The Lingering Hour

One mystery that remains after all these years since the publication of "The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner" in 1988 is whether Henry was the subject of Tennessee William's last play, "The Lingering Hour." The play itself is a mystery to Williams scholars, because only a fragment of it is known to exist: in the Theatre Collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard. Curiously, the fragment is apparently the final pages of the play, including the ending.

In July, 1982, I had dinner with Tennessee at his home on Duncan Street in Key West and he told me that Henry was the subject of his last play, "The Lingering Hour." After Tenneesee's death I made inquiries about the play but found out little except that one or two other people had heard that a play by that title existed.

I didn't think much more about the subject after the Faulkner book was published in 1988. When I decided I wanted to put the book back in print in 2005 I tried to see what I could find out about it. I found a few glancing references to it on the internet and contacted several Williams scholars, including Dr. Allean Hale at the University of Illinois, Dr. Annete Saddik, of the New York City College of Technology, and Tom Keith, editor of New Directions, Tennessee's publisher. What I found out was what I've said, that only a fragment is thought to exist and, also, that is is the most apocalyptic of Tennessee's final plays, reflecting his growing despair, apparently, and presaging his death.

This preoccupation with death and the sorry state of humanity coincided almost exactly with Henry's own sense of doom as is documented in the book. In May, 1980, Tennessee travelled to Lexington to join up with Henry so that they could attend to their joint "vicissitudes of the body" at a clinic Henry had discovered in Owensboro. It seems Henry would have been a good subject for a play matching the description of Tennessee's later plays. At the time of his death Henry was making plans to go to Key West to hear Tennessee read something he'd written about him. It's easy to speculate that it was the play. (Keeping in form, a few days before Henry's death he had a dream that Tennessee had died in a car wreck and tried to call to warn him.)

Dr. Hale sent me a copy of an essay written by Linda Dorff that appeared in a Yale Theater magazine. The essay was titled "Babylon Now, Tennessee Williams's Apocalypses" and dealt mostly with his later plays including "The Lingering Hour." There was good information about all the plays except "The Lingering Hour." Too little of it existed to say much about except that it seemed to be the most apocalyptic of them all. Included in the essay were the two key pages (of four known to exist) of the play which I read closely.
There are two characters, August (whom Dr. Hale thought was Tennessee himself), and Steven, whom she thought might be Henry. Here is the scene:

People are wandering around in a town square within site of a volcano that is apparently spewing toxic gasses and threatening to blast everyone and thing away. Scientists, who have taken some compound that makes them immune to the gasses, are discussing what to do, how many townspeople and tourists they can save, if any. A few may be vacated from the beach far below the town, or maybe not.

Steven, apparently a painter, is wandering around in a "shimmering gold Sulka robe" oblivious to the Scientists' orders. August tells Steven the whole scenario is quite a show and that the whole mountain is likely to blow any minute. They discuss an acquaintance who has just had a heart attack after a naked encounter with Steven's apparent friend, Roberto.
The discussion goes on in a sort of surreal manner with August suggesting that he is a playwright and it appears that the whole thing may be a play within a play, or that life itself is just a play and the audience is fully aware of it; or maybe not. What we are sure of is that an explosive hell is about to be let loose on humanity. At the end August "hobbles painfully over to the chair near which the scientists had worked."

There can be no question (if ever there was one) that the setting for the Lingering Hour is Taormina, Sicily. I have photos taken in Taormina when I was researching the book that almost serve as a graphic illustration of the scene as "August" describes it. Etna, of course, is the volcano (which is only too visible from Taormina and is imprinted on the residents' psyches like a tattoo), Naxos is the beach at the bottom of Mt. Taurus on which Taormina is located; IX April Square is the town square, and the characters are wandering along Corso Umberto. (This is the tight little milieu Tennessee and Henry occupied in 1980 where they went there to rest and paint. You can just see the ailing pair sitting at one of the outdoor cafes along Corso Umberto watching the nightly wandering of the tourists and residents ... that's what it was called: "wandering," just as in the opening scene.)

So, that much is clear. What is not clear is whether "Steven" is Henry Faulkner. There are two clues which may not be thought to be the over-reaching of a biographer bent on proving a point: One is that Steven is dressed in "his shimmering gold Sulka robe, " a very Faulkneresque thing; the other is Steven saying "If I did bring the wrong canvas-" And, well, perhaps a third clue: August says to Steven, "Your Roberto took to his heels . . ." I first read of Roberto in Claire Rabe's minor classic, "Sicily Enough." Before I went to Taormina one of my goals was to try to ascertain if this guy was real, and, if so, to interview him. It turned out that he was real enough and was, in fact, a font of information about Henry, since it was Roberto who gave Henry his first place to stay on Henry's first visit to Taormina. Here is a passage from my book, written in 1982, describing the scene of Roberto's Mecambo Bar:

"His (Henry's) favorite hangout was the Mecambo bar, Taormina's finest. The setting of the Mecambo, which also served as a sidewalk cafe, was among the most beautiful in town. It was situated in the center of Corso Umbeto, on a large, marble tiled plaza known as the IX April Square. The plaza was dominated by a historic clock tower and otherwise bounded on three sides by other cafes and and ancient cathedral, each building with its own assortment of lemon, orange, banana, or oleander trees to complement the ubiquitous bougainvillaea. The open side of the plaza, opposite the Mecambo, revealed a spectacular sheer drop to the Mediterranean hundreds of feet below. One could marvel at a truly breath taking vista: of Giardini Naxos wrapped like a bottle label around its beach-lined bay far below, with Mount Etna, Europe's largest active volcano, providing a smoldering backdrop off to the right ...." This passage, as much as the photos, describes the scene presented in the play.

Final thoughts: According to Dorff's essay, Tennessee mentioned in a letter dated May 15, 1982 that he was working on "The Lingering Hour." It was in July, 1982 that he told me that the play was about Henry Faulkner. The date on the play itself is August 1982 (whatever that means). Now, assuming that he was working on it while in Taromina in 1980, and that he was working on it in May, 1982, and told me about it in July that year, that seems like a lot of time gone by to have produced only four pages, not to mention the final four pages. That's something for Tennessee scholars to chew on: Where are the other pages? It seems likely that they (or some) were written.

A House in Sicily

In 1999 Englishwoman Daphne Phelps published a critically acclaimed book titled "A House in Sicily," a summing up of her life in Casa Cuseni, a villa she inherited from an uncle in Taormina. The longest chapter in the book (and most interesting, according to reviewers) is titled "Henry Faulkner."

When Henry first went to Taormina in 1960 Ms. Phelps was one of his chief benefactors. "I am still surprised at myself for having done it," she begins her account. "I cannot think what made me. For me, an on the whole cautious Anglo-Saxon, to have invited (on only a second encounter) a strikingly eccentric American painter born at Egypt (sic), Kentucky, to come and live, rent-free for as long as he liked, in the small flat in my garden which was then empty in the absence of a gardener, was indeed astonishing."

She describes his paintings and painting habits, and how "With shrewd, Kentucky-peasant determination, he bargained and beat down prices . . ." for everything from picture frames to daily meals in restaurants. He was "a small, sprite-like figure who sprang and danced rather than walked along . . ." She tells several typical Henry stories, including one about summoning the doctor mayor in the middle of the night to treat his lamb; bringing over all the animals on his second trip and of Gentry knowing when he returned from an unscheduled trip to the states. There are tales of Henry's buying trunk fulls of antique frames and arranging for their shipping to the U.S.; of Phelps flying to Lexington to see him and the weird party he gave for her; of Henry's and Tennessee's trip together in 1980 (Henry's third), and of Tennessee's trials having to put with Henry.

This is good stuff, observed first hand, and highly readable and entertaining. Phelps doesn't do as well in detailing Henry's life before she met him. Much of the background seems to have been taken in large chunks from my book. The parts that weren't taken from my book bore the mark of countless tales I'd heard people tell about his background, all of them untrue, but told by Henry because it made a better story.

There are two beautiful color photos, one of Henry in a black suit with a bouquet of flowers posing with a troupe of Africans dressed in native getup complete with facial paintings and spears, and one of Daphne with a dog and a drake and flowers which was posed by Henry in a composition any graphic designer would recognize as art itself.

Of course the book is not just about Henry. Phelps writes of several famous people who stayed at Casa Cuseni over the years. One person she didn't mention held special interest for me. Before we went to Sicily we read a book called "Sicily Enough," a brooding, beautifully spare and elegant narrative by Claire Rabe. The book was praised by the likes of Henry Miller, and for good reason. It was pregnant with eroticism and edgy mood. As I wrote under the "The Lingering Hour" section above, we were surprised to actually meet Rabe's lover, Roberto. We were equally surprised that Rabe's address while in Sicily, according to Phelps, was the very room in Casa Cuseni where Henry stayed. I was not much surprised that Phelps doesn't mention Rabe in her book. Phelps seemed to have a low opinion of the feisty woman when I interviewed her in 1982.

(More update material is planned for the site. Stay tuned!)