< Previous140John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. In a typical Williams inversion, Chris aids an old suicide who stands on a beach shouting cowardly for help . I gave him the help he wanted, I led him out in the water, it wasn’t easy . Once he started to panic; I had to hold onto him tight as a lover till he got back his courage and said, “All right .” The tide took him as light as a leaf . 81 By inverting and shocking the ordinary sensibility, Williams empha- sizes that prolongation of the physical mechanism of life is not living; his point is that a successful literal dying can be a more creative and socially responsible act than merely stoically continuing a dead-alive mechanics . 82 Sissy and Blackie make terrible encounter on this point that was also Lady-Myra’s . Mrs Goforth: The dead are dead and the living are living! Blackie: Not so, I’m not dead but not living! 83 Williams image and point are both Emersonian: vision of a higher than physical kind helps man transcend the existential horror . Man suffers terror and hysteria until he is only to “look and look and look, till we’re almost nothing but looking, nothing almost but vision .” 84 And this vision is that of the artistic eye which in correlating and uniting makes order of the hopelessly absurd and disconnected per- ceptions of an uninvestigated existence . Death forces the issue and 81 Ibid ., p . 112 . 82 In I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow Williams makes rare reference to suicide and his opin- ion of that act . A small man is refused entrance to the house of Death because he comes twenty years too early: The small man started to cry . He said if you won’t let in for twenty years, I’ll wait twenty years at the gate, I can’t go back down the mountain . I have no place down there . I have no one to visit in the evening, I have no one to talk to, no one to play cards with, I have no one, no one . But the guard walked away, and the small man, who was afraid to talk, began to shout . For a small man he shouted loudly, and Death heard him and came out himself to see what the disturbance was all about . The guard said the small man at the gates had come twenty years too early, and wouldn’t go back down the mountain, and Death said, Yes, I understand, but under some circumstances, especially when they shout their heads off at the gates, they can be let in early, so let him in, anything to stop the disturbance . Pp . 78-79 . 83 Orpheus, p . 33 . 84 Milk Train, p . 106 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction141 makes man look hard at life . This is the vision given to Vee Talbott, Big Daddy, 85 and “The Poet .” Sissy, however, lets her mercantile appreciation of the goods of life obfuscate her sight; like the Pha- raohs she plans only to sleep . 86 She misses entirely the “boom punc- tuation” of her Angel of Death . Thirteen times Chris says Boom . Like George’s snap in Albee’s Virginia Wolf, Chris throws the boom to awaken the existentially drowsing Sissy; the boom is to remind her of her mortality, for it is the crack of individual death, individual apoc- alypse, every man’s individual Armageddon . But Sissy, dying with her legalism and her mercantilism (two institutional good opposed to love), puts crass stop to love: she tells Chris to let go her hand as her rings are cutting her fingers . She can’t take the chance on love; and consequently in continuing the use she knows so well, she misses the opportunity for love, for “love of true understanding” which can crack “the hard shell” of her heart . 87 Her death is her total alienation . Isabel in Period of Adjustment says, “Love is stronger than death .” 88 Love, for Williams, redeems the failure, the corruption; love denies the ultimate alienation of death; love is the only means of regeneration . But to be all those things love must be a finding of self by going out of the self to lose the self in the other . Love is more than its physical expression in sex, for that can too easily become the cannibalized use of Sebastian and Chance and Sissy . Because love is a dying to self in the other it is appropriate that the act of love is often called by the French petite morte . Sexual use in Williams can be subsumed under Captain Rock- ley’s act of having relations with a porpoise in You Touched Me . This is the dehumanized use that makes the other a mere object; this is the most common personal “sin” in Williams . Phoenix’s Lawrence raves about the isolation of looking for God in oneself . This use of self that does not end personal isolation is Williams’ masturbatory metaphor which locks Billy Spangler of The Knightly Quest into his isolation . In his poem “The Siege” Williams repeats the cry of the sexual isolato: 85 Cat, p . 77 . 86 Milk Train, pp . 94, 118 . 87 Ibid ., p . 12 . 88 Period, p . 28 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK142John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. I build a tottering pillar of my blood to walk it upright on the tilting street . . . . How perilously do these fountains leap . . . . Sometimes I feel the island of myself a silver mercury that slips and runs, revolving frantic mirrors in itself beneath the pressure of a million thumbs . Then I must that night to in search of one unknown before but recognized on sight whose touch . . . stays panic in me and arrest my flight . Before day breaks I follow back the street, companioned, to a rocking space above . Now do my veins in crimson cabins keep the wild and witless passengers of love . All is not lost, they say, all is not lost, but with the startling knowledge of the blind their fingers flinch to feel such flimsy walls against the siege of all that is not I . 89 In “Crushed Petunias” Williams declares that living alone in a bar- ricaded house is sin . Mrs . Buchanan counsels John to sin by telling him in Eccentricities not to get involved with Alma’s strange little group . Blanche tells Stanley that “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation .” And one presumes that Blanche’s linguistic delicacy cover the vulgar term for the act of love which is without love and is use . 90 Blanche knows well this act of use; for when she discovered her husband’s homosexuality, he became a false god to her and she began to depend on the kindness of strangers . 91 She looks for love-salvation with the proper stranger, but such non-communicative intimacies do not waylay the panic of her unloved heart . Her sister Alexandra del Lago names the act of use as a way of forgetting death . It is the only “dependable distraction .” 92 Val had called sex the make-believe 89 In the Winter of Cities, p . 20 . 90 Streetcar, p . 45 . 91 Ibid ., p . 165 . 92 Sweet Bird, p . 372; Camino, p . 237 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction143 answer to communication . Sex is the rented room available since the beginning of time, as John tells the eccentric Alma . 93 The act of use, being rented, is not love that Chance seeks, “something permanent in a world of change .” 94 The streetwalkers’ birdcall of love-love in Camino Real is far from the love inherent in the term hermano, so important to that play’s ethic . The mercenary cry of love is worse than hate . 95 In short, love in Williams’ quite Christian economy is not groin-centered but is other-centered; for in the other becoming God to the lover the alienation of otherness transmutes into a mutual identity under the aegis of the Creator . When love is not requited, the unloved lover rightly calls love an affliction; for this reason Alma in both her plays recites a William Blake poem “on the affliction of unrequited love .” If Serafina can say that sex without love is without glory, 96 then Alma could make tru- ism of the converse . Both elements are required in a fruitful relation of man to woman to make them one, to complete their union—in Williams’ terms—physically and metaphysically as the tattoo trans- fers from one to the other to both . Quite rightly does Alexandra at the climactic revelation scene in Sweet Bird acknowledge that true love of another is salvific miracle: Chance, the most wonderful thing has happened to me . Will you listen to me? Will you let me tell you? . . .I felt something in my heart for you . That’s a miracle, Chance . That’s the wonderful thing that happened to me . I felt something for someone besides myself . That means my heart’s still alive, at least some part of it is, not all of my heart is dead yet . Part’s still alive . 97 She pleads with him to reciprocate; she emphasizes their mutual need . 93 Eccentricities, p . 91 . 94 Sweet Bird, p . 378 . 95 Battle, p . 220 . 96 Rose Tattoo, p . 82 . 97 Sweet Bird, pp . 424-425 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK144John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Princess: There’s no one but me to hold you back from destruction in this place . Chance: I don’t want to be held . Princess: Don’t leave me . If you do I’ll turn into the monster again . I’ll be the first lady of the Beanstalk Country . 98 She makes the characteristic Williams request that is too often super- ficially interpreted . She wants “To be warmed—touched—loved .” 99 And while the celebration of this touch may be the act of sex, the implications of that act transcend for the Williams people purely physical gratification . Serafina can say: “We had love together every night of the week, we never skipped one, from the night we was married till the night he was killed in his fruit truck on that road there .” 100 But it is not so much the physical act of love that Serafina misses; it is the psychic and existential reassurance which come from the act whose passing she laments . Love is, therefore, more than a sexual phenomenon in Williams, although a Freudian interpretation may be placed on such mother-son relationships as Violet and Sebastian’s in Suddenly, as Olga Kedrova and her golden son’s in “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch,” as the mother and son’s in the poem “Photograph and Pearls .” It is true in one Williams exception, at least, that Mr . and Mrs . Stone could not make their marriage functional until they assumed a mother- child relation; but normally sex is only species sign of Williams’ more generic love . It seems, for instance, most unlikely that Tom Wingfield’s love for mother and sister has incestuous designs; Chris Flanders, moreover, rejects any sexual suite of Sissy Goforth; and on the farther side of debit it is precisely sex—its misuse—that obstructs pair after pair of Williams lovers . Brick tries to correct the existential mendacity endemic to the misuse of love by sex . He and Williams employ a situation which requires a new set of tolerance from their audiences’ straight middle- class values . The distortion presented tells much about more socially accustomed relationships of love . 98 Ibid ., p . 432 . 99 You Touched Me, p . 50 . 100 Rose Tattoo, p . 50 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction145 Skipper and me had a clean, true thing between us!—had a clean relationship, practically all our lives, till Maggie got the idea you’re talking about . Normal? No!—It was too rare to be normal, any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal . Oh, once in a while he put his hand on my shoulder or I’d put mine on his, oh, maybe even, when we were touring the country in pro-football an’ shared hotel- rooms we’d reach across the space between the two beds and shake hands to say good-night, yeah, one or two time we— Big Daddy: Brick, nobody thinks that that’s not normal! Brick: Well, they’re mistaken, it was! It was a pure an’ true thing an’ that’s not normal . 101 In a more gee-whiz fashion Jim Connor tells Menagerie’s Laura that “The power of love is really pretty tremendous! Love is something that —changes the whole world .” 102 This change is precisely what Amanda and Big Mama desire as one confronts the absolute death of her past and the other the physical death of her husband . The desperate Amanda says: “In these trying times we live in, all that we have to cling to is—each other .” 103 Big Mama says: Time goes by so fast . Nothin’ can outrun it . Death com- mences too early—almost before you’re half-acquainted with life—you meet with the other . Oh, you know we just got to love each other, an’ stay together all of us just as close as we can, specially now that such a black thing has come and moved into this place without invitation . 104 Big Mama prescribes that only love can conquer Black Death; but Big Mama is only half-right . Lady-Myra’s encounter with Jabe, the symbol of death, clarifies the fact that in Williams’ economy literal death is of small import: Lady: [Referring to Jabe’s knocking] I know! Death’s 101 Cat, pp . 104-105 . 102 Menagerie, p . 1057 . 103 Ibid ., p . 1043 . 104 Cat ., p . 184 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK146John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. knocking for me! Don’t you think I hear him, knock, knock, knock? It sounds like what it is! Bones knocking bones . . . .Ask me how it felt to be coupled with death up there, and I can tell you . . . .I endured it . I guess my heart knew that somebody must be coming to take me out of this hell! You did . You came . Now look at me! I’m alive once more! I won’t wither in the dark! . . .Everything in this rotten store is yours, not just your pay, but everything Death’s scraped together down here! [It became Val’s because as life force he has conquered liter death, made it meaningless to Lady, and as a conse- quence deserves the spoils of the conquered .]—But Death has got to die before we can go . 105 This defeat of death, this need to deprive death of its victory and its sting is a sentiment totally Incarnational and highly Williamsian . The parallel between the general Christian economy and Williams’ view is that biological death having been introduced by sin as an inevitability is in the last analysis transcendable in both economies by the determination of true love . The metaphorical mind, which is Williams’, at once dramatizes this love as mutual human response; but to a poet-creator who is vividly conscious of his own creature- hood, the expression of this human response is defined as finding God in the other so that the entanglement is not simply a biological pas de deux but a theological triangle of existence . Up to this point Williams is a fairly traditional Western writer who subscribes to the belief that created and creative life can indeed be explained and understood; he is not picked in the full vitriol of a self-mocking Stendhal, or in the superparodic tradition of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka: although of late he has, as have they, sent gro- tesque people with impossible names through mad worlds of his own creative imagination . Yet even in these maddest stories and vaude- villes—The Knightly Quest and The Gnädiges Fräulein—the main concern remains an existential triumph over death by means of love . Williams truly believes that love is stronger than physical death; but the Puritan crosses the Cavalier in hybrid Williams and tends to negate the visible power of love . Like the characters of John O’Hara, 105 Orpheus, p . 109 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction147 the characters of Tennessee Williams almost as soon as they find the transcending love which frees or can free their existential are destroyed physically by literal death . It is almost as if the Puritan strain rising out of some national recessive gene makes insistent commentary that America’s dream of physical Eden can never be realized . 106 This trace in Tennessee Williams of the Puritan literalist’s inhibition almost compulsively devaluates metaphorical Williams’ restored and fruitful Eden of interpersonal love; but not completely, for though the physical base of the metaphor is destroyed by time or biological death (equable entities), the true lovers accept without self-pity the unidirectional boom of individual apocalypse . This they have learned is the last trial of active passivity before their acceptance into Nonno’s eternal sea which laps cyclically and forever around Alma’s retrieving fountain of Eternity . 106 In the latest Williams’ novella, Billy Spangler Calvinistically regards the act of love as an evil brought about by the animal nature of the female whom he equates—per- haps because of Eve’s role as temptress—with the devil . Confer The Knightly Quest, p . 49 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKBIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources A. Williams as Artist. American Blues: Five Short Plays, acting edition . New York: Drama- tists Play Service, 1948 . Battle of Angels with Orpheus Descending . New York: New Direc- tions, 1958 . Baby Doll . New York: New Directions, 1956 . Camino Real in Three Plays of Tennessee Williams . New York: New Directions, 1964 . Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . New York: New Directions, 1955 . Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Two Plays by Tennessee Williams . New York: New Directions, 1964 . The Fugitive Kind . New York: The New American Library, 1958 . Garden District (Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer) . London: Secker and Warburg, 1959 . The Glass Menagerie . New York: Random House, 1945 . Hard Candy . New York: New Directions, 1954 . I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow . Esquire (March, 1966) . I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, acting edition . New York: Dra- matists Play Service, 1951 . In the Winter of Cities . New York: New Directions, 1964 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >