celebrate all wayward things
I've been reading Eugene Walter's Milking the Moon lately, instead of other things I should be working on. Walter grew up in Mobile, Alabama, served his WWII army duty in the Aleutian Islands, moved to Greenwich Village in the '40s and then went on to Paris in the '50s, where he was part of the group that started the Paris Review. He was in Rome during the '60's, and appeared in several Fellini films. He seems to have somehow known everybody - Judy Garland to Isak Dinesen to William Faulkner. He wrote several books - including Monkey Poems and Singerie-Songerie - that were published by Gaberbocchus Press. He did a lot more besides, and then went back home to Mobile and died a quiet, obscure death.
His autobiography is a wonderful thing. I've enjoyed it immensely, although I didn't think I would on the grounds that it's an "as-told-to." This book has turned out to be the one exception in that genre. But then, I'm a total sucker for memoirs, especially one as varied as this. And anyone who claims the best sex is "in a phone booth, naked, with a lot of butterflies," is my sort of person. I'm only about halfway through this book, and I'm sure I won't be able to resist at least one more post on it.
For instance, Walter grew up with Truman Capote, who he knew as a short kid named Bulldog:
On Saturdays at the Lyric Theater there would be a matinee for children. That's where I met Truman Capote. We were never pals. We were acquaintances called Southerners. He came to Mobile on Saturdays to have his teeth straightened and go to the doctor and various things like that. He was Truman Persons from Monroeville, but he was called Bulldog. He had some funny underbite where the lower jaw sticks out, and he looked exactly like a bulldog. One night at this party in New York, suddenly, I looked across the room and there was Truman. And I said, "Bulldog! What are you doing here?" And he said, "Sh, sh. I'm Truman Capote now. " Well, see, I knew him as Bulldog Persons. …
In the Sunday Register there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children's page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage. Why not? But let's not say he invented the reportage-fiction, fiction-reportage style. Daniel Defoe would be giggling in his grave at the thought, not to mention a dozen French writers. And some of his things are so full of Gothic narrative impossibilities that one wants to say, "Now, Cousin Truman, come down outa that tree!"
This is what he has to say about the inception of the Paris Review:
We might have all committed suicide if we thought we were doing something of global significance. Our whole point was the here and the now, Americans in Paris, in the tradition of Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and all the Americans who were in Paris in the twenties. That sense of tending the fire of culture in the Old World. Here we are making sparks; that's why it was fun. Who knows what significance something has when they are doing it? Those Wright brothers really wanted to see what the shoreline looked like from the sky: the seagull's point of view. They weren't out to revolutionize the world. They wanted to see what the seagull saw. And I think that Edison must have burned his fingers once too often striking matches to light a lamp. People who are doing earthshaking things often don't realize that. Anne Frank didn't know she was going to be an international name when she wrote in her diary. Proust thought he was doing salon litteraire gossip. Faulkner just had this sense about life in the provincial South. We were simply being part of the here and now, Americans in Paris. Any group that would include South meets North and North meets South - by the time you shake that up in the popcorn popper, naturally you are going to have something lighthearted.
There's apparently one recording of Walter reading his work, and it's available for sale: Rare Bird: Poems-Stories-Songs, Eugene Walter.