Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Read online

  “Tennessee was completely taken by surprise and greatly shaken,” Webster said. “It seemed to me that if ‘Battle of Angels’ was nothing else it was certainly clean, certainly idealistic,” Williams told her. For about half the play’s run, according to Williams, “censors sat out front and demanded excision from the script of practically all that made it intelligible, let alone moving.” To counter the City Council furor and to speak up for the beleaguered playwright, Miriam Hopkins held a press conference in which she addressed the accusations of “dirtiness,” which she called “an insult to the fine young man who wrote the show.” “You can tell them for me that I haven’t gotten to the point where I have to appear in dirty plays,” she said, adding that “dirt” was in the eyes of the beholder. “MIRIAM HOPKINS SAYS BOSTON COUNCIL SHOULD BE THROWN IN HARBOR WITH TEA,” bannered one of the Boston papers the next day.

  A few days later, at another production meeting, Williams was told that Battle of Angels would close in Boston without transferring to Broadway. “You don’t seem to see that I put my heart into this play,” Williams retorted. “You must not wear your heart on your sleeve for daws to peck at,” Webster told him. “At least you are not out of pocket,” Theresa Helburn chimed in. Recalling the moment, Williams said, “I don’t think I had any answer for that one, any more than I had anything in my pocket to be out of.” After a two-week capacity engagement, Battle of Angels closed, in Williams’s words, “for recasting, re-writing, re-everything.” Williams, who had expected to make eight hundred dollars for the run, ended up with two hundred. “What a failure!” he wrote to James Laughlin.

  “Nothing whatever in this whole experience could have encouraged the author to go on writing for the stage,” Webster said. “And it was that which troubled me most.” The Guild sent out an unprecedented and defensive newsletter to its subscribers, explaining that “the play was more a disappointment to us than to you”; it concluded, “ ‘Battle of Angels’ turned out badly but who knows whether the next one by the same author may not prove a success.” “I am right smack behind the eight-ball. And it is going to take plenty of luck to keep me out of the pocket,” Williams wrote to Langner from Key West, where he had gone to lick his wounds and rewrite his play. “A few weeks ago I was a bright possibility. Now I’m just a bubble that burst in Boston!” He added, “You all know that I’m something more than that. But nobody else knows it.”

  Margaret Webster, the British director of Battle of Angels

  WHILE UNDER SIEGE in Boston, Williams had written “Speech from the Stairs,” a poem that seemed to acknowledge a change in the geography of his interior.

  O lonely man,

  the long, long rope of blood,

  the belly’s rope that swung you from your mother,

  that dark trapeze your flesh descended from

  unwillingly and with too much travail,

  has now at last been broken lastingly—

  You must turn for parentage toward the stars . . .

  Romantic idealism—the notion of beauty and sensation as a means of redemption—would be the guide and inspiration for his young adult self. “That is the one ineluctable gift of the artist, to project himself beyond time and space through grasp and communion with eternal values,” Williams wrote to his friend Joseph Hazan in 1940, invoking Van Gogh, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield. He went on, “Isn’t there beauty in the fact of their passion, so much of which is replete with the purest compassion. . . . Let us both have the courage to believe in it—though people may call us ‘esthetes,’ ‘romantics,’ ‘escapists’—let’s cling tenaciously to our conviction that this world is the only reality worth our devotion.”

  In “the days AB—After Boston,” as he referred to the debacle in his diary, Williams could still take hopeful stock of himself. He was young, fresh, “capable of passion and tenderness—my mind—vague, dreamy, but sincere and thoughtful and with a wealth of experience—my heart still with a purity, after all this time.” He added, “The past—the future—a continuing stream—something will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.” Those impecunious days—he had as little as five dollars in his pocket and even had to briefly pawn his typewriter for food—were filled mostly with work and wonder at what lay ahead. Williams had everything to play for and a bracing resilience to survive his disappointments. “This is a one-way street I have chosen, and I have to follow it through with all the confidence and courage that necessity gives you,” he wrote to Wood. The adventure of his writing, his travels, and his sexuality filled him with expectation and a kind of optimism. On the day in 1941 when he recorded the final rejection of Battle of Angels in his diary, Williams also noted, “I have diverted myself with the most extraordinary amount of sexual license I have ever indulged in. New lover every night barely missing one.” It was, he wrote, “a rich and exciting period sexually—the most active of my life. But I wasn’t happy—neither was I unhappy.”

