Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  While Kazan was contemplating his professional future, Williams was thinking about his personal one. Sometime between the Academy Awards and Kazan’s second appearance before the HUAC—at a public session on April 10, 1952—Williams wrote to Kazan with a “desperate request.” “He was asking me, in the greatest confidence, if I could arrange for a lady friend of his to be artificially inseminated,” Kazan said. “He didn’t say who the lady was, and perhaps, in this case, it didn’t matter. The point was that Tennessee, still with Frank Merlo, very happy and likely to remain so, wanted offspring. He wasn’t sure he could achieve the physical arousal necessary to penetrate a woman.” Kazan added, “I told him I’d look around, but when I didn’t hear any more about this from him, I forgot about it.”

  Unbeknownst to Kazan, of course, Williams was not happy. As implausible as it seemed, a child might have given Tennessee and Frank a shared enterprise beyond Williams’s writing, as well as a focus for Merlo’s restlessness. “He is going through some curious phase right now which I can’t pretend to understand,” Williams wrote to Britneva at the end of March. “I am not at all clever about people unless they’re people of my own invention. I no longer complain about the Horse’s behavior. He has a perfect right to behave as he chooses, and I can’t say that he is ever deliberately done anything to hurt me, he has been very kind to Grandfather.” Even Williams’s ad hoc family setup now seemed precarious. “I say ‘we’ as if I felt quite certain the Horse were going with me,” he wrote, alerting Britneva of his summer travel plans. “Actually I don’t know.”

  With the situation with Merlo so unstable, Britneva found herself elevated in Williams’s mind to his “five-o’clock angel.” Presenting herself as a personification of allegiance and love, she offered Williams a kind of emotional home in exchange for his financial support. The only young and biddable female in Williams’s close acquaintance, she was almost certainly the potential child-bearer he had in mind. At one point, earlier in the relationship, Merlo had offered to marry her to get her a green card, but the man she really loved was Williams. To a woman of Britneva’s overweening social and artistic ambitions, an important marriage was crucial; from the start, she had eyes for Williams. “She was madly in love with Tenn,” said the journalist Harriet Van Horne, who knew Britneva in her vagabond days, in the fifties in New York, when she was cooking dinner in a one-room apartment for, among others, William Faulkner and Marlon Brando. Although there is no evidence that Britneva and Williams ever had sex, Van Horne heard genuine passion in her talk about him: “Her description—‘Tennessee is so tanned. His head is like a brown nut. I just love to run my fingers through his hair.’ You don’t say that unless you’ve got a physical attraction.” Britneva wrote in her diary, “I do love Tennessee and don’t think there is anyone alive who is more sweet and gentle, kind and generous and so full of talent. . . . His companionship and support are what I value now most in my life.”

  Maria consulted a psychotherapist about her relationship with Williams, and despite sensational evidence to the contrary, she tried to believe that he was a lapsed heterosexual. “To go around saying Tennessee wasn’t a faggot is madness,” Gore Vidal said. But at times she went around saying more than that. “She called me up and said, ‘I’ve got to see you right away,’ ” Arthur Miller said. “ ‘Tennessee and I want to get married’—not are going to get married. ‘What do you think?’ I was floored. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re both of the same mind?’ I sensed a large element of fantasy in it. She was playing some kind of role, flying around the room and being extremely romantic and excited like a fourteen-year-old. All I could do was stall and think whether I’d heard right. I think she wanted me to talk to Tennessee and get him to marry her.”

  If Britneva’s delusions amounted to nothing, the same could not be said for those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Kazan appeared for the second time, he recanted his previous position and listed as Communist sympathizers eight members of the Group Theatre, whose names were likely already known to the Committee. “There was no way I could go along with their crap that the CP was nothing but another political party, like the Republicans and the Democrats,” Kazan said, explaining his change of heart. “I knew very well what it was, a thoroughly organized, worldwide conspiracy. This conviction separated me from many of my old friends.”

  One of those friends was Arthur Miller, with whom Kazan had discussed his upcoming volte-face. Walking with Miller in the woods of his 113-acre Connecticut estate, Kazan explained that he couldn’t see sacrificing his career for something he no longer believed in. “There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying,” Miller recalled in his autobiography Timebends. “Unless he came clean he could never hope, at the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work abroad either. If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee.” Miller added, “Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself? What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?”

  Two days after his testimony, Kazan paid for a column-length ad in the New York Times—“A Statement by Elia Kazan”—which was written by his wife, Molly Day Thacher, but signed by him:

  . . . I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.

  I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.

  What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party “discipline.” The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distrusted and disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite to their claims of “democracy” and “the scientific approach.” To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.

  I got out in the spring of 1936. . . .

  “A very sad comment on our Times,” Williams wrote to Wood.

  Overnight, in left-wing circles, Kazan went from cultural prince to pariah. “I seemed to have crossed some fundamental and incontrovertible line of tolerance for human error and sin,” he wrote. He was threatened, abused, and shunned. He changed his telephone number and hired a bodyguard for his wife and family. In Hollywood, the most popular director of his day was suddenly an undesirable. Even though he could continue to work, the crisis had made him a contractual cripple; he was relegated to the bottom of the studio heap. He had become, like Williams, a fugitive kind. (The ructions in Hollywood when he was chosen, four decades later, in 1999, to receive the Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievement, demonstrated that Kazan had still not been forgiven his trespasses by a sector of the show-business community.) “He was, on the whole, the man who was least forgiven, because he had been the epitome of courage and strength,” Irene Selznick, one of the many who stopped speaking to Kazan, wrote in A Private View. As Kazan put it, he was “on a great social griddle and frying.”

  Both Kazan and Thacher, whom Kazan described as “a passionate absolutist,” put on stoic fighting faces. “Yes! You did a solid and brave thing,” Thacher wrote to him. “Precisely because it did cut you off from all those people—outworn but familiar—knowing what they’d think—and still did what you found was right. Lonesome thing. And that’s why it was brave. And I know that it was right; it’s always felt ri
ght: like rock bottom, from which you can build up.” She added, “I remember most sharply when you got out of the bathtub in 74th St. and handed me the subpoena. I said to myself, ‘Nothing’s ever going to be the same again.’ I had a complete and final conviction of that. But it didn’t occur to me then that things would be better.”

  Although most of the theater community rushed to judgment, Williams did not. “I take no attitude about it, one way or another, as I am not a political person and human venality is something I always expect and forgive,” he told Britneva. For Kazan, “the most loyal and understanding friend I had through those black months was Tennessee Williams.” Two days after the HUAC testimony, Williams sent Kazan an expanded version of Camino Real.

  ON JANUARY 10, 1952, while he was writing the screenplay Hide and Seek, Williams reminded Kazan of Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, which seemed to have fallen out of their discussions. “Did some top-drawer work on ‘Camino’ lately. Do you remember ‘Camino’?” he wrote. When Kazan and Williams discussed Camino the previous fall, it was still a one-act play, and the putative producer of the evening was William Liebling, who was ultimately unable to raise the money. Then Irene Selznick had poached Kazan to direct George Tabori’s Flight into Egypt, for which Williams called her out as “treacherous.” “There were tears and protestations and lavish gifts at Christmas!” he wrote to Britneva. “But she got Gadg and I got what the little boy shot at.”

  “Now to ‘Camino’—ya gonna do it or not?” Eli Wallach wrote to Kazan in mid-February 1952. Wallach, who had played Kilroy—a bewildered former Golden Gloves champion and Williams’s wandering hero and surrogate in the Actors Studio workshop—reminded Kazan that he was keeping up his body-building regime for the role. “Wish you luck? I wish you more. . . . I also wish you break your goddamn leg, if you don’t do ‘Camino.’ ” Kazan’s HUAC appearance, and the news that Wallach would not be available until late 1952, led to yet another postponement. Kazan took another movie assignment (Man on a Tightrope). Williams took another Roman holiday. On June 10, the day before he sailed to Europe on the Liberté, he mailed Wood a copy of the full-length version of Camino. Williams saw the play, he said, as “an extension of the free and plastic turn I took with ‘Tattoo.’ ”

  In fact, Camino was a complete change of Williams’s theatrical palette. He had written Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in 1946, just after the creative burst of A Streetcar Named Desire. At the time, he’d thought of combining it with another Spanish-themed play, with songs and dancing, and calling it “The Blue Guitar” or “The Guitar of Picasso.” The titles themselves suggest a desire to change his style. “To me the appeal of this work is its unusual degree of freedom,” he said. “When it began to get under way I felt a new sensation of release, as if I could ‘ride out’ like a tenor sax taking the breaks in a Dixieland combo.” Williams claimed that Camino served him as a “spiritual purgation of that abyss of confusion and lost sense of reality” that he and others had “somehow wandered into.” (The epigram to the play, taken from Dante’s Inferno, set the stage for the spectacle of Williams’s existential bewilderment: “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”) In the exuberance of its dreamlike design and in the bold absence of psychology and of Williams’s familiar lyric tropes, the play was an unfettered journey into his interior. “This play is possible because it deals precisely with my own situation,” he told Kazan.

  And what was Williams’s situation? Like Kilroy, “the Eternal Punchinella,” Williams found himself in an America “galloping into totalitarianism,” which “struck terror in me.” Driven, lost, and hounded by a neurotic sense that his theatrical time was running out, Williams, in his own mind, was a kind of former champion holding out the hope that “the old pure music will come to me again.” “If you people . . . still take me seriously as a writer it is mainly because of what I did in the past,” he wrote to Kazan, in the dog days of the summer of 1952. “I can’t say what is the matter, why I accomplish so little. I work, God knows! But I’m not as ‘charged’ as I was, not as loaded. I have a sort of chronic fatigue to contend with. I used to have, say, two good days out of seven. Now I have about one good day out of fifteen to twenty. . . . I feed on delusion, beg for encouragement. In this situation the sensible thing to do would be to quit for a time, as so many writers have done, such as Rilke, and wait and pray for a new start, for a new vision, a regeneration of the tired nerve cells. But you see I committed myself completely to the life of an artist. I froze out almost everything else. I don’t know how to live as anything else. . . . I have not made a success of life or of love. And if my work peters out, I am a bankrupt person.”

  Conceived as part protest play and part shadow play, Camino Real was both a phantasmagoria of Williams’s turbulent interior life and a statement about “the all-but-complete suppression of any dissident voices” in American society, which “seems no longer inclined to hold itself open to very explicit criticism from within.” Set in the imaginary plaza of a port town, whose central fountain has dried up—“The spring of humanity has gone dry in this place,” Sancho Panza says—Camino Real weighed Williams’s romantic idealism against the unforgiving reality of both his private life and the reactionary public sphere. In an arid, threatening, bizarre landscape, where dreamers and troublemakers are killed and swept away by street cleaners, where the word hermano (“brother”) is forbidden, where the only birds are wild ones that have been tamed and are kept in cages, the denizens of the Camino Real—who are mostly romantic legends of literature—shuttle in perpetual jeopardy between a ritzy hotel and a flophouse. They live under constant financial threat, literally and symbolically in fear of being “discredited.” From Kilroy to Gutman, the sinister hotelier who controls his guests’ circumstances, to the trapped Romantics (Lord Byron, Proust’s Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote, Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier), the characters inhabit a freakish world, warped by desperation and pitched between desire and retreat. Their struggle for honor in dishonorable circumstances disfigures them. “It is they”—the Romantics—“who are being driven to the edge of the earth,” Kazan noted of Williams’s “v. personal” play. “It is they who have the problem of how to live and how to die, WITHOUT GIVING UP THEIR IDENTITY—even to realize their identity further through death.”

  “The people are nearly all archetypes of various human attitudes toward life,” Williams wrote to Kazan.

  Marguerite Gautier is the romantic sensualist and her friend, Casanova, is an out and out rake but also with romantic yearnings that promiscuity did not satisfy. Baron de Charlus is the completely cynical voluptuary, and hedonist. They belong together because they have pursued a fairly similar course, so they all stay at the hotel which is the “haut monde,” the prosperous side of the street. The Gypsy’s establishment is the brutal enigma of existence. Her daughter is the eternal object of desire. Kilroy, like Don Quixote whom he eventually joins, is the simple, innocent adventurer into life, the knight-errant who has preserved his dignity, his sincerity and his honor, though greatly baffled and subjected to much indignity and grief. I am not sure how precisely all this adds up, but perhaps it doesn’t have to, so long as the essential effect, of poetic mystery, is realized. I wrote it without figuring it out very logically in advance.

  Kazan’s identification with the perilous surreal nightmare of Camino was deep. “I was its unfortunate hero,” he wrote. “I’d just been knocked down and was flat on the canvas. . . . I had to do what Kilroy—and Williams—did: get up off the mat and come back fighting. . . . Once when I asked him what the play was about, he answered, ‘It’s the story of everyone’s life after he’s gone through the razzle-dazzle of his youth . . .’ Then he went on, ‘There is terror and mystery on one side, honor and tenderness on the other.’ ” The characters embody Williams’s longing for a life beyond life, for an ecstasy not just of the flesh. This spiritual grasping for a way beyond, which appears, literally, in the topography
of the set as the “Terra Incognita,” a desert that lies between the walled town and the snow-capped mountains in the distance, is also embedded in the stylization of the writing. In its swift interplay of poetry and panic, beauty and barbarity, Camino Real serves up a kind of theatrical gallimaufry that resists traditional forms: an allegory and not; protest play and not; naturalism and not; poetry and not; drama and not. The play’s rueful contortions express the surreal tragicomic mood of Williams’s poem “Carrousel Tune,” written in the same year:

  Turn again, turn again, turn once again;

  the freaks of the cosmic circus are men

  We are the gooks and the geeks of creation;

  Believe-It-Or-Not is the name of our star.

  Camino Real—the punning pronunciation of the title itself broadcasts the paradoxical conflict of the spiritual and the political—was conceived in the giddy, alienated spirit of “Believe-It-Or-Not,” that is, the spirit of the grotesque. The play’s comedy was, according to Williams, “traceable to the spirit of the American comic strip, and the animated cartoons, where the most outrageous absurdities give the greatest delight . . . where the characters are blown sky-high one moment and are skipping gaily about the next, where various members of their bodies are destroyed and restored in the flicker of the projector.” Kazan picked up on this need for incongruity. In his notes for the play, he wrote, “In the direction of this thing, keep it shimmering from violence and tragedy to broad wild humor, moving suddenly and always without transition.” In its counterpoint of speech and symbol—“I say that symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama,” Williams contended—Camino Real embodies a kind of fugue state. “Conventions of dreams should be studied as a key to much of the play’s staging and quality,” Kazan wrote in his director’s notes. “In dreams there is a continual flow and mutation: one identity melts into another identity without any interruption or surprise. . . . The play should set new limits of theatrical license and freedom.” (Camino Real, Williams said, “literally got down on its knees and begged for imaginative participation.”) For both the playwright and his characters, Camino Real was a leap into the unknown, which was part of its drama. “The essential stylistic problem is always to maintain the mood of mystery,” Williams told Kazan, who wrote this definition in his script and added “+humor.”