King of the Monkeys

through my newly found love of Southern Literature, i've recently discovered Eugene Walter. how i did not know about him before, i do not know-- after all, he grew up in Mobile, Alabama, was the city's most infamous character, and after decades spent living in New York, Paris, and Rome, came back to Mobile in the late 1980's and lived there until his death in 1998. Sucks for me that I never knew him, afterall, I grew up in Mobile from about 1990-2004!

anyway. he was quite an amazing person. he was a writer, poet, editor, actor, translator, puppeteer, basically everything good in life.



he was gay, though maybe never admittedly, as it seemed was the case with a lot of Southern writers/people in the art world in his day. like Truman Capote for instance, who Eugene knew, and who spent a lot of his life in Mobile too. one of my neighbors at home in Alabama was part of Eugene Walter's circle in Mobile back in the day. he & my mom are good friends. he has some other cool-gay-old-dude friends who own antique stores around town & my mom found some of Eugene's books there for me.

i just started reading Milking the Moon, which is his oral biography as told to Katherine Clark. i've only read a tiny bit of it so far but already i am completely enthralled with Eugene Walter.



one thing that Clark wrote about him in her introduction that really made an impression on me was how, though he was a very talented writer/actor/etc., he put his real genius into living his life; as if, his life was his greatest work of art. that idea, to me, is really incredible.

he also loved monkeys. they were his favorite animal. and he loved all "wayward things." in his most famous novel, The Untidy Pilgrim, the main character, who spends most of the book in Mobile, is based off himself. the title "untidy pilgrim" is a juxtoposition of the unrelenting work ethic of early Puritan pilgrims, which was passed down generation after generation to those hard workers up in the North. but in the South, there were only UNTIDY pilgrims, who did not have their lives mapped out, and who were more leisurely; they were the "monkeys" according to Eugene, who lived in the "green and crazy land" of the South.

i love that sentiment.