< Previous130John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. as her Way Out . Having long before had a frustrating love affair that ended in fruitless abortion, Lady-Myra wants only to be dead . She chooses this ultimate alienation, although she admits that death is terrible . 36 As a small girl she had asked her aunt a very important question, She tells Val, who feels that people live alone, that I was a little girl then and I remember it took her such a long, long time to die we almost forgot her .—And she was so quiet . . .in a corner . . .I remember asking her one time, Zia Teresa, how does it feel to die?—Only a little girl would ask such a question . . . .She said—“It’s a lonely feeling .” . . .I think people always die alone . 37 Val, however, shows her that death is in fact the ultimate corruption . He tells her of the legless birds who sleep on the wind; they live their whole lives on the wing and “never light on this earth but one time when they die .” 38 Lady answers: “I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free, not even nearly . Show me one of them birds and I’ll say, Yes, God’s made one perfect creature!” 39 Val consequently shows himself to Lady: he is the uncorrupted free bird . All at once Lady-Myra, who wanted to be dead because of her past, confronts her past in the form of her old lover David, and assesses her present with her dying husband Jabe in terms of the future that Val’s love promises . Of Jabe she says, “Ask me how it felt to be coupled with death up there,” 40 over the dry goods store with the merchant whom Williams’ notes call the “living symbol of death .” 41 To David in both plays she, like Tom Wingfield who abandoned the passivity of the movies for moving, says, “My life isn’t over, my life is only commencing .” 42 The symbol of the fruitful existential for Lady-Myra is not being physically barren . She uses the biblical trope of the fig 36 Battle, p . 179 and Orpheus, p . 69 . 37 Ibid ., p . 75 . 38 Ibid ., p . 42 . 39 Ibid ., p . 42 . 40 Ibid ., p . 109 . 41 Battle ., p . 227 . 42 Ibid ., p . 175; Orpheus, p . 63 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction131 tree to illustrate the wider dimensions of her conception . 43 Then, however, death in the form of her husband Jabe enters “like the very Prince of Darkness,” 44 kills her, aborts her pregnancy, and sends Val to death by fire . Both hero and heroine die; but they die a death of the physically mechanical . The level of life they have achieved transcends the literal death . Myra shouts for them both, “I’ve won, I’ve won, Mr . Death, I’m going to bear .” 45 Though she dies the literal death, Myra learns the lesson that Val brought her and that Chance articulates in Sweet Bird; “To change is to live . . ., to live is to change, and not to change is to die”; 46 that is, to be dead-alive by not coming to terms with the past and with evanescence . A failure to come to such terms characterizes Williams’ dramas of failure . His Blanche of the lost White Woods tells of her retreating confrontation with insistent evanescence . I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like rubbish! . . .Funer- als are pretty compared to deaths . Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always . Sometimes their breathing is horse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, “Don’t let me go!” Even the old, sometimes, say, “Don’t let me go .” As if you were able to stop them! . . .Unless you were there at the bed when they cried out . . ., you’d never suspect there was the struggle for breath and bleeding . . . .I saw! Saw! Saw! . . .Death is expensive . . . .Why, the Grim Reaper had put us his tent on our doorstep! 47 Blanche sees for all the existentially hysterical Williams people that surface ends . Ignorance of mortality would indeed be a comfort 43 Battle, p . 223 . 44 Ibid ., p . 229 . 45 Orpheus, p . 114 . 46 Sweet Bird, p . 416 . 47 Streetcar, pp . 25-26 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK132John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. to her and to them all . 48 But because she is not ignorant, life has become for her a dark march to uncertainty . For them all, as for the girl Willie in This Property is Condemned, death can no longer be glossed by the swift millimeter of the movies . Did you see Greta Garbo in Camille? It played at the Delta Brilliant one time las’ spring . She had the same what Alva died of . Lung affection . . . .Only it was—very beautiful the way she had it . You know . Violins playing . And loads of white flowers . All of her lovers came back in a beautiful scene! . . . But Alva’s [lovers] all disappeared . . . .Like rats from a sinking ship! That’s how she used to describe it . Oh, it—wasn’t like death in the movies . 49 The expurgated mendacity of movie-fied Puritanism on the subject of death is condemned by Bid Daddy who forces the interissue of literal death-life into the open where Brick can place it in an exis- tential dimension . Brick: Big Daddy . . . .It’s hard for me to understand how any- body could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle and so I said what I said without thinking . In some ways I’m no better than the others, in some ways worse because I’m less alive . Maybe it’s being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful . 50 Cat’s big debate of life and death is not whether the Ochsner Clinic can or cannot save the literal life of Big Daddy; Cat’s debate cen- ters on Maggie’s attempts—whatever be her motives and drives—to hand Brick back the life of his existential, 51 and secondarily upon Brick’s attempts to establish some viable communication with his 48 Cat, p . 75 . 49 Property, pp . 201-202 . 50 Cat, pp . 111-112 . 51 Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace . What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of—and I can! I’m determined to do it—and nothing’s more determined than a cat on a tin rood—is there? Is there, baby? Ibid ., p . 197 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction133 merchant father . Death is, after all, the ultimate visible expression of mankind’s guilt at alienation from his Creator . In it the general sin of the race is revealed . It is small wonder, recalling Eve the temptress’ role in introducing death, that Williams’ Lawrence comments wryly: Women have such fine intuition of death . They smell it com- ing before it’s started even . I think it’s women that actually let death in, they whisper and beckon and slip it the dark latch-key from under their aprons . . . .I have a nightmarish feeling that while I’m dying I’ll be surrounded by women . 52 Perhaps it is for this very reason that Period’s George Haverstick takes his bride on their wedding trip in a hearse . The cruel truth is that “the human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others .” 53 It gives him instead George’s shakes or Chance’s hysteria as he fears being killed in the War by an accident like a bullet . 54 The Princess del Lago refuses Chance even the mention of death . She adds, “I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever .” 55 And it is perhaps with these words that she establishes herself and several of her sisters, Serafina and Cathy Holly and Lady-Myra, as heroines of life . Death may be the last adventure to the minister in One Arm, but to Williams death is an unspeakable outrage, for it is the ultimate confrontation with relentless time . Life for Williams is the Calvinistic pilgrimage whose sequence is uni-directional from the inception of individual life to individual biological death . And between the two points something fierce blazes . A man’s gotta live his own life . . . .I don’t wanta die! I wanta live! What I mean is, get out of this [urban] place, this lousy town— . . .[mercantile] factories, building . . . .Quantity pro- duction, everything on a big scale;—that’s God! . . . .Millions 52 Phoenix, p . 9 . 53 Cat, p . 72 . 54 Sweet Bird, p . 54 . 55 Ibid ., p . 372 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK134John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. of people . . .down here in the mud . Ugh, too many of ‘em, God! . . .Crawling over each other, snatching and tearing, liv- ing and dying till the earth’s just a big soup of dead bodies . 56 For most of these people their vision allows them to see their life not as a cyclic phenomenon of seasons but as a uni-directional turtle race to the sea-cradle of life . So that they may never forget, Williams reminds his people in both Streetcar and Camino Real of their mortality as he employs contrapuntally to their conversations a dark Mexican woman who hawks repeatedly the one line: Flores para los muertos, flores—flores . . . . This is especially functional during Blanche’s monologue on death, desire, and young solders . Death . . . .We didn’t dare even admit we had ever heard of it! Mexican Woman: Flores para los muertos, flores, flores . . . Blanche: The opposite is desire . . . .Not far from Belle Reve, before we had lost Belle Reve, was a camp where they trained young soldiers . On Saturday nights they would to in town to get drunk— Mexican Woman: Corones . . . Blanche: —and on the way back they would stagger onto my lawn and call “Blanche! Blanche!” . . .Sometimes I slipped outside to answer their calls . . . .Later the paddy wagon would gather them up like daisies . 57 Thus the soldiers, the intimate strangers, became a crown of flowers, dead, to prove her desire, her life, that was the opposite of terrifying sentient death . This is her confessional monologue to Mitch and her existential hysteria increases . She screams for no literal reason “Fire! Fire! Fire!” as she becomes aware that this “jooking” living is the dead-alive that is less than life and worse than death . This being pinched with pleasures as Big Daddy is pinched with pains may be temporarily a satisfactory proof of existence but it is no gauge of true aliveness! Although death is absolutely universal in human life, Wil- liams’ people react with an almost inextinguishable horror at this 56 Mooney’s Kid Don’t Cry, pp . 11 and 13 . 57 Streetcar, pp . 138-139 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction135 end . They are afflicted with feelings they did not lose with Eden’s fall; they remember that man was not created to die . Death’s rela- tion to life is the causal one of some impersonal proto-sin; death affronts, therefore, even mocks, the integrity of man’s intended full organicism . Williams resists such dissolution; but because his view of Deity remains ambivalent, his attitude toward death is equally so . He remains ambivalent, his attitude toward death is equally so . He despises man dying the corrupting, dissolving death of Adam, the Old Testament death of revenge, when there is the possibility of redemptive non-death in a New Testament Christ . This ambivalency is not peculiar to Williams, but is typical of humankind’s death psychology . Karl Rahner, a most modern theologian, documents death’s duplicity . The end of man, considered only from man’s point of view, constitutes a real-ontological contradiction which is insol- uble and irreducible to simpler terms . The end of man as a spiritual person, is an active immanent consummation, an act of self-completion, a life-synthesizing self-affirmation, an achievement of the person’s total self-possession, a creation of himself, the fulfillment of his personal reality . At the same time, the death of man as a biological being is a destruction, an accident, which strikes man from without, unforeseeably, with no assurance that it will strike him at the moment in which he has prepared himself for it interiorly . Death is for man a dark fate, the their in the night; it is an emptying, an ending . This simultaneity of fulfillment and emptiness, of actively achieved and passively suffered end, of full self- possession and complete dispossession of self, may . . .be taken as a correct description of . . .death . 58 Such paradox Blanche cannot accept as she fantasizes her movie- fied death that will end her evanescence and recall her lost time of love . 59 The unwashed grape that will transport her soul to heaven is 58 Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1962), p . 48 . 59 Blanche: I can smell the sea air . The rest of my time I’m going to spend on the sea . And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea . You know what I shall die of? . . .I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean . I will die—with my ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK136John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. highly romantic gesture that ignores the fulfillment while belaboring the dispossession . She wishes to return to Nonno’s sea . She hopes for some vague life everlasting that is more than the everlasting mechan- ical life symbolized by the continual restoration of the virginity of Camino’s Gypsy’s daughter . Life everlasting is the specific hope of all mankind . Big Daddy, the sensitized merchant, diagnoses: The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! 60 But life everlasting has minimal definition for Williams people who have lived dead-alive half-lives of the mechanical . Mrs . Buchanan envisions her rosy burgher life continuing in Doctor John’s projected children . 61 Big Mama asks Brick to impregnate the childless Mag- gie to give the dying Big Daddy the life everlasting he desires . The physical continuance by procreation is in their minds, for in their minds without it—like Maxine’s dead Fred—the dead become only an echo, not transported by Nonno’s sea but mechanically feeding the fishes in Fred’s . 62 Yet in Camino Real, of which “resurrections are so much a part of its meaning,” 63 Kilroy wishes: Jean Harlow’s ashes are kept in a little private cathedral in Forest Lawn . . .Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could sprinkle them ashes over the ground like seeds, and out of each one hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blonde mustache and a big silver watch . “Poor lady,” they’ll say, “the quinine did her no good . That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven .” . . .And I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard—at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as . . .my first lover’s eyes! Streetcar, pp . 158-159 . 60 Cat, p . 73 . 61 Eccentricities, p . 54 . 62 Iguana, p . 22 . 63 Camino, p . 169 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction137 would spring another Jean Harlow? And when spring comes you could just walk out and pick them off the bush! 64 In absurdist fashion Kilroy exploits the concept of physical life ever- lasting . The Proprietor in 1948’s shorter Camino comments on the streetcleaners who in both plays are symbols of death . He voices the opinion that everyone thinks that with his own death there will be no survivors . 65 Iguana’s Hannah and Streetcars Mitch both know differently; he fears outliving his mother and she, her grandfather . Both live in a world if impermanence, but Hannah and her grand- father most clearly perceive—more even that Alma who loses the vision—the Statue of Eternity . For it is in Nonno’s poem of moral advice that physical death’s dark night is explained to those who blanche with existential fear . Nonno assures Hannah he will not leave her even in death; for when death, the zenith of life is “gone past forever,” “from thence/ a second history will commence .” 66 Williams is not quite sure of the nature of this second history, but like the Deity and whom he is likewise uncertain, he is sure it exists . When an artist makes a coalescence, brings together themes and images and attitudes, attention must be paid . In I Rise in Flame Williams integrates his art theme, his chiaroscuro sexual and eating imagery, and his attitudes toward life, love, death, women, violence, and ultimate resurrection . Out of all this emerges a life-triumph over death as art fulfills man’s desperate craving for immortality . Williams makes his D . H . Lawrence speak I’m an artist .—What is an artist?—A man who loves life too intensely, a man who loves life till he hates her and has to strike out with his fist . . . .To show her he knows her tricks, and he’s still the master! . . .I wanted to stretch out the long, sweet arms of my art and embrace the whole World! But it isn’t enough to go out to the world with love . The world’s a woman you’ve got to take by storm . And so I doubled my 64 Ibid ., p . 289 . 65 Proprietor: Any my death will be like the fall of a capital city, the sack of Rome or the destruction of Carthage—And, oh, the memories that will go up in smoke! . . . You mean to tell me that all this flesh will be lost? American Blues, p . 50 . 66 Iguana, p . 123 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK138John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. fist and I struck and I struck . . . .Fiercely, without any shame! This is life, I told them, life is like this! Wonderful! Dark! Terrific! . . .That’s how it is—when first you look at the sun it strikes you blind—Life’s—blinding . . . .The sun’s going down . He’s seduced by the harlot of darkness . . . .Now she has got him, they’re copulating together! The sun is exhausted, the harlot has taken his strength and now she will start to destroy him . She’s eating him up . . . .Oh, but he won’t stay down . He’ll climb back out of her belly and there will be light . 67 In The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore Williams writes, “Death: Celebration .” Inversely he writes, “Life: Celebration” as Sissy Goforth, who does not wish to go forth, wrestles within and without herself with the “meaning of life .” Terrified at the death of her husband Harlon Goforth, Sissy abandoned him: Suddenly he stops trying to make love to me . . . .I see—death in his eyes . . . .I see terror in his eyes . . . .I get out of the bed as if escaping from quicksand! . . .I leave him alone with his death, his— 68 Sissy nearly suffocates like Karen Stone whose husband died next to her on their plane flight over the oldest sea in the world . Sissy’s friends have been dying “rat-a-tat-tat” 69 so that knowing she her- self is dying 70 she insists that “Everything’s urgentissimo here this summer .” 71 Upon Chris’ arrival she covets life even more . She deludes herself into thinking her life is cyclic like the seasons and not uni- directional between the points of birth and death . “The summer is coming to life! I’m coming back to life with it .” 72 To convince herself she lies: Mrs Goforth:Death—never even think of it . . . 67 Phoenix, p . 17 . 68 Milk Train, p . 56 . 69 Ibid ., p . 84 . 70 Ibid ., p . 11 . 71 Ibid ., p . 37 . 72 Ibid ., p . 72 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction139 Chris: Death is one moment and life is so many of them . . . . Life is something, death’s nothing . . . . Mrs . Goforth:Nothing, nothing, but nothing . I’ve had to refer to many deaths in my memoirs . 73 Chris identifies Sissy with the banner of the Griffin that the Oriental stage assistants raise at the play’s beginning and lower at the end . One: The device on the banner is a golden griffin . Two: A mythological monster, half lion and half eagle . One: And completely human . 74 What’s a griffin?” Mrs . Goforth asks . Chris answers: “A force in life that’s almost stronger than death .” 75 And this is precisely what Sissy has tried all her life to be: stronger than death, as when she and her Alex toyed with death poking each other with sword tips and muz- zling one another with small revolvers . 76 When finally in the act of dying, Sissy is described by Two: “The griffin is staring at death, and trying to outstare it .” 77 And when Sissy is dead, Blackie and Chris wonder where all her fierce life has gone . “You feel it must be still around somewhere, in the air .” 78 But the bird is flown, done in by its ultimate encounter with the curved prisons of time and space . The only escape from prison, from the death-trap of existence, 79 is acceptance of life and death: “Acceptance is not knowing anything but the moment of still existing, until we stop existing—and acceptance of that moment, too .” 80 This is Chris’ vocation; it is the vocation of Everyman as Angel of Death—to help others break through the terror of literal death into the accepting sea of existence expansion . 73 Ibid ., p . 84 . 74 Ibid., p. 5. 75 Ibid ., p . 66 . 76 Ibid ., p . 36 . 77 Ibid ., p . 103 . 78 Ibid ., p . 117 . 79 Chris: . . .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 . Ibid ., p . 105 . 80 Ibid ., p . 114 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >