< Previous120John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. curdled cream—leche mala, we call it!—attractive to nobody, least of all yourself! 44 This is what Shannon is told by Hannah as she becomes more East- ern, a “Thin-Standing-Up-Female-Buddha .” She tells Shannon of her love experience with the Aussie underwear fetishist . “The moral” of that story, she says, “is oriental . Accept whatever situation you cannot improve .” She doesn’t want him to accept the falsely passive “no sweat” philosophy being sold by Maxine and she doesn’t want him to take the hyper-activist’s “long swim to China .” 45 Neither would she approve of Gewinner’s lover, Dr . Horace Greaves, whose samadhi (a trancelike condition known to Hindu mystics and their disciples) was probably only synthetic since he could enter a customs shed with apparent, dreamlike composure but was apt to go to pieces if a customs officer inquired into the nature of certain pills and vials that were tucked away into his luggage . 46 Alma when drugged, however, finds her repressed ego more con- structively released: “Those tablets work quickly . . . .I’m beginning to feel them almost like a water lily . . .on a Chinese lagoon .”47 Sissy Goforth lives on a Divine Coast, achieves pseudo-Nirvana on drugs, dresses in Chinese ritual robes, and receives unknowingly a true teacher, an author of a book of Hindu verse entitles Meanings Known and Unknown . He is a blond, bearded Christ-figure about whom everything is a contradiction; he counsels a Calvinistic world to a wise dualism of keeping the body in a state of repair because it is the home of the spirit . Sissy accuses him of being a saint because unlike most people who “get panicky when they’re not cared for 44 Camino Real, p . 327 . The imagery of milk in Williams is intricately meaningful . Its best summary is here in Camino . When mother’s milk turns bad, when the milk of human kindness is not the cup, specifically named as consecrated in Milk Train, then men cannot mean God one to another and they become leche mala, sour on themselves and each other . 45 Iguana, pp . 98, 115, 99 . 46 Knightly Quest, p . 29 . 47 Summer and Smoke, p . 178 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction121 by somebody .” he gets panicky when he has “no one to care for .”48 Sissy’s rejection of him grows when she learns from the pagan Fata- Morgana Witch of Capri that Christopher (Christ-bearer) has the medieval reputation of being the Angel of Death . Then alternately repelled and fascinated by him Sissy asks Chris for a kiss . He refuses; for a kiss now would be a Judas kiss . Sex between them would obfus- cate in her mind exactly what was Chris’ spiritual mission to her . His refusal ignites her sarcastic question: “Can you walk on water?” This aggressive woman, whose early history was undoubtedly that of the waif in “This Property Is Condemned,” Cannot bear to hear Chris’ message of life and death: “Accept it . . . .Accept it .” She cannot see that acceptance is not weak passivity; significantly, as she lies dying, the hospital Salvatore Mundi, Savior of the World, cannot be reached by telephone . “Acceptance,” Chris says to the dying woman . Mrs . Goforth: What of? Chris: Oh many things, everything, nearly . Such as how to live and to die in a way that’s more dignified than most of us know how to do it . And of how not to be frightened of not knowing what isn’t meant to be known, acceptance of not knowing anything but the moment of still existing, until we stop existing—and acceptance of that moment too . And she dies not understanding, not accepting, screaming at Chris: “No, no, go . Let me go!!” He stands over her quietly sipping “the milk as if it were sacramental wine,” 49 unable because of her resistance to become God to her as Doctor Sugar had to Catharine when she gave him her resistance, actively choosing to be passive . 50 About human beings unwilling to admit that acceptance, the active submission of the ego, is the answer to their existential tensions, Adjustment’s Isabel says: “They’ve all got a nervous tremor of some kind . . . .The world is a big hospital . . .a big neurological ward 48 Milk Train, p . 73 . 49 Ibid ., p . 82, 110, 65, 92, 113, 114, 105 . 50 The long “resistance” passage of Suddenly begins on page 66 with Doctor Sugar’s injection into Catharine’s arm . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK122John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. and I am a student nurse in it .” 51 Like Chris she finds her vocation in others, a student of her self simultaneously . She finds God in them and they in her, all accepting the fact that this is the best they can do . Williams specifies this in his autobiographical “Grand” when he says of his grandmother who loved him: “‘Grand’ was all that we knew of God in our lives!” 52 God exists for Williams as factually as does his father; but the way to approach that fact is a psychic problem . Not to know whether God is an avenger (this eschatology leads to the basic existential desperation in all Williams’ plays) or whether he is a lover (as Williams hopes) loved in what seems more than a make-shift way in other people, leads Alexandra to pry in the last act of Sweet Bird: “Someday the mystery god may step down from behind his clock like an actor divesting himself of make-up and costume .” Williams’ God is, in short, the father of the fragile Menagerie, the father who fell in love with long distance . His existence is known, but he send no word, no address; he makes no claim to the worn-out records he left behind . The family he abandoned, the brotherhood of men, must cling together—the only sure hope—to belie the statement of Sweet Bird’s Heckler who says: “I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of .” 53 51 Adjustment, p . 118 . 52 The Knightly Quest and Other Stories, p . 172 . 53 Sweet Bird, p . 433 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKCHAPTER VI A COALESCENCE OF DEATH AND LOVE: THE TEXTUAL POSTURE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS To speak of death is to speak of life, of time and place, and of God; to speak of love is to speak of God, of the sexual metaphor, and of the alienation of violence . Under these two general titles, death and love, Tennessee Williams has continued his insistent Puritan nam- ing of things . With a true artist’s convolution of surface reality into dimensional metaphor, 1 he has taken the literal moment of death— the ultimate alienation—and transfigured it to a symbol of the worse death of the living isolato . His Val sees men isolated in their own skins; his Blanche screams she cannot be alone; his Almas, his Han- nah, his Serafina, all suffer the hysteria of women abandoned . Their hysteria, however, is more than “the big female weapon” 2 that Shan- non diagnoses . Their hysteria is the result of existential dispossession . While most of Williams’ protagonists move forward to solve their dispossession, feeling on the way through some long night’s journey into day, Chance mistakenly backpeddles—much like the mistaken Amanda and Blanche—by trying to regain from the lost past the Heavenly home of his heart . 3 His excuse would be that of Baby Doll: 1 In his [Gewinner’s] vision was that alchemy of the romantic, that capacity for trans- mutation somewhere between a thing and the witness of it . The gods used to do that for us . Ceaselessly lamenting women were changed into arboreal shapes and fountains . Masterless hounds became a group of stars . The earth and the sky were full of metamorphosed beings . Behind all of this there must have been some truth . Perhaps it was actually the only truth . Things may be only what we change them into, now that we have taken over this former prerogative of the divine . Knightly Quest, p . 84 . 2 Iguana, p . 21 . 3 Sweet Bird, p . 412 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK124John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. “Sometimes I don’t know where to go, what to do .” 4 As a result, he retreats to the past, despairing of all the questions and the lack of answers chronicled by Marguerite in Camino Real. 5 Silva’s answer to Baby Doll is that her lost feeling is “not uncommon . People enter this world without instruction .” There is no surety except, not-pitying- oneself, to move forward as do the saveable Stella who makes the best of her situation and the redeemed Serafina who does a volte face from the past to the future . Those who do not progress are destroyed like Blanche and Amanda; they remember too passively “some distant mother with— wings .” 6 They rely on a security that has evanesced . The future is too foreboding . George Haverstick shakes for no physical reason; 7 he trembles rather at Camino Real’s existential question: “Can this be all? Is there nothing more? Is this what the glittering wheels of the heavens turn for?” 8 Williams’ people, like Williams himself, agree with Edwin Arlington Robinson quoted in Suddenly Last Summer: “We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks .” 9 Battle of Angels’ Val contin- ues this Everyman’s search: Why . . . .That was the first word I learned to spell out at school . And I expected some answer . I felt there was something secret that I would find out and then it would all make sense . 10 These existential pokings born of a dissatisfaction with life couple with Williams’ ambivalent view of God as a God of violence or a God of love . This uncertainty leads only to inhumane withdrawal 4 Baby Doll, p . 58 . 5 Marguerite: . . .What are we sure of? Not even of our existence . . . .And whom can we ask the questions that torment us? “What is this place?” “Where are we?”—a fat old man who gives sly hints that only bewilder us more, a fake of a Gypsy squinting at cards and tea leaves . . . .Where? Why? . . .the perch that we hold is unstable . Camino, p . 264 . 6 Ibid ., p . 263 . 7 Period of Adjustment, p . . 12-13 . 8 Camino, p . 223 . 9 Suddenly, p . 9 . 10 Battle, p . 168 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction125 of the personality and to ultimate despair of the justice of a Being who cold possibly give to the “tiny spasm of man” 11 some meaning . The theology-obsessed Chicken in “Kingdom of Earth” articulates of his sex experiences: I heard her footsteps on the stairs coming up to the attic . And then I realized that I had been praying . I had been sitting these praying to God to send that woman up to me . What do you make of that? Why would God have answered a prayer like that? What sort of God would pay attention to a prayer like that coming from someone like me who is sold to the Devil when thousands of good people’s prayers, such as prayers for the sick and suffering and dying, are given no mind, no more than so many crickets buzzing outdoors in the summer . It just goes to show how little sense there is in all this religion and all this talk of salvation . One fool is as big as another on this earth and they’re all big enough . 12 An approximation of this despair leads the majority of Williams’ people through dark nights of the soul from which they rarely recover . If not the answers, at least the questions become in “these tropical nights . . .so clear .” 13 It is on one such night that Jacques points out to Marguerite that over the whole Camino—even above the silk phoenix banner of resurrection—hangs the Southern Cross . And this cross of affliction, this affliction of the South of the human condition is that man seems alien and isolated on a cold highway to nowhere . Confronted with the ultimate dispossession of death, even the seeming strong are turned to jelly . 14 In the minicosm of his art, Williams focusses primarily on this worse death by dramatizing in almost grand Guignol detail the event 11 Menagerie, p . 1041 . 12 “Kingdom,”, p . 162 . 13 Camino, p . 262 . 14 When the big wheels crack on this street it’s like the fall of a capital city . . . .I’ve seen them fall! I’ve seen the destruction of them! Adventurers suddenly frightened of a dark room! Gamblers unable to choose between odd and even! Con men and pitch- men and plume-hatted cavaliers turned baby-soft at one note of the Streetcleaners’ pipes! Ibid ., p . 226 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK126John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. of literal death . Against his conception of death he displays certain attitudes toward living . Life is a basically elemental matter . The liq- uid imagery of the sea, the cradle of life, is the womb symbol of the eternity from which man proceeds and to which he will return . Iguana’s Nonno, whose real name is Jonathan Coffin, returns to the sea to die, making excuses for his “disgraceful longevity .” No one wants the old, the worn out, the dispossessed; he and Hannah are driven out, for as Maggie the Cat says, “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it .” 15 The living ignore the dying as a useless commodity . 16 Williams’ early heroine Amanda had pon- tificated that for no one is life easy . “Tom—Tom,” she says, “life’s not easy, it call for —Spartan endurance!” 17 A later Williams heroine, Sissy Goforth, insists that to get through life a person has to be tough; this is a more digested prescription than Alexandra del Lago’s insistence that only monsters succeed in life . Chicken says in 1967: A man can’t be soft in this world . I think that life just plain don’t car for the weak . Or the soft . A man and his life both got to be made out of the same stuff or one or the other will break, and the one that breaks won’t be life . Because life’s rock . So man’s got to be rock, too . Life, rock: man, rock . Because if they both ain’t rock, the one that’s not rock won’t be life . The one that’s not rock will be man, so man’s got to be rock, too . The soft one is broke when the two things come together, and life is never the soft one . 18 This rock is far from Nonno’s gentle sea, but it is fittingly opposite the repose of the latter . It is while most unreposed that Serafina della Rose—a flower like the Camino Real violets that crack the stone of the mountain—takes her stand and celebrates basic Williamsiana: the life in terms of sexual fertility . The Captain in 1947’s You Touched Me celebrates this Wil- liams theme; he warns his sister, whom Williams’ notes describe as 15 Cat, p . 38 . 16 Camino, p . 183 . 17 Menagerie, p . 1043 . 18 Kingdom, p . 134 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction127 a “self-righteous and mentally sadistic spinster,” 19 to stop her “efforts to keep life out of the place .” 20 He accuses her of being one of the “people [who] have got that power—of turning life into clay . 21 She represents to Williams an “aggressive sterility .” 22 Against the vio- lence of this Emmie’s chastity Williams places the young anti-soldier Hadrian, who arrives, like all Williams’ sensitive people, “waiting for something .” 