John Waters - "Tennessee Williams saved my life" (NYT Book Review)

[swag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/books/review/Waters.t.html?ref=books

(also available as podcast at the link, and Waters is an excellent reader)

Tennessee Williams saved my life. As a 12-year-old boy in suburban Baltimore, I would look up his name in the card catalog at the library and it would read “see Librarian.” I wanted these “see Librarian” books — and I wanted them now — but in the late 1950s (and sadly even today), there was no way a warped adolescent like myself could get his hands on one. But I soon figured out that the “see Librarian” books were on a special shelf behind the counter. So when the kindly librarian was helping the “normal” kids with their book reports, I sneaked behind the checkout desk and stole the first book I ever wanted to possess on my own. “One Arm” read the forbidden cover on a short-story collection by Tennessee Williams that I later found out had once been available only in an expensive limited edition, sold under the counter in “special” bookshops before New Directions released the hardback version. And now it was mine.

Of course, I knew who Tennessee Williams was. He was a bad man because the nuns in Catholic Sunday School had told us we’d go to hell if we saw that movie he wrote, “Baby Doll” — the one with the great ad campaign, with Carroll Baker in the crib sucking her thumb, that made Cardinal Spellman have a nation-wide hissy fit. The same ad I clipped out of The Baltimore Sun countless times and pasted in my secret scrapbook. The movie I planned to show over and over in the fantasy dirty-movie theater in my mind that I was going to open later in life, causing a scandal in my parents’ neighborhood.

Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend. I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny. I didn’t quite “get” “Desire and the Black Masseur” when I read it in “One Arm,” but I hoped I would one day. The thing I did know after finishing this book was that I didn’t have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society’s rules. I didn’t have to worry about fitting in with a crowd I didn’t want to hang out with in the first place. No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.

Years later, Tennessee Williams saved my life again. The first time I went to a gay bar I was 17 years old. It was called the Hut and it was in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as the Chicken Hut, and it was filled with early 1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. “I may be queer but I ain’t this,” I remember thinking. Still reading everything Tennessee Williams wrote, I knew he would understand my dilemma. Tennessee never seemed “gayly-correct” even then, and sexual ambiguity and confusion were always made appealing and exciting in his work. “My type doesn’t know who I am,” he stated, according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren’t always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams didn’t fit into his own minority, so I had the confidence not to either. Gay was not enough.

It was a good start, however. “I was late coming out, and when I did it was with one hell of a bang,” Tennessee writes in “Memoirs” in 1972, the same year my film “Pink Flamingos” had its world premiere in Baltimore. While I was just getting my first national notoriety, Tennessee was struggling to finish the final version of “The Two-Character Play” and horrifying theater purists by appearing on stage in his new play “Small Craft Warnings,” and then answering questions from the Off Broadway audience afterward to keep the show running. I never once thought this was unbecoming behavior on my hero’s part and tried to follow his example by introducing my star Divine at midnight screenings of our filth epic. “I never had any choice but to be a writer,” Tennessee remembered at the time, and he remained my patron saint. I followed his career like a hawk.



. . . more

[Shell Beau]

1. Just another reason Mississippi isn't as bad as everyone says!

[swag]

9. Lots of reasons, huh?

Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, North Mississippi All Stars, Shell Beau, Sundog, the list goes on.

I'd mention Faulkner, but I reckon people heard enough about that in school.

[mitchum]

12. Hell, Mississippi has given a king's treasure to the arts

phenomenal

[WCGreen]

2. I read that yesterday night....

One of the reasons I posted that stuff about being a conformist...

[swag]

7. Hi, Chris.

I missed the conformist threads.

I'll poke around.

[jonnyblitz]

3. thanks for posting. I will have to read the re-issue of

Tennessee Williams' "Memoirs" now. :thumbsup:

[swag]

4. Oh, you know what?

I have to post that Larry McMurtry review of Point to Point Navigation from the NYRB.

Thanks for the reminder-by-your-presence.

[jonnyblitz]

5. oooh..damn...

swag i appreciate your posts so much. I also plan to read that huge bio on Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan that i was unaware of until I read mention of it in Point by Point Navigation. It's like 800 or so pages long and carried in the library system I use here in CT.

[swag]

6. I liked the Kaplan bio, and I bet that you will too.

I think it was predictable that Vidal would hate the Kaplan book, but the Kaplan book is well written, respectful of its subject, and more complete that Vidal's memoirs, though the memoirs are more pleasurable to read.

As for appreciating posts, you have long been one of my DU stars. I hope to meet you some day when I'm in your part of the world.

[jonnyblitz]

8. I completely hear you on Vidal's style being more pleasurable

to read (knowing this without even have read Kaplan's book). I was thinking exactly that when I mentioned that book in this thread. I wasn't sure if you were reading Vidal's book mainly for the info within or for his writing style and I thought perhaps the Kaplan book wouldnt be something you would read.

I look forward to meeting you one day,also. anyone with a "bill" burroughs avatar... GOSH! :crazy:

[mitchum]

10. Tennessee Williams American Genius

I really love to read and many things have brought me pleasures, so I am loath to declare something "the best...", but "A Streetcar Named Desire" is the finest work in American drama. Absolutely. The best.
When I was a very young child, virtually the only books in our house were paperback editions of Tennessee Williams and Erskine Caldwell. My parents were young southerners barely out of their teens and had apparently bought the books in a spirit of daring. I don't know if my parents ever read them or just kept them around as some type of talismans of vice and license. When I was about seven, I started on those paperbacks of Williams and Caldwell. Despite the lurid covers and reputations, my parents never restricted my reading material. Those two gentleman served as my first introduction to literature. For that I am eternally grateful.

[bridgit]

11. i like it...