We need a break from all this disaster, don't we? Well, I do. To clear our minds, here's a note about the encounter of a couple of famous writers, who maybe should have gotten along, but didn't.
In the l940's, while working for M-G-M on a Lana Turner picture that never happened, young Tennessee Williams happened on another writer in Los Angeles he admired greatly — Christopher Isherwood.
Speaking of Isherwood's classic "Goodbye to Berlin," Williams wrote in his diary:
He interests me profoundly. Sally Bowles a brilliant study. A new something in it. How they can be lost and found again. And even their treachery isn't true, anymore than their apparent truth.
Isherwood seems strangely like me — his mind, his attitude. Only clearer, quieter, firmer. A better integrated man.
What is our purpose? To understand our lives and to communicate our understanding. Let's all join hands in the dark!
Williams wrote Isherwood a gushing letter, but when these two met, it didn't go smoothly. They met at the Brown Derby, at Williams' invitation. He wrote:
I recognized him at once, just by instinct, and he does look just the way I imagine myself to look — it was funny. I like him awfully, and I think he must have thought me rather school-girlish about his writing which I place with Chekhov's.
By contrast, in his diary, dated a day later, May 13, 1943, Isherwood wrote:
Yesterday, I had lunch with Tennessee Williams, the writer. He's a strange boy, small. plump and muscular, with a slight cast in one eye; full of amused malice. He has a job with Metro. He wanted to buy an autoglide [scooter] to ride to work on. I tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. We went to a dealer's, and he selected a very junky old machine which is obviously going to give him trouble.
Isherwood was right about the "amused malice," by the way. Speaking of his assignment for MGM, Williams told a friend that the script he was given to revise "contained every cliche situation you've ever seen in a Grade B picture. They want me to give it "freshness and vitality" but at the same time keep it "a Lana Turner sort of thing.'" Eventually he was fired, considered too "fey" to work with the star.
Williams concluded:
I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver. A bad comparison, as the beaver is a practical little animal who would never get herself into such a situation.
From Tennessee Williams Notebooks, ed. by Margaret Bradham Thornton, Yale University Press, 2006, pp368
Kit Stolz 