< Previous50John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. to struggle, to try to move against it . You go the way the earth pulls you whether you want to or not . 20 Thus heartily is Williams’ metaphysical determinism intimately rooted in his sense of place . The earth is a place as inescapable as the archetypal ruined garden and the expelling womb . These are places a man comes from; he cannot return to them . The wise realize the human condition of being trapped in claustrophobic space and they repeat stoically with Quixote the message of Camino Real: “Don’t! Pity! Your! Self!” 21 It is only the foolish who do not understand there is not going back to the Moon, the Lake, the Garden, or the womb . Amanda, in a sense, participates in both this foolishness and this wisdom: Go then!” she curses Tom at her play’s end, “Then go to the moon—you selfish dreamer .” 22 Tom, the cities sweeping by him like dead leaves, has only one answer! “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places .” This statement truly focusses the basic relativities of the human condition; for man’s problems while very often perceived as spatial are wider . Matters of space are subject like man himself to a more generic, more inevitable evanescence, time . “He who runs against time, “Samuel Johnson wrote, “runs against an enemy who suffers no casualties .” Once, therefore, that Williams’ esthetic of place is established, it becomes like everything else a chronometrable sub- ject; it is, in short, not only very often impossible to return to Moon Lake, in Williams’ economy, it is always chronometrically too late to return . The world then is an existentially condemned property and it is evanescence that has condemned it . Place, up to a point, is commandable; time is not, except in art, where particularly for the romantic the esthetic can freeze for better examination the change that is generally accepted as a good . Orpheus Descending illustrates Williams’ poetic use of place, the stage set, to suggest the problem of evanescence: 20 Battle of Angels, p . 172 . 21 Camino Real, p . 326 . 22 Glass Menagerie in Gassner, op . cit ., p . 1059 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction51 The hell into which Orpheus descends is a dreary dry- goods store in a small Southern Town . It is, of course, an image of the ordinary life, sterile and commercial, which offers us but “dry goods” at best; a life which is, in fact, a hell, populated by the shades of the doomed, presided over by a dying and vengeful proprietor from his sickroom upstairs . Yet partly seen through a wide arched door is a “shad- owy and poetic” confectionary hung with colored lanterns . Closed at present, it is being redecorated by the proprietor’s wife, in imitation of her father’s ruined wine garden [that had been at Moon Lake] . This is a typical Williams image of the poetry of life; contrived out of memories of the past, it is a kind of [restored] Eden, offering “sweets” not dry goods, color instead of drabness . 23 Naturally Myra, the wife, fails in her attempt to recover her Moon Lake Eden; but through her, Williams documents man’s attempt at remodeling and renaming place as a way to go back through evanes- cence to recover the Edenic time . In a very Keatsian attitude toward the art object, Williams wrote a much-reprinted essay entitled “The Timeless World of a Play .” 24 Needless to say, his attitude toward time in art differs from his char- acters’ attitudes toward evanescence in their own lives . Williams is probably more concerned with this latter problem which is theirs and his and everybody’s, but he nevertheless has ventured—somewhat embarrassingly for the reader—into a less intuitive examination of time in art . In a drama, Williams feels, it is “the arrest of time which has taken place in a complete work of art that gives to certain plays their feeling of depth and significance .” He discusses, not one of his own plays, but as case in point Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “Contem- plation is something that exists outside of time, and so is the tragic sense .” Therefore it is because of time, because time is money, that Howard Wagner looks at this wristwatch and tries to push Willie 23 Donald Justice, “The Unhappy Fate of the ‘Poetic,’” Poetry, XCIII (1959), p . 402 . 24 The quotations in the following three paragraphs are taken from Tennessee Wil- liams, “The Timeless World of a Play” in Three Plays, op. cit., pp . 3-8 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK52John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. without a hearing from his office . Williams contends that if wrist- watches did not exist, Willie would be granted an opportunity to receive compassion . It is precisely because the audience—who, one supposes, cut someone short in order to make it to the theater on time—has no wristwatch involved in Willie’s problem, that they are able to see Willie’s problem without the urgent complication of eva- nescence cutting their interview short . “Facing a person,” Williams contends, “is not the best way to see him!” He adds that “the diminishing influence of life’s destroyer, time, must be somehow worked into the context of [the] . . .play . . . .In a play, time is arrested in the sense of being confined .” Through a kind of static freezing that works as well on a play as on a Grecian urn, “events are made to remain events, rather than being reduced so quickly to mere occurrences” as happens in the disconnected moments of everyday evanescence . If the world of a play did not offer us this occasion to view its characters under that special condition of a world without time, then, indeed, the characters and occurrences of drama would become equally pointless, equally trivial, as corre- sponding meetings and happenings in life . This is his esthetic of art (if that is not redundant) and such an esthetic he finds equally helpful on a personal level of existence: The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power . . .to live . . .as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time . Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the greatest magic trick of human existence . As far as we know, as far as there exists any kind of empiric evidence, there is no way to beat the game of being against non-being, in which non-being is the predestined victor on realistic levels . It is interesting to American romantic thought that in this essay Williams uses examples of sculpture’s visual lines, painting, and photography, the while he emphasizes, even to the strength of ital- ics, the need for transcending time to see; for this use of the visual ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction53 as transcendent leap to freedom is characteristically Emersonian . In Nature Emerson asked men to go beyond the relativities of time and space . 25 to establish an existential freedom that would strip time of its illusion and enable men to look at the world with new eyes . 26 Williams’ use of the Emersonian visual is at best probably only coin- cidental (in the radical sense of that term) since both partake of the same general romantic sensibility . Their personal problems of expres- sion are, however, mutually inverse . Emerson wished to be a poet, but succeeded best as essayist; Williams succeeds in the wide poetry of drama far better than he does as analytical essayist . Emerson was more the integrated philosopher; Williams the more intuitive dramatist whose analyses of basic problems are more satisfactory in dramatic form than in either his prose essays or short fiction . Jacob Adler, for instance, feels that Williams (as well as Lillian Hellman) stands for falls as a dramatist rather than as a purveyor of folklore and cultural history after the manner of Paul Green . He cites, however, Summer and Smoke to show how Williams transcends a confinement of place and how he manipulates his esthetic of time to achieve, beyond either of these particularizations, “an allegory both of the South and of all mankind,” Adler declares that the boy and girl of Summer and Smoke could be from any small American town . The Fourth of July Celebration appears where a pure local colorist would have used a Southern Memorial Day; yet the play because it is about America and about mankind, is by sheer inclusion also about the American South . This story is unmistakably an allegory of body and soul . . . .The pastness of the play concerns it both as play and as allegory . . . . The pastness makes Alma [and her prudery] more [readily] believable . . . .To concentrate . . .on the allegory [Williams] . . . had to gain audience acceptance of Alma by a minimum of means . . . .Williams had to choose his past with care . Give an audience the antebellum South, or the Civil War South, or the Restoration South, and it will expect all the elaborate 25 R . W . Emerson in Selections from Ralph W. Emerson, Stephen Whicher, editor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p . 47 . 26 Ibid ., p . 55 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK54John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. apparatus, part real, part mythical, with which it has become familiar . But the South of the turn of the century? And, moreover, a middle-class South, neither aristocratic nor poor white nor Negro? A forgotten world, from which all need- less detail can be stripped away; an island, lost in space and time, which is what allegory seems to require 27 . . . .Williams’ allegory is an allegory both of the South and of all mankind . It is . . .not only timely . . .but timeless; and the timelessness . . .fits poorly with the actuality of the now . . . .Our Town achieves it through pastness plus fantasy; Williams achieves it through pastness plus allegory . The statue of Eternity may brood over the past, and by implication over the present; for to brood over the present would be less believable . Hence the use of the past helps Williams in various ways: it assists belief; it helps strip away the details useful to realism but detrimental to allegory; and it directly assists the allegory, both Southern and universal . 28 Extending out from an allegorical use of time in Summer and Smoke is Williams’ temporal allegory of existence . T . S . Eliot, for instance, found the wasteland redeemable by incarnational time (although he felt that mankind had not yet accepted its redemption, thus continuing the waste) . Williams, however, runs his clocks on eschatological time, on Old Testament time, the wrathful time of the wasteland . Such time if existence for Williams is primitive time, which surfaces out of the dark past into the modern consciousness . Camino’s Gypsy asks Kilroy: “Date of birth and place of that disas- ter?” She adds, “Baby, your luck ran out the day you were born .” 29 On telling Sebastian’s story, Catharine in Suddenly Last Summer says, “I think it started the day he was born . . . .I DIDN’T invent it . 27 “Sutpen’s Hundred is another such island, though in the rich texture of a novel it can be surrounded, in both space and time, by the familiar waters of reality . Everyman man also come to mind, and Pilgrim’s Progress, and Penguin Island .” Jacob Adler, “The Rose and the Fox” in Rubin and Durene’s South: Modern Literature in Its Cultural Setting (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p . 353 . 