Eugene Walter
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- Eugene Walter (1921-98) should not be confused with the playwright Eugene Walter (1874-1941).
Eugene Walter, 1921-March 29, 1998, was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur. A friend once observed that Walter had lived a "pixilated wonderland of a life."
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[edit] Biography
Walter was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, which he described as "a separate kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti." Walter and Truman Capote 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 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, contributing to the publication's earliest issues with text, art, and interviews. His short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue. His Paris Review interviews included Isak Dinesen [1] and Robert Penn Warren. [2] In 1960, for Transatlantic Review, he interviewed Gore Vidal. [3] After his return to Mobile, Eugene Walter kept on writing, publishing, and promoting the arts and culture. By special resolution of the city of Mobile, Alabama, he was buried in the historic Church Street Graveyard in his hometown.
[edit] Films
Living in Rome during the 1960s and 1970s, Walter was a translator for Federico Fellini. 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 (1963). For Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965), he played the role of the Mother Superior and collaborated with Nino Rota 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's Romeo and Juliet (1968).
[edit] 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 Hall (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. He contributed to numerous magazines, including Food Arts, Gourmet, Old Mobile and Harper's Bazaar. 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. [4]
His literary awards include a Rockefeller-Sewanee Fellowship, an O. Henry citation, the Lippincott Award for fiction and the Prix Guilloux. He returned to Mobile in 1979 and died there of liver cancer in 1998.
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 Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces -- another posthumous book by another unknown Southerner -- has a book come from so completely out of the blue to give me so much pleasure. [1]
Eugene Walter: Last of the Bohemians is a documentary in production by Waterfront Pictures.
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. [2]
[edit] References
[edit] Listen to
- Glen Weston singing the Nino Rota/Eugene Walter song, "What Is a Youth"
- Eugene Walter reading Rare Bird (poems, stories, songs)
[edit] Sources
- Walter, Eugene; as told to Katherine Clark (2001). Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet. New York: Crown. ISBN 0-609-80965-2. Oral biography
