Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Nonetheless, Magnani was fearful of going onstage before the American public. “For an actor, one’s language is like a flag,” she told Williams. “In the movie studios, you can repeat a phrase, you can shoot a scene again, there are systems for correcting the sound. At night you know what you did during the day. In the theater, on Broadway, I would be alone in front of a demanding audience.” Magnani’s extravagant personality came with extravagant terms; she wanted “almost complete control over everything.” To grant her this for a theatrical production would have been both impractical and unwise. From their brief encounter, Williams came away feeling that “it would be very easy to get her to do the picture,” but not the play.

  Whatever progress Williams felt he had made by befriending Magnani was stalled on August 12, when “the long dalliance with Gadg” came to an abrupt end. “Tell Tennessee how badly I feel about it, which I do,” Kazan wrote to Wood, rejecting the play that his notes had been so crucial in salvaging. Williams gave up the idea of a fall opening. The script, he understood, still needed work. “If Gadg were available it might be worth risking,” he wrote to Wood and Crawford, urging them to postpone scheduling the play. “He can do magic with fairly commonplace writing. Who else can? I feel as hurt as you must about his apparent dereliction—not resentful, but undeniably hurt!” As he sailed back to the United States, on September 1, Williams had no leading lady, no director, and, after eighteen months, no final script. “On the sea, returning. To what?” he wrote in his notebook.

  “I STILL BELIEVE that the flat stretches in the play will ultimately come to life, that I will eventually have a period of real stimulation again when I can do warm, spontaneous work that will suddenly illuminate the script where it is now like dusty glass,” he wrote that August. Between September and December of 1950, shuttling between New York, Los Angeles, and Key West, Williams rediscovered both his form and his equilibrium. Like Pepina, he made it through his impasse. James Laughlin, an honest broker when it came to the assessment of Williams’s writing, declared himself “very impressed with it in certain ways.” “The characters . . . move like veritable express trains through events more dramatic than those in plain and ordinary lives. . . . They are souped up, so to speak,” he wrote to Williams, placing the play “in the romantic, not the classical tradition . . . where passion rules and not reason.” He went on, “There are fewer of those beautiful poetic lines in this work. You probably know that. You probably intended it. More is done with motion and less with reverie. The wonderful dreaming quality of Menagerie is not here. But there is no reason that it should be. . . . You are breaking here into new ground.”

  The streamlined final draft of The Rose Tattoo had little in common with the kitchen-sink version. Gone were the symbolism, the moralizing, the indigestible Italian dialogue, the unfocused subsidiary characters, the scenic and verbal filigree of naturalism. The storytelling sparkled with a new impressionism, a theatrical shorthand in which Williams’s familiar lyricism was not purely verbal but lay in his orchestration of the visual with the verbal. As Kazan had suggested, The Rose Tattoo became about the unlocking of the widow’s frozen heart. Williams balanced the operatic passion of his widow (now named Serafina) with the tortured awareness of his stalled life, giving the widow a compelling new dimension. As a result, the play became a comic anatomy of Williams’s own melancholy. Serafina, her cloistered daughter, and the idealized memory of her faithless husband were all drawn from the bewildering mad scenes of Williams’s childhood: his mother’s fainting fits, her terrified screams during sex, her Puritan strictures, her delusional grandiosity, his sister’s knife-toting desperation and frustrated carnal longings, his father’s womanizing, and his own incarceration in a grief-struck house were motifs rewoven into the final tale.

  Serafina’s second chance at life, with the uncouth Mangiacavallo, was also a slapstick simulacrum of Williams’s relationship with Merlo. In the name of comedy, Williams steered the final version past heartache to an intimation of wholeness. “The heart should have a permanent harbor, but one that it sails out of now and again,” he told Kazan at the time, adding, “Thank God Frank understands about that, and I can still do it sometimes.” The play now incorporated both halves of Williams’s romantic equation for happiness. Its debate was between Serafina, an ascetic hysteric who splits off from her erotic self and who sexualizes virtue, and Rosa, who fights free of her mother to pursue her carnal desire. “You wild, wild crazy thing, you—with the eyes of your—father,” Serafina tells Rosa, when she arrives home from her graduation with her sailor-boyfriend, Jack Hunter, in tow. At the ceremony, in addition to her diploma, Rosa has been awarded “The Digest of Knowledge.” For Williams, the royal road to knowledge was sexuality—an avenue that Serafina tries to block as much for her daughter as for herself.

