There was one great party scene where I assembled thirty actors at this Rhenish castle. He filmed the whole day but forgot to put film in his camera.
She was so busy doing Anaïs that he got rattled. He shot all that day, and I had prepared a picnic for forty people. It was a wonderful day. But he didn’t have any film in his camera.
So afterwards I sat at a little Moviola with him and made a new story using what footage there was. And of course it’s very spotty. I did not have in mind a surrealist film. I had in mind a legend, a magic tale, with a logical development. Even though it was fantastic, it was logical. It wasn’t juxtaposed images. So often those early surrealist films are surrealist only because they never had enough money to finish the story, or the weather went bad the day they wanted to finish it. So they just made something that jumps, you know, like a flea on a goat. Anyway, we edited it and it was shown in the experimental section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1947 or 48.
Anaïs was always asking to see my work. She liked to see the work of young writers and young painters and say, “Why don’t you do this?” and, “Why don’t you do that?” But I never showed her anything. Because my ego—which is classic, not twentieth century—is huge, you know. And she was not my idea of a critic or editor. She was highly quick. Very well read. And fluent in several languages. But she was not what I would call in the last analysis, and in the good sense of this word, intellectual. She wrote a couple of novels that I think are unreadable. They are so closed in. Always the subject is not what is happening, but the intense feminine consciousness. The vibrations as perceived by the intense feminine consciousness. It’s like some of those secondary red clay Southern writers. There’s no universal sense. They are genuinely backwoods. She belongs to another kind of provincialism, which is the provincialism of the party set of Rome, Paris, London, New York. Who are, in the last analysis, out of touch with life on this planet. I feel I’m my own best editor and critic. Because I know the different road I am taking. Which is a Southern backwoods road toward
Arabian Nights.
And how could she understand that? She wasn’t raised in the South. She never went barefoot on black earth or red clay. She may have taken her shoes off at the beach once and said, “Oh, it’s cold.” But how could she understand somebody who took shoes off the day school let out and didn’t put shoes back on until the day school started? As was the wont of my contemporary males. Boys took their shoes off. And a lot of little girls did when they got away from the house. Girls are divided into those who took their shoes off and those who didn’t. I think Anaïs maybe took her shoes off once at the beach when she was a child. That’s why I didn’t want to show her anything I’d ever written.
Finally she got a copy of
Wake
magazine and read my poems. And she said, “Eugene, poetry is really a dead art. You should try England.”
I went back home and never saw her again. To say that poetry is a dead art when there are still cats and monkeys in the world. Even if the human race dies, there are still cats and monkeys. Butterflies are still floating by. Even if the human race vanishes, there are still going to be poets because there are cats, monkeys, and butterflies. And ducks, who are infinitely graceful on the water and plump assed on the ground. So I politely said, “Good evening,” but afterwards I faded out like a Cheshire cat, with my smile stamped on the air.
*
I became interested in Henry Miller because of a piece he wrote called “A Dream of Mobile.” It was in
View
magazine, the surrealist quarterly. He had never been to Mobile, but he was saying, you know, Spanish moss hanging from the trees, humid air, blacks carrying bundles on their heads, going barefoot through the streets, Carnival parades at the next corner. I loved it. I bought millions of copies of
View
and sent them to everybody I could think of in Mobile. When I heard he was coming to New York, I wanted very much to meet him. Finally I did meet him, at a party given by Charles Henri Ford, the founder and editor of
View.
I didn’t like him. I suppose he was friendly enough and all that. I mean, I was nobody, just a little thing from Alabama that wanted to meet him. And I wanted to say, “Thank you for A Dream of Mobile.’” He laughed and said, “Well, I’ve never been to Mobile. I may never get there.” I don’t think he ever got there. He just went on dreaming. But he said, “I always had this idea about it. Just the name itself.” I said, “Well, yeah. For a town that’s sitting so still, the fact that it’s called Mobile is one of our biggest jokes.”
But he was sort of fake tough. If there is anything I hate, it’s that fake tough American. That baseball tough, that fisherman tough, that woodcutter tough, that fake tough American. Because usually in Europe, in the Mediterranean world, the people who are the sportsmen or the fishermen or the woodcutters have a quiet gentleness. They are at one with nature, and they are not proving anything to their mamas or their wives or their daughters or their friends or their papas. They’re just natural. But in America, there’s that kind of fake hard-boiled thing which bores the pants off of me. He had a lot of that. I just don’t like it.
Farewell, Farewell, Eugene
One night I went to see Edith and Edwin Zelnicker, my old friends from Mobile. He was working for the Limited Edition Club. It took an hour from where I lived on 194 West 10th to their place way up Riverside Drive. One hour underground. And I thought to myself: I’m not made to travel underground. It ain’t my style. I had always thought I’d eventually get to Paris and live there for a few years. But that night I thought: I’ve got to get to Paris. I’ve got to leave. I don’t like the smell of this thing. I don’t like the look of this thing. I don’t like being underground. I’d be perfectly happy shaking on a hayrick, but not alone, underground, shaking on that thing.
New York was always just a place I was stopping on the way to Paris. It’s not my city. Even though I enjoyed it immensely, it was never my town. It was glamorous, it was fabulous, it was certainly a world capital. But I didn’t like it. People always ask me: “Do you prefer Paris or Rome?” I say, “Whichever one I’m in.” The only place on this planet where I didn’t feel at home was New York City. There was something finally in the official New York that I didn’t like. I mean taxi drivers, bus conductors, policemen, the people at the unemployment insurance office, some of the officials at the public library, some of the librarians. There was some coldness and irritation which was universal under the surface in New York.
I felt so alienated in New York because nobody smiles and nobody looks at each other. People in New York don’t like it if you look in their face. They don’t want you to look right at them. Eye contact—that’s what they call it now. I wasn’t making “eye contact.” I was just looking at all the animals running around in the street. But if you really look at somebody a second time in the street, they’ll go, “What do you want?” you know. Whereas in Mobile, sometimes we would just go and sit on the iron benches in Bienville Square and look at people. It was what you did. Especially on Saturday when all the people came in from everywhere to shop, to go to the doctor, to go to the dentist, go to the movies. Saturday was market day. The people came in from all the provinces to sell their stuff at market, to do their shopping. Proper country families with their starched shirts, neckties, and little hats and the young ladies in their little white gloves came into town to shop for dry goods and go to the pharmacy—all the things that all those little rural communities didn’t have. It was the cross section of the South, in the big city of Mobile, on Saturday. Shopping, going to the dentist, going to the matinee at the Lyric or the Saenger. And then back home to Chinaberry Town. I used to love to go sit on a bench in Bienville Square and just watch all that. But you had to avoid looking people in the face in New York City—I just couldn’t understand it.
And also the extreme heat and the extreme cold and the stench. There’s a certain stagnant air that stays between the tall buildings. Only two or three times a year is there a wind from the Hudson that blows away the stagnant vapors: the smell of taxis and trucks and hot dog stands. Then you have an amazing day, and you see New York as a new city in a new world with a new concept. But only once or twice a year.
And New York is one of those places where if you give a party, you have to give a party. If you are going to a party, you have to be at a party. You know. You can’t sit in the corner if you are tired or gossip with a friend where the bottles are if you feel like gossiping. All those poor Yankees never understood that a literary party is sort of the apotheosis of gossip. Southerners giggle and laugh and have a good time. But Yankees say mean things about publishers and other writers. I mean, parties were hectic. Nervous tension conversation. Little groups forming. Most people brought their office nerves with them because they wore their office nerves twenty-four hours a day. They never got out of them. “Upwards and onwards, I want to have enough money to retire at forty,” you know. I could no more think in those terms than I could fly.
