< PreviousCHAPTER I THE AMERICAN BLUES: WILLIAMS’ HERITAGE OF TENSION IN MATTER AND FORM Very much a child of his own time and place, Thomas Lanier Wil- liams experienced personally the basic American tensions . Born of a “Puritan” mother, Edwina Dakin, and a “Cavalier” father who did not boast that he was descended from the American romantic poet Sidney Lanier, Tennessee early retreated from his father’s insulting gibes at his interiority of his mother’s more comforting and protec- tive security . His mother also retreated from the father into her own parents’ home, an Episcopalian rectory . Here “his mother’s delicacy and his grandfather’s work . . .made him a little Puritan .” 1 In his par- ents Williams found wide personification of the basic imbalances he was later to exhibit in his characters: his mother, genteel and high- strung, still savored of the ante-bellum aristocracy; his father, cava- lier and footloose, was the sensual epitome of the traveling salesman . His mother, though she denies it literally, is Amanda, Big Mama, Aunt Nonnie, and the early Blanche DuBois . She is the pre-bitch Williams woman . His father is the drummer of “The Last of My Solid Gold Watches”; he is the sagging life-force of Big Daddy and the prototype of Boss Finley in Sweet Bird . He is the older men in Williams’ plays . His clerical grandfather, unlike either of his parents, was never transferred literally by Williams to a play; nevertheless, Williams’ intimate knowledge of both the ministry and of parson- age life contributed greatly to his clerical drawings: the Reverend Guildford Melton of You Touched Me, the Reverend Winemiller of 1 Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (New York: Citadel Press, 1961), p . 20 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK12John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities, and the defrocked Larry Shan- non of Night of the Iguana . Mrs . Edwina Williams sounds only hollowly sincere in disclaim- ing connection with any dramatic character; 2 for if the esthetic, sub- conscious, and associational truth be stated, the artist takes his own experienced reality and transmogrifies it to his own creative vision . One story, “The Yellow Bird,” gives example; it is the initial sketch of Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale . It beings: Alma was the daughter of a Protestant minister named Increase Tutwiler, the last of a string of Increase Tutwilers who had occupied pulpits since the Reformation came to England . The first American progenitor had settled in Salem, and around him . . .had revolved one of the most sensational of the Salem witch trials . In Alma, the last of the Tutwilers, “the puritan spirit fiercely aglow” had traversed the distance “from Salem to Hobbs, Arkansas .” Liv- ing in the parsonage, sorely repressed, (a feeling not unexperienced by Williams), Alma began to cut loose . She began to smoke . Her father threatened denunciation; but her mother, viewing life in truly Ramian-Puritanic opposites, would scream and go into a faint, as she knew that every girl who is driven out of her father’s house goes right into a good-time house . She was unable to conceive of anything in between . The fact is that Alma took to smoking and peroxide and jooking and worse “—as if someone were with her, a disembodied someone, perhaps a remote ancestor of liberal tendencies who had been dis- pleased by the channel his blood had taken till Alma kicked over the traces and jumped back to the plumed-hat Cavaliers .” 3 Williams, in a context he has related specifically to the colonial American, 2 Edwina Dakin Williams, Remember Me to Tom (New York, G . P . Putnam, 1963), pp . 148-149 . 3 “The Yellow Bird,” One Arm and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1954), pp . 199, 200, 202, 207 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction13 dramatizes a basic paranoia whose imbalance he had quite personally experienced, at least obliquely, very early in his own life . Alma Tutwiler in her degeneration pinpoints the unbalanced extremities between the mythical image and the existential reality, the difference between some kind of idealized ethical standard of repression (which has become associated with the puritanical) and the opposite standard of an expressive, or at least reactionary, mode of “cavalier” conduct . Because neither extreme plumbs true, Wil- liams chooses to work within the spectrum of the extremities; for he thinks to employ a kind of dissociative hyperbole to examine the myth of America that he might clarify what is really happening here . He places no one in balance—except maybe the pregnant Serafine of The Rose Tattoo; and he lets few live at the absolute end of the desolate wasteland: perhaps only the unredeemable Sissy Goforth of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore . He more often illustrates the extremes by bottling the oppos- ing tensions into a central character who, after an interior recogni- tion scene, finds the Angst of his opposing values sliding into ripe paranoia . For instance, Amanda Wingfield, pathetic as she reveals the difference time has wrought in her socially, provides pre-clinical prognosis of the Williams women to follow . Blanche DuBois, how- ever, hard on the heels of Amanda, becomes prototype for Williams’ vicious gynolatry . She embodies the puritan appearance of the vir- tuous female (the Edenic myth) as well as the ultimately revealed reality of her febrile nature . Alma, whose name in Spanish means soul, likewise makes the movement—which in Williams has become repetitive—of the puritanic individual who discovers the body and finds in its existence a frustrating schizophrenia . For Williams, in a kind of Platonic Calvinism symptomatic of the culture, does not allow his characters to envision body and soul as an organic unity forming one whole personality . 4 Instead, they experience within their very existences a deadly war of estrangement and alienation between parts that should be in organic unity were not the theologi- cal myth withstanding . 4 From the present introductory discussion Tattoo’s Serafina must nearly always be subtracted; for, a contrast to the rest of Williams’ characters, she is his one, major comic creation . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK14John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Chicken, in Kingdom of Earth, says: It’s like the preacher says, the gates of the soul is got to close on the body an’keep the body out or the body will break down the gates and overrun the soul and everything else that’s decent in a human . 5 Alma in Summer and Smoke tries her best to make John Cuchanan see humans as a balance of body and soul; but in describing the moral relationship of a man and a woman she oversells soul so that ironically by the time her body has broken down the gates and overrun her soul making her ready for physical union with John, he has awakened to a new reverence for her that makes the union impossible . Isn’t it funny, he tells Alma: “I’m more afraid of your soul than you’re afraid of my body .” 6 This disparity between soul and body pinpoints precisely what is, within the individual psyche, the heritage of moral imbalance which the Calvinistic tradition has bequeathed a major part of the western world . James Baldwin in his study of American identity, Nobody Knows My Name, focusses exactly on the tension between religion and reality in America, examining the relation in terms particularly Williamsian: I . . .felt how the Southern landscape—the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact one always seems to be traveling great distances—seems designed for violence, seems, almost, to demand it . What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night! Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private . Desire can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree, in the darkness, there; and no 5 Summer and Smoke (New York: New Directions, 1964), p . 214 . Immediately before John’s remark, Alma, on the other side of the dichotomy, had said about his “cava- lier” anatomy lecture: . . .so that is your high conception of human desires . What you have here is not the anatomy of a beast, but a man . And I—I reject your opinion of where live is, and the kind of truth you believe the brain to be seeking!—There is something not shown on the chart . John: You mean the part that Alma is Spanish for, do you? Alma: Yes, that’s not shown on the anatomy chart! But it’s there . (p . 213) . 6 Kingdom of Earth, Esquire (February, 1967), p . 100 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction15 one will see, no one will ever know . Only the night is watch- ing and the night was made for desire . Protestantism is the wrong religion for people in such climates; America is perhaps the last nation in which such a climate belongs . In the Southern night everything seems possible, the most private, unspeak- able longings; but then arrives the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was soft and dark . It brings what was done in the dark to light . It must have . . .for those people who made the region what it is today . . .caused them great pain . 7 Williams says the same but more obliquely in terms of character and setting . His South is regional precisely to the end of universality . He writes using the metaphor of the South as springboard to a ques- tioning inclusive of both the American experience and the human condition . The validity of this is not only that European Calvinism developed a peculiarly American strain, but that the Calvinistic ten- sion itself is symptomatic of the broken side of man’s very nature . Calvinism is an after-expression of an a priori human condition . Williams writes in the Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth: Guilt is universal . I mean a strong sense of guilt . If there exists any area in which a man can rise above his moral con- dition, imposed upon him at birth and long before birth, by the nature of his breed, then I think it is only a willingness to know it, to face its existence in him, and I think that at least below the conscious level, we all face it . Hence guilty feelings, and hence defeat aggressions, and hence the deep dark of despair that haunts our dreams, our creative work, and makes us distrust each other . 8 Thus Williams sees the artist’s role as a willingness to show this ten- sion, a willingness to name it up to a level of consciousness where it can be dealt with . He sees the violent exposure of this tension as a moral duty . “If there is any truth in the Aristotelian ideal that violence is purged by its poetic representation on stage, then it may 7 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1963), pp . 93-94; italics added . 8 Three Plays of Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1964), p . 336 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK16John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. be that my cycle of violent plays have had a moral justification after all .” 9 Thus does the Puritanism of his temperament exhibit itself in seeking such utilitarian apology for his writing; for the Calvinistic ethic has long not only found ars gratia artis untenable, but has made art without moral content seem impotent if not irrelevant . For the proto-Calvinists God’s beauty was all sufficing, and works of nature and of art could be only weak reflections thereof . In addition, the intense conviction of earthly transience further discour- aged painstaking artistic creation and concern with form . Emphasis was on ideas and themes rather than on beauty of expression . 10 Tennessee Williams, ambivalating between this dogmatic purity and his own esthetically expressive personality proved at the very least a working artistic marriage of both sensibilities present in the American culture . Repeating the lines of Hart Crane used as epi- graph to Streetcar, Williams, quoting, explicates his peculiar duty: And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whiter burled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice . Thus Williams has in common with Crane the Whitmanesque gift of emancipator; but unlike Whitman who so directly sings of himself, Williams’ injection of self into the American identity is less auto-erotic, is more the Calamus sensibility of social responsibility, although his social concern rarely boils over to obvious thesis drama . Perhaps about Whitman and Williams it can be observed that both, after enduring personal crucifixion, pulled out the nails and found they still could walk, although Williams, healing less well, resents the wounding more . Whereas Whitman saw an ultimate evolution of hope for the generic race though the specific man might fail, 9 Ibid., p . 337 . 10 R . B . Nye and N . S . Grabo, American Thought and Writing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), I . xxxii . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction17 Williams’ malaise is broader . He sees interwoven among the red- white-and-blue threads of the American cliché a tense alienation of the individual . As the new pattern of this individual alienation emerges, one can trace it seminally back to the proud Calvinistic isolation of the individual in private communication with his God . As this theological individualism evolved into Yankee independence and frontier democracy, it more and more acquired materialistic overtones . Where else could the Puritan ethic evolve than to a mate- rial rewarding of the spiritually elect? Practice, however, belied the theory; war and death and life, time, made all the material promise lacklustre . Individuals turned to one another, in more than political democracy, to construct social reform exhibiting the unity of indi- viduals who in caring for one another, as Whitman had suggested, would not be so much alone . Yet the modern existentialist philoso- phers have articulated the failure of even the attempt; they have, in fact, articulated it so well that nowhere more than in the literary arts has their influence been felt . In this his fourth decade of writing Williams has finally assimi- lated this modern philosophic stance into his metaphorical vocabu- lary . His Blanches and Almas of the 1940’s dramatized their terrible isolation as a failure of love; they used the metaphor of their failure at physical sex to illustrate their aloneness . Building on this, Williams of late has further isolated his characters . Although sex remains the great poetic symbol of union and alienation, Williams has tended to become more explicit in statement of theme . This might perhaps make him less a subtle dramatist, but as a reporter of ideas it makes him from another point of view more interesting . Laura’s isolation in The Glass Menagerie (1945) was poetic, almost without any ideo- logical raison . “All she does,” Amanda says of her halt daughter, “is fool with those pieces of glass and play those worn-out records .” Tom, her brother, tries to leave her in her isolation, but memory does not dissolve in time and space . Nothing for him can blow out his guilty memory of Laura, though he briefly intimates a justifica- tion for himself in that her candle-lit world has been by-passed by the “adventure” of modern lightning . Theirs is a poetic metaphysics without overt philosophical complexity . Tom Wingfield is only feel- ing his way to some rationale of their isolation . The great war outside ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK18John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. is only beginning to illuminate the great war inside . By contrast, two Williams heroines of the 1960’s are more philosophically articulate about their isolation . Sissy Goforth plaintively asks: When is it considered ridiculous, bad taste, mauvois gout, to seriously consider and discuss the possible meaning of life . . . .I’ve wondered more lately . . .meaning of life . . ., and meaning of death, too . . . .What in hell are we doing? . . .Just going from one goddamn frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddamn frantic distractions leads to disaster . 11 Out of her daily alienation, Sissy Goforth on the second last day of her existence, fears more than ever the total isolation of death, hav- ing become in life so alienated from others that all she can tell them about their relationship to her is, the train they’re on no longer stops for her to be milked . In the latest of the Williams vaudevilles, I Can’t Imagine Tomor- row, the woman named One, suffering like Laura, but much more articulate, paints the small apocalypse of the isolato: Dragon Country, the country of pain, is an uninhabitable country which is inhabited, though . Each one crossing through that huge, barren country has his own separate track to follow across it alone . If the inhabitants, the explor- ers of Dragon Country, look about them, they’d see other explorers, but in this country of endured but unendurable pain each one is so absorbed, deafened, blinded by his own journey across it, he sees, he looks for, no one else crawling across it with him . It’s up hill, up mountain . 12 It’s all the blocks on the Camino Real . Williams in 1953 distinguished “thinking playwrights . . .from us who are permitted only to feel .” 13 He added, however, that he 11 The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp . 59-60 . 12 I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, Esquire (March, 1966), p . 78 . 13 “Afterword to Camino Real” in Three Plays, p . 163 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction19 appreciated their closet dramas . He declared that his own creed as playwright is similar to the artist’s creed in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma: I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquex and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of art that has made these hands blessed . Amen . “Art,” Williams says, “is a blessing . . .and that it contains its message is also certain .” 14 He admits he writes for the stage and let those who wish to examine him in print be hanged, although he does often admit to a certain moral-philosophical edge . Of Camino Real, his Strindbergian dream play, he claims that is melange was meant the most of all his plays for the “vulgarity of performance .” More than any other work that I have done, this play seemed to me . . .nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and world that I live in, and its people are mostly archetypes of certain basic attitudes and qualities with those mutations that would occur if they had continued along the road to this hypothetical point in it . 15 If here Williams is not laying claim to more than an artistic inter- pretation of the American experience, then he certainly takes a stand a dimension beyond the purely esthetic when he says, “I hope . . .the philosophical import that might be distilled from the fantasies of Camino Real is the principal element of its appeal .” 16 Any spokesman ought to be objective as well as interpretive . Williams in assuming philosophical comment, therefore, necessar- ily subtracts himself and his plays from the general consensus to gain a telling perspective . Of theatre-goers who of late have let their “domesticated tastes” (the phrase is Williams’) lead them out the exits at his plays’ midpoints, he says: 14 Ibid ., p . 164 . 15 “Foreword to Camino Real” in Three Plays, p . 159 . 16 Ibid ., p . 159 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >