Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  In the character of Val, Williams made a myth of his remodeled self. He imbued the wanderer with his overheated imagination (“one of my biggest troubles,” Val says), his fictionalized age (twenty-five), his own former eccentric work habits (selling shoes while writing poems on shoeboxes), his haunted promiscuity (Val is dogged by the mysterious Woman from Waco), his literary aspirations (Val is writing a book—“When people read it, they’re going to be frightened. They’ll say it’s crazy because it tells the truth!”), and a surname, Xavier, that sounded like “Savior,” and resembled Sevier, a distinguished name in the Williams genealogy, which linked the family to the first governor of Tennessee. In fact, before settling on “Tennessee” as his literary persona, Williams had considered using “Valentine Sevier” as his own pseudonym. In choosing the name “Tennessee,” Williams had styled himself as a kind of pioneer. Val Xavier is cut from a similarly intrepid mythic mold: he is a pilgrim soul of sorts—“Says he’s exploring the world an’ ev’rything in it!” according to one local gossip—who offers the community of Two Rivers a new kind of transcendence. For the shy Williams, who claimed to “always feel that I bore people and that I’m too ugly,” Val was a totem of Williams’s newfound instinctual liberation and a transparent piece of autoerotic wish-fulfillment. “I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and to create a new world,” the play’s epigram, words from August Strindberg to Paul Gauguin, reads.

  Answering to the nickname “Snakeskin” (he wears a snakeskin jacket), Val is an agent of change. Newly arrived in town, he wanders into a dry-goods store looking for work. Soon he has called life out of the store’s joyless proprietress, Myra, and the other local womenfolk. “Decent is something that’s scared like a little rabbit,” he tells Myra. “I’ll give you a better word, Myra. . . . Love.” Val’s vagabond swagger captures the women’s imagination: they ogle him, they are confounded by him, they fantasize about him, they pursue him. His presence broadcasts the primacy of passion over reason; in Two Rivers, it makes him an almost immediate subject of scandal and concern. “Passion is something to be proud of,” the town’s wild child and cynic, Cassandra (“Sandra”) Whiteside, tells him, one fugitive kind to another. “It’s the only one of the little alphabet blocks they give us to play with that seems to stand for anything of importance.” While the women of the town project their longing onto Val, the threatened men set out to drive Val’s free spirit away and finally to destroy it.

  The battle of the play’s title is the clash of the romantic life force versus the philistine death force: a simulacrum of Williams’s own battle to shake off the constrictions of his repressed upbringing and to redefine himself both as a man and as an artist. “We of the artistic world are the little gray foxes and all the rest are the hounds,” he wrote from Mexico, where he had gone to write in 1940. “The butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker—also the typewriter rent man and the landlord, Etc.—are our natural enemies. We expect no quarter from them and are determined to give them none. It is a fight to the death, never mistake about that.”

  There’s no question into what camp Myra belongs when she makes her second entrance into the mercantile store; she’s dressed in “shiny black satin with large scarlet poppies”—symbols of sleep and death, which align her with her dying husband, Jabe, as “an enemy of light.” Her talk percolates with resignation. “You heard me cussing when I come downstairs? Inside I cuss like that all the time,” she tells Val. “I hate ev’ry body; I wish this town would be bombarded tomorrow and everyone daid. Because—I got to live in it when I’d rather be daid in it—an’ buried.” Over time, Val opens Myra up to her sexual nature and to love. Through passion, she is reborn.

  Battle of Angels bore witness to Williams’s quest for spiritual transformation, for “new patterns,” as an antidote to “this welter of broken pieces, wreckage, that floats on the surface of life.” “I have spent so many years making myself over in such a way as to get along with bastards, cultivating a tough skin, rejecting my tender responses before they are rejected,” he said. The regenerative power of the primitive—the shedding of psychological skin—is signaled by Val’s snakeskin jacket, “a shameless, flaunting symbol of the Beast Untamed!” and an emblem of both his protean metamorphosis and his wild, feral nature. After Val is lynched, Christ-like, by an angry mob of townsmen, the snakeskin is the only part of him that remains. Hung up by the Conjure Man on the back wall of the dry-goods store in the play’s last moment, the jacket glows in a shaft of sunlight—a radiance that clearly suggested the sacramental. The Conjure Man, the final stage direction reads, “seems to make a slight obeisance before it. The religious chant from across the wide cotton fields now swells in exaltation as the curtain falls.” The moment announces Williams’s romantic credo: instead of dedicating himself to God, he made a god of the self.

  A TELEGRAM CALLING Williams back to Broadway in the winter of 1940 found him in Acapulco:

  BETTER RETURN AT ONCE. WE ARE CASTING YOUR PLAY FOR IMMEDIATE PRODUCTION.

  —Theresa Helburn, Theatre Guild, New York.

  Since the late twenties, Eugene O’Neill had been the Theatre Guild’s star playwright and its claim to fame. Although the Guild was on a winning streak, with five hits in a row, including The Philadelphia Story, with Katharine Hepburn, by 1940 it was looking for a new literary star to hitch its wagon to. For the Guild and for Williams, the choice of Battle of Angels was a big roll of the dice.

  Flushed with a sense of both victory and age, Williams was suddenly overwhelmed with elegiac memories of the raffish life he’d only just begun to live. “I am becoming more and more a complete hedonist,” Williams wrote to a friend about his sensual education south of the border, around the time that the Theatre Guild summoned him back to the United States. In a Mexican cantina, he sat down in a wicker chair and recorded some of the most vivid moments of his “twenty-six years of living”:

  I remembered particularly the Vieux Carré of New Orleans where I first learned how a poor artist lives. I remembered the Quarter Rats, as we were called. The prostitute Irene who painted the marvelous pictures and disappeared, Helen who entered my life through a search for a lost black cat, the jobless merchant seaman, Joe, who wrote sea-stories more exciting than Conrad’s which were destroyed when the house he lived in burned. . . . The sunlight rich as egg-yolk in the narrow streets, great, flat banana leaves, and the slow, slow rain. The fog coming up from the river, swallowing Andrew Jackson on his big iron horse. . . . Life getting bigger and plainer and uglier and more beautiful all the time. I remembered thumbing a ride from Santa Monica to San Francisco to see William Saroyan and the Golden Gate Exposition. Saroyan wasn’t there but the fair was marvelous. . . . I remembered days of slightly glorified beach-combing in Southern California. Picking squabs and dropping one feather for each bird in a bottle and collecting afterwards two cents for each feather. Selling shoes across from the M-G-M lot in Culver City and spending lunch hour watching for Greta Garbo. Never with any success. Taking care of a small ranch up Canyon Road in Laguna Beach. And the sound of dogs barking a long way off at night when the moon started rising. . . . School-days in Mississippi. Walking along aimless country roads through a delicate spring rain with the fields, flat, and wide, and dark, ending at the levee and at the cypress brakes, and the buzzards wheeling leisurely a long way up. Dark life. Confused, tormented, uncomprehendable and fabulously rich and beautiful.

  When Williams got up, he noticed the American journalist and bon vivant Lucius Beebe sitting at a rival cantina in a crisp white linen suit. He crossed the plaza to share his news. Beebe thrust out his hand in congratulation and asked Williams how he felt in this triumphant, life-changing moment. “Old,” Williams said, adding, “The irresponsible days of my youth are over.” There was a silence, then Beebe smiled and said, “Has it occurred to you that the play might be a failure?” “No,” Williams said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” “You’d better think of it, Son,” Beebe said.

>   Williams’s emergence on the theatrical scene in the winter of 1940 was poised to fill a peculiar vacuum in the field. By 1940, William Saroyan had gone from being Broadway’s great white hope to a figure of fun. “Will Saroyan ever write a great play?” Rodgers and Hart joked in “Zip,” the show-stopping striptease in Pal Joey that sent up Gypsy Rose Lee’s intellectual pretensions. After the failure of Clifford Odets’s 1940 Night Music, the Group Theatre, which over the decade had fought the good fight to broaden the expressiveness and seriousness of American theater, was in the process of collapsing. (It officially disbanded in 1941.) Odets had been the Group’s literary star and its meal ticket. In plays such as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy, and Rocket to the Moon—full of lament and liveliness—he had captured since the mid-thirties the heartbreak of the American soul under capitalism. The disappointment of Night Music and the collapse of the Group sent Odets into semipermanent theatrical retirement in Hollywood. In the public mind, Odets had replaced Eugene O’Neill as the great American dramatist. By the time the Group began mounting Odets’s plays, O’Neill himself, disdaining Broadway’s “show shop,” had retired from commercial theater to work on a nine-play cycle. (He finished only two.) Although Williams was pessimistic about his chances in the contemporary commercial theater—“What can we produce from the tall silk hat of our esoteric fancy to cast a spell upon this sweating rabble?” Williams wrote to his friend Paul Bigelow—he arrived on the scene just at the time everything in American life, including the stage, was about to change.

  “We were deceived by the maturity of the play into misjudging the immaturity of the author,” the director Margaret Webster said. Williams later admitted as much. “Probably no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknowledge of it,” he wrote. He had no experience with casting, interfering producers, petulant actors, backstage politics, or, crucially, rewriting under pressure. Battle of Angels was written “before I knew what a proscenium arch was,” Williams said. The Guild, however, was planning a four-star production. The play was submitted to Joan Crawford, who thought it “low and common”; to Tallulah Bankhead (“It’s impossible, darling,” she told Williams); and, finally, to Miriam Hopkins, a talented but temperamental film star looking to revive her flagging career. Hopkins was tempted to star and, in order to have more control over the final product, to invest in the show. “HOPKINS MAY PLAY HILLBILLY’S ‘ANGELS,’ ” Variety announced in its October 30 issue.

  The play was set to open in Boston, a famously puritanical community. To Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood, the decision signaled “a deep collective death wish.” The producers also chose an opening night that clashed with the first night of Lady in the Dark, the musical collaboration of Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill, starring Gertrude Lawrence. The first-string critics would inevitably cover the all-star production, leaving the rest—“a bunch of prissy old maids,” according to Williams—for Battle of Angels.

  To his first meeting with Miriam Hopkins, over a champagne supper at her elegant apartment in the Ambassador Hotel in New York, Williams wore a corduroy jacket and riding boots, which he cavalierly propped up on her yellow satin chaise longue. Hopkins, he wrote to his family, “raised the roof about her part in the play.” He added, “I think she wants to do a solo performance.” For most of the meeting, according to Webster, who was also present, Williams didn’t “seem much interested; once, when Miriam became a little vehement, he prefaced his reply with ‘As far as I can gather from all this hysteria,’ ” Webster recalled, adding, “This is known in the language of Variety as ‘a stoperoo.’ ” However, it didn’t stop Hopkins from jumping up, at one point, and shrieking, “ ‘I am old, I am tired, I am getting lines under my eyes!’ ” Williams, who admired Hopkins’s beauty and intelligence onstage, judged her “the most temperamental person I have ever met, a regular hellion.”

  By the time Battle of Angels opened, Hopkins had lived up to Williams’s judgment. She had fired three different Vals. Seriously concerned about the script, toward the end of the rehearsals she protested to Williams, “For heaven’s sake, do something, something!” “How it wrung my heart that I could do nothing for her,” Williams wrote. “She had staked so much on this play. It was to mark her triumphal return to the stage, where her talent as a dramatic actress could operate without the bonds that bad screen vehicles had recently put on her. . . . Oh, if only my head would clear up a little—if I could only find some lucid interval in this dervish frenzy that was sweeping us all unprepared into Boston and disaster!”

  Miriam Hopkins, star of Battle of Angels

  Battle of Angels had had only one day’s rehearsal in the theater before it opened. Added to “a not very satisfactory cast,” according to Webster, were the technical glitches of a complex production—the most bedeviling of which was the apocalyptic blaze at the finale, in which the dry-goods store is torched. Williams’s script only suggested, with the flourishing of a blowtorch, the conflagration that razed the store—the fire played as a representation of both mob violence and romantic purification. The Boston premiere, however, required the illusion of an actual blaze. At the technical rehearsal, at the last moment, when Val and Sandra exchange their final lines of dialogue before being consumed by the flames, there was a mere whiff of smoke. “The store would not, it absolutely would not, catch fire,” Webster recalled, adding, “After the final dress rehearsal the technical staff took solemn oaths on Bibles that it absolutely should catch fire, even if it meant self-immolation.”

  According to Williams’s account of the opening night, things went fairly well for the play until it became clear that a character, Vee, a mystic and painter, had portrayed Val as Jesus in one of her visionary canvasses. “Up and down the aisles the ladies and gentlemen began to converse with sibilant whispers,” Williams said. “Subdued hissings and clucking were punctuated now and then by the banging up of a seat.” At the finale, the over-primed smoke pots began to fill the stage with “great sulphurous billows” that “coiled over the footlights.” “Outraged squawks, gabbling, sputtering spread through all the front rows of the theatre,” Williams said. The torching of the store became “like the burning of Rome.”

  “To an already antagonistic audience this was sufficient to excite something in the way of pandemonium,” Williams said. The first six rows were filled with acrid smoke. Theater-goers fainted, panicked, and bolted for the exits “like heavy heedless cattle.” “Nothing that happened on the stage from then on was of any importance,” Williams said. The last poetic moments of catharsis between Val and Sandra went unheard. At the curtain call, according to Williams, Hopkins, “gallantly smiling and waving away the smoke with her delicate hand,” took her bow to the backs of the bolting audience. After the orchestra had emptied, Williams recalled some scattered applause issuing from the balcony.

  If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco, history does not record it. Battle of Angels set a kind of high-water mark for disaster. “The bright angels were pretty badly beaten in Boston,” Williams wrote to a friend. Even the audience in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1896, which booed Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull so loudly that the actors could not hear themselves speak, stayed to the finale to vent its hate. Williams left his opening night stunned and speechless, according to his friend, the poet William Jay Smith. “He appeared so suicidal that I could not leave him alone,” Smith recalled. Back at the hotel, Smith read the poems of John Donne to the disconsolate author for several hours.

  The next morning, Williams and Wood, already well aware of their public humiliation in the press—“The play gives the audience the sensation of having been dunked in mire” (Boston Globe)—crossed the Boston Common for a postmortem at the Ritz-Carlton with the producers and the production team. A young boy, brandishing a cap pistol, jumped into their path and fired at them. There was a sudden pop, “which seemed to us the roar of a cannon,” Wood recalled. Instinctively, Wood and Williams recoiled and clutched each o
ther. “It’s the Guild. They’re after me!” Williams said. “We both rocked with laughter because we knew in a few minutes it was all about to begin and there wasn’t time for anything other than laughter,” Wood recalled.

  At the meeting, the producers demanded major cuts; Williams handed them a rewrite of the final scene. “I will crawl on my belly through brimstone if you’ll substitute this,” he said. The Theatre Guild panjandrums, however, were not in the mood for promises. Lawrence Langner, one of the Guild’s directors, rambled on about the Guild being an art institution. “If we were not,” he said, “we would all be sunning ourselves in Florida . . . but since we continue to be art producers we are struggling in Boston with an unknown playwright.” Williams looked at Wood and giggled. Langner caught him at it. “At that moment,” Wood later wrote to Williams, “I realized whatever would befall you in the future you would hold your own and ‘whether the cup with sweet or bitter run’ you would stand up and take it. And by God you have—and do and will—continue.”

  But there was still more “bitter” for Williams to endure. The outraged word of mouth of Theatre Guild subscribers was that the play was dirty, a view that was reinforced by some of the newspaper critics. A member of the Boston City Council called the play “putrid” and demanded its closure, adding, “The police should arrest the persons responsible for bringing shows of this type to Boston.” The police commissioner demanded changes in the dialogue, which was thought to be “improper and indecent”; the assistant city censor, arguing that “too many of the lines have double meanings,” also threw his weight against the play. The odium around Battle of Angels reached as far afield as Williams’s hometown Mississippi newspaper, the Clarksdale Register, which slapped down its native son for writing “DIRT” and giving a false picture of the Delta.