Cat's Condition

The recent Indiana University Theater production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof did not disappoint, as I feared it would. I was concerned that it might pale against the memory of a London production some ten years ago that starred Brendan Frazer and Ned Beatty in the roles of Brick and Big Daddy. It did not. It was well acted and admirably staged.

What struck me instead was how commonplace and less fraught the two central dramatic themes—cancer and homosexuality—have become since the play was first performed in 1955. Mendacity is the catchword. Everyone is lying. Big Daddy has been lied to about his aggressive cancer, which will soon kill him. Brick is lying about his relationship with Skipper, a “pure” friendship that nowadays can only be seen as latently, if not overtly, gay. But Brick’s lie is as much for himself as for the family, and his own mendacity drives him to drink.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1963) achieved recognition as a playwright after years of toiling in obscurity. His star finally rose with the 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie. He was at his best in the 1940s and 1950s. Williams’ genre is Southern tragedy. His plots tend to be Shakespearean in character. In Cat the king is dying. Big Daddy’s plantation empire is at stake. Rival brothers and their rapacious wives have gathered for the end that everyone except the king knows is coming. Big Daddy has been kept in the dark by the family’s treacherous secrecy and his own self-delusion. Big Daddy is lying to himself as much as Brick is lying to himself about their respective conditions.

But the conditions have lost the punch they had half a century ago. Cancer, while potentially devastating, is no longer spoken of in whispers. In Cat it is regarded as an automatic death sentence, which it usually was in the 1950s. Similarly, Brick’s homosexuality, whether he ever acted on it or not, is a dirty secret, one that has driven him into alcoholism—and drove his “friend” Skipper to suicide. Of course, homophobia and guilt still drive people to suicide today; the cyberbullying and gay teen suicide statistics are appalling. But being gay—or having homosexual thoughts—are no longer discussed only in whispers. More than a dozen U.S. states and several counties allow gay marriage. The world has changed. Mendacity regarding cancer and homosexuality is no longer the norm, no longer the stuff of great drama.

Williams’ Cat is well crafted, a classic perhaps, but no longer contemporary. The larger issues of the dying king and the lies people tell to delude themselves and others are as timeless as they are in Shakespeare. But the twin vehicles of Williams’ drama—cancer and homosexuality—throw the play into the class of historical drama. They are horse-and-buggy themes in a hybrid electric era. That said, it is no less watchable. Cat still offers an evening of compelling drama.

Gore Vidal's Box Set

Vidal at 23, photographed by

Carl Van Vechten in 1948

When Gore Vidal died in July at age 86, I belatedly discovered that he had written three mystery novels in the early 1950s, under the penname Edgar Box. An inveterate mystery reader, I take particular delight in discovering mystery novels written by persons best known for other pursuits. (A favorite example is striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, who penned two mysteries in the early 1940s, the first titled, appropriately, The G-String Murders.)

Gore Vidal, aka Edgar Box, cranked out three mysteries in quick succession: Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954). They were reissued in a single volume, titled Three By Box, in 1978. All three feature a reporter-cum-p.r. man, Peter Sargeant, as the amateur detective. Sargeant is a suave, if sometimes bumbling, sexual swordsman, almost a comic James Bond without the trappings of spydom. (Fleming’s 007, however, did not debut until Casino Royale in 1953.)

Despite its heterosexual hero, the first of Vidal/Box’s trio is an unabashedly gay—in both old and new senses of that word—romp along the lines of Oscar Wilde meets Raymond Chandler. The novel is a delicious foreshadowing of later flamboyant works, such as the outrageous Myra Breckinridge (1968), the movie version of which provided a final screen vehicle for the inimitable but often imitated Mae West, and the surreal and irreverent Live From Golgotha (1992).

Death in the Fifth Position is a surprising novel for the early Fifties for its frank, often gay, sexuality. But the treatment is not so surprising for Vidal, who had published The City and the Pillar in 1948. That novel offered a coming-of-age story about a young man coming to terms, healthily, with his homosexuality. Thus it flouted convention, which at the time regarded gay as synonymous with immoral, and so caused a scandal. The City and the Pillar was only Vidal’s third novel, and one can imagine an editor, on receiving the manuscript of Death in the Fifth Position a couple of years later, counseling the author to adopt a pseudonym for the latter book’s publication. I don’t know whether that happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Of course, it could equally be the case of a “serious” writer not wanting to be associated with something as déclassé as a mystery novel.

By contrast, the second of the trio, Death Before Bedtime, is sadly pedestrian. It is a serviceable mystery but lacks punch and pizzazz. The third, Death Likes It Hot, regains some sparkle, rather like a second wind along about midnight after an evening of hard partying. But it doesn’t measure up to the first mystery either, and I’m inclined to think that Vidal must have felt as though, after this third effort, he had gotten mystery writing out of his system. Box was laid to rest.

Still, the three novels are entertaining and, as mysteries go, intriguing. They are worth taking up, though no one could be faulted for stopping after the first one.

Real Books in Real Bookstores

In “Loggerheads,” his piece for the December 7, 2009, New Yorker, David Sedaris writes admiringly of a family he describes: “Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”

“Words still warm from being read” — what a wonderful image! I can conjure that from “real hardcover books,” and yet it eludes me when it comes to reading on an electronic device, whether this computer or one of any number of recently released handhelds. Kindles, Sony E-Readers, iPods — you name them. The latest one brought to my attention is called eDGe, whose dual screens open like a book with one side to display text and the other full-color images. It’s being touted as the brightest and best for the textbooks of tomorrow. Maybe it is. And maybe, for the sake of economy in a world where textbooks can cost a mint and weigh a ton, it is needed for economic and utilitarian reasons.

But none of these electronic devices, as yet, can compete on an aesthetic level with a “real hardcover book” — or even a good trade paperback — when it comes to look, feel, and readability. Try reading a book on a iPod Touch, for example. The eccentric word spacing alone, because it’s cheap just to slap already printed text into electronic form, is enough to drive anyone with an ounce of visual aesthetic bonkers.

As books migrate to the electronic world, so do bookstores. Recently I went for the last time to OutWord Bound Books, the only gay bookstore in Indianapolis, which is now closing. The shuttering of any independent bookstore is cause for lamentation in this age of corporate mega-stores. But even Barnes & Nobles and Borders are struggling against the online giant Amazon.

Part of the loss in any bookstore closing is that buyers are deprived of browsing rights — touching, feeling, mentally tasting those warm-from-reading words. Even with all its electronic bells and whistles, Amazon’s and other online booksellers’ websites ultimately are mere catalogs. Fancy technological catalogs to be sure, but viewing them is nothing like browsing real books in a real bookstore.

The loss of a gay bookstore is even more heartbreaking. In a mega-store, what passes for diversity often is only a shelf or a little more worth of gay or lesbian books — fiction, nonfiction, what have you, often all jumbled together — but nothing remotely approaching the scope of an entire store, however un-mega. And what about books from small independent or specialty publishers? Try finding those in any mega-store.

Gay bookstores always have been few and far between. Now, with the closing of OutWord Bound, not only has the population of Indianapolis gay, lesbian, or simply interested straight readers lost a significant resource. The loss extends to the whole of central Indiana.

Technology, whether online bookstores and e-reading devices, simply cannot replace the experience of real bookstores and real books with “words still warm from being read.”