People in New York threw parties. I don’t throw parties. I push parties gently forward. Most of my “Oh, come over tonight, I’ve decided to give a party” took two weeks to plan. Most of my sit-down parties that look terribly organized, I thought of that morning. I just like to do it that way. Like a famous Southern hostess said, “A formal dinner party can be done in ten minutes if you have silver and porcelain and put everything very straight on the table. Then,” she said, “you can get out the can opener and go to work.” If the linen is smoothed out, if the plates are exactly opposite, if the knives are straight and the forks are straight and the salad and dessert pieces are precisely straight across. It’s quite true. A lot of Southern hostesses, in Reconstruction and the Depression, had more porcelain and silver and crystal on the table than food.
I remember once I had expected a check in the mail that didn’t come, and I needed it for a party I was giving that night. Oh, Lord God, so I got some big jars of peanut butter and I went to the bakery where I had credit, and I said, “I want a sample of every kind of baked bread and roll that you’ve got.” So I put red crepe paper on the table and in the middle I had a Victorian cake stand. I put two jars of peanut butter on that, then piled that table with every known kind of bread and roll. I had a big jug of Chianti. Everybody thought it was so original, and they ate every bit of everything, because all Americans secretly love peanut butter. When in doubt, serve peanut butter. And I always carefully chose the guest list, so that even my oldest friend would have a surprise and even my newest friend would not feel out of place.
But New Yorkers are the people who have the least liberation, you know, because they are always claiming how free they are and how wonderful. They are all nervous-breakdown candidates. They talked so much about sex, you realized that not one of them had a sex life of any kind. Americans waste so much time worrying about sex and thinking about sex, and that’s another reason I hated New York. In Europe, one of the first things you see is that sex is a part of daily life. Like gardening, and watching the sky, and gossip. It’s not a secret suddenly. There is something about making it secret which the Puritans and the Baptists have done that just has taken the pleasure out of it, I suppose, and made it like something you have to do to prove you can beat the system. It’s like cheating on taxes; it’s not living.
And in Europe, everybody is polysexual. America has these funny ideas about having to live on one side of the line or the other. The only line I insist on is the Mason-Dixon line. The rest is individual cases.
In Europe, the men smile at other men. They smile at women. They smile at boys. They smile at girls. I guess they smile at Shetland ponies, too. They just do a kind of sideways smile and a little wink. That means, “Are you interested?” If the other person returns it, they are interested. People just say, “Wouldn’t you like to go to bed?” They say no; they say yes. It’s simple.
And I love that Turkish proverb: “For love, a beautiful woman; for pleasure, an adolescent boy; for sheer ecstasy, a ripe melon.” I’m saving that for a last thrill. I have never humped a melon. But everybody I know has humped a melon. The various melons were always a great delicacy in Turkey. To eat or to hump. My grandmother used to say that when you buy a melon in the market, if it has a triangular hole cut in it, then it’s all right. They’ve plugged it to see if it’s ripe. If it has a round hole in it, don’t buy it.
The Europeans know and remember something that people in the United States forget. Healthy males want some kind of relief, every eight to twenty-four hours, beginning at 12 and going on to 112. In America, people just don’t acknowledge that, although behind the haystack, the Puritans could give us all lessons in perversity.
*
So I started making plans. I went to this travel bureau on Washington Square and there was this gorgeous Italian girl with violet-colored eyes. Francesca something. I gave her ten dollars. I said, “Now I want to find the cheapest possible freighter to get me as close as possible to Paris.” And I said, “You shop around and I’ll bring you ten dollars every week, and when you’ve got enough, you tell me.” I said, “Don’t even talk about it. When you find a boat that’s going that way, I want a one-way ticket.”
Well, there was this friend of mine, John Vari, a very showy little number. Sicilian background. He had degrees from everyplace and taught English, but he was also an actor. He got enough money to take over a summer theater in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. The Hampton Beach Summer Theater. I agreed to come there as his designer for his first season.