< Previous30John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. crash head-on, giving in this reading exact and inevitable meaning to that house-tittering line: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” 44 Williams, recognizing the growing force of the new existential- ism, here dramatizes that the old stand-offs must finally come to grips with one another . Puritan Blanche resultant insanity is Wil- liams’ bleak comment that she cannot be regenerated by the encoun- ter, cannot be named to the new election . Cavalier Stanley, however, enjoys in the Williams world a temporary success as the new animal elect; but in his erotic descendent, the tawny gold and nearly nude Hollywood-Indian Joe of The Slapstick Tragedy it is not the bullish Indian who ultimately predominates; it is the gnädiges Fräulein, the merciful young woman, who allows her lover to raise her above both the selfish and selfless extremes of imbalance . In feeding the animal- istic Joe, the blind and bleeding Fräulein says to him: The fish “just landed in my jaws like God had thrown it to me . It’s better to receive than to give if you are receiving to give: isn’t it, . . .mein Liebchen?” 45 This is an answer that other Williams extremists could do well to consider . Brick and Chance and Val Xavier want to escape their imbalance: Brick through a clarification that his love for Skipper was balanced, was not so cavalier as the puritans accuse; Chance through a rejection of his animal coupling with the Princess and a retrieval of his Heavenly love; Val says in Battle of Angels: “How do you get to know people? I used to think you did it by touching them with your hands . But later I found out that only made you more of a stranger than ever .” 46 With this he rejects purely cavalier animalism . He talks of the dispossessed, his word for the existential isolation that either extreme proffers . In the later play, Orpheus Descending, Val adds: “We’re all of us . . .under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on this earth .” 47 To this rather Emersonian sentiment he appends a sequence obviously suggestive of Beckett’s Godot: 44 Streetcar, p . 151 . 45 The Slapstick Tragedy, Esquire (August, 1965), p . 134 . 46 Battle of Angels, p . 166 . 47 Orpheus Descending, p . 47 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction31 Val: When I was a kid on Witches Bayou . . .I felt I was—wait- ing for something! Lady: What for? Val: What does anyone wait for? For something to happen, for anything to happen, to make more sense . . . .I’ve lost it now, but I was waiting for something like if you ask a question you wait for someone to answer, but you ask the wrong question or you ask the wrong person and the answer doesn’t come . . . .Day comes after day and night comes after night, and you’re still waiting for someone to answer the question . . . . Lady: Then what? Val: You get the make-believe answer . Lady: What answer is that? Val: Don’t pretend you don’t know because you do! Lady: Love? Val: [placing hand on her shoulder]: That’s the make-believe answer . It’s fooled many a fool besides you an’ me, that’s the God’s truth . . . . 48 Here Williams, in the midst of the bourgeois Broadway theatre business, neatly parleys questions of existence (what Tom Wingfield had called “adventure”) and tinges of modern nihilism under the commercially successful gloss of the sexual metaphor . Lady should have answered sex not love as the make-believe answer; for Williams himself makes the distinction . It is not sex but love that sustains the gnädiges Fräulein; it is sex without love that destroys Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer; it is sex without love that runs Brick from Maggie the animalistic Cat to love without sex with Skipper; it is sex without love that drives Blanche into insanity; it is sex without requited love that drives Alma Winemiller into prostitution; it is animal sex without love that unnerves the Reverend Shannon at the Costa Verde Hotel: but it is physical sex balanced with genuine love that saves The Rose Tattoo’s Serafina from the living death of isola- tion . Not only does she have a new husband, but she has conceived: 48 Ibid ., pp . 47-48 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK32John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. “Two lives again the body! Two, two lives again, two!” 49 The solitary confinement of Val’s everyone-in-his-lonely-skin is this once broken; for Serafina is not only one of the few Williams women able to con- ceive, she is the only one whose pregnancy is not terminated . Sissy Goforth of The Milk Train is engaged in another kind of pregnancy, one that is to be aborted: the dictation of her memoirs . She and Alexander del Lago, like their male counterpart Chance Wayne, see their youth—the great American good—flying away . Alexandra and Chance try to conceive a permanence for themselves in the movies; Sissy Goforth, however, investigating the meaning of life decides that “life is all memory” and so she tries to capture it all into the permanence of words: Mrs . Goforth: Practically everything is memory to me, now, so I’m writing my memoirs . . . .Four husbands, all memory now . All lovers, all memory now . The Witch: So you’re writing your memoirs . Mrs . Goforth: Devoting all of me to it, and all of my time . 50 Time is what erodes the Williams people . It is time that destroys them; they go down in an attrition eventful only its accidentals: Val is burned, Chance castrated, Sebastian devoured, Blanche commit- ted, Big Daddy swindles . But the fact is they were each destroyed, eroded, before the violent concluding events . Williams, as neo- romantic playwright, exhibits all his characters living in “High Point over a cavern,” waiting out the period of rarely-arriving adjustment . Ralph: I guess all fair-sized American cities have got a sub- urb called High Point . . . .High Point is built over a great big . . .cavern and is sinking into it gradually . . . .But it’s not publicly known and we homeowners . . .have got . . .to keep it a secret till we have sold out . . . . 51 So bleak is the American dream in Williams that his protagonists 49 The Rose Tattoo in Three Plays, p . 155 . 50 Milk Train, pp . 44-45 . 51 Period of Adjustment, pp . 14-15 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction33 are generally incapable of any significant salvific action: after their erosion they simply submit, like Chance to the castrators; indeed . . .without action, there can be no tragedy; yet existential drama is, in tone and atmosphere, the most tragic of the mod- ern genres; . . .it is tragic in its perception . It lacks a tragic hero, but it evokes a tragic sense of life . 52 Williams, moving in this context, dramatizes the paralysis grow- ing from the basic Angst the American Project has put upon the human experience: the two Vals, Brick, Shannon, Chance, all give in; Lady-Myra, Amanda and Laura, the two Alma’s, Blanche, and Catharine Venable are each tendered a trick of life that allows them only a passive waiting for time to bring them the final alienation, the isolation of death . Sissy Goforth, for instance, after a lifetime of painters who didn’t paint and writers who didn’t write, meets the “point of no more pretenses” and needs “somebody or something to mean God to” her . 53 She articulates the ultimate cry of isolation; and the irony runs deep, for the basic Calvinism seminal to the American experience denied its social side, insisting only on man’s solipsistic relation to God . Such isolation has always run counter to the social psychology of America where, especially in the early times of adjustment, the group was necessary for the individual’s survival . The tension consequently generated has virtually enfranchised the American literary imagination . For out of “the great breakup of New England Calvinism” came a tense “Spiritual logjam” that yet requires much adjustment . 54 Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, as well as Melville and Tennessee Williams’ ancestor on the Chat- tahoochee, Sidney Lanier, each weaned his own romantic sensibility out of the heritage of native culture initiated by the Puritans . In their time of the nineteenth century “the Puritan temperament and psychology remained, but were no longer imprisoned in dogma . Out of Calvinism cam Unitarianism and the transcendentalism, more 52 Brustein, op. cit., pp . 29-30 . 53 Milk Train, pp . 70 and 111 . 54 R . H . Fogle, The Romantic Movement in American Writing (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), p . 1 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK34John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. hospitable to literary growth .” 55 It has not been the theologians, but the romantic men of letters who have dealt with the other side of the vision, the disintegrating idea of Eden . Emerson and Whitman, representative of this strain, saw the Lords of Life and heard the Drum Taps; they, like Chance Wayne, saw that despite their hope the innocence was gone and despite their knightly quest it could not be regained . Each in his own way asks what mistake was made in the Garden . So centripetal to this chronicling is Williams that his matter’s setting is more often than not some garden district, some precise jungle evolved from the trope of the biblical garden where flesh first encountered spirit . In his garden districts Williams constantly explores and exposes the duplicity of the new Eden idea . His South, with its ancient roots of puritan and cavalier, is metaphor for the whole of America, is even display base for the universal human condition . Williams considers himself a member of a school, which he terms the Gothic, uniting in a specific American combina- tion, expressionist, impressionist, surrealist, symbolist, and naturalist elements . . . .The disappointment, repression, and poverty of the South have . . .[made] it the natural ground for the “American Gothic .” Tennessee Williams considers this movement akin to French Existentialism, except that the “motor impulse of the French school in intellectual and phil- osophic while that of the American is more of an emotional and romantic nature .” The common link between the two movements, he says, is a “sense, in intuition, of an underly- ing dreadfulness in modern experience .” This “dreadfulness” he finds impossible to explain . [It is a] “kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about . . . .” 56 It is, quite likely, this very Angst of falsely polarized human nature that he finds so inarticulately “dreadful .” And it is his America, 55 Ibid. 56 Tischler, op. cit., pp . 301-302 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction35 the last Eden, which has become the newest wasteland, the “Terra Incognita” of his Camino Real . In this Strindbergian dream play of 1953, Camino Real, Wil- liams comes virtually to an anthological statement of his matter . 57 The quest of Kilroy, Williams’ American Everyman, is to travel down the Camino Real of life . His duty is to recover the Edenic time when the street was royal before the loss of innocence made it the present real . He had known the royal time when he had the true love of his one, true woman . Yet his Angst at being washed up—at having a body he may not use—drives him from his Eden . Marguerite says to him, “Then you have been on the street when the street was royal” “Yeah . . .,” Kilroy answers, “when the street was royal .” 58 Now, however, all these people live in “the real not the royal truth . . .terrified of the Terra Incognita .” 59 “Humanity,” the Gypsy tells Kilroy, “is just a work in progress .” 60 Everyone must seek his balance to save his body from the street cleaners when the soul has parted . The only balance to the alienation of death is the balance of love . The election of love is the only means of regeneration . Love is the phoenix that resurrects Kilroy of whom it was said at his death: This was thy son, America . . . .He was found in an alley along the Camino Real . . . .Think of him, now, as he was before his luck failed him . Remember his time of greatness, when he was not faded, but frightened . 61 There is, therefore, a possible alleviation of the tension: the ideal combination of spiritual and physical love which resolves into unity the falsely polarized soul and body of man . Williams insists that 57 In Modern Drama (1958), I, 166-171, Richard Vowles has set out to determine “the lineal descent of Williams from Strindberg” despite the fact that in a Stockholm interview in 1955 “Williams explicitly denied the influence of Strindberg .” Vowles sees a correlation between the two playwrights on point of moral inquiry, treatment of Life’s tense struggles, and theatricality . It is, he decides, “a poetry of the theatre” that they have in common . 58 Camino Real in Three Plays, p . 313 . 59 Ibid ., p . 239 . 60 Ibid ., p . 281 . 61 Ibid ., p . 316 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK36John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Camino Real “is not a document of despair, but of eternal idealism .” It served for him . . .as a spiritual purgation of that abyss of confusion and lost sense of reality that I, and . . .others, had somehow wan- dered into . . . .What the play says through this unashamed old romanticist, Don Quixote, is just this, “Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question .” 62 Thus can Marion Magid say: Williams is American in his passion for absolutes, in his longing for purity, . . .in the extreme discomfort with which he inhabits his own body and soul, in his apocalyptic vision of sex, which like all apocalyptic visions sacrifices mere accu- racy for the sake of intensity . Intensity is the crucial quality of Williams’ art, and he is perhaps most an American artist in his reliance upon the mastery of surface techniques for achieving this effect . 63 It is precisely to this intensity of technique, to this intense personal experimentation with form that Williams’ matter has driven him . The marriage of form and matter has always been the essential concern of relevant drama; and at no time more than in the past hundred years has there been such uneasy search for the proper dra- matic form . Ibsen moved from poetic drama to realism to symbol- ism in a realistic framework; Strindberg, chafing under the yoke of the well-made play, escaped to expressionism only to return to his initial naturalism . “In recent years this search for mode appears most clearly in the plays of Tennessee Williams where symbolism and realism are always juxtaposed .” 64 This juxtaposition of forms is precise barometer of the juxtaposi- tion that Williams finds within his matter . In fact, A . B . Kernan 62 Tischler, op. cit., p . 191 . 63 Marion Magid, “The Innocence of Tennessee Williams,” Commentary, XXXV (January, 1963), p . 34 . 64 A . B . Kernan, “Truth and Dramatic Mode in the Modern Theatre: Chekov, Piran- dello, and Williams,” Modern Drama (1958), I, 101 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction37 finds the tension between Blanche and Stanley in Streetcar an ana- log for the modal vacillation not only within Williams but within the evolvement of modern dramatic form . Their “conflict and its resolution dramatize very clearly Mr . Williams’ own struggle with dramatic form .” 65 Streetcar presents, basically, two polar views of experience: the realism of Stanley and the non-realism of Blanche . The tension is immediate . Blanche asks about the run-down Elysian Fields: “Out there I suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!” He sister, Stella, replies, “No, honey, those are the L & N tracks .” This is the basic problem which has kept the modern theatre boiling: If the modern world best described as a “ghoul-haunted woodland” or a neutrally denominated something like “The L & N tracks”? 66 The movement of the play is to show “the limitations of realism as an approach to experience”: Stanley mistakes paste for jewels; Blanche looks old and cheap only when the eyes alone are the mea- sure of things’ reality . When “realism” rapes “romanticism,” it is Stella—“born kin to the ‘romantic’ and married to the ‘realistic’” 67 —whose currently stoic position between the poles is most typically the American stance . Her moral sense is still active, for she points out to Eunice that “I couldn’t believe [Blanche’s] story and go on living with Stanley .” Eunice’s answer contains the dreadful truth of our times, “Don’t ever believe it . Life has got to go on . No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going .” 68 This perseverance in pressing ever onward to some equilibrium is Williams’ ideal “truth .” For he articulates a basic moral hope, char- acteristically American, that the wasteland of Weir will somehow regenerate to the true Elysian Fields of the First Garden District . He 65 Ibid ., pp . 102-103 . 66 Ibid ., 111 . 67 Ibid ., p . 112 . 68 Ibid ., 113 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK38John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. vacillates between the real camino and the Camino Real, between realism and expressionism . He approximates in his mixed and mix- ing form and varied ambivalencies in the modern psyche . He is a romantic whose optimism has been tempered by reality . He is a neo-romantic bearing all “the paradoxes of the rebel dramatist . He would exalt the ideal, yet he is imprisoned in the real . He would vindicate the self, yet he must also examine the claims of others .” 69 The polarities tug at him till he must come to some balance to relive the tension . He would sing of love and deny death . He would exalt Cavalier optimism, “ecstasy, wildness, and drunkenness, yet he must cope with the tedious, conditioned world” of an indigenous puritan- ism . He writes at the heart of the American existential where the accident of tension has become functional essential: the “touch of paranoia,” he says, “is necessary to individual felicity in this world .” Of the American, who—beyond Williams’ understanding—accepts as salvific election in itself this tense mode of existential paranoia, Williams writes: “Who can doubt, meeting him, returning the impulsive vigor of his handshake and meeting the lunatic honesty of his gaze, that he is the one, the man, the finally elected?” 70 69 Brustein, op. cit., p . 15 . 70 The Knightly Quest, pp . 81-82 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKCHAPTER II PLACE AND TIME: ALWAYS TOO LATE AT MOON LAKE A European whose knowledge of America was gained entirely from the collected works of Tennessee Williams might garner a composite image of the U .S .: it is a tropical country whose vegetation is largely man-eating; it has an excessive annual rainfall and frequent storms which coin- cide with its mating periods; it has not yet been converted to Christianity, but continues to observe the myth of the annual death and resurrection of the sun-god, for which purpose it keeps on hand a constant supply of young men to sacrifice . Its young men are for the most part beautiful . . . . Its women are alternately in a state of heat or jitters . . . .The sexual embrace . . .is as often as not followed by the direst con- sequences: cannibalism, castration, burning alive, madness, surgery in various forms from lobotomy to hysterectomy, depending of the nature of the offending organ . 1 Such selective appraisal obviously does as much injustice to geo- graphical America as it does to Williams; but then the Sixties’ pop- culture sensibility has found Williams strangely out of vogue 2 and has much too easily oversimplified him: The subject matter of Summer and Smoke is a little anec- dote about two people, a preacher’s daughter who represents spirit and a doctor’s son who represents flesh . Each influences 1 Magid, op., cit ., p . 34 . 2 Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams,” McCall’s, XCIV (October, 1966), p . 107 . Wil- liams “is the best playwright the United States has ever produced . And though from time to time the fashion goes against him, he is still there, at work, making a world like no other; and we are all fortunate to have lived in his time .” ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >