FROM: Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965.
July, 29 and 30, 1940
Captain Jack’s Wharf, Provincetown, Mass.
Dear Donnie—
Your letter came at a very opportune moment as I was feeling blue. My life now is full of emotional complications which make me write good verse—at least a lot of it—but make my mental chart a series of dizzy leaps up and down, ecstasy one moment—O dapple faun!—and consummate despair the next. … Depression this morning occasioned by fact the ballet dancer [Kip Kiernan] stayed out all night. So far no explanations, though I suspect a nymph at the other end of the wharf and am moving to a single bed downstairs till suspicions confirmed or dispelled. … Isn’t it hell? But, oh, God, Stinkie, I wish you could see him in his blue tights!
Later: Everything is okay again and I didn’t have to move downstairs after all. He slept alone on the beach because he needed some sleep. Doesn’t get much with me. But that’s his own fault for being so incredibly beautiful. We wake up two or three times in the night and start all over again like a pair of goats. The ceiling is very high like the loft of a barn and the tide is lapping under the wharf. The sky amazingly brilliant with stars. The wind blows the door wide open, the gulls are crying. Oh, Christ. I call him baby like you call Butch, though when I lie on top of him I feel like I was polishing the Statue of Liberty or something. He is so enormous. A great bronze statue of antique Greece come to life. But with a little boy’s face. … I lean over over him in the night and memorize the geography of his body with my hands—he arches his throat and makes a soft, purring sound. His skin is steaming hot like the hide of a horse that’s been galloping. It has a warm, rich odor. The odor of life. … And now we’re so tired we can’t move. “I like you, Tenny”—hoarse—embarrassed—ashamed of such intimate speech! I laugh for I know he loves me!
Then everything’s gone and when I wake up it is daylight, the bed is empty.—Kip is gone out.—He is dancing.—Or posing naked for artists. Nobody knows our secret but him and me. And now, you, Donnie—because you can understand. Please keep this letter and be very careful with it. It’s only for people like us who have gone beyond shame.
Windham later wrote in Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Others: “It was this sentence that struck me at the time. His assumption about me was wrong: I had not gone beyond feeling shame about sex. I had never felt it, and despite the evidence I had seen in Tennessee’s compulsive promiscuity and his ever-ready prophylactic salve, as though the punishment of the disease was the most likely follow-up to the act of making love, it had not occurred to me that shame was for him an inevitable part of sex, which could only be either felt or passed beyond.”