23 Hadrian’s return to the house revivifies the Cap- tain in his fight for life versus living death . A soldier of the broader existential and not the meaner World War, Hadrian engages in the only kind of military gallantry Williams respects: he does violence to the ordinary conceptions of words and inverts them . The World War being ended, he shocks the little moribund society to which he returns, saying, A new war’s beginning . . . .The war for life, not against it . The war to create a world that can live without war . All the dead bodies of Europe, all the corpses of Africa, Asia, America ought to be raised on flagpoles over the world, and the cit- ies not built up bet left as they are—a shambles, a black museum—for you and you and you—to stroll about in—on Sunday afternoons— case you forget—and leave the world to chance, and the rats of advantage . 24 Hadrian is obviously not unSpartan; he is, however, also not the tough rock calloused to the needs of others . His view of life is a responsible one; he sincerely regrets knifing a young guard in order to escape prison camp: I saw he was only a kid and just as—gentle—as you are . The life in him yielded as softly as tissue paper . I knew very well 19 You Touched Me, p . 116 . 20 Ibid ., p . 71 . 21 Ibid ., p . 94 . 22 Ibid ., p . 5 . 23 Ibid ., p . 12 . 24 Ibid ., p . 31 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK128John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. that gentle things, such as that boy . . .,are made to be gently treated . Barely touched, hardly breathed upon . 25 His regrets, his hopes for life, he expresses to Matilda whom he intends to save—and does—from the introverted, desiccated life- example her Aunt Emmie had set . In more direct terms the “expectant” Maggie says to the hying life-force Big Daddy: “Announcement of life beginning!” And Big Daddy studies her and agrees in italics, “Uh-huh, this girl has life in her body, that’s no lie!” 26 Earlier, Daddy had insisted to Brick that life was tolled by ejaculation, the office of the life-bringing seed-bearer: “They say you got just so many and each one is numbered .” 27 Karen Stone had been assured of life in a corresponding way: she regarded her menstruation as making her body “eligible for . . .service to life” 28 and when her menopause was accomplished, she began her drift, like the Princess Kosmonopolis, into unfertile death . In a related way Val knows he is sentiently alive: I can sleep on a concrete floor or go without sleeping, with- out even feeling sleepy, for forty-eight hours . And I can hold my breath three minutes without blacking out . . . .And I can go a whole day without passing water . 29 Both the services and discipline of such physical mechanics assure these people that they are alive, until one day they realize that mechanics are deceptive, that being alive is more than mere con- tinuation of physical function . The story of Lady-Myra centers on this discovery when once she announces the ultimate betrayal of mechanics, that she has coupled sexually with Death . While Williams has almost specialized in plays about death, non so conveniently centers its argument and conflict in quite the fashion of Orpheus Descending with Battle of Angels . The plot introduces Val Xavier, as seed-bearing life force, into the violated garden of a sterile 25 Ibid ., p . 62 . 26 Cat, p . 190 . 27 Ibid ., p . 80 . 28 Roman Spring, p . 107 . 29 Orpheus, p . 40 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction129 Southern town . His refrain is not against life but against life’s cor- ruption . For him and for Williams, as it was biblically intended at the exit from Paradise, death is the outward sign of man’s internal corruption . At his arrival, Lady-Myra wants to be dead; 30 but death, she laments, “don’t come when you want it, it comes [she intones prophetically] when you don’t want it . 31 Carol-Cassandra wants to live and not be dead-alive, but her gesture at living is a selfish exhi- bitionism . She screams at Val that she tries to be a show-off! . . .I’m an exhibitionist! I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! [All those sensual mechanics again!] I want them to know I’m alive . Don’t you want them to know you’re alive? 32 Val answers with balance: “I want to live and I don’t care if they know I’m alive or not .” He is not as hysterical as Carol-Cassandra who repeats in both plays a speech that Williams also used in “The Case of the Crushed Petunias .” She says: Take me out to Cypress Hill in my car . And we’ll hear the dead people talk . They do talk there . They chatter like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is one word and that one word is “live,” they say “Live, live, live, live, live .’” It’s all they’ve learned, it’s the only advice they can give .—Just live . . . .Simple!—a very simple instruction . 33 Cassandra’s very own irony is that Cypress Hill is situated “on the highest point of land in Two River County, a beautiful windy bluff just west of the Sunflower River” 34 in which she will later drown never to be recovered . Carol-Cassandra sees Val as her particular camino’s Way Out of Two River County and away into big-city jooking . That, Williams’ Val judges—having gone that route—is lively but is not living . 35 Lady-Myra, on the other hand also sees Val 30 Battle, p . 148 and Orpheus, p . 32 . 31 Orpheus, p . 61 . 32 Ibid ., p . 27 . 33 Ibid ., p . 28 . 34 Battle, p . 134 . 35 Ibid ., p . 148 and Orpheus, p . 38 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >