Since my life has always been free-form, I live three days in one day without haste, without hurry. I stop when I’m tired. I have a glass of wine when I feel faint. I have no schedule, although I work every day. The idea of going to an office—I think I’d slash my wrists the third day. It’s the plastic clothes and the plastic neckties. The necktie, the necktie, the necktie. We’ve gotten these stereotypes in all things. There’s a stereotype man, a stereotype woman. There’s a stereotype child, a stereotype dog, a stereotype cat, a stereotype automobile, a stereotype vacation, a stereotype Christmas dinner, a stereotype Thanksgiving dinner, a stereotype grandparent. It’s this fear of anything other than the approved. There is a kind of nylon suit, plastic shirt, plastic necktie, identical haircuts, identical shoes. You have to belong to identical clubs, drink identical drinks. These are the yuppies, the puppies, the hubbies, and the bubbies. That’s the norm. So anything outside of it is abnormal.
When I was growing up in Mobile, there was no such thing as an eccentric, because individuality was permitted. It’s only with the moment the dollar became God and the flattened-out culture of the mass media which has happened since World War II that the people who formerly might have been called—at the most—colorful or opinionated, now are thought of as eccentric or something. Somehow the television has created a race of morons. People in Mobile just sit around and blink, like lizards do.
And sex in America. In Europe they take it for granted. That’s one of the things God has created to keep us from being bored in our stay upon this planet. In America they still haven’t decided what it is. The Catholics think all of it’s all right. The Episcopalians think you can do anything as long as your fingernails are clean. But the fundamentalists think it’s all perverse, and they’re trying to take over the country. The Europeans laugh and never talk about it and do it all. I’m telling you, when I came back here, I had to adapt to life in a barbarian country. Barbarian.
But I’m glad to get back and into that traditional American mock battle: artists versus Philistines. In Europe the arts are considered something usual, for daily consumption. In America there is still the old Puritan suspicion that it’s all hothouse stuff. So I’m back where I started, sharpening my pen, my brush, my spade, my scissors, my pruning shears, my cheese parer, and the taps on my new tap shoes.
*
Sooner or later Southerners all come home, not to die, but to eat gumbo. And you see, I never really left home. You couldn’t say I was ever an expatriate, because I never left home. I was just traveling. And I was always on Alabama soil. I had taken a Thom McAn shoebox full of red clay from a Spring Hill gully to New York. I had it under my bed. So I always slept on Alabama soil. And when I packed that trunk to go to Europe, my Thom McAn box of red clay went with me. I always told everybody: If anything happens, just throw this in the coffin with me. There was only one moment in all those years when I was not on Alabama soil. In Paris I loved going to some of those gardens where they have these gorgeous roses. And I went to the lovely villa of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife, and stole some cuttings, because stolen cuttings always grow best. Even the most strictly moral British steal cuttings. Dear little old ladies take out these fingernail scissors and steal cuttings. Anyway, Josephine was famous for her roses and did all those famous paintings of them. She had all kinds of roses from all over the world. So I went and stole some cuttings and had them in a window box in Paris. Then I smuggled them across the border and had them on my terrace in Rome.
Then when Hans Werner Henze moved from Naples and bought this villa in the hills outside of Rome, he wanted some roses. So I gave him these roses. Well, one of Josephine’s roses was doing poorly. He said, “What shall I do, Eugene? It’s the prettiest one, and its bloom is palky. The others are doing okay.” So I said, “Oh, well.” I knew I’d be going home at some moment, so I gave him that clay, because roses like red clay. And that rose climbed up to the top of the first floor, on Spring Hill gully red clay. Since that was a rose that belonged to a lady originally from the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, that rose knew red clay when it saw it.
So that’s the only time I gave away my Alabama soil. Otherwise I was always on Alabama soil. I never left home. Except for that time I spent in New York. One should have some exotic experiences in one’s life, I guess. But I’ve always told everybody: Don’t call me an expatriate. I am not. I went to Paris and Rome to get something I couldn’t get at home. But I did not change nationalities. Although I lived in Rome all those years, I never took residency. My residence is Mobile, Alabama. I went every three months to the police station to have my visitor’s permit renewed. Every time I got a job in a film, I had to go have my passport stamped and get a certificate. I did not want foreign residency. I just didn’t want it. I wanted Mobile as my residence.
