Outlaw Marriages (23 page)

Williams drank two fifths of alcohol—one of bourbon, one of vodka—each day, while also using drugs. The
New York Times
later quoted him as saying, “I had suffered a great loss in my life, and I sought oblivion. While I continued to write every morning, through the use of ‘speed' injections and amphetamines taken muscularly, I was not in a very real world and unconsciously I might have been seeking death.”
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As had been the case during his period of spiraling downward in the late 1940s, Williams also turned to sex as a way of numbing his pain. The playwright initially invited a young poet into his bed and later replaced him with a paid companion from the theater.
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America's foremost playwright continued to churn out new works during this period, but none of them held a candle to his earlier masterpieces.
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In 1969, Williams's brother checked the playwright into a drug rehabilitation center. The patient had severe physical reactions to the withdrawal that the facility required, suffering three major seizures and two heart attacks within the first two days of treatment.
57

Once he was released from the center and for the next thirteen years, Williams devoted his energy to the craft of writing, even though the results were never satisfying. A pair of much more positive events occurred in 1979 when he, along with Aaron Copland, was awarded Kennedy Center Honors and a year later when Jimmy Carter gave him the Medal of Freedom.
58

Tennessee Williams's life came to an abrupt end in 1983 when he accidentally choked to death, at the age of seventy-one, while taking a prescription drug.
59

The country's major newspapers published obituaries as well as tributes to him. The
Boston Globe
called Williams “a towering figure of the American theater,” and the
Washington Post
wrote, “He was the greatest American playwright. Period.” The
New York Times
began its praise by calling Williams the “most important and influential playwright” in the history of the American stage, and then stated that seven of his plays had become “a permanent part of the international theatrical repertory.” Only two of those works had been
written before Little Horse had stabilized Williams's life and career, while the other five had been written during the years the two men had been a couple.
60

Several of the newspapers made brief references to the playwright's life partner. The most telling of those statements came in the
Los Angeles Times
when it said of Williams: “His longtime companion of 15 years, Frank Merlo, died of cancer in 1963. After that, the playwright said, ‘Everything sort of fell apart.'”
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Attacking Racism through Literature

…

During the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin took his place among the giants of American literature. His eloquent prose reflected on his experiences as a black, gay man living in a predominantly white, straight nation. Two of his books—
Go Tell It on the Mountain
and
Giovanni's Room
—received consistently positive reviews from critics, while two others—
Another Country
and
The Fire Next Time
—became national best sellers. Baldwin was lauded not only as one of the finest writers the country had ever produced but also as an effective advocate for racial equality.

Although the public is familiar with Baldwin, few people recognize the name Lucien Happersberger, even though he played a critical role in the writer's life and career. It was only when Baldwin fell in love with Happersberger that the aspiring author was finally—after ten years of effort—able to complete
his first novel. Baldwin biographers have noted, in fact, that all of his best writing occurred during the periods when Happersberger provided him with the emotional security he desperately sought throughout his life.

James Baldwin was born in 1924 to an unmarried domestic who cleaned houses in the Harlem section of New York City. He never knew his biological father, but, when he was three years old, his mother married a Baptist minister. The stepfather then abused the boy, physically as well as emotionally.
1

Jimmy was a frail child who had a voracious appetite for reading. By his early teens, he knew he wanted to be a novelist, and his intellect and writing talent were so clear that he was offered two college scholarships. Soon after he graduated from high school, however, his stepfather died and he was thrust, as the oldest child in the family, into the role of supporting his mother and his eight half brothers and half sisters. He worked as a dishwasher and elevator boy.
2

It was during this period that Baldwin met the man who became his lifelong mentor and confidant, Beauford Delaney. In 1940 when the boy came to know Delaney, who was more than two decades older than he was, he saw for the first time that an African American man could function as a self-supporting artist. In the words of one Baldwin biographer, “It was as if Jimmy had found his long-lost father.”
3

At the age of twenty and with Delaney as his role model, Baldwin began to pursue a writing career. His first step was to stop supporting his family, and the second was to focus on his creative work. He soon published a book review and an essay that won him a literary fellowship. He used the money to pay his way to Paris, believing his creative juices would flow more freely in what was widely viewed as the world's most cultured city.
4

By this point, Baldwin recognized his homosexuality and went to bed with various men he met while working as a waiter. This became a time of mental turmoil for Baldwin, who was haunted by feelings of extreme loneliness. “In Paris,” one biographer later wrote, “Jimmy threw himself into an expatriate life dominated by a frantic search for the kind of companionship that would answer his cravings to be loved.”
5

Adding to Baldwin's despair was the frustration that came with having his heart set on completing a novel, but not being satisfied with anything he wrote.
6

Lucien Happersberger was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1932. All that's been documented about his early years is that his family was from the middle class and that he showed, during his adolescence, a talent for painting.
7

When Lucien turned sixteen, he left his family and moved to Paris in
hopes of earning a living as an artist. He then joined the legions of young men who tried to sell their paintings by displaying them on the streets of the French capital.
8

Baldwin biographers describe Happersberger as a young man who was “quick-thinking and witty” and who possessed a “devil-may-care hedonism.”
9

From the moment Baldwin set eyes on Happersberger in a seedy Parisian bar in 1949, he was smitten. At least part of the appeal was physical, as the Swiss lad—six feet two inches tall, slender, and good looking—was much more attractive than Baldwin, who stood five feet six inches tall and was as skinny as a scarecrow, his dominant physical features being his protruding eyes and heavy eyelids that had earned him the disparaging boyhood nickname of “Frog Eyes.”
10

Another part of the appeal was that both young men—Baldwin was twenty-five, Happersberger was seventeen—enjoyed having a good time. The couple's first evening together set the standard, as they enjoyed several drinks at various bars before spending the night in Baldwin's bed. Their connection clearly wasn't intellectual, as neither of them knew enough of the other's native language to converse in full sentences.
11

After that first night, they immediately became a couple. Their mutual interests—other than alcohol and sex—extended to laughing a lot and using their ingenuity to survive on very little money. “We used to meet late in the day at a café,” Baldwin later recalled, “and pool the few francs we'd managed to raise that day and then we'd eat. We shared everything.” Happersberger's assessment of what made their outlaw marriage work is captured in his statement, made many years later, “We accepted each other exactly as we were. That's rare.”
12

Shortly after the two men became a couple, Happersberger expressed concern that Baldwin's jittery nervousness meant he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. So the younger man took his new lover to Switzerland, where the pace was slower and the air was healthier than in Paris. They landed in the tiny village of Loèche-les-Bains, where the Happersberger family had a small chalet. “There was nothing else for Jimmy to do in that village,” Happersberger later said, “but to work on his novel.”
13

The partners then went about pursuing their individual creative interests—Happersberger painting and Baldwin writing. For the latter, the words flew onto paper more quickly and more gracefully than ever before. He immediately began making progress on the novel he'd been struggling to complete
for more than a decade. He read draft passages to his young lover as he finished them, and, as Happersberger's English improved, the Swiss youth occasionally made a comment that was helpful.
14

When either man needed a break, they either made love or listened to music. “One activity we both very much enjoyed,” Happersberger recalled decades later, “was listening to Bessie Smith and Fats Waller. That jazz music also carried Jimmy back to his childhood, where he needed to be in order to write about the subject he had in mind.”
15

Finally, in February 1952, the couple walked to the nearest post office, the completed manuscript in Baldwin's hands. He sent his novel to Knopf publishing house in New York, hoping it would attract the attention of an editor there. Meanwhile, he continued to feel secure and confident, writing to friends that Happersberger was “the love of my life.”
16

For Baldwin, those three years in the Swiss village were both enormously productive professionally and highly satisfying emotionally. There were soon signs, however, that the outlaw marriage would have to overcome some serious challenges.
17

The problem was a dramatic difference in what the two men were looking for in a relationship. Baldwin wanted a faithful partner who would live with him in a stable domestic arrangement that was comparable to a conventional marriage. “Jimmy was very romantic,” Happersberger told an interviewer in 1990. “He had a dream of settling down.” Happersberger, by contrast, loved Baldwin but wanted the freedom to pursue sexual activities with other people—women as well as men. One Baldwin biographer wrote, “Lucien loved men, but he loved women as well.”
18

Happersberger had told Baldwin, from the beginning, that he wasn't willing to be monogamous. And yet Baldwin deluded himself into thinking he and his teenage partner's mutual love for each other bound them together in an idealized relationship that had no room for infidelity and that would last forever.
19

The contrast between Baldwin's dream and the realities of the situation came crashing down on him when Happersberger began inviting a former girlfriend to spend weekends at the chalet. Baldwin then found himself sleeping alone in one bedroom while Happersberger and the woman, whose name was Suzy, slept in the bedroom next door.
20

More reality entered the picture when Happersberger announced, in the summer of 1952, that Suzy was pregnant with his child. Baldwin's initial reaction was anger, but that feeling was soon tempered by his memories of how unhappy his own early years had been because his biological father hadn't
been part of his life. And so, he urged his lover to marry Suzy and help her raise the child, which Happersberger did. When the couple's son was born, they named him Luc James, after Baldwin, and asked the writer to be the boy's godfather.
21

These disruptive developments in Baldwin's relationship with Happersberger coincided with good news from the United States. An editor at Knopf liked the manuscript Baldwin had sent, and he was interested in working with the author on a few revisions before publishing it. Baldwin then left Europe and returned to America.
22

Baldwin had written the semi-autobiographical
Go Tell It on the Mountain
from the perspective of a poor African American boy growing up in 1930s Harlem and struggling to gain the love of a distant stepfather. Much of the novel focuses on religion, portraying the church as a source not only of inspiration and community but also of repression and hypocrisy.
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