Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (90 page)

Grabbing both the brass ring of success and the trapeze of the flesh, Williams swung high and low. His passage through time was sensational. He contended doggedly with his own roiling divided self. In him, until his last breath, the forces of life and death were pitched in clamorous battle. Art was his habit, his “fatal need,” and his salvation. Foraying into those ineffable realms of sensation where language has little purchase, he uncovered our sorrow, our desire, our hauntedness. At the same time, he changed the shape and the ambition of the American commercial theater, which ultimately couldn’t support the paradoxical truth, “the tragic division of the human spirit,” that his stories tried to trap.

In his single-minded pursuit of greatness, Williams exhausted himself and lost his way. “I want to get my goodness back,” he frequently said. If he didn’t find the light, his outcrying heart certainly cast it. “What implements have we but words, images, colors, scratches upon the caves of our solitude?” he asked. In the game of hide-and-seek that he and his theater played with the world, Williams left a trail of beauty so that we could try to find him.

Illustrations

New York, 1948

Laurette Taylor,
The Glass Menagerie
, 1945

Laurette Taylor as Amanda, with jonquils

Backstage with set painters,
A Streetcar Named Desire

Marlon Brando as Stanley and Kim Hunter as Stella,
A Streetcar Named Desire

New York, 1948

At Café Nicholson with (from left to right) Tanaquil Le Clercq, Donald Windham, Buffie Johnson, and Gore Vidal

Key West studio

New York, 1952

With Anna Magnani on the set of
The Fugitive Kind

With Maureen Stapleton,
Orpheus Descending
, 1957