Milking the Moon

Milking the Moon:

A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet

By Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark

Copyright 2014 by Katherine Clark

Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Design by Ginny Glass

Katherine Clark is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 2001.

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Also by Katherine Clark and Untreed Reads Publishing

Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story

www.untreedreads.com

Milking the Moon

A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet

Eugene Walter

as told to Katherine Clark

Foreword

Eugene Walter is one of those personages who turn up in life and leave, well, an indelible impression in which all personal characteristics—manner, speech, dress, and so on—are memorably distinctive. The first time I saw him was in the spring of 1952—an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped Paris Review office on the rue Garancière. He was wearing a faded linen suit, the kind plantation owners traditionally wore, at least in the movies, set off with a white panama hat. Actually, I don’t recall a hat, but the rest of the ensemble was exact. He posed in the doorway to let all this sink in. He was there because he had submitted a short story to the fledgling literary enterprise—indeed it was one of the first submissions received—and to our delight it was quite wonderful, a Eudora Welty-ish tale entitled Troubadour.

We had summoned him to give him the news. His first words on hearing our delight were, Ah, Tum-te-tum…a curious, drawn-out triad of sounds that stuck in one’s mind. Indeed, we referred to him as such (Tum-te-tum is coming in to confer) and I wrote notes and letters to him as Dear Tum-te-tum, though in fact he preferred to be known as Professor James B. Willoughby. That was how he signed his letters, under the phrase mille fleurs. The reference to flowers was appropriate since he was an expert on the decorative arts—costume and set design. He pressed a number of his drawings on us at the Paris Review, including one of courtiers illustrated as different vegetables; his influence was such that Archibald MacLeish, who had taught a number of the editors and early contributors in his famous English S course at Harvard, wrote me in his capacity as an advisory editor, wondering if the magazine was getting a bit fey. He might have been even more concerned had he known Eugene often spoke about starting up a magazine entitled The Druids’ Home Companion.

The monkey was his favorite animal. The highest accolade he pressed on the girls around the Café Tournon, across from the Hôtel Helvétia where he lived, was that they were just a step or two below being Queen of the Monkeys. They adored him. He invited them in for candlelit suppers in his tiny one-room apartment, the light reflecting on the gold stars he had pasted on the walls. He knew a lot about Southern culinary delights, gumbos, and so forth, but he was poor, and so for all the intended elegance of these little suppers, he did miracles with no more than an onion, a carrot or so, and some oysters. A remarkable stew would come of this, not much of it for sure; one truly learned that taste was far more important than volume.

In the room he had a stuffed monkey under a glass bell jar that he packed and took with him whenever he moved. It went with him when he left Paris to take up residence in Rome. I saw it there when I visited him on the way to Africa one year. His rooms were quite substantial—cats and plants everywhere in the moist rain-texture of the place—certainly substantial compared to the little room in the Helvétia, where there wasn’t enough room, as he put it, to swing a cat…

I saw him once or twice in Mobile when I was in the area doing research for an oral biography on Truman Capote. He knew Truman as a boy, of course, and had stories about him. He knew some of the folks up in Monroeville where Truman spent his early life—Harper Lee, of course, and he had stories about her. What I remember especially about my trips to Mobile, though, was his despair at the ruination of Government Avenue, the sea captains’ houses that stood in rows torn down to make way for malls and gasoline stations, and especially the disappearance of the shade trees, which he said were a requirement in the summer because it was always ten degrees cooler when you went and stood under them.

Anything of beauty or antiquity (the two were synonymous) being threatened was to cause him anguish. Modernity, the future seemed of little interest. One of the reasons he wrote less than he could have, and perhaps should have, was his suspect view of what was going on around him; playing in movies, and there were so many of them, especially roles with exotic costumes, provided him with a wonderfully agreeable escape. I remember asking Louis Auchincloss, who wrote Jamesian novels, which century he would revert to given the chance, and he said, wisely if somewhat surprisingly, Anything after novocaine. I think Tum-te-tum would bypass the threat of pain to eagerly embrace an era of seventeenth-, even sixteenth-century gentility and grace, at least as long as troubadours were about, and harlequins, and courtiers wearing vegetable hats, and surely a monkey dressed in red pantaloons sitting in a golden cage.

George Plimpton

New York, New York

Introduction: Eugene in the Details

I first met the extraordinary Eugene Walter when I moved to Mobile, Alabama, in 1987. I remember a plump, avuncular figure with a cheerfully protruding belly and missing teeth who beamed at me through glasses that magnified his eyes into giant jelly beans and paid me much more attention than I had expected him to. Eugene was, after all, Mobile’s reigning character, the city’s Grand Old Man. I knew of his illustrious past, the decades spent in Europe as a bon vivant, the involvement with the Paris Review, and the roles in Fellini films. But he seized on me as if I were the celebrity: Honey chile, tell me all about yourself. I later learned that, for Eugene, the capacity to be interested in others was one of the hallmarks of a truly great individual. Eugene himself had a boundless curiosity for the other people with whom he shared life on this planet. That first night he quizzed me endlessly about my Alabama background, my Harvard education, and the upcoming publication of my first book, Motherwit, which was an oral biography of a black granny midwife.

Soon after, Eugene invited me to lunch at his house. Despite our previous encounter, the invitation took me by surprise: Eugene Walter and I really did not know each other. But this was precisely why he invited me. I have since realized that Eugene operated on this particular principle of hospitality all his life, and this is one reason his life was so full of interesting people, whether in Mobile, where he grew up, or in New York, Paris, or Rome, where he spent a combined total of over thirty years. He knew few people when he first arrived in these cosmopolitan capitals, but by the time he left, his friends and acquaintances included some of the more extraordinary individuals of the time in each of those places. In Rome, where he lived for over twenty years, he kept the nearest thing to a salon, the writer Muriel Spark tells us, and all roads led to him. Wherever he lived, Eugene sought out people the way others seek money or career advancement. If he happened to meet someone who struck his fancy, he did not wait for chance to provide a second meeting. He quickly planned either a lunch, a dinner, a picnic, or a party. And so I found myself, a young woman in her mid-twenties, going to have lunch at the house of a gentleman in his late sixties whom I did not know.

I had been told the experience would be unique, but little did I realize just how much so. Now, after working so closely with Eugene’s account of his life, I know that what I felt when I crossed the threshold of his house had been experienced by hundreds of others in all the different places where Eugene had lived. It was like entering another world, a magical universe of Eugene’s creation. It wasn’t just the books everywhere, cramming the shelves and piling up on the floors; or the cats draped over the sofas and chairs and lounging among the dishes on the dining room table; or the paintings and objects of art accumulated from a lifetime, jamming the walls. It was also the absence of any sense of time. I had stepped out of the nine-to-five workaday world where a living must be earned and so many things must be done, into a place where good food, good wine, good conversation, and human companionship took precedence over anything else. Eugene would have called the otherworldliness of his environment simply civilization.

I was immediately handed a glass of sherry to whet the appetite. There was an hour of conversation, interrupted occasionally by Eugene’s stirring of pots in the kitchen while I absorbed the exotic atmosphere of the cat-free room, filled with Eugene’s most treasured relics, off-limits to the cats’ prying claws. As the conversation evolved (and the sherry went to my head), a strange transformation seemed to take place. The soul expanded. The worries and anxieties of daily life now seemed trivial and far away. I found myself discussing transcendent subjects, like my favorite books or Eugene’s memories of Europe. Throughout the lunch, of Southern food and French wine and cats crawling on the table, I felt as if I had entered a higher level of existence, where the transcendent had superseded the everyday. This was made possible not so much by the unaccustomed alcohol I was consuming at midday as by the clock-free rhythm of Eugene’s household, which allowed a person to slow down and thus achieve depths of thought and feeling not possible in the nine-to-five race to get things done.

After lunch there was a glass of port, to aid the digestion, dahlink. By the time I left, a wonderful new friendship had been formed. Actually, I now felt closer to Eugene after just one visit than I did to some of my so-called close friends I had known for years. Instead of just grabbing a drink or a quick bite to eat, we had spent real time together and had been able to truly share our different selves. As I stepped back outside, that workaday world was in my face again like an unexpected brick wall. For one thing, it was still so bright. Lunch had lasted three hours, which is long for lunch, but it seemed longer. Was it really the same day? Was I really the same person as when I first arrived? No. All was changed. Not only was there a new friendship, but there was a new world opening up, a slightly new me.

