wrote storm-the-barricades introductions to his signature “annuals” (as he called the nominally yearly anthology, New Directions in Prose and Poetry), his firm was increasingly respected and considered the place to be published by anyone who aspired to be part of the “advance guard” of American literature.

  Meanwhile Thomas Lanier Williams, son of a middle-class St. Louis family—his father had Nantucket Coffins and aristocratic Laniers in his family tree, while his Ohio-born mother had cultivated Southern graces and a Mississippi accenta1—was starting to make a name for himself as a playwright. In 1939 four one-act plays, under the collective title American Blues, had won a small prize from the prestigious Group Theatre in New York City. This led to an agent, Audrey Wood, then an up-and-coming representative for dramatic works. Williams was on the ascendant despite the fact that his first major effort, Battle of Angels, failed in spectacular fashion in Boston the following year—smoke pots were poorly rigged, causing the audience to flee the theater coughing. But Tennessee (as Williams began calling himself in 1938) yearned to be considered a poet, as did the publisher he was about to meet. Each man had been well prepared to meet the other by Lincoln Kirstein, who—when he wasn’t cofounding the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine—was a literary impresario. Tennessee wrote to his family on December 6, 1942, that he was to meet a publisher that night “who is interested in bringing out a volume of my verse. . . . I hope we get along amiably at this first meeting.” Laughlin considered a recommendation from Kirstein, whom he had admired since he had been allowed into the older man’s advanced literary circle at Harvard, to be all he needed to know about a young poet. The stage, as it were, had been admirably set.

  This volume, composed of letters selected from a correspondence spanning four decades, is the chronicle of two men, preeminent in their respective fields, whose not-so-secret longings to be taken seriously as poets drew them to each other. They forged an unlikely bond that survived the extremes of critical acclaim and critical rejection, good sales and bad, manic highs and depression (for both), serious relationships and passing liaisons. Tennessee designated New Directions and James Laughlin as his publisher of choice based largely on the impression formed at that first meeting, a commitment that never wavered. Their joint story, while admittedly only a small part of the life of either man, provides a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century and reveals not only the self-destructive tendencies of a great artist but also his lifelong perseverance to remain both a poet and an experimental playwright, supported in his endeavors by the publisher he considered his one true friend.

  A little more than a week after their encounter at Lincoln Kirstein’s apartment, Tennessee wrote to Jay—as he most often addressed Laughlin in writing, though the man himself preferred J, just the capital letter, no period—expressing a desire to get together to discuss the poetry (letter of 12/15/42). He sent J his only verse play, Dos Ranchos, also titled The Purification, and later some poems. In one of the few letters from Laughlin that has survived from this period (Tennessee’s copies of the originals mostly disappeared over the years during his many moves, and J did not reliably make carbons of letters until after 1946), J responds fervently: “I am very excited with the poems you sent. It seems to me you ARE a poet” (1/20/43). A selection of poems under the group title “The Summer Belvedere” was accepted for Five Young American Poets (1944), the last New Directions anthology of that title.

  Tennessee’s early letters are notable for their enthusiasm, openness, and willingness to do what was necessary to be a professional writer across several genres. All the while J was supplying Tennessee with New Directions books and introducing him to the work of authors such as Delmore Schwartz and Henry Miller. Despite the fact that Tennessee was actually three years older than J, Tennessee was in awe, and possibly a little in love, with the handsome, sophisticated publisher. During his largely unsuccessful stint as a screenwriter at MGM, Tennessee confessed to J that “I have a little picture gallery in my office of persons of importance in my life. . . . As my first real publisher, I would like to include one of you . . . preferably on skis” (7/23/43).

  The growing bond between the two men was further cemented in 1944 when Laughlin recommended Tennessee to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for a grant of one thousand dollars, calling him “the most talented and promising young writer whom we publish” (2/14/44). Tennessee thanked J for his “intercession,” promising not to count his “birds of paradise” before they hatched but admitting that the award would be “a small convenience that I could use” (2/26/44). But he did get the grant, which provided a much needed psychological validation that reverberated down the years—as his earnings from the productions of his plays increased and then skyrocketed, Tennessee would privately give support to a number of friends and artists and, in the end, would leave the bulk of his estate to his grandfather’s alma mater, The University of the South, to benefit “creative writing.”2

