Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (36 page)

He falls in love with his liquor with the same heroic abandon that he showed when he fell in love with and courted the girl he married. He loves it as if he had married it or given birth to it, it is his child now and his lover. Everything else disappears behind the comforting veil of his liquor or is seen through it with indifference and dimness, and then from that time on until the incredibly long time afterwards when it does eventually kill him, long after when it should have, in a crash on a highway . . . he seems to be throwing himself away like something disgusting he has found in his hands and has to get rid of as rapidly as he can.

Brick, who takes up residence in the bottom of a glass, embodied Williams’s desire for retreat. “The crustacean world for a while!” Williams advised himself in the miserable dog days of July 1951. He was, he said, “drawing the sails of my heart back in, for the wind is against them.” “Just taken: 2 phenobarbs, 1 seconal, 1 martini,” he noted in his diary a month later. “Now already the magic begins to work. But I know it isn’t right, it isn’t well, this cycle of sedation.” Williams, like Brick, “had not yet completely fallen beneath the axe blows of his liquor”; he was also “not long past his youth, in fact he was still in the further region of it.” In the story, Brick is described emerging noisily from a car in order to kick down the “For Sale” sign on a property he has just bought, in defiance of his wife’s power of attorney over their financial affairs. The scene inspires a recollection from the narrator’s childhood—a childhood that exactly resembled Williams’s own:

I am telling you mostly what I saw out of a window one spring in my childhood when I was recuperating from a long childhood illness which had turned me an ordinary active boy of ten into a thin and dreamy little spectre of a boy who had to depend on girls for companionship. I was like a child in wet weather. I brooded about the house, inventing solitary games, and I spent a lot of time looking out of windows.

Brick’s immobility certainly paralleled the creative and emotional still water in which Williams now found himself. Except for the story, Williams “couldn’t get going on anything that seemed important” to him. He had been “working, working, working all summer,” he confessed to Wood; for much of that time, he felt “like a man trying to run with a sprained ankle.”

BY THE BEGINNING of August, Merlo and Williams were cohabiting again; the time apart, however, hadn’t lifted Merlo’s sour mood. To Williams, he appeared cagey, irritable, and sullen, exuding “all the warmth and charm of a porcupine.” “I think the reason the Horse is so nervy and temperamental is that he has absolutely nothing, but NOTHING to do!” Williams wrote to Britneva. “I don’t think I could stand another year without him being busy at something, and so I’m going to do everything in my power to get him to go to a secretarial school when we get back to the States. If not that,
both
of us to a good analyst!” Williams saw the problem; his solution, however, missed the point. He figured that the typing of his manuscripts would allow Merlo to share in the work. He didn’t understand that Merlo’s serving as an in-house secretary would only exacerbate the problem.

In the emotional standoff, Britneva’s fierce allegiance—her “
amitié amoureuse
,” as she called it—became increasingly important to Williams, who longed to be kept in mind by someone. When he went to London without Merlo at the end of August, the high-spirited and affectionate welcome he got from Britneva was an answer to his prayers. “Thank God for Maria, if she still likes me,” Williams noted in his diary. “I wonder if
anyone
does, and
why
if they do.” But even the reunion with Britneva and her “good kind of mischief,” as Williams called it, was dogged by fiasco.

On the way to watch a polo match, at the invitation of the playboy the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, Britneva and Williams were part of a caravan of Rolls-Royces that stopped to pick up the actress Hermione Baddeley and her twenty-two-year-old bisexual lover, the actor Laurence Harvey, from her small house in Chester Square. Among the matchgoers was the drama critic Kenneth Tynan, whose gift for limpid description—Britneva, he wrote, was “attractive in a wild sharp-toothed way, like a dashing stoat”—captured in his diary the world of brittle and bewildering folly into which Williams had wandered:

We entered a small living-room, dark and shuttered despite the hot sun, full of bottles, glasses and party debris. Practical jokes were scattered everywhere, such as ashtrays in the shape of human hands and simulacra of lighted cigarettes lying on satin cushions. Laurence Harvey then staggered downstairs in a dressing gown, obviously hungover, to be introduced to us all and to pour drinks. He was followed by Hermione Baddeley, wearing an egg-splattered kimono. Hjalnar talked continuously; nobody else spoke except Tennessee, who muttered to me: “Do you know any of these people?” I shook my head. So did he. Hjalnar suggested we should leave: Miss Baddeley and Mr. Harvey got dressed; and as we were stumbling through the gloom to the door, Miss Baddeley said dramatically: “Larry—the beards!” “My God, yes,” said Harvey and plunged back upstairs.

He soon returned with an armful of long false beards made of crêpe hair and dyed extraordinary colours—green, yellow, purple, orange, puce. Solemnly he distributed them among the party: just as solemnly we hooked them over our ears. This was done without any suggestion of a prank but as if it were raining and he was handing out mackintoshes. “We turn up everywhere in our beards,” said Miss Baddeley categorically. Flamboyantly hirsute, we piled back into the cars, and silently sped through the suburbs. As we stopped at traffic lights, people would stare curiously at the bizarre convoy, beards steadily wagging, myself in magenta quietly rabbiting with Tennessee in sky-blue.

At Cowdray Park we disembarked and the chauffeurs produced hock and cold pheasant from the boot. Some of us remained bearded, others did not. . . . All at once there was a scream: “Jesus Christ!” Mr. Harvey had been stung on the lip by a wasp. He danced around in a panic. “Christ, fuck it, I’m

tomorrow and what happens to the fucking close-ups if my lip’s swollen up like a fucking balloon?” Miss Baddeley soothed him, procured a bottle of brandy from a chauffeur and retired with him into one of the cars, closing doors and windows and pulling blinds behind them. Outside the car, conversation remained becalmed in the heat. . . . Tennessee became silently drunk. No one had any idea why they were there. My wife and I joined Baddeley and Harvey in the car for some brandy. Harvey was moaning, Baddeley philosophically drinking. Emptying the bottle, she peered through the window and said memorably: “I think I’ll pop out for a mouthful of fresh wasp.”

Harvey followed her, so noisily in need of medical attention that the kindly Cooch Behar decided we all had better return to London. . . . We climbed back into the cars. My wife and I travelled with Tennessee, Miss Baddeley and Miss [Susan] Shaw; our host went ahead with Hjalnar, Mr. Harvey and Miss Britneva who had already shown, in a number of flashing oeillades, that she had very little time for Mr. Harvey’s tantrums.

As we were purring (I think that’s the word) past the Albert Hall the leading Rolls drew up at the kerb and Miss Britneva flew out. She ran back to our car, weeping hysterically. Opening the door, she said: “Get me out of here, Tennessee. That shit Harvey has just spat in my face.” It turned out that she had interrupted a monologue by Harvey on the subject of his film career to deliver herself of an incisive opinion on the effect of narcissism and megalomania on talent (if any). Whereupon Mr. H., who was facing her on a jump seat, had leant forward and let fly.

“The queen spat in Maria’s face and called her the foulest names I’ve ever heard addressed to a woman by anyone but Pancho,” Williams wrote to Merlo. “Of course Maria provoked the quarrel by some untactful remark, called him ‘insufferably conceited’ to his face.” Williams’s gossipy letter, which was meant to amuse, put a fine face on his aimlessness. “I’ve missed you an awful lot, both night and day, and Maria and I talk about you so much,” Williams concluded, before adding a false note of ingratiation. “But I think we needed this period away from each other.”

Over the next year, as Merlo’s withdrawal of affection continued, Williams learned resignation. Like his character Brick, Williams adopted “the cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle.” “At times in life there is a big two-letter word that says ‘No!’ and you must learn how to read it,” he admonished himself in his diary. “And if I don’t read it and believe and accept it, at least for a while, I’m going to crack in so many pieces you couldn’t find one of them!” Williams tried to achieve detachment. “I like being with Frank when he is friendly to me, which is only part of the time,” he wrote in his journal on September 16, 1951, shortly after reuniting with Merlo. Two days later, the day that
Streetcar
was being praised by the American press as a contemporary film classic, Williams was being put down by Merlo in Rome. “The Horse is in bed, cross as two sticks—no, as five or six sticks!” Williams wrote to Britneva. “What are we going to do with him?!”

AS WILLIAMS STRUGGLED to distance his heart from Merlo, he began to invest it more in his work. In mid-September, buoyed by the response to
Streetcar
, Kazan contacted Williams about doing a theatrical evening of one-act plays from Williams’s collection
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
, which he found “sexy, original and lively,” plus
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real
, a recently published one-act play, two scenes of which Kazan had workshopped at the Actors Studio in 1949. With Kazan’s rejection of
The Rose Tattoo
still not forgotten by either man, this suggestion of a new collaboration was a deep bow to Williams’s talent. It elicited from Williams a deep curtsey in return. “The prospect of another Kazan production is a good enough reason for any living playwright to go on living and
even
return to America,” Williams said. “Do you think he can be pinned down?” he wrote to Wood. “He would do a magnificent job and I think success, with him, would be fairly certain.”

Of all the writers with whom Kazan worked—Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, and Archibald MacLeish among them—Williams was the one with whom Kazan, by his own admission, meshed best. The partnership was the most influential in twentieth-century American theater. “It was a mysterious harmony; by all visible signs we were as different as two humans could be,” Kazan said. “Our union, immediate on first encounter, was close but unarticulated; it endured for the rest of his life.” Kazan and Williams romanced each other. Kazan was “Gadg, baby” and “fratello mio”; Williams was “Tenn, honey.” “I always had fun working with Kazan,” Williams wrote in
Memoirs
. “Some day you will know how much I value the great things you did with my work, how you lifted it above its measure by your great gift,” Williams wrote to Kazan after the first rehearsal of
Sweet Bird of Youth
in 1959. “I have been disloyal to nearly all lovers and friends but not to the one or two who brought my work to life. Believe me. I think I admire and value you more than any one I have known in this profession.”

The intimacy of their collaboration owed a great deal to the similarity of their family histories. “Life in America made both of us quirky rebels,” Kazan said. By reinventing themselves as artists—by rejecting the mediocrity of their brutal fathers—Kazan and Williams had each fashioned legends of daring. As a young writer, Williams had styled himself a pathfinder and adopted the name “Tennessee” in symbolic identification with his father’s “fierce blood” and pioneer lineage. Likewise, Kazan credited his resourcefulness, his enterprise, his appetite for adventure to his Anatolian roots. “I come from a family of voyagers,” he said. “My uncle and my father were transients, less from disposition than from necessity. They were slippery, had to be. Raised in a world of memories, they grew up distrustful of fate. ‘Don’t worry,’ my uncle used to say. ‘Everything will turn out bad.’ ”

Kazan’s and Williams’s suspicion of the world was a deep emotional bond between them. “We both felt vulnerable to the depredations of an unsympathetic world, distrustful of the success we’d had, suspicious of those in favor, anticipating put-downs, expecting insufficient appreciation and reward,” Kazan wrote. But the anxiety went further than that. Kazan shared with Williams an unstable metabolism; he too was a “disappearer.” Although married with four children, he was always at work and on the move; his appetite for freedom was tinged with a sense of paranoia that made Williams’s helter-skelter existence completely comprehensible to him. “The one thing any ambitious outsider seeking recognition in an alien society cannot tolerate is to be trapped in an enclosure where the gate is locked and he doesn’t have the key,” Kazan, who kept bank accounts and complete sets of clothes in three different cities, said. “I’ve been obsessed all my life with the possibility that flight might suddenly be necessary.”

Kazan and Williams grew up in household atmospheres of danger. Distrust and insecurity were the legacy of their feared fathers, whom, in later years, they regretted not having gotten to know. The eldest of four boys, Kazan recalled himself as a teenager watching from the window while a taxi took his father, George (Yiorgos Kazanjoglou), a rug merchant, off to the train station. “The terror in the house lifted,” he said. George Kazan, according to his son, “was a man full of violence that he dared release only at home. . . . The possibility that he might blow up at any time kept us all in terrible fear.” Where Williams was mocked as “Miss Nancy” by CC, Kazan was humiliated as a “good for nothing” and a “hopeless case” by his father. George Kazan was an Old World patriarch, oblivious to the needs of others except insofar as they served him. Kazan neither loved nor admired his father, though he shared a special bond with his mother, Athena, whose marriage to George had been arranged when she was eighteen. “We entered a secret life together, which Father never breached,” Kazan wrote. “That is where the conspiracy began.”