Fiction Friday: LEADING MEN
In July 1953, Truman Capote invited Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo to a party he was throwing in the hills of Italy. There’s no record they went — but there’s no record they didn’t go, because Williams’ diary is empty for that week. This gap in documented history was the way in for Christopher Castellani, and he crafted his novel Leading Men (Viking, 2019) around that lost weekend in Portofino. In Castellani’s author note, he calls the work “alternative history fiction,” and we find out that Capote, Williams, and Merlo aren’t the only figures he reimagines: he includes author John Horne Burns and his lover Sandro Nencini, as they were in Italy at the same time and Burns died of mysterious causes then (which Castellani fictionalizes). He also creates the characters of Anja and Bitte Blomgren from bits of a letter Capote sent about the party, referencing a “Swedish mother and daughter.”
It’s the voices of Frank and Anja who tell this story through alternating chapters. The novel opens with the party:
Truman was throwing a party in Portofino, and Frank wanted to go. The invitation came in mid-July, slipped between parentheses in the long, gossipy paragraphs of his letter to Tenn, as if daring him to acknowledge it. Frank read the letter in Tenn’s absence. … When Tenn returned home to find their bags lined up in the hall, packed for another trip, he didn’t protest. He was sweet on Frank again after three weeks apart. A drive in the Jag up the coast of Liguria, far from the melting heart of the centro, could only make things sweeter.
From there, the scenes in the past swim along as beautifully and languidly as the warm Italian days, moving from beaches and bars and bedrooms to the inner thoughts and concerns of Frank’s mind. A not-yet writer and a not-yet-known actor, Frank leads his life in the shadow of Tennessee Williams, playing both muse and secretary, but longing for something more. As his friendship with the young Anja grows — who herself wants to try acting — he asks Tenn to get him a bit part in a movie, and his hope grows as the volatility with Tenn grows. But Frank won’t get his something more, as the narrative moves from 1953 to 1963, where Frank, on his death bed, waits for Tenn to appear one last time:
[Tenn] left town that day, or so Frank was told. Milk Train was opening in Virginia. Tenn would have gone anywhere, though, made any excuse, just to escape the apartment, to put distance between himself and the whining skeleton Frank had become. Frank knew him like a book. He knew he paid for this private room on this quiet floor, for the oxygen tank, for the blinking machines and the better meals and the extra devotion of Nurse Fig, for the Bride of Frankenstein gown and the incinerating eye. He knew this was the most Tenn would do, here at the end of their long association. He had no more illusions. The only thing he didn’t know was how soon Indian Summer would come, and if Tenn would come back in time for one last day in the sun.
In the present day chapters, Anja is now a former star actress, living reclusively in New York City after her husband dies, when the son of Sandro Nencini from the days in Italy seeks her out to hear more about his father — but really so his friend can hear more about Tennessee Williams. Anja reveals that Tennessee William wrote her a play thirty years previous, which has never seen the light of day, and after some convincing (it could be her great reemergence), she agrees to produce it in Provincetown, at the Atlantic House where Tenn and Frank first met:
After years of wrangling, Sally has recently purchased the Atlantic House and vows to return it to its former glory, the days when it hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, back when it appealed to patrons other than shirtless men and bachelorette parties. What better way to usher in the new era, wrote Sally in her letter, than with this astonishingly original and groundbreaking buried treasure of a play from the greatest American playwright of the twentieth century, starring and directed by one of its finest actresses?
“The space is far from ideal,” Anja says. She notes the tacky stained-glass window in the far corner. She reaches up to run her hand along a large wooden oar hanging inexplicably from the ceiling. “But it does have meaning.”
The play (which Castellani wrote many years ago and pulled out of a drawer for this novel) is supposed to be Tenn’s reconciliation and closure around his loss of Frank, but Anja wonders if it really is her old friend conjured in the pages — or perhaps Tenn never saw the real Frank at all.
I had the privilege of being at Castellani’s launch at Porter Square Books last year, where he gave a packed house a short presentation on Williams and Merlo before reading from the first chapter. I read it shortly after, and I remember saying to myself, “Gosh, if I can write sentences like this someday…” The writing is stellar, and beautiful, and stylistic in that way that captures the nonlinearity of thoughts and greater considerations about relationships and identity and past and present compressing in memory. I read it again last week for a book club, and what struck me this time was that even though the characters swirl around Tennessee Williams, the narrative is mostly carried by Frank, someone nearly lost to history, who lived in that tension of loving a fickle artist, and knowing that’s really the only role he would play in his lifetime. I noticed more distinctly, too, the theme of longing: Longing for becoming something, longing for artistic achievement, longing for another, longing for the past, longing to have things made right that can never be made right again. This ended up being one of my favorite novels of 2019, and I still recommend it today.
Head to your local independent bookstore to pick up a copy, visit your local indie’s page on Bookshop.org, or head to the author’s website to purchase a copy as well. It’s currently available in hardcover, but the paperback is being released at the end of May.
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