Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Williams gives Hannah the last words in the play and the last image. “Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It’s so quiet here, now,” she says. Only then does she realize that Nonno has slumped in his chair, dead. “She looks right and left for someone to call to,” the stage directions read. “There’s no one.” Hannah is alone with her grief and her terror; like Williams, she must soldier on under new circumstances, with only the memory of love and loyalty to guide her.

  “I’M SORRY YOU’RE not feeling well,” Kazan wrote to his frazzled friend at the beginning of 1962. “Put part of it down to after-opening slump.” He continued, “One thing you should try to cultivate just a little bit is the ability to enjoy success, even if you consider it partial, still it is there, and very real, you really do accomplish you know.” But in the punishing struggle to bring The Night of the Iguana to life, Williams had sniffed the winds of theatrical change, and his accomplishments were no solace. Despite Iguana’s acclaim, Williams did not win the Tony Award; he was snubbed in favor of Robert Bolt’s middle-brow British historical play A Man for All Seasons. More significantly, Iguana did not get a national tour. “I think my kind of literary or pseudo-literary style of writing for the theatre is on its way out,” Williams said. If Williams had been Broadway royalty, he was beginning to feel deposed.

  As early as 1960, Williams and his thematic tropes had become sufficiently common currency to be parodied from the Broadway stage by the most sophisticated comedy team of the era, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In their sensational show An Evening with Nichols and May, Nichols, playing the playwright “Alabama Glass,” took a very long gulp from the tumbler beside him, and then drawled, “I want to tell you tonight about my new play, ‘Pork Makes Me Sick in the Summer.’ ” He went on:

  It is a simple story of degradation. The scene is a basement apartment in the Mexican quarter of Detroit. Before the action begins the husband of the heroine, Nanette, has committed suicide on being accused of not being a homosexual. Distraught, she has an affair with a young basketball team, after which she turns to drink, prostitution and putting on airs. During the course of the three acts she gradually begins to go downhill and, finally, she disintegrates and has to be put away.

  Williams saw the show; according to Mike Nichols, however, he didn’t go backstage. “I didn’t and don’t blame him,” Nichols said. “The piece was nastier than necessary, especially if you add my voice and character when doing it. It was less Williams than Capote, whom I truly disliked. I always felt bad about this since I admired Williams inordinately and still do.”

  By 1962, a new wave of American and European playwrights was bringing to their storytelling an allusive minimalism, which challenged both Williams’s florid narrative style and his hegemony. Williams was beginning to feel not just old but old-fashioned. “I’m so tired, so terribly, terribly tired. And now anything that I do is going to be compared to the savagely truthful work of the best New Wave playwrights,” he complained to the director Herbert Machiz in the fall of 1962, after seeing a preview of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he judged to be “one of those works that extend the frontiers of the stage.” The spareness of Samuel Beckett—whose Waiting for Godot Williams helped to produce in its debut American production—and the “astringency” of Harold Pinter drove him “crazy with jealousy.” Speaking of Pinter’s The Caretaker, which was competing with Iguana on Broadway, Williams was almost in awe. “While I’m in the theatre, I’m enthralled by it and I say, ‘Oh, God, if I could write like that.’ If only I were twenty-five and just starting out, what these boys could have given me.” During the course of the year, he’d written two “long-short or short-long plays” under the collective title Slapstick Tragedy that were perhaps, he told Jay Laughlin, “my answer to the school of Ionesco.” “They’re not just funny, they’re also supposed to be sad: I mean ‘touching,’ ” Williams explained. “Who is touched and by what is the big question these days, which are the days of the untouchables, the emotional astronauts. In which I’m beginning to feel like Louisa May Alcott or the early Fannie Hurst.”

  If Williams couldn’t die, he could imagine his death. So, too, could Flora Goforth, the indefatigable “dying monster” of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, the play that Williams was working on for the 1962 Spoleto Festival—“a poem of death,” he called it—about the last two days of an imperious wealthy woman’s existence on her mountaintop estate in Italy, where she has gone to finish writing her memoirs. “Ahhhhhhhh, meeeeeeeeee! . . . Another day, Oh, Christ, Oh, Mother of Christ!”—the first lines that Mrs. Goforth delivers, from offstage—sounded the unmistakable note of Beckett’s tragicomic ennui.

  Throughout his life Williams’s work had always been a kind of mother to him, nourishing and containing him. The title The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore—its reference to the drying up of a life-giving supply evoked the breast, even if it didn’t name it—signaled both a pining for his fecund youth and a profound sense of abandonment. (Subsequent play titles, such as Small Craft Warnings and The Mutilated, about a woman and her humiliation at losing a breast, also hinted at his fear of losing his power.) Walter Kerr, in his review of Milk Train, unwittingly hit upon the psychological issue at the center of the play, which was not just the drying up of the milk of human kindness but the drying up of Williams’s trust in his unconscious. “Which brings us to Mr. Williams’ own predicament,” Kerr wrote. “He has not yet heard from his muse, from his mind, from his typewriter, what needs to be said.” “Courageous title, by the way,” the twenty-six-year-old director John Hancock said to Williams during his subsequent production of Milk Train for the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. “He looked at me carefully and replied, ‘That’s right, baby. Glad you appreciate that.’ Of course he knew what he was writing about. The content of the exchange was clear. He’d always been a house on fire, but he couldn’t read the smoke signals anymore.” As Williams kidded on the square to Hancock, he was “ ‘the daid Mistuh William.’ ”

  Williams claimed that Milk Train was the most difficult of his plays to write. Woven from the tattered strands of his imploding life, the play is a kind of fairy tale of his own decline: The name “Goforth” was an echo of Williams’s mantra of endurance, “En avant!” (The title itself was an acknowledgment of his fear of creative paralysis, of the extinction of his “go forth” spirit.) The insignia on a flag that marks the first and last moments of Mrs. Goforth’s residency in her mountaintop aerie—“a golden griffin. A mythological monster, half lion, and half eagle”—is a simulacrum of Williams’s own family coat of arms: a fighting lion above a peacock. Even the epigram, from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” proclaimed Williams’s lostness: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is.”

  In a letter to John Hancock, Williams claimed that Milk Train was “a portrait. An allegorical portrait.” The allegory was in Mrs. Goforth, the pill-popping Georgia “swamp-bitch” who is trying to complete her “demented memoirs” and whose willful perversion and mysterious empowerment were a simulacrum of the destructive and creative sides of Williams, vying for domination of his overworked, balky imagination. A kind of broken, exiled, clownish monarch, Mrs. Goforth was a compendium of Williams’s deliriums—his stagnation, his fierce battle to defeat the enemy Time through literary endeavor. (“We’re working against time, Blackie,” she tells her beleaguered secretary, who tries to make sense of the diva’s scattershot ramblings about her six husbands and her famous life as an international beauty.) Mrs. Goforth acted out Williams’s own refusal to accept the inevitability of decline. As Blackie says, she “apparently never thought that her—legendary—existence—could go on less than forever!” “A legend in my own lifetime, yes, I reckon I am,” Mrs. Goforth says at one point, adding, “I’m a little run down, like a race horse that’s been entered in just one race too many, even for me.” To Hermione Baddeley, the first a
ctress to play her, Williams wrote:

  I beg you to play the broken queen of a corrupted material domain who knows she’s broken and the domain is corrupted, and offers her abdication, not her surrender, her strength, not her dissolution. She is a Napoleon wearing a sort of badge of honor on her regal garment. . . . She was a queen of the world as it is, and we know what it is. She’s exiled to Elba, yes, but exiled monarchs have pride, and speak out proudly. Their voices don’t lose the proud and imperious tone, no matter how they’re reduced, circumstantially. . . . Suddenly facing the false premise of their position, on a mountain, they remember how hard they had to climb up there, what it cost them in their hearts, now dying, and no matter how exiled and lonely they are on Elba, they know they fought as best they could however completely they lost. It’s only at the end, as everything dims out, that they appeal for the comfort of a death angel, and even then, without shame in the appeal. Their pride stays with the appeal.

  Mrs. Goforth is at the watershed between life and death when her castle keep is breeched by Christopher Flanders, a sweet-talking, insistent “death angel,” the author of a slim volume of poetry and a maker of mobiles who takes his name from the First World War killing fields of Belgium. Chris is, from the outset, associated with art and the higher mysteries of creation. Williams characterized him as “a guest desperately wanted but not invited.” He’s an interloper who trespasses on Mrs. Goforth’s hilltop compound, intent on bringing her some kind of salvation that will assuage her desire and ease her out of life. “Sometimes, once in a while, I’ve given [people] what they needed even if they didn’t know what it was,” he tells Mrs. Goforth of his ministrations. “I can’t explain Chris,” Williams said. “I can only reveal Mrs. Goforth.” Unlike Mrs. Goforth, who was modeled on divas well known to Williams—Tallulah Bankhead, Anna Magnani, himself—Chris was impossible for Williams to explain precisely because he was not a person but a phenomenon: an emissary of the intuitive, the imaginative, the mystical: those unconscious realms over which Williams felt he was losing his grip. At its most literal dramatic level, Chris embodies the question that Williams was asking about his own imagination: Can it be trusted? Will it deliver? Can you lose it by abusing it?

  Mildred Dunnock and Hermione Baddeley in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

  Inevitably, the protean Chris is both a seer and a seducer, a saintly angel and a predatory hustler, courtly and unbiddable. “There’s the element of the con man in him, but there’s also an element of the mystic,” Williams said. (“Everything about him was like that, a contradiction,” one of Mrs. Goforth’s acquaintances tells her.) Chris is at pains to explain to Mrs. Goforth that he is a representative of another reality—a reality that could be misconstrued as insanity. “We don’t all live in the same world, you know, Mrs. Goforth,” he says. “Oh, we all see the same things—sea, sun, sky, human faces and inhuman faces, but—they’re different in here!” (He touches his forehead.) “And one person’s sense of reality can be another person’s sense of—well, of madness!—chaos!” Chris is a messenger of the unknown and a votary of it. He carries in his backpack a book titled “Meanings Known and Unknown.” “It sounds like something religious,” Mrs. Goforth says. She can’t attract Chris, who refuses her imperious sexual command. “You have the distinction, the dubious distinction, of being the first man that wouldn’t come into my bedroom when invited to enter,” she tells him. The pleasure with which he tantalizes her is spiritual. “You need somebody or something to mean God to you,” he tells her.

  Writing was the ruthless something that meant God to Williams, a manifestation of the miraculous that had, several times, engineered his own resurrection. Through the blessings of his imagination Williams had been comforted and reborn. The drama onstage is not whether Chris will have sex with Mrs. Goforth; it is whether Chris will be the catalyst that allows her imagination to re-engage, her calcified heart to reopen. Flora Goforth—isolated by geography, money, celebrity, and competitive ruthlessness—is the reductio ad absurdum of the spiritual trap that Williams had spelled out to Kenneth Tynan almost a decade earlier: “Once the heart is thoroughly insulated, it’s also dead. At least for my kind of writer.” (Mrs. Goforth, whose motto is “Grab, fight, or go hungry,” admits to having built “a shell of bone round my heart with their goddamn loot.”)

  Mrs. Goforth’s indifference to others ensures her isolation; she exudes an epic ennui comparable to Williams’s. At the same time, the dying diva longs for and fears Chris’s life-giving touch. The play’s contest takes place between competing internal forces: it’s a drama of withholding and surrender, in which one frustrated half of Williams is shown struggling to communicate with the other half. Chris, looking out over the Mediterranean from Mrs. Goforth’s balcony, for instance, turns the vista into a poetic vision. “Here’s where the whole show started, it’s the oldest sea in the Western world, Mrs. Goforth, this sea called the Mediterranean Sea, which means the middle of the earth, was the cradle of life, not the grave, but the cradle of pagan and Christian—civilizations, this sea, and its connecting river, that old water snake, the Nile.” Mrs. Goforth short-circuits his meaning. “I’ve been on the Nile,” she replies. “No message.” Mrs. Goforth has no symbolic imagination. She is comically literal. When she complains that her work is “burning me up like a house on fire,” Chris turns her platitude into something visionary: “Yes, we—all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” “What do you mean by—what windows?” she counters.

