I was reading Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo
Spring: On Writers and Drinking, (a subject on which I’ve done a certain
amount of research at source). The book
is sort of all right (though not nearly as good as the reviewers seem to say it
is, if you ask me), and I came across a passage in which she describes Tennessee
Williams in Sicily, in 1954:
“He sat in his friend Franco’s bar till closing time
and then walked with him down the main street reassured by the music drifting
from a nearby club. But when he turned
for home alone, the club had closed and panic rose in him as he strode faster
and faster down a road that that seemed to stretch on endlessly, his chest
constricted and his breath coming in gasps.”
Her source for the story is Williams’ own Diary in
which he writes, “My chest felt constricted.
I breathed hard and fast. I
wanted to break into a run but didn’t have the breath to. The street was empty. Its length seemed to stretch forever. Every step built up my panic and I seemed to
be going further rather than closer to my hotel … Even after I reached the main
square, in sight of the Hotel Ternio, my sanctuary, the panic persisted. In fact reached its climax when I was half
way up the gradient, about 50 yds, in length, to hotel gates. I stopped and leaned against bank and plucked
a leaf of wild geranium and tried to admire the stars which are said to calm
fear.”
Well, is this an interesting bit of psychogeography isn’t
it? I mean we’ve all looked at certain
streets and said to ourselves, “No, I don’t think I want to walk along there.” And there are always reasons, which may be frivolous
or serious, reasonable or irrational.
Not wanting to walk down a certain street because it doesn’t contain an
open bar? Well yes, that’s a rather
specialized reason, but I can understand it.
Williams apparently wrote
in his diary the moment he got back to the hotel: “Now in my room, the seconal
is taking effect (my second today) and I have my liquor and I am quite calm and
comfortable. But someday, I fear, one of
these panics will kill me.”
One thing I know about Tennessee Williams’ writing
habits, at least at a certain time in his life, is that when he sat down at his
desk in the morning he liked to take a seconal and have a dry martin sitting
next to the typewriter. He didn’t always
drink the martini, but he needed to know it was there.
Of course as the morning wore on, the martini would
get up to room temperature and therefore, it seems to me, less desirable, less
of a temptation, and maybe that was Williams’ plan. But I’m not so sure. The serious martini drinker cares
passionately about the temperature: the serious drunk less so.
And one thing I do know about Tennessee Williams’
walking: in 1979 he was walking in Duval Street, the main tourist drag in Key
West.
He and Dotson Rader had emerged
from a nearby gay disco, called Monster, and they were walking along singing an
old hymn, sometimes known as “He Walks with Me,” sometimes as ”In the Garden,”
written by Charles A, Miles in 1913, though both Merle Haggard
and Elvis sang versions of it. The
relevant lines were probably:
“And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.”
Some might say
this combination of the sacred and the profane was just asking for trouble, and
certainly a group of young men thought so. Four or five young men jumped on the Williams
and Rader. People magazine reported, “Rader
says he was slugged in the jaw; Williams was knocked down and his glasses
broken. ‘Let's run,’ Rader shouted. ‘They may have knives.’ Williams stood his
ground. ‘I am not in the habit of retreat,’ he declared.”
Here’s a picture of Dotson Rader
with Ruth Ford and Andy Warhol
Later Williams said,
"Maybe they weren't punks at all but New York drama critics. That mugging
received better and more extensive publicity than anything I ever wrote.”
Here's a picture of Tennessee walking in happier circumstances:
