Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  The issue of suicide is raised in the play’s final beats. Clare finds a revolver hidden behind a sofa cushion and aims it at Felice. “Do it while you still can!” Felice says “harshly.” Clare cries out, “I can’t,” and drops the revolver; Felice picks it up and tries to execute Clare, but he can’t either. As the lights start to fade, “in both their faces is a tender admission of defeat.” But the ending is ambivalent. “They reach out their hands to one another, and the light lingers a moment on their hands lifting toward each other.” The embrace, when it comes, is in “total dark.” Have they reconnected in life? Or in death?

  Around this time, at a Chinese restaurant in New York, Williams had a stoned lunch with Yukio Mishima, also a New Directions author, whom he’d first met and befriended while traveling in 1956. “Mishima told me then . . . that I was ‘killing myself’ and I said something like ‘why not?’ ” Williams recalled. His latest play, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, was about to open on Broadway; a sense of doom hung heavily over him. He felt, he said, as if he’d “been ravaged, without Vaseline, by a troop of elephants.” To a recent acquaintance, his Canadian pen pal David Lobdell, he wrote, “I am in a state of panic and confusion. Although I may like the play—it is hard not to like something on which you’ve worked a long time—I feel that the critics will put it down. I feel that I am out of fashion as a writer.” In April, after the predicted critical bashing, Williams’s psychological situation grew worse. “I don’t believe God is dead but I think he is inclined to pointless brutalities,” he said. The reviews of Myrtle, however, were tame compared to the hoots of disapproval that awaited him in late May, when Joseph Losey’s film version of Boom! was released. The almost gleeful critical contempt for the movie had him reeling. Williams fled to England; but he could find no succor even in the emollient presence of St. Just, who reported his awful state in a distressed letter to Audrey Wood.

  Things had not improved by mid-July 1968, when Williams was back in New York. “He still is not taking care of himself,” Wood wrote to St. Just. Nonetheless, Williams forced himself to the typewriter. “Everyday I work slowly but carefully as possible on a middle-length play called ‘Two Scenes in the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,’ ” he told Laughlin. “I drink much less, but sometimes I fall out of my chair in a restaurant. Do I have brain cancer?”

  The new play, according to Williams, was about “an artist’s one-ness with his work, and growing estrangement from the world outside it.” But within that familiar theme, Williams called out of himself something new and startling. Through the character of Miriam, the disenchanted wife of a befogged world-famous painter named Mark, Williams introduced the unsparing, objectifying voice of his own self-loathing.

  Anne Meacham as Miriam, In The Bar of a Tokyo Hotel

  Miriam, who hates color and flowers, personifies the pure negative. Onstage, she spells out in physical terms something that Williams tried to define in poetic form: “The Negative: unhomed, unowned, by preference alone. / And that is all: why do you stay? Is it not time to go?” When the curtain comes up, Miriam is unhomed and in the process of leaving her husband. For fourteen years, she has lived in a fierce, fraught symbiotic relationship with Mark—each “the constant unbearable” of the other. Now, seated in the bar of a Tokyo hotel, alternately trying to pick up the barman and to compose an SOS to Mark’s agent, Leonard, summoning him to Japan to clean up after Mark’s “total collapse of the nervous system,” Miriam is calling it quits with the marriage. “He is mad,” she says. “I am married to madness! I need some space between myself and.—A man raging in the dark!” Miriam has lost faith in Mark’s new paintings, which are an “adventure” to him and a “crock” to her. “He’s gone through drip, fling, sopped, stained, saturated, scraped ripped, cut, skeins of, mounds of heroically enduring color, but now he’s arrived at a departure that’s a real departure that I doubt he’ll return from. Oh, I’m no fool about the. His sacred studio, talking to his. And his black and white period before he,” Miriam tells Leonard, when he arrives a few days later.

  Williams, like Mark, was in the throes of fashioning a new style—a literary attack that was as free and conspicuous as Mark’s vivid painterly gestures. To demonstrate the psychic static between Miriam and Mark, he came up with a new theatrical idiom, a sort of linguistic stammer, in which the characters anticipate and finish each other’s sentences.

