The Trip to Echo Spring (12 page)

4

A HOUSE ON FIRE

FROM THE MOMENT I STEPPED
off the train into the humid air, I found it almost impossible to piece New Orleans together. It wasn't like any place I'd ever visited, though at times it reminded me in its rich confusion of Addis Ababa, especially at night. Up in the Garden District, where the rich people lived in their gingerbread houses, the streets were deserted except for an occasional van, circling at walking pace and branded discreetly with the logo of a private security firm. The air up there smelled bewitchingly of jasmine, but a streetcar ride away, in the French Quarter, it reeked of mule piss and rotting refuse, that clinging, contaminating stench that Blanche DuBois was thinking of when she cried out at the end of
Streetcar:
‘Those cathedral bells – they're the only clean thing in the Quarter.'

I'd never been anywhere so abandoned, so profligate in its desire to pander to the basest impulses of its visitors. On Bourbon Street, I passed beneath a barrage of gleaming signs offering
BIG ASS BEERS, FISH BOWLS
and
CHERRY BOMBS
. Everywhere I looked there were photographs of life-sized half-naked women, crouching in their underwear or riding two on a tandem, their hair in schoolgirl plaits.
THE BARELY LEGAL CLUB. BABE'S CABARET. LARRY FLYNT'S HUSTLER. BOURBON STREET BLUES.
A girl came pelting past me, screaming, and on the street outside Walgreens a scratch jazz band started knocking out some swing.

I wanted to find the magical city Williams had inhabited in the 1940s. The fall of 1946, say, when he lived in one of the loveliest apartments he'd ever find. It was on St. Peter Street, in a building owned by an antiques dealer, who'd filled it with beautiful furniture, including a long refectory table set up under a skylight. The falling light made the room ideal for morning writing, a habit Tennessee stuck to in even the most dissipated phases of his life. He'd get up just after dawn and come to the table with a cup of black coffee, sitting at his typewriter beside a picture of Hart Crane. Years later, he wrote musingly:

You know, New Orleans is slightly below sea level and maybe that's why the clouds and the sky seem so close . . . I suppose they are really vapor off the Mississippi more than genuine clouds and through that skylight they seemed so close that if the skylight were not glass you could touch them. They were fleecy and in continual motion . . .

He'd started the play he was working on that winter the previous year, just before the New York premiere of
The Glass Menagerie.
In a letter to his agent Audrey Wood sent in March 1945, he'd mentioned that he was fifty-five or sixty pages into a first draft of a new work about two sisters, ‘the remains of a fallen southern family. The younger, Stella, has accepted the situation, married beneath her socially and
moved to a southern city with her coarsely attractive, plebeian mate. But Blanche has remained at Belle Reve, the home place in ruins, and struggles for five years to maintain the old order.' Then he reeled through a list of possible titles –
The Moth, Blanche's Chair in the Moon, The Primary Colors
and
The Poker Night
– for what would become, of course,
A Streetcar Named Desire,
the most famous of all his plays.

Under the St. Peter Street skylight he took it out again. He'd been feeling a little dismal all summer: a little ragged and run down. He kept getting spells of abdominal pain, which he'd begun to suspect were the first signs of pancreatic cancer. By December he'd convinced himself he was dying, and so he set about the play with renewed fury, hammering away from early in the morning until two or three in the afternoon, when he'd go out and soothe himself in a bar or at the pool.

His afternoons generally began around the corner in Victor's bar, where he'd order a Brandy Alexander – ‘a marvellous drink' – and set the Ink Spots crooning ‘If I Didn't Care' on the jukebox. After a sandwich he'd stroll on to the all-male Athletic Club on New Rampart Street, with its spring-fed pool beneath an elegantly balustraded gallery, where one could watch the swimmers or, conversely, enjoy the sensation of being observed.

This amiable, cosmopolitan, unashamedly erotic city worked its way deep into the bones of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Indeed, it's the first character to be introduced. On the opening page, there's one of those long, lyrical set notes Williams loved to write. He describes a New Orleans of raffish charm and ornamented gables, where the races mingle happily, blues piano pours from all the windows and the sky in May turns ‘a peculiarly tender blue, almost turquoise, which invests
the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee.'

I couldn't smell any bananas, but by evening I'd started to see what he was getting at. Even the curving four-storey frontage of the CVS looked beautiful with its glowing red lines of neon. The streetcar tracks ran between palm trees and the sky got very pale before it went dark. I went into Royal House on Royal Street and had a beer and a plate of grilled oysters. At six o'clock the room was empty. ‘It's game night,' the bartender said. ‘We'll see how it goes.' When I emerged a jazz wedding was parading past, twirling handkerchiefs and white umbrellas. A second line! The bride had stopped to be embraced by a man in a Mardi Gras costume, purple and green with a jester's hat. His face was painted gold and though I figured he was mostly out to bilk tourists, he still seemed to represent some private essence of the city: a particoloured spirit of misrule.

Blanche came into my mind then. Perhaps it was the white handkerchiefs, or the bride's lace dress. There's something mothlike about her, something feathery and antipathetic to the light. She likes illusions and pretty shadows, and she likes drinking too and for the same reason: to protect her from the harsh glare, the horror of reality, a thing she's too delicate to stand. Practically the first thing she does when she arrives at her sister Stella's apartment on Elysian Fields is toss down half a tumbler of whiskey, to soften what will become an unbearable flare of anxiety. All through the play she keeps sneaking little glasses. ‘Open your pretty mouth and talk while I look for some liquor! I know you must have some liquor on the place!'
‘The music is in her
mind; she is drinking to escape it and the sense of disaster closing in on her.'
‘Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!' ‘Why, it's a
liqueur,
I believe,' to which her one-time beau Mitch replies: ‘You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat!'
He
being, of course, Stanley, her nerveless, macho brother-in-law, who exposes all her secrets, wrecks her romance and then rapes her on her sister's bed, precipitating her final journey to the lunatic asylum, dressed in a Della Robbia blue jacket with a seahorse pin on the lapel.

The next morning I'd booked on to what was advertised as the Tennessee Williams walking tour. It started at 10 a.m., but by then I'd become suspicious of the vagaries of streetcars and so had risen very early and come into the Quarter when it was almost empty. On Bourbon Street men were sluicing down the sidewalks with buckets of soapy water, swilling away a debris of Mardi Gras beads and cigarette ends and adding a piercing note of bleach to the omnipresent smell.

The Royal Sonesta was quiet too, the neon sign that spells out
DESIRE
a little melancholy in the daylight. I took a seat in the lobby, a marble box decorated with urns of flowers like the beaks of tropical birds. There was a bank of telephone booths at the far end of the room, and this obsolete apparatus added to the sense, familiar to the over-punctual, of having wandered on to a stage set before the actors have received their final call.

A man was waiting on a chair beside me, at the centre of an enormous pile of luggage. He was a little overweight, in an orange
tracksuit and luminous white trainers. After a while a woman with puffy sugar-coloured hair came clicking towards him, snapping contemptuously from thirty feet: ‘We're not ready yet. You'll have to wait.' ‘Well, why did you make me get my stuff?' he asked, reasonably enough, and she spat back, ‘I didn't tell you to get it,' and then turned on her heel and walked away. He fidgeted miserably in the red chair, his big sorrowful face reminding me irresistibly of the weeping baby Alice rescues from the Duchess during her adventures underground.

I wanted to make some consoling remark, but by then the tour had begun to gather in an antechamber by the front desk. The guide, Nora, was a freckled woman with a straw hat toggled emphatically beneath her chin. I was by a good three decades younger than anyone else in the room and as we stepped out on to the street, following her like ducklings, a rangy sixty-something man slid up beside me and said, ‘I'm guessing by your accent you're not from these parts.' He had a daughter, he told me quickly, at university in Scotland who was studying the cello. She was predicted a 2:1 and hoped afterwards to go on and train to be a lawyer.

For the next two hours he pottered along beside me down the narrow streets, chatting amiably of this and that – how dirty the Quarter used to be, how it was nearly knocked down in the 1960s, the meaning of the word
graft
and then a long story about Andrew Jackson and his battle against the English, which took place in a meadow edged with live oaks on the outskirts of the city. All the while, Nora was whisking us through the stations of Tennessee's life. We whipped by two of his favourite restaurants: Galatoire's, where Blanche and Stella have dinner while Stanley hosts his poker game,
and Arnaud's on Bienville Street. ‘Tennessee hated so much to eat alone,' she told us cheerfully, ‘that he'd join groups of strangers at their table!'

I had an image of him then in his last decade, when he was very lonely and desperate for companionship: an unsteady figure in shorts and thick glasses, with a laugh you could hear from the other end of the street. Next, she pointed out the site of the old American Hotel on Exchange Place, where he used to come for casual sex. I expected some ripple of disapproval from the group at this, but they were evidently entirely unphased by the notion of picking up a cool hustle and seeing whether the nightingales could be persuaded to sing or not.

On we went, past the apartments he'd once rented, some shuttered and some with those beautifully ornate balconies that are so prevalent in the Quarter. Outside the brick-pink walls of 632½ St. Peter Street we stopped to admire the brass plaque about
Streetcar.
Nora quoted the line about clouds and we all looked up into the clean air, where swifts were sky-writing their unreadable letters against the wisps of cirrus.

Around the corner we stopped again and with the pleased air of a conjurer she produced the keys to 1014 Dumaine Street, the only house Williams owned in the city and the one in which he hoped he'd die. We filed in, past a Great Dane who sniffed warily at my hand before letting me pat her silky head. In the garden there was the spreading banana tree described in
Memoirs
, and a tiny, kidney-shaped pool, a few leaves circling at the bottom.

After that there didn't seem to be anything left to see, and so we drifted in a loose group back to the Sonesta. On the way my companion asked me what I did. When I mentioned I'd written a book about
Virginia Woolf, he thought I was talking about the Albee play and became all of a sudden very animated. His wife had directed it in college and he told me that of the four actors in that long-ago production three had died: one of suicide, one of liver disease and one of what he described as ‘a slow suicide of alcohol and drugs'. He looked me in the eye to tell me how very beautiful this woman was, adding with a sculptural gesture of his wrist, ‘but large'.

We shook hands twice, but minutes later, when I stopped to write up my notes on the steps of the Supreme Court, I found I had no clear sense of what he looked like. In fact, each time he'd turned to me in the crowd he'd seemed unfamiliar, as if his image had failed to develop in whatever darkroom it is the skull conceals. I was disconcerted by this experience until it occurred to me that it chimed with one of Williams's most passionately held beliefs about people: that they remain resistant to knowing, no matter how long or short the acquaintance.

Before I'd set off on my journey, I'd been reading
Notebooks,
the published version of Williams's diaries, which exist in the form of thirty cheap, undistinguished drugstore pads, kept more or less regularly from 1936 to 1958 and then again from 1979 to 1981. It had been unsettling. On Thursday 30 May 1940, Tennessee wrote in the spiral-bound stenographer's notebook he was using that year: ‘Holocaust in Germany – it really does sicken me, I am glad to say,' adding in the next breath: ‘Of course my reactions are primarily selfish. I fear that it may kill the theatre.' He continues in this self-interested vein for another paragraph, before breaking off with a thought that evidently pleased him so much he gave it a fresh line: ‘“
Me
” – that should be an adequate one-word-two-letter entry for every day!'