< Previous40John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. the other and so they wind up exchanging roles: she becomes a loose woman and he becomes a dedicated selfless man . . . . Sometimes Tennessee Williams seems to think with the mind of Stanley Kowalski . 3 There is the currently free-floating attitude toward Williams’ place in American literature that might be rectified a bit by establish- ing what is American place in Tennessee Williams . Because every art- ist, to communicate, must tangibly present the intangible universals of his mind, he is bound to use particulars . Nothing establishes the universal dimension better than a well crafted inventory of selected detail . In the evolution of thought, however, as ism has replaced ism, the peculiar turn for the modern mind has been to an all-inclusive esthetic . For the modern mind the esthetic has become the ethic, the metaphysic, the phiosophic, the geographic . Williams is no purist saint of this esthetic, but he is no more functionary either; he has, through a basic theory of place, matched the matter of the modern era to its most complementary esthetic form . This means, in short, that Williams deals with the American dream of cities (that is, perfect community) in an art form that is a peculiarly urban phenomenon, the drama . It is significant that Wil- liams, reared in the rural South, began as a poet, dealing as most poets do with the personal feelings of the isolato; it is significant that his first dramatic success dealt with the widening autobiographical experience of his family’s migration to urban St . Louis . And it is, per- haps, even more significant that when in 1964 New Directions col- lected all the Williams poetry to that date, the poet—better known as dramatist—insisted on naming the collection of personalia under the more social title, In the Winter of Cities . Williams writes in the city for the city; he explores its possibili- ties, its implications . Yet by a strange inversion of subject, a treatment of theme by indirection, he takes as his setting more often than not the country or some countrified place in the city . Western culture has long observed the rural pagani, the heathens form the heath, the rustici who are the villani; and it has observed them with all the 3 Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (New York: Grosset and Dunlap’s Bantam, 1966), p . 126 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction41 wariness that the latter term has come to demand . The rural mind has usually been more resistant to change than the urban . Histori- cally it was the pagani (with all the alienation their name has come to imply to a basically Christian society) who resisted the greatest change in Western culture: the shift from the Old Testament legalist ethic of fear to the New Testament ethic of love . Christianity was, in fact, firstly and since characteristically, an urban phenomenon . Christ and the Apostles, especially the Apostle Paul, traveled from city to city, only passing through the desert rural place . Conse- quently, Christianity’s urbanity established an archetype in the City of God . The pagan areas became subtle equated with the ruined Eden’s wasteland where heathens lived in isolation; these outposts of alienation, deserts and jungle, threatened by their very existence the establishment of the archetypal City . And for Christianity, as well as for Williams, the basic city is simply two people in the communica- tion of love . This if fundamental society . Williams intimates that if the lost Eden is ever to be recovered, it will be a well-manicured urban-garden recovery where people have broken the bondage of their isolation . Williams’ very inversion of thematic treatment here parallels his basic esthetic inversion of romanticism into neo-romanticism . This basic negation is part and parcel of the modern esthetic which has been so heavily influenced by existentialism and functional absurdity . Just as being has become more important for having encountered non-being, so does Williams define urban life—which is an absurdist’s enlargement of two people communicating—by delineating outside the cities the paralysis of his Gothic landscape . An appropriate parallel to this peculiar kind of modern inversion is this: just as Southern Negroes do not move to Chicago but to Chicago’s South Side (thus joining, while missing, the most important urbanization process of this century), so also Williams’ people do not move to St . Louis or New Orleans or Nice . They move to claustrophobic back alleys and to unmanicured gar- den districts and to cliffside lairs far from the urbanity of the Cote D’Azur . Williams is saying that if the pagani live in an isolation that opposes change, then the wasteland is still a threat to the Garden City; for now the rural threat may enter the city gates . Blanche, for instance, ruined in the country, arrives in New ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK42John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Orleans in a faintly hysterical humor . “Her appearance is incongru- ous to . . .[the] setting .” Looking repeatedly at a slip of paper, she is asked by Eunice if she is lost . Blanche then reads to her the directions on the sheet of paper: “They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!” 4 Williams here, in specifying his particular urban place into a universal, owes at least a coincidental debt to Thornton Wilder’s urbanely titled play Our Town in which the post office is given certain directions to a specific address: . . .on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; the Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; . . .United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God . 5 Despite all their talk of Blue Mountain and Glorious Hill, Missis- sippi, near Moon Lake and its Casino, the Williams people live on a map the same as Wilder’s . Williams does attempt geographical changes that do not, how- ever, affect the universal climate . At least ten of his play and short stories are set specifically in the epitome of the South, New Orleans, its French Quarter, its Vieux Carre, its Garden District . 6 Adjustment occurs in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and Glass Menagerie, of course, in St . Louis . More often than not, however, the locales are “small towns in the deep South,” sometimes specified as Blue Moun- tain or Glorious Hill . Sometimes, as in Baby Doll, only the county is specified and called Two Rivers, which incidentally is the name of the Enterprise into which Williams has incorporated himself . His geography widens to include the Gulf Coast in both Sweet Bird and Rose Tattoo; and then without really leaving the American South, various works show American transplants on foreign soil: Iguana in Mexico’s Puerto Barrio, Milk Train on Italy’s Divina Costiera . 4 Streetcar, p . 11 . 5 Thornton Wilder, Our Town in Gassner, op. cit., p . 936 . 6 Streetcar, Suddenly Last Summer, “One Arm,” “Angel in the Alcove,” “The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly,” The Lady of Larkspur Lotion,” “Auto-Da-Fe,” “Lord Byron’s Lover Letter,” “Something Unspoken,” and “The Mutilated .” ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction43 Yet neither place is any more foreign that Cat’s Mississippi’s Delta Plantation; and while he sometimes uses New Mexico, Manhattan, and Santa Monica, as well as undesignated industrial towns of the Midwest, 7 the only time he truly leaves America behind is in the highly derivative You Touched Me, which was also a collaboration . In short, with Williams, geography is at first quintessentially American with a climate that is metaphorically southern, even at times to absurdity . Polly in The Gnädiges Fraulein distills it all: What is my position? Why I’m the Southernmost gossip col- umnist and society editor of the Southernmost news organ in the Disunited Mistakes . . . .Everything’s Southernmost here, I mean like this morning I did the Southernmost write- up on the Southernmost gang-bang and called it Multiple Nuptials which is the Southernmost gilding or the South- ernmost lily . . . .Yais, everything’s Southernmost here, like Southern fried chicken is Southernmost fried chicken . But who’s got a chicken? None of us Southernmost white Anglo- Saxon Protestants are living on fish and fish only because of thyroid deficiency in our Southernmost systems, we live on fish because regardless of faith or lack of it, everyday is Fri- day, gastronomically speaking, because of the readjustment of the economy which is Southernmost too . 8 On the wider level, Williams drains every place in the human con- dition of any specific import in Camino Real, where everyplace is just this side of the inevitable wasteland of the Terra Incognita, the ultimate non-place . And in the countdown to non-place, towns for Williams are cities that failed; they document the increasing disin- tegration of the basic urbanity of two people in communication . The Knightly Quest’s town of Gewinner (based superficially, but darkly, on the space transformation of Cape Kennedy nee Canaveral) is any small American city gone berserk under an impersonal, institution- ally inspired, government program that forbids communication on 7 Taos, New Mexico: “The Purification”; Manhattan: “Talk to Me Like the Rain”; Santa Monica: “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch”; the Midwest: “The Maledic- tion,” “The Long Goodbye .” 8 The Slapstick Tragedy, p . 102 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK44John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. any but the most inane and/or professional level . In the town of Gewinner the Red Devil Battery Plant has been converted into The Project, and “The Project was engaged all day and all night in the development of some marvelously mysterious weapon of annihilation .” And along with the new religiousness” for the Methodist Church’s swimming pool . “All the world population of friendly Caucasians” would pitch in and keep the “fuck-offs like the sissy Pearce brother” straight on “tolerance and individual right” about which “You got to draw a line somewhere .”9 This, like Serafi- na’s South is not only the American South; it is the European South; it is by implication the South of the Human Condition, proving that any place can be a place of auto-da-fe . Williams knows through personal and cultural experience that the Old Testament Garden Place is lost and that a wasteland brought in from the Old Testament and not well mixed with a New Testa- ment sensibility presents certain tensions: in the only Garden Christ entered he sweat blood and upon a Calvary wasteland, created in some Old Testament necessity, he died . Thus in Western thought has the death of the Son of God reinforced the basic Calvinistic sense of existential horror . The truly remarkable feat of Calvinist psychology is that those subject to it never know where they stand; they are kept so in a tension between damnation and election that they can only make a trustful act of faith . In a complementary ten- sion, Williams keeps his people at a level of marginal urbanity . They remember—like Catharine Holly and the Episcopalian minister of “One Arm”—the terrifying jungles, and in their marginal urban gardens that manicuring has not erased the suggestion of the arche- typal terror . The set directions for Suddenly Last Summer are typical of this radical nightmare: the place is a Victorian mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans . The interior is blended with a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle . . .in the prehistoric age of giant fern- forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scale to skin . The colors of this jungle-garden are violent, 9 The Knightly Quest, pp . 8-9, 42 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction45 especially since it is streaming with heat after rain . There are massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings and thrashing sounds in the garden as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of a savage nature . . . . 10 This is such stuff as bad dreams are made on and a place such as this has its greatest reality (greatest because it is highly suggestive metaphorically) in the underside of the human psyche . Urbaniza- tion was supposed to have tamed and jungle and chopped down the wilderness, just as Big Daddy, like some Old Testament Patriarch, under Straw and Ochello, had clipped his Delta Plantation out of the heathen rain forest . But Brick, wondering for Williams, questions whether the domestication has gone far enough or too far, in fact . With his Calvinistic penchant for naming things, Williams names the dark rural geography of isolation, the Dragon Coun- try . Where once the romantic earth-mother rose dreamily out of the Gardened Land, in neo-romantic inversion she has become the emasculating bitch-goddess . The female is the dragon, based on myth based on some prehistoric reality, who obstructs the way to the city of God, the city of love-communication . But she is not solely responsible for mankind’s incomplete evolution from paganus to urbanus; for the cities are not the ultimate goal of the human animal . The cities in Williams tend to coalesce in his Ur-city, the last station of the Camino Real . Here against the Terra Incognita he distills the one city that looks like all the cities . He focusses on the plaza in “a tropical seaport that bears a confusing, but somehow harmonious, resemblance to such widely scattered ports as Tangi- ers, Havana, Vera Cruz, Casablanca, Shanghai, New Orleans .” 11 It is significant that Williams’ quintessential city of cities, is like its sources, a port city . For all of Williams’ people are the fugitive kind, driven from some rural garden; they are all transient, like Christ, the archetypal love-wanderer of the Western world; they are unhappy in their displacement, in their dispossession (Val Xavier’s word) and 10 Suddenly Last Summer, p . 13 . 11 Camino Real, p . 169 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK46John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. they are unhappy in any static settlement: they feel trapped, claus- trophobic, until like Gewinner Pearce they—in some less absurdist, or perhaps more absurd fashion—blow up their particular Project and take off in a space ship . All of the Williams people have fallen in love with long dis- tance, at least metaphorically, for none of them is content where he is . Place in Williams is, rather, most often the Calvinistic concept of the Pilgrim road: this is both basic cartography and basic metaphor . He achieves thereby the ultimate esthetic freedom, for he has cre- ated the non-place that is every place: parsonages (place of spiritual journeys), movie theaters (places of narcotizing escape), hotels and rooming houses (way stations of literal travelers) . His wanderers coalesce in Kilroy and Val Xavier . While the for- mer is a kind of Everyman, Val Xavier (savior) is a well identified Christ-figure who as wanderer is externally a rough customer but internally is a sensitive esthete about to finish his first book . In him Tennessee Williams characterizes the same hopelessness, the same dispossession of the creative mind in this country that Emerson had chronicled in The American Scholar in 1937 . Yet the esthete is a Williams’ subtlety that his rough customers most often mask . As much as Broadway audiences love Williams’ musky glorification of young men’s muscles which can chop down the literal wilderness to make the city or the woman, and as much as Williams himself (who confesses much of what he writes he writes as personal exorcism and therapy) admires the fighting Oliver Winemillers, the Diony- sian John Buchanans, the sweaty Stanley Kowalskis, he is on quite another level more concerned with esthetic muscles . For he sees in esthetics the ultimate axe to destroy the wilderness, the ultimate way to hack the alienated jungle into a manicured mode of communica- tion whose blossom, love, surpasses every locateable garden . Eden’s Garden is the archetypal happy home of mankind . Driven out and made fugitive, its occupants were cursed to wander in pain and toil, their security of home dissolved into a vast alien- ation . The things they had named no longer responded to the names they had been given . It is precisely this problem of place, this concept of home that troubles the Williams people . For them there is no shelter . Amanda tries desperately to establish a home for Laura; she ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction47 knows that a home is the security of love and she knows how fragile love can be . She can almost define home in Sissy Goforth’s terms as a place where someone will “mean God to you .” Chance returns to his birthplace of St . Cloud to find his home dissolved around him; the Princess he has in tow (significantly named Kosmonopolis, Beautiful City) confesses to her own flight, her own “interminable retreat from the city of flames” into the “endless, withering country in which” she “wandered like a lost nomad .” 12 Baby Doll, Williams’ Chaucerian bard, is the most infantile of his adults; she defines her security within a crib . Vacarro with his pathetic phallus, the whip of the quasi-primitive, joins her there to enter the world, both of them thumb in mouth, to set up their own little society-of-sorts, their own little city, which ends with the two of them up a literal tree whose shadow from Eden indicates what route their cuckolding little society has traveled . In his essential play, Camino Real, Williams matures all the places of all his wanderers . All the transients in Iguana’s Costa Verde Hotel, all the refugees of the Fräulein’s Southern-most rooming house, the traveling Venables, Tom Wingfield and Christopher Flanders, all must agree with Camino’s displaced Marguerite; she recognizes that it is the basic evanescence of the human condition that makes any perch . . .we hold . . .unstable! We’re threatened with eviction, for this is a port of entry and departure, there are no permanent guests! And where else have we to go when we leave here? Bide-a-While? “Ritz Men Only”? . . .We stretch out hands to each other in the dark that we can’t escape from—we huddle together for some dim—communal comfort—and that’s what passes for love on this terminal stretch of the road that used to be royal . 13 From all the town and semi-cities that did not dispel the primitive dark there is only one possible place of refuge . Williams makes it the sanctuary of the mood; but even at its best the moon provides only an ambivalent security of place, perhaps because it was after the 12 Sweet Bird of Youth, p . 362 . 13 Camino Real, pp . 264-265 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK48John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. setting of the moon (the traditional love symbol), at dawn, that the Adam and Eve of the myth were driven from the archetypal security of Eden . Williams’ plays are so littered with moon references that after a while the proliferation becomes trite . This does not, however, devaluate the basic function of the moon as symbolic place in Wil- liams’ existential geography . The moon is a place of light, not the harsh bone white light of the sun, but a softer absence of darkness, a more moderate light that blurs the harshness of even Williams’ Gothic landscape . Williams sees the moon as the traditional female symbol (it is the moon, for instance, that restores the virginity of the Gypsy’s daughter in Camino Real) hence more a symbol of the home left behind; for it is the mascu- line part of man that is the wanderer . This has wider consequences, particularly at Moon Lake—which is more than liquid moonlight poured over a Casino’s garden . At first, for those who experience it, Moon Lake is the elemental garden, a place of love, of real joy, of real security, a place where water and soft darkness coalesce into a warm memory of every person’s proto-time . Moon Lake is a female womb of waters which all men regret having left, regretting most of all the violence with which they were expelled into cold wasteland of Dragon Country . The illustration is this: Blanche had been quite in love with her young husband until at Moon Lake she accused him of his homosexuality and he killed himself at the water’s edge . Then, for her, there was no longer the liquid soft dark, for his death flashed across her reality a searchlight so blinding that around her “never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle .” 14 It was then that Blanche began her wanderings, her “dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching .” 15 Myra, fulfilled because she has conceived, dies violently, raving of Moon Lake where she a long time before had experienced love then been jilted by a boy named David Cutrere . In short, Moon Lake is a place where reality is tested and illusions destroyed . If Williams gives the likes of Blanche and Myra any prescrip- tion it is to find oneself a place in society, a homeplace where 14 Streetcar, p . 110 . 15 Ibid ., p . 81 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction49 “sometimes—there’s God—so quickly .” 16 The moon itself works only in a bittersweet way: it restores the virginity of the Gypsy’s daughter only to the end that—in the values of Williams’ economy—there is sure to be pain as well as joy in any physical encounter . Just so had all the joys Williams’ women experienced at the Lake turned to sorrow . The Princess Kosmonopolis, her youth and fertility gone, talks of her retirement: RETIRED! Where to? To What? To that dead planet the moon . . . .There’s nowhere else to retire to . . . .So I retired to the moon, but the atmosphere of the moon doesn’t have any oxygen in it . I began to feel breathless, in that withered, withering country . . . . 17 As the princess senses the failure of the moon as place of refuge, so does Carol Cutrere in Orpheus Descending note the failure of the rural area (“This country used to be wild, the men and women were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts . . ., but now it’s sick and neon . . .” 18 ), just as Val in the same play articulates the failures of the cities (“I went to New Orleans . . . .It didn’t take long for me to learn the score . . . .I learned that I had something to sell besides snake-skins . . . .I was corrupted .” 19 ) It is no wonder that all of Williams’ Kilroys yearn to catch the next flight of the Fugitivo, the plane that will fly them to a new place . But in truly neo-romantic disillusion, Williams counsels that flight and wandering do no good: Val: Myra, you know the earth turns . Myra: Yes . Val: It’s turning that way . East . And if a man turned west, no matter how fast, he’d still be going the other way, really, because the earth turns so must faster . It’s no use 16 Ibid ., p . 110 . 17 Sweet Bird, p . 361 . 18 Orpheus Descending, p . 103 . 19 Ibid ., p . 49 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >