Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (67 page)

Mildred Dunnock and Hermione Baddeley in
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

Inevitably, the protean Chris is both a seer and a seducer, a saintly angel and a predatory hustler, courtly and unbiddable. “There’s the element of the con man in him, but there’s also an element of the mystic,” Williams said. (“Everything about him was like that, a contradiction,” one of Mrs. Goforth’s acquaintances tells her.) Chris is at pains to explain to Mrs. Goforth that he is a representative of another reality—a reality that could be misconstrued as insanity. “We don’t all live in the same world, you know, Mrs. Goforth,” he says. “Oh, we all see the same things—sea, sun, sky, human faces and inhuman faces, but—they’re different in
here!
” (He touches his forehead.) “And one person’s sense of reality can be another person’s sense of—well, of madness!—chaos!” Chris is a messenger of the unknown and a votary of it. He carries in his backpack a book titled “Meanings Known and Unknown.” “It sounds like something religious,” Mrs. Goforth says. She can’t attract Chris, who refuses her imperious sexual command. “You have the distinction, the dubious distinction, of being the first man that wouldn’t come into my bedroom when invited to enter,” she tells him. The pleasure with which he tantalizes her is spiritual. “You need somebody or something to mean God to you,” he tells her.

Writing was the ruthless something that meant God to Williams, a manifestation of the miraculous that had, several times, engineered his own resurrection. Through the blessings of his imagination Williams had been comforted and reborn. The drama onstage is not whether Chris will have sex with Mrs. Goforth; it is whether Chris will be the catalyst that allows her imagination to re-engage, her calcified heart to reopen. Flora Goforth—isolated by geography, money, celebrity, and competitive ruthlessness—is the
reductio ad absurdum
of the spiritual trap that Williams had spelled out to Kenneth Tynan almost a decade earlier: “Once the heart is thoroughly insulated, it’s also dead. At least for my kind of writer.” (Mrs. Goforth, whose motto is “Grab, fight, or go hungry,” admits to having built “a shell of bone round my heart with their goddamn loot.”)

Mrs. Goforth’s indifference to others ensures her isolation; she exudes an epic ennui comparable to Williams’s. At the same time, the dying diva longs for and fears Chris’s life-giving touch. The play’s contest takes place between competing internal forces: it’s a drama of withholding and surrender, in which one frustrated half of Williams is shown struggling to communicate with the other half. Chris, looking out over the Mediterranean from Mrs. Goforth’s balcony, for instance, turns the vista into a poetic vision. “Here’s where the whole show started, it’s the oldest sea in the Western world, Mrs. Goforth, this sea called the Mediterranean Sea, which means the middle of the earth, was the cradle of life, not the grave, but the cradle of pagan and Christian—civilizations, this sea, and its connecting river, that old water snake, the Nile.” Mrs. Goforth short-circuits his meaning. “I’ve been on the Nile,” she replies. “No message.” Mrs. Goforth has no symbolic imagination. She is comically literal. When she complains that her work is “burning me up like a house on fire,” Chris turns her platitude into something visionary: “Yes, we—all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” “What do you mean by—what windows?” she counters.

Williams’s addictions, he knew, were shrinking his creativity even as they were meant to sustain it. “In my own writing, I look back wistfully on the years, many of them, when I only needed two cups of strong coffee,” he said. “Now I wouldn’t dream of attempting to reach my unconscious mind without some other device in the nature of two or three martinis.” Williams couldn’t properly nourish himself, and neither could Mrs. Goforth, for whom feeding is a crucial issue. Living mostly off pills and coffee—“Anything solid takes the edge off my energy,” she says—she can’t receive much nourishment or give it. At the same time, she is suspicious of Chris’s desire to nurture her. “One long-ago meeting between us, and you expect me to believe you care more about my spirit and body than your own, Mr. Flanders,” she tells Chris, who admits to being “panicky when I have no one to care for.” Mrs. Goforth also perversely refuses to feed Chris. He hasn’t eaten in five days; he is “famished.” But at the beginning of the play, before they’ve met, she has her servants remove a tray of food that’s been brought to him; when they meet the next day on her sumptuous patio, she orders the breakfast tray removed because she “can’t stand the smell of food.” By the time Blackie manages to sneak a bottle of milk into Chris’s rucksack, the play is nearly over. As the very particular stage directions indicate, milk is meant to suggest food for the soul, not just for the body: “
Chris opens the milk bottle and sips the milk as if it were sacramental wine. . . . He catches some drops of milk that have run down his chin, licks them almost reverently off the palm of his hand
.”

The drugged Mrs. Goforth is a mess; like Williams, she can no longer find herself to know herself. Just as Williams took up residence in the virtual world of his characters, Chris proposes to take up residence on Mrs. Goforth’s estate. The collaboration he suggests is an antidote to existential abandonment:

We’re all of us living in a house we’re not used to . . . a house full of—voices, noises, objects, strange shadows, light that’s even stranger—We can’t understand. We bark and jump around and try to—be—

in this big mysterious house but—in our hearts we’re all still very frightened of it. Don’t you think so? Then it gets to be dark. We’re left alone with each other and give those gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into—sleep and—rest for the next day’s—playtime . . . and the next day’s mysteries.

Chris is one of those mysteries. His first and last word is “Boom!”—a mysterious sound that mimics the waves crashing on the Divina Costiera below and carries the paradox of the waves’ resounding power: explosion and erosion, creation and destruction. “Boom” is the title of a mobile that Chris wants to construct. “That’s what it means. No translation, no explanation, just ‘Boom,’ ” Chris says in the play’s last lines.

To Williams, “Boom” was “the sound of shock felt by people each moment of still being alive.” Even in these metaphoric terms, the word contains the pulse of paradox—the sound of both heartbeat and heart attack. (In 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the word echoed Williams’s fear not only of his own demise but also of the demise of the Western world. The sound was so central to
Milk Train
that Williams titled his screenplay for Joseph Losey’s 1968 film adaptation
Boom!
In the film, which Williams considered “much better written than the play,” Chris doesn’t clamber up the mountain onto Mrs. Goforth’s property; instead, significantly, he emerges from the sea—the mother ocean—an emissary of the unconscious who may, or may not, help Mrs. Goforth. “
Don’t leave me alone till—
,” she whispers to Chris at the finale. “Be here, when I wake up,” she says with her last breath. “You always wonder where it’s gone, so far, so quickly. You feel it must be still around somewhere, in the air. But there’s no sign of it,” Chris says of the end of Mrs. Goforth’s “fierce life.” Between existence and extinction, there is only one infinite, unfathomable explosion.

Milk Train
is a murky play, but it accurately describes the confounding creative and emotional knife-edge on which Williams was perched; a vision of Williams’s creative demise and a prayer for his own imaginative salvation. It is also a portrait of Frank Merlo, who is the emotional and physical impasto with which Williams painted the characters around Mrs. Goforth. In Mrs. Goforth’s description of her thrilling first nights with Husband No. 3, and how he looked as he closed the curtains (“clothed in a god’s perfection, his naked body!—he went from window to window, all the way round the bedroom, drawing the curtains together”), Williams was specifically reworking his image of Merlo in “A Separate Poem”: “You put on the clothes of a god which was your naked body / and moved from window to window in a room made of windows, drawing, closing the curtain . . . then came to rest, fleshed / in a god’s perfection beside me.” Even Christopher, the hustler with artistic ambitions, contains a wash of Merlo and his charm. But most obviously, as the pun on his name indicates, Merlo was written into Blackie, the forthright, compassionate, put-upon factotum who is abused by her imperious employer. (“Blackie, the boss is sorry she took her nerves out on you,” Mrs. Goforth says.) Like Merlo, Blackie is at once feisty—she threatens to quit—and unable to leave, trapped in her boss’s psychic net.

IN LATE JUNE 1962, “just barely marching . . . stopping is not appealing,” Williams took his new play and his new “Angel,” as he called him—the poet Frederick Nicklaus—to Tangiers, where he had rented a house for four months: “He’s a desperate young man and I’m a desperate old one—a basis for some degree of communication, perhaps,” Williams wrote. A graduate of Ohio State University with a degree in art history, Nicklaus had migrated to New York from Columbus, Ohio, to pursue a poet’s calling. He was a handsome, tow-haired, gentle man—a cousin of the golfer Jack Nicklaus—to whom Williams had been introduced in September 1957 by Gilbert Maxwell at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, where both men were working to support their writing habit. “I was stacking books. And Gilbert came over and said, ‘Oh, Freddy, I want you to meet Tennessee Williams,’ ” Nicklaus recalled. “He was wearing a gray suit and dark glasses. He was tan. And he was smiling—a strange, ambiguous smile. You couldn’t tell if he was happy or if he was just disguising something.” Nicklaus added, “I blushed.”

“I have engaged a very gentle, kind young man to watch out for me,” Williams wrote to Lilla Van Saher in August. But before he agreed to accompany Williams on his travels that summer, Nicklaus did a great deal of “soul-searching.” “I didn’t want to be a home breaker,” he said, adding, “I asked Tenn emphatically, ‘What is Frank going to think about this?’ And he said very harshly—you know Tennessee had a hard side to him—‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks.’ ”

With Frederick Nicklaus

But it did. The previous months had been tempestuous ones for Williams and Merlo. That March, Robert Hines, a New Orleans realtor who managed Williams’s recently purchased property at 1014 Dumaine Street, and his friend Robert Lee (aka “The Dixie Doxie”) had stayed with Williams and Merlo at their Duncan Street “villa,” as Merlo called it. “The ‘fireworks’ started immediately upon my arrival,” Hines recalled. “Tenn was standing on the front porch naked from the waist up screaming, ‘the Sicilian Bitch has locked me out of my own house!’ So Dee Dee and I started to burgle a window when Frankie drove up and easily opened the patio glass door which evidently was left permanently unlocked—just slightly difficult to shove open, and Tenn obviously knew this.” Hines continued, “I quickly realized that Tenn had all along been grooming me as an ally versus Frankie . . . (i.e. ‘Frankie takes the afternoon off for drug runs,’ when actually Frank came home after running errands for laundry, dog care, groceries, plus planning to cook). Tenn then discovered Frank and I spent hours drinking and talking about our shipboard lives as sailors (we both did medical work for years at sea). This excluded Tenn, naturally. Frankie and I were also avid opera buffs and sat up late, playing grand opera from Frank’s great collection, which enraged Tenn, as he would shout down the stairs, ‘I can’t sleep in my own house!’ Frank would yell back, ‘Shut up, you don’t sleep anyway, you’re like a vampire roaming the place!’ ”

To Hines, the outbursts seemed to come more from Williams than from Merlo. After one scene—which was caused by Williams having it off with Dee Dee under Merlo’s nose—Williams stormed out of the house. “Robert, Sir, do me the honor of driving me to the nearest motel, away from this pack of lies and [this] poisoned roof,” Hines recalled him saying. Hines agreed to chauffeur Williams and Dee Dee away. “Frankie was hurt and stunned, helpless. Dee Dee stuttered, ‘T-T-Tenn, what about clothes?’ Tenn shot back, ‘
What
clothes? Buy clothes, the only thing important are my manuscripts,’ which he put in the trunk of my car!” Hines went on, “Off we went and travelled about four blocks when Tenn suggested I pull over to a liquor store and purchase a pint of Old Grandad—‘One should never be caught without
stash!
’ ” After a few hours at the local public beach with a bottle of Old Grandad, the theatrical trio returned to the compound. “All quiet,” Hines noted.