< Previous60John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. prefer the past or who do not adjust to the demands of evanescence, real life is disastrous . The stone statue of Eternity (Williams’ sym- bol of the art object that freezes evanescence for inspection) is the constant reminder that time is the gauge of everyman’s existential reality; and illusion that man’s existential is not threatened with impermanence leads simply to a paranoiac denial not only of love that could transcend at least psychically and emotionally the evanes- cence, but also of death, the one undeniable reality that proves the very insatiable existence of the voracious evanescence . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKCHAPTER III WILLIAMS’ ART THEME OF POESIS, POET, AND POEM: SOME UNITS OF HIS IMAGERY “Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to oth- ers feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them” It can, in short, serve as the most active and effective communicator among men . 1 This statement of Tolstoy, a common assumption of art criticism since ancient Greece, is penetratingly true of the Williams esthetic whose purpose of aft and of existence is to find the signals which will end the impersonal isolation of individual from individual . Williams agrees with Tolstoy that . . .a real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art . In this freezing of . . .personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art . 2 It is to this end of community that Williams has directed his poesis, his ordering and manipulating of reality by symbol; his view of the poet’s qualifications and duties; and his theory of poema, the techni- cal composition of the poem itself . As W . J . Bates maintains, the organic philosophy in art is usually 1 W . J . Bates, Criticism: The Major Texts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952), p . 514 . 2 Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? in Bates, op. cit., p . 516 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK62John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. characterized by some kind of transcendentalism which can be either an incomprehensible reality beyond experience or, as is the case of Williams’ organic poesis, simply the human mind working in a way which “transcends” the artist’s personal experience by impos- ing on his moment of personal lyricism a certain order which makes his experience communicable to others . 3 Thus the artist necessarily “transcends” the disconnections of a literal view of life; he manipu- lates instead the communally suggestive and evocative symbols of metaphor . Aristotle complements that “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor . . .; it is the mark of genius—for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances .” 4 Williams’ own esthetic demands that the literal “facing [of] a person is not the best way to see him!” 5 It is precisely this victory of the metaphorical that creates the communicating artist out of the isolated individual . Literal poesis is as impossible as it would be unintelligible, for each individual’s differentiated existential precludes any one-to-one correlation . It is necessary, therefore, that the communicating artist’s ordering of his personal reality be done on a ratio of one-to-two; his must be a poesis of metaphor, for the point of community between artist and receiver must be a point that is not only within both but also with-out both . Williams finds this place of urbane poesis- communication to be the stage . In his case, however, the poesis of the modern drama has become “interpenetrated with poetry . And as a result of [his] imaginative techniques, a poetry of the [mod- ern] theatre . . .[has come] into being .” 6 Tennessee Williams is, if not completely distinguished as a dramatic maker, at least highly dis- tinguishable as a poet of the drama; for in his ordering of reality he often superadds a lyric component which recalls that “the drama . . .is a concentrated form and a highly selective art . . .aspiring inherently to the state of poetry .” 7 The shade of difference is immediately appar- ent in the comparison of Williams’ plays with their earlier blocking 3 Bates, op. cit., p . 276 . 4 Aristotle, Poetics in Bates, op. cit., p . 34 . 5 Three Plays, p . 4 . 6 Gassner, A Treasury of the Theatre, p . xii . 7 Ibid ., p . xiv . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction63 versions as short stories . Whether it be “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” into The Glass Menagerie, “Three Players of a Summer Game” into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “Man Bring This Up Road” into Milk Train, or most recently “Kingdom of Earth” into Kingdom of Earth, the metamorphosis of Williams’ almost execrable prose into a poetry of dialogue and drama is nothing short of proof that his poetry is no mere decoration but is esthetic essence of his poesis . Williams has, for instance, transcended his literalist’s obfuscating attachment to the closely autobiographical characters of Menagerie; he has achieved the metaphoric poesis which detaches him enough to locate them beyond his own experience in an ordered time, place, and necessity . 8 In addition, he is able to integrate into modern the- atre more than this minimally classical poesis . He gives the theatre poema; for as he is subjective writer and realist, he is also dramatist and poet . This he does at no small expense to himself; for personally to be born as an artist he had to survive the tension between the ethic and his America’s Calvinist background and the esthetic of his heart’s desire . For the Calvinist, God’s beauty had been enough; for the esthetic mind, however, God is no sufficiency . The esthetic in one way or another subsumes every theology, for there is no altar that cannot use some polishing . As a result of surviving the liberating battle—though his war between the ethic and the esthetic drags sporadically on, Williams has established a theory of art which he pursues in his prefaces, articles, and interviews . This prose explanation of the relationship of his art to life is, when analytical, most often less perceptive than his more intuitive theory made through indirection by his plays’ characters, many of whom are themselves artists . Their remarks not only distill Williams’ esthetics, but give evidence in his work of a constant and basic art theme . The Williams of the prefaces, articles, and interviews sees art as something wild: . . .art is a kind of anarchy, and the theatre is a province of art . . . .Art is . . .anarchy in juxtaposition with organized society . It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized 8 Ibid., p . 1033 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK64John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. society apparently must be based . It is a benevolent anarchy: it must be that and if it is true art, it is . It is benevolent in the sense of constructing something which is missing, and what it constructs may be merely criticism of things as they exist .9 He uses the metaphor of the oyster and the pearl to show the social service of art, likening creative work to the grain of sand which must irritate society within society’s shell . 10 or cage, as he called it in Camino’s Foreword; for “the nervous system of any age is its creative workers, its artist .” 11 He reinforces the disturbing place of poesis in society in his Preface to Orpheus when he describes Val Xavier, the artist of that play, as “a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a con- ventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop .” This fox image is used often to delineate the sensitive soul who disturbs an otherwise insensitive environment . This is even so in the highly derivative You Touched Me in which the charity boy Hadrian is constantly associated with the fox . 12 This irritating vocation of art Williams further elaborates in Cat’s Preface, “Person-to-Person”: the poesis, he says, must attract more than observers . It must attract “participants in the performance .” 13 To insure this the artist must elaborate upon the abstract, but real, problems of life by presenting the particulars of time, place and necessity; “for the particular is sometimes as much as we know of the abstract .” 14 The ordered poesis of art, in his case, writing, Williams sees “as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action .” 9 “Something wild . . .,” 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays (New York: New Directions, 1953), pp . vii, viii . 10 Ibid ., p . xii . 11 “Tennessee Williams’ POV,” loc. cit. 12 Jacob Adler’s “Rose and the Fox: Notes on the Southern Drama,” already cited, deals with both Williams’ and Hellman’s basic allegories of human existence . The symbolic motifs of Roman Spring have been discussed by A . Gerard, “Eagle and the Star,” English Studies, XXXVI (1955), 145-153 . The imagistic heritage of Williams has been examined by J . R . Hurt, “Suddenly Last Summer: Williams and Melville,” Modern Drama, III (1961), pp . 396-400 . 13 Cat, p . vii . 14 “Something wild . . .,” op, cit., p . xii . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction65 Part of the organicism which Williams obviously claims for himself is the transcendence by the art object of space and time . Art makes personal evanescence meaningless . It gives the viewer of the object of a frozen moment in which to reflect upon his own rush- ing, evanescent existence . Art, Williams contends, can supply “the crying, almost screaming, need of a great world-wide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better .” 15 Exposing the corruption of self-ignorance is, therefore, in Williams’ mind the function of his art; for corruption, he admits, he has “involuntarily chosen as the basic allegorical theme of . . .[his] plays as a whole .” 16 Thus Williams, reading the problems of the world in a way per- sonally reflective of his own personal existential, sees his art as a Tolstoian service occupation . His personal creed of organic art explains much about Williams, particularly why his prose and poems generally fall so far short of his poetry of the theatre . His heart is only in the latter; for in the former, as in the reading version of a play, he feels that only the words on paper exist . While such posture is true for few but Williams, it is for him true enough to allow him to say of his particular art: In my dissident opinion, a play in a book is only the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it . . . .The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel’s . 17 The implications of this, raised out of Shaw, are fairly precise: My own creed as a playwright is fairly close to that expressed by the painter in Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velasques and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things 15 Williams in Tischler, op. cit ., p . 300 . 16 Ibid ., p . 300 . 17 “Afterword to Camino Real” in Three Plays, p . 163 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK66John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. by beauty everlasting and the message of art that has made these hands blessed . Amen .” How much art his hands were blessed with or how much mine are, I don’t know, but that art [poesis] is a blessing is certain and that it contains its message is also certain, and I feel, as the painter did, that the message lies in those abstract beauties of form and color and line, to which I would add light and motion . 18 Thus for dramatist Williams the poesis is an ordering of reality that is more real than the realists’ . I his Preface to Glass Menagerie he wrote that: . . .unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth . When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not . . .trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpret- ing experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expres- sion of things as they are . . . .Truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance . 19 Thus does Williams lay claim to be a metaphorical; for art for him is a matter of mind expansion, a freeing from the literal’s sim- plistic confusion . He envisions “a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted [presentational or literal] theatre of realistic conventions .” 20 And since metaphorical transformation begins within the personal, . . .the playwright is concerned with the objectification of subjective vision, with its transformation into concrete 18 Ibid ., pp . 163-164 . 19 Gassner, A Treasury, pp . 1033-1034 . 20 Ibid., p . 1034 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction67 symbols . . . .Like the objective expressionists, the playwright regards art as one of the great life forms, as an instrument of reconciliation no less important than religion, philosophy, politics, or human love . 21 The esthetic, in fact, becomes more important than the latter values simply because Williams makes it so by emphasizing throughout his works the salvific action of the art theme . The poet for Williams is guru, the one who organizes poesis into a lyric poema sympathetic to the human condition . In Cat’s Preface, “Person-to-Person,” he said: “Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life .” This “personal lyricism” to be meaningful, that is, truly communicative, must rise “above the singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import .” 22 This implies that the vision of the poet-guru is a giving, self-consuming act of sacrifice . In Night of the Iguana, Nonno receives the ultimate moment of poetic vision and in com- municating his moment of personal lyricism dies with his completed art object on his lips; but personally (literally) dead or not Nonno has reached out beyond his existential confinement through his art which communicates to the frightened Hannah the consoling word of courage . and courage is the right word for a poet who in the tension of maintaining the salvific esthetic versus the literalists’ eschatol- ogy must pay the violent price of the sensitive person in a generally insensitive society . To chronicle such alienation the poet must find suitable meta- phor . In Williams’ case the metaphors aptly specify the hostilities between the creative individual and the urban corporate personality: in short, it is constantly art versus business, the creator versus the merchant . And Williams obviously sees the angels’ side as the poets’; for while he sees an animality in everyone, there are animals and there are animals . In his poem of soul-body tension entitled “The Comforter and the Betrayer,” the animal in man is not only the betrayer of the whole personality into blackness, it is also the only comfort that uncourageous man has in facing “each day’s / bland 21 Jackson, op. cit., p . 28 . 22 Cat, pp . vii, viii . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK68John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. reassurance of a simple existence .” 23 Williams once again opts for neither extreme . Consequently his animals are divisible: the sensitive people are associated with sweet birds, the never-landing rondini of Roman Spring and Orpheus; they are associated with glass animals which do not defecate, or with elusive gadfly foxes which draw their society along by their Lawrentian bootstraps—as in the poem Cried the Fox .” The destroyers, merchants like Jabe Torrance, Big Daddy, Boss Finley, and salesman Kowalski, are associated with a baser animal imagery of apes, bulls, and ravaging lions . This leads directly to the constant Williams fare of eating imagery whose coalescence into a major unit of imagery proves that although the nature of God may be an open question, Mammon is most definitely a beast of a monster . The result of these opposing forces coming into dentine tension is Williams’ Hospital Imagery of Violence . The sensitive confront the mercantile with clinical results: Laura vomits at the Rubicam Business College; Blanche is raped by her apish salesman brother- in-law; Alma is rejected by a playboy doctor and prostitutes her- self with traveling salesmen; Myra, Lady, Val Xavier, and the Wop from Mood Lake are shot or burned to death by a drygoods owner; Chance and Heavenly are both castrated by a two-bit political boss; Catharine Holly is to be lobotomized, and Kilroy’s corpse goes to an impersonal laboratory . Williams chronicles that by violence the Edenic garden was remodeled to be only a low-rent dormitory for cripples . 24 He feels that the chance gained for America’s Eden, was lost in fact, in a Faustian business deal with some mercantile devil . 25 If he had been outraged at the dichotomies of Puritan Calvinism, he is even more angry at that Calvinism’s righteous evolution to a Yankee mercantilism which slights the graver questions of the self . His confusedly sensitive Brick sums up the hatred of materialistic mores under the epithet of mendacity. In Williams’ economy of art in life, therefore, these questions 23 In the Winter of Cities (New York: New Directions, 1964), p . 44 . 24 Gnädiges Fräulein p . 130 . 25 Leslie A . Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), p . 27 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction69 which can be pursued only with courage, are the province of the poet . Consequently Williams’ intuitive and scattered definitions of a poet can be collected to clarifying advantage . In general, if the poet’s duty is to retrieve from the eschatological wreckage of Eden some creative incarnational glimmer, it is significant that Williams’ most dramatic portrait of a poet (Suddenly’s Sebastian who has not visible life on stage) lives in “a well-groomed jungle . . . .[where] noth- ing was accidental, everything was planned .” 26 Sebastian, within the corporate city buys retrieval of a garden part of Eden; his mother, not really comprehending the truth she speaks, says: His life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet and—vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet, I mean you can’t separate the, I mean—well, for instance, a salesman’s work is one thing and his life is another . . . .The same thing’s true of —doctor, lawyer, merchant, thief!—But a poet’s life is his work and his work is his life in a special sense . . . .Poets are always clairvoyant! 27 By clairvoyant Mrs . Venable and Mr . Williams mean the same thing: the poet is a man who achieves the vision-expansion of metaphor . In addition, or perhaps because of this, “all poets look for God, all good poets do, and they have to look harder for Him than priests do since they don’t have the help of such famous guide-books and well-orga- nized expeditions as priests have with their scriptures and churches: which are all too often institutions of business that obfuscate the human, personal element under their own brand of mendacity . Mrs . Venable:All right! Well now I’ve said it, my son was looking for God . I mean for a clear image of Him . 28 This for Williams is the poet’s knightly quest: to find the ultimate image, the metaphor of the divine which can save the sensitive who have been wounded in the jungle-hospital of the mendacious world . But the poet, too often weakened by the cultural crippling done 26 Suddenly, p . 15 . 27 Ibid ., pp . 16-17 . 28 Ibid ., p . 21 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >