Understanding James Leo Herlihy

Robert Ward, Linda Wagner-Martin

• Editore: University of South Carolina Press
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611171990
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Understanding James Leo Herlihy is the first book-length study of one of America's most neglected post-war writers. Herlihy (1927-1993), an occasional actor, made his professional mark in life as a playwright and novelist. Herlihy's body of work includes numerous plays, two collections of short stories, and three novels. His best-known novel, Midnight Cowboy, was later adapted into a screenplay by John Schlesinger. It was the only X-rated movie to receive an Academy Award—three, in fact, in 1969: best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay.

In Understanding James Leo Herlihy, Robert Ward examines Herlihy's writing with reference to its historical, cultural, and personal contexts. Ward portrays Herlihy as a product of his environment, influenced by the 1950s and 1960s culture, including the youth rebellion, the erosion of the traditional family, and the increasing sexual liberation. Herlihy's award-winning novels, plays, and short stories display persistent themes of displacement, alienation, and the loss of innocence—all themes that Ward views as parallel to Herlihy's personal life.

Through a biographical introduction and a detailed discussion of the major novels, plays, and short stories, Ward details the writer's successful works.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding James Leo Herlihy

Leo Herlihy was born on 27 February 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, to parents of German and Irish heritage. His father, a construction engineer, and mother, a housewife, brought up their five children to believe in Roman Catholicism, traditional marriage, and the importance of working-class labor. From a young age Herlihy sought alternatives to such a predetermined life. His sister Jean introduced her younger brother to the literature of Thomas Wolfe, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others from the Book-of-the-Month Club. “As soon as I found out words,” remembers Herlihy, “I knew I wanted to write.” In 1934 at age seven he received a Dial typewriter as a Christmas present and began composing scripts for his own puppet shows. When he became an adolescent, the family and the city seemed insurmountable barriers to another, more artistic life: “How could anybody growing up on 76th South Sugar Street, Detroit, be a writer?”¹ The tensions between parents and children frequently appear in his writing, though Detroit is often supplanted by the faraway environments of Florida, New York, and Los Angeles inhabited by his characters.

World War II provided the catalyst for which Herlihy was searching. At the age of eighteen in 1945 he joined the U.S. Navy, though he was never to see active duty.² In the service he met John Lyons, an English professor from Loyola University, Chicago. Lyons quickly became a friend and mentor, helping Herlihy develop an appreciation for literature, especially short stories and plays—the forms he would go on to master in his writing. As his term in the navy was nearing its end, Herlihy had no wish to return to his family. Instead he wanted an education, one that taught him how to write. Knowing that his friend lacked formal entrance qualifications and disliked “play[ing] by the rules,” Lyons suggested Black Mountain College, a small and remote learning community then situated on the banks of Lake Eden, North Carolina.³

Opening in the fall of 1933, Black Mountain was certainly an extraordinary place. To its founder, John Andrew Rice, an artistic education was fundamental to the intellectual health of the individual and society. However, an education at the college was not the only learning offered there. “Most important to one’s growth,” wrote Annie Albers, “is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.”⁴ By 1946, as Herlihy faced the possibility of having to move back in with his parents, the college seemed the perfect place for him to spend his GI Bill funding. After his application was rejected, he traveled to the college to confront the person responsible for admitting students: “‘How come you turned me down? I’m just what you need’: And so they looked me over and they said, ‘Well, indeed you are. Come in September.’”⁵

For Herlihy, Black Mountain College was a “wonderful situation.”⁶ The desire to learn everything from the start—writing, painting, acting, psychology—led him to enroll in eleven courses at once, a route that his adviser attempted to dissuade him from taking. Here between 1946 and 1948 he would meet lifelong friends and important influences on his growth as a creative person. The poet M. C. Richards gave clear advice on improving his prose style, advice that he both respected and used. Richards and Herlihy liked each other from the start, and they continued their friendship through correspondence up until his death in 1993.

Similarly, Lyle Bongé, with whom Herlihy shared a dorm, became a close friend and influence. Bongé’s photography recorded Mardi Gras and the grotesquery of everyday experience, a focus that dominates much of Herlihy’s writing.⁷ As with Richards, Herlihy kept their friendship alive through correspondence, punctuated by the occasional visit. The letters, now housed in the University of Delaware’s Special Collections, are beautifully crafted documents, fragments of a life that are invaluable for our understanding of a writer who has been unjustly missing critical and biographical attention.⁸

Toward the end of 1947 Anaïs Nin came to the college on a four-day visit. At the time Nin was a diarist, avant-garde artist, and model. Her visit, as Herlihy remembers, “was just the most glamorous thing that ever happened to me . . . and I didn’t take my eyes off her the whole time.”⁹ They were to become intimate friends, she referring to him as “my spiritual son.”¹⁰ In an interview conducted over twenty years later, Herlihy vividly recalled the influence that Nin’s visit had on him as a fledgling writer:

One of the things she asked me was what I hoped to do with my writing. I said I hoped I could write a novel—I was strongly under the influence of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—and I hoped I could write a novel . . . that would make people feel how treacherous and sad it was . . . that we all have such suffering in our lives. If we could just feel the suffering and somehow affect it and cause people to be more concerned with the idea of maybe making less of it. That was my ambition. She said that seemed like a really good idea. And I said, “What do you do? What do you do with your writing?” She said: “I want to contribute to the world one fulfilled person—myself.” And that was like the beginning of—for me—a life-long double-mindedness. There was this part of me that wanted to do something for the world and part of me that wanted to understand what it meant to be a fulfilled individual. More and more I’ve realized that Anaïs was making a terribly important point that was never really understood by a great mass of people until the nineteen-sixties and then more and more in the seventies and eighties. People didn’t understand that one can’t really have a profound effect on others without being someone—the effect that you have on others comes from who you are. Anaïs understood this. I think she was the first person I ever encountered in my life who really understood that the great art form of the Twentieth Century is the Art of the Person. That, if you want to affect the world you live in, first of all you have to affect yourself, you have to affect the kind of being that you really think the world should be populated with. And that’s what Anaïs did. It was the central and strongest and most enduring influence on me and I’m very grateful for it.¹¹

With Nin’s departure the experimental artistic atmosphere at Black Mountain began to seem stifling. Herlihy’s desire to learn how to write clearly was frowned upon, the artistic equivalent of drawing the perfect circle. As a result he kept much of his writing private, asking only trusted friends such as Richards and Bongé for advice. The critic Isaac Rosenfeld, then teaching creative writing at the college, disliked Herlihy’s short stories intensely and encouraged his student to take an aptitude test to discover what else he could do with his life. Herlihy listened: the test told him to be a writer. The second vocation on the list was acting, about which Herlihy was equally as passionate.¹² He decided to leave the college and spent some time hitchhiking across the country before becoming a student at Pasadena Playhouse from 1948 to 1950.

The experience at Pasadena allowed Herlihy to grow artistically. His dislike of many of the theatrical roles he was given prompted him to return to writing in the hope of creating more suitable characters. As a result Streetlight Sonata: A Modern Tragedy was performed at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1950. Directed by Philip van Dyke and John Landreth, the play reproduced “a skid row dream street where people stand around waiting for their dreams to become the whole show.” Three years later Moon in Capricorn was produced in an Off-Broadway theater in New York.¹³ Moon in Capricorn is set in the astrologer Madame Zoe’s apartment, where the audience is introduced to Jeanne Wilkes. Wilkes lives only for her own pleasure, an attitude that her contemporary society is unable to tolerate. Both plays received only limited, localized attention. Despite becoming RCA Fellow at Yale Drama School in 1956, Herlihy drifted into a series of dead-end jobs.¹⁴ According to her diaries, Nin was concerned about her friend and encouraged him to move to New York, a city that she hoped would act as muse to his creative development. However, life on the social and economic periphery was perhaps the inspiration for which Herlihy was searching. Here was a world, on the edge both physically and psychologically, where many of his characters would wind up.

Herlihy became a recognized playwright in 1958 with the successful run on Broadway of Blue Denim, which he wrote in collaboration with William “Bill” Noble, a drama instructor at Pasadena Playhouse.¹⁵ The play, the plot of which looks through the keyhole of a postwar suburban home, received notoriety as one of the first pieces of drama to use a comfortable middle-class family to expose the issue of teenage sex and the perils of back-street abortions. Herlihy’s entrance into the realm of successful writers seemed sealed when the play was adapted to film by Philip Dunne and starred Brandon de Wilde and Carol Lynley. However, Dunne’s movie obscured Herlihy’s role as the original writer, as did other adaptations of his work. In the end he, like the characters who populate his work, was fated to remain on the fringes of American letters.

The concern with breaking down the image of the suburban middle-class family is one that also dominates his first novel, All Fall Down, published in 1960.¹⁶ Like those of the Bartleys in Blue Denim, the lives of the Williams family are shaped by the tension between material comfort and emotional insecurity. However, All Fall Down pushes that tension further, establishing Herlihy’s interest in the psychology of his characters. Like much of Herlihy’s work that came after, there are two important ways that this psychology is brought to the surface: the first is through dreams; the second is through a gothic landscape that invades the everyday reality of Herlihy’s fictional world.

In the only sustained, though unpublished, critical study of Herlihy, Jayne D. Mack devotes herself to the dream motif in his work. She has found that these sleeping dreams and daydreams have a particular structure. First, there are dreams that expose a specific problem that results from tensions within the family. In most cases these dreams are experienced by adolescent characters with overbearing mothers, such as Clinton Williams in All Fall Down, Gloria Random in The Season of the Witch (1971), Rudy Filbertson in “The Sleep of Baby Filbertson” (1959), and though somewhat older, Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1965). These initial dreams often enable the characters to begin to understand their present situations and map paths to maturity. As Mack suggests, “problem dreams become solution dreams,” and that pattern is a key device that originates in Herlihy himself: “I have always had a very active dream life, have recorded thousands of them in note-books over the years. . . . And being a dreamer myself, I seem to write of characters who dream. At first, I tried to eliminate the dreams because I was told no one wanted to read them; but soon discovered they were essential.”¹⁷

These so-called problem dreams also contribute to Herlihy’s representation of a gothic environment. This inspiration comes from the peculiarities of the southern gothic, at least as that term pertains to Herlihy’s reading of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. Like theirs, his suburban and urban environments become nightmarish, moonlit, shrouded in fog. In this setting his characters cast shadows on the dark ground, and their faces take on grotesque distortions, like the caricatures in the photography of Bongé and Stephen Arnold.¹⁸ As Mack says, this setting is sometimes temporary, as Herlihy cares too much for his characters simply to abandon them. It needs to be noted, though, that when older characters dream, such as Mary Ellen McClure in A Story That Ends with a Scream and Eight Others (1967), the gothic landscape, the grotesque existence of their everyday lives, is reinforced.

Sexuality is another major theme, which dreams often expose in Herlihy’s work. His characters struggle coming to terms with themselves as sexual beings, at times resulting in sexual dreams becoming incestuous. As Herlihy was a gay man who spent his early life trying to understand and articulate his own sexuality, it may be useful to consider a latent homosexuality as part of this struggle. There is little evidence of this latency in some early characters, though Clinton Williams does fall in love with the masculine femme fatal Echo O’Brien, but we see it very much on the surface of later work, especially the short story “Miguel” (1959) and perhaps Herlihy’s masterpiece, Midnight Cowboy.

That novel started germinating in Herlihy’s imagination as early as 1963, “when the character of Joe Buck started waltzing around inside my head, saying little things to me, being there when I closed my eyes.”¹⁹ Joe moves from small-town life to Manhattan to make his fortune dressed as a cowboy stud. His childlike naivety allows Herlihy to present him as an unknowingly gay icon, one who seeks rich women but ends up being picked up by confused and lonely men who are obsessed with their mothers. Herlihy refuses to abandon his protagonist to this existence, pushing him instead into a very human and loving friendship with the trickster Rico Rizzo, perhaps the most vivid character in all of Herlihy’s works.

His work had long been courted by Hollywood, and Midnight Cowboy was no exception. John Schlesinger’s film of the same title starred Dustin Hoffman as Rico and John Voight as Joe. Perhaps in order to be accepted in mainstream cinema, the film portrays Joe as a homosexual virgin, though it retains the novel’s sexual motifs and subtexts. The film earned three Academy Awards (for best director, best picture, and best scr...