‘I’ll Go Forth Alone’
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In Lahr we learn that Williams, toward the end of his life, was traveling with paid companions—whose habit of locking the door between their adjoining hotel rooms was, he said, always a painful sound. And that presumably included the man in the next room the night the playwright died in New York at the Hotel Elysée. The question, however, has always been how he died. The first explanation was that he choked on the cap of a bottle of pills he was trying to open with his teeth. But the coroner claimed he died of an overdose of Seconals. So the question then became: intentional or accidental? It wasn’t till I heard Augustin Correro mention all this in his lecture following “At Liberty” that I felt for the first time that the answer to that question mattered.

Perhaps that’s because Williams is a hero to most writers, certainly gay writers, but also to any writer who wants to keep going. That this prodigious artist—whose motto was “En avant!”—could efface himself, bring it all to an end, goes against what we want him to be: someone who refused to quit. And yet, the Lahr biography implies, it was most likely suicide. As Lahr presents it, there were too many clues to ignore: small, telling things he did in Key West before leaving for New York. And Thomas Keith tells me as we walk down Chartres Street after this excellent production of Milk Train that Williams told the man he was traveling with that night not to let anyone enter his room under any circumstances. Whether he knew he was taking too many pills or simply forgot, whether he did it intentionally or simply let it happen, no one can know. But it brings us back to the coughing ladies—the specter of death that was always in his work.

THERE IS a lady coughing in The Sea Is Quiet Tonight as well, a memoir by one of the panelists at the Saints & Sinners Festival, a retired Boston psychotherapist named Michael Ward, whose book I read on the plane going home—only in this case the coughs, the blood-stained handkerchief, take the form of an initial three-day fever, a case of thrush, a skin rash, shingles, and finally pneumonia: the well-known markers on the road to AIDS. Death haunts this work as much as it does The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which makes the first part of Ward’s book all the more… poignant? dramatic? romantic?—whatever it is that the story of Camille engenders in the spectator. To read the history of the relationship between the narrator and Mark Halberstadt, the man we know will die, is all the more moving because we know he’s doomed. For what distinguishes The Sea Is Quiet Tonight is not only that it’s an AIDS memoir but that it’s also a story of falling in love, which happens after a dinner party on Fire Island, and the long, hard struggle to meld two separate lives together. It’s also the story of what happens after Mark dies. Because Ward kept a journal, all the conversations, incidents, domestic difficulties have been retrieved, and make us flip back frequently to the front of the book, to the photograph of the handsome man at the wheel of a sailboat, smiling at us from beyond the grave.

What is the pleasure, the frisson, that we get from the knowledge that death hangs over him, or the spectacle of Flora Goforth arguing with the young man who’s been nicknamed the Angel of Death by gossips who say he attaches himself to rich old women when they are dying? A way of dealing with mortality from an æsthetic distance? When one is through with Ward’s memoir, one has gone through a harrowing deterioration of something that was so hard to build in the first place: the commitment of two men to one another. It brings to mind the old tradition of Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias as much as it does Williams’ coughing heroine.

That said, there’s a big difference between the death of Flora Goforth and that of Mark Halberstadt—Mrs. Goforth dies with a secretary who dislikes her, paid servants, and a wandering poet who may be either a predatory con man who comes to rich old women just before they die to get what he can, or a mystical being who will help ease Mrs. Goforth’s transition into the next world. What makes either scenario even more humiliating for Mrs. Goforth is that she wants Christopher; and he refuses to gratify her (and when he does grant her wish to see him naked, he opens his Japanese robe, alas, with his back to the audience). So she negotiates. Not only does she refuse to feed her unwanted guest, she won’t even give him a smoke unless he agrees to kiss her. Sitting in the audience, one flinches at the proposition. He is young and beautiful, she is old and haggard. One can’t imagine these two beings touching. And they don’t. He simply says, “There’s a time for kissing and a time for non-kissing, and this is a time for non-kissing,” and that’s that. She goes without the satisfaction of his body. She dies without sex, without love, alone.

Not so the doomed man in The Sea Is Quiet Tonight. Mark Halberstadt dies in a room with his lover and parents; and before that he’s been overrun with visitors, friends, fellow AIDS activists, doctors, and nurses. He dies among other people offering various forms of comfort and love. In Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych it’s made plain that, no matter how populous our domestic situation, everyone dies alone. But The Sea Is Quiet Tonight reminds us that one irony of AIDS is that it brought about forms and degrees of intimacy that “the golden age of promiscuity” never did. The final scene of Mark’s death—his last heroic effort to stay alive—is a defeat for everyone who tried to prevent its happening. But what Mark Halberstadt got from lover, friends, and family, Williams denies his heroine. When Mrs. Goforth raucously cries, near the end of the play, “I’ll go forth alone,” one wonders if that’s not the playwright speaking for himself.

On the wall of the annex to the Gallier House, where the opening night party of Saints & Sinners was held, a line by Williams is painted: “Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans,” it asks, “when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?” When one enters what a friend has called the third trimester of life, such lines resonate all the more—as does Flora Goforth’s vanity about her body, her loneliness and fear of dying. That Williams created this play in his late forties is testament to the clairvoyance of his obsessions. He was haunted by the brevity of life. When the mother in “At Liberty,” after listening to her daughter’s regrets, warns her that “The past keeps getting bigger and bigger at the future’s expense!” you think: That’s Williams! The distinctive note, the quotation on the wall of the Gallier House.

New Orleans is full of a sense of the transience of time, the sweet bird of youth, the vanity of human wishes. It still pervades the French Quarter, especially when you get away from the crowds. Standing in the Ursuline Convent or in the walled garden of the Beauregard-Keyes House across the street, walking down Dauphine or Burgundy late at night, watching from one’s hotel room the big ships coming up the Mississippi in the afternoon, one is inundated with not just a sense of history, of time past, in this many-layered city, but of the hour, the afternoon, the particular arrangement of clouds above the town below. And there’s always the river. Taking off, on the way home, the pilot banks the plane and one sees below the massive oxbows of the Mississippi, flowing endlessly past a city that once had a streetcar that took Blanche Dubois from a stop called Desire to one called Elysian Fields—after changing at Cemeteries! One never knows what one will experience when one goes to Saints & Sinners, but this time it was a sense of mortality.

Andrew Holleran’s novels include Dancer from the Dance, Grief, and The Beauty of Men.