Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet

Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet. By Eugene Walter. As told to Katherine Clark. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001. xxiii, 295 pp. $25.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-609-60594-1. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. xxiii, 295 pp. $14.00 (paper). ISBN 0-609-80965-2.

As the young ward of Mr. Gayfer, Eugene Walter staged a marionette theater with Madame Alexander dolls that he took free of charge to prisons, oyster camps, schools, and children's birthday parties for "wellheeled-Mobilians" (p. 43). Katherine Clark, in Milking the Moon, brings this Master Pinnochio, raconteur, painter, producer, and stage designer to life and places him center stage, surrounded by a cast of some 180 characters. As Clark states early in the book, the question of authenticity is irrelevant; Eugene Walter is his own masterpiece, and the composite of interviews that Clark taped during the summer of 1991 is "a madcap narrative of one happy-go-lucky Southerner's adventures of 'life on this planet'" (p. xv).

Attractively presented and typographically appealing with embellishments of script, Milking The Moon-its title derived from the song, "Go Milk the Moon," that Eugene wrote for Federico Fellini's Juliet, of the Spirits-is a tour de force, a musical tutta laforza played from Mobile to the Arctic Circle, to New York, Paris, Rome, and back to Mobile.

But wait, the orchestra has not struck the first note; the stage curtain has not gone up. The book begins with George Plimpton's foreword. He tells of meeting Walter-referred to as "Tum-te-tum"-in the spring of 1952, "an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped Paris Review office on the rue Garanciere" (p. vii).

Katherine Clark's introduction, "Eugene in the Details" is the curtain rising. Walter, with his gift for conversation and ability to transform the world into a comic spectacle, introduces himself: "I'm fat, I'm bankrupt, and I've got fleas," he says (p. xiii). The antics begin-the amusement, delight, the challenge, stimulation, fascination, and education of Eugene Walter. Born in 1921, a triple Sagittarius, in his grandmother's house on the corner of Conti and Bayou, Walter came into the world with a cat staring into his face and with his thumb attached to his nose in an "ancient gesture of disrespect toward all authorities" (p. 3). he explains that he is a "rare cross between cat and monkey," for monkeys can carry on "two or three conversations at once" (p. 4).

As Walter sings and swings and dances through the pages of Milking the Moon, it is obvious that he loves the South, and Mobile, and is ever the city's advocate even when he laments the disappearance of shade trees. He says "[t] he South of every country is different, and the south of every South is even more so. I come from that stretch of Gulf Coast South which is another kingdom. Mobile is a Separate Kingdom" (p. 5).

Walter subsequently mastered the culinary arts as a cryptographer on the island of Atka in the Arctic Circle. Later, in New York, he wore his Mardi Gras Prospero costume with real metal sequins and glass rhinestones to a party where others were decked out in Brooks Brothers suits. Walter painted Paris in grand design and acquired the moniker "Tum-te-tum." It is a noncommittal phrase, he explains, that means "let's change the subject" and get on to something else. In Rome, at a party for T. S. Eliot, Walter served a punch that, after a cup or two, had the poet, yellow rose in one hand and punch cup in the other, conducting Holy Cross football cheers.

At the close of his life Walter looked back at a set of experiences that seemed fantastic and alien. "There's this mad creature called Eugene who goes from Mobile and sets out," he recalled. "I don't recognize him as me at all. It's something I read about" (p. 269).

Eugene Walter comes alive in the pages of Milking the Moon. Readers are guests, invited into his home to sip aperitifs and wine and port and perhaps Jim Beam as the world is staged on Grand Boulevard. Had it not been for Clark's assiduous summer of taping, Walter's story would have been lost. She has thrust Eugene forever into the limelight-the actor, the writer, the stage magician-as he throws a never-ending literary party par excellence.

SUE WALKER

University of South Alabama

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 2004
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