< Previous70John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. his humanity by his society, is often distracted and diffracted the most; 29 for in society’s organized opposition to the individual, the poet because he is the individual par excellence is extremely vulner- able . Of Venable the poet, Williams says: “A poet’s vocation . . .rests on something as thin and fine as the web of a spider . . . .That’s all that holds him over!—out of destruction . . . .Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed!” 30 Drawing obliquely from the inexhaustible theatre of the bible and looting various mythologies, Williams fills out his picture of a poet and more than a poet—that is, a poet who has succeeded by giving of himself to others—in Milk Train’s Christopher Flanders . This poet breaks mercifully into the private property (a mercantile good) of Sissy Goforth; she ignores him as a human being while she contemplates the possibility of his bringing a lawsuit against her and her attacking dogs . The fact is that because Chris is a poet of life, a poet who no longer needs to write poetry, Sissy is confused . She misses what Williams fully intends as the complete vocation of the complete poet . After marrying three men for money and a poet for love, Sissy’s eye—principally because she succeeded financially (to the detriment of her basic artistic sense)—mistrusts writers who don’t write and painters who don’t paint . Blackie, Sissy’s secretary who has the name of a dog but is no dog, interrogates Chris about his mobiles and why he gives them away . “Some things,” he answers, “aren’t made to be sold .” 31 Some things, he means to say, are to be given; it is for this reason that he climbs Sissy’s mountain, remi- niscent of her “sister Karen Stone’s game of isolation, King of the Mountain . 32 It is for this reason he climbs the sensual goatpath as all Williams poet do; but unlike Sebastian he is not at all randy . His poetry, his message of the salvation which art in life contains, eludes her in her mercantile judgement of sex and money . 29 In his “POV” essay Williams wrote: “I am giving away no trade secrets when I point out how many artists, including writers, have sought refuge in psychiatry, alcohol, narcotics, way-in or way-out religious conversion, and so forth .” 30 Suddenly, p . 73 . 31 Milk Train, p . 25 . 32 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (New York: New Directions, 1950), p . 101 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction71 Mrs . Goforth: Mr . Flanders, you have the distinction, the dubious distinction, of being the first man that wouldn’t come into my bedroom when invited to enter . . . .Man bring this up road, huh? [She has snatched up his book of poems .] . . . .Your book of poems, your calling card? Y’must be running short of ‘em . Here take it back! . . . .I haven’t read it but I can imagine the contents . Facile sentiment! To be good a poem’s got to be tough and to write a good, tough poem you’ve got to cut your teeth on the marrow bone of this world . I think you’re still cutting your milk- teeth, Mr . Flanders . Chris: I know you better than you know me . . . .You’re nobody’s fool, but you’re a fool, Mr . Goforth, if you don’t know that finally, sooner or later, you need somebody or something to mean God to you, even if it’s a cow on the streets of Bombay, or carved rock on the Easter Islands, or— Mrs . Goforth: You came here to bring me God, did you? Chris: I didn’t say God, I said someone or something to— Mrs Goforth: I heard what you said, you said God . My eyes are out of focus by not my ears! Well, bring Him, I’m ready to lay out a red carpet for Him, but how do you bring Him? . . . Chris: I’ve failed, I’ve disappointed some people in what they wanted or thought they wanted or thought they wanted from me, Mrs . Goforth, but sometimes, once in a while, I’ve given them what they needed even if they didn’t know what it was . I brought it up the road to them . . . . 33 This bringing of salvation into focus through art, this bringing something up the road, giving an existential value to the traditional trek across the Calvinistic journey imagery, is the true vocation of the guru-poet . Yet the poet is himself not completely independent; Mrs . Venable says of her relation to her son: When he was frightened . . ., I’d reach across the table and touch his hands and say not a word, just look, and tough his 33 Milk Train, pp . 110-111 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK72John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. hands with my hand until his hands stopped shaking and his eyes look out, not in [on his existential isolation], and in the morning, the poem would be continued . Continued until it was finished . . . .I would say ‘you will’ and he would . 34 If this kind of coming-together the mother and son birthed a poem every summer after incubating it together nine months, “the length of a pregnancy . 35 This creativity is analogous to Serafina’s and Lady- Myra’s celebration of their physical fertilization . Iguana’s Nonno is the Williams poet grown older, physically dependent in his creative independence . Like Sebastian who needed Violet’s hand to gain the strength to write his annual poem of summer, Nonno needs Hannah, around whom time and sex are meaningless, 36 to write his first new poem in twenty years . Nonno, incarnationally involved in otherness, intends to write a poem of moral advice just as had Christopher Flanders in his verse adapta- tions of the writings of a Swami, a great Hindu teacher . This is the crucial difference between Nonno and Sebastian: Nonno’s whole intent is to share his insightful poetry of life . Unlike the Old Man in Ionesco’s The Chairs, he does this successfully . Sebastian’s purpose of poetry is selfish; he prints it himself on an eighteenth-century handpress and circulates it only among his coterie . This is the kind of symptomatic flaw that causes his violent end; for when the act of eating, the metaphor of becoming one with another, is not the total commitment of communion, it can only be cannibalism . Violet’s whole intent is to build Sebastian’s posthumous reputa- tion . The thrust of the play focusses on her attempt to silence Catha- rine Holly; for Catharine, who wished to love and not use Sebastian, continually screams out the poet’s lack of otherness . It was precisely this inability to transcend to any degree the existential isolation of the literalist that kept him from being a true poet in Williams’ terms . Violet, despite her protestations 37 that Sebastian wanted posthumous 34 Suddenly, p . 73 . 35 Ibid ., p . 18 . 36 Williams describes Hannah as “ethereal . . .she is totally feminine and yet androgy- nous-looking—almost timeless .” Iguana, p . 18 . 37 Suddenly, p . 17 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction73 recognition (recognition not communication), is doomed even in her own terms to failure, for she wishes to popularize a person whose very artistic selfishness devalued everything Violet herself had said a poet should be . This is the wrought irony around the falsely mani- cured garden of Suddenly Last Summer . Because of his selfishness, Sebastian finds eschatological black- ness in the isolated Encantadas’ bird-turtle violence; meanwhile Nonno finds incarnational communication in his prayer-poem as the iguana, “one of God’s creatures at the end of the rope . . .scramble[s] home safe and free .” Williams calls it “a little act of grace” at the hands of the business-man-returning-minister, Larry Shannon . 38 Generally it is Williams creative, incarnational people who are the fugitive kind: Hannah speaks for them all when at the end of Iguana she “pauses between the door and the wicker chair and speaks to herself and the sky . . . .’Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us . It’s so quiet here, now .’” But she knows that the next day Maxine the business woman will drive her farther down the road from the door of the Costa Verde establishment . In Williams’ exquisite eight-page vignette, “The Poet,” the hero is truly a seeing guru . He is evangelist of the intangible esthetic, a Christ-figure who “stretching his wasted arms like the cross-bars of a ship . . .compelled [the children] . . .to understand the rapture of vision and how it would let a man break out of his body .” 39 He tries des- perately to free the children into gaining personality that transcends the governmental and corporate mercantile association, because, he says like Thoreau, “they were old enough to be conscripted into the service of states and organizations” and therefore were also old enough to sense “the presence of something outside the province of matter .” But the children fail the poet; their bourgeois backgrounds overcome them . The lose their chance at poetic Vision . 40 Theirs is the choice of nearly all the Williams people as they function as symbols of Williams’ art theme . Versus the merchants are the Williams poets, the artists of vari- ous kinds with their associative characteristic imagery . Williams is 38 Iguana, p . 125 . 39 One Arm and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1954) . 40 Ibid ., p . 69 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK74John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. of the same opinion as Milk Train’s Blackie; she says to Chris about Sissy: She inspected you through a pair of military fieldglasses before she had me take you to the pink villa with the—king- size bathtub, the pink silk sheets, and the cupids . Chris: Do they, uh—signify something? Blackie: Everything signifies something . 41 This universal signification is Tennessee Williams’ basic claim to be a metaphorical . In this case, Blackie, the “dark” woman, is sent procuring for Sissy whose glasses of vision allowed her only to see if the poet’s body was usable enough, commercial enough in her terms to be worthy of her king-size pink possessions . Williams says: I can’t deny that I use a lot of those things called symbols but being a self-defensive creature, I say that symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama . . . .A symbol in a play has only one legitimate purpose which is to say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words . I hate writing that is a parade of images for the sake of images . 42 41 Milk Train, p . 26 . 42 “Foreward to Camino Real” in Three Plays, p . 161 . In a January 14, 1967 interview of the Irv Kupcinet Television Show following the Chicago premiere of Eccentricities, Williams said of III, ii, the hotel room set, that: I think the scene that didn’t come out last night for me was the scene in which John tries to bed down Alma in the rented room . Now that was a sym- bolical scene about a rather delicate matter . Sidney Harris: I almost went out with the fireplace . Williams: A delicate matter of whether or not a man will be able to perform the sexual act with a woman he is not in love with but who loves him desperately . It looks as if it won’t come off, and then all of a sudden the fireplace is lit . I suppose that’s one of my corny symbols, but for met it worked, although it didn’t seem to work in the production . Williams had hoped that John Buchanan’s dialogue would ease the working of what was certainly a heavy-handed symbol . Miss Alma, the fire has gone out and nothing will revive it . . . .It never was much of a fire, it never really got started, and now it’s out . . . .Sometimes things say things for people . Things that people find too painful or too embarrassing to say, a thing will say it, a thing will say it for them so they don’t have to say it . (p . 99) ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction75 Thus like the hero of “The Poet” the artist must be able to ferment something from any kind of organic matter, that is, be able to make transcendent poesis and universal poem out of the literalists’ flatly perceived moments of perception . Williams’ female artists fall into two units of imagery, the rubia y morena, the light and the dark . Blanche du Bois, whose name means white woods, is epitome of the light, hysterical, sensitive women whom Williams associates with imagery units of whiteness, trans- lucent glass, gentle music, and lyric animals . She is the lady of the camellias who love the poems a dead boy wrote . She is soul sister of Hannah and the women with diaphanous names, Laura and Heav- enly and Alma the nightingale of the Delta . These women stand, in Williams’ world of American opposites, against the epitome of Wil- liams’ dark woman, 43 Serafina della Rose . Serafina, whose creativity is expressed in her auspicious pregnancy, has several dark sisters: the Italians, Land and Myra, the middle-European Fräulein; 44 in addi- tion Flora (Sissy) Goforth receives the dark dog and garden imagery, calling herself Flora the Georgia swamp bitch . She is experiential sis- ter of Karen Stone and Princess Kosmonopolis . In Williams’ view all three darkened their white femininity through the business machi- nations of career . While the Princess—who married a dark Grecian name—takes her chance at retrieving her whiteness, her fertility, through the otherness of love, the unsaveable Karen Stone falls lower and lower to darker and darker Italian men . Only Catharine Holly seems midway between these extremes; she alone seem balanced as she relates to the venal Mrs . Venable what happened at Cabeza de Lobo (Head of the Wolf) even though Mrs . Venable, the wolflike business woman who has employed a business housekeeper named 43 From the beginning, the Dark Lady had represented the hunger of the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon male not only for the rich sexuality, the dangerous warmth he had rejected as unworthy of his wife, but also for the religions which he had disowned in fear, the racial groups he had excluded and despised . The black woman is typically Catholic or Jew, Latin or Oriental or Negro . Wherever the Dark Lady plays a serious role in our literature, she is likely to represent . . .our relationship . . .with the Mediter- ranean Europe from which our culture began; she is surrogate for all the Otherness against which an Anglo-Saxon world attempts to define itself and a Protestant one to justify its existence . Fiedler, op. cit ., p . 301 . 44 Gnädiges Fräulein, p . 130 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK76John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. Foxhill, threatens Catharine with lobotomy at Lion’s View Hospital . This is the same lion, one presumes, that threatens Sissy . Mrs . Goforth: . . .I’ll—wake up the next day . . .-face that angry old lion . Chris: Angry old—? Mrs . Goforth:—lion! Chris: The sun? You think it’s angry? . . . Mrs . Goforth: It’s just a big fire-ball that toughens the skin, including the skin of the heart . 45 Chris offer her the lovely evenings to offset the leonine sun . He talks of the soothing Mediterranean dark whose only shine is from little lamps, the opposite of the sun, the little lamps that don’t mean business, the little lamps that were all the brightness white Blanche once darkened could stand . Maggie the Cat, who howls because her darkly prowled nights are not negotiable enough, is the busi- ness woman supreme . Born a poor girl who read the Commercial Appeal every night, 46 she genuinely admires Big Daddy’s business acumen; desperate to insure her inheritance (“You’ve got to be old with money .” 47 ), she lies and makes pure animal announcement at the play’s end that she is indeed pregnant . Williams’ male artists likewise practice arts of many kinds: they are poets like Tom Wingfield whose image units of movie-fied dis- tance can articulate only the poet’s estrangement; they are abusers of poetry like Iguana’s Sebastian who uses art as a prop to make him- self the perennial house guest that the Milk Train’s Sissy complains about; they are seemingly mad artists like the poet in “The Poet,” the writer of a 780-page masterpiece in “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion”; they are would-be actors of youth like Chance who knows best the art of his body . He is brother to the statuesque youth, One Arm, who is brother to Camino’s sculptured, golden Kilroy . With these body artists Williams fairly shines with Whitmanesque sexual imagery .48 45 Milk Train, pp . 84-85 . 46 Cat, p . 30 . 47 Ibid ., p . 38 . 48 Chance has the “kind of body that white silk pajamas are, or ought to be, made for .” The Princess pronounces his body “hairless, silky-smooth gold .” (Three Plays, pp . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction77 In addition, there are artists of religion like Larry Shannon when he frees the iguana in and overture to Hannah, or artists of life like both Val Xaviers who merely try to resist the corruption of life both urban and rural . Or they are full-blooded poets like Nonno who dies giving and Chris who gives to the dying . When these artists do not sell themselves short, in fact, when they do not sell themselves like the Fräulein’s bullish Indian Joe or the male prostitute of “One Arm” and “The Interior of the Pocket,” 49 they become bricks, like Big Daddy’s son, tossed into the smooth- running machinery of mercantilism . By their mere creative incarna- tional existence they outrage businessmen like Jabe Torrance or men giving the business to the arts of science (John Buchanan), of politics (Boss Finley), or of human relations (Big Daddy, Braden Gewinner) . They oppose, like Suddenly’s Doctor Sugar, the inroads of institu- tionalization, the wasteland of the personal at the expense of truth . Male and female artists alike are far removed from Camino’s Gypsy, the dark woman of business who frankly sells her daughter, are far 342, 354) Oliver Winemiller of “One Arm” is a “statue of Apollo” whose “one large hand made joyless love to his “sculptured” body . He offers his flanks to the minister whose own dreams had been of a golden panther’s “narcotic” lick of his loins . The heroes of “angel in the Alcove” and “The Poet,” are used unnaturally and the hero of the short story “Kingdom of Earth” revels throughout in autoeroticism . In Hard Candy’s “Two on a Party” Williams describes all of his young heroes from Brick to Kilroy: “The motorcyclist . . .has one of those blond and block-shaped heads set upon a throat which is as broad as the head itself and has the smooth and supple muscularity of the male organ in its early stage of tumescence .” P . 69 . Williams’ formal poetry is especially ripe in sexual imagery . 49 “ . . .His left hand removed/ from the relatively austere pocket of the blue jacket/ and thrust now into the more companionable pocket of the gray pants . . . .The interior of the pocket is dark as the dark room he longs to sleep in; . . .in it the hot white hand of the boy is closed on itself/ with a betrayal of tension his eyes have refused to betray . . . .the hot white fingers unclose, they com unknotted and they extend/ slightly sidewise, to offer again their gesture of reassurance/ to that part of him, crest-fallen, on which he depends/ for the dark room he longs to sleep in .” In the Winter of Cities, pp . 35-36 . In Orpheus Lady attacks her estranged lover David Cutrere on this same point after her abortion and his desertion, both done for “Good reasons .” “You sold your- self . I sold my self . You was bought . I was bought . You made whores of us both!” (P . 61) Val says: “Lady, there’s people bought and sold in this world like car- casses of hogs in butcher shops .” (P . 41) The image of merchandising, especially oneself, is constantly functional in Williams’ ethical esthetic . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK78John J. Fritscher, Ph.D. removed from the ironically named Gutman, the merchant supreme on the Camino . The clash of opposing poles, art versus business, truth versus mendacity, creators versus destroyers, continues the duality of ten- sion that is basic to Williams, even to his units of imagery . On the one hand obsessed with moon and roses, on the other besieged by mendacious merchants in gardens of insectivorous plants and car- nivorous animals, Williams has Shannon rise to defend the only positive truth playwright and character can be sure of: “Sir? Sir? The pecuniary rewards of a poem are grossly inferior to its merits, always!” 50 Williams constantly juxtaposes the two camps and nowhere does it better than in his Suddenly which is centered on the art theme: The existential failure of the man who merchandizes poetry of any kind . This play condenses more integrally perhaps than any of Williams’ plays his basic units of imagery: the imagery of each pole and the violent imagery of those poles’ confrontation . The poet-sybarite is on constant junket with his castrating mother . The scene, however, is static . It is the violently colored gar- den of a Victorian Gothic home, itself in the Garden District of New Orleans . It is “inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of a savage nature” and all evocative of the ports visited by the poet . Sebastian “dreaded, abhorred!—false values that came from being publicly known, from fame, from personal exploitation .” Yet want- ing recognition, he left the press-agentry to his mother; he was too weak to accept every poet’s price of communication, a bit of self- inconvenience . He wrote his poems in the summer—always a sig- nificant time for Williams—because the other nine months were that poem’s germination, “the length of a pregnancy .” Violet treats his poems with the reverence due a Host; she recalls that his most significant trip was to the Dragon Country, the Beanstalk Coun- try, the dead moon country of the Encantadas . This was Melville’s land of “extinct volcanos, looking much as the world at large might look—after a last conflagration .” 51 This conflagration of fire imagery is metaphor throughout Williams’ work for fires more internal, for more emotional and 50 Iguana, p . 65 . 51 Suddenly, pp . 13, 17, 18 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKIntroduction79 existential smolders . The Glass Menagerie’s entire last scene of rev- elation is played by soft candlelight which is extinguished amidst impending sheets of lightning . The stage direction of Eccentricities, Summer and Smoke, and Cat all demand pyrotechnical displays . In Summer and Smoke, John strikes a match, holds it close to Alma and says that she had what he thought “was just a Puritanical ice that glit- tered like flame . But now I believe,” he says, “it was flame, mistaken for ice .” 52 In Rose Tattoo Serafina’s husband was burned to death, then cremated; Serafina says: “A Man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes .” 53 She herself is consumed with sexual heat as are Lady of Orpheus Descending and Myra of Battle of Angels to whom Val decrees that a man can burn down a woman . It is inevitable irony that because he has burned down women that Val is literally burned to death by vigilantes’ blowtorch . 54 Carol Cutrere and Cassandra Whiteside both burn with life fever as does Kilroy . Sometimes the result of the existential smolders if the burning of an orchard at Mood Lake or a cotton gin in Baby Doll . Eloi in “Auto-Da-Fe” sees fire as soul-ful purification of sensual corruption; in Camino Real the burning of the poet Shelley’s heart is diagnosed as “pure!—as a man’s burning should be .” 55 To this burning-heart image the poet Byron connects final commentary on what should be “a poet’s vocation . . . to influence the heart . . . .He ought to purify it and lift it above its ordinary level . For what is the [poet’s] heart but a sort of . . .instru- ment!—that translates noise into music, chaos into—order .” From on the other side of Sebastian, Byron admits: “That was my vocation once upon a time, before it was obscured by vulgar plaudits!” 56 While Christopher the true poet consumes cool milk, the fevered Mrs . Goforth—not willing to go forth—screams: “All that work [that business], the pressure, was burning me up, it was literally burning me up like a house on fire .” And the poet who knows well 52 Summer and Smoke, p . 238 . 53 Rose Tattoo, p . 153 . 54 Val: “They say that a woman can burn a man down . But I can burn down a woman .” Lady later agrees: “You can! You can burn down a woman and stamp on her ashes to make sure the fire is put out!” Orpheus Descending, pp . 40, 107 . 55 Camino Real, p . 243 . 56 Ibid ., p . 245 . ©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORKNext >