Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  With coffee at work

  Onto the facts of Eyre de Lanux’s situation Williams projected his own psychic reality. Mrs. Stone, who has retired from the stage and who has hit the unnerving milestone of fifty (Williams was approaching forty), is acutely aware of loss—loss of beauty, talent, career, and direction. She feels “stopped” and finds herself taking refuge in the consoling beauty of Rome, “leading an almost posthumous existence.” She, like Williams, is obsessed with the diminution of her magic: “Mrs. Stone knew it. She did not fail to discover this creeping attrition and to do everything in her power to compensate for it by increased exercise of skill.” When she is buttonholed by a bossy American female friend who is appalled by her promiscuous ways and who tells her that “you can’t retire from an art,” Mrs. Stone replies, “You can when you finally discover you had no talent for it.” Like Williams, who referred to himself that winter as a “wounded gladiator,” Mrs. Stone saw her career as a perpetual battle, a competitive slog driven by the infantile desire to be “King On The Mountain”:

  Scrambling, pushing, kicking and scratching had been replaced by ostensibly civilized tactics. But Mrs. Stone’s arrival at the height of her profession, and her heroic tenacity with which she held that position against all besieging elements or persons, with the sole exception of time, could not fail to impress Mrs. Stone as having a parallel to the childhood game on the terrace. At certain unguarded moments, those moments when the cultivated adult self . . . receives a transmission from its original, natural being, she had intercepted the inner whisper of these exultant words: I am still King On The Mountain!

  Mrs. Stone’s surname indicated the gravity of her retreat from that battle. “Security is a kind of death,” Williams had written in 1947. A theatrical workhorse who has put herself out to pasture, she finds herself with financial freedom, thanks to her late husband, but no purpose. “Being purposeless was like being drunk,” Williams writes. “She was free to drift for hours in no particular direction.” Deprived of output and acclaim—the hubbub of success that once surrounded her—Mrs. Stone is overwhelmed by intimations of emptiness.

  She had been continually occupied with more things than a single existence seemed sufficient to hold, and for that reason, the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward from its orbit, Mrs. Stone was removed for a long time from the void she circled. . . . Mrs. Stone knew, in her heart, that she was turning boldly inward from the now slackened orbit, turning inward and beginning now, to enter the space enclosed by the path of passionate flight. . . . And being a person of remarkable audacity, she moved inward with her violet eyes wide open, asking herself, in her heart, what she would find as she moved? Was it simply a void, or did it contain some immaterial force that still might save as well as it might destroy her?

  Paolo, the perfectly formed young Italian hustler who picks up Mrs. Stone, is for her a kind of unexplored territory. Seeing him undressed and sunning himself on a cot beside her, Mrs. Stone “could not bear to look at him. He was too lustrous.” Her marriage with the late Mr. Stone was essentially asexual: “Their marriage, in its beginning, had come very close to disaster because of sexual coldness, amounting to aversion, on her part, and a sexual awkwardness, amounting to impotence, on his,” Williams writes, describing how the marriage would have broken up had not Mr. Stone broken down and “wept on her breast like a baby, and in this way transferred his position from that of unsuccessful master to that of pathetic dependent.” Williams goes on, “Through his inadequacy Mr. Stone had allowed them both to discover what both really wanted, she an adult child, and he a living and young and adorable mother.”

  The fillip of emotional substitution lent longevity to the Stones’ marriage; it also invested the relationship with a ghostly quality—desires were unspoken and loneliness was disguised behind a performance of civility, in which “they exchanged their eagerly denying smiles at each other and their reassuring light speeches.” Until her Roman spring—a time that coincides with her menopause—Mrs. Stone enacted seduction onstage; her sexuality, however, was dormant. (In the tentative play outline on which the novella was based, Williams wrote, “Her effort to express a tenderness is . . . difficult. For scenes like this she always has lines memorized!”) Like Edwina Williams, with her Puritan terror of the flesh, Mrs. Stone associated sex with dread; menopause puts an end to that:

  What she felt, now, was desire without the old, implicit distraction of danger. Nothing could happen, now, but desire, and its possible gratification. . . . It had been the secret dread in her, the unconscious will not to bear. That dread was now withdrawn.

  This sudden liberty accounts for her “emotional anarchy” with Paolo. In the game of cat and mouse that she and Paolo play, Mrs. Stone refuses to be the aggressor; she is flirtatious but not active. “Mrs. Stone knew, as well as Paolo knew it, that to become the aggressor in a relationship is to forsake an advantage,” Williams writes. “She, too, had once held the trump card of beauty. . . . Her social manner and procedure were still based upon its possession. She showed as plainly as Paolo that she was more used to receive than to offer courtship.” Paolo’s fecklessness is intentionally confounding: “I will call you in the morning, he would say, or ‘I will pick you up for cocktails.’ Rarely anything at a fixed point on the clock. Sometimes he failed to appear at all.” Nonetheless, the mercurial behavior inspired Mrs. Stone’s “incontinent longings,” an auto-erotic thrill in which absence created the currency of desire.

  Mrs. Stone’s pining for the elusive Paolo offered Williams a fictional situation onto which he could project his own agitated emotions. Mrs. Stone’s complaint about Paolo was also Williams’s about Merlo: “When we’re alone together you’re so lazy and sulky that you’ll barely talk, but the moment you find yourself in front of a crowd, you light up.” Merlo’s temperamental scenes—his walk-outs, his walkabouts, his vituperative rants—as well as his occasional good moods, were duly noted in Williams’s diary. “Frankie and I have been happy lately in Rome,” Williams noted on May 30. “I am particularly glad that he is.” The jealousy, the frustration, the adoration, the lust, even the peace offerings of Williams’s relationship found their way into Mrs. Stone’s story. “Stai tranquillo”—the words with which Mrs. Stone calmed herself after Paolo’s bad behavior—were the same words Williams addressed to himself when exasperated with Merlo. He wrote in his notebook on May 29:

  I love F.—deeply, tenderly, unconditionally. I think I love with every bit of my heart, not with the wild, disorderly, terrified passion I had for K[ip] that brilliant little summer of 1940. But doesn’t this finally add up to more? If it doesn’t it is only because of the mutations—time—in me.

  But it is amazing that I who’ve become so calm and contained about other matters could feel as much as I do when F. is sleeping beside me. If only I could give F. something beside clothes and travel—something that would add to the content of heart and life, make a difference in his state of being. If he left me, and perhaps he will, I would go on living and enduring and I suppose turn him into a poem as I’ve done with others. But the poem is already there in his actual presence—Enough. I said to Paul [Bowles] “I am afraid it will end badly.”—Will it? The best way is to let everything alone—as it is—accept—and give—stai tranquillo.

  For both Williams and his fictional alter ego, a world without love was a dark, vacant place, but also a probability. Throughout Mrs. Stone’s passionate pursuit of Paolo, she herself is stalked—by a man who vaguely resembles him. (He is “somewhat taller than Paolo, but of the same general type.”) At the opening of the story, the man is just a handsome, threadbare, stealthy figure standing hunched near the Spanish Steps, looking up at Mrs. Stone’s palazzo terrace, who seems “to be waiting to receive a signal of some kind.” Over the course of the story, the shadowy figure takes on an aura of menace. Staring into a shop window, Mrs. Stone sees his reflection and hears him peeing behind her. Later, in another chance encounter, the
anonymous man exposes himself to her. A predatory figure, an apparition of anonymity and the negative, he at first causes Mrs. Stone to flee. However, by the end of the story, after she has violently broken off her affair with Paolo, Mrs. Stone wanders alone in her large apartment, overwhelmed by the imminence of nothingness—“Nothing could not be allowed to go on and on and on like this!” she thinks.

  Action is the antidote to angst; Mrs. Stone, for the first time, becomes an agent of her own desire. On the terrace of her apartment, she feels something stir inside her. “It was nothing that she had planned or wanted to happen, and yet she was making it happen,” Williams writes. Her stalker—the man waiting for a signal outside—now receives one. Mrs. Stone wraps her apartment keys in a handkerchief and throws them down to him. The gesture is a semaphore of absence: emptiness beckoning nonentity. With this histrionic gesture, the tale also becomes a parable of “the occult reasons” of Williams’s heart, the knowing that “does not need to be conscious knowing.” The figure, who stoops to pick up the keys, is not described as a person; he is an “it” rather than a “he.” “It looked up at her,” Williams writes, “with a single quick jerk of the head, and even now it was moving out of sight, not away from her but towards her.”

  The story leaves Mrs. Stone on the brink of an embrace. “Yes, in a few minutes now, the nothingness would be interrupted, the awful vacancy would be entered by something,” she says, in the penultimate paragraph. In seizing the moment, Mrs. Stone is also reclaiming the fantasy of her lost love. The encounter holds out the prospect of both emotional survival and self-destruction. “Look, I’ve stopped the drift!” she says in the story’s ambiguous last line. By throwing the keys down to a menacing, anonymous figure, she does what Williams did from the stage: she shares herself—puts herself at risk—with her audience by inviting it in. “I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you,” Williams’s spokesman Chance Wayne says to the audience in the final lines of Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). A decade earlier, Mrs. Stone asked for the same thing.

  ON JUNE 21, 1949, with a draft of his novella finished, Williams sent Wood an eight-page outline for “Stornello.” It was a project into which he’d “wandered,” he told Kazan and his wife, “simply because it seemed to demand so much less of me.” Like Mrs. Stone, the landscape of “Stornello” was defined by loss. The heroine, Pepina, a widowed Sicilian seamstress, “idolizes” her late husband, Rosario. Her house is “practically his shrine.” To drive home Rosario’s absence, the family Parrott frequently calls out Pepina’s name “in the voice of the dead husband.” The synopsis goes on: “Pepina wishes the Parrott would die . . . it never forgets how Rosario used to call.” Neither does Pepina, who for eight years has not “felt the coarse fingers of a man on her matronly flesh.” Her house has become an extension of her own petrified puritanical will, a sort of barricade around her desires. Just as she has locked herself away, Pepina has incarcerated her daughter, Rose, in order to protect the lovelorn teenager from the sailor with whom she’s infatuated. (“To say she is fallen in love is an understatement,” Williams writes. “She is transported with ‘the awakening ardors of adolescence!’ ”) Rose ends the standoff and wins her release by threatening to kill herself with a butcher’s knife.

  Into this arena of hysterical repression comes Umberto, “a young bull of a man: swarthy, powerful—Dionysian!” Like Rosario, Umberto is a truck driver, a brawler; even his build resembles Rosario’s. He is, in other words, Rosario’s double. At first sight, Pepina “blinks at him with an incredulous gaze,” as if she had seen a ghost. For all extents and purposes, she has. Umberto literally and figuratively steps into Rosario’s shoes. Like the figure who resembled Paolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Umberto is a stand-in for the woman’s real object of desire. Briefly, he holds the promise of some kind of emotional salvation. He finds Pepina “molto simpatico.” He is warm, “tremendously understanding,” and immediately at home. Eager to be helpful, he unwittingly subverts Pepina’s closed-off world. He is an agent first of disenchantment (he confirms a rumor of Rosario’s infidelity), then of disruption. After a night with Pepina, he drunkenly comes upon Rose asleep on the living-room sofa and gropes her. Nothing survives the emotional chaos of that clownish encounter. Umberto is driven out; Rose rushes to her romantic destiny with the sailor; Pepina batters the Parrott cage. Disabused of everything but the sure knowledge of her unfathomable desire, she is left alone. At the finale, she “crawls sobbing to the Madonna: as the light fades, her prayer becomes audible.”

  Neither Pepina nor Williams seemed able to find a path beyond endurance to grace, a failing that disappointed Kazan and his wife when they read Williams’s synopsis in July. “My efforts to make it sound lively made it sound cheap,” Williams wrote them, “but in the character of Pepina there was a lostness which I could feel and write about with reality, and would have, if I wrote it.” Although Williams valued ruthless criticism—“Honesty about failure is the only help for it”—the negative response sent him into a tailspin. In his diary, the same day, he wrote:

  Approaching a crisis.

