Charles Ludlam: Film and Theater History

Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludham and Ridiculous Theatrical Company”, 1970, Production of “Bluebeard”, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born at Northport, New York in April of 1943, Charles Ludlam was a prominent American actor, director and playwright known for his significant avant-garde contributions to Off-Broadway theater and his role in the development of gay and lesbian performance art. Ludlam also founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which became renowned for its innovative productions.

One of three children born to Joseph William Ludlam and Marjorie Braun, Charles Ludlam was raised in Greenlawn, a rural hamlet of Huntington, Long Island. Interested in theater from an early age despite his parents’ discouragement, he directed, produced and performed plays during his senior year in high school. Works by such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Kan Kikuchi, and John August Strindberg were performed by local students in their “Students Repertory Theatre”, a small loft space in Northport’s Posey School of Dance.

Ludlam studied at New York’s Hofstra College in Hempstead as an openly gay individual and received his Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Literature in 1964. After settling in New York City’s Greenwich Village area, he joined the Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1966. This theatrical company, under the direction of John Vaccaro, was founded the year before by actor and director Ronald Tavel. Inspired by Hungarian producer and dramatist Martin Esslin’s book “Theater of the Absurd”, Tavel’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous set aside naturalistic acting and realistic settings, employed a broad acting style and surrealistic stage settings, and introduced bawdy elements of both queer and camp performance to experimental theater.

In 1967 at the age of twenty-four, Charles Ludlam decided to found his own theatrical group, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, for which he would act as producer, director and playwright until his death. Though sometimes on welfare, Ludham wrote at least one play a year and raised enough money to keep his company alive. Early shows moved from one venue to another, until the company found a permanent home in a former nightclub at One Sheridan Square in late 1967. Ludham’s company soon found an appreciative audience with such productions as “Conquest of the Universe/When Queens Collide” (1968) and “Bluebeard” (1970), an adaptation of Well’s 1896 “The Island of Dr. Moreau”.

Ludlam’s works gradually became more structured plays that imitated a variety of sources from gothic novels and old movies to literary works by Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner. Using traditional approaches to comedy, these works were unconventional with humor but also conveyed serious undertones. Ludlam’s plays often contained sarcasm, cross-dressing, double-entendre, and melodramatics. He acted in many of his plays and was noted for his female roles. The only member of the theatrical company who surpassed Ludlam in the number of roles was his fellow Hofstra student and close friend Susan Carlson, also known as Black-Eyed Susan,

Over his career as a playwright, Charles Ludlam wrote twenty-nine theatrical plays for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. His best known work is the three-act 1984 “The Mystery of Irma Vep”, a satiric blend of theatrical, literary and film genres that included such works as “Penny Dreadful”, “Wuthering Heights” and Hitchcock’s 1940 “Rebecca”. Titled with an anagram of the word ‘vampire’, the play has only two actors of the same sex, who cross-dressing into different costumes, between them play eight roles, The two-hour show has a large number of special effects and props as well as thirty-five costume changes. Opening off-Broadway in Greenwich Village, “The Mystery of Irma Vep” featured Ludlam and Everett Quinton, Ludlam’s lover, in the lead roles; both actors won the 1985 Obie Award for Ensemble Performance.

In film, Ludlam was involved in ten productions from 1971 to 1983. Among these were: his acting role in director James Bidgood’s 1971 experimental erotic art film “Pink Narcissus”; a role in German director and queer activist Rosa von Praunheim’s 1976 New York underground documentary “Underground and Emigrants”; screenplay and directorial work on his silent 1987 short “Museum of Wax”; a role in Jim McBride and Daniel Petrie Jr’s 1986 neo-noir romantic thriller “The Big Easy”; and a role in Andrew Horn’s 1983 tribute to old school Hollywood melodrama, “Doomed Love”.

Highly regarded as an instructor, Charles Ludlam taught or staged productions at New York University, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Ludlam won six Obie Awards over the course of his career and the 1986 Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement in theater.

Charles Ludlam was diagnosed with AIDS in March of 1987 and died in May at the age of forty-four from pneumocysttis pneumonia (PCP) at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His obituary appeared on the front page of the “New York Times” newspaper; an essay on Ludlam’s life and art by American novelist and writer Andrew Holleran appeared in the gay-oriented newspaper “Christopher Street”. Charles Ludlam was interred at Saint Patrick’s Cemetery in Huntington, Suffolk County, New York.

Notes: Everett Quinton, Charles Ludlam’s lover, inherited the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. A January 2023 memorial article by Thomas Keith on the company and its history can be found at the American Theatre website: https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/01/30/everett-quinton-humble-hard-working-never-less-than-fabulous/

An excellent April 2013 article entitled “Your Primer on the Great Charles Ludlam” can be found on WordPress’s “Travalanche” site: https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/on-charles-ludlam/

The WarholStars organization’s website has an article written by Gary Comenas on the history of Theater of the Ridiculous and its connections to Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam at: https://warholstars.org/ridiculous.html

The LiteraryWorld website has an article on Charles Ludlam and the theatrical productions of the Theater of the Ridiculous at: https://literaryworlds.coas.wmich.edu:7000/4034/

An Interview with Charles Ludlam with New York writer and queer theater scholar Don Shewey can be found at Shewey’s website: https://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/charles_ludlam_CITA.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Stage Blood”, 1974, Evergreen Theatre, Publicity Poster, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jack Robinson, “Charles Ludlam in Long Robe and Floral Headdress”, December 21 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Jack Robinson, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Big Hotel- A Farce”, 1968, Vintage Poster, Tambellini’s Gate Theater, Designer Jack Smith, 36 x 21 cm, Private Collection.jpg

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Dario Bellezza: “Crazed, Crazed for Love”

Photographers Unknown, Crazed, Crazed for Love

For Pier Vittorio Tondelli

At night we lose sight of the Tiber.
The wind forces open your honeyed
mouth; I taste firsthand
the languid roses of your springtime.

The quick pace of a police officer
perhaps young and willing, or maybe
elderly who gropes for the stairs
confounds the memories and the sky
goes dark–

Crazed, crazed for love, to love
thresholds oblivious and rabid for trade
where I enter without looking for the gloom
within, muted lover, I shout
to get through the days, arrived
midway through life and sated,
but still unknown to myself
restless, high-wired for sex –
inclined to abandon personal grievance,
to abjure, repudiate the celestial spheres
of nightly idleness or of infected Narcissus.
I’ll trample History
out of dishonor or delight.

Dario Bellezza, Crazed, crazed for love, Snakewoman, Translated in 2025 from the Italian by Peter Covino

Born at Rome in September of 1944, Dario Bellezza was Italy’s first openly gay major prizewinning poet, author and playwright. He is considered to be among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth-century due to the veritable variety of his work from epigrams and brash love-lyrics to unfaltering political chronicles.

Bellezza’s elementary education was at Rome’s classical lyceum from which he graduated in 1962. His education led to writing for several Italian literary and poetry magazines, including the 1967-1968 journal “Carte Segrete (Secret Cards)” dedicated to avant-garde and contemporary literature, art and thought. Bellezza began his rise to prominence in the 1960s through his lifelong collaboration with the magazine “Nuovi Argomenti (New Subjects)”, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia.

Through his association with literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, Dario Bellezza entered the intellectual world of mid-1960s Rome, at a time when Italy was undergoing convulsive ideological confrontations in its culture and politics. Those writers who primarily influenced his work included Italian poet Sandro Penna, French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud whose entire poetic works would later be translated into Italian by Bellezza, and Elsa Morante, poet, novelist and wife to Alberto Moravia.

Bellezza’s first published prose work was the 1970 “L’innocenza (Innocence)”, a dark partially-autobiographical story of the protagonist Nino, who after recognizing his own homosexuality, chose condemnation rather than acceptance. In 1971, Bellezza’s first volume of poetry “Invettive e Licenze (Invectives and Licenses)” was published by the Milan press Garzanti. Noted for its technical precision, the autobiographically-inspired poems depicted people overwhelmed by bitterness, guilt, scandal, and shame.

Dario Bellezza’s debut poetry volume was praised by poet, film director and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini, prominent in the Roman intellectual scene and a major figure in European cinema and literature. Bellezza was very grateful for Pasolini’s affection and support for his work. Upset and angry at his friend’s death, Bellezza wrote the 1981 biographical essay “Morte di Pasolini” in response to the November 1975 brutal kidnapping, torture, and murder of Pasolini in the Roman coastal neighborhood of Ostia. This was followed three years later by a second work on Pasolini, “Turbamento (Disturbance)”.

In 1983, Bellezza published “io (me)”, a collection of autobiographical poems that described his everyday life and the desperation of his loves. Seeing himself as a highly educated bourgeois man and homosexual bigot, Bellezza suffered from insomnia that he felt was due to feelings of guilt as well as the many contradictions that struggled within him. The difficulty of a secret and clandestine homosexual life in Rome was a predominant topic in both his poetic and prose work. Bellezza cites the systematic refusal of the self as the only salvation from homosexuality in his 1972 “Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom)”,

Over his twenty-five year career as a writer, Dario Bellezza published more than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two theater plays, and translations from the French. He received the 1976 Viareggio Prize, Italy’s prestigious literary award, for his 1976 poetry volume “Morte Segreta (Secret Death)”. In 1994, Bellezza received the Montale Prize for his poetic work “L’avversario (The Adversary)” and the Fondi la Postora Prize for his play “Ordalia della Croce (Ordeal of the Cross)”

Known for his candid exploration of homosexuality and its complexities in the modern world, Dario Bellezza, in the midst of writing a book about his struggle with AIDS, died a premature death related to complications from AIDS on the last day of March in 1995. He is interred at Campo Cestio (Cimitero Acattolico), Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has a May 2025 article on Dario Bellezza written by essayist and poet Daniel Felsenthal, entitled “Drink Me, Lick Me Even” at its online site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1679372/drink-me-lick-me-even

The online literary site Asymptote has two poems by Dario Bellezza translated by University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Peter Covino: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/dario-bellezza-what-sex-is-death/

An obituary on Dario Bellezza written by James Kirkup for the online “Independent” news magazine can be located at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dario-bellezza-1303484.html

There is a collection of Dario Bellezza’s poetry, translated by Italian literature researcher Luca Baldoni, in Volume 1 of the 2006 Italian Poetry Review available as a PDF at Academie.edu: https://www.academia.edu/44358397/Dario_Bellezza_Selection_of_Poems_Translated_into_English

Top Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Second Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Morte di Pasolini”, January 1, 1981, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore , Milan, Italy

Third Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Addio Amori, Addio Cuori”, January 1, 1996, Fermenti Editrice , Rome, Italy

Bottom Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Julien Green: “A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing”

Photographers Unknown, A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing

Paris est une ville dont on pourrait parler au pluriel, comme les Grecs l’a fait avec Athène. Car il y a beaucoup de Paris et celui des touristes n’a qu’une relation superficielle avec celui des Parisiens. Un étranger qui traverse Paris dans en voiture ou en autobus et qui va d’un musée à l’autre n’a aucune idée de ce monde qu’il ne voit pas, bien qu’il soit dans elle.

Personne ne peut affirmer de connaître bien une ville s’il n’a pas perdu son temps dans elle. L’âme d’une grande ville ne laisse pas se comprendre légèrement. Pour qu’on se familiarise vraiment avec elle, on doit dans elle, on a dû s’ennuyer et pâtir un peu dans elle. Bien sûr, chacun peut s’acheter un guide de la ville et constater que tous les monuments indiqués sont là. Mais, à l’intérieur de la frontière de Paris, une ville qui est accessible autant dure que Tombouctou l’était autrefois se cache.

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing.

Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was.

Julien Green, Paris, 1987, Illustrator: Jean William Hanoteau, Publisher: Les Bibliophiles du Palais, Paris

Born in Paris in September of 1900, Julien Hartridge Green was an American writer who spent most of his life in France. Over a seventy-year career as an author, he wrote novels, essays, several plays, a journal written daily from 1919 to 1998, and a four-volume autobiography. In 1971, Green had the honor of being the first non-French national to be elected a member of the Académie Françoise. He had been awarded the Académie’s grand prize for literature in the previous year.

Julien Green was the youngest of seven children born to American parents Edward Green, a native of Virginia, and Mary Adelaide Hartridge from Savannah, Georgia. The family had emigrated and settled in Paris seven years before his birth. Raised in a traditional Protestant home, Green received his education in French schools including the city’s distinguished Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. After his mother’s death in 1914, he became a Roman Catholic two years later.

After sitting for the French baccalaureate in 1917, Green served as an underage volunteer ambulance driver during the first World War, initially for the American Field Service and then for the American Red Cross. He entered the French Army in 1918 and served in an artillery unit until the end of the war. At the invitation of his uncle Walter Hartridge, Green studied from 1919 to 1922 at the University of Virginia, his first direct contact with the United States and its Southern culture.

Julien Green returned to France in 1922 and began his career as a writer. His first published work in French was a critique entitled “Pamphlet Contre les Catholiques de France”, written under the name of Théophile Delaporte. In 1926, Green published his first novel “Mont-Cinère (Avarice House)” through philosopher and publisher Jacques Maritain who later published Green’s 1927 novel “Adrienne Mesurat (The Closed Garden)”. Until his death in 1973, Maritain remained a loyal friend, supporter and regular correspondent to Green

In the early 1930s, Green returned to the United States and began work on a novel set in the American South during the 1800s, an effort he abandoned after learning that Margaret Mitchell was nearing publication on her 1936 “Gone with the Wind”. Green’s Southern epic would be a three-volume saga written in France. The first volume “Les Pays Lointains (The Distant Lands, Dixie I)” was published in 1987. “Les Étoiles du Sud (The Stars of the South, Dixie II)” was published two years later. Both of these were reprinted in English in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The third volume of the saga, “Dixie (Dixie III)”, was published in both French and English in 1995.

In 1938, Julien Green began the publication of journals that provided a chronicle of his personal, literary and religious life as well as the atmosphere and events in the French capital. He extensively edited each of the journals to suppress accounts of his and others’ sexual adventures as well as the opinions he had expressed candidly to others. Of the nineteen volumes in the series, only two were published before the German invasion in 1940. Publication resumed after the war with volume three, “Devant la Porte Sombre (1940-1943)”, in 1946. The final volume, “Le Grand Large du Soir (1997-1998)”, was published in 2006.

After France’s surrender in July of 1940, Green fled Paris for the city of Pau in southwest France near the Spanish border. He was able to obtain visas for himself and his long-time partner, journalist Robert de Saint-Jean, for passage to Portugal from which they sailed on the 15th of July to New York City. After a brief stay with a cousin in Baltimore, Green was mobilized in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information to serve as a French-speaking broadcaster for the Voice of America. While in New York, he wrote his first English work, the 1942 memoir “Memories of Happy Days” and gave lectures at both Mills and Goucher colleges. Green also translated two works by French poet and essayist Charles Péguy into English and wrote articles for periodicals.

After his return to Paris in late September of 1945, Julien Green continued the editing and publication of his journals. In the next fifteen years, he published four major novels: the 1947 “Si J’Étais Vous (If I Were You)”; the 1951 ““Moïre” set in Charlottesville, Virginia; the 1956 “Le Malfaiteur (The Transgressor)”; and the 1960 “Chaque Homme dans sa Nuit (Each in His Own Darkness)”, a novel of a young Catholic troubled by homosexual urges. Between 1963 and 1974, Green published four volumes of memoirs that had been written before his published journals. In the third volume of this set, the 1966 “Terre Lointaine (Love in America)”, Green described how he became aware of his homosexuality while at the University of Virginia. These four memoirs were reissued in 1985 under the title “Jeunes Années”.

Julien Hartridge Green died in Paris on the thirteenth of August in 1996, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. His remains were entombed in a chapel designed for him at St. Egid Church in Klagenfurt, Austria. After his death, Green’s adopted adult son, novelist and playwright Éric Jourdan, served as executor of Green’s estate. Controversy surrounded Jourdan’s attempts to control and censor Green’s publications. After Jourdan’s death in 2015, his executor Tristan Gervais de Lafond supported the publication of an uncensored edition of Green’s journals; the first volume of this set was published in 2019.

Notes: Julien Green had been for many years the companion of author and journalist Robert de Saint-Jean whom he met in November of 1924. They lived together in an intimate and physical open relationship for most of the inter-war years. Green and Saint-Jean frequented Paris’s popular gay clubs, traveled together in the 1920s and 1930s through Europe, Tunisia, and the United States, and spent months together in London during the mid-1930s. For his body of work, Robert de Saint-Jean received in 1984 France’s literary award, the Prix Marcel Proust. He died in Paris at the age of eight-five in January of 1987.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’s online magazine “Humanities” has a feature article entitled “Julien Green: The End of a World”, written by NEH research fellow Francis-Noël Thomas. This article on Green’s life in Paris can be found at: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/julyaugust/feature/julien-green-the-end-world

A complete list of Julien Green’s hundred seventy-two published works can be found at the GoodReads site located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/36431.Julien_Green

Top Insert Image: George Hoyningen-Huene, “Julien Green”, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print, Vanity Fair

Second Insert Image: Julien Green, “Journal (1928-1939)”, January 1958, Limited Edition, Volume Nine of Ten, Publisher Librairie Plon, Paris

Third Insert Image: Carl van Vechten, “Julien Green”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Julien Green, “Les Pays Lointains”, 1987, Publisher Éditions de Seuil, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Julien Green”, circa 1971, Gelatin Silver Print

Frank Sargeson: “It Was Well On Into Autumn”

Photographers Unknown, It Was Well On Into Autumn

Nobody lived on the island. There were a few holiday baches but they were empty now that it was well on into the autumn. Nor from this end could you see any landing places, and with the wind blowing up more and more it wasn’t too pleasant to watch the sea running up the rocks. And Fred had to spend a bit of time manoeuvring around before he found his reef.

It was several hundred yards out with deep water all round, and it seemed to be quite flat. If the sea had been calm it might have been covered to a depth of about a foot with the tide as it was. But with the sea chopping across it wasn’t exactly an easy matter to stand there. At one moment the water was down past your knees, and the next moment you had to steady yourself while it came up round your thighs. And it was uncanny to stand there, because with the deep water all around you seemed to have discovered a way of standing up out in the sea.

Anyhow, Fred took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and his trousers as far as they’d go, and then he hopped out and got Ken to do the same and keep hold of the dinghy. Then he steadied himself and began dipping his hands down and pulling up mussels and throwing them back into the dinghy, and he worked at a mad pace as though he hadn’t a moment to lose. It seemed only a minute or so before he was quite out of breath.

It’s tough work, he said. You can see what a weak joker I am.

I’ll give you a spell, Ken said, only keep hold of the boat.

Well, Fred held the dinghy, and by the way he was breathing and the look of his face you’d have thought he was going to die. But Ken had other matters to think about, he was steadying himself and dipping his hands down more than a yard away, and Fred managed to pull himself together and shove off the dinghy and hop in. And if you’d been sitting in the stern as he pulled away you’d have seen that he had his eyes shut. Nor did he open them except when he took a look ahead to see where he was going, and with the cotton-wool in his ears it was difficult for him to hear.

Frank Sargeson, Excerpt from A Great Day, 1940, A Man and His Wife, Christchurch, New Zealand

Born in the New Zealand city of Hamilton in March of 1903, Frank Sargeson was a novelist and short story writer. One of New Zealand’s greatest literary innovators, he broke from colonial literary traditions and developed a style that expressed the rhythms of his native country’s speech and experience.

Born Norris Frank Davey, Frank Sargeson was the son of prosperous businessman Edwin Davey and his wife Rachel, both committed Methodists. He had a secure early life but later regarded it as limited in scope. Sargeson attended Hamilton High School and enrolled in 1921 as an extramural law student at Aukland University College. He worked in the offices of solicitors during the day and studied law in the evenings. Sargeson also stayed for a period at the Ōkahukura sheep farm of his uncle Oakley Sargeson.

After an argument with his mother in 1925, Sargeson relocated to Aukland to continue his studies; he received his qualification as a solicitor in 1926. Sargeson left New Zealand at the beginning of 1927 and spent two years in Europe where he explored London’s museums and theaters as well as the countrysides of England, France, Italy and Switzerland. While abroad, Sargeson made a failed attempt at a novel and had his first homosexual relationship in London.

Upon his return to New Zealand in 1928, Frank Sargeson took the position of clerk in the Public Trust Office at Wellington and concentrated on writing short stories.. A series of homosexual encounters in 1929 led to his arrest and a two-year suspended sentence on the condition that he live with his uncle at the Ōkahukura farm. For eighteen months, Sargeson worked on the farm and wrote continuously. By May of 1930, he had successfully published an article on his European travels in the New Zealand Herald and completed his first novel, though it was rejected by several publishers.

In May of 1931, Sargeson took permanent residence at his parents’ well-worn beach cottage (bach) in Takapuna, a northern suburb of Aukland. He adapted the pseudonym of Frank Sargeson at this time to distance himself from his earlier conviction and as a tribute to his uncle. Sargeson never obtained employment as a solicitor and ultimately relied on homegrown food to sustain himself as he experimented with his writing. Registered as unemployed to be eligible for relief , he sheltered people who were struggled financially or lived on the fringes of society. On of these was Harry Hastings Doyle, a suspended horse trainer ten years his senior, who became his life-partner. Doyle lived at the cottage for extended periods over a span of thirty years, the last being his illness from 1967 until his death in 1971.

Although he had published one story and several articles in Aukland newspapers, Frank Sargeson considered the publishing of the fictional, five-hundred word “Conversations with My Uncle” in a July 1935 issue of the weekly magazine “Tomorrow” to be his first success in the literary world. In 1936, publisher Robert Lowry’s newly established Unicorn Press printed Sargeson’s first book, “Conversations with My Uncle and Other Sketches”. The short stories in this collection displayed the features that would characterize Sargeson’s style: austere, minimalist narration and characters as well as the use of everyday New Zealand spoken English.

By 1940, Sargeson had established a significant reputation as a New Zealand writer with the publishing of more than forty stories. In the same year, his story “The Making of a New Zealander” won a prize at a New Zealand centennial competition and “A Man and His Wife”, his second short story collection, was published by Caxton Press. Sargeson’s writing had also reached the international market and appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. His 1943 novella “That Summer” dealt with the dynamics of male friendship in the isolated New Zealand environment and, as in much of his fiction, contained implicit homoerotic elements.

In 1946, Frank Sargeson formally changed his birthname to Frank Sargeson so his father could transfer ownership of the Takapuna cottage and its property to him. In the same year, New Zealand’s Internal Affairs changed his benefit allowance into a literary pension which continued until his eligibility for an old-age pension; this extra income allowd him to finance a new cottage. His friend George Haydn, a Hungarian who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1939 to escape the Nazi invasion, designed a simple, economical dwelling and, with the help of his partner George Rollett, built the new cottage at cost.

In the 1950s, Sargeson published the 1954 novella “I for One”, two stories and a short autobiographical essay. The majority of his time was spent writing plays, two of which,”The Cradle and the Egg” and “A Time for Sowing”, were staged in Aukland and later published in 1964 as “Wrestling with the Angel”. Sargeson had a burst of creative energy in the 1960s. His novel “Memoirs of a Peon”, based on the sexual adventures of a friend, was published in 1965, “The Hangover” in 1967, and his “Joy of the Worm” in 1969.

After the death of long-time partner Harry Doyle, Frank Sargeson published several collections of earlier works, among which were the 1972 “Man of England Now” which included the novella “A Game of Hide and Seek”, and the 1973 “The Stories of Frank Sargeson”. Sargeson also chronicled his life in a set of three memoirs: “Once Is Enough” in 1973, the 1975 “More Than Enough”, and “Never Enough: Places and People Mainly” in 1977. These autobiographies were published in 1981 as a single volume entitled “Sargeson”.

By 1980, Sargeson’s health had begun to decline. He was suffering from diabetes and congestive heart failure; he also had a mild stroke shortly before his seventy-seventh birthday. The onset of prostate cancer and senile dementia added to his deterioration. Frank Sargeson was admitted to the North Shore Hospital in December of 1981 and died there on the first of March in 1982. The Frank Sargeson Trust was formed to preserve his Tukapuna home as a museum and maintain a literary fellowship. Sargeson’s ashes were spread under a loquat tree in the newly renovated property’s garden in June of 1990.

Notes: The Frank Sargeson Trust website, which contains a chronological biography of Sargeson as well as the history of his Takapuna house, can be found at: https://franksargeson.nz

The essay introduction to Sargeson’s 1964 “Collected Stories: 1935-1963” is available through the Victoria University of Wellington’s Electronic Text Collection located at: https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PeaFret-t1-body-d12.html

Frank Sargeson’s “A Great Day” in its entirely can be found at: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/great-day-sargeson/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frank Sargeson”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: John Reece Cole, “Harry Doyle and Frank Sargeson, Cottage at Takapuna, Aukland”, early 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dave Roberts, “Frank Sargeson”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Flickr Images

Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”.

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing.

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name.

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.