Eugene Walter
Encyclopedia
Biography
Walter was born and raised in Mobile, AlabamaMobile, Alabama
Mobile is the third most populous city in the Southern US state of Alabama and is the county seat of Mobile County. It is located on the Mobile River and the central Gulf Coast of the United States. The population within the city limits was 195,111 during the 2010 census. It is the largest...
, which he described as "a separate kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti." Walter and Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
became acquainted in Mobile as children, a time when Capote was known as Bulldog Persons. Walter was labeled "Mobile's Renaissance Man" because of his diverse activities in many areas of the arts. In later life, he maintained a connection with Mobile by carrying a shoebox of Alabama red clay around Europe.
During World War II, Walter spent three years in Alaska as an Army cryptographer. A resident of Greenwich Village during the post-WWII years, he pioneered an early form of happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
by staging a spontaneous and unannounced group performance in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.
He relocated in the 1950s to Paris, where he helped launch the Paris Review
Paris Review
The Paris Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S...
, living across the street from the publication's office and contributing to the earliest issues with text, art and interviews. His short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue. His Paris Review interviews included Isak Dinesen
Karen Blixen
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke , , née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel...
http://theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4911 and Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
. http://theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4868 In 1960, for Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded and edited by Joseph F. McCrindle in 1959, and published at first in Rome, then London and New York...
, he interviewed Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
. http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1578066735&id=fz4_D9ta4zsC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=%22eugene+walter%22&num=50&sig=317TrFyKiHbsBFKsonuPw14AdNk Eventually, Walter moved from Paris to Rome to edit the literary journal Botteghe Oscure
Botteghe Oscure
Botteghe Oscure was a literary journal, published and edited in Rome by Marguerite Caetani from 1948 until 1960.It was named after Botteghe Oscure Street, where the editorial office was located...
for Marguerite Caetani (Princess di Bassiano).
Guests at his dinner parties in New York, Paris and Rome included Capote, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Judy Garland
Judy Garland
Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...
, Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
, Leontyne Price
Leontyne Price
Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant",...
, Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
and Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
.
Church Street Graveyard
Church Street Graveyard is a historic city cemetery located in Mobile, Alabama. The cemetery is situated on and is surrounded by a brick wall that dates to 1830...
which has been closed since the 1890s. He was buried at the feet of Joe Cain, the father of Mardi Gras in the U.S.
A critical biography of Eugene Walter is currently being prepared by Gabriele Gutting, Ph.D., who teaches at Florida Atlantic University
Florida Atlantic University
Florida Atlantic University, also referred to as FAU or Florida Atlantic, is a public, coeducational, research university located in , United States. The university has six satellite campuses located in the Florida cities of Dania Beach, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter, Port St. Lucie, and in Fort...
.
Films
Living in Rome during the 1960s and 1970s, Walter was a translator for Federico FelliniFederico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
. For different film companies, he translated hundreds of scripts. He appeared as an actor in more than 20 feature films, notably as the American journalist in Fellini's 8½
8½
8½ is a 1963 Italian fantasy film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director...
(1963). For Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits
Juliet of the Spirits is a 1965 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini that uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape"...
(1965), he played the role of the Mother Superior and collaborated with Nino Rota
Nino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
on the song, "Go Milk the Moon" (cut from the final version of the film). Rota and Walter teamed again for the song "What Is a Youth" for Franco Zeffirelli
Franco Zeffirelli
Franco Zeffirelli KBE is an Italian director and producer of films and television. He is also a director and designer of operas and a former senator for the Italian center-right Forza Italia party....
's Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Romeo and Juliet (1968 film)
Romeo and Juliet is a 1968 British-Italian cinematic adaptation of the William Shakespeare play of the same name.The film was directed and co-written by Franco Zeffirelli, and stars Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. It won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design; it was also...
. He also played the role of the priest in The House with Laughing Windows
The House with Laughing Windows
The House with Laughing Windows is a 1976 Italian mystery-horror film co-written and directed by Pupi Avati. The movie was filmed in Lido degli Scacchi, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy...
.
Books
His books include Monkey Poems (1953), The Byzantine Riddle (1980) and The Untidy Pilgrim (1954), a novel recently reprinted by the University of Alabama Press. He also compiled several cookbooks: Delectable Dishes From Termite HallGreene-Marston House
The Greene-Marston House, commonly known as Termite Hall, is a historic house in Mobile, Alabama, United States. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 11, 1983, due to its architectural significance.-History:...
