Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (18 page)

On November 1, Williams finished an early draft of the play. He wired Wood on November 11:

STILL DISSATISFIED WITH SCRIPT. SHOW GUTHRIE IF HE WISHES BUT NO ONE ELSE TILL I PREPARE FINAL VERSION.

“I agree with Guthrie that I don’t think this is for Cornell, primarily because I don’t think Cornell physically can ever fit herself into this play. I find it extremely hard to envision Cornell as a woman who is under the domination of her mother, father, church, and finally a man she loves but who doesn’t love her. On the other hand, I could believe a woman like Helen Hayes or a younger version of her in this predicament.” On December 1, Williams confided to his diary: “Still here, still working on ‘Chart’. Sometimes it seems just a grade or two superior to a radio soap-opera. I have committed some astonishing lapses of taste in this play.” He added, “This week coming—Margo will visit here one night on her way to Dallas. I’ll finish up this 3rd draft before she gets here and let her read it. If she is encouraging it will help.”

On December 7, Laurette Taylor died suddenly. To Williams, her death was another augury of his decline. During this grief-stricken week, Williams read “Chart” aloud to a friend. “He kept yawning as I read,” Williams wrote. “And so I read badly and when I finished, he made this devastating remark: ‘How could the author of “The Glass Menagerie” write such a bad play as this.’ ” “Maurice’s negative reaction and Margo’s unexpressed but suspected disappointment took whatever was left of the wind from my sails and I don’t even feel like sending the ms. off,” he wrote on December 16. (In fact, Jones liked
Summer and Smoke
and agreed to direct it at her Dallas Theatre.) He was failing at art and at life. “Quarreled with Pancho last night,” he wrote in his diary. “He brought his brother home with him for the second consecutive night which would be alright if I were well but I don’t want anyone around when I’m sick. Is it possible that I
am
losing my mind?” Nonetheless, on December 19, “feeling pretty desolate,” Williams sent off the final draft of “Chart of Anatomy” to Audrey Wood, then feeling unwell he went to bed “with newspaper and Crane and Hemingway. Two of the best bed-partners a sick old bitch can have.” He judged “Chart” incomplete. “Somehow or other, for a complex of psychological reasons, I did not do as well with ‘Chart’ as I should have,” he wrote to Wood, adding, “My interest has shifted to the other long play which may turn out to be stronger.”

“I haven’t caught sight of my old guardian angel in a long time,” Williams confided to his diary in mid-December. “Where are you Angelo mio? Can’t you hear my little cries of distress? If I were well, I feel that I would be writing my best work now.
If!
” Williams added, “One of Mr. O’Neill’s pipe dreams.” On Christmas Eve, however, Williams recorded a rare moment of contentment. “Pancho is home with me and preparing a nice supper. There are clean sheets on the bed. I read, write, smoke and am tolerably peaceful.” He had begun to rework “The Poker Night.” “I . . . find it surprisingly close to completion,” he wrote. “All in all I think it’s better than ‘Chart’. Simpler and straighter & therefore more forceful. The ending is not yet right. May continue working on that tomorrow.” The new play posed a set of totally different dramatic problems. It was relatively short (ninety-four pages) and structurally compact; it had, Williams told Wood, about six characters and was “rather harsh, violent and melodramatic with some pretty rough characters: a relief after the rectory.”

After welcoming in 1947 with a New Year’s Eve party, Williams began working “desultorily” on “The Poker Night.” Reverend Dakin was on his way to visit him, but even the cheering anticipation of his grandfather seemed unable to lift Williams’s spirits. Audrey Wood had not responded about “Chart”; Williams feared the worst. “She is probably disgusted with it. So was I,” he wrote. “Oh, how dull I am!” In his battle against depression—“this huge, dreadful game of fox and hounds with neurosis,” Williams called it—action was often the antidote to anomie. “Thinking of driving down into Florida if I remain well,” he noted in his diary for January 2. A couple of weeks later, he and his nearly ninety-year-old grandfather were on the road from New Orleans to Key West in a newly purchased secondhand white Pontiac.

“Grandfather was a wonderful traveling companion,” Williams said. “Everything pleased him. He pretended to see clearly despite his cataracts and in those days you could shout to him and he’d hear you.” They took up residence in a two-room suite on the top floor of the La Concha Hotel that offered a view “over a clean sweep of the sea that covers the bones of [Hart] Crane.” Williams worked in the morning; they spent the afternoons at the beach. His grandfather had purchased a pith helmet and a pair of swimming trunks decorated with palm trees. “You cannot imagine what a fantastic sight he is! Everyone smiles at us on the street, we are such an odd looking couple, I suppose,” Williams wrote to Pancho. “Yesterday he walked in a fruit-store and said, ‘I want a dozen
California
oranges’!” Williams continued, “It takes him half an hour to order a meal because he really wants everything on the menu. I have to read it to him all the way through several times shouting like a circus-barker. But he is enjoying himself and that is really the object of the trip.”

The Reverend Dakin

“By the calendar I am somewhat younger than you, but only by the calendar which is an unimportant thing,” Williams had written his grandfather a few months earlier. “You are one of the youngest people I have ever known, and incidentally one of the two people I have most loved and admired in this world. You know who the other one was and still is.” Williams’s enduring love was reciprocated; Reverend Dakin’s un-judgmental pleasure in his grandson and in his writing grounded Williams and strengthened him. (Williams subsequently repaid this allegiance by leaving all his royalties to Sewanee, his grandfather’s alma mater.) “Just being with him renewed my own pleasure in the fact of existence,” Williams recalled. It also renewed his confidence. “I think the change was good for me, physically, but I miss being with you all the time,” Williams wrote to Pancho. As it turned out, even the distance from Pancho, and from the destructive aspects of their relationship, proved to be some kind of psychological stimulus. In the benign Florida atmosphere, with its dramatic absence of abrasion, when Williams turned back to the tormented and tempestuous world of “The Poker Night,” to his surprise the characters seemed to flow powerfully onto the page. “It went like a house on fire, due to my happiness with Grandfather,” he recalled.

