Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (53 page)

Instead, Kubie cobbled together a new analytic plan for Williams that included five 50-minute sessions a week with him and a sort of forced separation from Merlo. “My analyst is very anxious for Frank to stay in Key West till we have gotten over the hump of the analysis as during this period it is very difficult for me to share such a small apartment with another person as tense and temperamental as myself,” Williams wrote to Paul Bowles. “We’re like a couple of fighting cocks here lately, all but pecking each other’s eyes out, and naturally that is not a healthy atmosphere in which I can go on with my work with Dr. Kubie.” He added, “I give Dr. Kubie one year which expires in June. If, by that time, I am not on the way to something unmistakably better, I’ll start travelling again.” At the beginning of his treatment, Williams rented a second New York apartment, a sort of chic bolt-hole on the Upper West Side, with a fireplace and a calming vista of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. “Analysis is very upsetting at first,” he explained to St. Just. “You are forced to look at and examine things in yourself that you would choose not to. So it’s necessary to have a retreat, a peaceful place to retire. . . . At the same time, I feel very guilty about it because I know Frank interprets it as a threat to our relation.”

Williams’s West Side retreat was something of a sin bin, which might have reasonably been provocative to Merlo. On Saturday nights, Williams turned his eighteenth-floor apartment, he said, “into a swinging honky-tonk.” “I had it all decorated like a chop-suey joint, I mean there were beaded string curtains, paper lanterns, kewpie dolls, every kind of outrageous tacky bit of decor I could pick up on Mulberry Street or Mott Street,” he recalled to Oliver Evans. “Early Saturday morning I would get on the phone and call every swinger I knew and tell him to come to my West Side pad that night with any congenial friends he cared to bring. The number of guests usually ranged between twenty and thirty in number—if not also in age—and we had some high old times.” He continued, “I laid in an abundant supply of liquor and Frank Krause—the steady occupant of the pad—would prepare a lot of dips and canapés and sometimes casserole dishes. . . . Sometimes we would take to the streets in the neighborhood to augment the guest list and it was on one such occasion that I first encountered Mishima”—Yukio Mishima, one of the most important Japanese authors of the twentieth century—“As a rule I only participated as host. Unless something very special was present.”

Initially, Williams struck a cavalier pose about the analytic endeavor. “I’ve been wanting to try it for a long time, and this seems a good time to do it, now that it seems advisable to stay at a safe distance from Broadway till the critics have a chance to forget my recent transgressions,” he wrote to his mother. But he was serious about the process; he found it painful. “With Kubie I have worked mostly on negative points: my suspicions, fears, jealousies. I have deliberately painted a black picture of myself, a sort of ‘mea culpa,’ ” he explained to Kazan. “If only we could turn up something nice,” he complained to St. Just in October. “But so far nothing of that sort even worth mentioning, just envy, hate, anger, and so forth. Of course he is attacking my sex life and has succeeded in destroying my interest in all except the Horse, and perhaps the Horse will go next and I will start getting my kicks out of dirty pictures.”

THE PROCESS OF analysis may not have been pleasant, but it did change at least one aspect of Williams’s narrative: his story of his hated and hateful father. “Kubie would imitate my father and scream at me—to break the doors down, you know,” Williams explained to
Playboy
in 1973. “What he gave me was not forgettable. I actually learned to respect my father, and now that he’s dead, I love the old son of a bitch.” Williams even took issue with a twelve-part
New York
Post
profile in which Cornelius, who he now claimed “wasn’t really that bad,” was cast in a “terrible light.” “My father was a totally honest man,” Williams wrote in a protesting letter, which was published in full in the newspaper. “He was never known to tell a lie in his life or to take an unfair advantage of anybody in business.” He continued:

He had a strong character and a sense of honor. He lived on his own terms which were hard terms for his family but he should not be judged as long as he remains a mystery that he is to us who lived in his shadow. Maybe I hated him, once, but I certainly don’t anymore. He gave me some valuable things: he gave me fighting blood, which I needed, and now he has given me, through the revelations of my psychoanalysis, a sense of the necessity to forgive your father in order to forgive the world that he brought you into: in my opinion, an important lesson which I hope I have really learned. Forgiving, of course, does not mean accepting and condoning, it does not even mean an end to the battle. As for his being devoted to money, as my younger brother is quoted as having said of him, all American businessmen seem to have that devotion, more or less, mostly more, and I think it a sort of reverse sublimation. Disappointed in their longing for other things, such as tenderness, they turn to the pursuit of wealth because that is more easily obtainable in the world. My father got little of either.

Behind the tyranny of CC’s anger, Williams came to see a punishing sense of resignation, a man exiled from those he ought to love and who ought to love him. In the poem “Iron Man,” he imagined his father’s “strangulated love”:

I.

We cringed at his anger,

sudden as steel,

rapier-like,

but did not feel

his wounds that could not

utter their need

but bled in silence

as martyrs bleed!

II.

His rage over trifles,

his bitter smile

were the things that we noticed,

and yet all the while

a frustrated heart

was beating there

that wanted to love us

but did not dare!

In his essay “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” Williams wrote, “A psychiatrist once said to me, You will begin to forgive the world when you’ve forgiven your father. I’m afraid it is true that my father taught me to hate, but I know that he didn’t plan to, and, terrible as it is to know how to hate, and to hate, I have forgiven him for it and for a great deal else.” He added, “Now I feel a very deep kinship to him.” Through psychoanalysis, Williams achieved a less judgmental view of CC’s boozing. “I think it was the constraint of working in an office after the free life on the road, and his unexpressed but deep feeling of guilt over his failure ‘to be a good husband and father,’ ” he wrote in 1962 to Lucy Freeman, who helped Edwina to write her autobiography. “His nature was not to comply with accepted social modes and patterns without a restlessness that would have driven him mad without the release of liquor and poker and wild weekends.” Williams recalled, “My mother would scream, ‘I know where his liquor is. He’s hidden it behind the bathtub.’ If only she’d’ve sat down and had a sherry with him.” In his son’s eyes, CC had lived “a rather pathetically regular life.” CC had played it safe; in the compromise, he lost everything. His sorry example inspired his son to take a more uncompromising approach to his own heart’s desires, to gamble everything on his writing. “Oh, no, I can’t make peace,” he wrote in his diary. “I can’t accept a little or nothing.”

Williams’s recognition through analysis of his underlying love for his long-absent, frustrated father was by itself a major accomplishment, but it was overlooked by friends in their posthumous accounts of Williams. “Happily, the Bird’s anarchy triumphed over the analyst,” Gore Vidal wrote, for instance. “After a troubling session on the couch, he would appear on television and tell Mike Wallace all about the problems of his analysis with one Dr. Kubie, who not long after took down his shingle and retired from shrinkage.” This entirely misrepresented both Williams’s hard-won emotional education and the analyst’s role in it. Kubie did indeed retire, but to become director of training at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital outside Baltimore; Williams did indeed talk to Mike Wallace, but with a new inward-looking tone, which demonstrated his serious attempt to reconsider his upbringing and to explore its effect on his character:

WALLACE:

Richard Watts, whom I know you admire, has described your characteristic mood as “steeped in passion, hatred, frustration, bitterness and violence.”

WILLIAMS:

I’m having a big argument on this subject with my analyst, Mike. I tell him that I don’t feel that way and he—he wants to find out if I do or I don’t, and we’re still exploring it. I think I feel more affection and love. He thinks that certain early conditions and experiences in my life made—created a lot of anger and resentment in me, which I am taking out now through my writing. He may be right. I can’t say. . . . Have you ever heard of the term—he didn’t want me to use these analytic terms, he doesn’t approve of them, but I do a lot of reading and I use them to him, he doesn’t use them to me—a term that I’ve come across lately is “infantile omnipotence.”

WALLACE:

“Infantile omnipotence”?

WILLIAMS:

That is what we all have as babies. We scream in the cradle, the mother picks us up, she comforts us, she suckles us, she changes the diaper, whatever is giving us discomfort is tended to, and through this she rocks us to sleep and all that. And whatever gives us discomfort, we find, is—is relieved in response to an outraged cry. . . . This is the infant feeling omnipotent. All it has to do is cry out and it will be comforted, it will be attended to. All right. We grow up a little and we discover that the outcry doesn’t meet this tender response always. After a while the mother realizes that it’s no longer an infant, she gets impatient with its outcry or maybe the father gets impatient with it. Anyway, it meets the world which is less permissive, less tender and comforting, and it misses the maternal arms—the maternal comfort—and therefore, then, it becomes outraged, it becomes angry. And that’s where most of our neuroses spring from, from the time when we—. . . We meet a more indifferent world, and then we become angry. That is the root of most anger.