  In the years that followed the failure of Battle of Angels, Wood steered Williams to important theater connections, to grant-giving agencies, even to Hollywood, where for five months in 1943 he worked haphazardly on a Lana Turner movie for MGM—“a celluloid brassiere,” he called it—making the studio minimum of $250 a week. (During that time, Williams also wrote a screen treatment for a play he had titled “The Gentleman Caller,” which he would rework over the next two years into The Glass Menagerie.) With her formal eloquence and her starchy bearing, Wood was a kind of empowering mother whom Williams saw as his salvation. (“Dear Child of God,” he began one letter to her.) In these early years, her messianic belief in his talent was almost all that sustained him. In his voluminous correspondence with Wood, he poured out his deepest longings. “I want an audience,” he wrote in early September 1942. “If I get that, I am satisfied, for then I can throw up in their faces the things they won’t take till they know me, all the little, helpless, unspoken-for crowd of sheep-like creatures I seem to find in the world and wish quixotically to be the equally little and helpless voice of.”

  Williams’s theatrical world and his lyrical voice seemed swamped in the tumult of the World War. “I cannot see ahead nor can anyone,” he confided to his diary, adding, “I suspect it will be especially hard for us who are not made to be warriors. Our little works may be lost.” To a friend, he wrote, “The things that I have to sell in my work—what little I can give to the world in the way of poetic truth—is going rapidly down on the wartime market, and lies and manic laughter and nationalistic hoopla are soaring dizzily up!” He went on, “Who can we speak to, who can we write for—what can we say—Nothing but GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

  But, in a way, the war provided Williams with the spiritual challenge he needed. In his 1942 diary, he hectored the fragile side of himself, which could so easily lose heart: “I must be able to be a post-war artist. Keep awake—alive—new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes.” It was during this time that Williams began to dream of “a new form, non-realistic,” which he called “sculptural drama.” “The three-act play . . . is probably on its way out anyhow,” he wrote. “This form, this method, is for the play of short cumulative scenes which I think is on its way in.” He imagined “something resembling a restrained type of dance with motions honed down to the essential and the significant. Playing with cigarettes, toying with glasses—the myriad little nervous businesses of realistic drama will be out. The pure line, the strongly chiseled profile will at once point and restrain the emotional impact of drama . . . . Apocalypse without delirium.”

  In 1941, Williams’s vision of a new theatrical climate was pie in the sky. “I think there is going to be a vast hunger for life after all this death—and for light after all this eclipse,” he wrote to William Saroyan. “People will want to read, see, feel the living truth and they will revolt against the sing-song Mother Goose book of lies that are being fed to them.” By 1943, however, this vague hope of change had become a full-b
lown conviction. “We must remember that a new theatre is coming after the war with a completely new criticism, thank God,” he told Horton Foote. He went on, “Keep your ear to the ground and concentrate on honesty till you know what else is coming! All these people are going, going—GONE!” He added, “Maybe we are, too, but—En Avant!”

  In a world turned upside down by calamity, Williams lost perspective on his own work. After re-reading an early one-act version of The Glass Menagerie, in 1943 he wrote in his diary, “It is appalling. Something has definitely gone wrong—that I was able to write such shit. Hysterical and empty.” He worked slowly, with “no overwhelming interest,” as he wrote to Windham in July 1943: “It lacks the violence that excites me, so I piddle around with it.” “I have been horribly worried over ‘The Gentleman Caller,’ ” Williams wrote to his champion Margo Jones in August 1943. “Loving the story and characters, but doubting the audience-appeal and strength of the plot.” Williams confessed to Jones that writing the play had been “hell.” “Everybody has liked the script so far, the first time this has happened with any of my plays, and it surprises me,” Williams said, adding, “I guess it’s a sign that the theatre is changing.” By August 1944, Williams had completed the play, but his doubts remained. “Have finished ‘The Caller,’ ” he wrote to Windham. “No doubt it goes in my reservoir of noble efforts. It is the last I will try to write for the now existing theatre.”

  The thunderous applause of The Glass Menagerie’s Broadway first-nighters, which greeted Laurette Taylor on her first entrance, sent Taylor so far off course that she jumped into the second act; it also gave Dowling, now onstage as her son, Tom, time to guide her back on track. “I said, ‘Ma, c’mon, now,’ ” Dowling recalled. “She came back like a little terrier.” A bucket had been placed in the wings for Taylor. “The few minutes she had between scenes, she was leaning over and retching horribly,” Tony Ross recalled. “She played almost through a fog,” Dowling said. When they weren’t on stage, the cast, at once amazed at Taylor’s performance and aghast at her offstage vomiting, clustered in the wings to watch her. “There was nothing left inside of her, poor thing, but on stage—good God!” Ross recalled. Even Williams from his sixth-row seat soon realized that he was present at a special occasion. He was struck by Taylor’s “supernatural quality on stage.” “I had never seen a performance like it in my whole life. It was something like out of another world,” he said. Later on, he would recollect, “Laurette’s basic tragedy was not in herself but in the shabby microcosm of the commercial theatre. It had nothing to offer her that corresponded to what she had to give. Her talent was like a chandelier, all glittering crystal and gold, that was hung incongruously in a kitchen.” But now, miraculously, even for the critics in the audience, something rarely, if ever, experienced was happening before their eyes: illumination and revelation coalesced in Taylor as Amanda worried about her children and invoked her long-lost life of youth and hope. “There is an inexplicable rightness, moment by moment, phrase by phrase, endlessly varied in the transitions,” Stark Young would later write in the New Republic. “Technique, which is always composed of skill and instinct working together, is in this case, so overlaid with warmth, tenderness, and wit, that any analysis is completely baffled. Only a trained theater eye and ear can see what is happening, and then only at times.” At intermission, Wood had to be disabused of her high anxiety. “Stop all this hand clasping and stop digging your elbow into my side,” Robert Edmond Jones told her. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about—any longer.”

  The Glass Menagerie began with Amanda calling Tom to the dinner table. “We can’t say grace until you come back to the table,” she said to her dreamy son. As they intuited from Taylor’s weird radiance, Williams and the enthralled audience were in the presence of it. Taylor seemed to inhabit and to transform into light the punishing suffocation and loss of his “haunted household.”

  Throughout his life, Williams, who was the most autobiographical of American playwrights, always approached his typewriter in the same way: “I begin with a character in a situation—a vague one. If I have a problem, I invent people in parallel circumstances, create parallel tensions. It is my way of working out problems.” Writing was good, he said, “in exact ratio to the degree of emotional tension which is released in it.” By the end of each writing day—he wrote for up to eight hours at a time—manuscript pages were scattered across his desk and at his feet. This disarray made a larger symbolic point: his mess was now outside him. For Williams, writing was a kind of cleansing. “There are only two times in this world when I am happy and selfless and pure,” he said. “One is when I jack off on paper and the other when I empty all the fretfulness of desire on a young male body.”

  The pulse behind Williams’s unique voice—as he told Brooks Atkinson, the legendary drama critic at the New York Times—was desperation: “that thing that makes me write like a screaming banshee, when under this impulse to scream all the time is a deep, deep longing to call out softly with love.” On stage and off it, hysteria was Williams’s idiom. “I have a vast traumatic eye / set in my forehead center / that tortures to its own design / all images that enter,” Williams wrote. His plays put those images on stage and made a spectacle of his haunted interior—which he once characterized as “sixteen cylinders inside a jalopy.” Each play, he felt, registered “the climate of my interior world at the time in which [it was] written.” “I took to the theatre with the impetus of a compulsion,” Williams explained, describing the immediate charm of representation—re-presentation—of his dimly understood but persecuting internal world, a sump of confounding and conflicting projections (“the siege of all that is not I,” he called them).

  “The turbulent business of my nerves demanded something more animate than written language could be,” he said. “It seemed to me that even the giants of literature, such as Chekhov, when writing narratives were only describing dramas. And they were altogether dependent on the sensitivity of their readers. Nothing lived of what they had created unless the reader had the stage inside him, or the screen, on which their images could be visibly projected. However with a play, a play on the stage—let any fool come to it! It is there, it is really and truly there—whether the audience understands it or not!” Williams had begun to feel, he said, “a frustrating lack of vitality in words alone. I wanted a plastic medium. I conceived things visually, in sound and color and movement.” He added, “Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me: actors appeared out of nowhere . . . and took the stage over.”

  At the time of his conversion to drama, in his early twenties, Williams had never been backstage and, he said, “had not seen more than two or three professional productions: touring companies that passed through the South and Middle West. My conversion to theatre arrived as mysteriously as those impulses that enter the flesh at puberty.” For two decades, however, he’d had a ringside seat at some unforgettable and indigestible family scenes. Williams’s childhood was not happy, but it was noisy. He was born into a hate-filled parental drama—a theater of war in which the children were stunned witnesses. In “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” the short story that was the basis for The Glass Menagerie, the Narrator says, “In five years’ time I had nearly forgotten home. I had to forget it, I couldn’t carry it with me.”

  For Williams, however, his family was never far from his mind. In a sort of séance with the ghosts of his past, their narratives and their voices were perpetually reworked into his cast of characters. His closest relatives—his benevolent grandparents, the Reverend Walter Dakin and Rosina Dakin, known as “Grand,” in whose various Southern Episcopal rectories Williams had spent his early life; his feared and frequently absent traveling-salesman father, Cornelius Coffin (“CC”) Williams; his prim and protective mother, “Miss Edwina”; his younger brother, Dakin; and his older blighted sister, Rose, who at the age of thirty-three was given one of the first prefrontal lobotomies in America—along with Williams himself, with his own “irrec
oncilably divided” nature, formed what the novelist and man of letters Gore Vidal astutely called “his basic repertory company.” Williams’s romance with the theater allowed him to get his insides out and to act out the warring fragments of family madness to which he had been an understudy all his life. To put feelings into the audience and to watch its startled response was also reassuring; it allowed Williams to reenter childhood innocence and to be known for himself as he never was in the family.

  According to Vidal, who on occasion wrote in the same room as Williams, the playwright entered entirely into his imaginary world while working; he was “so absorbed that, as he was typing, he was acting out what his characters were doing.” The pinched world of The Glass Menagerie, with its alley and fire escape, its secondhand furniture, is a poetic, if not literal, representation of the Williams family’s existence in St. Louis—where the family moved in 1918 when Williams was seven so that CC could accept a management position with the International Shoe Company, then the biggest shoe company in the world, after working four years as a traveling salesman for them. In 1943, while he was staying at his parents’ house and working on The Glass Menagerie, Williams wrote “Cortege,” a poem that evoked the suffocating trauma his displaced family had experienced in St. Louis: “Nowhere was ease / You lost belief in everything but loss.”

  In fact, although Williams claimed that his life before St. Louis “was completely unshadowed by fear,” he was already no stranger to loss. Between the ages of four and six, he had lost the use of his legs (probably a case of diphtheria, which kept him an invalid for two years); his beloved black nanny, Ozzie, who disappeared without explanation; and, to all extents and purposes, his father, who, like the absent patriarch in Menagerie, “had fallen in love with long distances” and returned only occasionally to the rectory for fractious reunions with the family.