In the first-draft scenes of “The Poker Night,” with muscular, terse dialogue undecorated by the fine filigree of his lyricism, Williams set out the lineaments of need in each of his main characters: Blanche’s hysteria over the loss of both the family home and the husband who “loved me with everything but one part of his body”; her baby sister Stella’s bed sweetness with her virile uncouth husband Ralph. In these notional scenes, sex and survival were already the stakes of play. Williams imagined Blanche’s breakdown but not the cause of it. He had not yet situated the story in the specific steamy locale of New Orleans or imposed a patina of symbolism on Stella’s address—Elysian Fields—a name that held out the promise of eternal delight. At first, Stella appeared to Blanche to have settled merely in “an awful city wilderness.” Before her husband entered, Stella described him as “a different species.” Ralph, whose name Williams instructed to be changed to “Stanley” when the first draft was typed up, was a mutant breed, a person who had successfully adapted to this vacant, barbarous habitat, someone willed beyond the dimensions of cultivated behavior: in other words, a primitive.

In the simple situation—desperate visiting sister intrudes on sensual paradise of sibling—Williams did what he could not do in “Chart of Anatomy”—he dramatized desire instead of talking about it. He put psychology into behavior. In Blanche’s airs and graces, her ablutions, her romantic persiflage, her insistence on illusion—“the soft people have got to—shimmer and glow—put a—paper lantern over the light”—the hysteric’s masquerade was incarnated. She used her wound as lure. She made a spectacle of the broken connection between herself and her own desires. By contrast, Stanley was comfortable in his skin—“Be comfortable is my motto,” he says. He was clear about his needs and about how to satisfy them. Here, where life was reduced to the creaturely taking and giving of pleasure, to the expression of passion however violent and craven, impulse, not idealism, ruled. Williams’s characters acted out yet another deliberate regression that “Chart of Anatomy” merely indicated. When Blanche suggests to Stella that she should get out of the hovel she’s living in, she replies “slowly and emphatically,” “I’m not in anything I want to get out of.”

As Williams pored over the rewrite, he turned Stanley and Stella’s railroad flat into a battleground that externalized his own internal war. Pancho’s capricious intrusiveness, the absence of calm, the lunatic sense of his own collapse, the bouts of sexual pleasure, the compulsion to cling to the temperamental and abusive love object, the memory of the deadly family home, the need to endure—all these warring personal issues became the pigments that brought Williams’s characters to life. “Nobody sees anybody
truly
,” Williams wrote a few months later to Elia Kazan, in an attempt to entice him to direct the play by explaining it. “Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us.” He went on, “Add to those distortions in our
own
egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of the
others
—and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.” This drama of misperception required that the audience understand in each character both the public face and the unconscious desire it hid. Williams built up this complex contradictoriness, the division in each character that Kazan would characterize in his notebook as “Masks” and “Spines”:

Damsel in Distress

BLANCHE

find protection

The King of Ball and Jane

STANLEY

Keep things his way (B antagonist)

Housewife:

STELLA

Hold onto Stanley (B and herself the CAPTIVE, Glazed always day dreaming

narcotized asleep

He man-Mama’s Boy

MITCH

Get away from his mother (B the lever)

Long after he had done
Streetcar
, Elia Kazan wrote, “I kept puzzling over the play—which must be a measure of its size—and about the author. The more I thought about the play, the more mysterious the play appeared.” He continued, “It was certainly not what it seemed to be, a moral fable of the brutalization of a sensitive soul by a sadistic bully. Then what was it? Something far more personal.” Where Alma was preserved in the aspic of Victorian America, in Blanche the vestiges of the Victorian world—the refinements of mind and manners—were brought into fierce conflict with the modern spirit of self-aggrandizement. This clash of worlds and wills called out of Williams the most accurate coordinates of the split in his own internal geography, those life and death forces contending within him.

WHEN WILLIAMS SAT down to complete the play, his postoperative sense of renewed life was at odds with the sense of doom that had plagued him through the fall. A
froideur
had begun to creep into his relationship with Pancho. Williams wrote in late March 1947 that Pancho had “threatened to leave several times lately” and “I have twice bought him railroad tickets which he has subsequently cashed in and remained.” Williams added, “I am not sure how I would feel if he left. . . . Lately, I have been philandering a bit, here and there. I think it is an excellent thing for a relationship to have little side-dishes now and then but not everybody can see it that way. However, I intend to suit myself in the matter.” Williams’s restlessness had returned and with it a familiar loneliness. “Somehow in my life I have not succeeded in winning and holding the love of any person,” he wrote in his diary. “I have misjudged and made wrong choices in my relations and wind up now with no one capable of feeling anything much for me. Maybe I have been too cool and reserved—only my work held my heart. And I’ve had a way of evading emotional responsibility with people. The times they might have loved me I’ve slipped away.”

When the rewritten Blanche first enters Stella and Stanley’s louche New Orleans world, she brings with her a strung-out sense of collapse and a neediness that the character shared with her author. When she gets off the streetcar, Blanche is literally and figuratively at the end of the line, “a desperate driven creature”—Williams explained to Kazan—“backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand.” Her life has been a series of abdications; she is exhausted by the masquerade of gentility. Williams knew the panic-struck feeling. “To breathe quietly—how sweet!” he wrote at the time. “Oh, how sweet it would be to exist altogether without this tired old fabrication of flesh—such a mess of impurities and disintegrations—such a pitiful mess. But where is existence except in this ruin.”