Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (56 page)

During the first few months of his analysis, Williams reported unmistakable progress. For the first time in his life, he had become punctual; his panic attacks dramatically decreased; and his claustrophobia abated to the point where he could use the self-service elevator in the East Side gray-stone building where he shared an apartment with Merlo. One friend, who preferred to remain anonymous when interviewed by the
New York
Post
, noticed a new relaxation in his demeanor. “I remember a couple of years ago if anyone even a dear friend, like say, Audrey Wood, kissed him on the cheek or put an arm around his shoulders, you could see him stiffen. Now if he likes somebody, it’s more evident.” Kazan saw a new centeredness in his nervy friend. “I’ll tell you a new ‘bit’ I noticed about you,” he wrote to Williams after the opening of
Suddenly Last Summer
. “I don’t think a couple of years ago you would have hung around the back of a lobby after one of your openings and gone up to a group of tough characters, Josh Logan and Molly Kazan, and sat down with them and asked ‘How did you like it?’ That’s a new one and—oh, I forgot—Moss Hart—I really admired that, admired it because that much strength I don’t think I have.”

Kazan, who’d been sent two new scripts, including
The Loss of a Tear Drop Diamond
, noticed that Williams’s point of view toward his characters kept shifting, as if to say, “ ‘Just this second I’m fucking fed up with these goddamn types.’ ” “I think they as well as you are in a time of transition,” Kazan wrote, adding, “I agree with Kubie. Don’t rush. Please don’t. You have the best record of anyone currently working in our Theatre. (Only except O’Niell [
sic
] and I can’t even spell his fucking name. I don’t know why I except [
sic
] his plays since I haven’t read his plays since college). Anyway, don’t hurry. No one is going to forget you. No one.”

“Kubie has said for me, some way to quit work for a while and ‘lie fallow,’ as he puts it, till I have found myself; then go back to my work with a measure of inner composure,” Williams told Kazan. “ ‘A measure’ of that is all that I can hope for. I’ll never be as composed as Inge seems to be. I have one more job to do before the attempt to ‘lie fallow.’ I have to finish ‘Sweet Bird.’ At least a clean draft of it, and this I’ll try to do in Key West and Havana during this two-week vacation.” That exchange with Kazan was in January 1958. In late April, acutely depressed and in Kubie’s words “passing through purgatory”—“I thought I had been going through that all my life,” Williams wrote to St. Just—he wrote Kubie a long farewell letter. “But instead of posting it I delivered it by hand and of course he talked me into going on with it.”

Williams’s need for control meant that he was never going to submit easily to an analyst. The success of
Suddenly Last Summer
and the subsequent preproduction sale of
Sweet Bird
to MGM for $400,000, as well as the record-breaking release of the film of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, virtually ensured that he wouldn’t surrender to the analytic process. On June 27, 1958, Williams had his last session with Kubie. “It turned into a contest of wills,” Williams told Kazan in his postmortem. “He got sore and wound up saying that I wrote nothing but violent melodramas that only succeeded because of the violence of the times that I live in.”

Williams’s account is not necessarily reliable. As Kubie noted, in a letter to Lucy Freeman in 1962:

He is a strange and interesting phenomenon. Of course no matter what he says nor how he misquotes me I can never answer him in public print without violating his privacy. He has the right to indulge any public fantasies he pleases, but I do not have the right to correct him. His first reference to his treatment was in Newsweek (if I remember correctly). I vaguely remember that he had interrupted his analysis and was sorry and wished to go back but could not because his analyst was dead!! The more recent supposed quotation (put in quotation marks) bore not a remote resemblance to what I had actually said to him on that topic. However these are the hazards of the game and do not really worry me.

Writing was so successful a defense for Williams that he could not—would not—drop it even temporarily. “I had to defy my analyst to continue my work this past year,” he wrote to Kazan, three weeks before calling it quits with Kubie, adding, somewhat disingenuously, “I wanted to accept this instruction but without my work, I was unbearably lonely, my life unbearably empty. And I didn’t feel I could go on working with him while acting in total defiance of all his injunctions. So I quit for a while. I think maybe after this play I
could
do what he asks. Lie fallow. . . . The trouble, now, is that my personal life is all fucked up. Frank and I have drifted so wide apart and nobody else has come near enough to help me.”

ON HOLIDAY IN Europe after concluding analysis, Williams used anger to separate from Kubie. “I resented him telling me that I must go through ‘hell,’ ” Williams wrote to Wood that July. He also resented Merlo for putting him through it. At the beginning of the summer, in Barcelona, Williams was stung by a jellyfish, which, he noted in his diary, “seems to have set the keynote to practically all that has followed.” He sank into a deep depression. As he saw it, he had success but no life. He couldn’t live without Merlo, or with him. His work, which was his way of living, was also becoming his way of dying.

“Another day without coffee and work. Kubie would be pleased,” he joked bitterly in his diary. Flying to Europe, he confided to Wood, had been a “grave error.” “It was certainly not a good move. I became very paranoiac soon as I got here, fought with Frank,” he wrote. During this lonely European sojourn, Williams was trying to bring more clarity both to
Sweet Bird of Youth
—“The truth of the play has not yet been quite reached. It’s still a melodrama,” he wrote to Wood in June—and to his bedeviling relationship. (“Frank and I never get along in Rome,” he wrote to Jo Mielziner that summer. “Sometimes I wonder where we do get along, I’m not sure the place has yet been discovered on earth.”) Sometime later, he addressed the temperamental and footloose Merlo with the state of their union.

I’m drunk enough to write you about you and me as I see us and the situation between us.

Something you said to me in the first few weeks that we lived together has stuck in my mind all these years. You said, “I hope you’ll never be sick but if you were, then I could show you, prove to you, how kind I can be to you”—or something like that, that was the meaning of it.

I was already involved in a psychological and spiritual struggle that was slowly breaking me down despite the fiercest resistance. I needed exactly what you were offering to me and you were and are far too knowing not to have known it, but I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say the promise was false.

You meant it, I’m sure you did, but you didn’t carry it out. Your love never got out of bed, if you know what I mean, and you are far too knowing not to. I loved the bed but it wasn’t what I needed, strictly speaking, I needed tenderness, sweetness, support and reassurance all the time, all the way, or a recognizable facsimile of it, and mighty damn little of it was forthcoming even in the beginning, and progressively less. It was you who “threw down the gauntlet” in the battle of wills, of egos, that our life together turned into over the years, progressively. You wanted it that way and I had to take it that way, and so the support, the spiritual sustenance, was not only withheld but in its place there was a continual duel, draining me emotionally, embittering me, turning me into an angry middle-aged man. Kubie was quick to see this, although I never told him anything more about you than the literal, day-to-day, blow-by-blow, account of our lives together in New York while we were there during my analysis. He came to the quick conclusion that the situation between us was “mutually destructive” and that’s why he went out on a risky limb to try to put a stop to it. He knew I was at the point of a total crack-up and he saw that you not only did not care about it but gave a very suspicious appearance of pushing me toward it faster.

These are very harsh things to say and there may be some elements of injustice or misapprehension in them but this is the way it has been as far as I am able to see it, or Kubie could.

I know my faults and you know them so I don’t have to tell you about them, you can tell me about them if you care to, and I will be glad to hear your full account of them. Intense irritability, raw nerves, chronic fatigue were the unavoidable concomitants of my endless struggle to carry on my vocation in years when energy was running low and lower, but it took far less than your native perception and wisdom to recognize the reasons and to understand and forgive them. If you did, you expressed it in strange ways, most of the time.—We still had the bed, and it was still good, but the love never got out of bed.

The bed-sweetness, the malignant dependency, the fear of running out of time, the hunger to hold onto fame’s live wire, the longing for a pure love and the abuse of it, the issue of whether to stay with Merlo or to go, the artist’s mortification at a “botched” work that turns into a big public success: all these intense personal issues in Williams’s life found their way into the panorama of
Sweet Bird of Youth
. Analysis had given Williams a sort of detachment from his unfulfillable emotional demands, and that newly minted self-awareness lent a tragicomic flavor to the power play between
Sweet Bird
’s drugged, exhausted fading star Princess Kosmonopolis (aka Alexandra Del Lago) and Chance Wayne, her hapless, desperate, blackmailing gigolo and a would-be star who returns to his hometown in a doomed attempt to recover the love of his youth. Obsessed with her “outlived legend,” the washed-up Princess is driven mad by the loss of her success; Chance is driven mad by his failure to achieve it. The drama that these two characters enact mirrored the conundrum of Williams’s existence.

The Glass Menagerie
had made a myth of Williams’s escape through art from his “2 by 4 situation”; now, in
Sweet Birth of Youth
, he documented how his pursuit of art and fame had gotten him into an even tighter spot. Like the rat caught in a trap that Chance mentions in the play’s penultimate moment—it “gnaws off its own foot . . . and then, with its foot gnawed off and the rat set free, couldn’t run, couldn’t go, bled and died”—Williams saw self-destruction as his only avenue of escape. Through both characters, he bore witness to his spiritual exhaustion. The Princess spoke for the abrasions of time and lost energy. “There’s nowhere else to retire to when you retire from an art because, believe it or not, I really was once an artist. So I retired to the moon, but the atmosphere of the moon doesn’t have any oxygen in it,” she says, adding, “You can’t retire with the out-crying heart of an artist still crying out, in your body, in your nerves, in your what? Heart? Oh, no that’s gone.” Chance spoke for Williams’s moral exhaustion and the invidious pull of fame. “In a life like mine, you just can’t stop, you know, can’t take time out between steps, you’ve got to keep going right on up from one thing to the other, once you drop out, it leaves you and goes on without you and you’re washed up.” He added, “I’m talking about the parade. THE parade! The parade! the boys that go places.”

Once, in 1955, while playing the truth game with Anna Magnani, en route to New York on the
Andrea Doria
, Williams had shocked her by calling her a “monster.” “I told her that all good artists were monsters,” he wrote. “In the sense of departing extravagantly from the norm, sometimes in a conspicuous fashion, sometimes in a fashion that almost escapes public detection, but I think they are always monsters if they have greatness. But try and try as I might, as I certainly did, to explain what I meant by ‘monster,’ she was still sorrowful over the term, and it lingered in her memory a long time. . . . For almost a year later, when I was back in Rome and she was driving me home from a late party her changeable face became dark and brooding and she lapsed into a long silence, and then she suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Tennessee, you are also a monster.’ ”

By 1958, Williams had come to agree with her. The term “monster” was one that he regularly applied to himself, a defining descriptor in the idiom of his “out-crying heart.” “I am a monster, but I don’t hurt anybody by plan or intention,” he wrote to Kazan as they were reworking
Sweet Bird of Youth
. “Am simply very self-centered without confidence in the center—Chance without looks, shall we say. And middle-aged and hate it.” The play itself dissected the concept of monstrousness at length. “I wasn’t always this monster,” the Princess says. “Monsters don’t die early; they hang on long, awfully long. Their vanity’s infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.” (The eponymous reptile in
The Night of the Iguana
, which Williams would begin writing in 1959, while
Sweet Bird
was being mounted, embodied his next spiritual mutation: a monster at the end of its tether.) “Kubie said I can’t believe anyone likes me because I despise myself,” Williams told Wood, adding—in a phrase that foreshadowed Chance’s struggle in
Sweet Bird
—“I want to become a decent person, as I used to be.”

After a grueling decade of celebrity and literary striving, Williams had become all too aware of the shrunken circumference of his life, which brought with it the hardening of his carapace. Analysis had poisoned the pure well of his idealized self. “I came to discover a lot of very unpleasant things about my character,” he wrote to Oliver Evans as 1958 drew to a close. “I doubt that I have improved as a result but at least I know they are there instead of considering myself as I used to, an unusually nice little man.” To Kazan, he complained, “Kubie didn’t seem to understand how much of my character is scar-tissue, an accumulation of traumatic experiences which have made me imitate the hermit crab, a crustacean way of living.” Williams had become a stranger to himself. He could live successfully in his art but not in his life. By cultivating his literary persona, he had starved his private one. “A writer is always two beings, the part of him he works with and the part he lives with,” he said. “Of course he lives with both, in a sense, but one is the more objective, the observer, and the other one, is the left-over one that he was born as.” Williams went on, “This left-over one is constantly more left-over, more reduced, I’m afraid. It’s an unfavorable contract between them, unfavorable to the original ‘as born’ being. It usually becomes unfavorable to both of them, after a certain point of difficult co-existence.”