moise and the world of reason

Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams (Simon and Schuster, 1975)

This odd novel was written toward the end of Williams’ life (he died in 1983) when he was struggling with drugs and alcohol and trying to regain his literary prowess and stature.  Like Albee, he was thought to have lost his talent and genius and anything he produced was ridiculed and dismissed (unlike Albee, he did not live long enough to resuscitate his career and artist reputation).  He did produce inferior work during this period, but much of it, like this book and The Two Character Play (1973; see above) contains passages that are heartbreakingly brilliant and beautiful. 

Moise and the World of Reason (which is a terrible title–odd for TW, who was so usually so good with titles, especially early on–and does the book a real disservice) is narrated by a 30-year-old man living in a partitioned room in a huge unheated warehouse on the Hudson River at 11th Street.  He is an unsuccessful writer who keeps his piles of rejection letters in the crate that he uses as his desk.  His first lover, a Black figure skater, has died and he now lives with a younger lover, but they both seem to be biding their time.

The novel takes place over a single day and night.  The narrator and his young lover attend a party at their friend Moise’s one-room apartment on Bleecker Street.  Moise is an enigmatic and waifish painter who specializes in paintings that appear to be unfinished.  At the party she announces that she is withdrawing from “the world of reason” and the narrator’s lover runs off with another man for dinner at Phebe’s (which still exists, having  miraculously survived the gentrification of the East Village).  The narrator returns to the warehouse and spends the entire night writing in his Blue Jay notebooks, and when he has filled his last one, he resorts to writing on the backs of his rejection letters and on shirt cardboards (which is something James Ivory also does).  He writes about growing up queer in Selma, Alabama and running away to the New York City when he was 15, meeting the figure skater, who referred to himself as “the nigger on ice,” and their symbiotic friendship with Moise.  A few visitors interrupt his writing marathon, and the book concludes with him returning to Moise’s room where they seem to be fated to live together in an unworldly darkness and silence (the one window in her room has frosted glass).  

Parts of this book are funny, engaging, and written with Williams’ poetic flair.  His recollections of his mother and grandmother and his figure skater lover are particularly vibrant and fun to read.  He writes frankly and graphically about sex and human bodies–it’s as is if he making up for all the suppression and inversion in his great plays, and some of the language and acts described are shocking, and must have been extremely offensive to readers in 1975.  The New York Times review of this book is a snide, mean, homophobic dismissal, and reading it one feels the derision piled upon Tennessee Williams during this late period.  It’s sad.

Another interesting thing about this book is its accurate and highly detailed  evocation of New York City c. 1975.  Williams uses real names of places (Phebe’s, The Factory) and people (Warhol, Mary McCarthy, Jane Bowles) and this gives the book a gritty specificity I recognized in the city as I first encountered it in the late 70s and early 80s.

Note: the image above is the cover a New Directions edition of the book, reissued in 2016.  I read the original Simon and Schuster edition, pictured below.