  MIRIAM:—Are we two people, Mark, or are we—

  MARK: (with a force of dread) Stop there!

  (She lifts her hands to her face, but the words continue through it.)

  MIRIAM: Two sides of!

  MARK: Stop!

  MIRIAM: One! An artist inhabiting the body of a compulsive—

  MARK: Bitch!

  MIRIAM: Call me that, but remember that you’re denouncing a side of yourself, denied by you!

  Struggling to explain the discoveries he is making upstairs in the hotel room, where he works obsessively with a spray gun to translate his incoherence, Mark stammers.

  MARK: For the first time, primary colors and no. No technique that sep, sep!

  MIRIAM: Are you trying to say separates?

  MARK: Yes, separates, holds at some dis!

  MIRIAM: . . . holds at some distance, is that it?

  MARK: You understand what I’m trying to say.

  “I don’t complete many sentences these days,” Williams told a reporter in 1969. The ravaged and rumpled Mark is a doppelgänger for the derelict Williams at the time of writing, a personification of the “peculiarly humiliating doom of the artist,” as Williams said. When Mark makes his entrance in the middle of the first scene, he attempts to pull a chair up to Miriam’s table “but stumbles to his knees: staggers up with an apologetic laugh.” “Too soon after work,” he explains, his hand so tremulous that he needs help lifting the cocktail the barman puts in front of him. “Sometimes the interruption of work, especially in a new style, causes a, causes a—loss of momentum that’s never recovered!” he tells Miriam, when she literally holds up a mirror to his “shaking, unbathed, unshaved,” demented self.

  Miriam sees only his breakdown; Mark sees only his art. He is compelled to return to his canvases, which are “demanding what I can’t give them yet.” It’s exactly because he can’t function that he can’t achieve his artistic aim.

  MIRIAM: You’ll return to the States and you will consult a.

  MARK: He would only tell me what I already know. You know there isn’t much further.

  MIRIAM: Your least attractive quality is self-pity.

  MARK: I was being objective.

  Mark feels his inspiration—a word synonymous with breathing—waning. He is winded. “I’ll tell you something about what’s called—the breath of life in us. No, I don’t have the breath to tell you,” Mark jokes. In the second scene, he staggers up from Miriam’s table, promising to “be back in ten minutes, exactly,” and then falls to the floor. For both the characters and the audience, the shock is that Mark’s much-vaunted forward movement is a race toward death after all.

  The question that haunts the play, as it did Williams, is why does Mark, a man of great attainment who has found his creative bliss, destroy it. Williams wrote a kind of explanation, in a letter to Herbert Machiz, the play’s original director, which he asked to have read to the company. (In his references to the “wife or lover,” Williams was clearly referring to his relationship with Merlo, which had split along similar fault lines.)

  As Mark truthfully says, the intensity of the work, the unremitting challenges and demands that it makes to him and of him (in most cases daily) leaves so little of him after the working hours that simple, comfortable being is impossible for him. . . . For a few years this wife or lover will accept, or appear to accept, his primary commitment to his work. Then the wife or lover will reasonably resent being so constantly in second place, and will pay him back by promiscuities, sometimes as ravenous as Miriam’s. His youth passes. The health of his body fails him. Then the work increases its de
mand from most of him to practically all of him. . . . As death approaches, he hasn’t the comfort of feeling with any conviction that any of his work has had any essential value. The wife or lover is repelled by his shattered condition and is willing to be with him as little a time as possible. Somewhere in her or him there remains, unconsciously, a love for him that can only be expressed in her or his feeling when the artist is dead.

  By associating love with posthumous feelings, Williams pointed to the murderous impulse of envy that is at the core of Miriam and Mark’s toxic relationship:

  MIRIAM: I have clipped flowers outside your studio and heard you talk to your work as if you were talking to another person in the studio with you.

  MARK: No. To myself.

  MIRIAM: And I was clipping flowers. It’s natural that I.

  MARK: Felt?

  MIRIAM: Sometimes a little excluded, but I never spoke of it, did I?

  MARK: The work of a painter is lonely.

  MIRIAM: So is clipping flowers. . . .

  MARK: When I heard you clipping flowers outside my studio, it would sometimes occur to me that you wished the flowers you were clipping were my.

  MIRIAM: What’s become of the man that?

  MARK: What’s become of the woman that?

  Miriam has played midwife to the artist whose achievement is both her validation and her alienation. She is in the paradoxical position of needing Mark to succeed and wanting to undermine his success. Her promiscuity is dramatized as both an attack on and revenge for Mark’s creativity. And her unconscious wish to steal his power is dramatized by her conscious choice to rip off his work in order to finance a future without him. “I have, under my own name, in Morgan Manhattan Storage, about, no less than two hundred of his best paintings before he discovered color with spray guns, and I also have a hell of a lot of his drawings,” she tells Leonard. When Leonard feels Mark’s pulse and pronounces him dead, “Miriam appears to see and feel nothing,” the stage directions read. Eventually, she says, “Released! . . . I am released.”

  In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel acts out Miriam’s envy of Mark; it is also an unusually raw and baldly autobiographical meditation on the problem of self-envy, of the artist whose best work may be behind him. Mark speaks for Williams’s romantic, heroic side; Miriam, for his perverse, capricious side. Mark seeks illumination through struggle; Miriam seeks escape through distraction: “Animation. Liveliness. People at a smart restaurant talking gaily together.” The creative life she has shared with Mark is literally and symbolically behind her. In the play’s final moment, Leonard asks Miriam, “What are your actual plans?” She replies, “I have no plans. I have nowhere to go.” She is at a loss; she can’t move. “With abrupt violence, she wrenches the bracelets from her arms and flings them to her feet,” as the lights fade to black. For the first and only time in his canon, Williams ends on a harrowing image of impasse.

  The last words spoken over the dead artist in Tokyo Hotel are, “He thought that he could create his own circle of light.” By the end of 1968, Williams, in his drugged-out paranoid blur, was living entirely in darkness.

  In early January 1969, Dakin flew down to Key West. “At this moment, and not for the first time, he looked as though the death bed might not be far away,” Dakin recalled of his gaunt, withdrawn brother. In the 1962 Time cover story, the piece mentioned Dakin’s “broad hints in person and in print” about how his beleaguered brother could “achieve peace of soul” through religion. “If it would make him happy, I would have a deathbed conversion. It might help to distract me too,” Williams had joked. Now, when Dakin raised the issue of conversion again, Williams was in forlorn agreement. Dakin arranged a meeting and a baptism with a Jesuit priest, Father Joseph LeRoy of St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church.

  On January 10, flanked by Dakin, Bill Glavin (Williams’s secretary and companion since 1965), Leoncia McGee (his housekeeper), and Margaret Foresman (a longtime friend and the editor of the Key West Citizen), a haggard Williams, “weakened by the flu” and “wobbly when he went to the altar,” was baptized into the church. “I also received the last rites, assuring my ascension to heaven after a relatively short stay in purgatory,” Williams wrote later to Robert MacGregor, adding, “I have always been a Catholic in my work, in the broadest sense of it. Don’t be disturbed. I question the canons of all faiths. I love the chanted Mass, and the rich ceremony. At best, I will be a very eclectic Catholic.” “Salty Author Williams Takes Catholic Vows” was a headline in the Miami Herald. Father LeRoy gave Williams a copy of Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island; Williams gave Father LeRoy a book of his plays, which he inscribed, “Dear Father Joe, Faith is in our hearts, or else we are dead.” According to Father LeRoy, Williams, in his profession of faith, accepted everything except the idea of immortality. “He didn’t understand much about that,” he said. When asked later by the press why he had converted, Williams said to “get my goodness back.” As Dakin said, “Tenn thinks his conversion will cause him to write better and clearer. He expects that his best plays are ahead.”

