Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  537 “Tennessee would touch him”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.

  537 “There was something about him”: Ibid.

  537 “My young writer friend”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Dec. 4, 1972, FOA, p. 279.

  537 “a disastrous and destructive liaison”: FOA, p. 292.

  537 “a nature I know”: Williams to Robert Carroll, Dec. 29, 1978, HRC.

  537 “Traveller, stranger”: Williams to Robert Carroll, Jan. 13, 1977, HRC.

  537 “a beautiful dream”: Williams to Edmund Perret, Oct. 1972, LLC.

  537 work of Carson McCullers: “The best I’ve known personally since McCullers,” he said. (Williams to Oliver Evans, Oct. 5, 1972, Harvard.)

  537 “My name for him”: CP, “Little Horse,” pp. 75–76.

  538 “cryin’ all the time”: “Hound Dog” written by Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman. Famously recorded by Elvis Presley.

  538 “Where is Robert?”: Tennessee Williams, “Robert” (unpublished), undated, Harvard.

  538 “He got himself”: Williams to Edmund Perret, Oct. 31, 1972, LLC.

  538 “He has a young”: Williams to Harry Rasky, Oct. 20, 1972, Harvard.

  538 documentary: Tennessee Williams’s South, DVD, written and directed by Harry Rasky (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1972).

  538 “I did not complain”: Williams to Harry Rasky, Oct. 20, 1972, Harvard.

  539 “All rights, moral, or in writing”: June 1972, FOA, p. 264. St. Just kept the copyright, however, when Williams deeded it to her.

  539 “Glenville’s abortion”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Oct. 1973, FOA, p. 303.

  539 “You don’t recover”: Williams to Lady St. Just, May 8, 1973, ibid., p. 291.

  539 “great sweetness to me”: Williams to Lady St. Just, May 26, 1973, ibid., p. 292.

  539 “hired companion”: Williams to Bill Barnes, May 31, 1973, LLC.

  539 “just lay there chain-smoking”: N, p. 738.

  540 “the Twerp”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Dec. 18, 1976, Harvard. The feeling was mutual. “Robert called her a cunt to her face,” Rader said. (JLI with Dotson Rader, 2013, JLC.)

  540 “That ‘grass’ he smokes”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Dec. 4, 1972, FOA, p. 279.

  540 “I said: ‘You find me intolerable’ ”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Apr. 18, 1973, ibid., p. 289.

  540 “was talking persistently”: Williams to Lady St. Just, May 31, 1973, ibid., p. 294.

  540 “The co-habitation with Carroll”: Williams to Bill Barnes, June 13, 1973, THNOC.

  540 “It turned out that ‘enigmatic’ ”: Williams to Oliver Evans, June 22, 1973, Harvard.

  540 “The West Virginia Kid”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Feb. 5, 1974, FOA, p. 309.

  541 “abruptly decided he wouldn’t leave”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Dec. 18, 1976, Harvard.

  541 “When Tenn was with Robert”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.

  541 “You see, you had laid”: Williams to Robert Carroll, Jan. 13, 1977, HRC.

  541 “Robert seemed to be going through”: Williams to Bruce Cook, Feb. 23, 1978, Harvard.

  542 “My beloved Genius”: Pancho Rodriguez to Andreas Brown, Nov. 2, 1978, THNOC.

  542 “I hope to see you some day”: Williams to Robert Carroll, undated, HRC.

  542 “Robert was far more confident”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.

  544 “The banishment of Frank”: Ibid.

  544 “There are not many readers”: Williams to Robert Carroll, Feb. 2, 1980, HRC.

  544 “Take care”: Williams to Robert Carroll, July 14, 1980, HRC.

  544 “It is true that my charms”: Williams to Bill Barnes, July 15, 1973, THNOC.

  545 “I have a conviction”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Apr. 10, 1973, JLC.

  545 “a kind of autobiographical peep show”: Michael Korda, “That’s It, Baby,” The New Yorker, Mar. 22, 1999. In the same article, Korda said, “I thought it courageous of Tennessee to have tried his hand at a novel, particularly one that celebrated the decline of the characters’ sexual and artistic powers.”

  545 “If he hasn’t exactly opened his heart”: Allean Hale, “Afterword,” in Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: New Directions, 2006), p. 253.

  545 “I am knocking it out”: Williams to Lady St. Just, July 30, 1972, FOA, p. 270. St. Just was so offended by the book’s sexual explicitness that she threw her copy away.

  545 “I don’t plan”: Williams to Kate Medina, July 16, 1972, HRC.

  545 “I feel that the project”: Williams to Kate Medina, Feb. 1973, HRC.

  546 “You impressed me”: Williams to Thomas Congdon, Apr. 4, 1973, HRC.

  546 “I feel I’ve been had”: San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 25, 1976.

  546 full power of his romantic connection: Williams wrote, “Donald Windham had suggested the dramatization of this story [You Touched Me!] but it was I who had secured the rights to dramatize it from Lawrence’s widow. . . . Unhappily it is also true that Donald’s contribution to this adaptation is not hugely under-estimated by the word minimal. . . . Donald Windham was already, in my opinion, a precociously gifted writer of prose-fiction, but he had not learned to write dialogue that actors could comfortably employ on a professional stage nor even off . . . .” (As quoted in an unpublished essay, “The Flowers of Friendship Fade the Flowers of Friendship,” LLC.)

  546 “amusing and well-written”: N, Spring 1979, p. 749.

  546 given permission to Windham: In a disingenuous letter to the New York Times, answering Williams’s complaints about Robert Brustein’s review of the book, Windham wrote, “The first agreement was signed January 6, 1976. . . . This letter asked him, if he agreed, to give the accompanying rough-drafted document to his lawyer to draw up an agreement between us. It was because TW signed this rough draft that evening when he came to dinner, saying that there was no need for his lawyer to be involved, that I went to a lawyer and had the second agreement prepared to make everything legally clear between us. TW was given this second agreement after he returned to New York, on Feb. 17, 1976, at a restaurant where he was having lunch with his sister and friends and had asked me to join him. He signed it in front of his five guests, after reading it and making a handwritten addition on it, as he had made on the first agreement.” (New York Times, Jan. 15, 1978.)

  546 “insulting and damaging”: Williams to Floria Lasky, Nov. 21, 1976, LLC.

  546 “What makes a Windham?”: N, Spring 1979, p. 749.

  547 “The love that previously dared not speak”: Robert Brustein, “The Perfect Friend,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 1977.

  547 “I can’t live in a professional vacuum”: Williams to Hillard Elkins, June 18, 1974, LLC.

  547 Kennedy assassination: “I think the panic and rot of our present era really did first manifest itself in full when those murders of JFK and Oswald took place in Dallas; it was the elevation of that red devil battery sign,” Williams wrote to Barnes. (Williams to Bill Barnes, Oct. 19, 1973, THNOC.)

  547 “Did I die by my own hand”: N, Spring 1979, p. 739.

  547 “one big hell-hollering death grin”: Tennessee Williams, The Red Devil Battery Sign (New York: New Directions, 1984), p. 25.

  547 “Oh, they trusted me”: Ibid., p. 24.

  548 “Tonight?”: Ibid., p. 38.

  549 “grief and disease receive little pity”: Herbert Kretzmer, “High Level Plot That Is Hatched in Hell,” London Daily Express, June 9, 1977, cited in William Prosser, The Late Plays of Tennessee Williams (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2009), p. 145.

  549 “Dreams necessary”: Williams, Red Devil Battery Sign, p. 90.

  549 “outlaws in appearance”: Ibid., p. 92.

  549 “They seem to explode”: Ibid., p. 84.

  549 “He’s just 32”: Williams to David Merrick, Nov. 3, 1973, LLC.

  549 “In the old days”: Williams to Bill Barnes, undated, THNOC.

  550 declare him “dead”: John Simon, in his review of Creve Coeur in New York, for instance,
wrote, “The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth.” (Cited in Prosser, Late Plays, p. 157.)

  550 “If the play has not your confidence”: Williams to David Merrick, Nov. 23, 1973, LLC.

  550 “I sensed that you were seriously interested”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Dec. 1973, LLC.

  550 “What’s the matter, David?”: Howard Kissel, David Merrick: The Abominable Showman (New York: Applause Books, 1993), p. 426.

  550 after Merrick’s option lapsed: Ed Sherin, “A View from inside the Storm” (unpublished), ESC.

  551 “None of us wanted to be involved”: Tennessee Williams, “The Curious History of This Play and Plans for the Future,” LLC.

  551 “one of the most important works”: Sherin, “View,” ESC.

  551 “were paranoid”: Ibid.

  551 “I fancy this”: Williams to Lady St. Just, May 4, 1975, FOA, p. 326.

  551 “another actress be found”: Sherin, “View,” ESC.

  551 “As I live and breathe”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Apr. 1975, FOA, p. 325.

