by Dan Isaac
Candles
to the Sun
contents
Foreword
Introduction
Production Notes and Credits
Candles to the Sun
Textual Notes
foreword
by william jay smith
I had the rare privilege of attending in St. Louis, on Saturday March 20, 1937, a performance of Candles to the Sun, the first full-length play of Tennessee Williams. The performance took place in the auditorium of the Wednesday Club, an elite women’s cultural organization. The play had been produced by an amateur theatrical troupe, the Mummers, and directed by Willard Holland, who played one of the leading roles and, more importantly, had almost single-handedly helped to shape the final version of the play from the more than 400 unnumbered typewritten pages of various drafts that now repose at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. This was the second of two performances, but the major one, of Candles to the Sun, which had had, we learn from the typescript, several other tentative titles, including The Lamp, Place in the Sun, and Candles in the Sun.
The primary focus of the Mummers was drama of social concern and this play, presenting as it does the travails and struggles of three generations of a family of coalminers in the Red Hills of Alabama, seemed definitely to fit the bill. The play appears now in these pages for the first time anywhere thanks to the fortuitous, wise, and thoughtful intervention of Jane Garrett, who played the important role of Star, the wayward daughter of this strict Puritanical coal-mining family, and Dan Isaac, who has meticulously edited and reconstructed the Mummers script. I trust that it will delight a worldwide audience of readers, and eventually theatergoers, as it did the perceptive newspaper critics and others in those small, but extremely enthusiastic, gatherings sixty-seven years ago. It was for me, not only a decided pleasure, but also an absolute revelation, all the more astonishing because I had come fully prepared, I thought, to give my heart-felt approval to any offering of my dear friend and close associate, Thomas Lanier Williams, however modest and unpolished it proved to be.
Dakin Williams, Tom’s younger brother, together with his parents, had attended the Thursday, March 18th premiere (or preview, as the Mummers preferred to call it). He remembers that Tom had sat at some distance from his family and from most of the others in the audience, alone in an aisle seat, which he had insisted on having. When to thunderous applause, loud cheers, and resonant foot-stomping the full cast gathered for numerous curtain calls, they suddenly all burst out singing “Solidarity Forever.” The celebrated union anthem, totally uncalled for in the script, gave the play an aura of propaganda, which the playwright, despite his pronounced sympathy for victims of social injustice, had clearly not intended.
I met Tom Williams at Washington University in St. Louis in 1935. He had come there after his father, Cornelius Coffin Williams (C.C.), a veteran of the Spanish–American War, horrified that Tom had flunked R.O.T.C. after three years at the University of Missouri, brought him back to St. Louis to work in the shoe factory where he was a sales manager. Tom had heart palpitations (he later referred to them as a heart attack), and since it was clear that he could not continue in this tedious, difficult job, he was permitted to register at Washington University as a Special Student. We were introduced by Clark Mills McBurney, who, as Clark Mills, had published widely in prominent magazines and who was studying for a Master’s degree in French at the University. I had just registered there and as a freshman was immediately placed in advanced courses in French since early training had made me fairly proficient in that language. I made Clark’s acquaintance at the first meeting of the College Poetry Society. Ann Winslow (her real name was Grubbs) had written to colleges and universities all over the country and had persuaded them to establish chapters. She raised money for prizes which were awarded by juries of prominent writers to young promising poets throughout the country. Clark introduced me to Tom, and after the three of us attended the next meeting of the College Poetry Society, we decided that we were the only ones in that organization truly interested in writing poetry, and from then on we met on our own, usually at Tom’s house on Pershing Avenue, which was a ten-minute walk from the campus. I was the kid, the youngest of the group. Tom was seven years older than I and Clark, five. Because he seemed to have read everything that mattered in both French and English, Clark became our mentor. In my memoir Army Brat I have described Tom as he was at the time, one of the shyest men I’d ever known, very, very quiet and soft-spoken. Once he got to know someone he would let himself go, but otherwise he was quite withdrawn. His stony-faced silence often put people off, he appeared uninterested in what was going on around him, never joining in the quiet give-and-take of a conversation but rather listening carefully and taking it all in. He would sit quietly in a gathering for long periods of time until suddenly like a volcano erupting he would burst out with a high cackle and then with resounding and uncontrollable laughter. Tom’s mother, who always graciously greeted us, was a busy little woman who never stopped talking although there wasn’t much inflection or warmth in the steady flow of her speech. One topic, no matter how trivial, received the same emphasis as the next which might be utterly tragic. I had the impression listening to her that the words she pronounced were like the red balls in a game of Chinese checkers, all suddenly released and clicking quickly and aimlessly about the board.
Tom, Clark, and I were inseparable, meeting several times a week and spending evenings out with a number of attractive co-eds (Clark had far more success with them than Tom or I). Although we confided constantly in one another, Tom kept any hint of depression to himself and with us appeared always tough-skinned, energetic, and above all determined to make a success as a writer and to get away as soon as possible from St. Louis, which was for him and for us an intolerable cultural backwater.
I knew, of course, that Tom had written plays, any number of short ones, each of which he usually referred to as a “fantasy.” But for me at the time he was first and foremost a poet, and it was as a poet that I expected him to make a national name for himself. And indeed he did just that, but not for his poems as such but rather for the poetry of his plays, which was powerfully revealed to me in Candles to the Sun.
One of the most significant short “fantasy” plays of Tom’s with which I became acquainted was Me, Vashya. In early 1937 Tom eagerly awaited the announcement of the three one-act play winners in the annual contest in English 16, Professor William G.B. Carson’s “Technique of Modern Drama.” English 16, the only writing course then offered at Washington University except for Professor Webster’s in the short story, was quite popular on the campus. The students wrote one-act plays and at the end of the year three plays were chosen and given workshop productions. One of the three was selected as the best and its author was awarded fifty dollars, a considerable sum in those days, especially for students. Tom had received a B in the course for the first semester and after his play Death of Pierrot had failed to get even an honorable mention in the contest of the Webster Groves Theatre Guild the previous year, he was hoping he would fare better with Professor Carson. “Horrible if I were eliminated,” he wrote in his journal. And horrible indeed it was when that elimination of his play Me, Vashya was announced.
I remember his bitterness at the time. The decision was said to have been that of an “independent jury” but Tom thought, as others of us did, that it was solely Professor Carson’s, especially when the winner chosen for a full production was a play by Wayne Arnold, who appeared to be Carson’s favorite in the class. His play First Edition was a drawing-room comedy concerning a recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Although not mentioned by name, this was the local author Josephine W. Johnson, whose lyrical novel Now in Nov
ember Tom, Clark, and I very much admired. First Edition, a bright little piece, was the absolute opposite of Tom’s somber dramatization of the murder of a powerful munitions maker who sold armaments to both sides in wartime. And war was much on everyone’s mind. The assassination the previous summer of the poet-playwright Federico García Lorca by General Franco’s Fascists in Spain enraged us all. Tom was attempting to deal with a large and very dark subject, and ironically it was precisely this subject, Professor Carson later revealed, that caused him to eliminate Tom’s play. Me, Vashya may now seem, as apparently it did when read aloud in Carson’s class, laughably melodramatic, but as the youthful fantastic treatment of a very real problem it was to us, his fellow beginning writers, serious and moving.
What was particularly hurtful to Tom about this defeat was that, while on the surface his subject appeared remote, he had put so much of himself and his own life into this play. Lady Shontine’s madness is clearly a reflection of his sister Rose’s mental breakdown which so haunted Tom at the time and the blunt, obsessive vulgarity of Vashya himself surely owed much to that of Tom’s alcoholic father, who was making his sister’s life and his own totally unbearable.
Tom Williams’ next failure was a private rather than a public one. At about the time of Carson’s rejection, Tom read to Clark and me the just-completed draft of what was apparently his first attempt at poetic drama. It was Ishtar: A Babylonian Fantasy. He had first tackled such an exotic subject in 1928 when at the age of seventeen, he wrote a short story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” based on a paragraph of Herodotus. It tells of an Egyptian queen who avenges her father’s murder by locking his murderers in an underground chamber while festivities take place overhead. It contains the memorable opening line: “Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes.” One would have thought that now at the age of twenty-six Tom would have left behind such attempts at Flaubertian exoticism, but no. Here presented to us in his rich Southern voice was a bit of Babylonian Gothic. This may have been the resurrection of a much earlier piece or a blind stab at verse drama that was then so popular. In any case, he did not get very far with his reading before Clark and I exploded with laughter. Tom responded not by clamming up, mute and hurt, but rather immediately joining in with his celebrated cackle, astonished himself that he could have seriously set down such patent nonsense.
I found only one page remaining of Ishtar in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. I quote from it only to show how very far Tom had come with the truly spare and moving poetry in every line of Candles to the Sun.
Ishtar
(A Babylonian Fantasy)
Ishtar that naked walked
Beyond the seventh gate of Hell for Tammuz sake
Has heard my prayer!
Let us be wanton then! Give me your lips!
Give me your saffron-scented lips. . .
What’s this!
Oh, here’s a sorry end! My lover sleeps.
And then a few lines farther on:
I see the silver arrow of the dawn on the heels of the night.
Hail, Dawn! I salute you!
Hail, rising sun!
Hail Ever-Conquering Worm That Eats All But the Sky!
For a less florid effort, “Sonnets for the Spring,” Tom received first prize in a poetry contest at the Wednesday Club. The award was presented to him on his birthday, March 26, 1936, in the same auditorium where Candles to the Sun would appear almost exactly a year later. It had been established in 1925 by the celebrated lyric poet Sara Teasdale, whom Tom greatly admired. He was aware that in 1914 after rejecting the proposal of poet Vachel Lindsay, she had married Ernst Filsinger, a highly successful international St. Louis businessman who made and sold shoes. She divorced him in 1929, and four years later, having found life in St. Louis intolerable, took an overdose of sleeping pills and was found dead in her bathtub. Tom had been very moved by her suicide and had written an ode to her, “Under April Rain.”
He turned again to April, that cruelest of months, in his prize-winning sonnets. The first of these, “Singer of Darkness,” serves as a fitting prelude to Candles to the Sun because it deals, as does the play, with the struggle between light and dark:
Singer of Darkness
I feel the onward rush of spring once more
Breaking upon the unresistant land
And foaming up the dark hibernal shore
As turbulent waves unfurled on turbid sand!
The cataclysm of the uncurled leaf,
The soundless thunder of the bursting green
Stuns every field. The sudden war is brief,
And instantly the flag of truce is seen,
The still, white blossom raised upon the bough!
(Singer of darkness, oh, be silent now!
Raise no defense, dare to erect no wall,
But let the living fire, the bright storm fall
With lyric paeans of victory once more
Against your own blindly surrendered shore!)
Reed Hynds, reviewing Candles to the Sun for the St. Louis Star-Times, contended it was certainly not a propaganda play, as some “lobby critics” had thought, but rather “an earnest and searching examination of a particular social reality set out in human and dramatic terms.” In a separate interview in the same paper, Tom had explained that “the candles [in the title of the] play represent the individual lives of the people. The sun represents group consciousness. The play ends as a tragedy for the individuals, for in the end they realize they cannot achieve success and happiness apart from the group but must sacrifice for the common good.” I think at the same time that for Tom this had not only a social but also a personal reference. John Donne, a poet whom Tom particularly appreciated, had written, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” and these lines might well be an epigraph for Candles to the Sun. Tom, speaking personally, referred at the time to the “Island of Myself,” and it was, he later declared, to ward off the dread of loneliness that he wrote. If he was an island, he knew that, in his life as in his work, he had to create a bridge to humanity, to a greater world beyond the self.
If taken only literally as a chronicle of social protest, the play can never be fully understood. It must be read as a closely unified and carefully developed metaphor. It is an extended study of light and dark, both inside and outside the characters and the setting. The action moves, as does the sonnet, “Singer of Darkness,” from dark into light, with all the degrees of chiaroscuro and shadow along the way. The two principal pivotal characters are the heroines, Star, the miner Bram Pilcher’s daughter, and Fern, his daughter-in-law. Note the careful choice of names, each with its own metaphorical implication. Star moves from her virginal purity that like the real star above her cuts clearly through the camp’s darkness, drawn by her own sensuality to the false bright light of Birmingham, the urban dark. She loses her chance to regain that innocence when Red, the spiritual organizer she loves, is murdered. She turns then to the brothel that had always awaited her and from which she will send some of the dark money she earns to help Fern, ironically, purchase freedom from the mine and light for young Luke, her son, whose name means light. Fern, on the other hand, like the plant for which she is named, grows up out of darkness into light: her clean pure self is aware that she can move from her grief and her dark inner self into the blinding, liberating light of the sun. To obtain the greater freedom that the strike provides for the entire community, Fern sacrifices all that she has strived for. The final scene with Fern transcendent in the rocking chair and light streaming through the open door is heart-breaking in its intensity. This intensity is prepared for us by the stage directions of the final scene that are in themselves pure poetry: Winter has broken up and it is now one of those clear, tenuous mornings in early spring. A thin, clear sunlight pale as lemon-water comes through the windowpanes of the cabin which is now barer and cleaner-looking than usual in this strange light. Heartbreaking also at th
e same time is Bram, the “Old Man of the Mines” who has preferred to remain in the dark, to go down daily into the dirt to dig his own grave, a mole who knows nothing but the dark and is blinded by sunlight. He moves finally into a deeper level of the dark, into the madness from which there is no return.
It is what Henry James calls “the madness of art” that saves Tom from the madness that he contemplated in his sister, and that he so feared would overtake him as well. The ghost of Rose hovers over this entire play, rising as from the heavy morning mist that Luke sees, “thick as wood smoke down on the hollow.” Fern and Star are both aspects of Tom’s imaginative vision of Rose: Fern, evoking her enduring and transcendent innocence; Star, an innocence lost to a destructive sensuality of the powerful sort that he felt had brought on Rose’s madness.
Clark has told that he and I attended the Saturday performance of Candles to the Sun with the “underground crew” of our rebellious Bohemian confrères. Among them may have been the star members of the League of Artists and Writers whom Tom had met when he attended their weekly meetings in 1936 at the old courthouse near the St. Louis riverfront: poet Orrick Johns, novelist (and Marxist) Jack Conroy, short-story writer J.S. Balch, and humorist Willie Wharton. Whether or not they were all there I am not sure, but I have the distinct recollection that we all went on, along with Tom, to the apartment of Jack Conroy where we spent the rest of the night with some tough heavy-drinking types I had never before encountered. Clark had this memory of Tom that night:
He was there at the beginning of the show, but at the intermission Tom was gone—nobody could find him. Finally, I found him outside. It was a cold night—he was sitting on the curbstone in front of the theatre with a bottle of whiskey—and he was drunk as a skunk and in total despair. Apparently, something had gone wrong, or he imagined it. I know he was intensely concerned with the reaction of audiences, and now suddenly he saw the play as hopeless, and he was drinking himself into oblivion. He refused to go back in—he saw it as just a total disaster. That was the only time I ever saw him really drunk.