  Sex is inseparable from a sense of life and of loss. In her morbid isolation, Serafina tolerates neither. For three years, she has locked herself away with her husband’s ashes and her daughter. (Rosa’s clothes are temporarily stashed away so that she can’t go out, and are surrendered only at the last minute so that she can go to her graduation.) Serafina is sexually and psychologically suspended. Her real erotic relationship, Williams makes clear, is with absence. “To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion,” she tells the local priest. “Now I lie on it with dreams, with memories only!” She’s “a female ostrich,” one petulant customer observes in passing. Her abiding passion, it turns out, is a passion for ignorance. Instead of making love, Serafina makes scenes: her “slovenly deshabille,” the stage directions read, “is both comic and shocking.” She makes a spectacle of her own retreat from life by drawing attention to her grief and to her ghostliness. “Are you in there, Mama?” Rosa asks, calling into her mother’s room from the parlor. “No, no, no I’m not,” Serafina says from within. “I’m dead and buried!” At the beginning and end of the kitchen-sink version, Williams had imposed a “spectral rose”: “Above the tin roof we see again the faint apparition of the rose between two curved hands.” Now, instead of this external imposition of the ghostly, Serafina’s hauntedness emerges directly from her own hysterical erotic imaginings.

  Although Rosario never appears—his death and Serafina’s subsequent miscarriage are offstage events—Serafina makes a permanent presence out of his memory. She idolizes Rosario’s hair, his chest, his lovemaking; she counts the number of nights—four thousand three hundred and eighty—that they spent together in their twelve-year marriage. “Each time is the first time with him,” she says. “Time doesn’t pass.” Her identification with Rosario takes her to the brink of mysticism. On the day of their second child’s conception, she swears, Rosario’s rose tattoo appeared on her own breast—with “a pain like a needle, quick little stitches.” The tattoo plays as a sort of stigmata—a hysterical manifestation not of Jesus but of her husband, whom Serafina has turned into a kind of household god. When she first lays eyes on Mangiacavallo, she is suddenly seized by a similar kind of supernatural identification. “Serafina stares at the truck driver, her eyes like a somnambule’s. All at once she utters a low cry and seems about to fall,” the stage directions read. When Mangiacavallo walks into her life, he is crying over a fracas with a salesman. Serafina starts crying, too. “I always cry—when somebody else is crying,” she says.

  Eli Wallach sporting Alvaro Mangiacavallo’s rose tattoo

  Mangiacavallo is another of Williams’s primitives—a rambunctious handsome man with disarming appetites and a fierce immediacy. As the agent of lightness, and, therefore, of comedy, he is also vulnerable, down to earth, and honest. Unlike Rosario, with his vaunted patrician lineage, Mangiacavallo is spectacularly un-pedigreed (“the grandson of the village idiot,” he says) and un-propertied (“Love and affection is what I got to offer”). He is at home in himself—and in Serafina’s home. “You are simpatico, molto,” he tells Serafina when they first meet. Psychologically speaking, Mangiacavallo is everything that Serafina is not. He flows, she is
stuck; he is open, she is closed; she refuses loss, he accepts it as part of the comedy of life. “I like everything that a woman does with her heart,” he tells Serafina. Inevitably, as the stage directions instruct, there is a “profound unconscious response” between them. As Mangiacavallo becomes increasingly Rosario’s double—he even gets a rose tattooed on his chest—Serafina’s atrophied heart is gradually resuscitated. Mangiacavallo’s pragmatism punctures her grandiosity. He is present when she learns the name of Rosario’s mistress, a blackjack dealer at a local casino, whom Serafina sets off to stab with a kitchen knife. Mangiacavallo literally and figuratively disarms her. Serafina smashes Rosario’s funeral urn, then later that night sleeps with Mangiacavallo. But whom is Serafina really bedding? The still-virginal Rosa and Jack, coming home in the early hours from the graduation festivities, overhear Serafina in the bedroom:

  SERAFINA: (from inside the house) “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!”

  JACK: (springing up, startled) What’s that?

  ROSA: (resentfully) Oh! That’s Mama dreaming about my father.

  The joke, which seems to be on the innocent Rosa, turns out to be on us. In a rubber-legged tableau of lust—“the scene should be played with the pantomimic lightness, almost fantasy, of an early Chaplin comedy,” the stage directions say—the Spumanti-swigging Mangiacavallo emerges shirtless from Serafina’s bedroom the next morning only to crouch over the sofa and ogle the sleeping figure of Rosa. “Che bel-la, che bel-la!” he whispers on his knees, staring at her “like a child peering into a candy shop window.” His whispered words wake Rosa. Her screams at the sight of a stranger set in motion a whole series of farcical effects: Mangiacavallo falls on his back in shock; Serafina enters in her nightgown and lunges at him “like a great bird, tearing and clawing at his stupefied figure.”

  Despite his protestations of love, Mangiacavallo is driven out of the house. In the ensuing face-off with her daughter, Serafina lies to her (“I don’t know how he got in”), which breaks the spell of maternal authority. Rosa understands what’s going on; as in all fairytales, disenchantment sets her free. Rosa goes off to find Jack, who is on his way to New Orleans to join his ship, but not before a cruel argument. In the fracas, “abandoning all pretence,” Serafina speaks an intimate truth to her daughter. “Oh cara, cara!” she says. “He was Sicilian; he had rose oil in his hair and the rose tattoo of your father. In the dark room I couldn’t see his clown face. I closed my eyes and dreamed that he was your father.” Although she can’t meet her daughter’s eyes as she leaves, they give each other their blessings. “How beautiful—is my daughter! Go to the boy!” Serafina tells her. Rosa, as she exits, tells Serafina that Mangiacavallo didn’t touch her.

  In his notes to Williams about the ending of the kitchen-sink version, Kazan had laid down to Williams what amounted to a theatrical gauntlet. “I was very surprised at the ending,” he wrote. “Its main spirit up till then seemed to be in praise of life, and its sensual, undying base. Then comes the two women kneeling and gathering the ashes. That beat hell out of me.” At the finale of the kitchen-sink version, Rosario’s mistress, Estelle, stands nervously outside the door, returning to tell Pepina that Rosario had broken things off with her on the night he died. By having Pepina beckon Estelle inside the house to join in sweeping up Rosario’s ashes—“The urn is broken. Help me gather his ashes, spilt on the floor!”—Williams demonstrated her acceptance of loss and forgiveness. Then, “quietly and gravely as two children gathering flowers, the women kneel together to collect the scattered ashes of Rosario and return them to the broken urn.” Spelling out the play he’d like to see, Kazan continued, “It would be a comic Mass then between what man and woman are, and what they have made of themselves. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be gathering ashes at the end.” In the early version, the widow seems to accept loss, but she doesn’t accept Mangiacavallo, who is shooed out the back door and never heard from again.

  The play’s emotional ambivalence mirrored Williams’s own. Throughout much of the play’s gestation, Williams was not certain whether he and Merlo had a future either. By the time Williams had finally understood his own story, Merlo was a fixture in his life. Mangiacavallo resuscitates Serafina in much the same humble way that Merlo bolstered Williams: he coaxed Williams reluctantly out of his isolation and into life. Williams’s bravura final ending was a daydream of romantic transcendence—an eloquent image that was both an answer to Kazan’s theatrical challenge and proof of Kazan’s contention that Williams’s plays “might be read as a massive autobiography . . . as naked as the best confessions.”

  For three years, in his “little cave of consciousness,” Williams had labored to excavate comedy from his sense of collapse; for three years, struggling in a similar reverie of loss, Serafina buries herself in the shuttered gloom of her sewing room. Both are compelled to rendezvous with ghosts. Serafina’s morbid lamentation is a way of keeping Rosario close to her; likewise, in his writing, Williams’s habitual reconfiguration of his family and friends was a way of not losing his love objects, who were, as Vidal said, “forever his once they had been translated to the stage.” In Serafina’s story, Williams materialized the transfiguration he longed for in life. By the finale, she is no longer living in the past but in the moment. (The watch that Serafina meant to give Rosa for her graduation, which had stopped ticking, suddenly starts to work again.) The wind blows Rosario’s spilled ashes away, and with it the sump of melancholy. “A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes,” she says. “No woman can hold him.”

  The loss of Serafina’s illusions is symbolized by a rose-colored silk shirt—a totem of Rosario’s faithlessness—originally ordered by his mistress and sewn by Serafina with her own cuckolded hands. At the finale, reversing the negative trajectory of the end of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in which the widow invites destruction by throwing her keys down, Williams contrives to have the disputed shirt passed up to the temporarily banished Mangiacavallo, who is hiding out of sight on the embankment behind Serafina’s house. Once an emblem of humiliation, the shirt is transformed into a semaphore of hope. “Holding the shirt above her head defiantly,” Serafina throws it to the townsfolk, who rush it up the embankment “like a streak of flame shooting up a dry hill.” “Vengo, vengo, amore!” Serafina shouts, feeling a supernatural burning in her breast that signals to her that she is pregnant. As the curtain falls, she is heading up the embankment toward her new man—she is finally fecund and in motion.

  In this last scene, Mangiacavallo is crucially not present; he is an immanence just beyond Serafina’s horizon. This absence seems to inspire her passion. Desire, Williams once said, was “something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being.” The Rose Tattoo, which Williams called “my love-play to the world,” was also a keepsake of a unique personal moment in his own life. Throughout the tale, Williams bore witness both to Merlo’s liberating presence and to the shadow of autoeroticism in his romantic desire.

  THE CASTING OF The Rose Tattoo coincided with the publication on September 27, 1950, of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Before the novella came out, Williams told Cheryl Crawford that he was “terribly afraid of critical reactions to the book!” “I am sure they will find it ‘rotten,’ ‘decadent,’ Etc. and will revive the charge that I can only deal with neurotic people,” he wrote. He added, “My answer to that, of course, is when you penetrate into almost anybody you either find madness or dullness: the only way not to find them is to stay on the surface.” After the publication, he was worried by the public indifference. “It comes at a point in my life when I have a need for some confirmation or reassurance about my work’s value,” he wrote to Laughlin, and sent the relevant portion of the letter to the Herald Tribune, one of the most egregious culprits. “The fact that the Herald Tribune has ignored it completely, both in the daily and Sunday book-review sections, is the worst sort of slap in the face, not only to this one book, but also, I feel, to all the work I have
done, to my whole—position is not the word I want to use!”

  But what was Williams’s position? Streetcar had been closed on Broadway for nearly a year; the movie version wouldn’t be released until the following year. The 1950 season had seen the debut of William Inge (Come Back, Little Sheba), the return to form of Clifford Odets (The Country Girl), and the premiere of Guys and Dolls, whose buoyancy and ambition defined the confidence of the new decade. Williams could be forgiven for fearing that he had somewhat fallen out of the cultural discussion. “Critical reactions to the novel indicate a downward trend in my favor with reviewers,” he wrote to Wood. He felt himself “at a crucial point when a failure might [be] final.”

  Wood had warned Williams that following Streetcar would be “a gigantic task.” So it was proving. Williams finally settled on the director Danny Mann, who was responsible for staging Come Back, Little Sheba. “He has your aliveness,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “He is young and daring and says he is ready to rehearse the play as I wrote it and devil take the hindmost! Why are most people so cautious when the whole scheme of things is suspended by a single fine blond hair in the beard of God?” One of Mann’s other mots was “ ‘Mood’ is ‘doom’ spelt backwards,” which gave Williams pause. “Probably means that I shall have to put up a fight for the plastic-poetic elements in the production,” he wrote to Laughlin, noting, however, that Mann was “no fool.” Still, Williams had a new producer, a new director, a new leading man (Eli Wallach), and a play that attempted a new theatrical form. All the more reason, the management argued, for the box-office insurance of a star in the part of Serafina.

  “Would Maureen Stapleton be all right?” Williams wrote to Crawford in mid-August. “I have never seen her but have heard she is a somewhat Magnani type.” Stapleton was twenty-five, Irish American, and an unknown who had appeared a couple of times on Broadway. She had arrived in Manhattan from Troy, New York, at the age of seventeen, weighing a hundred and eighty pounds, determined to be an actress. By day she worked as a billing clerk for twenty-nine dollars a week; at night, she studied theater with Herbert Berghof. At the Actors Studio and in a few character roles, she had, with her combination of volatility and vulnerability, caught the attention of such Broadway nabobs as Guthrie McClintic and Harold Clurman, whom she credited with planting the idea of her as the middle-aged Serafina in the mind of Crawford. “Maureen must have been a victim in her early life of some nameless wound,” Clurman once wrote, responding to the uncanny power of her playing. “To bear it she requires the escape of acting and the solace of close embrace.”