28 Ibid ., pp . 353-354 . 29 Camino Real, pp . 279, 283 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction55 I know it’s a hideous story but it’s a true story of our time and the world we live in .” 30 After experiencing the Lords of Life, Emerson, himself travers- ing the neo-romantic route, also became eschatological: Everyday is doomsday, he summarized . Williams’ eschatology is in his own way highly Calvinistic . Calvin preferred eternity to time, minimally recognizing that regeneration may only occur in time . Camino’s Byron calvinistically makes his grand exit shouting “Make Voyages! Attempt them!—there’s nothing else .” 31 Far less than Eliot does Wil- liams extend the incarnational redemption; Williams’ regeneration is limited like Calvin’s but in a different way: Williams sees, not Christ redeeming selected individuals, but individuals regenerated by an encounter with another human who can mean God to them . Sissy Goforth, for instance, is so busy “working against time” on her “timely” book of memoirs which is to “rank with and possibly even outrank the great Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past” that she misses her dying opportunity to have Christopher Flanders bring God to her . Thus she misses her incarnational regeneration and loses her bout to eschatological time, dying in her bedroom which, as she says, “is full of historical treasures, including myself!” 32 For Williams the bed is nearly always a bier . Nowhere is this more essentially demonstrated than in Sweet Bird of Youth whose entire first and third acts occur in a bedroom setting dominated by the outsized property of a great bed . If in Eliot time is philosophi- cally functional, in Williams time’s main function is as base for char- acter motivation by neurosis . This is particularly true of Williams’ bedroom athletes who see diminishing sexual returns as time’s sign of advancing age . The bed is the bier of their youth . Williams’ exposé of time is strong throughout his work, but is nowhere more summary than in the thematic minuet of Sweet Bird’s Chance Wayne and Alexandra del Lago . Chance’s “ravaged young face” is, at the play’s opening, immediately confronted by his hometown, which no longer wants him . Alexandra, meanwhile, rises from the huge bed of their travelers’ hotel room . She is dying for 30 Suddenly Last Summer, pp . 70, 47 . 31 Camino Real, p . 246 . 32 Milk Train, pp . 8, 89, 111, 109 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK56John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. oxygen and for the pills and vodka that make her forget . “Can you control your memory like that?” Chance asks . She answers, “I’ve had to learn to .” 33 They continue to dance, the feinting-then-aggressive movements of becoming acquainted . She asks him if he is young and what time it is; he answers, Chance: My watch is in hock somewhere . Why don’t you look at yours? Princess: Where’s mine? Chance: It’s stopped, at five past seven . Princess: Surely it’s later than that . . . .(355) And then she recalls “the goddam end of my life” that only drugs and liquor and sex can blot out . She begins one of the long speeches characteristic of this play, a not-young refrain, bewailing that her comeback (an attempt to regain the former time) had failed because “the legend of Alexandra del Lago couldn’t be separated from an appearance of your .”(361) She screams at the aging Change: “BEAUTY! Say it! What you had was beauty! I had it! I say it with pride, no matter how sad, being gone now .”(335) She throws his memory of what-once-was with his girl Heavenly back into his face, cynically asking if Heavenly was “Something permanent in a world of change?”(378) Chance becomes monstrous in return; he lowers accusingly at Alexandra’s cynicism: “I understand . Time does it . Hardens people . Time and the world that you’ve lived in .”(381) Then like supporting dancers after the principals’ vicious pas de deux the minor characters come into Williams’ focus which remains thematically based on evanescence . There is high irony in the Youth for Tom Finley Clubs, for Finley by his mistress’ admission is “too old to cut the mustard” and as his daughter Heavenly, whom he insists on dressing in virginal white points out: “Papa, there was a time when you could have saved me, by letting me marry a boy that was still young and clean . . . .” The abortion and hysterectomy her father forced her to have she claims “cut the youth out of my body, made me an old childless woman . Dry, cold, empty, like an old woman .”(396,399) Her cry is very unlike the beginning of her sexual 33 Sweet Bird, p . 352; in the following plot precis, pagination is included in the text . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction57 love with Chance when she was a fruitful fifteen and he was seven- teen and he cried in her arms for the “youth, that would go .”(407) Finley’s mistress, Lucy, confirms this prediction . She sends splinters under Chance’s fingernails in pointing out that he is balding and older . Chance counters that he is about to star in a film . Bud: What is the name of this picture? Chance: . . .Name of it? “Youth!” Bud: Just “Youth?” Chance: Isn’t that great title for a picture introducing young talent? (421) No one believes him and he becomes so busy in fighting the ravages of eschatological time, he misses his chance (an irony perhaps) at the incarnational; for Alexandra comes to him, after waiting forever, to tell him of the wonderful thing: she loves him and brings her love to him . She wants to redeem him, regenerate him, take him out of the time of his terror (368) because he is lost in the eschatological place, “lost in the beanstalk country, the ogre’s country at the top of the beanstalk the country of the flesh-hungry, blood-thirsty ogre .”(426) It is significant that she comes to him on Easter Sunday, the day the incarnational time is proven, the day when proof of regeneration is given . But Chance does not allow Alexandra to bring any New Testament love to him, does not allow her to mean God to him, does not allow the incarnational time to break through the terror of his eschatological dementia . As a result, he not only remains the monster Alexandra had named him, but he also returns her to the eschato- logical monster shape . Frustrated and scorned she screams at him: I came up alone, as always . I climbed back alone up the beanstalk to the ogre’s country where I live, now, alone . Chance, you’ve gone past something you couldn’t afford to go past; your time, your youth, you’ve passed it . It’s all you had, and you’ve had it .(447) She equates him with Franz Albertzart, the gigolo who was old before his time because he missed his chance for love . “You were crowned with laurel in the beginning,” she shay, “your gold hair ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK58John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered . Fact it—pitiful monster .”(448) Because he has failed to respond to her, because his rot from the wasteland would not respond, would not become regenerate and incarnate at her touch, she fails too . “Princess,” Chance admits, “the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of—level of—rot in them . And by that account I’m ancient .”(450) Since both fail to achieve that incarnational time of love, both remain doomed by the relentless eschatological clock . Chance is to be castrated by his townspeople; Alexandra is to be castrated by the menopause of time . Their beds thereby become places of meaningless encounter, unfertile biers of lost time . Chance can only turn to the audience, “rising and advanc- ing to the forestage,” as the castrators close in on him: “I don’t ask for your pity . . . .Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all .”(452) Time is the great eroder; it creates fading women and fading virility . For Williams the problem of evanescence is bound up in the duplicity of pastness; for the “past . . .is impossible to recapture but also inescapable .” 34 Amanda is Glass Menagerie has outlived the social time of her Southernmost Cherry Orchard . “In the South we had so many servants . Gone, gone, gone . All vestige of gracious liv- ing! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me .”35 More widely the erosion is of time versus the Life Force . Not only are all of Williams’ golden young seed-bearers struck down, but so also is a raging life force like Big Daddy . He stands foursquare against time’s erosion, but is nevertheless existentially entrapped by time; for time’s duplicity adds to mankind’s basic paranoia: the full- ness of time ages, but the lack of time is life’s extinction . Williams’ mankind lives like Baby Doll under the aegis of the Pay as You Go Furniture Company with all the terrible fear of Val Xavier’s ultimate dispossession even if the payments are made . The essence of evanescence, of change and time, is insecurity . If there wasn’t a thing called time, the passing of time in the 34 William Sharp, “An Unfashionable View of Tennessee Williams,” Tulane Drama Review (March 1962), p . 1961 . 35 Glass Menagerie in Gassner, op. cit ., p . 1051 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction59 world we live in, we might be able to count on things staying the same, but time lives in the world with us and has a big broom and is sweeping us out of the way, whether we fact it or not . . . .Such things happen to people, all people, ne excep- tions, the short time limit runs out, it runs out on them and leaves them high and dry .36 Amanda says to Tom: “You are the only young man I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the pres- ent the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret . . . .”37 This paranoiac unadjustment to evanescence is problem internal to his view of American society . His apologia, his encompassing esthetic, for this equation is that . . .the nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists . And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will ines- capably reflect the disturbance . . . .Deny the art of our time its only spring, which is the true expression of its passionately personal problems and their purification through work [how Puritan!], and you will be left with a soul of such aridity that not even a cactus plant could flower upon it .38 He assures a view of this equation under the perspective of esthetic objectivity; for in his theory of esthetics, “a convention of the play is existence outside of time in a place of no special locality .” This achievement of non-place and non-time allows the audience in a perspective of non-involvement on spatial and temporal levels to see the events and the characters disconnected from the evanescent rush of their normally perceived disparate moments of reality . Wil- liams, like Keats, thinks that art allows people to attain a view that transcends the clock which is in every room where people live . Thus not only do Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities take place before the fountain of Eternity, but so in a thematic sense do all of Williams’ plays; for his constant tragic motif is that for those who 36 I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, pp . 78-79 . 37 Glass Menagerie in Gassner, op. cit ., p . 1046 . 38 “Foreword to Camino Real” in Three Plays, p . 159 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >