Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (34 page)

The other guest with Gore was Frederic Prokosch, the controversial American writer known for his novels, poetry, memoirs, and criticism.

[Frederic Prokosch (1906-1989), whose novels
The Asiatics
and
The Seven Who Fled
received widespread attention in the 1930s, remains one of the most mysterious figures on the American literary landscape. Born in Wisconsin, he spent most of his adult life in Europe, more or less wandering. He defined his life as a hopeless riddle: “I have spent my life alone, utterly alone,” he claimed. “My real life has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts, and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes. My life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, and capricious.”

In 1983, he would publish his notorious
Voices: A Memoir,
a self-proclaimed record of his encounters with some of the century’s leading artists and writers. But in 2010, the book made headlines when it was shown to be almost wholly fictitious and part of an enormous hoax.]

“There were a lot of egos at my party, but I don’t think any topped Prokosch,” Tennessee said.

In a corner of the room, where he held court, Prokosch told the other guests, “My most ardent fans are Thomas Mann, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, W. Somerset Maugham, T.S. Eliot, and Lawrence Durrell.”

“Gore became a friend of this weird gentleman, Mr. Prokosch,” Tennessee later said. “In those days and for the rest of his days, Gore liked to picture himself an intellectual. I did not. I was a poet of the heart.”

As dawn came up over the legendary seven hills of Rome, Tennessee invited Gore to go for a ride in “the grandfather of all Jeeps. It sounds like a pair of fire engines in a fit of passion.”

“I purchased it from a G.I. after seducing him,” Tennessee said. “It has a defective muffler.”

He and Gore were later seen racing around the fountains of St. Peter’s in the pre-dawn Roman ritual of sobering up. As Tennessee claimed, “An American could get away with a whole lot in 1948 in Rome.”

As he recklessly drove the Jeep, he told Gore, “I’m molto umbriaco.”

“What in hell is that?” Gore asked.

“Americans call it shitface drunk,” Tennessee said.

One hot afternoon in Rome, Tennessee’s new friend, Gore Vidal, invited the playwright to accompany him to the Convent of the Blue Nuns in Rome. “What is this?” Tennessee asked. “Get thee to a nunnery?”

The invitation involved meeting the widely acclaimed George Santayana, who had retreated to the convent with the “Blue Nuns”
[at 6 Via Santa Stefano Rotundo, on the Celian Hill, in Rome]
for peace, contemplating, thinking, and writing. Gore had to explain to Tennessee that Santayana was a world famous philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, a towering figure. Tennessee had heard of his famous line, however—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Santayana was not at all familiar with the works of these Americans. He was more at home conversing with figures he’d met during his stint teaching at Harvard, including Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Walter Lippman.

At the convent, Santayana received Gore and Tennessee in a mauve-gray vest from 1890 and a Byronic shirt open at the neck. He was eighty-five years old.

During his time with Gore and Tennessee, he presented them with copies of his famous 1935 novel,
The Last Puritan
, which had become an unexpected bestseller. He told them that his book was a
bildungsroman [a novel centering on the personal growth of the protagonist.]

During the course of his talk, Santayana revealed that he was a classical pragmatist committed to metaphysical naturalism. “I believe that human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may be adjusted by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness.”

“A lot of that went over my head,” Tennessee later said, “but Gore at least pretended he knew what Santayana was talking about.”

Even though Tennessee had not “tuned in” to Santayana, he felt his meeting with the philosopher was worth noting in his
Memoirs:

“When we met Santayana, he was an octogenarian, semi-invalid, and a saintly old gentleman. He had warm brown eyes of infinite understanding and a delicate humor, and he seemed to accept his condition without the least bit of self-pity or chagrin. It made me, this meeting, a little more at ease with mankind and certainly less apprehensive about how the close of a creative life might be. His gentleness of presence, his innate kindness, reminded me very strongly of my grandfather.”

***

After all that spiritual uplifting, Tennessee decided it was time he returned to a life of decadence. He invited Gore to join him in his old battered army Jeep for a tour of Southern Italy—the Amalfi Coast, Capri, and Sicily—“to meet the golden boys of the Mediterranean.”

In Rome, both writers had been told that they might have to compete with “hordes of German women” flocking at the time to Southern Italy for sex, since millions of their own young men had been killed in World War II while fighting for the Nazis.

On their southbound trip in the Jeep, Gore noted Tennessee’s work habits:

“
He worked every morning on whatever was at hand,” Gore said. “If there was no play to be finished or new dialogue to be sent round to a theater, he would open a portable file and take out the draft of a story already written, which he would begin to rewrite it.”

When Gore once discovered him revising a short story that had already been printed, he asked why.

“Well, obviously, it’s not finished,” Tennessee answered, returning to his typing.

Perhaps Gore’s most astonishing statement about Tennessee was that his “puritanical guilt drove him to relentless self-punishment. He was—and is—guilt ridden. Although he tells you that he believes in no afterlife, he still is too much the puritan not to believe in sin. At some deep level, he truly believes that the homosexualist is wrong and the heterosexual is right. Given this all-pervading sense of guilt, he is drawn in both life and work to the idea of expiation of death.”

On the Amalfi Coast, Gore, along with Tennessee, paid his first visit to the little village of Ravello, which in time would become Gore’s residence.

“We walked in the footsteps of D.H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Bocaccio,” Gore said. “I vowed to return to Ravello.”

That night, they descended on the taverns of Amalfi, where Gore determined that “many of the penises of these young Amalfi boys, when flaccid, evoke a piece of okra.”

After Ravello, Tennessee drove Gore to the little fishing village of Positano, which he would visit several more times in his future without Gore.

After World War II, the village had been discovered by troops stationed in nearby Salerno
[less than 30 miles away]
, under the command of General Mark Clark.

Then, Gore and Tennessee took a ferryboat to Capri. An aging British homosexual in Positano had told them that Capri “had the tastiest young men.”

Following in the footsteps of such artists as D.H. Lawrence and Noël Coward, they arrived on the island which the early Greeks had dismissed as “a haven of wild boars.” Later in life, Tennessee would use the island as a setting for
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
.

Capri also had a reputation as “the Island of the Sirens,” a temptation to Ulysses. Tennessee became fascinated with one of the legends of the spectacularly debauched Tiberius (born 42 BC, died 37 CE), who had retired to the island after fleeing from the tortures, pain, and degradations he had inflicted on Rome since he had ascended to the status of Emperor in 14 CE. He and Gore visited the ruins of the Villa Jovis, one of several palaces the Emperor had constructed there. Gore told him that when Tiberius tired of a young boy or a young girl, he tossed them off the cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below, instructing his Centurions to hack their bodies, living or dead, to pieces.

“That depraved emperor knew how to get rid of a lover who no longer amused him,” Tennessee said to Gore. “We might follow his example.”

Then Gore urged Tennessee to drive his Jeep further south until they reached the departure point of a car ferry which would haul their vehicle across the Strait of Messina to the eastern coast of Sicily. From there, they would drive to the fishing village of Cefalù, once a Norman stronghold with a cathedral dating from 1131, 44 miles east of Palermo.

Gore had been reading extensively about Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), an early 20
^th
century English occultist, mystic, ceremonial magician, and poet. The popular press of the day had dubbed him “The Wickedest Man in the World,” and “The Great Beast 666.”

Gore had been tempted to follow his controversial
The City and the Pillar
with an even more daring book. With an interim, working title of
The Beast of the Apocalypse
, it would have been based on the flamboyantly notorious life and legacy of Crowley and the cultish commune he had established in a small stone-sided house (“The Abbey of Thelema”) in the hills above Cefalù,

There, Crowley had built up an ostentatiously bizarre cult devoted to a creed of “Do What Thou Wilt.” In time, and in the future, Crowley’s writings would influence such di verse writers, musicians, and entertainers as Marilyn Manson, Ozzy Osbourne, Kenneth Anger, and Dr. Timothy Leary of LSD fame.

[Thelema, the religion developed by Crowley, was based on a mystical experience that he and his wife, Rose Edith, had shared in Egypt in 1904. According to Crowley, a spiritual being defining itself as Aiwass dictated a text known as
The Book of the Law (aka, Liber AL vel Legis
), which outlined the principles of Thelema. An adherent of Thelema is a Thelemite
.

As Crowley developed his core of acolytes from his base in Cefalù, he wrote about and widely publicized his “Holy Books of Thelema,” as reviewed, worldwide, by a raft of scandalized tabloid journalists. Thelema blended ideas from the Quabala, alchemy, tarot divination, yoga, astrology, sexual disciplines which included the Tantra, and various forms of occult mysticism that some clergymen and journalists, outraged, defined as Satanism. In 1923, universal hatred throughout the U.K. was intensified when London’s
Sunday Express
published the allegation that a 23-year-old Oxford undergraduate, a recent convert named Raoul Loveday, had died from drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat during one of the Thelema community’s ritualized worship services. (More likely, later medics have surmised, was acute enteric fever derived from polluted water from a nearby spring.)