< Previous90John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. in Orpheus Descending . Vee Talbott talk of beatings, lynchings, and runaway convicts torn to pieces by hounds as example of violence . Val amends her definition: Violence ain’t quick always . Sometimes it’s slow . Some tor- nadoes are slow . Corruption—rots men’s hearts and—rot is slow . 15 Corruption is quiet violence; it is the alienation of parts within the whole . It is the violence of Williams’ concern . Change says: “Prin- cess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of— level of—rot in them . And by that measure I’m ancient .” 16 This—not the castration—s for Williams’ message as Chance closes the play asking the audience “for your recognition of me in you .” Into this metaphorical web signifying internal corruption Williams easily fits his “southernmost” garden locales . Shannon says: It’s always been tropical countries I took ladies through . Does that, does that—huh?—signify something, I wonder . Maybe . Fast decay is a thing of hot climates, steamy hot, wet climates . 17 This amply reinforces the previous conclusion that Williams writes about the south of the human condition . Corruption is disorder . The artist by definition is a creator who imposes order on disconnected chaos . He takes the literal, superficial happening and invest it with layers of meaning a literalist cannot tolerate . Anything can be invested; everything is grist for the artist’s mill . Thus even violence can be raised to metaphor as it elucidates theme, intensifies mood, and delineates 15 Orpheus, p . 67 . 16 Sweet Bird, p . 450 . 17 Iguana, p . 42 . “In the South slavery and in the North industry which fattened on slave-produced cotton were outward signs of the inner fall of man who always perverts the freedom which his Creator provided . Even when given a New World . . ., he again lost Paradise . He carries into every beginning the configuration of the end, his lustful, proud, gluttonous self . That this corrupted nature sows and reaps little except destruction is abundantly dramatized .” Louise Y . Gossett, Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1965), p . 42 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction91 character . . . .The violence gives aesthetic value to the incon- gruous, the ugly, the repulsive, and the chaotic which these sensitive observes [Southern writers] see in their world . It expresses the suffering of inarticulate and the dispossessed persons . It questions an optimistic faith in progress and human self-sufficiency by asserting the darkness in the heart of man . It protests that without some formal ordering of his experience man will be overwhelmed by the acciden- tal and the relative . By expressing in the mode of violence the destructive forces in society and in human nature, these Southerners affirm their sense of order through the very dis- order which violates it . 18 Robert E . Fitch, Dean of Christian Ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, is representative of the Williams critics who descry surface sensationalism . Dean Fitch calls Williams the High Priest of La Mystique de la Merde which he defines as “the deification of dirt, or the apotheosis of ordure, or just plain mud mysticism . 19 Fitch points out, however, almost accidentally, the translation Williams makes of Calvinist theology into literary metaphor: No one wishes to deny the deep corruption of which human nature is capable . But when we obliterate both character and intelligence in a fixation on sex and obscurity, we are arriv- ing at a doctrine of total depravity . And this doctrine in the hands of a skilled literary artist is even more repulsive than in the teachings of a theologian . 20 Williams comes from a generally Calvinist background that has injected an element of violence into his artistic vision . Vee Talbott of Battle and Orpheus is, perhaps, his most explicit portrait of the afflicted artist . Vee is concerned with that essential poetic quality, vision . In both plays, driven by religious guilt, Vee begins to paint, 18 Ibid ., p . 51 . 19 Robert Fitch, La Mystique de la Merde,” The New Republic, CXXXV (September 3, 1956), p . 17 . 20 Ibid ., p . 18 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK92John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. not pictures quaintly pastoral, but pictures associated with sex and primitive religious experience . She paints imaginative treatments of the Church of the Resurrection, its phallic steeple blood red . Her personality, frustrated in its contact with externals, has turned deeply inward . She has found refuge in religion and primitive art and has become known as an eccentric . Although a religious fanatic, a mystic, she should not be made ridiculous, . . .not be devoid of all dignity or pathos . 21 At Val Xavier’s arrival Vee is completing her painting of the Twelve Apostles . Dolly: She’s been painting them for twelve years, one each year . She says that she sees them in visions . But every one of them looks like some man around Two River County . She told Birdie Wilson that she was hoping she’d have a vision of Jesus next Passion Week so she could paint Him, too . 22 Naturally, Vee makes the Val-Savior identification in her vision and paints him as Christ (“Passion week always upset her .” 23 ) after experiencing a violent sexual vision of her Savior . Beulah and Dolly repeat that Vee saw Him in the cottonwood tree . The lynching tree . . . .Exactly where time an’ time again you see couples parked in cars with all the shades pulled down! And what did he do? He stretched out his hand and touched yuh . Dolly: Where? [Vee . . .touches her bosom .] . . .He made a pass at you? . . .He made a pass at you? 24 In Vee coalesces a vision of sex, religion, violence, and art in a way derided by disorder . The fact is that the biography of Christ lends itself well as Western archetype to all four categories . Vee tells Val that she saw her Savior on Holy Saturday, the day before the 21 Battle, pp . 130-131 . 22 Ibid ., p . 130 . 23 Ibid ., p . 207 . 24 Ibid ., pp . 210-211 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction93 Resurrection, and was blinded . Because of such shock treatment Vee comes to the artist-orderer’s vision of life’s duality . Vee: . . .You know we live in light and shadow, that’s, that’s what we live in, a world of—light and—shadow . . . . Val: Yes . In light and shadow . [He nods with complete understanding and agreement . They are like two children who (through the vision of art) have found life’s mean- ing, simply and quietly, along a country road] . . . .Without no plan, no training, you started to paint as if God had touched your fingers . . . .You made some beauty out of this dark country . . . . 25 For those who cannot stand the generic artists’ tension-pain of cre- ation Williams chronicles several unsatisfactory ways out: drink, drugs, sexual promiscuity . These are all variations of self-violence that mask the deeper Angst of existence . Frustration at existence leads to violent aggression against oneself or others . Sebastian’s sick aggression against self is singularly unfruitful as he sets himself up for his masochistic sacrifice . Sandra in Battle of Angels confesses to Val her own frustration: You should have killed me, before I kill myself . I will some- day . I have an instinct for self-destruction . I’m running away from it all the time . . . .All over the God damn country with something after me every inch of the way! 26 Sandra is pursued like Shannon whose psychic masochism, bound like Val’s mysticism in the Passion of Christ, is spooked to violence . The Princess, Lady-Myra, Sissy Goforth, Baby Doll, Maggie, and Brick are all likewise sparked to their own peculiar kinds of self- violence: the Princess is bent on destruction failing her comeback; Lady-Myra forces her husband Jabe (whom Williams names Death) into killing her; Sissy, who wold never dream of doing herself vio- lence, does herself the worst violence by deliberately obfuscating her chance for salvation with Chris; Maggie and Baby Doll both subject 25 Orpheus, pp . 92, 68 . 26 Battle, p . 161 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK94John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. themselves to violent situations because, childless, they both are out of harmony with themselves . None of them are like the satisfied Serafina whose pregnancy integrates her self-ideal of female fertil- ity, puts two lives in one body, and symbolizes the love of her new husband . Shannon, the male questor, is violent to himself: he cuts his neck attempting to drown himself in the sea . As a result, he has to be lashed into a hammock, a voluptuous crucifixion, that he sincerely enjoys for the painless atonement-assuagement of his guilt at his rage at God . Yet despite this one sad-masochistic scene, Iguana’s violence is much like most of Williams’ violence: either internal or off-stage so that despite Fitch, McCarthy, and Falk, 27 Williams is not nearly so mercantilely sensational as first glance would tell . This is especially true in the play that even Williams thinks is his most violent, Sud- denly Last Summer . But even here, as if in the best of Greek tradition the sensational violence occurs not only off-stage but in the past . “The violence promised by the fury remains in the telling, not in the doing .” 28 The rage provides interplay for characterization of the personages: the arbiter Doctor Sugar, the abused Catharine Holly, the violent Violet Venable . The language of abuse that Williams’ people employ is most often violent for what it leaves unspoken . Williams employs in his plays few four-letter words . This is a tribute to his lyric sensibility; for to translate the excess and kind of language now usually associated with the novels of Henry Miller or William Burroughs to the stage would be offensive to the common sensibility no matter how inte- gral the language was . Sometimes, however, Williams’ lyric by-pass does not fit his characters; for instance, when crude, rude Stanley Kowalski wants to “get those colored lights going,” 29 the phrase is vivid but definitely not Kowalski . That Williams filters the reality of his stage language is aptly proven by a comparison of his story “Kingdom of Earth” with his play Kingdom of Earth . The story is written in a crude countrified vernacular that knows the common 27 Signi Falk, op. cit. 28 Gossett, op. cit ., p . 8 . 29 K . M . Sagar, op. cit. p . 151, comments wryly on various inconsistencies between Kowalski’s character and language . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction95 phrase for every function and describes those functions in purple detail; the play is a reconstructed version of the short story and as such—not, therefore, only because its bowdlerized language is more socially acceptable—is more worthy of Williams’ controlling art . Mrs . Goforth wants Chris—professional linguist—to toy with language, to play the truth game with her; but he refuses . Chris- Williams intends language to be the vehicle of the truth, because language is communication, is the major means of breaking down the alienation between people . I think the truth is too delicate and, well, dangerous a thing to be played with at parties, Mrs . Goforth . It’s nitroglycerin, it has to be handled with the—the carefulest care, or some- body hurts somebody and gets hurt back and the party turns to a—devastating explosion, people crying, people scream- ing, people even fighting and throwing things at each other . I’ve seen it happen, and there’s no truth in it—that’s true . 30 When language breaks down, when language is not true, only the violence of increased alienation can result . This is quintessential truth to Williams, and if the integrity of his intent is to be judged, this must be fully understood . In a definite apologia pro arte sua, Williams give Myra and Val the following exchange about truth in the art of language . Myra takes Val’s book in her arms and makes the same comparison as Mrs . Venable to Sebastian’s poems and Mrs . Goforth to her own memoirs: Myra: It’s like holding a baby! Such a big book, too; so goon an’ solid . Val: It’s go life in it, Myra . When people read it, they’re going to be frightened . They’ll say it’s crazy because it tells the truth . 31 Williams himself said of all his work and specifically of Suddenly that he writes the “true story of the time we live in .” It is small wonder, therefore, that so late in his career, when Williams has given 30 Milk Train, p . 72 31 Battle, p . 194 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK96John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. a so-far summary statement in Milk Train and has written several excellent vaudevilles (e .g ., Slapstick Tragedy) that he should be turned out of vogue—as Gore Vidal has said 32 —and not be so “popular” simple because his frightening work must be attended to with greater concentration and more critical effort than the currently popular Neil Simon’s . 33 Perhaps the test here is that nearly all of Williams’ dramatic works (not his prose) survive the test of rereading . The violence of Williams’ plays is often centered, as is Eudora Welty’s, 34 about the “collapse of the individual in a society, or more specifically, in a family oblivious of his need to be loved and believed in .” 35 The Kowalskis could have saved Blanche who just “can’t be alone!”; the Venables and Hollys could have saved Heavenly and Chance; the Pollitts could have saved Brick; and the larger families of human kindness could have saved the Princess and Sissy and Mrs . Stone . In Williams’ world, therefore, it is small cynicism that when Period of Adjustment’s Ralph is asked if he were an orphan, he answers: “Yes, I had that advantage .” 36 The Williams families barely communicate, so deep is their estrangement . The knightly Quest’s Gewinner exchanges with his family certain cablegrams of subtle violence that is representative of the general familial alienation: The Christmas one said, Christ is born, Love, Mother, and the Easter one said, Christ is risen, Love, Mother . And 32 Gore Vidal, op., cit. 33 Williams: Today the theatre seems almost all musical comedy . . ., so I don’t go to it very much . I like to see every Albee play and every Pinter play . And I can’t think of anybody else . Ann Southern: There is a young man named Neil Simon who has written a few funny plays . Williams: Who? Ann Southern: Neil Simon . Williams: What did he write, dear? Ann Southern: Didn’t he write Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park? Are you putting us on, Mr . Williams, by asking us who Neil Simon is? Williams: I really didn’t know . Kupcinet Interview, op. cit . 34 The connection between Welty and Williams has been established by Winifred Dusenbury, “Baby Doll and The Ponder Heart,” Modern Drama, III (1961), pp . 393-395 . 35 Gossett, op. cit., p . 107 . 36 Period, p . 26 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction97 once, between Christmas and Easter, Gewinner dispatched a cablegram to Mother Pearce that was utterly meaningless to her . It said, Dear Mother, What is He up to now? Love, Gewinner . 37 In nearly every instance of sadism Williams uses the handy trope of Christ’s Passion and Death to reinforce the existential horror of every man’s isolation . From Battle through the quintessential Kilroy to Milk Train Williams very often establishes his hero as a Christ figure and then works upon him some kind of Christ-ian violence . In Iguana, for instance, Priest Shannon, “crucified” in a hammock, is tormented by the lusty pink German militarists as was Christ surrounded by soldiers on the Cross . Williams’ depiction of this German family is of interest on two counts: their pink Germanic sensuality is ironic comment on America’s imported Calvinism, and their militarism, dramatized as something despicable, is pointedly inveighed against by a writer who comes from a South where the military tradition is viewed as a kind of gallant violence . In Williams’ generally polar and cyclic view of things violence precedes sex; man rages at one thing or another—his isolation, Mama, God—and then turns, to solve his rage, to sex which only increases the rage since the act of sex can only be performed in the continuum of time and is, therefore, touched as much as anything else with enemy evanescence . Williams consequently experiences the romantic promise, the realized shock of alienation, the neo-romantic’s partial adjustment to frustration . Sex is violent in Williams when it is use and not love that is its mark . For this reason Williams has taken sex, its violence and perversions, and matured it into an existential alienation metaphor in order to define his message . The writer with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience . When you can assume that your audience 37 Knightly Quest, p . 11 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK98John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures . . . .My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the gro- tesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable . 38 Myra Mannes specifies Williams’ dramatic technique of violence as “a shock treatment, administered by an artist of great talent and painful sensibility who illumines fragments but never the whole . He illuminates that present sickness which is fragmentation .” 39 Like many of the Victorian critics of the so-called immoral and decadent Restoration comedy, Fitch and those critics who have advocated similar positions have failed to see in Williams’ plays the pervasive moral implications of the decadent and violent elements . They fail to see that Williams simply follows in the dramatic tradition that has its roots in fifth-century Greek and tragedy and comedy . Williams, like Euripedes in Medea, like Aristophanes in Lysistrata, like Jonson in Volpone, Wycherly in The Country Wife, and like Otway in Venice Preserv’d, has chosen to mirror and not reform directly in his drama . Although Yeats says, “Art . . .is a revelation, and not a criticism” there is in Williams’ plays implied criticism about the society in which he lives . When superficial reaction distracts one too much in a Williams play, he becomes blind to the metaphor; and it is precisely this meta- phor as well as Williams’ expressionistic dramatic techniques which should sign to the viewer not to become as superficially distracted as some of his critics evidently have . As with Artaud, whose theatre of explicit cruelty goes beyond Williams’ American daring, Williams’ “cruelty” does not refer exclusively to torture, blood, violence, and plague— but to the cruellest of all practices: the exposure of mind, 38 Flannery O’Connor in “The Fiction Writer and His Country .” The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed . Granville Hicks (New York: MacMillan, 1957), pp . 162-163 . 39 Marya Mannes, “The Morbid Magic of Tennessee Williams,” The Reporter, XII (May 19, 1955), pp . 41-43 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction99 heart, and nerve-ends to the grueling truths behind a . . .real- ity that deals in psychological crises when it wants to be hon- est [that is, versus mendacity], and . . .confronts the existential horror behind all social and psychological facades . 40 Consequently when Shannon shocks Hannah by telling her of his sex-partner’s parents—old maids of both sexes, when Williams reveals the psychic anomalies of Brick and Sebastian and Oliver Winemiller, the sexual heat of Maggie and of Lady-Myra and of Alma grown older, the point is that sexual hysteria is metaphor for a more basic existential hysteria . If there is any direct relation, it is that Williams counsels that a fully developed sexuality be incorporated into the organic personality . In a Puritan culture which tends to fragment sexuality, he maintains that the individual does essential violence to his own organic whole when he denies sex a fulfilling role in the personality . Both of his Alma’s illustrate the violence of this existential corruption . 41 Serafina who spends most of the Rose Tattoo in hysteria transcends that condition of hysteron (womb) through discovery of a true love who confirms her as a person and as a fertile woman; such dual confirmation is for Williams positive statement that any division of personality from sexuality is a condition which can only lead to psychic fragmentation and violence . It is in this way that Williams redeems sensationally superficial sex to a metaphorical currency of alienation . Maxine tells of her dead husband Fred, of how not only the violence of language, but also the unexchange- ability of sex between them defined their isolation . We’d not only stopped sleeping together, we’d stopped talk- ing together except in grunts—no quarrels, no misunder- standings, but if we exchanged two grunts in the course of 40 Charles Marowitz, “Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty,” Tulane Drama Review (Win- ter, 1966), p . 172 . 41 Williams: Someone in one review of Eccentricities said it was a sexless play which astounded me because I thought the play was almost nothing by a woman’s effort to integrate sex into her sexless life . Sidney Harris: I almost said in my review that it made one realize that the word hysteria comes from the Greek meaning womb . Williams: I know that . And it seems to me that Alma’s hysteria was the whole folium of the play . Kupcinet Interview, op. cit. ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >