Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [222]
“The heart is a stubborn organ” might also have served as Tennessee Williams’s motto and was certainly the theme of each of these stories, whatever their merits (or lack thereof). By this time, in 1982, Tennessee was on a roller coaster of pills and booze, and his writing showed the consequences, and he knew it. Yet even in “The Donsinger Women,” there are flashes of the old lyricism, the occasional wonderful phrase, and the sense of a powerful imagination going hauntingly out of control.
Tennessee himself could tell that the stories needed work, and I spent a good many hours with him trying to make sense of them, but even with the best will in the world Tennessee’s heart wasn’t in it. He wanted the stories published, but he found it hard to concentrate on revising them and often toyed with the idea of giving up the whole project. Many of the older stories were in comparatively better shape, but by fits and starts he tried to revise those, too. A couple of years after we had signed the contract for Fairy Tales, and over six years since he had first broached the subject, Tennessee was beginning to have second thoughts, just as we were about to announce their publication in our catalog. He called me out of the blue one day, just as Billy Barnes had warned, to say that he didn’t know whose idea it had been to call the collection Fairy Tales, but he couldn’t allow it. “It’s real tacky, baby,” Tennessee said, despite the fact that it had been his idea from the beginning.
From an outsider’s point of view, it was easy enough to guess that Tennessee’s life was coming apart at the seams. He was hard to reach, restless, and plagued by ill health of an unspecified nature, complaining of headaches, personal problems, and the ubiquitous oncoming cold. A photograph intended for the jacket of Fairy Tales shows him wearing a neat straw hat and smiling seraphically, his eyes completely obscured by big dark glasses. The effect is to cancel out the smile or contradict it, and there is a kind of ghostly sadness to the picture, as if he had already guessed it would never be used and was mildly amused by the fact.
Indeed, Fairy Tales (now referred to more prosaically as “Untitled Collection of Short Stories”) was postponed several times. By now, I had real concerns. Every time a book is postponed after appearing in a publisher’s catalog, the orders are canceled. When new orders are solicited, they are invariably fewer, and after a number of postponements, the bookstores simply lose interest and decide the book is never going to happen. At that point, it falls into limbo, from which no amount of effort is likely to rescue it. This book was on its way there rapidly.
After considerable difficulty, I managed to pin Tennessee down to a meeting. I turned up on time to find him in his bathrobe, a towel wound around his neck. He did not look good: His face was puffy, sallow rather than tanned, and there was a noticeable tremor to his hands. The blinds were pulled in the living room, but we sat down there anyway, in partial darkness. Around us, covering every flat surface in the room, was the evidence of a party that must have ended only hours ago—bottles, glasses, overflowing ashtrays. Tennessee’s legs were bare, and he was wearing red morocco slippers. He seemed baffled by my presence, despite several telephone calls