  551 “amateurish”: Sherin, “View,” ESC.

  551 “a mess”: Prosser, Late Plays, p. vi.

  551 “cause for rejoicing”: Ibid.

  551 “beginning to emerge”: Sherin, “View,” ESC.

  553 “I stood in disbelief”: Ibid.

  553 “He gave me this shocking report”: Williams memo, undated, LLC.

  553 “Tennessee Williams”: Kissel, David Merrick, p. 429.

  553 “the very forces in our society”: Sherin, “View,” ESC.

  553 “It’s not closing for good”: Kissel, David Merrick, p. 429.

  553 “Burn, burn, burn”: Prosser, Late Plays, p. 144.

  553 “one of the most thrilling tragedies”: Ibid.

  554 “a blazing torch”: Ibid.

  554 “coup-de-disgrace”: Williams to Bill Barnes, undated, LLC.

  554 “I am like some old opera star”: Leicester Mercury, May 11, 1978.

  554 “Aside from you”: Williams to Walter Kerr, Mar. 10, 1978, LLC.

  554 “Why, Roger”: Teddy Vaughn, Washington Star, Dec. 2, 1979.

  554 “I am widely regarded”: Tennessee Williams, “I Am Widely Regarded as the Ghost of a Writer,” New York Times, May 8, 1977. In his “Epitaph for Tennessee Williams,” included in Writing in Restaurants, David Mamet wrote “his life and view of life became less immediately accessible, and our gratitude was changed to distant reverence for a man whom we felt obliged—if we were to continue in our happy feelings toward him—to consider already dead.”

  554 “imminently posthumous”: Williams, interview by Dick Cavett, The Dick Cavett Show, May 16, 1979.

  554 “Help!”: Prosser, Late Plays, p. xvi.

  554 “I phoned Tennessee”: Ibid.

  555 “so they might hear”: FOA, p. 333. The leading lady and the director were Ruth Brinkmann and Franz Schafranek. “Ruth took it very badly and screamed at Tennessee. . . . Franz fell to his knees and apologized for her outburst.”

  555 “The lady who produced my new play”: Peter Hall, Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle, ed. John Goodwin (London: Oberon Books, 2555), p. 274.

  555 “Tenn used death”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.

  555 “I saw him use it most in places”: Ibid.

  555 “inordinately possessed of the past”: Richard F. Leavitt, The World of Tennessee Williams (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), p. x.

  555 plays teemed with apparitions: Vieux Carré; Stopped Rocking; Something Cloudy, Something Clear; Clothes for a Summer Hotel; Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis?; The Chalky White Substance.

  556 “alternate projects”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Nov. 18, 1974, THNOC.

  556 “spectral country”: Tennessee Williams, Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays (New York: New Directions, 1984), p. 382.

  556 “No, not alone”: Ibid.

  556 “No more Sunday visits”: Ibid., p. 377.

  556 “utterly peaceful”: Ibid., p. 384.

  556 “stone outside and in”: Williams, Stopped Rocking, p. 327. Rose Williams haunts Stopped Rocking—Farmington, the state institution to which Janet is being transferred, is the name of the state hospital where Rose spent nineteen years. Williams, like Olaf, was also increasingly haunted by his own sense of deadness and hardening heart.

  557 “he told me ruefully”: JLI with John Hancock, 2012, JLC.

  557 “calamari fritti”: Ibid.

  557 “had written another”: Ibid.

  557 “skimpy”: Ibid.

  557 “I knew we were in trouble”: Ibid.

  558 “The actors were stunned”: Ibid.

  558 “Tennessee stirred”: Ibid.

  558 “a passionate will to create”: Opening stage direction, original Ms. of Vieux Carré, Harvard.

  558 “Once this house was alive”: Tennessee Williams, Vieux Carré (New York: New Directions, 1979), p. 5.

  558 “(As he first draws the door open”: Ibid., p. 116.

  559 “Old cats know how to fall”: Early draft of Vieux Carré, HRC; lines appear later in Tennessee Williams, The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays (New York: New Directions, 2011), p. 236.

  559 “None of us saw Tennessee”: Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 324.

  559 “I am as frightened as ever”: Williams to Arthur Seidelman, May 1977, LLC.

  559 “It developed that the backers”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, May 22, 1977, LLC.

  560 “Tennessee Williams’s voice”: Walter Kerr, “A Touch of the Poet Isn’t Enough to Sustain Williams’s Latest Play,” New York Times, May 22, 1977.

  560 “body snatching”: Brendan Gill, “Body Snatching,” The New Yorker, Apr. 7, 1980.

  560 “We are simply being told”: Walter Kerr, “The Stage: ‘Clothes for a Summer Hotel’; People Out of Books,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1980.

  560 “In a sense all plays are ghost plays”: Tennessee Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 84.

  561 “Zelda is the type”: Michiko Kakutani, “ ‘Ghosts’ of the Fitzgeralds Rehearsing under the Watchful Eye of Williams,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1980.

  561 “the brutality of the unconscious”: As quoted in Tennessee Williams, “In Masks Outrageous and Austere” (unpublished), JLC.

  561 “In Tennessee’s work”: Kakutani, “ ‘Ghosts,’ ” Jan. 8, 1980.

  561 “Scott used Zelda’s life”: Ibid. Walter Kerr on Geraldine Page’s Zelda: “She looks like a gypsy moth that’s been put through a shredder, leaving only her pink ballet dancing slippers more or less intact.” (New York Times, Mar. 27, 1980.)

  561 “Is that really you, Scott?”: Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, p. 9.

  561 “What was important to you”: Ibid., p. 11.

  561 “Mr. Fitzgerald . . . seems to believe”: Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald (St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 31.

  562 “The will to cry out remains”: Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, p. 50.

  562 “Call it a ring of”: Ibid., p. 12.

  562 “ZELDA:—I’m approaching him”: Ibid., p. 48.

  563 “The gates are iron”: Ibid., p. 77.

  563 appropriation of Fitzgerald’s life for his own short stories: In The Notebook of Trigorin, Williams’s free adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which was commissioned by the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, and staged there in 1981, Williams continued his meditation on self-destruction and the appropriation of others for art. As Williams’s retitled play implies, the famed Trigorin makes a myth of writing—“A writer’s a madman—probationally released,” he says—and is a testament to the smug brutality of the artistic temperament. (Williams, The Notebook of Trigorin (New York: New Directions, 1997), p. 45.) He uses his literary legend to seduce and to betray the aspiring young actress, Nina. Trigorin�
��s obsessive need to write drains his experience of all meaning. Trigorin doesn’t understand his brutality; Williams did. The year that Trigorin was staged, Williams was interviewed by Studs Terkel, who started to define his talents in the following exchange (from a transcribed tape):

  Terkel: Lyricist, poet, storywriter, playwright.

  Williams: Playwright, yes. Is it all right to say son-of-bitch? (Laughs)

  Terkel: I suppose that’s an art form in itself, isn’t it?

  Williams: It’s something you learn in show business.

  563 “You see, I can betray”: Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, pp. 67–68.

  564 “write yourself a new book”: Ibid., p. 77.

  564 “He said he wanted to fly away”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2011, JLC.

  564 “hung on for ten years”: Ibid.

  566 “He seemed nervous”: Dotson Rader, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), p. 333.

  566 “Eli was the first to grab him”: Dotson Rader to John Lahr, Sept. 8, 2012, JLC.

  566 “I have had it all my life”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 336.

  566 “Slender Is the Night”: Jack Kroll, “Slender Is the Night,” Newsweek, Apr. 7, 1980.

  566 “ ‘Clothes’ Needs Some Tailoring”: Clive Barnes, “ ‘Clothes’ Needs Some Tailoring,” New York Post, Mar. 27, 1980.

  567 “There is nothing necessary”: John Simon, “Damsels Inducing Distress,” New York, Apr. 7, 1980.

  567 “The action is set in the 1940s”: Robert Brustein, “Advice for Broadway,” New Republic, May 3, 1980.

  567 “This is an evening at the morgue”: Rex Reed, New York Daily News, Mar. 27, 1980.

  567 “ ‘Clothes’ was a victim”: Williams to Elia Kazan, July 5, 1980, Harvard.

  567 “Couldn’t the son of a bitch”: Bruce Smith, Costly Performances: Tennessee Williams: The Last Stage: A Personal Memoir (St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 1990), p. 158.

  567 “critical homicide”: Earl Wilson, 1980, LLC.

  567 induction to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: Williams took Chair 19 vacated by the death of the sculptor Alexander Calder.

  567 “a playwright in the way”: Elia Kazan, Kennedy Center Honors speech, 1979, WUCA.

  567 “shaped the history”: President Jimmy Carter, “Presidential Medal of Freedom Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony,” Jan. 9, 1980, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=45389#axzz2ikgS3SEj.