Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (39 page)

“The people are nearly all archetypes of various human attitudes toward life,” Williams wrote to Kazan.

Marguerite Gautier is the romantic sensualist and her friend, Casanova, is an out and out rake but also with romantic yearnings that promiscuity did not satisfy. Baron de Charlus is the completely cynical voluptuary, and hedonist. They belong together because they have pursued a fairly similar course, so they all stay at the hotel which is the “haut monde,” the prosperous side of the street. The Gypsy’s establishment is the brutal enigma of existence. Her daughter is the eternal object of desire. Kilroy, like Don Quixote whom he eventually joins, is the simple, innocent adventurer into life, the knight-errant who has preserved his dignity, his sincerity and his honor, though greatly baffled and subjected to much indignity and grief. I am not sure how precisely all this adds up, but perhaps it doesn’t have to, so long as the essential effect, of poetic mystery, is realized. I wrote it without figuring it out very logically in advance.

Kazan’s identification with the perilous surreal nightmare of
Camino
was deep. “I was its unfortunate hero,” he wrote. “I’d just been knocked down and was flat on the canvas. . . . I had to do what Kilroy—and Williams—did: get up off the mat and come back fighting. . . . Once when I asked him what the play was about, he answered, ‘It’s the story of everyone’s life after he’s gone through the razzle-dazzle of his youth . . .’ Then he went on, ‘There is terror and mystery on one side, honor and tenderness on the other.’ ” The characters embody Williams’s longing for a life beyond life, for an ecstasy not just of the flesh. This spiritual grasping for a way beyond, which appears, literally, in the topography of the set as the “Terra Incognita,” a desert that lies between the walled town and the snow-capped mountains in the distance, is also embedded in the stylization of the writing. In its swift interplay of poetry and panic, beauty and barbarity,
Camino Real
serves up a kind of theatrical gallimaufry that resists traditional forms: an allegory and not; protest play and not; naturalism and not; poetry and not; drama and not. The play’s rueful contortions express the surreal tragicomic mood of Williams’s poem “Carrousel Tune,” written in the same year:

Turn again, turn again, turn once again;

the freaks of the cosmic circus are men

We are the gooks and the geeks of creation;

Believe-It-Or-Not is the name of our star.

Camino Real
—the punning pronunciation of the title itself broadcasts the paradoxical conflict of the spiritual and the political—was conceived in the giddy, alienated spirit of “Believe-It-Or-Not,” that is, the spirit of the grotesque. The play’s comedy was, according to Williams, “traceable to the spirit of the American comic strip, and the animated cartoons, where the most outrageous absurdities give the greatest delight . . . where the characters are blown sky-high one moment and are skipping gaily about the next, where various members of their bodies are destroyed and restored in the flicker of the projector.” Kazan picked up on this need for incongruity. In his notes for the play, he wrote, “In the direction of this thing, keep it shimmering from violence and tragedy to broad wild humor, moving suddenly and always without transition.” In its counterpoint of speech and symbol—“I say that symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama,” Williams contended—
Camino Real
embodies a kind of fugue state. “Conventions of dreams should be studied as a key to much of the play’s staging and quality,” Kazan wrote in his director’s notes. “In dreams there is a continual flow and mutation: one identity melts into another identity without any interruption or surprise. . . . The play should set new limits of theatrical license and freedom.” (
Camino Real
, Williams said, “literally got down on its knees and begged for imaginative participation.”) For both the playwright and his characters,
Camino Real
was a leap into the unknown, which was part of its drama. “The essential stylistic problem is always to maintain the mood of mystery,” Williams told Kazan, who wrote this definition in his script and added “+humor.”

Nothing quite as poetic and visually playful had ever been tried on Broadway. “This play is moving to me because it describes what is happening in the world of 1952 to the people I love most in the world . . . all those blessed nonconformists,” Kazan told Williams. (At a time when merely knowing a homosexual could justify an FBI investigation, Williams brazenly included the first unabashed portrait of a gay man on the Broadway stage, the promiscuous Baron de Charlus. “My suit is pale yellow. My nationality is French, and my normality has been often subject to question,” he says.) Kazan continued, “I say, if the play IS about these people, let’s speak out and say so clearly because they are being killed off and ironed out, they are being shamed out and trained out and silenced and shunted and shoved off the edge of the world. Let’s speak out for them so everyone will hear and understand. If we don’t no one else will.”

“To the hard of hearing you shout,” Flannery O’Connor observed about the use of the grotesque, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Camino Real
did both. “Are you afraid of anything at all?” Williams’s Gypsy asked the audience through a loudspeaker. “Afraid of your heartbeat? Or the eyes of strangers! Afraid of breathing? Afraid of not breathing? Do you wish that things could be straight and simple again as they were in your childhood? Would you like to go back to Kindy Garten?”

When Wood first read the play, she told Williams “to put [it] away and not show to anyone,” he recalled, adding, “Her reaction had depressed me so that I thought the play must be really quite bad.” But by June 1952, despite his morbid fears to the contrary, Williams was on a kind of artistic roll. The film of
Streetcar
was a hit;
Summer and Smoke
had been successfully revived Off-Broadway by José Quintero, who brought new luster to the play and to its star, Geraldine Page; and Williams had just been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. These things and Kazan’s enthusiasm for the full-length
Camino Real
renewed Williams’s hope and his energy. “The script is only about 1/10 of the total quantity of writing done on it,” he told Kazan, when he delivered it, adding, “The writing has a wild, breathless, stammering quality which reflects my own brink of hysteria, but nevertheless I feel tonight that it is the most original piece of writing I have done and is, in a way, as beautiful as ‘Streetcar.’ The texture of the writing is not as fine, of course, but the underlying spirit is finer. ‘Streetcar’ was fundamentally an encomium to the enduring gallantry of the human spirit. So that is how I feel about it tonight, and I am not drunk, though tanked up on coffee.”

In mid-June 1952, Kazan and Williams met in Paris to discuss
Camino
. “I was prepared for anything, but to my happy surprise he seemed to be very favorably impressed,” Williams reported to Wood, adding, “He says he wants to start rehearsals in late October. This suits me!” In late July, Kazan’s suggestions for rewrites reached Williams. “I am
terribly stimulated
by these notes,” Williams told him. But, privately, he worried that “The Terrible Turk” was a “slippery customer,” liable to drop out of the project; strategically, he urged Wood to hurry the decisions about the show’s producer and set designer. “The important thing is to keep Gadg occupied with it.” Williams’s own way of keeping Kazan occupied was to create a melodrama.
Camino
, he confided to Kazan, was “very likely my last [play]. I almost hope that it is.” He added, “Except for some unexpected thing that will restore my old vigor, it would be better to put writing away, after this last job, and settle for whatever I could get out of just existing.”

Kazan, who, like the characters in
Camino
, had his back against the wall and was making a daring fight for his integrity, responded in particularly pugnacious form. “We’re fighting here for fun and for theatre and for self expression and not for money,” he wrote to Williams about
Camino
, the day after he finished filming
Man on a Tightrope
. “So let’s see to it that this once we do it really right, and not as a job. I don’t want to do a job now. I’m not in the mood to overly respect that word.” He went on, “Christ: let’s have some fun! Let’s have a costume parade that sends us home happy and relaxed and relieved. . . . I don’t want to take the attitude towards this play that we’re lucky to be able to GET IT ON at all. The hell with that. I’m in too mean a mood, and also too happy a mood, for that. . . . But I want the most difficult, the most experimental play to have the best help it can get. Who should ‘experiment’ except the best people.”

But over the next few months it became apparent that the best people didn’t know quite what to make of the experiment that Williams called “essentially a plastic poem on the romantic attitude toward life.” The set designer Jo Mielziner, who had done three productions with Williams, “felt like an ungrateful dog” for his lukewarm response. Cheryl Crawford worried about cost, clarity,
succès d’estime
, and her preference for a “hot light” finale. “This play ends with a sort of ‘misty radiance,’ and I am not sure that will be, or can be, hot enough to suit her,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “If you dissolve the shimmer of mystery over this thing, you lose its fascination.”

Unsettled by the reactions of the other potential collaborators, Williams wrote to Kazan in late July: “I think it is remarkable that your own interest and faith in the play still survives. Mine is indestructible.” But over the summer, after a couple of script-conference trips to Germany, where Kazan was filming, Williams began to discern “a retrenchment” of his director’s enthusiasm. “Yesterday eve we read over the work I’ve done on ‘Camino’ under Gadg’s direction,” he noted in his diary on August 20. “He kept snorting and exclaiming, oh, this is wonderful! The way a doctor tells a dying man what perfect condition he’s in. It seemed to me like one long agonized wail and I couldn’t go out to eat with him. Said excuse me but I think I’ll go cruising now.”

With Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford

“I hate writing that is a parade of images for the sake of images,” Williams said. But
Camino
was in danger of becoming just that. The connections between his passages were not linear and naturalistic but imagistic and symbolic; the play was a delicate, elusive weave of ideas and metaphors, unified as much by the rhythms of the music as by the rhythms of speech. The problem with Williams’s proliferating imagination was one of organization. Those poetic fragments had to be melded into a whole; a dramatic through-line had to be found in “a chowder of archetypes,” as one wag called the play. “It’s an almost super-human job,” Williams said. It took Kazan more than a month to respond to Williams’s September revisions. “I am very, very disturbed by the fact that you say that you have not read the script,” Williams wrote to him.

As Williams suspected, a lot of Kazan’s hesitation came from the reaction of his wife, Molly Day Thacher, who served as a kind of in-house critic for all her husband’s work. Thacher was the playreader for the Group Theatre who had “discovered” Williams in 1939 and had been responsible for getting him to Audrey Wood. After the skirmishing over
Camino
, however, Williams came to see her as “the self-appointed scourge of Bohemia.” At the end of September, still straddling the fence about
Camino Real
, Kazan wrote to Thacher, “About Tennessee: I called him yesterday, and he said he had finished the script and had sent one to Audrey, etc. As I told you, and then he said, he had the feeling I was going to run out on him again, he quoted from ‘Glass Menagerie’ and said: ‘Don’t fail me Tom! You are my right-hand bower!’ Now, what can I possibly do but do his entire and utter bidding—at the same time of course making the script good which it is not yet.” Kazan added, “I truly believe I can work with Tenn more, but he is the one guy that when I work with him, the stuff doesn’t turn out as I put it down in the outline. Not at all. . . . I can certainly understand any queasy feeling about this venture, and it is a staggering job, once embarked on. It seems to me life and death to Williams, though.”

Thacher, who hadn’t read the play at that point, heard the doubt in her husband’s tone. “When you’re sold, you just sell and don’t take no for an answer from anybody you want,” she replied. “There’s quite a difference. You said No to ‘Tattoo’ not too uncomfortably and with clarity. Here, you’re involved. And perhaps it wouldn’t be fair to look at it as though you’d never read it before and then decide. I sense a great hesitation or reluctance or something in what you write. I’m not talking about what I think—I haven’t read it—I’m talking about what you think, which is important.”

THACHER BROUGHT TO her passionate, articulate opinions an element of the firebrand. (Three days before Kazan began shooting
On the Waterfront
, for instance, she went behind her husband’s back to tell the producer, Sam Spiegel, that the script wasn’t ready and the film would be a disaster.) “Molly, to all extents and purposes, was smarter than Elia,” their son, the screenwriter Nick Kazan, said. “They both knew it. He desperately needed her critical input. It was one of the reasons he respected her and one of the ways they kept their marriage together. But once he felt that a play was going to work, he didn’t want to hear everything that she had to say.” He continued, “At some gut level, Elia worked and lived out of his heart and groin; Molly lived in her head.”