{"id":121877,"date":"2018-03-12T11:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T15:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121877"},"modified":"2018-03-12T11:30:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T15:30:39","slug":"tennessee-williams-four-objects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/12\/tennessee-williams-four-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"Tennessee Williams in Four Objects"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Left: Tennessee Williams, Self-portrait<\/em>, undated, oil on canvas. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Right: Autograph manuscript notebook, 1943 March 12 to September 26 and undated entry dated \u201cLate Tuesday Night\u201d [24 March 1943]. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University. Tennessee Williams papers, 1932\u20131983, Ms Thr 397 (1355).<\/p><\/div>\n

In the decade I spent editing and annotating the notebooks of Tennessee Williams, I learned that one cannot find nor, as my editor Jonathan Brent noted, tell the story of anyone\u2019s life in a linear way, certainly not Williams\u2019s. As I endeavored to track down individuals with only their first names as guide and find and identify unpublished manuscripts referred to only in the most generic ways, my efforts, at times, took more the form of a scavenger hunt, even a flea-market trawl. Along the way, I unearthed several lost notebooks and unknown manuscripts, including a one-act play. Encouraged by the British Museum\u2019s ability to tell the history of the world across a span of two million years with one hundred objects, I have chosen, from Williams\u2019s archives, four objects from four categories\u2014an unpublished poem, a passage from a journal, an unknown one-act play, and a letter\u2014to give insight into his ambition, his psyche, his creative process, and, finally, his sense of humanity.<\/p>\n

The Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n

Williams had early ambitions to be a poet. In 1933, he sent Harriet Monroe of Poetry <\/em>magazine a poem accompanied by a letter in which he asked, \u201cWill you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?\u201d He would amend this line many years later for Blanche\u2019s exit in A Streetcar Named Desire. <\/em>During the summer of 1936, he and two friends, including a future U.S. poet laureate, met regularly to discuss poetry and work on their poems. At the end of 1938, Williams, who had just completed his senior year at the University of Iowa at age twenty-seven, left his home in Saint Louis for New Orleans. Within two months, he was headed for the West Coast. While in Laguna Beach, he traveled to the San Francisco Art Fair, where he saw Bonnard\u2019s Salle \u00e0 manger \u00e0 la campagne <\/em>(1913), which moved him to write an ekphrastic poem titled \u201cGarden Scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the poem, an unnamed narrator addresses a woman named Aida, who leans on a windowsill looking into a dining room. She is \u201cwaiting\u201d and \u201cdreaming,\u201d and the narrator confesses, \u201cquite against my will I failed to arrive \/ at the appointed time for supper,\u201d and instead waits crouched at the farthest end of the garden. From an image of a woman leaning over a windowsill, Williams vested the painting with a dramatic, offstage element\u2014the tortured narrator.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s affinity for and response to Bonnard hinted at his future as a playwright. Bonnard worked, at times, as a set designer, and many of his paintings, including the one that had enchanted Williams, often resemble set designs. More important, there is a correspondence between Williams and Bonnard in that they both tried to record an emotional and psychological response to reality. Bonnard\u2019s ambition was to paint emotions and \u201cto show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden.\u201d As Jean Clair noted, \u201cThe revolution in painting brought about by Bonnard was that, for the first time, a painter attempted to translate onto canvas the data of a vision that is physiologically \u2018real.\u2019 \u201d About Williams, Arthur Miller wrote, \u201cThe Glass Menagerie <\/em>in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theater\u2019s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it.\u201d For both Bonnard and Williams, sheer sensibility was the driving force.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s minor early poem, moreover, contains the essence of his great Delta plays, specifically, the theme of waiting. He understood the Southern sensibility; he understood the seasonal rhythms of an agrarian society in which waiting is an integral part. He looked at Bonnard\u2019s painting and imagined that this woman was waiting for someone to join her for supper. In The Glass Menagerie, <\/em>Laura waits for gentleman callers who never come; in A Streetcar Named Desire, <\/em>Blanche stays behind on the run-down plantation Belle Reve, waiting five years for her situation to improve; and in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, <\/em>Maggie waits for Brick to make love to her. \u201cYou know, if I thought you would never, never, never <\/em>make love to me again\u2014I would go downstairs to the kitchen and pick out the longest and sharpest knife I could find and stick it straight into my heart.\u201d The vast majority of Williams\u2019s plays, including his three great ones, are about longing, not love, about women who want and wait for men who do not want them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Journal<\/strong><\/p>\n

While searching through the uncatalogued material acquired by Columbia University in its purchase of the contents of Williams\u2019s house in Key West, I came across a 3\u00bd”-by-5\u00bd” flip-top notepad that turned out to be a small journal. It was in a box of what appeared to be the contents of a drawer that included used boarding passes, expired passports, sales receipts, and random photographs. \u201cKeeping a journal,\u201d Williams had written, \u201cis a lonely man\u2019s habit.\u201d He would later add that his journals \u201cmay have some usefulness as a history of an individual\u2019s fight for survival, emotional travail.\u201d Williams kept a journal for most of his life. At the end of October 1941, Williams had taken the small notepad with him on a hitchhiking trip from New Orleans to Saint Petersburg, Florida. He recorded his thoughts, noting some of the dangers of hitchhiking, giving frequent updates on the status of his progress, offering reflections, making observations. Disqualified from service in World War II because of his poor eyesight, he dressed as a soldier to improve his chances getting rides. Left alone, he used his voice to keep himself company.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

I got from N.O. to Mobile in one hitch with a \u201ccontact man\u201d for a cigar co.\u2014one of those cordial, personality men. Talked me to pieces. My main objection to hitchhiking is the necessity of keeping up a conversation with drivers who give you a lift because they want someone to talk with.<\/p>\n

Later\u2014Somewhere beyond Pensacola about noon\u00a0\u2026\u00a0now in front of a wilderness gas station run by a bearded ex-wrestler called Daniel Boone Savage \u2026<\/p>\n

Most of the cars are headed west. well, here comes another\u2014Look bright, son!\u2014Nope \u2026<\/p>\n

My life is very unsatisfactory but surprisingly endurable. Through my skill at evading pain and cultivated detachment \u2026<\/p>\n

May not make Tallahassee tonight\u00a0\u2026\u00a0Big lovely rooster strutting in yard. Ruddy orange and gleaming blue-black. An old tire swing. Nice for stage. Here comes a soldier hitchhiking damn\u2014I\u2019m sunk. Already got a ride. Good! Pretend to be writing. I guess my military disguise is only moderately convincing …<\/p>\n

It is about 8:20 \u2026 I stand in the red glare of a neon by a filling station\u2014cool\u2014pleasant enough \u2026\u00a0Not likely to get out of here tonight\u2014about 2\u20131 improbability. World news improved with Germans pushed back at Rostov and Libya. Gay music from radio in station.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Williams\u2019s natural ability made it almost impossible for him to write anything that wasn\u2019t dramatic. With a voice full of melodrama and modulation, his jottings can be read as a minimal one-act play.<\/p>\n

Williams used his voice for comfort and companionship, but he also used it as a form of protest. A few months after his seventh birthday, he and his family moved from Columbus, Mississippi, to Saint Louis, Missouri, where their status changed dramatically. They went from being the prominent family of the minister in a small Southern town to being an undistinguished, middle-class family in an unfashionable Saint Louis suburb. Despite spending so few of his formative years in the South, Williams would always cling to his identity as a Southerner, never trying to fit in by softening or minimizing his accent. Voice was very much his form of protest to write about the world he had been forced to leave, a society based on \u201cgrace\u201d and \u201celegance,\u201d not money. He would return to the Deep South as the subject and setting for the majority of his plays.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Play<\/strong><\/p>\n

Williams wrote compulsively, revised constantly, and rarely discarded anything. There are over two thousand manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts dispersed in archives across the country. When his writing stalled, he changed location, and organization was not his strong suit. As a result, random fragments\u2014some forgotten, others left behind\u2014turn up from time to time. Such was the case with the unknown one-act play The Drums<\/em>, an early character study of Blanche, written, mostly likely, in the early 1940s, just after Williams had met Paul and Jane Bowles in Acapulco. The play begins with Belle Wingfield Bowles, an attractive but nervous thirty-five-year-old who \u201cin the dusk \u2026\u00a0looks ten years younger.\u201d She has come to rest and wait for her husband at a summer resort in the mountains of East Tennessee. It ends with her seduction of a young musician. While notable as an example of how Williams often worked like a visual artist, creating studies in the short form before attempting the larger work, it is also important as an indication of how intertwined initially The Glass Menagerie <\/em>and A Streetcar Named Desire <\/em>were. In this one-act play, aspects of Laura and Blanche are merged in Belle Wingfield Bowles.<\/p>\n

Other examples, specifically several early fragments, combine elements of both plays. In 1942, Williams recorded in his notebook that he had \u201cjust finished writing The Spinning Song<\/em> a play suggested by my sister\u2019s tragedy.\u201d He referred to his sister Rose\u2019s diagnosis in 1937 of dementia praecox, an early term for schizophrenia. No complete manuscript of The Spinning Song <\/em>is known to survive. A number of minimal fragments of different drafts, some with the alternative title The Paper Lantern<\/em>, do exist, however. These fragments combine embryonic elements of both The Glass Menagerie <\/em>and A Streetcar Named Desire. <\/em>For example, in one, a woman lives on Belle Reve plantation with her two children and is estranged from her husband, who lives in New Orleans\u2014Amanda Wingfield\u2019s circumstances, Blanche DuBois\u2019s property. In another fragment, titled The Paper Lantern (A Dance Play for Martha Graham) <\/em>there are direct references to Williams\u2019s mentally ill sister. A young girl, Ariadne, is diagnosed with dementia praecox, and her mother discusses with the doctor whether or not the young girl can stay at their plantation, Belle Reve. Williams had been writing about Rose as early as 1938 in his short story \u201cThe 4-Leaf Clover,\u201d but by 1942, he was attempting to write a play with more complexity and ambition. Several variants even include a third element, one of miscegenation and murder, very likely borrowed from Faulkner\u2019s Absalom, Absalom!<\/em><\/p>\n

What is clear from these fragments is that Williams had the idea of both plays and was trying to write them as one, but the material was too unwieldy. It was only when he pulled the two stories apart that they could work. News from home would provide the catalyst. At the beginning of 1943, his mother had written to him of his sister\u2019s \u201chead operation.\u201d He wrote back asking for more information, and when he got it, he was devastated. He wrote a few lines in his journal: \u201cRose. Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain.\u201d His sister had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy. A month later, he was writing with \u201ctigerish fury\u201d on The Gentleman Caller, <\/em>a forerunner to The Glass Menagerie. <\/em>He returned exclusively to his sister\u2019s story and did what he could to transform his love and despair into an elegiac memory play. The Faulknerian elements were forgotten, and the setting of the plantation Belle Reve was dropped and not taken up until 1945, when he started working on the manuscript that eventually became A Streetcar Named Desire. <\/em><\/p>\n

These fragments show not only how his sister\u2019s situation affected him creatively\u2014Williams based characters on Rose in a number of his significant plays, short stories, and poems\u2014but they also hint at the long gestation period for his plays. I would suggest that one of the reasons Williams was able to create so many iconic characters is because he had lived with them for such long stretches of time that he knew them intimately. Many of the full-length plays were developed from one-act plays or short stories written anywhere from four to seventeen years before the full-length play.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Letter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Williams developed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof <\/em>(1955) from an earlier short story, \u201cThree Players of a Summer Game,\u201d published in 1951, but the inspiration for Brick came much earlier, in the summer of 1942, when Williams was invited to Macon, Georgia, by his friend Jordan Massee. Williams found the model for Big Daddy in the form of Jordan Massee\u2019s father, who owned and operated a large brick manufacturing company. (Williams did not have to look far for a name for Big Daddy\u2019s alcoholic son.) Careful understanding of Macon\u2019s closed and conservative society strongly suggests that Williams\u2019s experience in this small Southern town influenced his writing not only of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof <\/em>but also of A Streetcar Named Desire. <\/em>Williams joined the private world of young gay men in Macon who lived a secret existence from their families. Several of these young men went on to marry, but the marriages ended in divorce with lives ruined by alcohol and unhappiness. In both plays, Williams created men who had had unusually close relationships with other men, who marry and then have conflicts over their relationships. Williams was fascinated by this complicated, cross-currented world, and Brick, I believe, was, in part, based on these young men.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s correspondence with Kazan reveals that Kazan pushed him to be more specific about Brick\u2019s sexuality and the nature of his attachment to Skipper. Williams resisted as much as he could. In a letter dated November 31, 1954, he wrote to Kazan:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the conclusion I\u2019ve come to. Brick did love Skipper, \u201cthe one great good thing in his life which was true.\u201d He identified Skipper with sports, the romantic world of adolescence which he couldn\u2019t go past. Further: to reverse my original (somewhat tentative) premise, I now believe that, in the deeper sense, not the literal sense, Brick is homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment: a thing I\u2019ve suspected of several others, such as Brando, for instance \u2026 He\u2019s the nearest thing to Brick that we both know. Their innocense [sic], their blindness, makes them very, very touching, very beautiful and sad\u00a0\u2026\u00a0But if a mask is ripped off \u2026 that\u2019s quite enough to blast the whole Mechanism\u00a0\u2026\u00a0knock the world out from under their feet, and leave them no alternative but\u2014owning up to the truth or retreat into something like liquor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Williams believed, as he noted in his journal, \u201cThings are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don\u2019t always \u2018progress.\u2019 \u201d On a fragment of a manuscript, he had noted, \u201cI don\u2019t know [Brick] any better than I know my closest relative or dearest friend which isn\u2019t well at all: the only people we think we know well are those who mean little to us.\u201d Williams understood that individuals are complex and mysterious not only to others but, more significantly, to themselves. He even said, \u201cIf you write a character that isn\u2019t ambiguous you are writing a false character, not a true one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Museums rest, as Neil MacGregor noted, \u201con the hope\u2014the belief\u2014that the study of things can lead to a truer understanding of the world.\u201d Williams left a trove of artifacts that give a truer understanding of all aspects of his creative being. A romantic in an unromantic, postwar world, he attempted to re-create the South he remembered as a \u201cdark, wide, open world that you can breathe in.\u201d His work, and, most significantly, his characters, share an affinity with all great works of art, specifically, that they appear to have been here all along and were just waiting for him to find them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the editor of<\/em> Tennessee Williams\u2019s<\/em> Notebooks<\/a> and is the author of the\u00a0novels\u00a0<\/em>Charleston<\/a>\u00a0and<\/em> A Theory of Love<\/a>, which is forthcoming in May.<\/em><\/p>\n

The essay is excerpted from the Morgan Library and Museums\u2019s\u00a0catalogue accompanying the exhibition \u201cTennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing<\/a>,\u201d on view through May 13.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In the decade I spent editing and annotating the notebooks of Tennessee Williams, I learned that one cannot find nor, as my editor Jonathan Brent noted, tell the story of anyone\u2019s life in a linear way, certainly not Williams\u2019s. As I endeavored to track down individuals with only their first names as guide and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1407,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11598,4507,3882,5323,10410,33270,33051,33050,165,3628,1754,33053,12326,33054,33055,33052],"class_list":["post-121877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-streetcar-named-desire","tag-absalom-absalom","tag-blanche-dubois","tag-cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof","tag-elia-kazan","tag-harriet-monroe","tag-jordan-massee","tag-neil-mcgregor","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-magazine","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-the-gentleman-caller","tag-the-glass-menagerie","tag-the-paper-lantern","tag-the-spinning-song","tag-three-players-of-a-summer-game"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTennessee Williams in Four Objects<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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