Miracle elixir, that’s wot did the trick, sir
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage against the dying of the light with a well-mixed martini in your hand.
In a recent post about a Vox spoken-poetry performance, Art Scatter mentioned in passing “the magician’s drone of listening to the likes of W.H. Auden reciting his own work.” That phrase caught the attention of playwright, novelist and filmmaker Charles Deemer, who passed along the following memory of the great gimlet-eyed poet. (And, yes, we know it was Dylan Thomas who advised against going gentle into that good night. Thomas was known to pack away a brew or two, himself.)
Since you mention Auden …” Deemer writes, “his magical readings were more magical than meets the eye.
In 1963 I had the honor of hosting Auden, who was giving a reading at a community college I attended at the time. There was a dinner and reception before the reading, during which he drank, by my own nervous count, a dozen martinis! And seemed drunk. We didn’t know what to do, and when approached he assured us all was fine, no, he didn’t want any coffee …. so off we went to the reading, nervous as hell. He still seemed drunk to me when he went to the podium. Then somehow he didn’t. He gave a brilliant, flawless reading. Then he stepped away, seemed drunk again, and wanted to know when he could have a drink.
Remembering Auden’s feat got Deemer going, and he passed along another couple of encounters.
Deemer continues:
My other favorite “famous writer” story happened in the mid 70s.
At a university dinner party in Maryland I was seated next to the visiting and very old Katherine Anne Porter. She was a remarkable woman, telling me story after story about Paris in the 20s. Anyway, dinner ended, the drinking began (it was an English Dept party known for its drinking), but we stayed at the table, she talking, me listening. After an hour or so, some faculty member with too much to drink stumbled and knocked down a lamp behind us. Porter grabbed my arm, leaned close, and said, “Why are people throwing things?” I’ll never forget it!
So I might as well add my Ken Kesey story and conclude the deal.
In the 80s (aha, a famous writer story for each decade!) I was performing my Woody Guthrie one-man show at a camp ground on the coast at night. Some asshole was singing along out of key. He intro’d himself after the show, yep, Ken Kesey, looking the part dressed like a logger, boots, plaid shirt and suspenders etc. He invited me for a drink, we drove down the coast in his convertible and stopped at a bar. In which Ken Kesey drank … MAI TAIs! The picture of this rugged logger guy drinking these dainty drinks with little umbrellas in them … another unforgettable moment.
That got me thinking about my own college-days encounter with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who was something of a reluctant god in university circles in the late 1960s. He made the circuit, got paid a lot of money for giving 20-minute readings, and of course was obligated to show up at cocktail parties littered with the needy souls of those few and lonely locals who could truly appreciate the genius of the literary man of the moment.
The party took place in a swaybacked Craftsman-style flat gone to pot in more ways than one, and Vonnegut, Einstein hair crackling under the bare light bulb, clearly wasn’t in a party mood. He kept edging into corners, which were mostly stacked with yellowed copies of the New York Review of Books, and one particularly eager faculty member kept edging in on him, like a yawping poodle, begging for attention. The closer he got the farther Vonnegut retreated, but the space was narrowing. Then the faculty member tripped — and spilled his red wine all over the front of Vonnegut’s rumpled corduroy sport jacket. Vonnegut and the poodle froze, one in anger, the other in acute embarrassment. I happened to be standing nearby, and Vonnegut looked at me. “Do you have a car?” he asked coolly. Yes, I said, I did. “I have a headache,” Vonnegut said. “Would you mind delivering me to my hotel?” So I did. The great man was ruthlessly quiet on the drive. “Thank you,” he said when we reached the hotel. He opened the door and got out, and that was the last time I saw Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I returned to the party, which had thinned out considerably. The academic literati who remained seemed thoroughly depressed. The potheads didn’t seem to notice. They just kept partying on.
Maybe you have your own stories about great figures behaving badly, or just humanly. Let’s gather them here. Hit that comment button.
*
ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:
– W.H. Auden, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
– Dirty little martini/Wikimedia Commons
– United States postage stamp, Katherine Anne Porter and the ship of fools
– Statue of Ken Kesey in Eugene, Oregon. Photo: Cacophany/2007, Wikimedia Commons
– The book “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut.” Evidently, some lasted longer than Mr. Scatter’s.
April 20th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Let me see–I too have an Auden story. I was an undergraduate religion major at Barnard College and I’d been invited by a writer named Robert Payne, my father’s age (so he didn’t like this “date” very much) to go up to Union Theological Seminary where they were giving a play by an Oxford writer (and associate of Auden’s) named Charles Williams about Cranmer (all I remember about the play was that the good archbishop kept his wife in a trunk!). I was to meet Robert outside the little theater they had there, and he was as usual late and I was tapping my 21 year old foot impatiently when along came my adviser, Ursula Niebuhr (I’m just dropping names all over the bloody place here, aren’t I? with more to come) wife of Reinhold, accompanied by a tall man with a raddled face. “Oh Miss Ewlman, Miss Ewlman,” Mrs. Niebuhr cried (she was a Brit), and turned to the man beside her. “Wystan, this is Miss Ewlman and she is a great friend of Miss Mead’s.” Wystan? Wystan? who the hell is Wystan I wondered, and then he leaned down, took my hand, breathed the fumes from at least a dozen martinis into my face and professed to be delighted to have met me. The penny dropped and I realized it was Auden, whose poetry I loved and still love. And yes, Auden and Miss Mead, aka Margaret Mead, did indeed know each other quite well. Robert at that point turned up, and we all hastened into the theater. Friends of mine who went to Swarthmore in the same period used to talk about Auden requesting more “panther piss” at a faculty party there to which students had been invited. God alone knows what he would have called the I kid you not lime kool aid punch they served at Portland State at the annual president’s reception for the faculty in the mid-sixties.
April 21st, 2010 at 8:49 am
Great story. By the way, recently I asked my class if anyone knew who W. H. Auden was — in this class of 20-odd undergrads and half a dozen grad students, only 3 knew!!! (all grad students). I was appalled or is that just showing my age?
April 21st, 2010 at 12:48 pm
I know, I know. I recently had to explain to someone who Margaret Mead is/was. Not even a student, but a grownup of some kind. Can’t remember who; I’ve blocked it. Maybe we are showing our age, but I’d prefer to think the reason is the education system has gone straight to hell, bypassing the handbasket. In all seriousness, it is increasingly clear to me that we live in apost-literate society. It’s the people who know nothing and are proud of it that bug the hell out of me.
April 21st, 2010 at 1:19 pm
I’ve got a few interesting memories. Not really stories, mostly just snippets:
1. Hanging out with Mark Morris at a keg party, and tuning him out while he went on and on about his personal fabulousness.
2. A college house party following a reading by a former poet laureate, where he ended up publicly making out with a fellow student (despite his very obvious wedding band).
3. A friend in college published her No Problem List (that’s a list of people you’d have sex with, no problem) in the school newspaper just before a visit from Carrot Top. [I know he doesn't quality as a great figure, but, he's kinda famous, isn't he?] Amazingly enough, Carrot Top was #1 on the list. Well, CT somehow got hold of the paper. He proceeded to call her up on stage during his show where read her No Problem List aloud to 2,000 people. It was quite hilarious. Fortunately for her (she may disagree), she did not get her wish…play from CT was not forthcoming. We found out later he hooked up with another student.
April 21st, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Since we’re expanding beyond literary figures, let me share my favorite “famous person” story. Back in the early 80s, I got a call from a friend who said he was at a party with a guy who claimed to have known Woody Guthrie. Ends up this was Ramblin ‘ Jack Elliott, my folk musical hero! His Winnebago had broken down, parked in the lot of the Gypsy in NW. I got to hang out with him for a few days, get a long interview for WW, but best of all, I arranged an immediate concert at the old Earth Tavern so he could get money for repairs and gas to get out of town (he was pretty broke, driving between gigs). So I helped him set up before the Earth gig, just the two of us before they opened, and after we did a mic check, Jack asked me, What do you want to hear? and for the next HOUR he took my requests, my own personal Ramblin ‘ Jack Elliott concert. I already had proven myself a true fan because I had all his British records, where he recorded before Prestige picked him up in the States. But no celebrity story has topped my personal Ramblin’ Jack Elliott concert. And his daughter’s doc film, THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN’ JACK, does a good job of communicating the guy’s personality.
April 23rd, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Jenny, as for No. 1: Yes, I’m sure Mark Morris has tons of personal fabulousness. As for No. 2: At least the married former poet laureate wasn’t downing a dozen martinis. As for No. 3: Carrot Top? Ick!
Martha, who is this Margaret Mead person of whom you speak? (says the former anthropology student).
Charles, that’s a great Ramblin’ Jack story. I met him once, too, but only in the howdy-good-to-meet-you-sixty-seconds-and-it’s-done sense. So that really doesn’t count.
And now, since we’ve expanded to celebrities, I’ll tell my Candice Bergen story.
It was the late 1970s or very early ’80s, and I was in New York covering a bunch of show-biz junk (I think that’s why they called it a “junket”) for the old Oregon Journal. My wife (not Mrs. Scatter; the other one) and our very young daughter, Sarah (now the wise and worldly OED, or Older Educated Daughter) were with me. We were holed up in a suite in the Park Plaza (!) that had such a big walk-in closet we just had the hotel put a crib in it and that’s where Sarah slept.
The movie junkets worked like this: Maybe half a dozen films would be involved at the same time, the studios took up several spaces in the hotel, brought in directors, producers, stars, sometimes even a cinematographer, and arranged round-robin interviews with all the journalists who’d flown in. Very strategic, very assembly line. And primed for puffery. You wonder why movie critics get cynical?
Ms. Bergen was part of the assembly line — the movie might have been “Starting Over,” with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh, or maybe it was “Rich and Famous,” with Jacqueline Bisset (pray god it wasn’t “Oliver’s Story”), and at her appointed time she came to my suite to sit down and do her interview.
I must say she was charming, gracious, smart, very funny — the kind of person you’d actually want to know. Or maybe she was just a great actor, but I think it was genuine. Of course, she was Edgar Bergen’s little girl and knew this show-biz racket inside out and upside down.
Sarah had the sniffles, and was wandering around the suite in, if I recall right, a diaper and a T-shirt. Candice seemed amused. The interview droned on (can’t for the life of me remember what it was about, or who else I talked with on that trip) and as it neared the end, Sarah toddled up with a Kleenex in her hand. A very used, very gloppy, very runny Kleenex. This was the Plaza, not home, and she didn’t know where to put it. She looked up and saw Candice sitting there. Ah! An adult! She waddled over, held out her paw, and handed the Kleenex to Candice Bergen. SHE’D know what to do with it!
Candice took the Kleenex, said “thank you” most graciously, then broke out in that deep-throated, raucous, highly infectious laugh. She was, it seemed, genuinely delighted that SOMETHING had happened to break the incredible boredom and artificiality of the junket routine.
Of course, if I wasn’t already a Candice Bergen fan, that made me one. Over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed her in everything from “Murphy Brown” to “Boston Legal.” And every time I see her I think of that Kleenex. Gezundheit, Murphy Brown.