Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  The portrait was Williams’s tender homage to his proud, histrionic grandfather: Nonno is a home to Hannah, just as Reverend Dakin’s presence in Key West gave Williams “a sense of really having a home.” “When he died, something in me died, too, and it’s hard to revive it,” Williams wrote to Katharine Hepburn, when pitching her to play Hannah Jelkes on Broadway. “He didn’t like my plays, although he would never admit it to me directly, but he always would say to others ‘Tom is a poet, he will be remembered as a poet’—In his middle nineties he could recite Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’ by heart, and quote long speeches from Shakespeare. . . . He wanted his Manhattan with two cherries before dinner every evening, could charm lady birds out off bushes, loved eau-de-cologne, even perfume.” Williams explained to Corsaro, “When the old keep serenity and dignity and sweetness in them as long as he did, life turns to poetry and, without that, to cold prose. Their memorial is almost a religious recognition of them.” (Williams’s subtitle for the original play was “Three Acts of Grace”; in its post-Spoleto 1960 version, it was subtitled Southern Cross and “dedicated to the memory of Reverend Walter Dakin.”)

  In the short story, which was written in the full flush of Williams’s romantic rebirth in Mexico, Edith Jelkes glimpses salvation in the carnal. In the play, however, Shannon, who is set upon by both a nubile teenage tourist he has seduced and her outraged guardian, has been betrayed by his carnal impulses, driven out of his church for fornication and heresy, and he strains beyond them for transcendence. “See? The iguana? At the end of its rope? Trying to go on past the end of its goddam rope? Like you! Like me! Like Grampa with his last poem!” he says.

  The play was a sort of summa of Williams’s warring urges, of his humiliated Puritan soul, fighting a pitched, and likely losing, battle against self-destruction. “It’s horrible how you got to bluff and keep bluffing even when hollering ‘Help!’ is all you’re up to,” Shannon says. His “reaching-out hands”—“as if he were reaching for something outside and beyond himself”—perform the emblematic gesture, at once a plea and a prayer, with which Williams ends the second act.

  “My life has cracked up on me,” says Shannon, trapped, like Williams, by his past, his appetites, his lost goodness, his isolation, his winded hankering for grace. “I am a little bit in the condition of the Reverend Shannon right now,” Williams told Corsaro in 1960, in the early stages of their collaboration, “as a result of corresponding tensions, I mean correspondingly great, which have gone on longer than anyone but a tough old bird like me would be able to survive, even physically.”

  As Williams’s relationship with Merlo continued to unravel, Shannon’s tormented voice became a kind of fever chart of his isolation and self-loathing. “We—live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really,” Shannon confides to Hannah. “But when you live on the fantastic level as I have lately but have got to operate on the realistic level, that’s when you’re spooked, that’s the spook.” Devoured by fear and feeding off it for inspiration, Williams faced the same predicament. “Don’t ask me why I’ve fallen into this state,” he wrote to Wood from Egypt in late October 1959. “Because I couldn’t tell you except to say that something ‘spooked’ me somewhere, sometime, somehow, and I can’t shake the spook. The lucky thing is that I’m writing about just exactly that thing.”

  Hannah Jelkes, by contrast, is a model of containment and compassion; she is a new type of Williams heroine, one who speaks for his embattled moral side, holding out the hope of an escape from the self. (She was also his first non-Southern lady.) “Hannah is not a loser,” he explained to Corsaro, his “other Sicilian Frankie.” “She is profoundly understanding and compassionate but still a fighter and winner. She doesn’t bow to the terms as Alma, or crack under them completely as Blanche who could only accept a doctor’s arm at the end. She rises to a sort of necessary pride and austerity like the Oriental concept of living with a ‘cool’ God.” Williams went on:

  She is unseduced by any worn-out and weakly sentimental concept of Christian-Hebraic philosophy of human behavior, but—and yet—she, out of her austerity, her coolness, can escape from herself, her personal dilemma and crisis, to concern for a captive lizard: she forms a workable synthesis between the Western and Eastern concepts of morality. And feeling. An affirmation of the human spirit undefeated.

  Hannah’s stoic composure puts into bold relief Shannon’s hysteria and his compulsion to use his woundedness—his “Passion Play performance,” as Hannah calls it—as a lure, as well as a lament. Through his connection to her, Shannon achieves what Williams couldn’t manage in life: “understanding and kindness, between two people at the end of their ropes.”

  “As we were working, pages kept coming in from Williams until I had ninety pages of script,” Corsaro said of the Spoleto version of The Night of the Iguana, which had a completely new, almost symphonic, tone. He added, “I knew I had something very special.” So did Williams. “I’m tired, the energy’s low from the long, hard screaming I’ve done for help, for light and forgiveness,” he wrote to Atkinson in the summer of 1959. “But I’ve just now finished a scene about forgiveness, and help, and maybe there is some light in it to make up for the fatigue. I think the hate of the world has worn itself out, for a while—There never was hate of people—and if ‘the hazards’ of this long trip are lucky I will come back with a play or two for you that you may be able to like as well as admire technically.” In May 1959, Williams wrote to Wood, “I think the play for Spoleto can be made very good.” “Tenn dear, you’re right to say that in this latest work of yours there is all your heart. ONE FEELS IT!” Anna Magnani wrote after reading Iguana. “Once I said to a journalist . . . ‘the characters of Tennessee Williams are always looking at the sky/heaven.’ And it’s true! They are always seeking salvation, in the purest and most noble sense.”

  IN THE THIRTY months or so that it took to complete The Night of the Iguana, Williams’s world, like Shannon’s, came down around him. He lost his longtime director, Kazan, and then his most consistent and insightful public champion, Brooks Atkinson, who retired from the New York Times in the spring of 1960. The rumble of paranoia began to shake even Williams’s bedrock faith in Audrey Wood. “In all the letters and phone-calls and talks between us about the ‘Iguana’ there was a great area of ambiguity, which unnerved me and made it harder for me to complete the work with any confidence in it,” he wrote, forgetting his own initial doubts about the play’s viability. “You never said clearly, I am deeply interested in this work and think it is valuable. So I had to represent myself and make my own decisions about its production some of which may have been faulty.”

  Finally, Williams lost his longtime lover. In the battle of attrition with Merlo, Williams officially waved the white flag on January 2, 1961. “Dear Horse: or Saint Francis,” he wrote:

  I guess you win, like Mizzou in the Orange Bowl Game. Thirteen years, the longest war on record, but that’s not a nice way to put it. Anyhow I am going back to Key West since I feel like I have a ton of lead in my legs and island-hopping doesn’t seem possible for me.

  Please be a good winner. A good winner respects a good loser, which I hope I will be. He enjoys his victory over him, but he treats his surrendered opponent with courtesy and consideration, not rubbing his nose in the ground.

  I hope to behave as my father did when he lost but I hope that unlike him, I won’t be locked out of the house. I have no Knoxville to go back to, and no widow from Toledo. If it should not turn out to be an honorable capitulation, I suppose I could still employ a traveling companion who would take me away to Europe but then victory, yours, would lose its glory and even its just reward, and I do mean just because I think to have passed thirteen years with me, the gloomy Hun of all time, must merit a crown in heaven.

  Blanche was a bit of a Hun, too, but I think she was quite sincere when she said, “Thank you for being so kind, I need kindness now.”<
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  Kindness in one makes kindness in the other. Love, T

  Williams’s courtly request put a shellac of civility on his own cruelty. Prior to the tryout of The Night of the Iguana at the Coconut Grove in Miami in August 1960, Merlo had gone up to New York for medical tests to explain a mysterious loss of weight and energy, which Williams attributed to drugs. In Merlo’s absence, Williams took up with a painter. Alerted by a Key West friend who had walked in on Williams’s frolics, Merlo flew home unannounced. (Merlo was no stranger to Williams’s provocations; earlier in the year, by his own admission, Williams had spent an afternoon in a drunken orgy with three queens in a South Beach hotel, after which he returned home for a home-cooked dinner with Merlo. “I set myself down at our patio table like a king, waiting to be served. The kitchen door banged open and past me sailed a meat loaf, missing my head by inches,” Williams recalled. Before bolting in their car, Merlo managed to throw the succotash, the salad, and the Silex of coffee at him as well. “When people I care for turn violent,” Williams told Gore Vidal solemnly, “I have no choice but to withdraw from the field. I abhor violence of any kind.” “There was no use in saying that Frank had a good case for throwing a lot more than a leg of lamb at the maddening Bird,” Vidal wrote in his memoir Palimpsest.) Having come home to Williams and the painter, Merlo “declined to eat and he hardly spoke . . . his great eyes fastened upon the painter and me,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. “Then the scene exploded. Like a jungle cat, Frankie sprang across the room and seized the painter by the throat and it appeared to me that the painter was being strangled to death—that is one evening when I am pretty sure Frankie was deep under drugs.” Williams called the police; Merlo slept at a friend’s house. The next day, as Williams prepared to decamp to a Miami motel with his painter and his papers, Merlo ran down from the porch. “Are you going to leave me without shaking hands, after fourteen years together?” Merlo said.

  The incident marked the beginning of their end. For the next year, they lived separately in their Duncan Street house. Merlo found a new friend and a new life. “I’m not any longer his ‘Embraceable You,’ at best, a tolerated guest in my Key West refuge, my place where I fight for survival, my wild beast’s cave, as it were,” Williams wrote to Wood in March 1961, alternately outraged and avuncular. Even as he pushed his loved ones away, Williams was compelled to hold onto them. “I have never stopped loving anyone that I ever loved, and I have loved everyone who was considerate of me and my trouble,” he told Wood. “In one of my plays, I don’t remember which one, somebody says: ‘He liked me and so I loved him.’ Oh, yes, in ‘Suddenly Last Summer’—Catharine speaking to the doctor about her feeling for Sebastian. I was speaking for myself, too. I love anyone who likes me, even if I know it may be illusion.”

  With Marion Vaccaro and others on holiday adventure

  In April 1961, Williams set off alone for Europe in the company of Marion Vaccaro and her gigolo. “Perhaps I will meet with someone who can stand me—somewhere,” he said. About once a week during his time away from Key West, even after swallowing three Miltowns at night, Williams couldn’t sleep. He reported being overcome by “terrific waves of loneliness [which] sweep into my single room.” When he counted up “the dreadful facts of my life,” Merlo was high on his list. “I gave my love, so much of it that there was hardly enough feeling left for friendship, to someone who seems to hate me,” he said. Nonetheless, he couldn’t resist trying to call Merlo. The overseas operator got through, but, as Williams explained to Wood, “the answering party said that he didn’t know me. I said, never mind let me speak to this person. I waited a while and the operator called back, and said, The person doesn’t want to speak to you and I can’t force him.—Then he said to me: Why don’t you get off that streetcar named desire?—I said: I know what you mean, get off it and lie on the tracks.”

  “I suppose he is so revolted by my sickness, my state of mind which I think is close to lunacy, that he will take no more of it, and I mustn’t ask for it,” Williams wrote melodramatically to Bob MacGregor, his editor at New Directions, adding of the upcoming production of Iguana, “I doubt that Frank will be with me, he doesn’t answer my letters or even the phone.”

  In May, from Rome, Williams tried phoning Merlo again, only to be stung once again by his ex-lover’s tormenting refusal to speak to him. Sometimes Williams tried to joke about the telephonic stonewalling and Merlo’s refusal to recognize his name (“Sic Transit Gloria Swanson”); inevitably, bitterness percolated through the posture of nonchalance. “I’ve always tried to respect his pride but now I think he is confusing it with cruelty of a frightening nature, and that he wants to break all pride in me, which I mustn’t permit, for then I would turn to a worm, which is worse than having turned to a bit of a monster,” Williams confessed to Wood. He went on, “Why do I still care about him? He gave me an escape from loneliness, which I think is the worst affliction in life, and he gave me a sense of life all these years when I’ve been so inclined to think too much about death.” “Magnani says, ‘Fuck it,’ ” Williams reported in a joint letter to Bowden and Corsaro in mid-May. “But I still hold the torch for ‘The Horse.’ And I long for the peace of my little house there, to help me get through one more Broadway production.”

  Merlo’s silence cast a long shadow over Williams’s travels, and also over the rewriting of Iguana. In their life together, Williams had been the engine and Merlo the caboose. Now, for both parties, the ride was over. So it was for Shannon. The argument with Merlo became the argument of the play.

  Dispossessed of his keys, his tour bus, his job, and his confidence, Shannon is hounded into frantic retreat. Facing off against Miss Fellowes, the infuriated leader of his tour group’s insurrection, Shannon repeats almost verbatim Williams’s words to Wood about Merlo: “Don’t! Break! Human! Pride!” he says. At the end of the play, Hannah faces the prospect of continuing on alone without her beloved Nonno. “I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest—rest—live in, emotionally speaking,” she says. “How will it seem to be traveling alone after so many years of traveling with

  . . . ,” Shannon asks Hannah, who replies, “I will know how it feels when I feel it.” “I wonder . . . if we couldn’t travel together, I mean just travel together,” Shannon suggests. Hannah demurs. “Don’t kid yourself that you ever travel with someone,” she says. “You have always traveled alone except for your spook, as you call it. He’s your traveling companion. Nothing, nobody else has traveled with you.”

  Like an amalgam of his characters, Williams felt at once incensed and unmoored. “The Horse has done just about all in his power to shatter me and humiliate me, so I must find the courage to forget and put away a sick thing,” he wrote to St. Just in the summer of 1961. “To be fair, it isn’t easy to live thirteen years with a character walking a tight rope, and a thin one, over lunacy. But the time has come to ‘cool it’ and I trust I can.”

  ON JANUARY 8, 1961, six days after Williams officially called it quits with Merlo, he also cut loose his producer, Cheryl Crawford, who had mounted four of his plays and had told him, after seeing an Actors Studio workshop of Iguana in May 1960, “In Iguana you can have your finest play to date and a play, stealing movie slogans, I would be proud to present.” Williams had asked Crawford for notes; she gave them. “During the intermission I want an audience to be saying ‘What’s going to happen next?’ ‘What is he (or she) going to do?’ They weren’t,” she wrote, adding, “The audience simply does not know who or what to follow by the end of Act Two. Consequently, they were not identifying and not caring.”

  Although Crawford had correctly identified a problem—which Williams would elegantly solve in his final version—she didn’t hear from him for six months. His letter of January 8 informed her that Charles Bowden would be his producer. “This play is a dramatic poem of the most intensely personal nature and Bowden, for some unknown reason, seemed to want it like that,” William
s wrote. Once again, in a sensational bit of backpedaling, Williams imposed on his own bad faith the posture of reasonableness. “I never thought that you really wanted ‘Iguana’; I thought that, being a truly kind person, you wanted to encourage me by seeming to want it, just that, and when I got your notes, I realized I couldn’t please you with it and still please myself,” he explained, adding defensively, “I think you need this play like a hole in the head. Surely you know that, don’t you?” Having declared Iguana his “probably last play,” in the next paragraph Williams wrote, “I hope and trust and pray that one of the [plays] I am holding in reserve will be a right one for you.” His careless kiss-off was signed, “My heart’s true love to you, darling!” Their collaboration was over.

  The Night of the Iguana would make its way to Broadway with Williams now cast as the seasoned captain of a new team. “I want to be around for the staging of this one,” Williams told Bowden. “Corsaro would need me and want me, since the play is such a highly personal play, dealing with emotional things that only a man of my history (and age) has experienced enough to understand them, totally.” To Williams, the Harvard-educated Bowden, an actor-turned-stage-manager-and-producer, was “a terrifically dynamic man”; to Corsaro, however, Bowden was “silly putty—a silly person who had a coterie of people around him right out of a Tennessee Williams waxworks” and who “almost wrecked the play.” While teaching them how to cope with his own wayward style of living and writing, the befogged playwright struggled to hold these incompatible elements of himself together.

  In order to free himself from inhibition and test out dramatic possibilities, when he worked on a play Williams would often forget the logic of his plot and fill in scenes without necessarily picking up where he’d left off the day before. “My scripts at this stage are a shambles of inconsistencies, repeats, contradictions, because of my methodless method of work, my not reading over yesterday’s work, just going on, on, like a madman, spooked chased by a spook,” he explained to Chuck Bowden. From this crazy quilt of reimagined strands, the play was finally assembled: an act of collage as much as construction. “The revisions extended certain areas and, in some ways, they overwhelmed others,” Corsaro recalled of the daunting task of pulling together Williams’s eloquent mess. He remembered Williams handing him three versions of a scene in the third act in which Shannon tells Hannah about him and his tour group spotting some natives consuming “undigested” scraps from a dung hill. “I said, ‘What do I do with them?’ ‘I want you to see what you think is right, or whether any of them are right.’ I said, ‘You’re giving me a big responsibility, Mr. Williams,’ ” Corsaro recalled.