  Although Williams believed that “the eventual, unavoidable doom of an artist is a thing that’s appallingly simple,” the staging of it was not. After a few weeks of rehearsal for In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel at the Eastside Playhouse in New York, Williams himself replaced Machiz as the director. “He seemed to be interested only in stage movement, no comprehension of anything else,” Williams told Laughlin. In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel may not have been one of Williams’s great plays, but it was a good one, a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche. The play had obvious structural limitations—no satisfying arc, no empathetic characters—and a flawed central performance (“Anne Meacham as Mark’s wife italicizes every word she utters,” Harold Clurman observed). Nonetheless, it had more intellectual sinew, moral complexity, and psychological nuance than the critics acknowledged. With the exception of Jack Kroll, the sophisticated culture editor of Newsweek—“In the age of the heartless avant-garde it is good to see that Williams still has the touch,” he wrote—the press was deaf to the new tones in Williams’s outcry. In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, critics judged, was “almost too personal, and as a result too painful” (the New York Times), “more deserving of a coroner’s report than a review” (Time). “Tennessee Williams appears to be a White Dwarf”—a star at the end of its life cycle—Life magazine reported. “We are still receiving his messages, but it is now obvious that they come from a cinder.” Of all the reviews, however, the most annihilating came from Williams’s mother, who attended the opening night on May 11, 1969, with Dakin. “Tom, it’s time for you to find another occupation now,” Edwina said. That afternoon, Williams had delegated Wood to accompany Edwina to Bergdorf Goodman to be fitted for a fur coat. “Whatever the exact price was, I do not remember, but it was in four figures,” Wood recalled. “Mrs. Williams was delighted.” After Edwina’s comment, Williams canceled the purchase.

  In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel lasted for twenty-five performances. In May, Williams was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in June, a full-page ad for Life magazine appeared in the New York Times. In it, a picture of Williams’s mustached profile was captioned, “Played out? ‘Tennessee Williams has suffered an infantile regression from which there seems no exit. . . . Almost free of incident or drama . . . nothing about In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel deserves its production.’ That’s the kind of play it is, and that’s the kind of play it gets in this week’s Life.” “I really began to crack,” Williams said.

  In desperation, Williams, accompanied by Anne Meacham and his bulldog, Gigi, fled to Japan, ostensibly to see rehearsals of Streetcar at the renowned Bungakuza Theatre Company in Tokyo, but quarantine issues with the dog sent him into an even deeper tailspin. “I had an evening with very sad Tennessee Williams and Anne Meacham,” Yukio Mishima wrote to Robert MacGregor. “I did not understand his talking at all because he was drunken being so shocked by Japanese custom officer
s’ bureaucratic treatment to separate him and his sweetheart Gigi (a dog). It was a very very sad but very impressive evening. I took care of him with Anne beside of his bed in order to give him a good sleep and sweet dream. He was just a big baby with beards drinking alcohol instead of milk.” “My condition had so deteriorated that I do not even recall my seeing Yukie,” Williams confided later to Oliver Evans. After the fiasco of Japan, where Williams proved impossible for Meacham to wrangle—he ended up accusing her of stealing his drugs—he reunited with Bill Glavin in San Francisco, for a dismal three-week stay at the elegant Fairmont Hotel.

  With Bill Glavin

  Glavin was a charming New Jersey–born lost soul, with azure eyes, half-moon teeth, rotted away, and nice cheekbones, who had a “rollicking nature” and “an almost suspect glamor,” according to Williams. He was tall, cast against type for Williams. “Tennessee always preferred someone of his own height as a companion,” Bill Gray, a professor of English who befriended Williams in the late forties, said. “He did not like a person of ideas. He did not like an intellectual. God knows Glavin filled that bill.” Many people who saw Williams and Glavin at close quarters felt that Glavin treated Williams shabbily. “He didn’t look after him. He didn’t do the job. Glavin was never there,” the realtor Robert Hines said. According to Jack Fricks, Hines’s partner, Glavin “would get Tennessee knocked out and have him back home by ten or eleven in the evening, and then Glavin would take off and go out and stay out till four in the morning.” Even a laissez-faire freeloader like Glavin had his work cut out trying to take care of Williams. “There’s a limit to what anybody could do with Tennessee in that period,” Dakin Williams said. “Glavin couldn’t handle Tennessee because of his temperament—an explosive type Irish temperament.”