  Throughout the summer of 1944, Tennessee kept dropping hints about his “new play,” which he thought would be “too quiet” for J since it was a “sentimental family portrait” (9/25/44). The “new play” was The Glass Menagerie, and with its success the American theater was changed forever. J, who traveled to Chicago to see the play before it opened in New York, knew immediately that it had “an overwhelming theatrical power”3 and wanted to publish Menagerie as soon as possible. This was Tennessee’s fervent wish as well; however, there was a problem. Back in 1940, shortly after he had won the award from the Group Theatre, Tennessee accepted an advance of one hundred dollars from Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, against his “next work.” Now, in early February 1945, Tennessee asked Audrey Wood to extricate him from this commitment since Cerf had shown no interest in Battle of Angels or anything else he had written. If Tennessee occupied the moral high ground, Cerf maintained the lower legal space. Tennessee wrote to J, “I need not tell you again how happy that would make me [to have you publish Menagerie] for I would like all my shy intrusions on the world of letters to be thru N.D.” (2/6/45). J offered to pay Cerf one hundred dollars to reimburse the earlier a
dvance, but Cerf stalled until after the New York opening and then pounced, moving very quickly to exercise his option on the play. Random House did publish Menagerie but allowed it to go out of print when sales dropped after the first year. J immediately secured the rights.4 The play finally appeared in the New Directions New Classics series in 1949, and it continues to be published by New Directions to this day.

  Tennessee’s inability to extricate himself from the Random House contract was a small setback, but in the end the professional relationship between Tennessee Williams and New Directions was strengthened. Despite repeated offers from other publishers, Tennessee would never publish his plays, poems, or stories with anyone else (without J’s express permission, as in the case of the Memoirs). He would often tell J that one reason he wanted always to publish with New Directions was so that any money J made from publishing his work could go toward subsidizing other young writers. And J let Tennessee know of his appreciation, writing when paperback reprint rights to Streetcar were sold that he was happy about this “windfall, because my share of it will permit me to print two or three books by promising newcomers which I would not otherwise have been able to do” (7/25/51).

  Despite their shared disappointment that New Directions was not the original publisher of Menagerie, J and Tennessee already had other projects in progress. Battle of Angels was published in the spring 1945 double issue of Pharos, a magazine J founded, in part to involve his young wife, Margaret Keyser Laughlin, in his literary pursuits. The magazine did not last (nor did the marriage), but that issue was Tennessee’s first book-length publication. Already New Directions was preparing a volume of one-act plays, published later that year as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton & Other One-Act Plays. New Directions did publish all the plays post-Menagerie, but an important motif in these letters is J’s encouragement of Tennessee as an author across genres—as a poet and short-story writer independent of his success as a playwright. In a 1945 note, written while he was in Utah at his fledgling ski resort at Alta, J enjoined Tennessee to write another story “as good as ‘One Arm.’ ” After spending an evening together, Tennessee wrote with feeling of his dependence on J’s good opinion: “You are my literary conscience—the only one outside of myself” (mid-1945). Later on he implored J to be honest with him about poems recently sent: “If you hate them, for God’s sake Jay, don’t hesitate to say so! I depend so much on your critical opinion as there are times when my own seems to fail me. . . . Honesty about failure is the only help for it” (8/17/49).

  And just as J was a sounding board for Tennessee, the young playwright responded warmly to J’s poetry. Tennessee wrote to J: “The little blue book [A Small Book of Poems] is with me and I think it contains your very loveliest poem. . . . The level of work is higher, I think, than in Some Natural Things [an earlier volume of J’s poems]” (7/9/48). At this stage in their relationship the two men were already confidants. Tennessee candidly acknowledged his homosexuality, saying, “So let us exchange fatherly advices. No, I don’t want to be ‘saved’ ” (1/25/46). He even drolly suggested that J travel to New Orleans and relieve him of unwanted female companionship, while simultaneously encouraging J to enjoy an extramarital affair (with Gertrude Freedman Huston, an appealing young war widow who, more than four decades later, would become J’s third wife). They were two young(ish) men lamenting to each other about their disorderly sex lives.

  The twin triumphs of The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and A Streetcar Named Desire in late 1947 forever changed the material reality of Tennessee’s life, and he experienced the “Catastrophe of Success,” as he called the “vacuity of a life without struggle” in his essay of 1947, often published with The Glass Menagerie. Not only was life no longer a struggle, but also now all the giants of the theater world (and eventually Hollywood) were clamoring to know the young playwriting sensation. Eventually J would pull back a bit from Tennessee’s celebrity life. I once asked J if he felt that maintaining a certain distance from Tennessee and his circle made their relationship last, and he replied that theirs was “a more professional relationship” because he didn’t “hang out with those buzzards [the celebrity seekers].” He went on to say that his being “ostensibly, a serious publisher” meant something to Tennessee. Although J’s support was crucial to Tennessee’s integrity as an author, even that was not sufficient protection for the playwright. Over the years the crushing combination of a desperate need to churn out another Broadway success and the concomitant fear of failure drove Tennessee to those stress relievers of drink and pills, sadly with predictable results for his personal and professional life.

  J sailed for Europe in November 1947, hoping that a stay on the Continent might repair his disintegrating marriage. His canny aunt Leila Laughlin Carlisle paid for a nurse for the two young children so that the parents might be able to spend more time together. Thus J missed the opening of Streetcar on December 3, though he got a glowing report from someone on the New Directions staff, very likely the young novelist Hubert Creekmore, who was more or less running the New York operation at the time: “Streetcar opened last night to tumultuous approval . . . and the final [act] left them—and me—wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained . . . and then an uproar of applause which went on and on” (12/4/47).5

  However, as Tennessee readied himself for his own transatlantic crossing at the end of December, he would write not about the tremendous reception of the play but in consternation about the jacket of the just published Streetcar: “My first reaction to the book cover was adverse. I think it was the color more than the design. It’s a sort of shocking pink which reminds me of a violet scented lozenge” (12/29/47). By the third try the jacket was changed to red, providing a vivid backdrop for the striking stick-figure design, and author/publisher harmony was restored. But this flap highlights another recurring theme of the letters: the appearance of the books.

  J loved fine printing, and in the next year he encouraged Tennessee to authorize a limited edition of the short play about the death of D. H. Lawrence, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, “printed by those boys who do that gorgeous hand printing up at the Cummington Press in Massachusetts” (12/18/48). Because he knew how much these aspects of publication mattered to Tennessee, over the years J would continue to suggest typefaces and paper and to comment on cover design. Many of the early jackets for Tennessee’s plays, including Streetcar, were designed by Alvin Lustig,6 whom Tennessee had met in California during his brief screenwriting career and whose work he greatly admired. But after Lustig’s death, the eternal struggle between an opinionated author and his publisher would continue, last surfacing in the mid-seventies when Tennessee strongly objected to the way in which his own painting was reproduced for the jacket of his second book of poems, Androgyne, Mon Amour (resolved only by repeated—and expensive—redoing of the color separations). Tennessee was one of very few authors who received special treatment and do-overs from a notoriously frugal publisher.

  The first book-length publication of Tennessee’s short stories came in the fall of 1948 when One Arm & Other Stories appeared in a limited edition. J’s highly indulgent treatment of Tennessee as author was again on display as the playwright urged: “Please remember not to let One Arm be displayed for sale in bookstores. . . . I hope that the book will be distributed as we planned, entirely by subscription” (10/12/48). This counterintuitive approach to book sales was occasioned by the direct treatment of a gay hustler in the hard-hitting title story. But the caution on Tennessee’s part was less from a fear of book banning or censorship than from the certain disapproval of his overbearing mother once she saw the story. J would continue to support Tennessee’s less-than-mainstream subject matter throughout his career, replying to him that he greatly liked a new story, “Kingdom of Earth”: “This is something to which I would apply my phrase of ‘clean dirt.’ To me, there is salacious sex, such as you find in magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal, and there is good, clean honest sex, such as you find in Henry Miller and Lawrence [and] in
a story like that one” (12/18/48). Tennessee and J were on the same page.

  The wide-ranging nature of their relationship was signaled by Tennessee’s sensitive advice to J over the defection—to the ever-rapacious Random House—of New Directions’ first best-selling author, Paul Bowles, whose novel The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949, had been brought to New Directions by Tennessee. “The only serious loss, for you, is through becoming angry and bitter, which I think you can avoid by thinking very objectively about the predicament of a writer such as Paul” (4/5/50), Tennessee would counsel, elaborating on the difficulties of a writer trying to live on meager earnings. The irony in the advice is that it would increasingly become Tennessee who could not be mollified by reason and who would see conspiracy and even treachery in those who most wished him well, as when, in a fit of paranoia, he fired his longtime and fiercely loyal agent, Audrey Wood, in 1971. J, in contrast, became with age increasingly tolerant of restive authors, even encouraging some to try larger publishers if they wished, with the promise that New Directions would publish them again if this strategy “didn’t work out.”

  It was at this juncture that a most important ingredient was added to the New Directions publishing mix: Robert MacGregor, a former correspondent for United Press in Moscow and Beijing and decorated World War II veteran, was hired on June 19, 1950, in what Ian MacNiven, in his thorough and engaging biography of James Laughlin, “Literchoor Is My Beat,” called “the most momentous personnel decision of J’s publishing career.” 7 Not only was MacGregor competent and trustworthy, but also his presence added a steadying hand to both the running of the office and the handling of production. He was well versed in the theater, and he was gay—from the point MacGregor joined New Directions for the entire time the offices remained at 333 Sixth Avenue, New Directions would share the eleventh floor with Theatre Arts Books, the concern owned by MacGregor and his life partner, George Zournas. Soon a new correspondent entered the exchange of letters, as MacGregor not only began to handle many of the details of preparing the scripts of Tennessee’s plays for publication but also became a valued friend to Tennessee and Frank Merlo, who was Tennessee’s lover and companion for nearly fourteen years beginning in 1948. Much more than J, MacGregor became part of the fabric of Tennessee’s New York life.