Though writers are grateful for such coincidences and magical thinking, they’re not what give us permission to tell stories; nor are they what keep us returning again and again to the people we create on the page. We do it because we fall in love, as I did with Frank Merlo, a real person who lived and breathed and died too young, and as I did with Anja Bloom, our mutual imaginary friend who made sure I didn’t forget him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support of Leading Men.
To research the novel, I turned first to multiple works by Williams, in particular Suddenly Last Summer, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, the script of Senso, Memoirs, Collected Stories, and the fascinating late plays collected in Volumes IV–VIII of The Theater of Tennessee Williams, published by New Directions.
I also happily devoured Williams’s extensive and extraordinary Notebooks, gorgeously edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton, and published by Yale University Press; New Directions’ The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. II (1945–1957); and Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just. For a sense of Capote and Jack Dunphy, I turned to Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke, and Clarke’s wonderful Capote: A Biography.
John Lahr’s world-class 2014 biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh also proved essential, as did James Grissom’s Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, and our off-the-record conversation over drinks in Manhattan in 2015. Though its biographical period predates Williams’s time with Frank, Lyle Leverich’s classic Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams was also useful.
To explore the character and sensibility of John Horne “Jack” Burns, I (re)read his published novels—The Gallery, Lucifer with a Book, and A Cry of Children. I then visited Box 1238 of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, which houses the manuscript of The Stranger’s Guise, as well as Burns’s letters and selected family photographs. In the meantime, David Margolick’s excellent Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press, 2013) appeared, and provided a rock-solid and insightful basis for understanding and appreciating this misunderstood and underappreciated writer. On a 2015 trip to Italy, I visited “Villino Brunella” and “La Bicocca,” where I was given a memorable tour of Burns’s apartment and neighborhood.
Though the vast majority of the dialogue in Leading Men is my own invention, some words and phrases have been transposed directly or paraphrased from the sources mentioned above. This includes the very last line of the novel—“I’m used to you.”—which, as Williams recorded in Memoirs, Merlo is reported to have said to him on the last day of his life.
I am grateful to the following people who generously went out of their way to connect me to someone or something important in the lives of Merlo, Williams, and Burns:
David Kaplan, founder and director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, guided me with great wisdom not only toward the production of the entirely fictional Call It Joy, but toward a better understanding of Williams’s work itself. Kaplan’s Tennessee Williams in Provincetown deepened this understanding. He also led me to Thomas Keith’s article “You Are Not the Playwright I Was Expecting” in the September 2011 issue of American Theatre magazine, which proved especially useful for appreciating the experimentations in Williams’s “post-Frank” period.
Professor Alessandro Clericuzio, of the University of Perugia, author of Tennessee Williams and Italy, was my proxy at the Luchino Visconti archive in Rome, where we read Williams’s typed and handwritten drafts of the Senso script.
Anthony Narducci sat with me for hours at a coffee shop in Chicago in January 2017, talking candidly about his time with Williams, specifically about how Williams came to terms with his relationship with Frank Merlo. Narducci’s own gripping memoir, In the Frightened Heart of Me: Tennessee Williams’s Last Year, provided great insight into the broken man Anja meets at the Waldorf in the summer of 1982.
The late Thomas D. Burns, Esq., Jack’s younger brother, was gracious enough to host me for a long and candid interview some years ago at his law offices in Boston. Howard Medwed kindly made the introduction and set up the interview.
Extended and ongoing conversations with Christopher Bram, Maud Casey, Chip Cheek, Robert Cohen, Stacey D’Erasmo, Katherine Fausset, Antonia Fusco, Sonya Larson, Margot Livesey, Thomas Mallon, Stephen McCauley, Heidi Pitlor, Whitney Scharer, Sebastian Stuart, Michelle Toth, Barbara Shapiro, and Dawn Tripp gave me the permission, guidance, and direction(s) that ultimately proved necessary.
My friends, colleagues, and students at GrubStreet, Warren Wilson, and Bread Loaf—especially Debra Allbery, Lisa Borders, Eve Bridburg, Michael Collier, Jennifer Grotz, and Ellen Bryant Voigt—provided unending support, inspiration, and crucial feedback on early drafts.
For various kindnesses, indulgences, and talents—including gifts of time, space, translations, and additional research help—I thank Boris Deliradev, Christopher Dufault, Arthur Egeli, Brian Halley, Gary and Paul Hickox, Karl Krueger, Aaron Lecklider, Elizabeth Kostova, Matthew Limpede, Elinor Lipman, Mameve Medwed, Elisa Piccinelli, Rebecca Smith, Isabel Walsh, Dito van Reigersberg, Noah Whitford, and the friendly staff of Provincetown Public Library, The Chellidency NYC, and Caffè Loro.
Janet Silver and Paul Slovak not only brought Leading Men into the world—they made it immeasurably better with their wise and insightful feedback, their fierce advocacy, and their commitment. I am forever indebted to them and to everyone at Viking.
The love, faith, and unquestioning support of Michael Borum, my leading man of twenty-one years and counting, made this book possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Castellani is the author of three previous novels (the trilogy A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love) and The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on the craft of fiction. He is the son of Italian immigrants, a Guggenheim fellow, and the artistic director of GrubStreet, one of the country's leading creative writing centers. He lives in Boston.
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