  Kazan’s letter—the dissolution of play project—

  Nerves—the fear of talking—society almost intolerable.

  Nervous impotence,

  Concern over F.

  Bodily weakness—fatigue—sloth.

  Tonight barely strength to hold this pencil.

  Merlo continued to be as capricious in life as Williams’s “illogical phantoms” were on the page. The night of his near collapse, Williams wrote, “Left F. at theatre with ‘his gang.’ Came home alone under influence (waning) of a seconal taken right after supper. Something has to break soon.—Hope not me.” A few days later, he confided to his diary, “Saw Frank only in morning—He disappeared before I got back tonight—first time we haven’t dined together in Rome.” He added, “Nerves quieter but the trauma is there. And work remains useless.” Still, there were nights, duly noted, when “the nightingales sang very sweetly for Frank and I.”

  While Williams worried about the outcome of his relationship, Hollywood was worrying about the outcome of The Glass Menagerie. Warner Brothers sent for Williams. “They say they don’t want a fairy-tale ending but there is evidence of double-talk,” Williams wrote ruefully to Laughlin on August 17. He went on, “At least I should learn something more about the technique of film-making which I can use creatively on some other assignment perhaps over here. I am on excellent terms with Rossellini and De Sica and Visconti and would enjoy working with any one of them. Last week had supper with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini. Their ‘Fuck you’ attitude toward the outraged women’s clubs and sob-columnists is very beautiful and should have a salutary affect on discrediting those infantile moralists that make it so hard for anyone to do honest work and live honestly in the States.”

  Before leaving Rome in late August 1949, for emotional and literary luck Williams threw coins into the Trevi Fountain. His departure from Europe was full of the anxiety of failure; his return to America was full of the excitement of success. In New York, Wood greeted him with the news that Hollywood had agreed in principle to a lush deal for the screen rights to A Streetcar Named Desire. At a time when the average yearly income was $2,100, Williams would get half a million dollars, plus a percentage of the film’s profits.

  Almost instantly, Williams’s drift was transformed into direction. In the first week of September, he and Merlo rolled into Hollywood and into its carefully orchestrated world of blandishments and ballyhoo. As a preemptive measure, to bolster her skittish client during the Menagerie script conferences, Wood had written ahead to the director George Cukor to ask that he show Williams some hospitality. “I always feel Tennessee is bound to be in a happier, safer frame of mind if you have your good eye on him,” she said. “I think you will find him in the Bel-Air. If not he will be at the Beverly Hills hotel. If he isn’t in either place, call me and we will searc
h America together.” Wood needn’t have worried. Warner Brothers escorted Williams around Los Angeles like the goose who had laid a Fabergé egg.

  Amid the low-hanging sycamores and the bougainvillea of the Hotel Bel-Air, he lounged in a three-room Spanish-style bungalow, with a pool just outside his front door. A rented Buick convertible was at his disposal. And Warner Brothers threw him an A-list black-tie party at the swank Chaunticlair—“like a wet dream of Louella Parsons’s,” Williams joked to Kazan. Williams and Merlo had arrived early, in rented white dinner jackets that made them look more like waiters than grandees. The maître d’ barred them from entering. Charles Feldman—the film producer of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—“who was arranging place cards . . . rushed over to make amends,” Wood recalled. She added, “Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood of the forties was there that night. Dear Hedda and dear Louella, David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner, phalanxes of leading men and ladies.” Williams was given his first solid-gold cigarette case, lovingly inscribed by management. With a mixture of amusement and awe, he moved through the surreal spectacle among large ice statues of animals, which melted and flooded the floor. He saw his name in blue letters inside an illuminated block of ice. “The deeper you go into this dream-kingdom, the more fantastic it becomes,” Williams told Kazan. “I expect to meet the Red Duchess or the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter at any moment.”