Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  In mid-August, according to Williams, “a girl”—Shirley Brimberg, who as Shirley Clarke later became a famous documentary filmmaker—“entered the scene.” Williams was on the dunes with a group of artists that included another still-unknown cultural star, Jackson Pollock, when a solemn-looking Kiernan appeared with his bike. “Tenn, I have to talk to you,” he said. With Kip perched on the handlebars, Williams rode into Provincetown. “On the way in, with great care and gentleness, he told me that the girl who had intruded upon the scene had warned him that I was in the process of turning him homosexual and that he had seen enough of that world to know that he had to resist it, that it violated his being in a way that was unacceptable to him.” One morning soon afterward, upstairs in Kip’s room, Williams “made a horrible ass of myself—insulting a stupid little girl” (he hurled a riding boot at Brimberg, “missing her, but not intentionally”) “because she had been instrumental in my unhappiness. Felt quite unnerved, almost hysterical—silly! The whole mess has got to end now—”

  It did. “C’est fini,” Williams wrote in his diary on August 15. He was overcome by a despair that echoed down the decades to the annihilating impotence of his solitary childhood. “I can’t save myself. Somebody has got to save me,” he wrote. “I shall have to go through the world giving myself to people until somebody will take me.” The loss, he wrote, “threatens to wreck me completely.” Deracinated and embattled, he prayed to God: “You whoever you are—who takes care of those beyond caring for themselves—please make some little charitable provision for the next few days of Tennessee.” Back in Manhattan, he frequently spoke Kip’s name to his diary: “Oh, K.—if only—only—only.” “K.—dear K.—I love you with all my heart. Goodnight.” He saved his parting shot for his only written letter to Kip: “I hereby formally bequeath you to the female vagina, which vortex will inevitably receive you with or without my permission.”

  “Do you think I am making too much of Kip?” Williams asked the reader in a rhetorical line that was cut from Memoirs. “Well, you never saw him.” In a sense, Williams never stopped seeing Kip. At the time of their breakup, he wrote, “K., if you ever come back, I’ll never let you go. I’ll bind you to me with every chain that ingenuity of mortal love can devise!” Kip never came back (he married, then died of a brain tumor, in 1944, at the age of twenty-six); but through the alchemy of Williams’s stagecraft, in a sense, he also never went away.

  “Tennessee could not possess his own life until he had written about it,” Gore Vidal observed. “To start with, there would be, let us say, a sexual desire for someone. Consummated or not, the desire . . . would produce reveries. In turn, the reveries would be written down as a story. But should the desire still remain unfulfilled, he would make a play of the story and then—and this is why he was so compulsive a working playwright—he would have the play produced so he could, at relative leisure, like God, rearrange his original experience into something that was no longer God’s and unpossessable but his.” Vidal continued: “The sandy encounters with his first real love, a dancer on the beach at Provincetown, and the dancer’s later death (‘an awful flower grew in his brain’), instead of being forever lost, were forever his once they had been translated to the stage.”

  “For love I make characters,” William said. As well as being the subject of Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), Kip’s muscular outline informed the proportions and the sexual presence of many of the subsequent steamy male heroes that Williams called into the world. Val in Battle of Angels “has a fresh and primitive quality, a virile grace and freedom of body and a strong physical appeal”; John Buchanan in Summer and Smoke has the “fresh and shining look of an epic hero”; Alvaro in The Rose Tattoo “is one of those Mediterranean types that resemble glossy young bulls . . . has a massively sculptural torso”; Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is “still slim and firm as a boy”; and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, of course, needs no description—he is “the body electric” that Williams indirectly invoked in his farewell letter to Kip: “I love you (with a robust manly love, as Whitman would call it) as much as I love anybody.” Writing closed the circle of desire.

  ON THE REBOUND from Kip, Williams went on a sexual binge. In Mexico, he was raped by a handsome, powerful Mexican beach boy who swam out to his raft and later ravished him in his beach shack. “I screamed like a banshee and couldn’t sit down for a week,” he said. Back in Provincetown, there were rent-party orgies; and during his five-month stint at MGM, there were the blacked-out bushes on Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue, near where Williams was living. “I have just had an orgy with a Ganymede of 15 years exactly, met on the Palisades,” he wrote to Windham. “Moaned like a wounded bird pierced twice by the arrow of love, and I have just sent him home to get ahead of Mama who works on the swing-shift. If Saint Oscar wasn’t working with me this summer I would wind up not in Mexico but San Quentin.”

  On his sexual rounds that year, 1943, Williams was beaten up by sailors he’d taken to a room at the Hotel St. George. “Why do they strike us? What is our offence?” he wrote in his diary. But even this violence informed his heart. “Not that I like being struck,” he recorded a few days after the incident. “I hated it, but the keenness of the emotional situation, the material for art.”

  Sexuality brought Williams down to earth and into life. “What do you expect to get from this sort of life?” Stanley asks Blanche about her promiscuity, in the first version of Streetcar. “Just life,” she says. Sexuality also called all absolutes into question. “The truth of the matter is that all human ideals have been hats too big for the human head,” Williams wrote in his diary in 1942. “Chivalry—democracy—christianity—The Hellenic ideal of Intellectual purity (the one I find most appealing)—all too big a hat!”

  Desire brought Williams to a new place and to a new sense of his own literary power. Summer and Smoke and Streetcar picked up the story of Williams’s psychic evolution where The Glass Menagerie left off. (The Glass Menagerie broadcast William’s invented romantic self—a seeker of truth and “companions.” In the opening speech, the adult Tom Wingfield boasts that he has “tricks in my pocket”; though the play only hints at it, sex is clearly one of them.) Through the characters of Alma and then Blanche—who in an early draft is “charged with plenty of that blue juice which is the doves of Aphrodite’s or anyone’s car!”—Williams brought his own promiscuity and the forces that drove it into the center of the drama. “She tries to explain her life to him but he can see only the details of promiscuity, not the underlying panic and need for protection which had forced this upon her,” Williams wrote of Blanche, in his first description of the play to Audrey Wood on March 23, 1945.

  In 1941, Williams was shocked to hear Oliver Evans, a poet and professor of English whom he’d met in Provincetown and who would become one of his lifelong friends and traveling companions, say, “We ought to be exterminated for the good of society.” Williams reported the “sad but poignant” episode to his diary. “If you think we are dangerous, why do you act as you do? Why do you not isolate yourself?” he asked Evans. “Because I am rotten,” Evans replied. “How many of us feel that way, I wonder?” Williams wrote. “Bear this intolerable burden of guilt? To feel some humiliation and a great deal of sorrow at times is inevitable. But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance.”

  In his writing, Williams defended himself against Evans’s kind of guilt and shame by turning sexuality into a kind of theology. Even as he was embarking on his discipleship to the carnal, in 1942, he intuited that the experience of war would force Americans to find a new faith beyond self-sacrifice. “What are we doing, we people who put words together, who project our shadows on stages,” he wrote to the acclaimed German director Erwin Piscator, whose first playwriting seminar at the New School Williams had attended. “But trying to crea
te a new and solid myth—or faith—or religion—in place of the old and desiccated and fruitless one of ‘simple endurance’?” The self-aggrandizement that Piscator had criticized in Battle of Angels when he and Williams met for the second time in 1942—“Mr. Williams, you have written a Fascist play—all of your characters are selfishly pursuing their little personal ends and aims in life with a ruthless disregard for the wrongs and sufferings of the world around them”—was actually a portrait of Williams’s “underground devils” and of the “naked and savage kinds of creation” required to trap them onstage. The “vast hunger for life after all this death” that Williams had predicted to William Saroyan in 1941 had taken hold; Williams invested the “long fingers” of desire with a sense of the divine. He referred to his own sexual spree as a “daemon,” a divinity. Williams’s characters, too, embodied the gospel of the flesh; in the process, devils became angels.

  In Battle of Angels, his first attempt to set out the tenets of his new romantic gospel, Val, who is “too selfish for love,” is burned to death for his sexuality, which nonetheless revives the community of Two Rivers, Mississippi. As Williams began to question the old myth of salvation—the epigram to Summer and Smoke is from Rilke: “Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me / among the angelic orders?”—he replaced it with a new one in which salvation is based on the unlearning of Christian principle. His plays function in a world where the credo is libido. “Probably the greatest difference in the world is the difference between being fucked and well-fucked,” he wrote in 1943.