From that moment on, my friendship with Eugene progressed rapidly. He called me often for small favors, usually rides to the grocery store, since he didn’t have a car. I was always happy to oblige; indeed, I was flattered to be asked. There were many others he could call on to perform these services. I felt chosen. And I was always rewarded, if not by a lunch or one of his squiggle drawings, then just by the sheer pleasure of his company. And it was such a pleasure. Taking Eugene to the grocery store was not just a trip to the grocery store. For that matter, taking Eugene anywhere or just being with Eugene was, again, like inhabiting a different universe.

His conversation was his greatest gift, the means through which he transformed the everyday world into a comic spectacle for anyone in his presence. It might just be a running commentary on the passing landscape: Have you ever noticed how the Baptist churches have the smallest steeples? I hate those little-prick Baptist churches. It might be a tragicomic tale of woe about a recent visit to the dentist or a run-in with a benighted city official. Or it might be a reminiscence about an important event or personage from his years outside the South. But just to greet Eugene with a conventional How are you? was to invite the unexpected. Oh, I don’t know, darling, he replied to me once. I’m fat, I’m bankrupt, and I’ve got fleas. Eugene was nothing less than a walking one-man show, always on, always delivering an impromptu dramatic monologue that never failed to amuse, delight, challenge, stimulate, fascinate, and educate all at the same time.

The qualities and characteristics that made Eugene so special are the same ones to be found in his favorite animal: the monkey. A creature of subtropical climates, the monkey is noted for its capering, its chattering, its mischief making, and its high jinks, frivolity, and caprice. Eugene was just such an animal. Throughout his book of poetry, Monkey Poems, he celebrates life as lived by the monkey. I’ll celebrate all wayward things, he proclaims in the first poem. In the last, he declares, O, I am monstrous proud / This life to live, this joy to laugh out loud. He was, like the title of one of these poems, The Socrates Monkey, seen dancing in midair, amidst Sun, Moon, Stars and Field Flowers. He was bawdy, funny, irreverent, mischievous, flamboyant, and impish; at the same time he was shrewd, incisive, learned, and knowing. He was a rare combination of sage philosopher and monkey clown.

The many of us who knew and loved Eugene always assumed that he would one day write a memoir about the remarkable life he had lived in and out of the South. After all, Eugene was a writer who had won a Lippincott Prize and an O. Henry citation, among other awards for his poetry, short stories, and novels. Eugene himself assured us regularly that he had every intention of writing such a memoir. But as the years went by, it gradually dawned on me that no such book was forthcoming. Part of the reason, I’m afraid, is that Eugene engaged in too many daily sessions with a certain Dr. Jim Beam. But the larger reason, I think, is that Eugene’s true artistic genius went into creating the moment—into living life itself—and for him, capturing those past moments in print would have been only a second-best achievement. As for Oscar Wilde, so for Eugene: he put his genius into his life and only his talent into his writing. I think he knew this.

So, gradually, the idea of doing an oral biography with Eugene dawned on me. It was exactly the kind of project that appealed to my love of Southern culture. Unique though he was, Eugene’s personality and voice were so classically Southern as to be archetypal. And in Southern literature, the autobiographical narrative of a native Southerner’s coming of age in the South and then embarking on a journey of exile and return is no less an archetype. To me, Eugene was the living embodiment of so much of Southern culture that should not be allowed to pass away with him. It had to be preserved. When I tentatively broached the subject with him, he said, "Darling, I can see it on your resume now: Motherwit and Daddyshit."

Happily, this was Eugene’s way of saying yes. As I planned for our project, the beauty of it struck me more and more. An oral biography was really the ideal medium for Eugene’s life story. This was the way to capture Eugene’s ability to create the moment through his conversational genius and the power of his personality as he performed his stories for an audience. It was not Eugene the writer, but Eugene the consummate Southern raconteur who needed to recount his autobiography. So, in the summer of 1991, I spent three hours every day from the beginning of May till the end of August tape-recording the stories of Eugene Walter in that same cat-free room where I had awaited my first meal with him.