  Williams’s addictions, he knew, were shrinking his creativity even as they were meant to sustain it. “In my own writing, I look back wistfully on the years, many of them, when I only needed two cups of strong coffee,” he said. “Now I wouldn’t dream of attempting to reach my unconscious mind without some other device in the nature of two or three martinis.” Williams couldn’t properly nourish himself, and neither could Mrs. Goforth, for whom feeding is a crucial issue. Living mostly off pills and coffee—“Anything solid takes the edge off my energy,” she says—she can’t receive much nourishment or give it. At the same time, she is suspicious of Chris’s desire to nurture her. “One long-ago meeting between us, and you expect me to believe you care more about my spirit and body than your own, Mr. Flanders,” she tells Chris, who admits to being “panicky when I have no one to care for.” Mrs. Goforth also perversely refuses to feed Chris. He hasn’t eaten in five days; he is “famished.” But at the beginning of the play, before they’ve met, she has her servants remove a tray of food that’s been brought to him; when they meet the next day on her sumptuous patio, she orders the breakfast tray removed because she “can’t stand the smell of food.” By the time Blackie manages to sneak a bottle of milk into Chris’s rucksack, the play is nearly over. As the very particular stage directions indicate, milk is meant to suggest food for the soul, not just for the body: “Chris opens the milk bottle and sips the milk as if it were sacramental wine. . . . He catches some drops of milk that have run down his chin, licks them almost reverently off the palm of his hand.”

  The drugged Mrs. Goforth is a mess; like Williams, she can no longer find herself to know herself. Just as Williams took up residence in the virtual world of his characters, Chris proposes to take up residence on Mrs. Goforth’s estate. The collaboration he suggests is an antidote to existential abandonment:

  We’re all of us living in a house we’re not used to . . . a house full of—voices, noises, objects, strange shadows, light that’s even stranger—We can’t understand. We bark and jump around and try to—be—pleasingly playful in this big mysterious house but—in our hearts we’re all still very frightened of it. Don’t you think so? Then it gets to be dark. We’re left alone with each other and give those gentle little nudges with our paws and our muzzles before we can slip into—sleep and—rest for the next day’s—playtime . . . and the next day’s mysteries.
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br />   Chris is one of those mysteries. His first and last word is “Boom!”—a mysterious sound that mimics the waves crashing on the Divina Costiera below and carries the paradox of the waves’ resounding power: explosion and erosion, creation and destruction. “Boom” is the title of a mobile that Chris wants to construct. “That’s what it means. No translation, no explanation, just ‘Boom,’ ” Chris says in the play’s last lines.

  To Williams, “Boom” was “the sound of shock felt by people each moment of still being alive.” Even in these metaphoric terms, the word contains the pulse of paradox—the sound of both heartbeat and heart attack. (In 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the word echoed Williams’s fear not only of his own demise but also of the demise of the Western world. The sound was so central to Milk Train that Williams titled his screenplay for Joseph Losey’s 1968 film adaptation Boom! In the film, which Williams considered “much better written than the play,” Chris doesn’t clamber up the mountain onto Mrs. Goforth’s property; instead, significantly, he emerges from the sea—the mother ocean—an emissary of the unconscious who may, or may not, help Mrs. Goforth. “Don’t leave me alone till—,” she whispers to Chris at the finale. “Be here, when I wake up,” she says with her last breath. “You always wonder where it’s gone, so far, so quickly. You feel it must be still around somewhere, in the air. But there’s no sign of it,” Chris says of the end of Mrs. Goforth’s “fierce life.” Between existence and extinction, there is only one infinite, unfathomable explosion.