Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [220]
Moïse had begun as a novella, and Tennessee labored mightily to inflate it to the length of a full-size novel without losing its pace. At one point, he was so doubtful about the book that he offered to give the advance back (though by the next day he had changed his mind and called, early in the morning for him, to say, “You didn’t tell Billy that, did you, baby?”). The story was about three people and their need for each other: Moïse, an impoverished and quixotic young woman painter with a gift for unfinished canvases, a character based on Tennessee’s old friend Olive Leonard; the narrator, a young man from Thelma, Alabama, a self-styled “distinguished failed writer” who strongly resembles the young Tennessee; and Lance, a young man whose intensity, strength, and sexual energy held them all together while he lived and whose absence gives the novel its driving pathos. Set on the night Moïse gives a party to celebrate her retirement from “the world of reason” and the narrator loses the second love of his life, the novel is at once lyrical and puzzling, a kind of autobiographical peep show full of brilliant jeux d’esprit. The characters talk—and talk and talk—about the loss of innocence and the rekindling of desire, two of Tennessee’s favorite themes, as the night goes by. He often said that he wrote all his work for Rose, but I think by that he meant that Rose’s innocence and simplicity was what he sought to find and convey in his writing.
In the end, Tennessee rewrote it so many times, in so many different places—New York, Key West, Tangiers, Europe—and added so many new pages to it that even he was muddled by its intricacies, as was I. This was not just a function of complicated plotting: Tennessee’s pages were typed on what appeared to be several different but equally ancient manuals, all with frayed, faded ribbons; each page was heavily revised in a shaky hand that Tennessee himself could not always decipher, and whole paragraphs were slashed out fiercely then partially restored. In my editorial notes, the questions “Where does this go?” “Who is this?” and “What does this mean?” recur with alarming frequency, along with such questions—which seemed pedestrian to Tennessee—as “Is there such a thing as a square camera lens?” and “What is a Blue Jay notebook?” (It turned out to be a lined school notebook with a mottled black-and-white pasteboard cover, in which Tennessee still liked to write and with which, as a schoolboy, he had begun his writing career.)
In the end, after several years of revising, Moïse was finally published, though its sales disappointed Tennessee, and me as well. Most of the reviewers seemed baffled by the book, with its stagy plotline and the unbridled lyricism of its dialogue. James Leo Herlihy commented fulsomely that it was “like a wild street song heard on the eve of a Doom’s Day [sic] that is forever postponed,” while Elia Kazan, rather more cautiously, responded to the book I had sent him by simply writing, “Tennessee Williams is a great man.” The truth was, nobody knew quite what to make of the book, and there was a natural tendency to compare it to Tennessee’s major plays, however unfairly. Myself, I thought it uncommonly courageous of Tennessee to have tried his hand at a novel, particularly one that celebrated the fatal decline of the characters’ sexual and artistic powers.
In any event, the completion of Moïse was enough to persuade Tennessee to move forward with a collection of his later short stories. Even so fervent an admirer of his as Lady Maria St. Just, who was to become the devoted and fiercely protective literary