*

The mere facts of Eugene’s life are quite impressive. Born in Mobile in 1921, he was virtually orphaned in his early teens. He embarked on life with no family, no money, no connections, no college education. Yet in the course of his seventy-six years, he was a writer, a poet, an actor, an editor, a translator, a cryptographer, a puppeteer, and a gourmet chef. The list could actually go on. His 1954 novel, The Untidy Pilgrim, was awarded the Lippincott Prize by judges Jacques Barzun, Bernard DeVoto, and Diana Trilling. Monkey Poems, published in 1952, won the author a Sewanee-Rockefeller Fellowship. He also wrote the bestselling cookbook American Cooking: Southern Style, compiled for the Time-Life Foods of the World series. He was one of the founding contributors to the Paris Review; his short story Troubadour appeared in the magazine’s first issue and was later awarded an O. Henry citation. For many years he served as editor for the important multilingual journal Botteghe Oscure, published in Rome by the American-born Princess Marguerite Caetani. As an actor, he appeared in over a hundred films, including several by Fellini, most notably 8½.

Despite the apparent drawbacks of his background, Eugene lived a charmed existence. By pure serendipity, he always managed to be at the right place at the right time. In the late forties he lived in Greenwich Village when it was coming alive as a famous community of artists. He was in Paris in the early fifties, when the second wave of American expatriatism was sweeping the city. And he was in Rome in the sixties, during the golden age of Italian cinema. In each of these places, Eugene was a part of what was happening and knew the people who were making it happen. He was one of those people himself.

But Eugene and I did not put together his oral biography in order to document his achievements or provide an exhaustive portrait of the postwar period in New York, Paris, and Rome. What we are offering is the madcap narrative of one happy-go-lucky Southerner’s adventures of life on this planet.

The themes of Eugene’s own life story are the same ones generated by his prize-winning novel and best-known work, The Untidy Pilgrim. In the novel, the protagonist is a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. But after this unnamed pilgrim arrives in the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts and musicians, and sweet lunacy’s county seat, he is soon seduced away from his beaten career path and set on what he calls a zigzag course through life.

Eugene’s notion of the untidy pilgrim is juxtaposed against the image of those industrious Puritan pilgrims who arrived in the bleak world of New England to found our American society. They imparted to our culture its grim, inexorable work ethic, along with a certain nose-to-the-grindstone singleness of mind and purpose. It is they who spawned that Yankee breed of cutters and dryers who already have their lives mapped out when they’re six years old. In the green and crazy land of the South, however, there are only untidy pilgrims and monkeys.

An untidy pilgrim is a product of a culture which is cut off from the mainstream of American society and the iron grasp of the Puritan work ethic. An untidy pilgrim is one who has been transformed by the lush, sensuous, prodigal landscape of the South, where life is erratic, erotic, eccentric, and exotic. The ruling forces are those of chaos, craziness, and caprice, which Eugene calls the Three-Eyed Goddess. In his novel’s Mobile, which lays claim to the oldest Mardi Gras in America, the permanent atmosphere of Carnival takes the place of any work ethic. Throughout the novel, the author celebrates this culture and its inhabitants, who inevitably forsake the straight and narrow, conventional and predictable road to Success in order to embark on an untidy pilgrimage of adventure and exploration through life and the world at large.

This is exactly what Eugene Walter did throughout his own life. He eschewed any straight and narrow career path and spent his life wandering from one place to another without clear direction or a fixed destination. Not only did he never obtain a college education, but he never even formed any definite plans for his life. He simply set out and went wherever his whimsy led him. Yet his life was one of extraordinary excitement and fulfillment. His life story is the flip side of the traditional American success story, which involves achieving money, power, and status. For Eugene, success meant the ability to enjoy and celebrate life. It is probably no coincidence that the kind of success he did achieve was more possible in Europe than in America. His is the tale of someone who simply followed his heart and lived in the moment and was rewarded with a transcendent life of art and culture. The book’s title, Milking the Moon, is intended to convey just that image of someone who traveled far and wide to squeeze all the life out of life. This title was inspired by a song Eugene wrote called Go Milk the Moon for Fellini’s film Juliet of the Spirits.

