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By Root 896 0

Management, suggested one night over dinner that I might like to become the publisher of Tennessee Williams’s fiction. There is no American playwright whom I admire more than Williams, and at least two of his plays are masterpieces, but of course that was not necessarily a guarantee that he could write a novel or short stories of the same quality or that S&S could publish them successfully. Indeed, his previous ventures into fiction had been published, very quietly indeed, by a small press and without much impact. This was exactly the reason, Billy explained, that Williams wanted to come to a big, commercial publisher, who could put some muscle behind the books.

This would have normally set off an alarm bell inside my head. The notion that a big publisher can sell more copies of a book than a small one is widespread but doubtful. A book that is too “special” or hard to categorize might, in fact, do far better with a smaller publisher on whose list it will have a certain importance than on that of a big, mainstream publisher, where it might disappear. Also, a lot of small publishers can bring to a book of narrow appeal a personal enthusiasm and attention that no big publisher can duplicate. In this case, however, my admiration for the author was so great that Barnes did not even have to work hard to get me on the hook. By the time our main course was served, I had agreed to publish a novel and a book of stories by Tennessee Williams, with whom Barnes promised me a meeting in the near future.

Since Williams was then living at the Elysée Hotel on East Fifty-fourth Street, Billy suggested that we meet at one o’clock at Lutèce, which was conveniently close. Besides, he said, Williams would be pleased and flattered—his previous publishers had certainly never taken him to lunch at Lutèce.

A reservation was quickly made and the proprietress, Mme. Soltner, informed of the importance of my guest. The chef, André Soltner, himself was hard to impress—many of his clients were rich and famous, after all, and unlike most of his rivals in New York, he insisted on treating everyone who dined in his restaurant with equal courtesy—still, for the French nobody takes precedence over a distinguished man of letters. For Monsieur Williams, Madame said, Soltner would insist on preparing a special menu. I should not concern myself about the luncheon—each course would be a veritable work of art, in homage to Monsieur Williams.

On the appointed day, Billy Barnes and I met at Lutèce. Madame Soltner had given us the best table in the house and from time to time came over to bring bulletins from the kitchen: The soupe d’écrevisses in the manner of New Orleans was coming along famously; the boned quails would not go in the oven until Monsieur Williams arrived. At intervals, small delicacies appeared from the kitchen to whet our appetites as we sipped our kir royales. Barnes was a man of dazzling charm, as unmistakably Southern as Tennessee Williams himself, which perhaps explained the length and closeness of their relationship. Barnes was good-looking, flamboyantly gay in both senses of the word, outrageously funny, and apparently had a rare gift for jollying his most important client along at those not infrequent moments when Williams stubbornly dug in his heels and refused at the last minute to do something that Barnes had arranged for him. Tennessee, Barnes confided, could be a little difficult at times and needed to be handled with kid gloves. Despite a basically sunny disposition, he had dark, brooding moments when he thought everyone was plotting against him, and he suffered from a tendency to listen too carefully to people who were close to him but didn’t always have his best interests at heart, if I knew what he meant, Billy whispered to me in his most conspiratorial fashion.

I nodded. No genius was easy to deal with or altogether predictable, and there was no reason why Williams should be an exception. Much as I enjoyed Billy Barnes’s company, I had the sense that time was flying, and, indeed, when I looked at my watch, I saw that it was