Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (16 page)

Tennessee: This is Vanilla Williams interviewing Princess Rodriguez who just arrived here from Monterey. . . . Have you gotten around much yet?

Pancho: Ah, yes I have, Vanilla. I have gotten around. I’ve been cruising on Canal Street, you know.

Tennessee: Oh, honey, get off Canal Street. Miss Canal Street is no good. You should get on Miss Royal or Miss Bourbon. You should get to Personality Bar. That’s the place for new girls.

Pancho: The Personality Bar?

Tennessee: Yes, ma’am. . . . Princess Rodriguez, you get your ass up to the Personality Bar. That’s where the queens all carry little ladies—twenty-two pistols to protect themselves against dirt.

Pancho: I know, but I have a personality already. I don’t want to go there.

Tennessee: Well, honey, you’ll shine there. That’s the place for you.

Pancho: How about L’Affiche?

Tennessee: L’Affiche is elegant, honey. That’s piss-elegant. That’s this elegant business. Now, you don’t want to be this elegant business, do you?

“Well bred people find it difficult to break out of their shell of good-breeding. They live constantly under wraps,” Williams said. Pancho embodied Williams’s deliberate regression. By the standards of Williams’s refined upbringing, Pancho was trash. Williams had aligned himself with the pagan and the redemption of the instinctual, which, like the cool water Alma mentions at the finale of
Summer and Smoke
, “comes from deep underground.” Decades later Williams told Studs Terkel that Alma “was willing—when she gave up her great love—she was finally willing to settle for an attractive salesman.” Williams was also speaking of himself.

Pancho
was
his attractive salesman. A man-child of twenty-five, Pancho was sensual, explosive, jealous, unlettered, and primitive. Pancho’s frequent and fantastic misdoings filled Williams’s life with sensational melodrama. “All of my nights with Pancho, and many of my days, in those days when he was so fond of fire-water, were inclined toward a great deal of wildness,” Williams wrote in the original manuscript of
Memoirs,
changing Pancho to “Santo” in the published version because he was “sort of an off-beat saint.” “At first I entertained him in my apartment only two or three evenings a week but he decided to move in and in he moved and that was the end of my social success in New Orleans.”

With Pancho Rodriguez

“My deportment wasn’t too exemplary at that time of my life,” Pancho said. When he was on his bad behavior, Pancho could empty a room in a heartbeat, and he did. “The scenes he created scared respectable society away,” Williams wrote. “I received no more invitations to debut parties in the Garden District.” Their relationship propelled Williams even faster toward the horizon of his desires and even further into Bohemia. “He could not explain this thing to himself and yet he did not regret it,” Williams wrote in his short story “Rubio y Morena,” a meditation on their relationship. Like the narrator, Williams “had never been able to believe that anybody sincerely cared much about him.” Pancho’s uncomplicated ardor “restored his male dominance. In his heart he knew this and was grateful.”

Williams also had written Pancho into the schematic emotional equation of “Chart of Anatomy.” On the page, he was the rapacious, fiery Mexican Rosa Gonzales, “some loud tacky thing with a Z in her name!” Pancho’s sister’s club—La Luna—became the Moon Lake Casino, “where anything goes” and which is, Alma says, “gay, very gay.” Pancho was representative of Williams’s extravagant new romantic reordering of existence. He was a package of paganism, through whom Williams found the redemption of the instinctual. Rosa’s irresistible, insidious hold on the prodigiously gifted Dr. Buchanan reimagined Pancho’s subterranean pull on Williams—something he both craved and feared. “Did anyone ever slide downhill as fast as I have this summer? . . . Like a greased pig,” Buchanan tells Rosa, to whom he is briefly and improbably engaged. Rosa does for Buchanan what Pancho did for Williams. As a catalyst of his undoing, Pancho “widened the latitude of his experience . . . the circus-trapeze of longing on which he had kicked himself senselessly back and forth.” Pancho didn’t know much, didn’t think much, didn’t have much to say: nevertheless, his presence reprieved Williams from his isolation, his sense of being “sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.” “Of all the people I have known you have the greatest and warmest heart,” Williams wrote to Pancho; like the narrator in “Rubio y Morena,” quite to his surprise, Williams “had grown to love” him.

In late April 1946, hoping to escape muggy New Orleans and to refresh himself for the grind of completing “Chart of Anatomy,” Williams decided to take off for a few months to Taos, New Mexico, “to breathe the fine air between those two ranges of mountains, the Lobos and the Sangre de Christo.” He set out in his new car, a convertible Packard Roadster christened “Skatterbolt” by the family, making a stopover in St. Louis. Pancho, who worked at a department store, told Williams he would rendezvous with him in New Mexico after he gave notice. “I have learned how to use an hydraulic jack and a lug-wrench which is really a milestone in my life!” Williams wrote to Audrey Wood from the road. By the time he reached St. Louis, both his radiator and his heterosexual masquerade to the family had been blown.

“When I got home I found a telegram—opened and read by the family—which stated that he had quit his job and was leaving for Taos and would I please wire him some money to live on till I arrived there,” Williams wrote Donald Windham. “I need not tell you the reception this wire had in the bosom of the family. They have cross-examined me about Pancho and the wire ever since I got here. He has called me long-distance a couple of times, with Mother scuttling downstairs to grab up the phone so she could listen in on the conversation. Naturally I would have to practically hang up on the poor kid, especially when he burst into tears and begged me to leave here at once as he was lonely and hungry in the middle of the desert!” Williams added, “I guess the cat is all but out of the bag, although I have covered up as well as I can—you know how well that is!”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you much on the phone,” he wrote to Pancho, promising to wire money. “We have two phones, one upstairs and one down and Mother usually listens at the other phone. I was terrified that you would say something.” He continued, “I wish you would write me immediately but please be extremely careful what you put in any communication addressed here. Make the letter very casual but tell me where you are staying in Taos, how you like it—do you think you’ll be happy there? . . . Staying with me you would not need much money but knowing you, I am afraid you will be restless without something in the way of an occupation. I shall be writing awfully hard during the days and there is not society of the sort in New Orleans—although I consider that to be an advantage. However the important thing is that I shall see you very soon!”

The first day on the road from St. Louis to Taos, Williams’s car and his body began to break down. He felt stabbing pains in his abdomen. “Jack in Black had come out of the bushes,” Williams wrote. As he continued west, both he and the car grew worse. In Missouri, his pain was diagnosed as cramps and nerves; in Kansas, as low-grade appendicitis; in Oklahoma, as kidney stones. After Williams abandoned his car in Oklahoma and got himself by bus to Taos, the Sisters of Nazareth at the Holy Cross Hospital told him that because he had a fever and a white blood cell count of 18,000, his appendix might have burst and therefore he required immediate surgery.

“The altitude affected my heart, and I did not think I’d pull through,” he wrote Audrey Wood. “Pancho sat in the hospital with me and I made out my last will and testament while the young doctors shaved my groin for surgery,” Williams wrote. “I had nothing to leave but the playscript of ‘Battle of Angels’ and I left it to Pancho.” Pancho took the will and tore it to pieces. “He always had moments of great style, and this was one of them,” Williams said. As Williams breathed in the anesthesia, he experienced “a sensation of death.” “Claustrophobia, feeling of suffocation are my greatest dreads,” he explained later about the moment. As he went under, Williams’s last words were, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”

When Williams came to, “Dios Mio!”—Spanish for “My God!”—were his first words. “I don’t know why I said it in Spanish,” Williams told Audrey Wood. “Probably the strong influence of Hispanic culture!” The doctors told him that instead of finding a ruptured appendix, they discovered that he had Meckel’s diverticulitis, “a rare intestinal problem.” To his close friends—Audrey Wood, James Laughlin, Paul Bigelow, Donald Windham—Williams wrote extended accounts of the traumatic event. Even ten years later, reimagining the operation for the critic Kenneth Tynan, the word picture of his torment remained remarkably the same.

As he lay recuperating from the surgery, one of the sisters bustling through her chores remarked to Williams, “Well, you’re all right now. Of course you’re probably going to get something like this again in a few years, but we all have to go sometime, or other, don’t we?” Williams received her statement almost like a curse. “One of the good sisters of the Holy Cross came into my room and advised me to make my peace with the Lord as whatever improvement I showed would only be temporary,” he told James Laughlin. Nothing the doctors said would disabuse Williams of his opinion—formed on the basis of the sister’s coded words and his own analysis of the decayed parts of his intestine—that he had pancreatic cancer. “I don’t know what you got and I don’t care what you got, it’s nothing to me,” the dressed-down sister told him, returning to hiss her fury while he was still taking plasma.

“Since then, and despite the assurances of the doctors, I have been expecting to die, which is something I have never really looked forward to at all,” he wrote to Laughlin. Williams’s life had acquired both a sense of urgency and a sense of an ending. Still recovering at the hospital three days later, he wrote to Donald Windham, “I am sitting up here smoking and writing, but feel profoundly changed in some way. I did not know life was so precious to me or death so unalluring.” The incident proved to be a watershed. “This was when the desperate time started,” he told Kenneth Tynan. The moment marked the beginning of a three-year period when he thought he was “a dying man and a still young one.”

In an attempt to shed his sense of doom, Williams left Taos to lose himself in work and in the recuperative delights of a Nantucket summer. He rented a gray clapboard house at 31 Pine Street and invited a number of friends to distract him. “As everyone remarked, the house seemed just like the Wingfield apartment except there was more light,” Williams wrote to Margo Jones. “But after the first week there were no clean sheets or towels and the atmosphere of southern degeneracy had completely triumphed over the brisk New England climate.”

The first to arrive that summer was a stranger, Carson McCullers, to whom Williams had written praising her novel
The Member of the Wedding
and suggesting they meet up before his imminent death. “She was a crashing bore, but Tennessee found her sort of tragic and interesting,” Gore Vidal said. “The minute I met her she seemed like one of my oldest and best friends!” Williams confessed to James Laughlin. He went on, “We are planning to collaborate on a dramatization of her last book soon as I get my present play finished. I think this play will be my last effort to write for Broadway. From now on I shall write for a nonexistent art-theatre.”

McCullers, like Williams, was lion-hearted. Her poem “Love and the Rind of Time” addressed “Those who find it a little harder to live / And therefore live a little harder.” She was Southern; she had battled ill health, alcoholism, insecurity, and her own wayward sexual desires. Williams called McCullers his “sister.” In later years, she would keep a writing room in her Nyack house for Williams. “I feel that once I can be with you nothing will frighten me and I can rest safe,” she wrote him. “My self-confidence—about health, and work, and realization of my inward self—are dependent on you: sometimes it disturbs me to realize how much. But not really—I know nothing but good can come of our alliance.”

Williams cherished the memory of that summer—“the last good year before her stroke”—including his first sighting of McCullers disembarking the ferry: a tall girl in slacks and baseball cap, flashing a radiant snaggle-toothed grin. None of the passengers seemed to fit her description, so Williams and Pancho started up the gangplank to see if anyone else was still on board. Just then, her two battered suitcases in hand, McCullers came toward them. “Are you Tennessee or Pancho?” she asked. Williams identified himself. He suggested they go for a swim; Pancho, already drunk at midday, joined them. They changed at the bathhouse. Outside was a patio with a long row of rocking chairs overlooking the water; in each chair sat an old lady. “For some reason Pancho did not like the way they looked and he turned his rage upon them,” Williams recalled. “At the top of his voice, addressing these very proper old ladies, he shouted, ‘What are you looking at? You’re nothing but a bunch of old cock-suckers!’ ”