GLR November-December 2024

Windham’s novel Tanaquil (1972) was based on the life of photographer George Platt Lynes, famous for his fashion pho tographs but noted privately for his nude and homoerotic pho tos. It was a roman à clef about New York in the 1950s. Stone in the Hourglass , his last novel (1981), was described as “a wildly intricate adventure dealing with corruption in the arts— both painting and literature. It is an unequivocal, intellectual tour de force pretending to be a thriller, and mayhem pervades every preposterous turn of plot.” His final book was the mem

Reviewing the book for The New York Times , Robert Brustein wrote that the letters detailed Williams’ erotic experi ences “with hustlers, rough trade, sailors, and young boys that cruise through his waking and dreaming life like so many wind up toys. ... The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it. ... If revenge is a dish that tastes best cold, then Donald Windham has certainly fixed him self a satisfying frozen dinner.” Still, the really significant thing in these pages for biographers, analysts, and just plain literary

oir 1948, Italy: Letters to Sandy (1998). A limited edition of E. M. Forster’s Letters to Donald Windham was published by Camp bell in 1975. However, it was Windham’s Tennessee Williams’Letters to Donald Windham 1940 1965 , published in 1977, that earned him the most attention, while at the same time sabo taging his friendship with the playwright.

gossips is not Williams’ “erotomania” but rather his treatment of friends and acquain tances, for this provides the most revealing and, let us admit it, the most amusing pas sages of the book. Although Williams ex presses impatience with Truman Capote’s “callous sort of bitchery,” he has a pretty im pressive gift himself for planting teeth in an other’s back. When he meets Gore Vidal, for

Windham met Campbell at the studio of ar ti st Paul Cadmus. Brimming with charm and wit, they were friends wth the leading writers of the day.

This book was a response to Williams’ own unreliable and myth-making Memoirs (1975), which barely mentioned Wind ham, who felt that it bore little resemblance to the man he knew (“a full retinue of misinformation”). Before publishing, he asked for and received Williams’ permission to publish his letters to Windham. In the preface, Windham intriguingly called Williams “the rarest, most intoxicating, the most memorable flower that has blossomed in my garden of good and evil.” Later he would write: “For my part, in our relationship, I had gone from want ing to protect him to wanting to protect myself.”

example, he professes to be “crazy” about him (“a beauty and only 23”), but one month later, he is saying: “I liked him but only through the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit. He has studied ballet and is constantly doing pirouettes and flex ing his legs, and the rest of the time he is comparing himself and Truman Capote ... to such figures as Dostoyevsky and Balzac.” The letters show many sides of Williams, from passionate to self-absorbed to playful, often with a recognizable touch of the poet-playwright. From the gay enclave of Provincetown, he writes to “the boys”:

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The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

November–December 2024

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