Terry was really hard up for money in those days, even in a Paris where a franc went a long way. I wasn't rich myself but I was, after all, a recently published bestselling author, and I could occasionally buy him a meal. We ate a couple of times in a cramped but excellent bistro on the avenue du Maine and had such luncheons as the following, which I recorded in a notebook: entrecôte, pommes frites, haricots verts, carafe de vin, tarte tatin, café filtre. Price for two: $3.60. The U.S. dollar was, of course, in a state of loony ascendancy, for which the French have been punishing us ever since; if, in addition, you exchanged your traveler's checks for the fat rate given by Maurice Loeb, the cheerful cambiste who hung out on the rue Vieille du Temple, in the Jewish Quarter, you could really become a high roller in 1952. It was one of the reasons the Communists plastered U.S. Go Home signs on every available wall.
That June I was busy in my room each afternoon, writing on a manuscript that would eventually become my short novel The Long March. One afternoon, unannounced, Terry showed up with his own manuscript and asked me if I would read it. His manner was awkward and apologetic. I knew he was working on a novel; during our sessions on the terrace of Le Dôme he had spoken of his serious literary ambitions. I had met a lot of Texans in the Marines, most of whom lived up to their advance reputation for being yahoos and blowhards, and I never thought I'd encounter a Texan who was a novelist. Or a Texan who was really rather shy and unboastful. The manuscript he brought me made up the beginning chapters of Flash and Filigree, and I was amazed by the quality of the prose, which was intricately mannered though evocative and unfailingly alive. The writing plainly owed a debt to Terry's literary idol, the British novelist Henry Green, one of those sui generis writers you imitated upon pain of death, but nonetheless what I read of Flash and Filigree was fresh and exciting, and later I told him so. Even then he had adopted that mock-pompous style that was to become his trademark, yet I sensed a need for real encouragement when he said: “I trust then, Bill, that you think this will put me in the quality lit game?” I said that I had no doubt that it would (and it did, when it was finally published), but as usual his talk turned to the need to make some money. “De luxe porn” was an avenue that seemed the most inviting—lots of Americans in Paris were cranking out their engorged prose—and of course it was one of the routes he eventually took, culminating a few years later in the delectable Candy. For Tex, success was on the way.
I didn't see a great deal more of Terry in Paris. That summer I went off to the south of France and, later, to live in Rome. But back in the States Terry was very much a part of the quality lit scene in New York during the next twenty years, frequenting places like George Plimpton's and, later, Elaine's, where I too hung out from time to time. He had great nighttime stamina, and we closed up many bars together. He bought a house in the remote village of East Canaan, not very far from my own place in Connecticut. And it was either at this house or mine that we decided to make a transcontinental trip together. I had been invited to give a talk at a California university, while Terry, having collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a great hit, had been asked to come out to the coast to write the script for a film version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. It was a perfect vehicle, I thought, to hone his gift for the merrily macabre. But the catalytic force for the whole trip was Nelson Algren. Nelson had written me, asking me to visit him in Chicago. The two of us had become friends and drinking companions during several of his trips to New York from Chicago, a city with which he had become identified as closely as had such other Windy City bards as Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg and Studs Terkel. In his letter he said that he'd show me the best of Chicago. I had for some reason never been to Chicago, and so Terry suggested that we go west together and stop by and make a joint visit to Nelson, with whom he had also become pals. He had the notion of doing the Chicago–Los Angeles leg by train since soon, as he astutely predicted, no one would be traveling on the rails except the near destitute and those terrified by airplanes. By taking the fabled Super Chief of the Santa Fe, he pointed out, we'd be able to get a last glimpse of the great open spaces and also of the sumptuous club cars upon whose banquettes the movie bigwigs and sexy starlets had cavorted while the prairies whizzed by. It would bea precious slice of Americana soon to be foreclosed to travelers in a hurry, and I thought it was a fine idea.
Nelson was in his mid-fifties, one of the original hipsters. He had been telling stories about junkies and pimps and whores and other outcasts while Kerouac and Ferlinghetti were still adolescents, and had nailed down as his private literary property the entire grim world of the Chicago underclass. After years of writing, including a stint with the WPA Federal Writers’ Project during the Depression and another one hammering out venereal-disease reports for the Chicago Board of Health, he hit it big with The Man with the Golden Arm, a vigorous novel about drug addiction that won the first National Book Award in 1950 and was made into a successful movie starring Frank Sinatra. Money and fame were unable to go to Nelson's resolutely nonconformist head; “down-at-the-heel” would have been the politest term for the neighborhood he still lived in, where he took the three of us (my wife, Rose, having signed on at the last minute) after meeting our plane at O'Hare. It was a predominantly Polish faubourg, hemmed in by mammoth gas-storage tanks, and the odor of fatty sausage and cabbage began at the curb, becoming more ripe and pronounced as we labored up the five flights to what Nelson called his “penthouse”—an incredibly cramped and cluttered apartment with only two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchenette, and an old-fashioned bathroom with water-stained wallpaper.
The boxy living room was dark and jammed with books. It was fairly clean amid the disorder, but the pad was the lair of a totally undomesticated animal. I do recall a framed photograph of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Nelson had had a torrid affair, and whom he still referred to as “the Beaver.” That night we partook of Polish cuisine, mystery stew and memorably awful, in a nearby restaurant, where Nelson titillated us with secret hints about the Chicago he was going to show us the next day. With the exception of Rose we all got pie-eyed. I was very fond of Nelson but I always thought he was half crazy. When he got enthusiastic or excited his eyes took on a manic gleam, and he would go off on a riff of giggles that was not unlike Richard Widmark's in Kiss of Death. Terry and I exchanged bewildered glances. I frankly had no idea what we would experience, thinking of such wonders as Michigan Avenue, the Art Institute, lunch at the Pump Room, the great Museum of Science and Industry, the Merchandise Mart, even the celebrated stockyards. That night, we three visitors slept in the same room, Rose and I locked immobile in a narrow, sagging single bed and Terry on a cot only a foot away, where he drifted off to sleep with a glass of bourbon still in his hand, heaving with laughter over Nelson and our accommodations.
Early the next morning, still behaving like a man withholding knowledge of a delightful mystery, Nelson took us by taxi on a meandering route through the city and deposited us at the entrance of the Cook County Jail. He then revealed that he had arranged to have us given a guided tour. This would be our most authentic taste of Chicago. We were all stunned—Terry, wearing his shades, said, “Well, Nelse old man, you shouldn't have gone to all the bother”—but in a way it was something I might have anticipated. Despite the merciless realism that he brought to his subject, Nelson was basically an underworld groupie; he loved all aspects of outlaw life, and his obsession with crime and criminals, though romantic, was eclectic to the extent that it also embraced the good guys. He counted among his many cronies a number of law enforcement officers, and one of these was the warden of the Cook County Jail. Despite the drab municipal sound of its name, the Cook County Jail was then, as now, a huge heavy-duty penitentiary, with harsh appurtenances such as a maximum-security unit, industrial areas, facilities for solitary confinement, and a thriving—if the term may be used—Death Row. All this was explained to us in his office by the warden, a thin man with a disarmingly scholarly look, whom Nelson intro
duced us to before vanishing—to our intense discomfort—saying he'd pick us up later. Clearly none of us could comprehend this sudden abandonment. While the warden fiddled with the buttons of his intercom, Terry wondered in a whisper if I was as hungover as he was; beneath his dark glasses his cheeks were sickly pale and I heard him murmur, “Man, I think this is turning into some kind of weird nightmare.” Rose tried to appear happy and self-contained. We heard the warden summon Captain Boggs.
Captain Boggs had a round, cheerful, fudge-colored face and could not have weighed an ounce less than 250 pounds. His title was associate captain of the guards, and he would be our guide through the institution. As we trailed him down the corridor I couldn't help being struck by his extreme girth, which caused his arms to swing at wide angles from his body and made his body itself, beneath the slate-gray uniform jacket, appear somehow inflatable; he looked like a Negro version of the Michelin tire man. I was also fetched by his accent, with its rich loamy sound of the Deep South.
I thought of Richard Wright's native son, Bigger Thomas, also an émigré from the cotton fields to Chicago, only to become the doomed murderer of a white girl; plainly Captain Boggs, in all of his heftiness, had made a prodigious leap for a onetime black boy. He had a rather deliberate and ornate manner of speaking, possibly the result of many trips with what he called “VIP honorees,” and the tour itself dragged on through the prison's depressing immensity, seeming to continue hour after hour. “Dis yere is de inmates’ dinin’ facilities,” he said as we stood on a balcony overlooking an empty mess hall. “Dis yere,” he yelled at us at the doorway to a deafening machine shop, “is where de inmates pays off they debts to society.” We went down into a cavernous basement, chilly and echoing with a distant dripping sound. “Dis yere is what is called de Hole. Solitary confinement. You gits too smart, dis yere where you pays fo’ it.” We would not be able to go on the tiers of the cell blocks, Captain Boggs explained, Rose being a distracting presence. “Dem suckers go wild aroun’ a woman,” he declared.
We did end up, finally, on Death Row. After going through a series of doors, we immediately entered a small, windowless room, where we had a most disconcerting encounter. Seated at a table was a white inmate in orange prison coveralls being given an intravenous injection by a black male nurse. Captain Boggs introduced us to the prisoner, whose name was Witherspoon, a mountaineer transplant up from Kentucky (and known in the press as “the Hillbilly from Hell”) who had committed a couple of particularly troglodytic murders in Chicago, and whose date with the executioner was right around the corner. Witherspoon and his gruesome crimes were of national interest, his case having made the New York papers.
“Howya doin’, Witherspoon?” said Captain Boggs in a hearty voice. “Dese is two writer gentlemen. Doin’ de VIP tour.”
“Howdy,” said Witherspoon, as he flashed a smile and in so doing displayed a mouth full of blackened teeth in a beetle-browed skeletal face that had doubtless inspired many bad dreams. “I've got diabeet-ees,” he went on to say, as if to explain the needle in his arm, and then, without missing a beat, added: “They done railroaded me. Before Almighty God, I'm an innocent man.” Terry and I later recalled, while ensconced in the lounge car of the Super Chief, the almost hallucinatory sensations we both experienced when, most likely at the same time, we glimpsed the tattoos graven on Witherspoon's hands: LOVE on the fingers of the right hand, HATE on those of the left. They were exactly the mottoes that decorated the knuckles of Robert Mitchum's demented backwoods preacher in The Night of the Hunter. Witherspoon himself had a preacher's style. “I hope you two good writers will proclaim to the world the abominable injustice they done to me. God bless you both.”
“Mr. Witherspoon,” Terry deadpanned, “be assured of our constant concern for your welfare.”
I had undergone a recent conversion about capital punishment, transformed from a believer—albeit a lukewarm believer—into an ardent opponent; hence my chagrin, after we bade good-bye to Witherspoon, when Captain Boggs walked us down a narrow corridor and acquainted us with the vehicle that would soon speed the Hillbilly from Hell back whence he came. We trooped into a sort of alcove where the captain motioned us to stand, while he went to one wall and yanked back a curtain. In glaring light there was suddenly revealed the electric chair, a huge hulking throne of wood and leather, out of which unraveled a thicket of wires. I heard Rose give a small soprano yelp of distress. In the lurid incandescence I noted on the far wall two signs. One read: SILENCE. The other: NO SMOKING. I felt Terry's paw on my shoulder, as from somewhere behind me he whispered: “Did you ever dig anything so fucking surreal?”
Captain Boggs said: “De supreme penalty.” His voice slipped into the rhythmic rote-like monotone with which I was sure he had addressed countless VIP honorees. “De procedure is quick and painless. First is administered two thousand volts for thirty seconds. Stop de juice to let de body cool off. Den five hundred volts for thirty seconds. Stop de juice again. Den two thousand mo’ volts. Doctor makes a final check. Ten minutes from beginnin’ to end.”
“Let me out of here,” I heard Rose murmur.
“I always likes to ax de visitors if they'd care to set down in de chair,” the captain said, his cheerful grin broadening. “How ’bout you, Mr. Starling?” he went on, using the name he'd called me by all morning.
I said that I'd pass on the offer, but I didn't want the opportunity lost on Terry. “What do you think, Tex?” I said.
“Captain Boggs,” said Terry, “I've always wanted to experience the hot squat—vicariously, that is. But I think that today I'll decline your very tempting invitation.”
I've recently discovered that the quite accurate notes I kept about our trip, which allow the foregoing account to possess verisimilitude, become rather sketchy after we leave the Cook County Jail. This is probably because our trip farther westward on the elegant Super Chief was largely a warm blur of booze and overeating, causing me to discontinue my notes except for a few random jottings, themselves nearly incoherent. (I want to mention, however, while the fact is fresh in mind, that some months after our trip I read that Witherspoon never had to receive that voltage; his death sentence was commuted, through a legal technicality, to life imprisonment.) I thought of Terry recently when I read, in an interview, the words of a British punk-rock star, plainly a young jerk, nasty and callow but able to express a tart intuitive insight: “You Americans still believe in God and all that shit, don't you? The whole fucking lot of you fraught with the fear of death.”
Terry would have given his little cackle of approval at the remark, for it went to the core of his perception of American culture. Like me, Terry was an apostate Southern Protestant, and I think that one of the reasons we hit it off well together was that we both viewed the Christian religion—at least insofar as we had experienced its puritanical rigors—as a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings. It magnified not the glories of life but the consciousness of death, exploiting humanity's innate terror of the timeless void. High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure. In contemplating Americans stretched on the rack of their hypocrisy as they tried to reconcile their furtive adulteries with their churchgoing pieties, Terry laid the groundwork for some of his most biting and funniest satire. Christianity bugged him, even getting into his titles—think of The Magic Christian. Nor was it by chance that the surname of the endearing heroine of Candy was—what else?—Christian. His finest comic efforts often come from his juxtaposing a sweetly religious soul—or at least a bourgeois-conventional one—with a figure of depravity or corruption. Candy was surely the first novel in which the frenzied sexual congress between a well-bred, exquisitely proportioned young American girl and an elderly, insane hunchback could elicit nothing but helpless laughter. (“Give me your hump!” she squeals at the moment of climax, in a jeu de mots so obvious it compounds the hilarity.) One clear memory I have is of Terry in the lounge car, musing over his Old Grand-Dad as he considered the imminent dem
ise of the Super Chief and, with it, a venerable tradition. His voice grew elegiac speaking of the number of “darling Baptist virgins aspiring to be starlets” who, at the hands of “panting Jewish agents with their swollen members,” had been ever so satisfactorily deflowered on these plush, softly undulating banquettes.
In fact, he had a fixation on the idea of “starlets,” and it was plain that in Hollywood he would be looking forward to making out with a gorgeous ingénue from MGM and embarking on a halcyon erotic adventure. Toward the end of the trip we stayed up all night and drank most of the way through Arizona and Southern California, watching the pale moonscape of the desert slip by until morning dawned and we were in Los Angeles. Rose and I had to catch a late-morning plane to San Francisco but we all had time, it suddenly occurred to me, to visit the place that was the reason for Terry's trip. This was Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the “Whispering Glades” of Waugh's scathing send-up of America's funerary customs; how could Rose and I leave Los Angeles without viewing the hangout of Mr. Joyboy and his associate morticians? Terry agreed that we should all see it together. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the studio had arranged to put Terry up at that decaying relic the Chateau Marmont; for me it was an unexpected bonus to catch a glimpse of the mythic Hollywood landmark before heading out to Whispering Glades.
Terry and I were both in that sleepless state of jangled nerves and giggly mania, still half blotto and relying heavily on Rose and her sober patience to get us headed in the right direction. At Forest Lawn, in the blinding sunlight, our fellow tourists were out in droves. They were lined up in front of the mausoleum where the movie gods and goddesses had been laid to rest, stacked up in their crypts, Terry observed, “like pies in the Automat.” Marilyn Monroe had passed into her estate of cosmic Loved One only two years before, and the queue of gawkers filing past her final abode seemed to stretch for hundreds of yards. Cameras clicked, bubble gum popped, babies shrieked. One sensed an awkward effort at reverence, but it was a strain; the spectacular graveyard was another outpost of Tinseltown. As we ambled over the greensward, vast as a golf course, we moved past a particularly repellent statuary grouping, a tableau of mourning marble children and a clutch of small marble animals. A woman onlooker was gushing feverishly, and Terry said he felt a little ill. We all agreed to be on our separate ways. “A bit of shut-eye and I'll soon be in tip-top shape,” he assured us as we embraced. We left him standing at the taxi stop. He had his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and he was scowling through his shades, looking fierce and, as always, a little confused and lost but, in any case, with the mammoth American necropolis as a backdrop, like a man already dreaming up wicked ideas.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 54