The change in Williams’s story about his father inevitably led to a recalibration of his story about his mother, and her legend as the put-upon family saint. Prior to analysis, Williams’s narrative of his family was encapsulated in
The Glass Menagerie
, which (aside from its depiction of Amanda’s inability to touch or comfort her children) essentially presented his mother’s version of events. After analysis, Williams’s attitude toward his parents (and himself) became more nuanced.

This new version of his story was incorporated into
Suddenly Last Summer
, which was a direct product of Williams’s turmoil on the analyst’s couch. “I was bored not working,” Williams explained later. “I began to cheat. I’d get up at four, type a few hours, and then I felt fresh. The doctor finally surrendered.” Kubie’s diktats may not have broken Williams’s writing habit—trying to was possibly even a strategic analytic mistake, too challenging for someone like Williams, whose self-worth was bound up entirely in his work—but they did allow him to come to terms with Edwina and her punishing passive-aggression, in which there was as much unacknowledged hate as love, as much selfishness as selflessness. When Edwina died, at the age of ninety-five, in 1980, Williams wryly acknowledged the lethal, castrating dimension of her “extraordinary power.” “Only four feet eleven, she conquered my father who was six feet and drove him out of the house as soon as she received half of ‘Menagerie.’ Allowed the State hospital to perform one of the earliest lobotomies on Rose. Unconsciously managed to turn both her sons gay,” he told Elia Kazan.

Suddenly Last Summer
, which made a stylistic departure into the realm of the grotesque—a genre with “much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” as Edgar Allan Poe once described it—registered the roiling anger and the shock of disenchantment that his analysis had released. The play documents a furious struggle between Catharine Holly, a young woman who is driven mad by the gruesome death of her homosexual cousin, Sebastian Venable, and his mother, Mrs. Venable, who threatens to have her lobotomized for telling the truth about the circumstances of his demise. Set in a sort of festering and fantastical garden, “a well-groomed jungle,” full of thrashing sounds, “as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of a savage nature,”
Suddenly Last Summer
was, according to its author, an allegory. The “prehistoric” jungle-garden was as much a simulacrum of Williams’s unruly interior as it was a production of the decadent poet Sebastian Venable, who tended it. What has broken in Sebastian, in the play—“that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a—a sort of a—sort of—
umbilical
cord,
long—after . . .
”—was breaking in Williams too.

For the first time in his dramatic oeuvre, Williams allowed himself to face overtly the madness of his mother. Mrs. Venable, who idealizes her late poet-son, refuses to accept the shocking and contradictory account of his behavior delivered by the institutionalized Catharine, who claims that Sebastian used her as bait to attract young male lovers. “I was PROCURING for him,” she tells her psychiatrist, Dr. Sugar. “
She
used to do it,
too
,” she says of Mrs. Venable. “
Not consciously!
She didn’t
know
that she was procuring for him in the smart, the fashionable places they used to go to before that summer! Sebastian was shy with people. She wasn’t. Neither was I.” Mrs. Venable, who gasps “like a great hooked fish,” clings to her delusions on the subject. “It wasn’t
folie de grandeur
. It was grandeur,” she tells Dr. Sugar of the halcyon days she spent traveling the watering holes of Europe with Sebastian. In Mrs. Venable’s mind, Catharine is a “vandal” bent on destroying the perfect image she has of her son and herself. “Really I was actually the only one in his life that satisfied the demands he made of people,” Mrs. Venable tells the doctor, contending that the forty-year-old Sebastian was “chaste,” “not c-h-a-s-e-d.” Mrs. Venable tries to use her wealth and her moral authority to bribe Catharine’s family into having the incriminating details of Sebastian’s sex life wiped out of her brain: the play is a negotiation for a lobotomy. “After the operation, who would
believe
her, Doctor?” Mrs. Venable says to Dr. Sugar, adding, from offstage, at the finale, “Cut this hideous story out of her brain!”