Milking the Moon traces Eugene Walter’s life from his childhood in Mobile, to his three years as an air force cryptographer in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, to his years in New York, then Paris, then Rome, and then back again to Mobile. Fittingly, the trajectory of Eugene’s life did not follow a straight line from one fixed point to another, but formed an untidy circle, which ended up almost, but not exactly, where it had begun, as the Mobile Eugene returned to was not the same Mobile where he had grown up. In part one, Mobile, Eugene describes with poignant lyricism his beloved hometown of banana trees and oak trees, subtropical heat and humidity, old houses and front porches. His evocation of the porch life and the Southern household routines of gardening, cooking, shopping, eating, napping, visiting, and gossiping forms a classic portrait of Southern life. This first section is also a portrait of the artist as a young man in his small but exotic Southern town. In its concentrated description of the special hothouse environment which produced our untidy pilgrim, the first section differs somewhat from the others, which trace the zigzag path of that pilgrim after he leaves his Southern home and launches himself into the world at large. In their episodic progression from one adventure to another, these sections become a picaresque narrative depicting our rogue hero in action as he meets important people and becomes involved in important events. Again, this progression does not have a climactic or culminating moment, but travels a circular course where there is always another adventure right around the bend.

Knowing that the journey was all, Eugene relished every detour and seized every opportunity for being sidetracked along the way. Sagittarians are interested in so many things, he says of himself, that when we head out for California, we end up in Florida. Eugene’s stories are the same way. He says of Alice B. Toklas that she had the true classical gift of the parenthesis—she always finished her parenthesis, and she always returned to her original subject. According to this definition, Eugene Walter also had the true classical gift of the parenthesis. Readers of this quintessentially Southern narrative by this quintessential Southern storyteller must assume the virtue, if they have it not, of a Southern audience, which has all the time in the world and, of course, absolutely nothing better to do than sit out on the porch and swap stories.

*

One of the first things readers will want to know as they encounter Eugene’s fantastical tales about real people like Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, T. S. Eliot, and many more is: Are they true? This was the same question I was asked repeatedly before I began my collaboration with Eugene: Do you think he will tell you the truth? Invariably, my reply was: I certainly hope not. I was not after the truth of Eugene’s life, whatever that was in terms of facts. I wanted his stories. The ones I had been hearing, and he had been telling, for years and years. After all, these stories were the central and most important truth of Eugene’s life. It was through storytelling that he invented himself and created a life for himself out of nothing. Therefore, I felt, his life story should reflect this storytelling and its central truth.

So in response to inevitable questions like Did Eugene Walter really get three pubic hairs from Tallulah Bankhead? I answer with a question of my own which indicates my approach to fact-checking Eugene’s anecdotes. How can we ever know? I also have three words of advice for the reader of this narrative: Just enjoy it. Eugene is best understood and appreciated as a mythmaker, as a teller of tall tales, as a yarn spinner from the Southern oral tradition. As such, he never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good story.

However, this is not to say that Eugene had no regard for factual accuracy. When I arrived at his house every morning for our daily interview, it was not so much the Monkey Poet who welcomed me as it was a sober and earnest schoolboy intent on making all the right answers on his upcoming exam. Eugene approached our project with more seriousness than I thought he possessed. Throughout the summer, he made a monumental effort to recall the events of his life with as much accuracy as possible. But when it came to his favorite stories, he was like a great jazz improvisationist. These were familiar riffs and staples of his repertoire, and he never played them the same way twice.

Eugene’s own philosophy of storytelling can be pieced together from various things he said over the years. One of his grandmother’s favorite sayings, which he was very fond of quoting, was, Gossip is no good if it doesn’t start from fact. This was Eugene’s conviction as well: A story was no good if it didn’t start from fact. My very strong sense is that Eugene’s stories are essentially accurate in their basic foundation. He met the famous people he says he met; what he says transpired is probably a fair approximation of what really happened. In other words, Eugene was not primarily a fabricator. He embroidered. He embellished. At a certain point in his very best stories, the actual gives way to the apocryphal. This isn’t the mark of a fraud; it’s the mark of a great storyteller.

In one of our interviews, Eugene himself said, The mark of a good storyteller is: Have a whole shelf full of shoeboxes of details. Take out one detail one time, one detail another. Otherwise, if you tell the same story over and over, it gets stale. You have to have a new detail which you bring out each time. It’s like those ballad singers at the Scottish lords who improvised new verses for those ballads every night and forgot some others.

A case in point would be Eugene’s oft-told tale about the time he had dinner in Paris with William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. At the end of a spectacular meal at one of the finest Parisian restaurants, Eugene says, Faulkner leaned back in his chair and observed wistfully, Back home, the first butter beans will be coming in. In the most classic version of the tale, Katherine Anne Porter replies with the same wistfulness, Blackberries. The title of a recent Southern cookbook, Butter Beans to Blackberries, was inspired by this story of Eugene’s. I have heard that well-known version, but the version Eugene recounted to me on tape is slightly different. After Katherine Anne Porter says Butter beans, Faulkner says, The baby speckled ones. Blackberries had been put into a shoebox, and the baby speckled ones had been taken out.

Although I know of no feasible way to verify this story, I don’t doubt that Eugene attended such a dinner with William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. I have no trouble believing that they had an exchange afterward which inspired the dialogue Eugene has attributed to them in his retelling. But clearly Eugene has been doctoring that dialogue for some time. The anecdote has a basis in fact, but Eugene is in the details. I think this is the case for many, if not all, of Eugene’s stories.

In another interview, when I was pressing Eugene to supply a specific name or date in one of his stories, he finally replied in exasperation, Oh, darling, I can’t remember. That’s a research detail for a novelist. I’m a ballad singer. This was the second time he had referred to himself as a ballad singer, and the analogy is as instructive as it is appropriate. Eugene’s narrative is often lacking in specific names, dates, and other dry facts not particularly relevant to the heart of a given story. So be it, I say. When Eugene later recalled such information, or corrected an error or inconsistency, I have changed the text accordingly. Otherwise I have let the lapse of memory, the contradiction, or the error stand. As I see it, my role was to let Eugene be Eugene in print as he was in person and thus capture his character as I knew it and his voice as I heard it. In putting together the final manuscript, I have strenuously avoided any editorial meddling which would violate the integrity of either that character or his voice. Inevitably, I have not been able to include every story Eugene told me or cover every aspect of his busy life. This book is representative of those stories and that life, but it is by no means comprehensive.

There is a Cast of Characters at the back of the book which provides biographical information about many of the people Eugene mentions. Of course, some of them have not yet made it into the reference books. Others are too far-flung to be tracked down by even the most diligent researcher. I hope the reader will approach it with the spirit in which it is offered: as a helpful, though not exhaustive, appendix to the text.

*

The last time I saw Eugene Walter alive was on March 29, 1998, when he lay in a coma in the hospital a few hours before he died. He could not know that I had just driven over from New Orleans, where I now live, to pay my final respects and say farewell. I’m sure he wanted it that way. Farewells and final respects were not really in his line. To the last, Eugene Walter was a man of comedy, not tragedy, or even serious drama. Nothing illustrates this point better than my encounter with him just two months earlier, the last time I saw him truly alive.

My husband and I were to pick him up at seven o’clock on a Saturday night in late January for a dinner party at a friend’s house. We rang the doorbell right on time. I knew immediately that something was wrong. The mail, which was one of the loves of Eugene’s life, was still in the mailbox outside the door. Nor did I hear the faint sounds of the classical music that Eugene kept on for the cats whenever he left the house. The familiar sounds of his feet shuffling to the front door also failed to materialize. There were no sounds of any kind. The house was all silence, stillness, and darkness. There was no Eugene.

We rang the doorbell repeatedly, to no avail. We tried the front door and the back door without success. We went around the side of the house and hollered for Eugene through the windows. No answer.

Finally we got back in the car and drove down the block to the pay phone at the Circle K. There was no answer at Eugene’s house. Then we called our host to see if Eugene had perhaps contacted him or canceled for the evening. But no, our host replied that he had spoken with Eugene at noon, and Eugene was most enthusiastic about attending the dinner party that evening. In desperation we dialed Eugene’s number again. This time we got a busy signal. We hopped in the car and raced back to his house.

