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Carolyn Haines, Sue Brannan Walker, and Saundra Grace remember Eugene Walter, a Man for Any Season.
Carolyn Haines, Sue Brannan Walker, and Saundra Grace remember Eugene Walter, a Man for Any Season.
It’s impossible to fully capture who Eugene Walter was. Novelist, poet, translator, coffin painter, film star, lyricist, barking mad diner, enjoyer of Jim Beam and port—he was all of that and so much more. Most importantly, though, he was a good friend.
In the opening of The Untidy Pilgrim, Eugene Walter’s Lippincott-award winning coming of age tale, he describes Mobile as “sweet lunacy’s county seat.” This past February, in Mobile we were in the midst of Mardi Gras, a time of celebration and definitely some lunacy. It’s a party that always brings Eugene to mind. How he loved carnival.
As a celebration of Eugene and the carnival season, I asked two writers to join me to put together a few memories of Eugene. Sue Walker and I knew Eugene well. Saundra Grace knows Eugene through his literary career.
Sue Walker was chair of the University of South Alabama English department and head of creative writing for many years. Her influence has been felt by generations of students, and she engineered the Renaissance Man celebration for Eugene. A celebrated poet and teacher, Walker served as Alabama’s poet laureate 2003-2012 and was only recently inducted into the University of Alabama, College of Education Hall of Fame.
Saundra Grace traveled the world and returned to Mobile in 2018.
I moved to Mobile in 1983 and met Eugene shortly thereafter. We were fast friends until his death in 1998. Here are a few tales that catch the flavor of a man who will always epitomize the best of Mobile to me.
MY ILLUMINATING, INCONTESTABLE, INCANDESCENT EUGENE WALTER
Sue Brannan Walker
I imagine mornings, afternoons, evenings with Eugene Ferdinand Walter, Mobile’s grand Renaissance Man, imagine him reading “Hurly-burly, hullabaloo, / From whence comes the likes of you?” I Imagine Fanny Dryer, that grimalkin, that feline creature he found huddled in the dryer on the back porch of his Grand Boulevard home, and I imagine Eugene saying, as Fanny jumps up beside me: “Darling, she’s just trying to read your lips. Cats do that, you know. So speak up. Whatever do you have to say today about our grand poo-bahs and politics?”
I imagine it’s nearing noon, and Eugene hands me a glass of Port. I imagine we talk for an hour, and he tells of going to mass with his grandmother at St. Joseph’s, recalls her arranging flowers on the altar, and recollects a catechism class with a Polish nun who had a moustache. We talk publishing. It’s 1982, and he’s written “William Faulkner’s Shopping List” for the journal Negative Capability: Jack Daniels, 6 Redbird tablets, Witch Hazel, chocolate mints for Dean. He also wrote “Agatha Christie’s Shopping Listicle” for the gazettes that graced each issue. It’s time for lunch and we’re off to Butch Cassidy’s at 60 N. Florida Street. I order Tombstone Chips and Salsa, Outlaw Rings, and Wildbunch Shrooms, but Eugene’s busy barking like a Pumi or Pekingese, and tumps pepper paste on the restaurant floor. He wants proper peppercorns.
I imagine time past is time present. It’s evening. Eugene’s enjoying a toast or two with Jim Beam and a few special friends. “Try my Dr. Willoughby crab kebabs from Delectable Dishes of Termite Hall,” he says. “And Carolyn Haines, will you pass the Korozott Liptoi; you know, that Hungarian Caraway Dip of mine.” Well, here’s to mayhem and madness, frolic and fun, my dear Eugene, my fabulous, fanciful, festive Ferdinand, winsome Walter. I shall, with some Mardi Gras Merry Widows dance on your grave. Cheers, Santé, Skål, Salud.
From Where to There
Sue Brannan Walker
Dear Eugene, Ferdinand, Renaissance Man, Raconteur, Professor Willoughby, journalist Walter, I did not steal your Goodluck jockstrap.
Perhaps you left it in Rome when acting in 8½.
Perhaps Federico Fellini purloined it at a dinner one night as you two dined on oysters--fried, stewed, and nude, drank fine Frascati wine, and he opined, “Cinema is an old whore, like a circus and variety show, and knows how to give many forms of pleasure.”
I revel in your poetic names, Federico and Ferdinand, and I wonder, Eugene, if you barked in Rome’s restaurants when you wanted fresh ground pepper instead of some popinal paste. You told Fred you’d made up an interview with him, whole-hog, and published it in the Transatlantic Review. Byzantine types understood each other.
Life’s a tuzzy-muzzy of complications, as we hide the amadelphous tears of clowns and smile. Your mama said you only blushed when you told the truth, and when you escaped for some six hours, your father found you following a circus. Rome is not so very different from Mobile, kingdom of buffoons, monkeys, and musicians.
I remember your home on Grand Avenue, your 17 cats, the life-sized Dolly Parton cutout inside your living room, the Lev clock and little match-box holding three pubic hairs Tullulah Bankhead once had given you. “Sooner or later Southerners come home,” “not to die,” you said, “but to eat gumbo.”
Wherever you are Eugene, I’m sure life’s a party.
Your Sassy Sue
BREATHING IN THE SPIRIT OF EUGENE WALTER
Saundra Grace
On a hot summer night in 1974, I sat in a tiny movie theater in the ancient cobblestoned Trastevere quarter of Rome, the only one in the city that showed films in English or with English sub-titles. The seats were small, hard, and close together, and the room so filled with smoke that every time they stopped the film to change a reel, the entire roof would open to clear the air. For a few minutes every half hour or so, one could look up to the star-filled sky over Rome. As a young, lone backpacker from Mobile, Alabama, it was hard not to be enchanted with the exotic nature of the moment.
Federico Fellini’s film, 8 ½, a 1960s black and white Italian classic, was playing that night. I spoke no Italian at the time, but read the sub-titles quickly, trying to decipher all the symbolism packed in the film. Suddenly, my ears picked up a change in the tempo of the language as the character of the young American journalist, dressed in a white summer suit, began speaking in a mixture of Italian and English, with what was most decidedly a Southern accent. I had no idea who he was, and it didn’t really matter, he was a minor character added in the mix with all the other accents. But in viewing my story over the past fifty years, I like to think of that night as the moment the spirit of Eugene Ferdinand Walter walked off the screen and into my life.
It would be disingenuous to say that I thought about him after that event, when in reality, I only learned his name in 2000, when I was on vacation in Mobile from Miami, and attended a book launch by chance of “Moments with Eugene,” held at the historic Church St. cemetery. It would be another 18 years, until 2018 when I returned to Mobile to live after a 44-year absence, that Eugene became flesh and blood to me, and I heard, saw, and felt the impact he had on the entire literary community and beyond. But there were many hints along the way that we were leading parallel lives, separated by time, most of which I only realized after 2018 when everyone I met had a Eugene story!
I followed in his footsteps—New York, Paris, Rome. Though Eugene was almost thirty years older, we both felt the need to leave our Gulf Coast home to travel, to learn more, to see more and be more. Learning languages became our ticket to other worlds (and I am still impressed by his French and Italian). He lived in Paris, as did I, where he was well known in the 1950s to one of my dearest friends, Alfred Allan Lewis, who told me of their connection shortly before his death in 2022.
I lived and worked for the United Nations in Rome for four years in the early 1990s, and love the history of every cobblestoned street, and the scent of time that permeates the air. But Eugene embraced Rome, making it his home for many years in the 1960s and 70s, where I am sure he charmed the Italians with his sense of fantasy, flamboyance, and creativity. His love of wild and interesting parties, good food and fine drink, would have endeared him to Romans, who, throughout time, have seen everything, done everything, and accept everything.
I enjoy reading his colorful descriptions of the cities that so influenced my life, and nod in understanding when I read of his home with stacks of papers everywhere and books galore, and the absolutely indispensable memorabilia we collected from all the glorious people and places in our lives. I laughed out loud when he talked of the rude Italian hand gesture of thumbing one’s nose, maramèo, having seen it often on the streets in Italy.
And we both returned home, Eugene and I, when it was time. Based on the Eugene stories I continue to hear twenty-six years after his death in 1998, I think he brought his European life back with him, continuing to live as he always had: he called everyone Darling in his never-lost Southern accent, encouraged writers and artists, continued to write of what he loved, held court, introduced our genteel city to day-drinking, loved cats and Jim Beam, and generally turned the outrageous into an art form. I once asked Sue Walker what it was about Eugene that people were drawn to. “He was so unique,” she replied, “so completely himself.”
At the end of the Fellini film 8 ½, the characters are assembled like Circus performers—clowns, musicians, dancers, prostitutes, parents, producers, actors, adoring women, and a gleeful American journalist—all holding hands, dancing around the edges of a circus ring. There is much hilarity, fancy dress, and Absurdist drama at its finest. I cannot decide whether Eugene constructed his life along Fellini’s vision, or whether Eugene’s life was an inspiration to Fellini.
I am not saying that the spirit of Eugene Walter called me home to Mobile, Alabama. But I will say that when I got here, he was waiting.
MOONLIGHT, MARDI GRAS BEADS, AND A GLASS OF PORT
Carolyn Haines
It was a full moon on Mobile Bay the evening I met Eugene Walter for the first time. He arrived at a neighbor’s house with a huge cardboard box filled with hot dogs from the Dew Drop Inn, one of his favorite eateries.
“And who are you?” he asked me.
And even though I was just a wannabe writer, he listened to every single word I said.
I met Eugene in 1983. I’d moved out to Old Bay Front Road into one of the old officer’s houses at what once had been Brookley AFB. Eugene loved the view of the bay and the moon and the quiet nook that was my home for several years. He visited the writers there often.
I’d never met a man so filled with fairy charm. Eugene was all twinkling eyes and laughter. I was instantly charmed.
From those first meetings, I became Eugene’s driver for errands when I wasn’t working. We made our forays to the liquor store, the grocery store, and all places in between. We went to lunch and drank wine because he said iced tea would give us both kidney stones. Everyone in town knew him and catered to him.
Eugene won the Lippincott Prize, one of England’s top literary prizes, when he was 26 years old. He wrote short stories, plays, cookbooks, and translations. He composed music, painted coffins, and made films with Fellini. He lived in Paris and helped found the Paris Review. And he lived in the city of his heart, Rome, for a number of years.
In the end, he returned to his birthplace of Mobile. And I benefitted from that decision.
I have a lot of memories of Eugene. The excellent fun we had sustained me through some emotionally hard times. He got me absolutely snockered one day at lunch—and I had to go back to work. I knew I was in big trouble, so I locked my office door and thought, “Oh, if only I can just put my head down for ten minutes I’ll perk up and be okay.” Half an hour later I woke up because I had drooled all over my knees. And when I told Eugene, he only laughed. “Perhaps the aperitif (Ouzo) was a bit much,” he said, totally unrepentant.
While we did talk books and writers, I never saw an iota of snobbery in Eugene and his assessment of other writers. He disliked some people—and he made that plain. And generally for good reason. But he was my friend.
He nicknamed me Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons. He told me I was a warrior and to never let anyone push me in a corner. He encouraged my writing and generously read my manuscripts.
We were both cat lovers, and I tried to help him with the many cats he fed and cared for at his home on Grand Ave. I hardly ever sat in the “cat free” room at his house, where he had a huge cardboard cut-out of Dolly Parton that he adored, because I loved his cats and enjoyed petting them. Cats and trees—those were things no one messed with.
He had a lovely war with the power company about cutting the tallow trees on his right of way on Grand Blvd. (He won!) And he gave me a seedling of a tallow tree. It is over thirty feet tall now and the squirrels and birds love it in my front yard. I go out some days and put my hand on the bark and I can feel Eugene’s energy. His love for the trees should put the local city administration to shame since cutting trees seems to be their “thing.”
“Mobile is known as the city of trees,” he would tell me. “The beauty, the shade, they are what makes Mobile so unique.” And he fought for them. All of them. Even the ones like the tallow, that some people consider a “trash tree.”
My favorite Eugene story is one that occurred not too long after I met him. I had come up with a theory that we recreate the emotional miasma of our childhoods. I would ask people to say one word that described their childhoods. My theory was that if the person was honest, the word would reflect not only the past but the present.
I’m always surprised by the honesty with which most people answer. Surprised and often saddened by such words as fear or unhappiness. My word, just so you know, was responsibility. I have been and am a very responsible person. I run an animal refuge and take care of 22 cats, dogs, and horses. I was raised to be and therefore I am…responsible.
But Eugene! Ah, Eugene. He had the best answer anyone has ever given. His word was “enchanted.” And honestly, he was! Eugene’s life was not easy. He had loss and disappointment. But he didn’t see his life as a series of hardships or losses. He saw…adventure and fun! He focused on creating enchantment and he certainly did manifest it.
When I went over to his house one evening for “a special dinner” he had candles burning and a big bag of marshmallows. We roasted those marshmallows by candle flame, and we made up stories that made us laugh. He could create magic by sheer will of his personality, and I had the good sense to understand I was in the presence of a unique human being.
For all of the many, many things he was, enchanted is my favorite. And his generosity in sharing that with me is a special gift I cherish to this day.
Carolyn Haines is the USA Today best selling author of over 80 books, including the long-running Sarah Booth Delaney mystery series. She has been inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame and was the recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing and the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. She lives on a small farm in Alabama which doubles as a refuge for a number of older cats, dogs, and horses.
