< Previous80John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. the price of the creative life answers: “Yes, we—all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it .” 57 Life is a death trap set on fire by the burning lion of the sun, the regular-as-business chronometer that burns out youth and talent . 58 The hot fire of Williams’ sun nourishes the unedenic jungle of insectivorous plants and carnivorous animals; the fire cooks things to be eaten . “We were going to blond, blonds were next on the menu .” Catharine says of Sebastian . “He was famished for blonds, he was fed up with the dark ones . . .famished for light ones: that’s how he talked about people, as if there were—items on a menu .—‘That one’s delicious-looking, that one is appetizing .’” 59 Thus in an irony appropriate perhaps only to the gentility of symbols Sebastian runs from a restaurant to be eaten alive by dark, naked boys screaming the word for bread, pan, on a street burnt ash-white, under a sky of phal- lic bone picked carrion clean . This eating is the ultimate metaphor of hate in Tennessee Williams, for it is the use that opposes salvific love . Catharine, whose surname Holly recalls that New Testament incar- national time of Christmas, says: “I loved him, Sister! Why wouldn’t he let me save him? . . .We all use each other and that’s what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what’s—hate .” 60 Sebastian was all in white, 61 white as a Host about to be consumed by dark birdlike boys . The Blackness cannibalizes the Whiteness to reciprocate usage that should have been love . The light and shadow of a hearth fire become violent sacrificial pyre in Catharine’s fevered, orgasmic vision which is “a true story of our time and the world we live in .” 62 This is the time of lightning promised so early in Williams by the poet Tom Wingfield . It is true perhaps not only of the times but of Williams’ own writing sensibility . Wingfield’s “preoccupation with the artist’s singularity or specialness” has evolved in the Wil- 57 Milk Train, p . 245 . 58 Ibid ., p . 85 . 59 Suddenly, p . 40 . 60 Ibid ., pp .39, 61 . 61 Ibid ., p . 79 . 62 Ibid ., p . 47 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction81 liams’ esthetic to the pitch of Suddenly Last Summer where the artist’s singularity, his “sense of alienation [is] defensively exaggerated into exhibitionist defiance .” 63 Suddenly Last Summer is, therefore, most important to the basic imagery units of Tennessee Williams not only because of those units’ coalescence, but also because of its enormously successful organic allusiveness which brings to maturity much of the somewhat awk- ward experimentation that Eddie Dowling expunged from the act- ing version of The Glass Menagerie . Concerning the period of the latter play, John Gassner has written: . . .playwriting manifested itself chiefly in the manner in which playwrights resorted to flexible and expressive play structure and relied on supplementary theatrical elements, such as music, lighting, and stage design . Our writers con- tinued to write imaginative drama, but they created a poetry of theatre rather than dramatic poetry . 64 it is with this poetry of the theatre that Williams has had his greatest success . If he has, at least intuitively, theories of poesis and poet, then these can be complemented by his basic theory of poem . His theory of creativity he explained quite well in Orpheus Descending: Vee: . . .Since I got into this painting, my whole outlook is different . . . Val: . . .Before you started to paint, it didn’t make sense . Vee: —What—what didn’t? Val: Existence! 65 The purpose of the artist’s work is to arrange the disconnected moments of reality in order to extract some meaning from existing . Therefore the theory of poem in Williams is a search for the form most reflective of his time . Needless to say, in Williams the base of poetry is the theatre . But just as the setting of Suddenly typically refracts the mature Williams’ verbal image units, so also is his basic 63 Gassner in Tischler, op, cit., p . 303 . 64 Gassner, Best American Plays: 1945-1951 (New York: Crown, 1952), p . xii . 65 Orpheus, p . 66 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK82John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. mode of composition the image-making eye of the motion picture camera . In her excellent study entitled The Broken World of Tennes- see Williams, Esther Jackson writes that Williams “has subjected his lyric moment to process . In his theatre, the instant of vision has been re-created: its image has been enlarged and enhanced .”66 Miss Jack- son then definitively investigates Williams’ basic cinematographic technique of composition by montage in the representative “This Property Is Condemned .” Like Joyce, O’Neill, Wilder, Giraudoux, and Cocteau, Williams uses his camera eye sensitively . With it he is able to arrest time, to focus upon the details of his vision, to empha- size elements of its structural composition, to vary his point of view, and to draw a wide variety of parallels . 67 Williams uses the . . .same general pattern of image-making in his longer works . Each of the plays represents an attempt to give exposition to poetic vision . Each play is composed like a poem: The dramatist spins out symbolic figures which are its lyric com- ponents . A Streetcar Named Desire is composed of eleven theatrical images . Summer and Smoke has a like number . Camino Real is divided into sixteen scenes . Orpheus Descend- ing has nine . Some plays, such as The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, do not appear at first glance to be composed of such poetic components . Beneath the apparently continuous flow of action, however, a similar structural design may be found . For Williams, the play is an ordered progression of concrete images, images which together give sensible shape to the lyric moment . 68 66 Esther Jackson, op, cit ., pp . 36-37 . 67 Ibid ., p . 37 . 68 Ibid ., p . 39 . “Many artists, including Hart Crane, have been convinced that there is, operating in contemporary symbol-making, a ‘machine aesthetic .’ Williams, like Joyce, Eliot, and Pound—and like plastic artists such as Léger—seems to create such ‘synthetic’ symbols: to invent shapes and forms out of the fusion of organic elements . The great film artist Sergei Eisenstein discussed this technique in modern art . He ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction83 Williams enlarged recently upon the distinction between a play in dramatic form and a dramatic poem . He said, When the leading drama critic of Copenhagen, Denmark, told me that Rose Tattoo was not a play, but was a dramatic poem, I didn’t know quite how to take it . It’s hard to be told you haven’t written a play in dramatic form . However, seeing Eccentricities of a Nightingale last night [the premiere, at which this writer sat next to Mr . Williams], I felt that it was a dramatic poem . I really don’t regard myself as much of a traditional poet . I don’t write poetry consciously . But in Eccentricities I use a southern heroine who tends to speak in a lyrical style . I think you can respect is an artist’s opinion of his own work . But I think it’s an interesting evening of a special kind of theatre, the theatre of poetic sensibility . 69 In the same interview Williams told Chicago drama critic Sidney Harris that he was just finishing his last long play . I don’t feel I have to write long plays anymore . I can write short plays or occasionally I can write a short story . . . .I like a short play, a play that is around eighty pages long . Why stretch a one-act play into three hours for commercial reasons? He could almost have reiterated the art theme of his plays: why debit the esthetic for business purposes . Thus does Williams handle the technical problems of poema . His cinematographic technique is complemented with an “enthusi- asm for metaphor and symbolism [that] comes partially from mod- ern psychology and partially from a regard for the French symbolist poets .” 70 While thematically he is indebted in varying degrees to D . H . Lawrence, Strindberg, Proust, Chekhov, Pirandello, Lorca, Hart Crane, many Southern novelists, and dozens of others, Williams as technician has “seldom ‘organically’ incorporated” his literary tastes claimed, for example, that Joyce was aware of using the cinematic technique of montage . . . .Arthur Miller also discusses the use of the camera eye in his Introduction to Collected Plays (New York, 1957), pp . 23-36 .” Ibid ., p . 37 . 69 Williams in Kupcinet Interview . 70 Tischler, op. cit., p . 294 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK84John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. into his plays . Consequently when de does attempt literary grafting, “they most often sound like ventriloquists’ tricks .” 71 (Witness You Touched Me .) The fact is that in intuitive application of theories of poesis, poet, and poema, Williams is, in his expression of personal lyricism, for better or worse, his own man . 71 Ibid ., p . 295 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKCHAPTER IV TOWARD A THEORY OF ALIENATION METAPHOR: SEX AND VIOLENCE IN WILLIAMS About her young husband, a “poet with Romanov blood in his veins,” Mrs . Goforth dictates: I made my greatest mistake when I put a fast car in his hands . . . .The Police Commissioner of Monaco personally came to ask me . . . .To inst that he [the poet-husband] go with me in the Rolls with a chauffeur at the wheel, as a protection of his life and of the lives of others . —M . le Commissionaire, I said, for me there are no others .—I know, Madame, he said, but for the others there are others . 1 Alienation differs from isolation in this that it implies a point of reference, implies a quality of otherness . It is from within personal existential isolation, from within his own solitary confinement that the individual looks out to see others . And while Val Xavier’s state- ment that “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life” 2 is basically true, it does not rule out the lesson of otherness that Williams’ characters learn or do not learn in varying degrees . Alienation is endemic to the American tradition: this country’s alienation from mother Europe has been accomplished beyond the fondest hopes of The American Scholar; the alienation of South and North in Civil maelstrom continues today; this century has seen increase of tension between agrarian and rural sensibilities; besides these, there have always been male-female differences as well as the 1 Milk Train, p . 7 . 2 Orpheus, p . 47 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK86John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. alienation of the sensitive versus the burger-merchant . At every turn and in every case, because of the isolation inherent in the human condition man looks out at the other and perceives the alien . The consequent Angst of incompletion drives him to various distrac- tions 3 or compensation . We don’t all live in the same world, you know, Mrs . Goforth . Oh, we all see the same things—sea, sun, sky, human faces and inhuman faces, but—they’re different in here! [Touches his forehead .] And one person’s sense of reality can be another person’s sense of—well, of madness!—chaos!—and . . .when one person’s sense of reality seems too—disturbingly dif- ferent from another person’s . . .he’s—avoided! Not welcome . 4 In Williams’ plays this conflict of personal realities births vari- ous kinds of violent tensions; for everybody lives in an oubliette of isolation on the Gulf of Misunderstanding . 5 Recalling the Calvinis- tic importance of naming things as a means of showing dominance, one feels that Williams gives consummate emphasis to names whose value is existential identity . Kilroy:My name’s Kilroy . I’m here . 3 Sissy Goforth says: “Everything that we do is a way of—not thinking about it . Mean- ing of life, and meaning of death . . . .Just going from one goddam frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddam frantic distraction leads to disaster .” Milk Train, p . 60 . Williams calls “the worst of all human maladies, of all afflictions” the felling of existential dispossession, “the thing people feel when they go from room to room for no reason, and then they go back from room to room for no reason, and then they go out for no reason and come back in for no reason .” Ibid ., p . 88 . 4 Ibid ., pp . 68-69 . 5 Mrs . Goforth: You are what they call you! Chris: . . .As much as anyone is what anyone calls him . Mrs . Goforth: A butcher is called a butcher, and he’s a baker . A— Chris: Whatever they’re called, they’re men, and being men, they’re not known by themselves or anyone else . Ibid ., p . 114 . In Williams’ economy this is the inherent failure of the created existential . Chance: We’ve come back to the sea . . . .The Gulf . Princess: The Gulf? Chance: The Gulf of misunderstanding between me and you . Sweet Bird, p . 364 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction87 Jacques:Mine is Casanova . I’m here, too . 6 This existential exchange with emphasis on identity and presence is important to a writer who changed his own name 7 and whose characters either change theirs (Val Xavier, 8 Sissy (Flora) Goforth) or intend to live under the directive of their given names: Alma’s soul, Blanche’s whiteness, Big Daddy’s paternity, Heavenly’s fallen grace . Life is not “Hello from Berth .” It is rather “The Long Good-bye,” the recognition of alienation from others and sometimes from one’s very self . This is the epitome of alienation when one becomes alien- ated within his own isolation . Catharine Holly’s journal experience precisely describes this violent alienation from self . After a Mardi Gras Ball, Catharine was willingly seduced by a married man who after their intimate union—which for her destroyed the otherness between them—told her to forget . She reacted in public violence, beating on his chest, humiliating herself before everyone at the Ball . After that, the next morning, I started writing my diary in the third person, singular, such as “She’s still living this morning,” meaning that I was . . . .—“WHAT’S NEXT FOR HER? GOD KNOWS!”—I couldn’t go out anymore . 9 This is a kind of dying when self disintegrates into pieces of self, and the first person stands outside of the self as a third person voyeur of all that de does . On the level of the art theme it might here be stated that this first to third progression in Catharine is analogously the 6 Camino Real, p . 210 . 7 Mrs . Williams read “Tom the Piper’s Son,” “Little Tommy Tucker,” and “Little Tommy Tittlemouse” to her son who objected: “’Evvy’body’s [sic] named Tom .’ . . . The name had no distinction to him, even then .” Remember Me to Tom, p . 19 . Wil- liams himself gives various reasons for the change, the most pretentious being that “the Williamses had fought the Indians for Tennessee and I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages .” Ibid ., p . 190 . 8 Valentine Xavier is “the very name of one of Tom’s ancestors on his father’s side, a sixteenth-century Basque who was a younger brother of St . Francis Xavier .” Ibid ., p . 120 . In addition, internal to Val’s characterization is the fact that he admits to Myra that he has changes his name to Val Xavier . Battle, p . 190 . 9 Suddenly, p . 64 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK88John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. progression from romantic to neo-romantic . The species of change is the problem . Change to the romantics was a good whose any deficiency art could supply . To the neo-romantic, however, change takes on a char- acter of duality . It is more often not the romantic evolution to matu- ration; it is more often violent corruption of some organic whole . Williams, however, did not begin with functionally metaphoric violence . At first—and perhaps to a degree latterly—he deserved the savaging done his Streetcar by Mary McCarthy in March, 1948 . 10 But long before that, at age sixteen, Tom Williams had published his first story, a violent one, in Weird Tales, July/August, 1928 . Needless to say this poorly written story was sensational . Williams wrote in the March 8, 1959, New York Times: If you’re well acquainted with my writings since then, I don’t have to tell you that is set the keynote for most of the work that has followed . My first four plays, two of them performed in St . Louis, were correspondingly violent or more so . My first play professionally produced and aimed at Broadway was Battle of Angels and it was about as violent as you can get on the stage . . . .During the nineteen years since then I have only produced five plays that are not violent . . . .What surprised me is the degree to which both critics and audience have accepted this barrage of violence . I think I was sur- prised, most of all, by the acceptance and praise of Suddenly Last Summer . When it was done off Broadway, I thought I would be critically tarred and feathered . . .with not future haven except in translation for theatres abroad, who might mistakenly construe my work as a castigation of American morals, not understanding that I write about violence in American life only because I am not so well acquainted with the society of other countries . 11 Violence, however, defined as any lack of proper order knows no special country . The most widely read book of Western civilization, 10 Mary McCarthy, “A Streetcar Called Success” in Sights and Spectacles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), p . 131 . 11 “Foreword to Sweet Bird, “ p . 335 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction89 the Bible, shows order made from chaos almost immediately turned back to chaos as creature and creator became alienated and men were violently expelled into a suddenly violent environment . Such violence of environment mirrored the internal violence; the Creator gave to nature the appearance of man’s internal disintegrated reality . Hannah says: “Sometimes outside disturbances . . .are an almost wel- come distraction from inside disturbances .” 12 Not only do nature’s disorders mirror man’s, they provide man therapy as he tries to restore order to nature, tries to regain the Edenic appearance . But the appearance and the reality are too disparate and man most often sits upright in tension . Hannah tells Shannon “that everything has its shadowy side .” 13 As if in complement, Silva Vacarro and Baby Doll make rapid etiological exchange of Williams’ philosophy of violence: Silva: . . .I believe in the presence of evil spirits . Baby Doll: What evil spirits you talking about now? Silva: Spirits of violence—and cunning—malevolence— cruelty—treachery—destruction . . . . Baby Doll: Oh, them’s just human characteristics . Silva: They’re evil spirits that haunt the human heart and take possession of it, and spread from one human heart to another human heart the way that a fire goes springing from leaf to leaf and branch to branch in a tree till a for- est is all aflame with it—the birds take flight—the wild things are suffocated . . .everything green and beautiful is destroyed . 14 Thus, in what he diagnoses as a lamentable human condition, Wil- liams sees a violence much more devastating than that violence’s sporadic eruption in murder, arson, rape, and castration . Critics are often distracted by the sensationalism of this surface violence; theirs is an unfortunate distraction, for Williams intends the external vio- lence rather as metaphor of the more subtle violence he diagnoses in all mankind . Williams attempted to countermand this impression 12 Iguana, p . 42 . 13 Ibid ., p . 105 . 14 Baby Doll, pp . 78-79 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >