3

When I was about to set off for college in the early fall of 1929 suddenly there wasn’t any money for the tuition; if it hadn’t been for Grand coming through with a thousand dollars right in the nick of time, I couldn’t have gone. This was just one of many times in my life when Grand and Grandfather Dakin brought calm and order to my usually chaotic state, or were responsible for my accomplishing something, in part because of the happy atmosphere they were able to create, in part because of their almost magical power to dispense financial aid from their own small resources.

Off I went, to the University of Missouri, in the charming town of Columbia.

I did not go for “rush week” as I could not imagine myself being accepted by a fraternity or wanting to be a fraternity member.

This was a disappointment to Dad, who had been a Pi Kappa Alpha during his years at the University of Tennessee and he was determined to do something about this in short order.

Miss Edwina accompanied me to Columbia; it did not concern her at all that I had not gone up for rush week. We spent our first night in a hotel room and the next day she selected for me what she regarded as a suitable boardinghouse. The boardinghouse was segregated, sexually, there were two buildings under the proprietorship of a very lively middle-age landlady, a widow with a bright red Buick convertible.

The boys and girls met only at meals. There was a piano and two or three of the girls could play and it was actually a pleasant arrangement for me.

I have forgotten to mention that my first night in Columbia, at the hotel and on its stationery, I wrote a letter to Hazel, who was at the University of Wisconsin, proposing marriage. In a week’s time she sent me an appreciative but negative response, explaining that we were still much too young to think about such a thing …

I shared a room with a young somnambulist. One night he got out of his bed and crossed the room to my bed and got in with me. I recall him as a lanky farm boy, blond and a bit blemished with adolescent acne, but not unattractive.

Of course, when he crawled into bed with me, I cried out in dismay. He mumbled something and staggered back across the room to his single bed in another corner.

Now I’m going to make another confession of a comical nature.

For several nights, I waited for this fit of somnambulism to come upon him again and hoped that it would lead him in the same direction.

Well, it only happened that one time.

But one evening, before he’d come to the room, I took the bolts out of his cot so that it would collapse when he got into it.

I suppose I was not quite sane in those days. In any case, the cot did, indeed, collapse when he got into it. However, he quickly and silently reassembled it, giving me several enigmatic glances.

I had been in the boardinghouse for about a month when I was visited by three or four very well-dressed and personable young men from the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.

Well, their visit had come about through Dad’s intervention. He had a pair of young collateral cousins, the Merriwether boys, at the University of Tennessee and they were influential members of ATO there. They had written the local chapter, Gamma Rho, that the son of an executive in the International Shoe Company was “hiding out” in a boardinghouse and that this would not do, since he was descended from the Williamses and Seviers of East Tennessee, since he was a published writer and a traveler of the world.

One of the fraternity brothers laid it on with the most impressive and possibly genuine warmth of feelings; he insisted that I go straight to the fraternity house with him so that I could see at once how preferable it was to the “dismal” boardinghouse.

Nowadays, of course, I would have recognized this “brother,” whom I will call “Melmoth,” as what he turned out to be.

About as gay as they make them …

However, he merely struck me, then, as a person of exceptional grace and charm.

I went to the fraternity house. On the way to it, we passed the new house being constructed, a huge pseudo-Tudor thing that managed to look quite attractive. Before I got to the temporary quarters of the Gamma Rho chapter, I’d made up my mind to join, I mean pledge, if they really asked me to.

The next day they did, and, having observed the brothers with appreciative eyes, I was eager to accept.

The ATO chapter at Missouri U. greeted me with cordiality, at first, but then with growing and growing and growing disconcertion.

Surely, they had never encountered such an eccentric young man, let alone pledged him.

Once a week, at midnight, there was held what was called a “kangaroo court.” At this court, conducted with great solemnity, the transgressions of each pledge were read aloud to the gathering and punishment was meted out in the form of paddling. The paddling was light in some cases, and heavy in others.

In my case, it was practically spine-breaking.

A brother would stand poised with a paddle at the end of the long front room. The pledge to be punished would be instructed to bend over, presenting his backside to the brother with the paddle, and to hold up his balls, since the brother did not want to include castration in the punishment.

Then the brother with the paddle would come dashing across the great chamber and swat the pledge’s backside.

I was often meted out the maximum number of ten paddlings. And they were often administered with such force that I would barely be able to make my way back upstairs to bed …

What were my transgressions?

Various and many. In fact, they were practically innumerable.

A spirit of anarchy had entered into my being. This was partly due to nostalgia for the old boardinghouse. And it was partly due to the meagerness of my monthly allowance from Dad. I was continually out of shirts and in those days you had to appear at dinner, in a fraternity house, in a clean shirt and jacket.

The bell for dinner would ring at six and I would never be prepared for it. Hungry, yes, but always surprised by the sound.

I would wait until the other boys on the floor had descended to the great dining hall in the basement. Then I would scurry into somebody’s room and snatch one of his white shirts and wear it down to dinner and return it, surreptitiously, when the meal was over.

1. Mother at nine years, studying the violin. Grand tried to teach her to play but Mother achieved only a fairly correct pose with the instrument.

2. Dad before the death of his mother and consequent deprival of a gentle influence on his boyhood.

3. Dad as a student at Bellbuckle Military Academy, where, he says, he spent half his time in the guardhouse, fed on turnips—which he never permitted on the table in later years.

4. Mother dressed for riding—man, beast or storm, a delicate survivor of most elements in life.

5. The Rectory in Columbus, Mississippi—very Southern Gothic.

6. Mother in a snapshot taken by her favorite beau, after she had married “C.C.” Williams—hence the wistful look.

7. Mother, Grand and Rose.

8. Mother as Regent of the Jefferson chapter of the D.A.R.

9. Grandfather’s totally natural, never affected or merely social humor is apparent in this snapshot.

10. Grandfather with me in Key West, Florida, early in 1947. I was just beginning to feel well, recuperated from the illness of 1946 and with Streetcar almost ready for submission.

11. Grandfather in Key West, posing with a pelican. His failing eyesight—or his infinite benevolence—made him regard them as beautiful birds

12. Grandfather and me in St. Louis.

13. Mother, Grand and “Jiggs” in front of our house on Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri.

14. My paternal grandfather, Thomas Lanier Williams II, who practically exhausted the family’s fortune, mostly in real estate, by running repeatedly for Governor against a popular demagogue. The crack across the face in the photograph is a touch of accidental symbolism, as it was not till this handsome but improvident descendant of the Williams-Sevier-Lanier line that things began to go wrong. Although educated in law at Heidelberg University he never rose higher in politics than State Railroad Commissioner. He was a great lady’s man—I wonder if he would have tolerated me …

15. Isabel Coffin Williams, my father’s mother, who died at the age of twenty-eight from tuberculosis. This meant that my father grew up mostly without the emollient influence of a mother.

16. My favorite picture of Grandfather, taken late in his life. A dignity and wisdom—the grace of age—in his face.

17. Cornelius (“C.C.”) Williams—a reluctant paterfamilias and sales manager.

18. Mother and Dad, on a vacation in the Ozarks.

19. A formal portrait of Mother, at the time of her “second debut.”

20. Mother and me after a long conversation in Key West, during the forties.

21. Rose Isabel Williams.

22. Rose on Westminster Place in St. Louis.

23. My sister Rose at the time of her debut in Knoxville.

24. Rose on the beach in Florida.

25. Rose and a friend my mother didn’t like. Mother thought all Rose’s friends were a bad “moral influence” and so Rose became lonely.

26. My sister Rose as a young woman.

27. Rose in a Catholic sanitarium in St. Louis, just after her nervous breakdown.

I was not very clever at this and was soon found out.

Then, and this is really an awful confession, I had taken to the habit of “kiting checks.” Whenever I would go out on a jelly-date, as afternoon dates were called, and find myself unable to pay the café bill, I would write out a check on a bank where I had no account. These bad checks would be pasted on the cashier’s box of the restaurant.

What in hell was going on in my mind that year?

Nothing presently recognizable.

About once a month the chapter would give a formal dance and the pledges were given a list of sorority girls who were acceptable as dates for these grand occasions. And I would always ignore the list and bring some girl who was either not even a member of any sorority or was from a sorority that was considered of no consequence, such as Phi Mu or Alpha Delta Pi, which owned the dreadful, sub-rosa sobriquet of “After Dinner Pussy.”

There was one particular girl from Alpha Delta Pi that I kept bringing to the dances. This girl was an hysterical nympho: and very, very pretty. She had only one formal dress and it was a shimmering rich brown satin that did not adequately contain her bosom and made no secret at all of her voluptuous behind.

Although her presence at the dance was regarded as a social disgrace, as the evening wore on the brothers began to cut in on us with more and more frequency until she was getting about the dance floor as dizzily as Tippy Smith from the Theta house or the queen of Kappa Kappa Gamma whose name I forget.

The boys would take over my date completely after midnight and they would each dance her into the dark little library and what went on I cannot relate with authority but I can easily conjecture. They would give her what was then called “a dry fuck.”

My own intimacies with this girl were not much: once, in a car, I took hold of one of her breasts and she went into an almost epileptic spasm.

Boys and girls together. You can’t put it down …

The summer after my first year at college I actually obtained and held legitimate employment for a short while, in St. Louis.

I was a house-to-house peddler of a big “woman’s magazine,” and just how this came about I don’t recall but certainly I did it only to please, or should I say pacify, “Big Daddy.”

There were about ten of us recruited by a sort of regional sales manager who put up at a second-class hotel on Grand Avenue; and we were a motley crew. We were paired off, and the pairs worked on opposite sides of streets. The young fellow who was paired off with me came from Oklahoma.

He struck me as being curiously antic in his behavior. I was not yet hip, you see, to the gay world and I didn’t know that this partner was actually an outrageous young camp. He was blond and rather pretty, I remember, but he interested me only as a funny companion at a very tedious job. Neither of us was very successful at pushing the woman’s magazine. Housewives slammed their doors in our faces more often than not: of course this was the first year of the depression. I guess the job lasted for both me and my gay partner about two weeks. But after we’d been summarily dismissed, the kid from Tulsa remained in St. Louis. One evening we went on a double date with Hazel and a girlfriend of hers named Lucy. I was surprised at the Tulsa boy’s lack of interest in having a date with a girl; he said, “Wouldn’t we have more fun if we went to the bars?” I had never been to “the bars,” he did not specify which kind of bars he meant and I certainly didn’t know, not having ever suspected their existence.

After we’d collected our little commissions from the mag subscriptions, we went on the open top of a bus to the neighborhood of Hazel’s house. It seemed to me that the night air had made my partner a bit wacky with exhilaration. He kept repeating the name “Lucy” and going into soprano howls of amusement. The howls had an hysterical note.

I believe that Hazel was much wiser about the sex scene than I was at that time. When she admitted him to the Kramer residence, she looked at the Oklahoma kid with a touch of dismay in her great brown eyes. All during the evening he kept chattering like a bird and putting special emphasis on the name “Lucy.” I must admit Lucy would not have rated at a fraternity dance: she looked quite a bit like what her name suggested. She was tall and angular and there was a sort of Luciness about her. But my partner’s behavior was really quite overboard and the “double date” ended upon a somewhat ambiguous note. Hazel seemed more than a bit put off with me for the first time in our long relationship.

When I say that Hazel was probably much wiser about the sex scene than I, I am not altogether sure what I mean by that. For five or six years she had been a loving girl-friend but the love was what the Victorians would describe as pure. Now this will come as a rather incredible bit of news, but Hazel permitted me to kiss her only twice a year on the lips, and that was at Christmas and on her birthday. In retrospect I wonder if she was actually what the shrinks call “frigid,” or if she was being coquettishly demure to bring out a more aggressive attitude in me. I am inclined to think the latter is true, since I remember an afternoon in our very early teens when we visited the St. Louis art gallery, atop Art Hill in Forest Park; she headed straight for a room of ancient statuary containing The Dying Gaul, who was clad only in a fig leaf. Now take my word for this, it’s the absolute truth: the fig leaf could be lifted and Hazel knew it. She lifted the fig leaf and asked me, “Is yours like this?”

She got no answer but a maidenly blush …

I have incorporated that little occurrence in one of my best short stories, published by The New Yorker, no less: its title was “Three Players of a Summer Game.” The New Yorker cut it out of the story, that incident of the fig leaf, but I restored it when the story appeared in Hard Candy and I think rightly so, for the little girl in the story was based upon Hazel as a child—including the bit about the old car, the “electric.” Mrs. Kramer, grand’mère, had an “electric” automobile and the pretentious old lady loved to sit in its square glass box tooling sedately among the more fashionable residential sections of the city. She doted on Hazel and she would sometimes allow Hazel to take me for rides. The electric only went at a speed of about twenty miles an hour, at the most. Later on the Kramers were to give Hazel a light green Packard, but that was quite a bit later …

I didn’t know why the boy from Oklahoma kept hanging around St. Louis, which is all but intolerably hot in summer, but he did hang around and he did keep suggesting that we go to “the bars”—but I continued to decline. Something about him disturbed me and I was somewhat relieved when he finally went home. (Later I received from Tulsa a written declaration of love.)

Cut, now, back to college. And to a youth with large and luminous eyes which gleamed at night like a fire-cat’s.

I was now an initiated member of ATO and at one point I had this roommate with the exceptional eyes, dark hair and one hell of a physique—I’ll call him Smitty.

Once each autumn the ATO’s would have “Old Home Week” when the great Tudor house would be packed with alumni. On these weekends, everyone doubled up in bunks for the night. I shared a bunk in the dormitory on the third floor with Smitty, sleeping under—no, not sleeping under but lying under—a very light blanket, the influx of alumni having put a great strain on the supply of bedclothing. Well, that night a singular adventure occurred. He and I were both sleeping in underwear. I had on shorts and a singlet and I think he only wore shorts.

After lights out in the dormitory, I began to feel his fingers caressing my upper arms and shoulders, at first almost imperceptibly and then, and then—

We were sleeping spoons and he began to press hard against my buttocks and I began to tremble like a leaf in a gale.

But that’s as far as it went.

Then, a few weeks later, when we were back in our regular sleeping quarters and I had climbed into my upper bunk, the boy suddenly jumped up there with me.

Automatically, virginally, I said, “What do you want?” or “What are you doing?”

He laughed, sheepishly, and jumped back down from the upper.

I think I must have lain awake nearly all night, cursing myself for my inadvertent “put-down” of this (for those days) very daring approach. How mixed up can you be, and how ignorant!

Another boy began to visit our bedroom at night and one of those nights—they were purely for conversation, or “rapping” as the kids say now—Smitty grinned at our visitor and said, “You know what I’m going to do tonight? I’m going to corn-hole Tommy.”

Well, I didn’t know what that meant, in those days I had never heard of the idioms for pederasty.

There was a bit of puppy-love-play among the three of us on the lower bunk. We were all in shorts. And we sort of tangled our legs around a bit, but that’s as far as it went.

Smitty and I were going on double dates with girls from Stephens College, and were both frustrated. The girls were not giving much.

Now I remember one night in particular and we were not double dating with girls from Stephens but with a couple of very wild coeds, unaffiliated with a sorority for quite apparent reasons. One of them had a roadster and we drove out toward the quarry and stopped by it in the moonlight. Then Smitty said, “Why don’t you two walk down the road a piece?”

So we walked down the road—nothing happened.

When we returned to the roadster, Smitty’s date was drinking some home brew and his fly was open and his tumescent member stood straight up and I was somewhat appalled. It looked more like a weapon than part of a human body.

But the fire-cat eyes, and the tall and well-formed body counteracted that aversion, and as the year went on, we fell more and more in love yet still without any outlet for the physical side of the attachment, at least none that led to a release.

When spring came, I remember lying on the wide lawn at night and he thrust his hand under my shirt and caressed my upper torso with those big fingers of his. I would always go into my shaking leaf bit and I would always say or do nothing to encourage him.

Obviously, our attachment had begun to trouble the brothers.

Smitty was dropped and he moved disconsolately into a rooming-house. We went on seeing each other without interruption, however, and one night we went to a sort of open-air speakeasy, identical to the one I later described in Orpheus Descending. A long-sloping hill was dotted with little gazebos in which the home brew was served and in which the couples would carry on. The gazebos were lighted by tissue paper lanterns, and one by one these lanterns would be extinguished.

I think we would sometimes turn out our lantern, too, and still nothing happened.

But one night something did.

We got quite high on the brew and we started laughing and hooting together in a crazed condition. Then all at once we raced out of the gazebo and down that long-sloping hill toward the fence at its bottom. I was too drunk to get over the fence. I sprawled in the deep, wet grass and he sprawled on top of me. We sort of wrestled together in an amorous way, that was all. But he said, “Let’s spend the night at my place.”

We went there by taxi and several times, making a joke of it, he attempted to kiss me on the mouth and each time I would push him away.

Sort of dumb, huh? I would say so …

Soon as we entered his bedroom, I puked on the floor.

He swabbed up the vomited brew with a towel and then he removed my clothes and put me to bed. When he got in bed with me he caught me in a tight grip with his arms and legs and I shook so violently that the bed rattled.

He held me all night and I shook all night.

At this point I might say, “Ah, youth,” and possibly get away with it …

After exams (he had flunked) came the night which was known as “Crazy Night”—the night just before the college kids dispersed for home. Smitty and I and some other fellows all piled into somebody’s big car and we drove about town in quest of bootleg liquor. We got quite drunk, all of us. We ran out of booze and drove to a house where home brew was dispensed. Smitty, another boy and I remained in the car while our companions went in the house to make the purchase. While we waited, Smitty dropped his hand on my crotch. My cock stood straight up.

He made a joke of it.

“Tom thinks I’m like Melmoth,” he yelled, removing his hand from its improper position.

And this reference to Melmoth leads squarely enough into an odd chapter-meeting which had taken place in the “house” a few weeks before.

The chapter meeting was secret. Melmoth was not present. There was an atmosphere of spooky solemnity.

One of the officers of the fraternity made a speech. He said he was sure we noticed the absence of Melmoth and there was a reason for it and the reason was such a shocking thing that it was hard for him to mention it.

He said slowly, with a ferocious glare into space, “It has been discovered that Melmoth is a cock-sucker.”

An awed silence.

Then another brother, God bless him, spoke up.

“That isn’t so,” he said. “I’ve been his roommate all year and I know what cock-suckers are and he isn’t.”

The boy who spoke up was a very, very handsome black Irishman. Logically, I should think Melmoth would have attempted to seduce him. But Melmoth was a cool one.

The officer said, “I’m sorry, but we happen to be very certain that it’s true.”

He then told how Melmoth had gotten very drunk one night and had put the make on some boys at another house, and how, having failed with them, he had gone up to the dormitory and made advances to one of our own “brothers.”

Well, it was decided that Melmoth must not only leave the fraternity at once, but also his job and the town. Within a week, he had gone from the scene and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of his subsequent fate.

More about Smitty, now.

About once a month I would hitchhike home to St. Louis—I mean to University City and to the apartment on Enright. It so happened that my sister Rose’s room was available to Smitty and me one weekend, for Rose had gone to Barnes Hospital for a checkup. Her long period of mysterious indigestion—preceding her mental crack-up—had set in.

He and I shared her ivory bed, which was double. And all that night we lay sleepless; he embraced me tightly while pretending to be sleeping and I—the trembling, teeth-chattering bit.

Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love-affair?

I decided yesterday that once again, as I did a few days ago and before then, I would take a role in Small Craft Warnings, the part of Doc, as a way to draw people to the play. After the performance, I escorted Candy Darling to a nearby bistro named P. J. Clarke’s. The party grew to about eight. And during our supper, there, I got a bit high on wine and I said, “You know, I only sleep alone nowadays. You see, I’m such a light sleeper that anyone else in the room would keep me awake …”

“I’m like that, too,” said Candy. We exchanged commiserating glances.

I said a lot of other stuff, mostly about my faith in God and in prayer, but my paradoxical disbelief in an after-existence. I also said that I believed in angels more than I did in God and the reason was that I had never known God—true or false?—but that I had known several angels in my life.

What?

“Oh, I mean human angels,” I explained. And that is true for sure …

My return to “the boards” as Doc last evening was a distinct letdown. I am no longer the capacity draw that I was during my first stint at the New Theatre, when I followed my performances with the “symposiums.” At the first return performance, Tuesday evening, we did have a full house, and a certain exhilaration at being back in action as actor carried me through the evening, despite a few fluffs, with a degree of bravura.

Yesterday evening, though, I was immediately deflated, upon entering the men’s dressing room, by Brad Sullivan, who plays the pathetically boastful stud, Bill. Sullivan has always had a tendency to put me down, at least so it seems to me, and I don’t understand why. I’ve always treated him with an easy and amiable informality, a manner of behavior toward the cast that I’ve tried to establish since the start of rehearsals. I must acknowledge that most of the others have responded in kind, that is, most of the time. Actually I was closest, both in age and in spirit, to that fine actor, David Hooks, whom I have replaced in Doc’s part.

Now my return to the role has been a matter of box-office exigency. During those very hot summer weeks, business had dropped rather badly. Billy Barnes, my present agent, asked me if I would go back in the part since I had proved such a draw that single week when I appeared earlier in the summer.

But the bloom has worn off a bit. The house, last night, had noticeably shrunken in size and perhaps it was apparent to the actors that I was not going to be the draw I’d been before. At intervals, Gene Fanning, who plays Monk, complained about my opening monologue saying that it was not “conversational” enough. This was not quite fair in my opinion, and I was much disenchanted with Gene, who had always been so helpful to me in previous performances. After all, I was laboring under double jeopardy. I had been continually told that I did not project sufficiently and must always “cheat” toward the front of the house. However, I would always relate to Gene by quick glances at him. The stage manager also gave me a bad time. He said that I had left out some important bits. It was true that I had made a couple of one- or two-line cuts in my expanded role, but the cuts were not important and, without Gene’s assistance, I believe that I covered them up and possibly the talky play was improved by these deletions.

Bill Hickey was my only male defender now, though Patrick Bedford was, as always, very friendly to me. But I was—probably out of wounded ego—quite annoyed after the performance and I said, with only a surface jocularity, that from now on I would use the ladies’ dressing room or the separate room devised for Candy Darling—who, being a transvestite, had been given special quarters. She is, by the way, becoming my closest friend in the cast.

I left the theatre in costume, going to Candy’s room before leaving and asking her to go with me to Joe Allen’s restaurant, a night spot for theatre people on West Forty-sixth, which she had mentioned favorably the night before. She dressed up in a glamorous fifties style, with her very becoming blond wig, on which she placed a black velvet cloche hat with brilliants over her forehead.

We must have made quite an entrance at Joe Allen’s, since Candy is over six feet tall and I only five foot six. And I had on my “planter’s hat,” a thirty-dollar Stetson with wide upswept brims which I had bought to wear in the play.

We were cordially received by the manager and we had a nice talk. Candy recited a poem she’d written called “Stardust” and it was very touching. We talked about our private lives, the loneliness of them, our difficulties “with men.” Then I took her home—her duplex apartment next to the Christian Science church (from which she says she gets good vibes)—and when I took her to the entrance of the apartment, she invited me to come up but I declined. I was tired and didn’t want another drink.

My third year at the University of Missouri was relatively colorless. My adored Smitty did not return to school at all, and the roommate I had was of no interest to me. In the spring of that year, I had a poignant and innocent little affair with a very charming girl named Anna Jean. My feeling for her was romantic. She was very pretty, she lived just across the street at the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and she had a delightful sense of humor. I wrote a little poem about her, well, I think several. Here’s one:

Can I forget

the night you waited

beside your door—

could it have been more

plainly stated?—

for something more.

You spoke a rhyme

about young love

while we stood

breathing the rain-sweet

fragrance

of the wood.

I was a fool, not

knowing what

you waited for.

And then you smiled

and quietly

shut the door.

This was to be my final year at this first of three universities. My grades were good in English and one or two other subjects, but I flunked out of ROTC and got poor grades in several other courses.

When I came home, Dad announced that he could no longer afford to keep me in college and that he was getting me a job in a branch of the International Shoe Company.

This job was to last for three years, from 1931 to 1934. I received the wage of sixty-five dollars a month—it was the depression.

Well, truly, I would take nothing for those three years because I learned, during them, just how disgraceful, to the corporations, is the fate of the white-collar worker.

I got the job because Dad had procured for the top boss his position at the Continental Shoemakers branch. (This was still before the poker game and the decline and fall of “Big Daddy.”) Of course the bosses were anxious to find an excuse to get me out. They put me to the most tedious and arduous jobs. I had to dust off hundreds of shoes in the sample rooms every morning; then I had to spend several hours typing out factory orders. Digits, nothing but digits! About four in the afternoon, I was dispatched to the establishment of our main client, J. C. Penney, with great packing cases of shoes for their acceptance or rejection. The cases were so heavy that it was a strain to lift them: I could carry them only half a block before having to set them down to catch my breath.

Still, I learned a lot there about the comradeship between co-workers at minimal salary, and I made some very good friends, especially a Polish fellow named Eddie, who sort of took me under his wing, and a girl named Doretta, with whom Eddie was infatuated. Then there was the spinster at the desk next to mine, little plump Nora. While we worked we carried on whispered conversations about the good movies and stage shows in town and the radio shows such as “Amos and Andy.”

My first year there I came of age and I registered and I cast my first and last political vote. It was for Norman Thomas: I had already turned Socialist, and for reasons already made clear.

Hazel was still in school in Wisconsin. She was singing on the radio with considerable success. I continued to see her mother, Miss Florence, at least once a week.

I started writing at night. I would write and complete one story a week and mail it, as soon as I finished, to the distinguished story magazine called Story. It was the time when the young Saroyan had made a sensation in that magazine with “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” At first the editors encouraged me with little personal notes of criticism. But soon I began to receive those dreadful “form” rejections.

I had Saturday afternoons off from my job at Continental. I had an unvarying regime for those lovely times of release. I would go to the Mercantile Library, far downtown in St. Louis, and read voraciously there; I would have a thirty-five-cent lunch at a pleasant little restaurant. And I would go home in a “service car”—to concentrate upon the week’s short story. Of course all of Sunday was devoted to the story’s completion.

During the weekdays I would work on verse: quite undistinguished, I fear, and upon one occasion I knocked out what is probably the most awful sonnet ever composed. It strikes me, now, as comical enough to be quoted in full.

I see them lying sheeted in their graves,

All of the women poets of this land,

Each in her own inscrutable small cave,

Song reft from lip and pen purloined from hand.

And no more vocal, now, than any stone,

Less aureate, in fact, now, than winter weed,

This thing of withered flesh and bleached bone

That patterned once beauty’s immortal creed.

Rudely death seized and broke proud Sappho’s lyre,

Barrett and Wylie went their songless way.

He does not care what hecatomb of fire

Is spilt when shattering the urn of clay.

Yet, Death, I’ll pardon all you took away

While still you spare me glorious Millay.

My work in the short-story form, then confined to weekends and spurred by strong coffee, was considerably better, and most of these stories are preserved in the archives of the University of Texas.

The onset of my cardiovascular condition occurred in the spring of 1934, and it is a condition which has remained with me ever since, in greatly varying degrees, sometimes not enough to draw my attention but other times sufficient to become an obsession.

The first dramatic onset of this condition, in the spring of 1934, was triggered by two things. First, the quite unexpected marriage of Hazel to a young man named Terrence McCabe, whom she had been dating at the University of Wisconsin. I felt as though the sky had fallen on me, and my reaction was to start working every evening on short stories, overcoming fatigue with black coffee.

One evening I was at work on a story titled “The Accent of a Coming Foot,” perhaps the most mature short story that I undertook in that period. I had arrived at a climactic scene when I suddenly became aware that my heart was palpitating and skipping beats.

Having no means of sedation, not even a glass of wine, I did a crazy thing: I jumped up from the typewriter and rushed out onto the streets of University City. I walked faster and faster as though by this means I could outdistance the attack. I walked all the way from University City to Union Boulevard in St. Louis, expecting to drop dead at each step. It was an instinctual, an animalistic reaction, comparable to the crazed dash of a cat or dog struck by an automobile, racing round and round until it collapses, or to the awful wing-flopping run of a decapitated chicken.

This was in the middle of March. The trees along the streets were just beginning to bud, and somehow, looking up at those bits of springtime green as I dashed along, had a gradually calming effect—and I turned toward home again with the palpitations subsiding.

I did not mention this experience to any member of the family but the following Monday I consulted a doctor who informed me that I had high blood-pressure and a heart defect of unspecified nature.

Still I said nothing to the family and I continued to work each day at the shoe company.

That weekend my sister and I went downtown to see a movie, The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Leslie Howard. I was too tense to pay much attention to the film. Afterwards, we took a service car home, a phenomenon of city transportation in the depression era. It cost fifteen cents a passenger from downtown St. Louis to suburban University City.

As we progressed along Delmar Boulevard toward University City, my tension steadily increased and a very alarming symptom occurred. I lost sensation in my hands, the fingers stiffened and my heart pounded.

When we were approaching St. Vincent’s Hospital, I leaned forward and said to the driver, ‘Please take me to the hospital entrance, I am having a heart attack or a stroke.’

I stayed in the heart ward for a week or ten days. It was when I returned home that Rose had her first mental disturbance of an obvious nature …

I remember her wandering into my small room and saying, “Let’s all die together.”

The suggestion did not appeal to me in the least.

Within a week, I had submitted my resignation to Dad’s friend, Mr. Fletcher of Continental Shoemakers, and had received a politely phrased acknowledgment of it: “Best wishes for an early return to health. We have all appreciated your many sterling qualities” (my own italics). I do wish I had that letter to frame it in silver …

It was decided by the folks that I should spend a summer recuperating with Grand and Grandfather at their little home in Memphis.

And so, as a twenty-fourth birthday gift, I received a permanent release from the wholesale shoe business in St. Louis, and my first full opportunity to approach maturity in my “sullen art and craft,” as Dylan Thomas described the vocation of writing. In my own case, it was oftentimes a desperate commitment, but I have never found anything very sullen about it. Even the best of poets can sometimes put a thing rather badly, as did Stephen Spender when he spoke of “the evening’s grave demand for love.” What’s grave about the genital itch? No matter how romantic one is, the urge to “lay knife aboard” can hardly be regarded as a thing of gravity, confined to the evening hours, as though it were Evensong in a high Episcopal church. Chacun, chacun, perhaps some poets confuse it with kneeling in prayer before the high altar: maybe a practical position, at times, but hardly the right place.

And so I’m a clown today. I fear it results from reading over my funny melodrama Kingdom of Earth, which Michael Kahn has promised to revive at Princeton to which he will transfer his fine directorial gifts from The American Shakespeare and Hot Cat Theatre at Stratford, Connecticut.

Everything is next season, next season, and I feel as if next week were all but impossibly remote!

I wish to God I had the spirit of Bricktop. She was the surprise guest at Chuck Bowden’s dinner party night before last. It was her eightieth birthday: she entered the apartment singing “Quiéreme Mucho,” the song which I always requested her to sing at her club on the Via Veneto of Rome. Then she sang many other favorites of mine and her voice, her enunciation of words and her phrasing are as lovely as ever.

Michael Moriarty also sang to his own accompaniment on the piano and I still consider him our most promising young dramatic actor …

Jim Dale of Scapino sang and played a song of his own composition, molto con brio.

My first play was produced when I was 24 years old and staying in my grandparents’ home in Memphis the summer of 1934. This play (Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!) was successfully produced by The Rose Arbor Players, a little-theatre group, in Memphis. Grand and Grandfather Dakin had a pleasant little house on Snowden Avenue. It was a block or two from Southwestern University and less than that distance from the residence of Knolle Rhodes and his wife and mother and cat. Professor Rhodes and his little family were great friends of ours. They were Virginians of the first rank. Later on Professor Rhodes became the president of the university: in the summer of 1934 he was, I believe, head of the English Department. He got me access to the library of the university and I spent most of those summer afternoons reading there, or at the downtown library on Main Street.

That summer I fell in love with the writing of Anton Chekhov, at least with his many short stories. They introduced me to a literary sensibility to which I felt a very close affinity at that time. Now I find that he holds too much in reserve. I still am in love with the delicate poetry of his writing and The Sea Gull is still, I think, the greatest of modern plays, with the possible exception of Brecht’s Mother Courage.

It has often been said that Lawrence was my major literary influence. Well, Lawrence was, indeed, a highly simpatico figure in my literary upbringing, but Chekhov takes precedence as an influence—that is, if there has been any particular influence beside my own solitary bent—toward what I am not yet sure and probably never will be …

Last night Donald Madden reminded me of my promise to do a new adaptation of The Sea Gull (both of us feel it has never been let out of the confines of the translation straitjacket, not even by Stark Young) and of my longing to direct it, sometime, with Madden in the role of Trigorin, Anne Meacham as Nina or Mme. Arcadina—

But last night I shook my head a little at this reminder of that ambitious project: I said—no self-pity—I don’t think I have time, now, to undertake anything of a writing nature but this “thing,” my memoirs, and possibly the final version of Milk Train for Michael York and Angela Lansbury …

In that summer of 1934, when I first became a playwright, there lived next door to my grandparents in Memphis a family of Jews with a very warmhearted and actively disposed daughter named Bernice Dorothy Shapiro. She was a member of a little dramatic club in Memphis. Their productions took place on the great sloping back lawn of a lady named Mrs. Rosebrough, which accounts for the “Rose Arbor” name of that cry of players. Dorothy wanted me to collaborate with her on a play for the group—she knew that I was a writer and she wasn’t. I wrote a play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!—a farcical but rather touching little comedy about two sailors on a date with a couple of “light ladies.” Bernice Dorothy Shapiro wrote a quite unnecessary and, I must confess, undistinguished prologue to the play. Thank God the prologue was short: that’s all I can remember in its favor.

The play was produced late that summer. It was not long, either, but it was a great success for the group. On the program I was identified as the collaborator and was given second billing to Dorothy. Still, the laughter, genuine and loud, at the comedy I had written enchanted me.

Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse.

I know it’s the only thing that’s saved my life.

During that same summer of 1934 in Memphis, when I started to realize fully an attraction I had long suspected, to writing for the theatre, I also began to realize more fully an attraction, also suspected for some time, to young men. And, the delicacy of my physical nature.

One afternoon I went out with two young university students who had become friends of Grandfather. They were exceptionally handsome: one was dark, the other a shining blond.

In retrospect, I realize that they must have been lovers. They took me out to a lake near Memphis where there was a swimming-beach—and, well, the love-bug bit me in the form of erotic longings for the blond. I believe the interest was reciprocal, for one evening he invited me to have dinner with him at the Peabody Hotel restaurant. We had beers; I doubt that the beer was the true cause of the palpitations that suddenly began to occur in my excitable heart. I went into panic and so did the blond. A doctor was summoned. The doctor was a lady, and an extremely bad doctor. She gave me a sedative tablet of some kind but informed me, gloomily, that my symptoms were, indeed, of a serious nature.

“You must do everything carefully and slowly,” said this gloom-pot. She told me that with the exercise of care and a slow pace I would live to be forty!

“Oh, I’m so glad you told him that,” said the poor blond, “he walks much too fast on the street for someone with a cardiac condition.”

This incident resulted in a return of the cardiac neurosis which had begun to subside late that summer.

My first and last and only consummated sexual affair with a woman occurred after that, when I had returned for a year of college, in the Drama Department at the University of Iowa, the fall of 1937. The girl was, I suppose, a genuine nympho, and I’ll call her Sally. She was not only a nympho but an alcoholic and she came on with me all of a sudden and like gang-busters, a little before my second long (semiprofessional) play, Fugitive Kind, was performed by the Mummers of St. Louis. That I was having a play performed in St. Louis gave me a certain panache that fall season at Iowa. Sally found me interesting for that reason, I suspect, although, also, I was not a bad-looking young man. I had developed a slim swimmer’s physique and the cataract in my left eye had not yet appeared. Sally had a sort of Etruscan profile, I mean the forehead and nose were on a straight line, the mouth full and sensual and her breath always pleasantly scented with tobacco and beer. She had a terrific build, especially her breasts, which were about the most prominent on the campus.

One evening that early fall she borrowed an apartment from a friend, for the purpose of my seduction. I remember how all the right oldies came over the radio, like “Kiss Me Again,” “Embraceable You,” “Oh Promise Me,” and so forth, as if we’d requested them, and we were soon on the sofa, naked, and I couldn’t get it up, no way, no way, and all of a sudden I felt nauseated from the liquor consumed and from the nervous strain and embarrassment. I rushed into the bathroom and puked, came out with a towel around me, hangdog with shame over my failed test of virility.

“Tom, you’ve touched the deepest chord in my nature, the maternal chord,” she said.

The next night I took her home to the rooming-house she lived in. She was wearing crimson ski-pants and a white sweater with those great boobs standing out. She turned out the light in the rooming-house parlor and motioned me to the sofa.

Her caresses were wildly successful. She unzipped the front of her ski pants and I fucked her with my overcoat on. We were interrupted once or twice by other roomers returning. She would zip up her pants and I would button my coat but no one was much fooled and no one cared, for it was a raffish house. The roomers would go upstairs at once and we would at once return to our wild break-through of my virginal status.

I took to it like a duck to water. She changed positions with me, she got on top of me and rode my cock like a hobbyhorse and then she came and I’d never imagined such a thing, all that hot wet stuff exploding inside her and about my member and her gasping hushed outcries.

I was not yet in love with Sally but terribly impressed with myself. I got home long after midnight. I went straight to the men’s room at the ATO house. Another brother was peeing as I peed, and I said, “I fucked a girl tonight.”

“Yeh, yeh, how was it?”

“Oh, it was like fucking the Suez Canal,” I said, and grinned and felt a man full grown.

Then it was every night for about two and a half or three months before the start of the Christmas holidays. We repeated the same scene with more and more satisfaction on both sides, I believe. I learned how to hold back my orgasm. But in those days I could have one and still keep it up.

There was the weekend interval of my play’s opening, put on by the Mummers, a semi-pro theatre I worked with in St. Louis.

Then I got my first taste of blood drawn by critics.

It was a much better and more promising play than the first long play, Candles to the Sun, but the critics put it down. Afterward there was a desperately drunk party in someone’s downtown hotel room. I made a sudden dash for a window but was tackled and I cannot say reliably whether or not it was my intention to jump.

The point is that I already knew that writing was my life, and its failure would be my death …

I had wonderful friends in those days and I think I deserved them because I responded so warmly to any warmth that was offered. Sally consoled me, showing not the least disappointment in the flop of Fugitive Kind. Things went on as before between us.

One night she said to me, in a whisper on that living-room sofa, “Tom, I want to show you something.”

She started to go down but I was shocked and wouldn’t let her.

Then the last night before vacation for Christmas, we took a room in a shady hotel in town and spent our first night naked in bed together. Somehow it was a bit of a comedown from our nights on her rooming-house sofa. She had her beer under the bed and kept drinking between love-making and her breath turned a little sour.

When we’d slept a while and woke up and I tried to kiss her, she said, “No, no, baby, I’ve got a mouth full of old chicken feathers.”

When I returned from the holidays she wouldn’t see me. She said something had happened and she’d tell me later. It was several days later when we met again that she told me she was pregnant.

I didn’t believe her. I suspected she was dating a new boy and I was right.

It was a short affair, but a very deep one we’d had and I think that she had loved me as long as I’d satisfied her but now she was with a real stud and she was letting me out.

I had, during all that time I was involved with Sally and for months afterward, no interest in a member of my own sex.

After she had irrevocably dismissed me in favor of the new stud, I tried to date other girls.

Somehow I didn’t manage.

There were two very beautiful young men who acted in a play at the University Theatre, a dramatization of a Jane Austen novel. One was the actor Walter Fleishman, as he was called then, who actually, some years later, made a screen debut in the film based on the life of Valentino. He had a fantastically perfect body. The other beautiful young actor in the Jane Austen play, based on Pride and Prejudice, asked me to have dinner with him one night—he was troubled over something, he said, and he didn’t know how to tell me what it was. But after a few beers he did.

“Y’know, I went in Fleishman’s bedroom last night and he was in there naked and I—well, I—I don’t know how to tell you but I felt something like I wanted to touch him like a man does a woman, y’know.”

He kept his long-lashed eyes on the table. His face was beautifully flushed.

I had an ideal opening and I suspect he had intended to give me one.

When I finally spoke, I said to him, “There’s nothing about it to be upset over.”

“It isn’t a natural thing,” he whispered.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s a perfectly natural thing and you’re just being silly.”

I walked him home to his dormitory and we shook hands good night.

It was to secure a private place in which Sally and I could make love that I had elected to share an apartment with an outrageous young Middle Eastern student, whom I’ll call “Abdul.”

“Abdul” was a notorious girl-chaser and he had gotten in bad with the local police because of his intemperate tactics.

However, when I was looking around for an apartment, he had one which he wanted to share. He was a scrawny, dark young man and the apartment was not attractive, naturally, and it was always filled with the odor of his cooking, a strong, sweetish odor.

He was a good enough companion except that he would sometimes come home all liquored up and inform me that when he was drunk he’d just as soon fuck a girl or a boy or a goat: he once tried to enter my bed and encountered savage resistance which persuaded him that I was no willing substitute for girls and goats.

One night he was arrested and he called the apartment and begged me to come to the lockup and obtain his release. Fortunately he had the money for the fine. I went to the jailhouse and he was in the tank with a bleary-eyed bewhiskered old alcoholic and Abdul was trying to communicate with him. He kept shouting at him, “You pees, too? You pees, too?”

It seemed that on this occasion Abdul had been arrested for pissing in an alley behind a bar.

My efforts to entice Sally to the apartment were only once successful and she came with her new boy-friend, which seemed a bit like rubbing Siberian salt in my wounds as she could not keep her hands off him during the dinner prepared by Abdul.

She did allow me a few minutes of private talk in an alcove.

“I love you, Tom, and I don’t want to hurt you, sweetheart, but I’m just no good, I’m not pregnant, I made that story up, in fact I’ve lost one ovary from an operation, but the point is I’m a sex-fiend, I want it from one after another and I’d fuck up your life.”

She let me kiss her and hold her for a moment, then she returned to her new young man. I was desolate, for a while. But then I became a close friend of a young man named Lomax and his Negro girl-friend; they were marvelous companions and were also in the school of drama.

I had been cast as a page boy in Richard of Bordeaux and they said they’d make me up for it. They painted my cheeks, rouged my lips and tousled my hair into curls. Then Lomax put me into my page-boy outfit and brought me in for the black girl’s inspection.

“See what I mean?” he asked her. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Then I looked in the mirror and I knew. I looked like a young girl …

In the page boy’s part I had only one line. I had not recovered from my dreadful shyness. Throughout the scene in which I appeared I had to sit on the forestage, polishing a helmet, all the while my throat getting tighter and tighter with apprehension at delivering that one line. I simply had to say that somebody had arrived at the gates. But when my cue came, the sound that issued from my constricted throat was quite unintelligible and would always bring down the house—it was like a mouse’s squeak. They said it was effective, however. I suspect, though, that I was merely on the stage because I looked so well in the make-up applied by Lomax.

I recall having one other part on the stage of the great theatre at the University of Iowa. It was in a play about the Penitentes and I was drafted into a scene of flagellation among the young monks. I’ll never forget one line from the show, home-written on the campus. An actor was floundering bare-shouldered about the stage, lashing himself with his whip and he cried out loudly, “Tonight there will be much glory in the Morada” (the Morada being the subterranean chamber in which these flagellations were practiced).

The Christ figure, the one who performed as victim with the ritual crucifixion, was Fleishman, the leading young actor that year. He was elevated nearly naked upon the cross—and it was his virile young beauty that drew me back toward my more predominant sexual inclination.

Sally began to fade out of my libido.

Others of my own gender began to fade in.

Once during the rehearsals for Richard of Bordeaux, Lemuel Ayers, who was a postgraduate student at Iowa and who had, like myself, fallen into the displeasure of E. C. Mabie, head of the Drama Department, was walking around the men’s locker room quite naked before a performance. He was like a young saint out of Italian renaissance painting—darkly gleaming curls, and a perfectly formed body.

Once we had met at dusk in a tiny zoo on a hill. No one was around. There was, just at the moment we saw each other, a great flutter of wings.

“What’s that?”

“Guinea hens roosting,” he answered.

We lingered a while, which I would have liked to prolong, but Lem, I suspect, was accustomed to more aggressive types, and he smiled and he drifted away.

It was a lonely spring. So much of my money had gone into the apartment with Abdul that I had, for a month, to live almost entirely on eggs, of which there was a surplus that season, which made them very cheap. I still like eggs, though now they’re forbidden me because of my high cholesterol count, but they do get unpalatable after a while when you have to eat them exclusively.

Then I met this marvelously lively young Irish companion and he used to take me on long canoe rides upon the river Iowa; then he would bring us to a secluded nook where we would sing Irish ballads. And there was a carnival in town and he took me there, too.

I’d lost interest in studies and so I failed that term and had to stay over for the summer term to get my degree. The summer term I was almost continually with Lomax and his lovely black girl-friend.

I felt no interest in getting a degree, I didn’t want to get out of college. We were in the depression.

Two dreadful things occurred: Rose was submitted to a lobotomy, one of the first performed in the States, and my Aunt Belle died in Knoxville, the result of an infected wisdom tooth the poison of which had permeated her system.

Aunt Ella wrote, “Your poor Aunt Belle was surrounded by a solid wall of prayer but Death got through.”

I was just beginning to write well in an individual style. I remember writing there the story “The Malediction” and a number of nice little poems.

When the summer term ended and I had my diploma, Lomax and his black girl-friend invited me to go to Chicago with them, saying that I could get on the WPA writers’ project up there. What we did was meet some fantastic black fags who were entertaining in a wild night club. I remember one particularly exuberant one who remarked, “You know, I take the sheets every trip”—meaning he loved playing the passive role in sodomy. I tried to get on that WTA project and I was rejected because I could not say my family was destitute. I had only about ten dollars to carry me through the time there, and so I had to wire home for money to get me back to the house in St. Louis County.

Clark Mills McBurney was home in St. Louis, from Paris, and we picked up our friendship; it was a lively summer. There were other friends, and picnics along the Meramec River and almost continual diversions. Dad allowed me to take out the family Studebaker a good many times: he was still trying to overcome my dreadful shyness of him. I was important to Dad because I was the namesake of his own father, Thomas Lanier Williams II.

While I’m fairly close to the subject of Iowa University, let me tell you about old E. C. Mabie, who headed the Drama Department there. For a good many years Mabie had suffered from an inoperable brain tumor that was said to be benign but that affected his behavior at times in a very erratic fashion.

He was dedicated to that great new theatre plant he’d had built on the Iowa campus and he would always attend the final rehearsal of an impending show.

One night the show about to open was in such deplorable shape that Mabie was enraged. He took off his glasses and hurled them at the actors and then he kept them rehearsing all night until the production had been revamped to suit him.

Mabie was prejudiced against me and against Lemuel Ayers. He used to hint that Ayers, who’d come as a postgraduate from Princeton, was a fag—which indeed I suspect he could have been, but a very talented and very nice fag and quite undeserving of Mabie’s persecution.

(This is parenthetical, but one night—years later, in 1943—while I was staying on the West Coast working for MGM, not working for them but receiving the salary they were legally obliged to pay me each week—Lem Ayers invited me to spend the night at his charming little house in Beverly Hills. When I woke in the morning it was to the enchanting vision of Lem, quite naked, wandering along the upstairs hall. He greeted me cordially. Of course I had my cue right in mind: “Come on in, Lem, I’ve seen you naked before.” But shyness prevented me and that last golden chance escaped me for toujours …

Lem really was about as beautiful a young man with an available disposition as I’ve ever laid eyes on, without attempting seduction—with the possible exception of … no, a bit of discretion’s in order.

How can I honestly say, “Je ne regrette rien”—in the words of the “Little Sparrow” of Montmartre … ?)

That single summer at Iowa, I was still lonely, and I took to wandering aimlessly about the streets at night to escape the stifling heat of my room. There were many great trees and the town had an old-fashioned charm. At night it almost seemed Southern. I was lonely and frightened, I didn’t know the next step. I was finally fully persuaded that I was “queer,” but had no idea what to do about it.

I didn’t even know how to accept a boy on the rare occasions when one would offer himself to me.

Yesterday, Saturday, I did a most remarkable thing for me, and one that was really delightful. In the company of a young friend, I spent about five hours strolling about Central Park, which we entered at the “gay” corner of Seventy-second and Central Park West. We bought lemon and cherry ices and we strolled out upon the area across the lake that is all but exclusively pre-empted by the homos. And they’re quite a nice and personable lot in the daytime. They have cast off, I noticed, most of the swish and camp that made them, when assembled in such numbers, unattractive to me. I enjoyed the company of the “camps” at one time when I was young and lived at the “Y.” But my closest friends, though as capable of camp as I was, then, were not the “obvious” types.

I did know some very obvious types in New Orleans, however, when I first “came out.” There was, for instance, one whom I’ll call Antoine who walked about the streets of the French Quarter with a tiny cut-glass bottle of smelling salts in liquid form and at the approach of a woman or girl, would stop and lean against a wall with the stricken whisper of “Poisson”—and sniff his counteractive vial until the lady had passed; and even then he would affect a somewhat shattered condition …

I found him hilarious, but Antoine had a serious and gifted side to him, like most of our kind. He was not a brilliant painter but he had a distinctive and highly effective flair which later made him a successful designer in New York.

I remember an evening when Antoine, who had a charmingly decorated apartment on Toulouse, presented his production of Four Saints in Three Acts—the cast all homosexuals—and they did not camp it but presented it with true style and it was the best evening of Stein I’ve yet experienced.

I also remember, when I returned to New Orleans after my first exposure to the more discreetly organized gay world of New York, proselytizing my “gay” friends in the Quarter to conduct themselves in a fashion that was not just a travesty of the other sex. I told them, those who would listen, that that type of behavior simply made them distasteful, sexually, to anyone interested in sex … and that it was “dated,” as well.

Of course, “swish” and “camp” are products of self-mockery, imposed upon homosexuals by our society. The obnoxious forms of it will rapidly disappear as Gay Lib begins to succeed in its serious crusade to assert, for its genuinely misunderstood and persecuted minority, a free position in society which will permit them to respect themselves, at least to the extent that, individually, they deserve respect—and I think that degree is likely to be much higher than commonly supposed.

28. Dakin and mother outside one of our apartment in St. Louis.

29. Dakin and me by a small country club swimming pool.

30. Back of our home on Aberdeen Place in St. Louis.

31. Dakin, planning a political future.

32. Grandfather in the living room of our house on Arundel Place.

33. In Venice, 1928—the group Grandfather took to Europe. I’m left out of this picture.

34. On the deck of the S.S Homeric, bound for Europe.

35. A sweet picture of Rose.

36. 53 Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri.

37. Grandfather and Grand in St. Petersburg, Florida.

38. Rose at the sanitarium, with “Jiggs.”

39. Grandfather Dakin’s graduation photo

40. In the state of innocence—and Mississippi.

41. On Ozark holiday. I’m on the left.

42. Dakin and me outside the summer cabin in the Ozarks.

43. At a swimming hole in the Ozarks.

44. On Arundel Place, about the time I graduated from high school.

45. In Clayton living room.

46. Dakin and me in the Ozarks, Jerome, Missouri, August 1929.

47. Trying to be a writer—1939.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is more sensibility—which is equivalent to more talent—among the “gays” of both sexes than among the “norms” …

(Why? They must compensate for so much.)

Continuing along this happy mood of self-congratulation, I find that I’ve established or am in the process of establishing, a sort of personal following in New York. For instance, yesterday I stopped with a friend at a small and expensive men’s shop. I found a beautiful copper-colored cotton-and-polyester suit that fit me with little alterations to be made. When I produced my charge-card the proprietor made a great fuss over me and, to prove its sincerity, he made me a gift of a thirty-dollar silk tie that went perfectly with the suit. I shall have on both at my appearance on the “Midday” talk show this coming Wednesday with Candy Darling, to promote Small Craft Warnings.

Despite my totally exhausted state after the night-owl show, at 10 P.M., of Small Craft Warnings, I went out with our star, Helena Carroll, to meet Donald Madden, the only actor beside Brando—no, that’s not true, Michael York has now joined the select, making it a trio—for whom I have “written plays,” or at least parts in plays, more than once. You see, I was still capable of falling in love in the sixties, and during the rehearsals of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel—despite my condition, which was verging on mental and physical collapse—I was “mad about the boy,” Madden, but refrained from declaring it as he was involved in my work.

My feeling toward Madden has now settled sensibly into a platonic one based upon my very deep regard for him as an actor. I think there’s no better actor in the States … (Perhaps Michael Moriarty will challenge that pre-eminence someday.)