But the same thing happened all over again. No answer when we rang the doorbell. No answer when we shouted through the windows. We took our second trip back to the pay phone at the Circle K. And this time Eugene picked up the phone.

Eugene, are you okay?

Darling, he said, I’m perfectly fine. I just can’t get up off the bathroom floor.

You can’t get up off the bathroom floor?

I’m flat on my back on the bathroom floor.

What in the world has happened?

I just stumbled and lost my balance and fell.

Are you hurt?

Darling, I could dance a jig if I could just get up, but I can’t get up. I’ve been trying all afternoon.

All afternoon?!

Yes, darling. Luckily there’s a phone in the hall right outside the bathroom, and I’ve been trying for hours to get hold of the cord. Finally I managed to grab it and pull it over to me.

You know, Eugene, the line was busy when I called you earlier.

Oh, he said, that was Nell.

Well, is she on her way over? Does she have a key to your house? Did you tell her what happened?

No, darling. Of course not.

But Eugene—why not?

Because, darling, it was none of her business.

Nell was one of his best friends—someone he’d known for over fifty years.

We had no choice but to call 911, and a few moments later firemen broke into Eugene’s house and retrieved him from the bathroom floor.

Mr. Walter, one said, are you on any medications, sir?

Oh, yes, he said. Let’s see. Ah—honey, peanut butter, British orange marmalade, and Jim Beam.

May we see your driver’s license, Mr. Walter?

I don’t have a license. I don’t drive a car, I don’t wear blue jeans, and I don’t go to football games.

It was during that episode at his house that I finally acknowledged something I’d been denying and suppressing for months: Eugene Walter was dying. Yet I was laughing.

With almost anyone else, what had just happened would have created a sad, somber, serious scene. With Eugene, however, it was comic. It was as if the tragic could not even gain a toehold in the presence of Eugene Walter. There was no room for it, no oxygen for it. It was not just that Eugene had been able to maintain a sense of humor after spending what we later figured was at least six hours on the bathroom floor. It was something more than that. The sheer force of his personality had turned a potentially tragic scenario into a comedy.

With his aching back and his evident discomfiture, he was not trying to be funny, any more than I was being callous by laughing. He was just being Eugene, and I was just doing what I always found myself doing whenever I was with him—I was laughing. Even in the face of death.

Afterward I came to understand and respect Eugene’s comic genius more than I ever had before. Eugene saw life through the lens of his own antic wit. He loved to quote Aristophanes’ claim that God is a comic poet. Paradoxically, his whimsical response to life was so powerful that he forced others to see the humor in any given situation, including death. This vision was not one that denied the serious or the tragic, or merely anesthetized us to that part of life. Rather, his was a spirit that could find and affirm the joy of life in the midst of the terrible, the horrible, the traumatic, and the catastrophic. To know Eugene was to know that joy. He helped to show us the joy and fun of living when we might have seen nothing but a grim reality. Not only that, but he could transform a grim reality, like a bad spill onto the bathroom floor, or a dull chore, like going to the grocery store, into an occasion for hilarity.

Eugene stands as an important and rare counterpart to the many people, especially in America, who are so caught up in some serious purpose that they have no ability to enjoy the tiny details of daily life. Indeed, anything that does not pertain to that serious purpose or pursuit is only an irritant for such people. For them, the world is just an interference, a place of small daily torments. Too late, they often learn that achieving that goal or dream was not the key to happiness they thought it would be, and they’ve missed out on life along the way.

Those without such a driven or serious approach to life are the ones for whom, like Eugene, the world opens up in all its infinite beauty and enchantment. A trip to the grocery store could give him no end of pleasure, as he cruised the aisles, humming happily to himself, pushing his basket, inspecting the shelves, and then, inevitably, going into a paroxysm of delight as he discovered some new item, like, say, lingonberry jam.

Not only would he be transported, but in turn, his presence somehow transfigured the store from a modern-day wasteland of fluorescent lights and Muzak into a magical universe of surprises and possibilities. And from him I learned a lesson that few teach us in a society so consumed with success: It is not necessarily the most important or significant things that can give us the most intense happiness in our daily lives. It’s the stray cat, the purple wild-flower, the lingonberry jam.

