Stella Adler, a strong influence on Tenn’s life, was, like Hepburn, not terribly interested in the lives of artists she admired: her admonition to Tenn was always to show her the work, and she would then know all she needed to know—all she cared to know—about the person who created it. Adler believed she could study and deconstruct and direct and perform the plays of writers like Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw and Shakespeare and keep unearthing new things, and she exhorted Tenn to do the same. Tenn’s decline as a writer, in Adler’s opinion (one she personally expressed to Tenn), came when he lost his interest in the works of other writers, in the actions of the theater—when he submitted to the devices, alcohol and drugs, that he believed helped him to survive. When Adler was heard to exclaim, “Who will take care of Tennessee now?” he was not hurt or angered: he wanted it to be Adler who took care of him.
“That would be the day,” Maureen Stapleton quipped. “Stella Adler was not going to lie in a bed with Tenn and talk things out. She would never do as I did, and let him drink and keep talking about demons and overhead camera shots—she would have put him to work.” The ministrations of Stella Adler came with an ultimatum, and it was repeatedly given to Tenn: clean yourself up and get back to work. She promised to stand by him and look at whatever he wrote and offer whatever help he might need.
“But I couldn’t do it,” Tenn admitted. “I had the meetings with her, but my condition was not acceptable to her—or rather, it was not acceptable to what I knew she expected. Whatever condition I might have been in when I went to Hepburn for her aid, it was far worse when I went to Stella. The heaviness was extreme, and my head, and the dreams within it, were scary and gelatinous. Words and thoughts made no sense as I wrote them. It was through sheer will and massive editing that I was able to get anything out at all, and no one, least of all Stella, should have seen what that encompassed.”
The meetings with Adler did have an effect on Tenn, and it was noticed by Elia Kazan. “Tennessee was reading so many different playwrights,” he remembered, “and when he would bump into me, and several times when he called me, he would be full of questions about plays, particularly those I might have directed or acted in. He became terribly obsessed with Clifford Odets, and asked me so many questions about him, about his working habits, his methods.”
Tenn had become obsessed—in a fashion that would have pleased Hepburn—with work, with what he called “the architecture of artistic desire.” Tenn explained to me why the architecture of Clifford Odets had been so important to him.
“It is imperative that one should never begin to write anything,” he told me, “for anyone, or for any venue, until something both monumental and rudimentary is at stake, and what is more monumental and rudimentary—and fragile and temporary and capricious—than our very existence? Our very reality? Our purpose, our worth, our identity?
“I am always asking my characters, and they are always asking themselves, who they are,” Tenn continued, “and this is absolutely necessary for day-to-day survival, because we cannot perform any functions until we answer that essential question. Who will ultimately care what happens to a particular character until we know who and what they are?
“Clifford Odets taught me a great deal about identity,” Tenn continued, “because his characters are so vividly examined and understood and loved by their creator. Intensely realized. Odets will not simply indicate, for example, that a character is male and poor and desperate; he will extrapolate until we see that this character is male and poor and desperate and unloved and trapped and American. His characters unfold before you as if you were watching an onion peeled away layer by layer, and all around him you suddenly see that there are still other layers—home, country, family, society—that must either be shed or used as protection from the onslaughts that life inevitably and without mercy presents to us.
“Amazingly,” Tenn said, smiling, “he is to me a positive writer, no matter how tragic the circumstances, because no matter how pitiful the circumstances of his children—which is how we must see our characters—I am always left with the very vivid idea—the hope—that within us all, within the most horrific of circumstances, we will find, within or about one of our layers, the means to communicate, to defend, to love, to persevere.
“It is easy and acceptable to dismiss his works as proletarian,” Tenn told me, “and I might have done so myself at some point, but I am proud to realize that, no matter my trappings, I am very much an Odets character—male, poor, and desperate, American, and yet, amazingly, positive. Positive and fighting and—this is the loveliest of his qualities, and, I would hope, mine—perpetually able to share, no matter how puny my treasures become or remain.”
In his earliest years in New York, Tenn would not only spend time in movie theaters; he also snuck into theaters to watch other plays coming to life, and he persistently pursued Odets. “I was terribly attracted to him,” Tenn confessed. “To his talent, and to him. He had the most wonderful hands, and I became, for a time, convinced that the quality of one’s writings was proportional to the hands of the writer. Odets also had a beautiful mouth and a quick laugh and an intense gaze. I came to feel that he knew quite well what I was up to.”
The ease with which Odets painted his characters, their passions, and Tenn’s memories of the writer’s personal magnetism and intensity inspired his play Stairs to the Roof, which owed, in his estimation, a great deal to Awake and Sing! “I had had a failure,” Tenn remembered, “and I felt that I was a failure at that point as a writer and a man. Odets had had success as a writer and as a man, and he, more than any other young playwright at that time, spoke to me and excited me. His aesthetic fingerprints are all over Menagerie, and when it is properly directed and performed, I think you can hear the fast and urgent humor, the desperation, the airless rooms, and the sad hope of those two women, growing, at the play’s curtain, as dim as the apartment.”
An original thought and an original voice had come to Tenn when he began to write Streetcar, Summer and Smoke, and Camino Real, a sort of fever-dream narrative that came to him as he kept following the characters that had visited him, or as he looked at works of art that had inspired him. “I wrote those plays as if perpetually on a final deadline,” he told me, “always acting as if I needed money to get a loved one out of jail, or money to get me out of an unfriendly country. I worked a lot in that time under the belief that I would be dead or incapacitated at any moment, and it brings a certain texture to the work, but it can wreak havoc on your soul and your body. I now believe it’s better not to write in a state of anger. I think it works to be angry about something, a condition or the treatment given to someone, a character you come to love; but a general anger, which is what I operated beneath for so long in my fifties and early sixties—as I fought against the declivity in my talents and my health—was not good for the writing.”
He paused for a moment, then looked at me. “I would like to rewrite a great many of those plays now,” he said. “To get them right. And I think I can do it now.”
TENN STOOD and looked at the notes on the bed. “We don’t have much more time,” he told me. “I need to read and study more plays, from all times and from all types of writers, and find out how they work, how they’re built. I may soon be in a position, in a condition, to ask Stella for her help, to really place a play, and all its parts, in front of me cleanly and plainly.”
There were two playwrights that Tenn was studying most intently, the two he loved the most, personally and artistically: John Guare and Edward Albee, both of whom he termed “terminal and magical.” In the notes on that bed, I found comments about both men, and I copied some of them, those that could be deciphered. Of Guare, Tenn had written, “I want to work and to walk about with Guare eyes. Wonder and urgency. I think I always had in common with John my terminal vision, seeing everything as if for both the first and the last time, which allows one to invest anything with powerful, mystical, deeply emotional power.”
Every walk past a p
articular building, Tenn instructed, could be the last. That pond over there—what if fate or blindness or relocation made it unavailable to you? “Items of subjective beauty,” Tenn called them, and our pasts are full of them; our present life is crowded with them as well, but we are generally unaware of their existence, much less their worth, until they gain entrance into what he called an “amber-hued past, that closet of psychic bric-a-brac” to which we repair when we want to remember, or to lick or bind wounds, or, as Tenn insisted, “to find out what you are.”
“Own all of what you see this day,” Tenn had told me on one of our earlier walks around New Orleans, “and it will be of worth to you some other day.” He had pointed to a woman in a vivid green coat and told me that I would have that color as a marker, a directional device back to this moment, this memory, this time we were having. There were smells and sounds all around us that were being placed in our inventories, our creative DNA, that would serve as levers to the feelings that would lead us to write. “This,” Tenn demonstrated, opening his arms to encompass our surroundings, “is living, and it is writing, the present act of accumulating the material we are compelled, required, to use in our work. And life is the inventory of everything we’ve felt and seen and heard: our inventory of subjective beauty; items that have traveled with and alongside this act of living, of surviving, questioning, and coping, and which we reflect upon and fondle and remember and honor with our work.
“And John Guare seems to be alongside and with me as I live, as I gather and hoard my inventory, and I think it is because he taps into something I don’t have in my amber-hued closet, but which I have sought and misplaced, sought and abused, sought and misunderstood, sought and overlooked with stupidity and fleshly misallocation. He has had a family,” Tenn continued, “and he has shared it with us. The pond we pass, the color that serves as marker, these become our property. What we own, we carry, and whether we marry and have children, or write symphonies or plays, we deliver our property, our inventory, to those with whom we live and work and love and abuse. I have always wanted a family, a group of people—Christ, one person!—who might say to me, ‘Stop crying, you fool, and come home to the people who love you. Come crouch in safety in our collective amber-hued closet. It’s ours; it’s here to be shared.’
“Our experiences, our families, our fears, our items of beauty—all locked in our DNA, which we splatter over our actions and our work. I now have membership in that Guare family. I can feel I’ve walked past his ponds and buildings, and I can feel, as he did, that I loved them too long, I didn’t want to leave, and I don’t want to leave.”
Tenn paused, inhaled deeply, then laughed. “But,” he said, “I live with his family, because mine only gave me a history, but they failed to offer me any shelter or comfort. That is something John has given me—that and an idea of where to begin and how to do it again.”
BOTH EDWARD ALBEE and John Guare were “mountains, mighty cliffs of talent one sees in awe and climbs with some trepidation.” Tenn felt more comfort with Guare because his mountain was covered with welcoming and soft greenery, while Albee had built with his words a jagged, wounding, vertiginous challenge. “You take on Albee,” Tenn warned me, “with equipment of survival, to keep you alert and alive on your journey, but Guare’s journey is like one you take while drunk: you laugh, you feel invincible, you feel elated, giddy. And then, at some point, you become aware of the heights you’ve reached, or you gain some sobriety in the fresh airs of his intellect and imagination, and you come awake, shattered, horrified … and stranded alone in a high, lonely place.”
John Guare’s talent was one that came to Tenn as if it were an over-exuberant puppy, out of control, full of affection, and utterly dependent on the reaction of the lap he’s landed on. “I don’t mean to imply that Guare, the writer, is out of control,” Tenn added, “only that his talent is presented with full force. It hits me in a way that fills me with glee and also with an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness, as if it were unearned affection, or loving attention that calls attention to your double chin or the zit you’ve been hoping no one will notice.”
Guare’s plays appeared to Tenn in retrospect as if they were mammoth boxes designed by Joseph Cornell, with each compartment detailing a life in full development or disintegration. “Lives, you will learn,” Tenn advised, “are perpetually in varying degrees of growth and decay, as are the people who have been cast in them, and I’ve come to see that a grab bag of myths is necessary for either providing the strength to grow or to stanch the wounds and cloak the odor of decay.” Guare’s characters may harbor cancer or mental illness or a staggering lack of self-worth, all of which they conceal or contain with particular myths that are in the arsenals of everyone, whether in Sunnyside, Queens; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Hollywood; Mississippi; or an African veldt. “The human condition is maddeningly uniform,” Tenn told me, laughing, “and no one escapes it. One of our most potent—our most visceral—myths is that some or all of the human experience is avoided, softened, abridged, or transferred by means of beauty, money, faith, good works, or chemical alchemy.”
The Joseph Cornell artifact that Tenn imagined Guare’s work to be was lacquered with liberal doses of the many myths that propel the characters trapped in its compartments, or “niches,” as Tenn called them. “I prefer the idea of a niche,” he admitted, “because I think of a niche as self-created, self-invented, a sinecure necessary for survival, and Guare’s characters are all singularly diligent in their delusion, their survival, their self-destruction.” Guare’s plays are constructed with a merciless eye and a masterly sense of proportion and pacing. Within Tenn’s memories were the uncomfortable sensations of feeling his soul rotting along with Kate Reid’s breast in Bosoms and Neglect, his brain “oozing out of my head both from the batterings of life and the frustration of using that organ to no good effect” in tandem with Katherine Helmond, as Bananas, in the original production of The House of Blue Leaves. His most amazing and alarming reaction to a Guare play came with the original production, in 1977, of Landscape of the Body, a viewing that dramatically altered his concept of both theater and his role as an artist within it. It was within this play that he faced a sense of identity that was both an epiphany and a judgment, and with those characters, all of whom were on a journey toward “understanding what mattered and if they were part of that scene,” Tenn came to re-evaluate himself, personally and professionally, and he realized that the many notes and index cards on which he had scribbled his characters and his intentions, his goals and his dreams, his “moral inventory built by magpie,” were misguided and false. Landscape of the Body had led Tenn to try to figure out his identity, his “person” and to go to the most frightening place he could imagine.
What is that place?
“Never go there without a very strong sense of identity,” Tenn told me.
Where?
“That most frightening of all places,” Tenn continued, “the one I mentioned to you earlier today: the intersection of desire and aptitude.”
That place. That corner which, like so many corners in Tenn’s past, held what he needed. In Tenn’s mind, and on his mental map, this corner housed Guare and Albee.
“The love that I feel for Edward Albee extends far beyond his work,” Tenn told me, returning to the bed and leaning against a small pile of pillows. “I think that his is the most extraordinary talent to emerge in the last thirty years. I have admired other plays, and other writers, but his work is emotionally dangerous and stunningly beautiful. I can’t think of any other writer who has managed to combine the lean and the lapidary. He understands to a shocking degree the ravages both of love and of love denied. His command of the language is far beyond me. My words come from some instinctual dictionary that responds to fear and rage, but he has a full command of the language and can therefore achieve more with less effort.
“You can see that I feel it is important that his work be studied. His is work from which you can lear
n, but the love of which I spoke derives from the fact that Edward remains the only playwright who truly acknowledged me and my work, and that is a great honor, especially considering his greater abilities. That I should have been noticed by this man, that I should have been of some aid, means a great deal to me. While others write my obituary and perpetually recalculate my worth and my gifts, he has always been loyal in his respect, and he has waved at me across some rocky seas.”
Edward Albee came to Tenn’s attention in the late fifties, when Tenn was urged to see a production of The Zoo Story, and what he loved about that one-act play (“danger and beauty and sexuality welded together as tightly as a fist”) was further displayed three years later, in 1962, when Tenn saw, by his own estimation five times, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “The dance of people caught in a nest of poor choices and unfulfilled needs, a dance I know all too well, was on that stage,” Tenn remembered. “I felt invaded by that play, purloined. I felt that someone had gotten into my head and my heart and my notes and had written the play I would have liked to have written. Bill Inge had the ability to write plays or scenes of plays that appeared to have been influenced by our conversations or by dreams I had had or by ideas I had entertained, but Virginia Woolf was the first play I ever sat through shivering, because someone had rushed ahead of me and done something I would have liked to have done, but had neither the talent nor the courage to do so.”
Tenn endured Albee’s adaptations of Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Café, which was difficult because he felt the playwright was veering away from that intersection he was meant to dominate and devoting his time and his gifts to the work of another writer, one Tenn had known and loved. “I knew the shape of that novel,” he told me. “I knew what she had intended and I knew what she felt she had failed to provide in that novel, so the play—the experience of watching that play—was odd and unpleasant, even though it was skillfully done.” Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance both devastated him, because both were, to him, plays about shattered families: the one to which we submit our souls in hope of salvation (the church) and the one into which we are born and in which we hope to find safety.
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