by John Lahr
The brouhaha drew attention to the play. “The controversy over ‘Camino Real’ is paying off. Did better biz Holy Week than week before,” Winchell noted in his column on April 6. The Times, under the headline “Concerning Camino Real,” kept the argument going with a full page of contradictory opinions from such figures as Shirley Booth and Dame Edith Sitwell (again). The Post’s “Sidewalks of New York” asked the Man in the Street, “What do you think of Tennessee Williams’s controversial new play ‘Camino Real’?” One of the five people questioned was the actress Geraldine Page. “I adore it, every minute of it,” she replied. The producers, in their daily ad, tried to capitalize on the fun of the furor:
The Talk of the Town, Indeed!
“First bop show, sent me.”
“A BURLESQUE for Ph.D.’s.”
“Divided our town into roaring camps.”
“Pure theatre poetry.”
“Must see it for oneself.”
“Felt less lonesome.”
“Wanted to shriek.”
“Felt dirty.”
“Felt clean.”
“Split my family asunder.”
“Clear as sparkling crystal.”
“I was confused.”
“If you’re alive, it’s for you.”
“The sexiest show in town.”
“I’ve been three times.”
“Should be ‘Prize Play of the Year’—but won’t.”
“Sheer emotion.”
“Sheer hogwash.”
“You’re conversationally sterile without it.”
“See it before its First Revival.”
A couple of days after the opening, just before he left for Key West by train, Edwina asked Williams to autograph her Camino Real program. “Bloody but unbowed. (Or more literally) Eggy but unbeaten,” he scrawled across the cover. Still, Williams was beaten. On the train, he wrote a disconsolate letter to Atkinson, thanking him for his sympathetic notice, but adding, “I can’t believe that you really think I have painted the world in blacker colors than it now wears, or that it is melancholia, psychopathic of me, to see it in those shades.” (Atkinson’s review had spoken of “psychopathic bitterness,” “a dark mirror, full of black and appalling images,” “a miasma of hopelessness, cruelty and decadence.”) Williams’s courtly words couldn’t hide his bewilderment or his hurt:
Has this play alienated your old regard for my work? Do you feel as others that it is a “mish-mash” of muddy symbols and meaningless theatricalism, were you pulling your punches? No matter what you say, I think it would help me in this dark moment if you would level with me.
Back in Key West, Williams received, he said, a “flood of correspondence . . . when so many people, more than were moved to write me about ‘Street Car’ and ‘Menagerie’ put together . . . tell me that it touched and moved them deeply, I can’t keep on feeling that it was all in vain.” But the most comforting of all the letters was from Atkinson. “You have no idea how much less lonely your letter made me feel,” Williams replied, in a letter in which he cast himself as both a friend (“I hope I have not yet forfeited your friendship!?”) and a fugitive (“I came out of the world that you belong to, Brooks, and descended to those under levels”). By mid-April, Williams’s mood had lightened. “Of course soon as the notices came out Mother Crawford took us off royalties,” he bitched to Britneva, adding that he had worked two years “mostly for nothing.” “She is hoping, as usual, to scrape along by such economies as lighting the stage by fire-flies and a smokey old kerosene lamp, substituting a bit of percussion on an old washtub for a five-piece band, etc., but even so the prospects for an extended run are but dim.”
On May 9, after sixty performances and a loss of $115,000, Camino Real closed. “The work was done for exactly what it has gained, a communion with people,” Williams wrote to Atkinson. He had promised Atkinson a published copy, but now explained mournfully, “A published play is only the shadow of one and not even a clear shadow.” He went on, “The colors, the music, the grace, the levitation, the quick inter-play of live beings suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, those things are the play, not words, certainly not words on paper and certainly not any thoughts or ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel’s. The clearest thing ever said about a living work, for theatre or any medium, was said in a speech of Shaw’s in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ but I don’t remember a single line of it now, I only remember that when I heard it I thought, Yes, that’s what it is, not words, not thoughts or ideas, but those abstract things such as form and light and color that living things are made of.”
In the leafy calm of his Key West studio, contemplating the fifteen-year life expectancy of American literary talent, Williams did the math and found he had “long-exceeded” the mark. He was already living on creative borrowed time. He had a play by Donald Windham to direct in Houston, an around-the-world trip with Merlo planned for June, and the screenplay of Hide and Seek with Kazan to get back to. Although he felt that he should shift gears—he was diverting himself “with a little painting in oils”—he found his “daily existence almost unbearably tedious without beginning at the typewriter.” There would inevitably be some kind of writing ahead of him. But what kind? Could he, like the poet in Esmeralda’s prayer, find his way back to his heart’s green country? He was now less sure than ever. He felt, he said, “shut out” from the theater world, and “the door barred against me.” As summer approached, in the shifting landscape of his imagination only one thing seemed certain. “I have nothing more to expect from Broadway,” he told James Laughlin.
CHAPTER 5
Thunder of Disintegration
I believe I said, “I am a furtive cat,
unowned/unknown, a scavenging sort of black alley cat
distinguished by a curve of white upturned
at each side of its mouth which makes it seem to grin,
denial in its eyes,
The negative: un-homed . . .
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
“To Maria Britneva”
If only I could realize that I am not 2 persons I am only one.
There is no sense in this division. An enemy inside myself! How absurd!
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Notebooks, 1936
In late December 1953, afflicted with “thrombosed hemorrhoids,” which to his frightened eyes were “as large as a hen’s egg,” Williams found himself in a New Orleans hospital, where he was to undergo emergency surgery. “Don’t think I ever spent such a night of pain not even at the time of the operation in 1946,” he wrote in his diary.
Despite the lacerating pain—“this pain eclipses thought,” he said—Williams had himself transferred from the prestigious but dry Ochsner Clinic to the “shabby” Touro Infirmary, where liquor was allowed. The failure of Camino Real and the devastations of the ensuing nine months—“a great storm has stripped me bare, like one of those stripped, broken palm trees after a hurricane passes”—had left Williams unabashedly dependent on his “pinkies” (Seconal) and his alcohol. The minor procedure had a major psychic impact; it seemed the culmination of his misery. “All hell is descended on me,” he noted at the Touro Infirmary, “retribution for all my misdoings and the things undone.”
Williams had written of “the catastrophe of success”; since the March premiere of Camino he had experienced its opposite: the catastrophe of indifference. It only fueled his paranoia. His journey two and a half months later on the SS United States began “not auspiciously,” he noted, when a female friend of Merlo’s collapsed in tears at their leave-taking and had to be supported off the ship. “A neurosis is worrying the ragged edges of my nerves,” Williams wrote. “Bill Gray cried a little as he said goodbye to me but by no means so copiously as Ellen did over F. How could anyone manage to feel much concern over my coming and going I really don’t know. Have thought of death a lot lately.” The intensity of Ellen’s feelings also fed anxieties about Merlo’s loyalty.
“These suspicions of mine are tiresome,” Williams wrote. “I must at least cut them out of my list of torments this summer.”
Back in Rome, however, his list of torments grew longer: at the top of the list was Merlo. “One gets tired of begging for crumbs under the table,” Williams wrote in his diary on July 1. “Here is Kaput. But goot!” In a July showdown, Williams told Merlo that he was tired of being “treated like a stupid, unsatisfactory whore by a bad-tempered pimp.” In a letter to Kazan, he expanded on the summer standoff. “Conversation had fallen to the level of grunts and barely varying inflections and simply coming into a room with him seemed to constitute an abuse of privilege,” he wrote. “This went on for two weeks. Then I had it out with him verbally, and flew to Barcelona the next day. I don’t think the poor bastard is even aware of what I protested about. He is sunk into such a pit of habit and inertia and basic contempt for himself or his position in life which I think he, consciously or unconsciously, holds me responsible for and almost if not quite hates me for. That old cocksucker Wilde uttered a true thing when he said, Each man kills the thing he loves. The killing is not voluntary but we sure in hell do it. And burn for it.”
Neither travel nor writing worked their usual magic; Williams was mired in an enervating slough of defeat. “What a sorry companion I make for anyone young & alive,” he wrote in mid-July. “ ‘The Horse’ and I never laugh together. Why? He has a sense of humor.” Most of the summer was spent reanimating the “dreary” film script Hide and Seek and revising his 1940 play Battle of Angels, straightening out the story line and doing away with its “juvenile poetics” to shape a new version, which he called Orpheus Descending. By re-submerging himself in the world of Battle of Angels, in particular, Williams forced a comparison between his youthful romantic self and his ravaged middle-aged one, which only magnified his sense of impasse.
In his youth, back in 1940, his life had been spread out before him like a field to play on; he had been eager and energized. But success, which had expanded his literary horizons, had shrunk his personal ones. As early as 1946, in order to concentrate “on the one big thing, which was work,” Williams had begun to draw a sort of psychic circle around himself. At age thirty-eight, he had characterized the pie chart of his existence as “work and worry over work, 89%: struggle against lunacy (partly absorbed in the first category) 10%, very true and tender love for lover and friends, 1%.” Now, four years later, at forty-two, Williams complained of a “physical deterioration and a mental fatigue that makes me downright stupid”—Britneva nicknamed him “Forty Winks” for his new habit of nodding off over dinner—as well as a pervading sense of emptiness at the “nothingness of my world outside of work.” His good writing days, “and they were not too good,” totaled maybe three a month.
On September 7, 1953, Williams mailed a draft of Orpheus Descending off to Wood. By mid-October, he had her response. “Audrey wrote me a devastatingly negative reaction,” he told Britneva. “I believe she thinks that I have ‘flipped my lid’ and will be waiting for me at the docks with a straight-jacket behind her back as she waves sweetly with the other hand.” Williams, in his recent plays, had insisted on the promise of some kind of romantic transcendence: Rose Tattoo ended with Serafina finally in motion; Camino concluded with Don Quixote and Kilroy escaping the toxic plaza for the snow-capped mountains, with a grace note of romantic hope: “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!” But in the emotional sump into which Williams was now sinking, there was no flow to life or to the imagination. “Death has no sound or light in it, but this is still life,” he wrote around this time.
In early October, finding himself in Madrid, Williams read through a new play he had been working on, whose tentative title—“A Place of Stone”—signaled his sense of petrified life. “Was so disheartened that I closed it and prepared to descend to the bar,” he wrote. “What troubles me is not just the lifeless quality of the writing, its lack of distinction, but a real confusion that seems to exist, nothing carried through to completion but written over and over, as if a panicky hen running in circles.” He added, “Some structural change in my brain? An inability to think clearly and consecutively. Or simply too much alcohol? . . . The prospect of returning to America with this defeat in my heart, which only drink can assuage, is a mighty dark one.”
AT THE TOURO INFIRMARY nearly three months later, terrified, lonely, and in pain, Williams imagined himself on his deathbed. “If anything goes wrong, I want Frank to have the film play in addition to other items,” he wrote in his diary. “I think he is loyal to me and possibly even loves me. Who else does? Audrey. Grandfather, Rose (as I was) and Mother in her way.” Williams’s connection of death to his love objects was not accidental. From childhood, he had associated loss with love, had felt an erotic attachment to pain, which he acknowledged in “Cortege,” a poem about his thwarted family life:
And on that morning—
precociously—for always—
you lost belief
in everything but loss,
gave credence only to doubt,
and began even then,
as though it were always intended,
to form in your heart
the cortege of future betrayals—
the loveless acts
of crude and familiar knowledge.
Even as he awaited the operation, which was called off at the last minute because the doctors thought better of it, Williams castigated himself for his fears (“I’m such a coward, oh, such a damned sniveling coward. It does disgust me so.”); for his panicky hypersensitivity (“Anything strange upsets me”); and for his debasing loneliness (“Waiting for Frank like a dog for his bone and his master!”). Apocalyptic foreboding filled his diary: “If I am ever even relatively well again and free from pain I hope I will remember how this was.” Williams clung to the memory of his few loved ones, listing them almost like talismans against his fear of cancer, a diagnosis that he “whispered” to himself. “Suppose someone said to me, Tennessee, you have cancer? How would I take it? Probably not well. And yet I suspect that I do.” Nonetheless, when Oliver Evans visited him in the hospital on New Year’s Day, and reported a conversation with Williams’s doctor about the benign hemorrhoids, Williams took umbrage at even the mention of cancer. “He says you should have an operation as it could become malignant,” Evans said. “I thought the remark at least unnecessary,” Williams wrote in his diary, adding, “He has impulses of shocking cruelty sometimes.”
More to the point was Williams’s cruelty to himself. His New Year’s resolution was to give up “that old breast-beating.” About to leave the hospital, he resolved “to make no more incontinent demands on the exhausted artist. Let him rest. Even let him expire if his term is over. But since I want life, even without Creation, I must not whip myself for not doing what I’ve stopped being able to do. Whether the failure be only a while, or longer, or always.”
“Oh, how I long to be loose again, entering the Key West studio for morning work, with the sky and the Australian pines through the sky light and clear morning light on all four sides and the warmth of coffee in me and the other world of creation,” Williams wrote from the hospital on New Year’s Day, 1954. By the third week of January, he was back in the sweet solitude of Key West with his grandfather, filled with a sense of both relief and release. “I am doing what I dreamed of doing again,” he wrote. “Clear mornings, coffee, the studio—quiet, serene. But the Muse is not attracted. Not today.”
A similarly potent constellation of warring internal forces—death and creativity, fear and freedom, doom and gladness—had occurred only once before in Williams’s life. In 1947, after the trauma of his Taos hospital experience, Williams had sat down and projected, he said, “all the emotional content of the long crisis” into A Streetcar Named Desire. “Despite the fact that I thought I was dying, or maybe because of it, I had a great passion for work,” he wrote in his Memoirs.
Now, seven years later, in the spring of 195
4, Williams picked up “A Place of Stone,” a short play that he hadn’t been able to “get a grip on” when he started it the previous year and that had added to his “terrible state of depression last summer in Europe.” In March, he wrote to Wood about it. “I’m . . . pulling together a short-long play based on the characters in ‘Three Players’,” he said. “Don’t expect that till you see it, as I might not like it when I read it aloud.” Nonetheless, within a week, although he judged the new play too brief and too wordy, Williams clearly saw that he had found a new imaginative seam. “I do think it has a terrible sort of truthfulness about it, and the tightest structure of anything I have done. And a terrifyingly strong final curtain.” Back in Rome that summer, when Wood was visiting, Williams handed her a pile of pages he called his “work script,” typed mostly on hotel stationery. By then the play was called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Wood stayed up reading until four in the morning. “I was terribly excited,” she said. “In the morning I immediately told him this was certainly his best play since ‘Streetcar’, and it would be a great success. He may not remember this now, but he was then overwhelmed by my enthusiasm. It was obvious to me that he didn’t yet know what he had done.”
When Williams showed Wood the working script, he was, he said, “passing through, and still not out of, the worst nervous crisis of my nervous existence.” During that parlous summer of 1954, he had arrived “at just about the pit.” “I’m just holding on,” he wrote in his notebook in June. “Liquor and Seconal are my only refuge and they not unfailing.” Williams’s diaries also report a rueful hardening of his heart about love. “Am I worthy of it? Is anybody ever? We’re all such pigs, I am one of the biggest”; “my soul, if I have one still, sighs. And shudders and sickens.” In 1940, he had confessed to Margaret Webster, the director of Battle of Angels, that he had “begun to develop a sort of insulation about my feelings so I won’t suffer too much.” She replied, “That’s a very dangerous thing for a writer.” The observation had caught Williams’s attention; he recounted it to Kenneth Tynan, fifteen years later. “Once the heart is thoroughly insulated, it’s also dead,” he said. “My problem is to live with it, and to keep it alive.” At an emotional nadir, in his helplessness, he prayed for the intercession of a commanding presence, whose strength would resuscitate him. “Maybe Frank can help me. Maybe Maria will help me. Maybe God will help me,” he wrote in his diary. In the end, Williams helped himself.