When Eugene died that Sunday night a few hours after I left the hospital, I was at first distraught that I had not been able to say my final farewells. Now I’m glad that my final encounter with him was on that night in January, when he dusted himself off and said, "Of course I’m still going to the party, darling. I wouldn’t dream of missing it."

*

When Eugene Walter died, one of the few remaining vestiges of a bygone Southern culture died also. As Eugene himself once remarked, They don’t make them like they used to, even in the South. The Southern psyche and Southern voice that Eugene exemplified have virtually disappeared along with the South itself. I am proud to have been a part of putting together a book which attempts to preserve Eugene Walter for posterity. I will be the first to say that the experience of reading his stories and encountering his personality in print pales tremendously in comparison with the experience of actually being in Eugene’s company and watching him perform his stories with gestures and pantomime and facial expressions and eye movement and accents and mimicked dialogue. But I think those who knew and loved Eugene will find that this book comes as close as anything possibly could to capturing our dear old friend between two covers. And I know that the many others who never knew Eugene Walter will find in this book great cause to wish they had.

Katherine Clark

New Orleans, Louisiana

Part One

Mobile

Monkey Was I Born

You may think you don’t know me, but you have probably seen me on late-night television playing either an outlaw or a hanging judge. During those twenty-three years I lived in Rome, I must have been in over a hundred of those crazy Italian films. I’ve been a crooked cardinal, a lecherous priest, and a female impersonator, just to name a few. I was Velvet Fingers in Lina Wertmüller’s Ballad of Belle Starr. If you’ve ever seen Fellini’s 8½ I’m the tacky American journalist who keeps pestering Marcello Mastroianni with obnoxious questions. And if you haven’t seen 8½, you need to: it’s one of the great films of this century.

But to begin at the beginning.

I was born, at least this time around, in little ole Mobile, Alabama, in my grandmother’s house on the corner of Conti and Bayou Streets. Downtown Mobile. 1921. The first thing I remember is a big gray face staring down at me. I learned later from my nurse, Rebecca, that it was one of my grandmother’s twenty-three cats. When someone suggested to my grandmother that it might not be in the best interests of the newborn baby to have a cat in its cradle, my grandmother said, Nonsense. The cat is much more likely to catch something from the baby, she said. So perhaps that is why I belong much more to the world of cats than I do to the human race.

And like most poets, I was born with my thumb attached to my nose in that ancient gesture of disrespect toward all authorities, establishments, institutions, and shitfaces. It has taken long and arduous operations to disattach it. In certain weather, and in certain circumstances, it jerks back to its original position.

The moment I was born, my sun, my moon, and my ascendant planet were all in the same sign of Sagittarius. The effect is that I am triple everything. Triple Sagittarius. Sagittarians are basically happy, don’t like to settle down, like to travel, are of an inquiring mind, basically generous, can be real mean and snotty if crossed, have lifelong feuds—the good Mobile stuff. We are the ones who gallop ahead two hundred miles and then stop and say, What country is this? If we could organize, we could have taken over the world way back, but we are interested in so many things that when we head for California, we end up in Florida. You know. Our emblem is the centaur: half animal, half man. And shooting that arrow at the moon. Centaurs have all four feet on the ground, but that arrow is whizzing off to a distant planet.

I’m supposed to, by ancient tradition, get along with all Geminis because that’s the opposite sign. I get along perfectly well with Aquarius. They don’t understand us, and we don’t understand them, but we get along. So many of my lady friends have been Aquarius. Leontyne Price, Muriel Spark, Ginny Becker are all Aquarius. If I don’t show too much exuberance, I get along very well with Capricorns. Fellini is a Capricorn. All of the Italian film directors except Zeffirelli are Capricorns. But there are no fish signs anywhere in my life. Sagittarians do not get along with Pisces.

This is all part of an ancient body of knowledge that we have simply dumped, because the early Christians were opposed to it. But those cave age darlings were onto something. They knew that if that dead stone the moon can affect us the way it does, then those big things like Jupiter have to affect