Dear readers, Writers generally tend to be indoor cats. Long hours of sedentary solitude are built into the job description, and a good imagination covers the lack of all kinds of lived experience. (Think of the wildly romantic Brontë sisters, two-thirds of whom may have never even been kissed.) Still, I have a soft spot for authors whose lives off the page make their fictions seem tame: the misfits, gadabouts and hard-living libertines who somehow manage to produce great works in between benders or bouts of madness. The hazard, of course, is that the habits and proclivities of the wild ones impair their art as often as they enrich it. Both writers in this week’s newsletter met objectively awful ends, neither of which I would recommend. But these two weird and wonderful books? That’s a different story. —Leah “Star,” by Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam BettFiction, 1960
The circumstances of the great Japanese novelist Misihima’s death in 1970 at age 45 — after a failed imperialist coup he committed seppuku, then had a follower finish the job by taking off his head with a sword — tend to color every other fact about him. How could they not? Improbably, it’s also maybe the 10th most interesting thing about a man who in his short life produced 34 novels, 50 plays and dozens of essays and short story collections while also dabbling in acting, modeling and martial arts. “Star” is a sort of roman à clef about one of those unlikely side hustles: Mishima’s experience on the set of his first major film role as a soulful gangster in the 1960 yakuza noir “Afraid to Die.” Told via the jaundiced first-person voice of a young heartthrob called Rikio Mizuno, “Star” paints its protagonist as a prisoner of his own celebrity: gorgeous, hunted, existentially bored. The only real relief he finds is in Kayo, the personal assistant who is also his secret lover. Kayo is a stealth operator supreme; nobody knows that this unglamorous older woman, with her deliberately dumpy wardrobe, messy bun and silver-capped front teeth, is also a witty and wicked partner in crime to the lonely matinee idol whose life she diligently organizes. As a meditation on fame, the book is a humdinger. At one point, it’s Rikio’s 24th birthday, and a dinner party has been planned. When his film shoot goes long that night, he doesn’t call to say he won’t make it after all, because “showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention.” A true star, you see, is defined by absence: “The people wait for me, checking their watches, standing at their doorsteps, but I am a speeding car that never stops. I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight. … I ride and ride and never arrive.” Read if you like: Toshiro Mifune, the French movie “Clouds of Sils Maria,” creative dental work. “Memoirs,” by Tennessee WilliamsNonfiction, 1975
Williams actually mentions a meeting with Mishima, of whom the roué playwright was a friend and a fan, late in his “Memoirs.” They had dinner in Yokohama not long before Yukio’s death, and Williams was touched by his friend’s concern over his drinking. Williams outlived Mishima by more than a decade, though “lived” is probably relative. By then, the man from Mississippi who adopted the pen name Tennessee was pretty much pickled in alcohol and pills, and hadn’t had a critical or commercial hit in years. Be warned: “Memoirs” is not a useful source for theater scholars looking to learn about the creative process behind “A Streetcar Named Desire” or “The Glass Menagerie.” Any workplace details here are haphazard and incidental. Instead, it’s a diary in the form of free association, weaving in and out of timelines and lovers and long-ago feuds like a sozzled honeybee. There are snapshot appraisals of Ernest Hemingway (“touchingly shy”), Greta Garbo (“gracious but frightened”) and Thornton Wilder (“has never had a good lay”). Williams has his fuse box fixed by Marlon Brando on Cape Cod, rips around the Villa Borghese with the Italian screen siren Anna Magnani and gets into mostly good trouble with his fellow sybarites Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood and Truman Capote. Home is intermittently Rome, Manhattan, New Orleans’s French Quarter and Key West, but the dream is to grow old in Italy, somewhere by the sea with geese and goats and “an attractive young gardener-chauffeur.” The narrative engine here, if one exists, is romance, or at least the pursuit of physical pleasure in many forms. Williams’s longest and most grounding love affair was with a younger man named Frank Merlo, whom he affectionately called “Little Horse.” When Merlo died painfully of an invasive cancer at 41, Williams fell apart and never quite recovered. The book largely elides some other terrible stuff, like a brutal assault by sailors after a sexual encounter in Times Square and the early lobotomy that essentially destroyed Williams’s beloved sister, Rose. “Memoirs” can feel like both too much and not enough, but as John Waters correctly noted in the introduction of a 2006 edition, it “certainly isn’t a bore.” Read if you like: Negroni Capriccios, natty little mustaches, the kindness of strangers We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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