Three days ago, the playwright Terrence McNally died at 81, a victim of the coronavirus. He had COPD and had lost part of both lungs to lung cancer, so he was one of the most vulnerable among us to this awful pandemic. He was also one of the most brilliant, creative, and loving men in our world.
I didn’t know McNally personally except that I once did a long, lovely interview with him over lunch at Portland’s Heathman Hotel. This was in the early 2000’s when I was writing regularly about theater for the Oregonian, including interviewing any playwright who came through town: Lanford Wilson, Romulus Linney, John Guare, Tracy Letts.
Wilson and Linney (who had been my professor for a class on playwriting at Columbia University in the 1990’s) were both warm and generous to me, but McNally was even more so. I had writing assignments to justify all of the other interviews, but not the one with him. Even so, he sat and answered all of my questions, treating me as a peer rather than just another interviewer.
Over time, I have watched many of McNally’s shows on the stage or on film. He had broad range and a big heart. But I didn’t know just how wide-ranging his work was, or how big his heart, until I watched the 2019 PBS American Masters program on him last night.
If you want proof that the jerks who say we should choose the stock market over the lives of older people as this pandemic continues to spread are sick and twisted, watch this program. You’ll find a link to it here.
What life and wisdom and love left the world with this man. How many others with these attributes we need so desperately right now are we willing to lose?
Thirty-five years ago, in a simpler and less-connected time,
I had my first experience with self-isolating. After traveling through Europe
with a friend, I caught the nine-hour ferry to the Greek island of Patmos by
myself. I didn’t know anyone there. In fact, after my friend flew home, I didn’t
know anyone within thousands of miles of where I was. There was no internet in
those days, of course, and I was too poor to afford what was then the high cost
of international calls. For the two months I planned to be on Patmos, I would
have no contact, even by mail, with anyone I knew.
I didn’t remember at the time that Patmos was where an
earlier man, now a saint, had spent time in isolation. I chose it only because
I had vowed to take the first ferry out whenever I was ready to go and it was
the first stop. A Greek man told me it was beautiful—which it turned out to be,
although it was January, when Patmos is swept by fierce wind and the
temperature hovers near freezing.
Broke and needing the cheapest possible place to stay, I
managed to secure what was usually a summer-only apartment for just three
dollars a day. It had two beds in a modest main room, a small kitchen, a tiny
bathroom, and a balcony big enough for one person, with a view out over the fields
to the distant sea. I couldn’t believe my luck—until a few hours later when I realized
why it was a summer-only place: It was made entirely of concrete and had no
heat.
My main reason for secluding myself on an island in a
country I’d never been to before was to set down the first draft of a novel. I
was only 27 but I’d been a writer for over a decade and veered into journalism
to support myself despite wanting to write fiction. Now I had my chance. I set
strict rules for my island time. I had to type for at least eight hours a day
before doing anything else. (I later amended that to six hours.) Thinking
didn’t count; only the time my fingers were actually pecking away. I could go
for walks but only after the day’s writing was done. The same was true of
reading. The one exception was Sunday, which I took off as a day of rest.
The only person I spoke to that first month, other than a
brief word or two with my landlord, was an Australian woman who ran the closest
grocery store, and my conversations with her never lasted more than a few
minutes. When I walked, I walked alone, except for three stray dogs that seemed
to take turns accompanying me along the shore road. I thought of them as angels
sent to keep me company. No matter when I walked, even near midnight, one would
appear and amble beside me. Never more than one and never in a way that
disrupted my thinking. They never begged for my attention and I never petted
them. When our walk ended, they simply peeled off and headed home.
When I went to bed at night, warmed only by several thin blankets—or,
later, when the sneezing and shivering made me to beg my landlord for some kind
of heat, a cheap aluminum heater—I usually lay awake for a while. Because my
nighttime thoughts were uninterrupted, I often woke up the next morning not
knowing whether something I remembered had been a conscious thought or a dream.
Sometimes during these nighttime reveries, I’d return to
some place in my past. Free of present concerns, I was astonished at how well I
remembered things, including, one night, my grandparents’ house, where I had
lived for a summer as a small child and visited regularly until my grandfather
died when I was ten. I found I could walk through the house and remember
everything, even photographs hidden from view behind doors. I remembered the
smell of the rusted screen on the open window in the attic room where I slept
on the floor—the Dr. Seuss books stacked beside me and my grandparents’ winter
clothes zipped into bags beyond the half-wall. I remembered that the bathroom
wallpaper was black but full of colorful dots. I remembered my grandfather’s tools
above the worktable at the bottom of the basement stairs, the perennial five-gallon
tub of vanilla ice cream kept in the freezer there, and the back room I liked
to play in alone, where they stored their extra furniture: a room-sized
collection of various forts.
When I wasn’t thinking about my novel or remembering earlier
times, I was praying for people I knew, imagining what they were doing. I
missed them, of course, but in a strange way I felt closer to them through my
thoughts and prayers than I do now when I can email anyone anywhere anytime.
I’m sure I felt lonely at times, but I don’t remember
feeling that way, other than on those nightly walks when I passed a small
restaurant or bar where men (always men) watched movies at night, most of them
Kung Fu movies. It wasn’t that I wanted to watch the movies or even be with
those men, but the interior was softly lit and looked like a warm, pleasant
space to sit with a beer in hand. Alcohol was one of the things I gave up
during my self-imposed isolation.
I had a Walkman with me and in the evening I’d often play
one of the half-dozen cassette tapes I’d brought along. I had maybe a dozen
books too, and I spent part of every evening reading. One book was Thomas
Merton’s autobiography, The Seven-Storey
Mountain, which I had bought in an Athens bookstore for little more than a
dollar. It was there, during that month
of self-isolation that I read about and felt a strong attraction to the Merton
friend I would eventually come to know and write a biography of: Robert Lax.
In addition to my cassettes and books, I had small packages
of modeling clay and, though I’d never studied sculpting, I managed to form
what looked like the face of an ancient Greek man and a bum sitting with his
dog on a curb, reflective of a character in the novel I was writing. (I almost
destroyed this last one by trying to “fire” it on the gas stove, rescuing it
just in time, with only some singeing on the bottom.)
On my Sunday walks, if it wasn’t raining, I roamed farther
and farther over the island, eventually choosing the wilder places where there
was only a thin trail. At first I looked for the snakes I’d read warmed
themselves on Greek island trails, but since it was never warm and I never saw
wildlife of any kind except birds, I stopped looking.
One of my favorite places to go, rain or shine, was a huge
rock connected by a narrow causeway to one of the beaches far from town. A
small guidebook a man in a shop gave me said the caves carved into it had been
used by monks living in stricter isolation centuries ago. By the time I started
exploring the caves, the only signs of previous habitation were the smells and
droppings of goats, but I did find a crude catchment tank for rain water at the
top. What I liked most about the cave I usually sat in was that all I could see
from it was the sea. Sitting there, although I had never had any instruction in
playing it, I would sound out tunes on my harmonica: childhood songs,
spirituals, and simple hymns.
When my mother’s birthday neared, I went around to all of my
favorite places and recorded the sounds for her: the ocean rolling the beach
pebbles, the goat-herder’s cry, the tinkle of goat bells, the thunder that
shook my apartment when a big storm passed, and my halting, inept playing of
“Happy Birthday” in that cave. Then I sent it off, hoping it would arrive in
time.
When I had been on the island a month, it wasn’t the
isolation but rather the cold that got to me. Somewhat miraculously, I’d
finished a full draft of my novel by then. I decided to take the ferry back to
Athens, check into a hotel with heat for a while, and send a copy of the novel home
for safekeeping. I planned to visit some of the ancient sites as well: Corinth,
Olympia, Delphi.
In those moments before I left the island, I felt as
centered and open and peaceful as I ever had. It was then, as I waited for a
ferry delayed by winter weather—as I thought about going back to my room and
trying again the next night—that I heard a voice for the only time in my life.
“If you will endure,” it said, sounding inside me, “God will bless you.”
Moments later, the delayed ferry appeared, and as I boarded it, I fell into conversation with an older man. It was during our brief interaction that I found out Robert Lax was living on the same island I was. This news seemed miraculous, of course. A revelation. A blessing. Born of the isolation I had dared to endure and the peace that had come to me through it.