I never rejected the South. There are many things that are maddening, but since I was born with a certain cat and monkey detachment, I look at some of these morons as a cat or a monkey looks at an idiot fox terrier. Like I just know things they don’t know. When I was getting ready to leave for New York, I thought, Well, am I doing the right thing? Maybe I should just stay. I said no. You’ve got to get to New York. Got to get to Paris. Got to do it. You’ve promised yourself since the cradle.
I never intended to be gone so long. But that’s Southern. Like people who were invited to Termite Hall for a week and stayed a year. It’s just Southern. You see, I’d made no plans. In that, I’m not American. I listen to teenagers today saying, “After I’ve taken my bachelor’s, then I’m going to get a master’s, then I’ll do this and that, and then I’ll buy a house in Point Clear.” You think you can plan a life? I’ve always thought you must improvise daily. Today may bring money in the mail. Today may bring a hurricane. You have to be ready for either one. In either case, give a party. But I never make plans. I just blunder ahead successfully. Now, a good party has to be planned. You can’t improvise a party. You can improvise a life, but you can’t improvise a party.
When I was in seventh grade and saw that faded photograph in the Rand McNally textbook with the palm tree, the Sphinx, the Pyramid, and a hunk of shore of the Nile, I didn’t say to myself, Maybe someday I’ll go, or, I’d like to go. I thought to myself, Now, when I’m coming down the Nile, that’s what I’ll see. Of course, what I saw was a redbrick building with an R. J. Reynolds Tobacco sign looking exactly like Water Street in Mobile. But anyway, I had a certainty that I had set enough energy rolling into the world, it would roll back and roll me to where I wanted to go. It was not a plan. You can’t plan a life. So many people think they can, but then, they don’t even see where they are. They don’t see a strange bird in the sky. They just don’t see. It’s those blinders that the American educational system and the big dollar value on everything have put on most people. And they just don’t see beyond. Somehow by pure good luck, by a combination of the nationalities meeting in me, by being triple Sagittarius, I was spared blinders. I haven’t been smashed by the educational system, the financial system, the political system. So many people have. I’m so glad I never wanted to be an adult. I’ve stopped smiling on certain occasions, but I don’t claim adulthood.
Sometimes you just have to get up and go. Most people make plans; they don’t understand the importance of impulse. If you have a strong impulse, obviously there are some waves coming at you from way out there. You’re at this end of something. Way out there from the other end of something, waves are coming towards you. And most people just don’t pay attention. They say, “Oh, someday I’m going to Paris.” “Someday I’ll go to New York.” But they don’t go; they plan. It was not that I was so secure or fearless; it’s just that I had this sense of get-up-and-go. The music is playing. It’s my music. It’s my cue. I’m due in Paris. Or Rome. Or North Africa. Or Egypt. Or wherever. It may be that people who have not been suppressed by education have some set of shadow instincts, so that they just hear something, smell something, feel something. I think everybody has it and they don’t use it. All that goddamn eighteenth-century love of logic has squashed a lot. The current American educational system and television are squashing a deal more. Most people don’t listen to their own bodies or their own supra-conscious. They just don’t listen.
I suppose that really, if I had planned my life, I probably would be in a well-cut gray suit with a black necktie in some office. And I’d have a lot of money in the bank and own real estate. And probably be miserable and not know why. Well, I’m broke. But I know why. I’m happy, and I know why. Of course, I have regrets. I’m human, so naturally I have several fireplaces full of regrets. But I have more delights than regrets. And I’m always thinking much more about next week than I am about last year. You can’t relive what certain things meant when they were happening. I look back upon my life as something I read about in a book. There’s this mad creature called Eugene who goes from Mobile and sets out. I don’t recognize him as me at all. It’s something I read about.
Well, it all goes too fast. But basically, it’s been a success. Not in the usual American sense of success, but in my sense of success. Picnicking on Oscar Wilde’s grave. Riding in a Bentley with seven dwarfs. Getting three pubic hairs from Tallulah Bankhead. I haven’t gone to see those ants in Patagonia who make anthills higher than a man and who raise mushrooms in the cellar in the winter. I want to see those ants. Because any civilization based on mushroom culture has to be highly interesting. And I’ve never been to Peru. I’ve never been to Persia. I’ve never been to any of those places that start with “P.” I want to go to Portugal, where they’ve got that fountain of rose-colored marble in Coimbra with those monkeys in eighteenth-century costume in rose-colored marble. I’ve got to be photographed
in
that fountain. And I want to go to Finland. I want to meet my 253 cousins in Norway I’ve never met. And I’ve got to get a good red wig and a white grand piano, because I want to tap-dance into the next century.
Cast of Characters
Alberti, Guido
(b. 1909) Italian actor. Alberti made his first film appearance in Fellini’s
8½.
He has continued to act since, though his career slowed down to a large extent after the 1970s.
Albrizio, Conrad
(1894–1973) American painter and teacher. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Albrizio left his mark around Louisiana and Alabama in frescoes and murals commissioned for such buildings as the Louisiana State Capitol Building. Albrizio taught at Louisiana State University.
Alexander, Madame
(1893–1990) American dollmaker. Alexander began her doll company in 1923, and it has since become a major toy corporation. Some Alexander dolls are considered more than toys, however, and are collected by doll enthusiasts. Alexander was given an FAO Schwarz Lifetime Achievement Award as “the First Lady of dolls.”
Antonioni, Michelangelo
(b. 1912) Italian film director, producer, and screenwriter. Antonioni is best known in the United States for his English-language film,
Blow-Up
(1966), for which he earned Oscar Award nominations for best director and best screenplay.
Athas, Daphne
(b. 1923) American writer. With several novels to her credit, Athas is best known for her novel
Entering Ephesus
(1971). From 1944 to 1945 Athas taught at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Her 1947 novel,
Weather of the Heart
, was based on her time there. Athas collaborated with writer Gurney Campbell to create the play
Sit on the Earth
(1957).
Bachmann, Ingeborg
(1926–1973) Austrian writer. Bachmann was a poet and a fiction writer who achieved immense critical acclaim and literary status in post-World War II Europe, especially for her poetry. The book to which Eugene alludes as the one that brought her the initial critical attention is probably her first book of poetry,
Die gestundete Zeit
(Borrowed Time).
Beginning in the 1950s, Bachmann collaborated with the composer Hans Werner Henze. Examples of their work together include librettos for the operas
Der junge Lord
(The Young Lord
) and
Der Prinz
(
The Prince).
Balanchine, George
(1904–1983) Russian-born American choreographer of ballet. Balanchine co-founded the School of American Ballet (1934), the American Ballet Company (1935), and the New York City Ballet (1948), for which he also served as artistic director from its creation until his death. He choreographed over two hundred ballets, including
The Nutcracker
(1954).
Bankhead, Tallulah
(1902–1968) American stage and film actress born in Huntsville, Alabama. Beautiful, sexy, outrageous, and immensely popular, Bankhead found her greatest success on the stage on Broadway and in London. Her performance in
The Skin of Our Teeth
(1942), the play that Eugene saw, won her the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Although her film career was less successful than her theater career, Bankhead did achieve critical acclaim for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat
(1944).
Barnes, Djuna
(1892–1972) American writer of verse, fiction, and dramatic literature. A prolific writer and frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, Barnes was an important figure in the literary and intellectual culture of Paris in the 1920s. While in Paris, Barnes had a tumultuous affair with another American expatriate, the sculptor Thelma Wood. The affair ended painfully and served as a psychological source for Barnes’s novel
Nightwood
(1936). In 1930 Barnes returned to New York City, and in 1940 she moved to 5 Patchin Place, where she lived for the next thirty-two years, battling depression, alcoholism, illness, and her family’s attempts to commit her to a sanitarium. Although she continued to write, she became fairly reclusive. Some believe that this tendency, combined with her refusal to permit reprinting of her earlier work or to grant interviews, accounts for her current lack of renown.