(1982) and the bestselling American Cooking: Southern Style, part of Time-Life's Foods of the World series. Hints & Pinches (1991) is an encyclopedic coverage of more than 150 herbs, spices, chutneys and relishes. The Happy Table of Eugene Walter: Southern Spirits in Food and Drink (2011), which Walter described as "an ardent survey of Southern beverages, and how to prepare such, and a grand selection of Southern dishes employing spiritous flavorings," was edited by Donald Goodman (executor of Walter's estate) and Thomas Head and published by the University of North Carolina Press
University of North Carolina Press
The University of North Carolina Press , founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina....
.
Walter contributed to numerous magazines, including Food Arts, Gourmet
Gourmet (magazine)
Gourmet magazine was a monthly publication of Condé Nast and the first U.S. magazine devoted to food and wine. Founded by Earle R. MacAusland and first published in 1941, Gourmet also covered "good living" on a wider scale....
, Old Mobile and Harper's Bazaar
Harper's Bazaar
Harper’s Bazaar is an American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper’s Bazaar is published by Hearst and, as a magazine, considers itself to be the style resource for “women who are the first to buy the best, from casual to couture.”...
. His essay "Front Porches" is an evocative portrait of Mobile in 1929:
- Old black men with sugarcane stalks over their shoulder would come passing by. Children selling cut flowers, stolen from that morning's funeral wreaths at Magnolia Cemetery. The scissors grinder with his fascinating emery wheel-on-wheels. The pot mender with his bits of lead and solder and strange tools and a spirit lamp. The postman always stopped for a word. Conversations went on, corn was husked, beans hulled or snapped, rice picked over, coffee grounds, beads restrung, paper wicks folded for next winter's fireplaces — somehow a whole world was encompassed, seized, dealt with before noon. http://www.theava.com/04/0421-porches.html
Awards
His literary awards include a Rockefeller-Sewanee Fellowship, an O. HenryO. Henry
O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter . O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.-Early life:...
citation, the Lippincott Award for fiction and the Prix Guilloux. After his return to Mobile in 1979, Walter kept on writing, publishing, and promoting the arts and culture. He died in Mobile of liver cancer in 1998. By special resolution of the city of Mobile, Alabama, he was buried in the historic Church Street Graveyard
Church Street Graveyard
Church Street Graveyard is a historic city cemetery located in Mobile, Alabama. The cemetery is situated on and is surrounded by a brick wall that dates to 1830...
in his hometown.
Katherine Clark began interviewing Walter in 1991 for an oral biography, and Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet was published by Crown on August 21, 2001, three years after Walter's death. Shelved in bookstores during the three weeks prior to 9/11, the book has a paragraph describing reactions to the performance art he staged in the 1940s at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet Walter's words were suddenly synchronistic and eerily prophetic: "You could tell he was the guy who sees a train wreck, or a skyscraper collapse, and he's never got his camera when he needs it."
Jonathan Yardley reviewed Milking the Moon in The Washington Post:
- To Katherine Clark, who sat with Walter for four months in the spring and summer of 1991 while he talked into her tape recorder, we owe an incalculable debt. Not merely has she rescued him from manifestly unwarranted oblivion, but she has edited his oral history into a book as amazing as the man itself... Of all the characters whom we meet in these pages, by far the most interesting and endearing is Walter himself. He may have been a minor figure in literary and cinematic circles, but he never had any illusions about his own grandeur, and he was grateful for everything his work and friendships brought him. His curiosity was bottomless, and he followed wherever it led: "I really am like old America: just get up and get in the covered wagon and go three thousand miles because you want fresh air... Most people really don't take chances, you see. They wanted to go. But they didn't have the -- I don't know what it is. It's not courage. It's not ambition. It's cat and monkey spirit. Let's see what's over there. Let's just have a look."
- Perhaps all of us harbor, somewhere deep inside, a free spirit yearning to break loose, but few of us have the... whatever... to go ahead and let it do so. Eugene Walter did, and led a life with "more delights than regrets." The story of that life, as told here, is absolutely over-the-top, a treasure, a wholly unexpected surprise. Not since John Kennedy TooleJohn Kennedy TooleJohn Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected...
's A Confederacy of DuncesA Confederacy of DuncesA Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic, and later a...
-- another posthumous book by another unknown Southerner -- has a book come from so completely out of the blue to give me so much pleasure.
Recordings
There are two compact disc releases of Walter reading his own works. Rare Bird is a sampler of Walter at his best and includes "The Byzantine Riddle." Monkey Poems is faithful to the 1953 book that is the source. Both CDs feature cover art by Walter. Produced by Charlie Smoke and Barry Little with permission from Walter's estate, these CDs are available from Nomad Productions, Inc.Eugene Walter: Last of the Bohemians (2008) is a documentary by Waterfront Pictures.
Listen to
- Glen Weston singing the Nino Rota/Eugene Walter song, "What Is a Youth"
- Eugene Walter reading Rare Bird (poems, stories, songs)