GLR November-December 2024

wrote Windham. About both, he wrote: “As highly rewarded with celebrity and money as they were, each considered himself under-appreciated ... a personal example of the failure of Amer ica to value and recompense its artists.” Windham took the opportunity to go deeper into Williams’ professional and personal life. “As for being sexually re pressed,” Windham wrote, “the evening I met him and through out the first years of our acquaintances, his quotidian goal was to end up in bed with a partner at least once before the twenty four hours were over.” AL EGACYFOR W RITERS TO C OME S UMMING UP Windham’s character and his connection to Williams, Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Camp bell Prize, writes the following: Donald was ... the loyal one, the good guy, always trying to keep these drunken genius friends on track. My sense of things, based on Donald’s book, was that he was clearly wounded by Tennessee and Truman, but especially Tennessee. Donald was someone who was ambitious to a point, but his friendships were more important than his career. I don’t think that was true about most of his friends. He struggled with the fact that Ten nessee was going to put writing and fame above anything they experienced together. I think Tennessee was like, “I’m off to stardom, man,” and there was this 20-feet-from-stardom thing with Donald, and with Sandy, too. While clearly accomplished, Windham’s talents were eclipsed by those of his dazzling friends. Gore Vidal, remarking in his later years on a photograph of himself with Williams and Wind-

The “crowd” here is dominated by a platinum blond Holly wood belle named Doug and a bull-dike named Wanda who is a well-known writer under a male pen-name. The most raffish and fantastical crew that I have met yet and even I—exces sively broadminded as I am—feel somewhat shocked by the goings-on. However, the sun has come out and the lonely sand dunes, sea-gulls and blue ocean is an excellent katharsis [ sic ] for a “sin-sick soul.” All of this will go very nicely into a play some day. In the book of letters, Windham quotes from a New York Times interview with Williams: “The real fact is that no one means a great deal to me, anyway. ... I prefer people who can help me some way or other, and most of my friendships are ac cidental.” But, Windham adds: “I had a hard time convincing outraged acquaintances that he was saying no one meant a great deal to him compared to his work, that he preferred people whose private responses helped him with this private vocation.” That response by Windham was representative of his largely sympathetic stance toward Williams—despite much mistreat ment by the latter, which Williams characterized as Windham’s “morbid humility.” When the letters were published, Williams took offense at what he considered an unflattering presentation—and perhaps Windham’s pointed editorializing. It ended their long friendship and inaugurated nearly a decade of lawsuits and recriminations. Windham’s 1987 memoir Lost Friendships dealt with the after math of the Letters as well as a detailed narrative of his rela tionship with Williams over the years, as well as with Truman Capote, whom Windham befriended in 1948. “Truman and Williams never became close, despite Truman’s wishing it,”

A Letter to ‘Donnie,’ from Tennessee EXCERPT

FROM: Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Don ald Windham, 1940–1965. July, 29 and 30, 1940 Captain Jack’s Wharf, Provincetown, Mass. Dear Donnie— Your letter came at a very opportune moment as I was feeling blue. My life now is full of emotional complications which make me write good verse—at least a lot of it—but make my mental chart a series of dizzy leaps up and down, ecstasy one mo ment—O dapple faun!—and consummate despair the next. … Depression this morn ing occasioned by fact the ballet dancer [Kip Kiernan] stayed out all night. So far no explanations, though I suspect a nymph at the other end of the wharf and am mov ing to a single bed downstairs till suspi cions confirmed or dispelled. ... Isn’t it hell? But, oh, God, Stinkie, I wish you could see him in his blue tights! Later: Everything is okay again and I did n’t have to move downstairs after all. He

slept alone on the beach because he needed some sleep. Doesn’t get much with me. But that’s his own fault for being so incredibly beautiful. We wake up two or three times in the night and start all over again like a pair of goats. The ceiling is very high like the loft of a barn and the tide is lapping under the wharf. The sky amazingly brilliant with stars. The wind blows the door wide open, the gulls are crying. Oh, Christ. I call him baby like you call Butch, though when I lie on top of him I feel like I was polishing the Statue of Liberty or something. He is so enor mous. A great bronze statue of antique Greece come to life. But with a little boy’s face. … I lean over over him in the night and memorize the geography of his body with my hands—he arches his throat and makes a soft, purring sound. His skin is steaming hot like the hide of a horse that’s been galloping. It has a warm, rich odor. The odor of life. ... And now we’re so tired we can’t move. “I like you, Tenny”— hoarse—embarrassed—ashamed of such intimate speech! I laugh for I know he

lovesme!

Then everything’s gone and when I wake up it is daylight, the bed is empty.— Kip is gone out.—He is dancing.—Or pos ing naked for artists. Nobody knows our secret but him and me. And now, you, Donnie—because you can understand. Please keep this letter and be very careful with it. It’s only for people like us who have gone beyond shame. Windham later wrote in Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others : “It was this sen tence that struck me at the time. His as sumption about me was wrong: I had not gone beyond feeling shame about sex. I had never felt it, and despite the evidence I had seen in Tennessee’s compulsive promiscuity and his ever-ready prophylac tic salve, as though the punishment of the disease was the most likely follow-up to the act of making love, it had not occurred to me that shame was for him an inevitable part of sex, which could only be either felt or passed beyond.”

TheG & LR

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