  In Summer and Smoke, John Buchanan, the little devil of the prologue, grows up to be a big one, but one “unmarked by the dissipations in which he relieves his demoniac unrest.” Gambling, drinking, womanizing, the young doctor Buchanan is all romantic excess, elevating the ungovernable and the unconscious to the level of heroism: “a Promethean figure, brilliantly and restlessly alive in a stagnant society.” Buchanan, who refers to prayer as “worn-out magic,” tells the pious Alma, “It’s yet to be proven that anyone on this earth is crowned with so much glory as the one that uses his senses to get all he can in the way of—satisfaction.” “Self-satisfaction?” she asks. Buchanan replies, “What other kind is there.” Alma, of course, embodies Christian self-sacrifice and has all the attendant faith in transcendence—“the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach.” To her, Buchanan has been blessed with “all the gifts of the gods . . . but all he cares about is indulging his senses!” Waste, it turns out, is an issue both for her and for him. “I should have been castrated!” Buchanan says at one low point, admitting to Alma later, “I’m more afraid of your soul than you’re afraid of my body.”

  Williams resolves the situation with a reversal of manners. The repressed Alma eventually gives herself over to the spontaneous and the ungovernable in her own nature—she finds a place for wildness in her life—while Buchanan, who becomes dedicated to his medical calling, is converted to Alma’s spiritual rigor. “I came here to tell you that being a gentleman, doesn’t seem so important to me any more, but you’re telling me I’ve got to remain a lady,” she says, laughing “rather violently.” “The tables have turned with a vengeance.”

  The argument between indulgence and commitment, sensuality and soul is precisely the argument Williams was having with himself during these years. Sex was disruptive; the pull toward pleasure—a state demonstrated by Stella’s “narcotized tranquility” in Streetcar—was a push away from refinement and mission. Sexuality, Williams knew, could disrupt the mind and derail the will. “I cannot create,” he wrote in his diary. “I am mentally torpid. And I do not seem to care very much. Perhaps it is the excessive sexual activity. Perhaps I have really burned my daemon out.” He added, “I must find purity again. A whole undivided heart. Something simple and straight. A passionate calm. . . . Am I still looking for God? No—just for myself.” In a letter to Hazan, he wrote, “I pray for the strength to be separate, to be austere. That is the best future for me—asceticism and consecrated work. But remember what an animal I am!” He went on, “I have started off on a rather disciplinary regime. Only one or two drinks a day, when very low, and a calm endurance of moods instead of a mad flight into intoxication and social distraction. When I feel like writing a little poem, instead I sit down and labor away on a long play. It is tedious to me for some reason . . . the animal in me rebels against it and wants to do little, diverting things, such as sentimental lyrics or things about sex. But I see now that to grow or even to survive I must practice more discipline with myself and I am resolved to do this.”

  Alma Winemiller (Margaret Phillips) giving a valedictory salute in the 1948 Broadway premiere of Summer and Smoke

  Alma Winemiller’s spiritual turnabout is a simulacrum of Williams’s own. Alma, like Williams, had engineered an escape from “the cage of Puritanism.” Once she has cast off her parents and the rectory, the serenity she finds is not the peace of heaven but the bliss of pickups and pills. “The prescription number is 96814,” she says at the finale. “I think of it as the telephone number of God!” In Williams’s renovated consciousness, revelation is gratification. The body is spiritualized: offering the promise of a communion that brings resurrection in the flesh, not the afterlife. “And still our blood is sacred,” he wrote in “Iron Is the Winter.” “To the mouth / the tongue of the beloved is holy bread.”

  By the time Williams returned to New Orleans at the end of 1945—“I need a soft climate and softer people,” he wrote in his diary—his sexual landscape had become as dramatic as his interior one. “N.Y. holds me only by the balls, but that is sometimes a hard hold to break. There is so much sex there,” he wrote to Donald Windham. “I was running quite a little establishment at the Shelton, what with Oliver’s raids on the steam room and the bar and my own chicken run. That part was hard to relinquish for I—alas—am not yet ready to forswear all fleshly attachments. However N.O.L.A. is not strictly celibate.”

  Still, his promiscuity quickly dissipated in favor of a relationship, with his new partner, Pancho Rodriguez. “Our friendship was more spiritual than sexual,” Rodriguez recalled. “It was like two broken down people trying to survive and help each other.” Pancho was “the rare and beautiful stranger” for whom Williams had longed since the breakup with Kip. “I don’t think he was disappointed,” Rodriguez said. “I was very handsome then. . . . I had a lot of charm then and a lot of charisma.” He added, “My behavior was very good socially, up to the point that I would drink so much. But I always had the intelligence of walking out of a place before I would be criticized. Nobody saw me drunk after midnight.”

  Like Williams, Pancho was something of a vagabond and a lost soul. “I was a casualty of war,” Rodriguez said. “I had wanderlust in me.” He served for four years with the Army Corps, some of that time in the South Pacific. “Right in the thick of it,” Williams told Margo Jones. “Then he was let out of the army without an honorable discharge simply because he had a spell of confusion and talked too trustingly to an officer about it. So he has nothing to show for what he went through, and none of the G.I. compensations, which I think is an outrage.” Rodriguez’s oldest sister played the piano in her band at the La Luna Night Club—a Spanish watering hole—in New Orleans; when she promised to find him work, he moved there. Not long after he arrived, Pancho ran into Williams. “It was not until I met him that I sort of settled down,” Rodriguez said. “I had a sense of irresponsibility to myself. I wanted to do something very constructive, but something kept me from doing it.”

  Contending with Pancho kept Williams from being overwhelmed by his own craziness. When drunk, Pancho could be violent; but he also made Williams’s life exciting, bringing out, as Williams said, “the bright side of myself.” A cardboard record they made in New Orleans preserved their affectionate playfulness:

  Tennessee: This is Vanilla Williams interviewing Princess Rodriguez who just arrived here from Monterey. . . . Have you gotten around mu
ch yet?

  Pancho: Ah, yes I have, Vanilla. I have gotten around. I’ve been cruising on Canal Street, you know.

  Tennessee: Oh, honey, get off Canal Street. Miss Canal Street is no good. You should get on Miss Royal or Miss Bourbon. You should get to Personality Bar. That’s the place for new girls.

  Pancho: The Personality Bar?

  Tennessee: Yes, ma’am. . . . Princess Rodriguez, you get your ass up to the Personality Bar. That’s where the queens all carry little ladies—twenty-two pistols to protect themselves against dirt.

  Pancho: I know, but I have a personality already. I don’t want to go there.

  Tennessee: Well, honey, you’ll shine there. That’s the place for you.

  Pancho: How about L’Affiche?

  Tennessee: L’Affiche is elegant, honey. That’s piss-elegant. That’s this elegant business. Now, you don’t want to be this elegant business, do you?

  “Well bred people find it difficult to break out of their shell of good-breeding. They live constantly under wraps,” Williams said. Pancho embodied Williams’s deliberate regression. By the standards of Williams’s refined upbringing, Pancho was trash. Williams had aligned himself with the pagan and the redemption of the instinctual, which, like the cool water Alma mentions at the finale of Summer and Smoke, “comes from deep underground.” Decades later Williams told Studs Terkel that Alma “was willing—when she gave up her great love—she was finally willing to settle for an attractive salesman.” Williams was also speaking of himself.

  Pancho was his attractive salesman. A man-child of twenty-five, Pancho was sensual, explosive, jealous, unlettered, and primitive. Pancho’s frequent and fantastic misdoings filled Williams’s life with sensational melodrama. “All of my nights with Pancho, and many of my days, in those days when he was so fond of fire-water, were inclined toward a great deal of wildness,” Williams wrote in the original manuscript of Memoirs, changing Pancho to “Santo” in the published version because he was “sort of an off-beat saint.” “At first I entertained him in my apartment only two or three evenings a week but he decided to move in and in he moved and that was the end of my social success in New Orleans.”