The Traveling Companion & Other Plays
Page 27
[Two hotel employees carry in a cot and set it downstage from the room service table. Automatically Vieux produces a bill: one of them takes it and they leave. The walls begin to become transparent and the light dims out on Vieux and his traveling companion. A distant and cold-hearted moon become visible through mist.]
BEAU [finally and softly]: —If you got me a new guitar tomorrow, I might stay on a while longer. . . .
CURTAIN
SOURCES AND NOTES ON THE TEXT
The Chalky White Substance
The Chalky White Substance was originally published in issue 66 of Antaeus in 1991. The typescript published here is from Williams’s then agent‚ International Creative Management [ICM], dated 1982; however, in Donald Spoto’s biography of Williams, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), a script titled The Chalky White Substances is mentioned as appearing as early as 1980, and there are drafts in the Harvard Theatre Collection, one dated “summer 1980.”
The Day on Which a Man Dies
The text is from a script in the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections, dated 1960. Although Williams indicated on the manuscript in his own handwriting that the play was finished in 1960, scholar Allean Hale believes that while he may have updated the play a bit in 1960, it was likely to have been written in 1959. She cites the fact that in his manuscript Williams carefully changed the “ten year relationship” between Mark and Miriam to “eleven years,” which she sees as echoing the relationship between Williams and his lover Frank Merlo, whom he met in 1947. Merlo died in 1963, and while some sources document their relationship as lasting for fourteen years, others indicate that they were together for closer to eleven or twelve years. The character of Mark, however, may also have been inspired by Jackson Pollock, whom Williams knew in Provincetown, and who was married to Lee Krasner for eleven years, from 1945 until Pollock’s death in 1956. Hale surmises that when Williams recovered the manuscript in 1970, he might have recalled it as written in 1960 rather than 1959. Either way, since Williams dated the play 1960, that is the date I chose to honor here.
As Hale also points out, the “God and Mama” speech that occurs in The Day on Which a Man Dies is similar to a speech that occurs in The Night of the Iguana (1961).
In a later draft of The Day on Which a Man Dies, Williams refers to a “plastic theater” as he did in the Production Notes to The Glass Menagerie. This later draft contains a collage of cultural and political images from the early 1970s.
A Cavalier for Milady
A Cavalier for Milady was the center play of a trilogy titled Three Plays for the Lyric Theatre (including The Youthfully Departed and Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws) that Williams was working on in the mid-1970s. He submitted the plays through ICM to New Directions in August 1980, and a copy exists in Columbia University’s Williams Archives at the Butler Library. In the Harvard Theatre Collection there is a draft of the play titled Magic is the Habit of Our Existence.
This play mentions the television show Cannon, starring William Conrad, which was a crime drama series that aired Tuesday nights on CBS from 9:30-10:30 and ran from Sept 14, 1971 to March 3, 1976.
An interesting aspect of this play is that the desire of the women—the Mother and Mrs. Aid especially—is depicted in terms of stereotypically gay male desire, although they are clearly women. The women are predatory and pay “escorts” to satisfy them, even going so far as to have their rendezvous in “The Ramble,” a section in Central Park where gay men infamously go “cruising.” Moreover, Nance seems to be a composite of Williams, whose father even called him “Miss Nancy,” and his sister Rose, who was chastised by her mother for her “inappropriate” expression of desire.
The Pronoun ‘I’
The text published here comes from a manuscript found in the files of New Directions. One of the absurdities of The Pronoun ‘I’ is Williams’s playful license with the royal lineage of England; of course, there was never a “Queen May,” and Williams’s invention serves to highlight the play’s anti-realism.
The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde
In 1984 the Albondocani Press of New York published The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde in a limited edition of 176 copies. The probable composition of the play is 1982. According to George Bixby, publisher of Albondocani Press, in 1982 he requested permission of Williams’s agent, Luis Sanjuro, to publish a limited edition of The Traveling Companion. Sanjuro conveyed to him Williams’s feeling that if Bixby wanted to publish something in a limited edition, it might as well be something new and previously unpublished. Williams instructed Sanjuro to send Bixby The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde.
An earlier fragment of the play, titled A Rectangle with Hooks, or Mint and Hall (a one-act play) exists in the collections of Columbia University’s Butler Library. Other full-length drafts include one titled A Rectangle with Hooks, or The Remarkable Rooming-house of Mme. Le Monde from the Harvard University Theatre Collection, and one titled A Rectangle with Hooks from the Williams Research Center in New Orleans. In Williams’s 1975 novel, Moise and the World of Reason, the young writer calls the room that he shares with his lover in the abandoned warehouse “the rectangle with hooks.”
Kirche, Küche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage)
The text published here is from a manuscript titled Kirche, Kutchen, und Kinder given to New Directions by Eve Adamson‚ who directed the play at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York City in 1979. An earlier draft exists in the New Orleans Historical Collection, which contains the alternative title, Two Organists and Others.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) mentioned in the play were negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union to agree to place restraints and limitations on their central armaments. SALT I, the first round of negotiations between President Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev that took place from November 1969 to May 1972, resulted in an interim agreement. SALT II, which began in November 1972, led to a long-term agreement and a treaty that was signed by President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev in June 1979. “. . . a little cyanide with Kool Aid à la Jonesville” refers to the Jonestown Massacre of November 18, 1978, where over 900 members of the “Jonestown Community” in Guyana—a cult from California known as “The People’s Temple” and led by the Reverend Jim Jones—took their own lives by drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide and sedatives.
The way that the Man’s revives his unconscious Wife through the “quick Christening” of pouring sour mash into her mouth is reminiscent of the Irish ballad of “Finnegan’s Wake,” where the deceased Finnegan is resurrected after whiskey is poured into his mouth. The ballad forms the basis for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
A parallel can be made between the Wife and the Fräulein in The Gnädiges Fräulein—another comic German character—in the Wife’s attempt at speech, which fails as she “only opens and closes her mouth like a goldfish.” In The Gnädiges Fräulein, the Fräulein interrupts herself while performing one of her musical numbers, and initiates a non-sequitur gesture of opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish, which Molly explains as “demonstrating.” Ultimately, the Fräulein’s expression of “the inexpressible regret of all her regrets” occurs outside of language, through the cry of “AHHHHHHHHHH!” This image occurs again in The Frosted Glass Coffin (1980), which ends as Kelsey “opens his jaws like a fish out of water. After a few moments, a sound comes from his mouth which takes the full measure of his grief.” A similar moment occurred in Helene Weigel’s performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, during the scene in which Mother Courage is forced to identify the corpse of her son. After her questioners left, Mother Courage opened her mouth, extended fully, and silently mimed a cathartic scream that expressed the grief that could only be expressed outside of language.
The Man’s statement that he had written “a number of epic dramas . . . not all of which closed in Boston
if opened” is Williams’s reference to his first professionally produced play, Battle of Angels, which closed during its Boston tryout after only thirteen days in 1940.
The Man’s statement that “Something is impending” recalls Clov’s statement in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame that “Something is taking its course.”
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, which premiered earlier in 1979, also contained a grotesquely comic German character and German references.
Throughout the play, actual German words or phrases are italicized, while faux or phoneticized English meant to sound German is left in roman type.
The lyrics to “Danny Boy” were written to the tune “Londonderry Air” by Frederic Edward Weatherly in 1913. The lyrics and music to “My Wild Irish Rose” were written by Chauncey Olcott in 1899.
Green Eyes
The text published here is based on the script sent to New Directions by Audrey Wood at ICM, along with The Demolition Downtown and The Reading, on Sept 17, 1971, and incorporates changes from the revised version that exists in the archives at UCLA titled No Sight Would be Worth Seeing.
The Parade
Williams wrote the original draft of The Parade in 1940 and gave it to Joe Hazen, who gave it to Andreas Brown of the Gothic Book Mart. In 1962 when Brown was compiling and documenting Williams’s oeuvre, he retyped Williams’s handwritten draft and sent both to Williams who then rewrote the play. Both manuscripts are in the archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. We know that Williams worked on it after 1962, and ICM sent it to New Directions in 1979 in a folder of various odds and ends called Pieces of My Youth; this version is the one published here. Even though Williams may have made some minor final changes to the script between 1962 and 1979, the date of composition is 1962.
The first lines of his poetry that Don recites to Miriam come from Williams’s early poem, Sanctuary, originally published under the name “Thomas Lanier Williams” and reproduced on page 200 of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams:
Let down your hair, dream-dark at night . . .
I shall forget that fear was bright,
I shall evade whatever doom
Was waiting in this narrow room!
I am secure locked in this tower . . .
No peril looms beyond this hour,
No foot shall scale this final stair
When you let down your dream-dark hair!
We have also seen the image of “the parade” as a metaphor in Williams’s work before, but used differently. In The Parade it’s a metaphor for love, but in the 1959 play, Sweet Bird of Youth, Chance uses it as a metaphor for ambition: “I’m talking about the parade. THE parade! The parade! the boys that go places that’s the parade I’m talking about, not a parade of swabbies on a wet deck.”
In both The Parade and in Suddenly Last Summer, soliciting lovers for someone else is interestingly referred to as “procuring.”
The One Exception
The One Exception was originally edited by Robert Bray and published in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Volume 3, in 2000. The text published here is from the Harvard University Theatre Collection.
Viola describes Kyra’s “agonized” moaning as “Just a long “Ahhh. A long agonized “Ahhh.” This is strikingly similar to The Gnädiges Fräulein, where the Fräulein’s expression of “the inexpressible regret of all her regrets” occurs through the cry of “AHHHHHHHHHH!” (see note for Kirche, Küche, Kinder).
Kyra’s attempt to avoid emerging from her room with the excuse: “Please, please, I—forgot something . . .” echoes Blanche’s desperate attempt to delay her institutionalization in A Streetcar Named Desire with the cry “Yes! Yes, I forgot something!” as she rushed back into the bedroom.
Sunburst
The text published here was given to New Directions by John Uecker. In the Harvard Theatre Collection there are fragments of a longer version of the play called The Sailing Away of Miss Sails that is clearly an unfinished draft. In the version published here, Giuseppe refers to Miss Sails as “Miss Sail Away” at the beginning of Scene Two.
In both Sunburst and The Traveling Companion there is a reference to the “Bangkok massage.” In Sunburst, Luigi complains that Mr. Peterson “rolls over slowly and starts the Bangkok massage mitt with me.” In The Traveling Companion, Vieux refers to “the finger touch, fingertips on the bare skin, light and caressing, that only: the Bangkok massage which I learned there.” Similarly, in The Pronoun ‘I’, Queen May refers to being a “skin freak”: “I have in my fingertips, this sensual stroking compulsion—would classify me as a ‘skin freak’?”
Miss Sails’ dreamy recitation that “The rabbit—is pounding—the medicine in the moon . . .” may refer to a 12th-century story, The Rabbit in the Moon, written during the time when Buddhism was beginning to spread among the masses. The story comes from a collection titled Konjaku Monogatari, a series of stories based on Buddhism and morality. It explains why people see a shadow of a rabbit when they look up at the moon.
Miss Sails lives in a hotel suite “in the East Fifties or Sixties of Manhattan,” and Williams himself often stayed in the “Sunset Suite” at the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street in Manhattan, where he died in 1983.
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?
Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? was originally published in The Missouri Review, Volume XX, Number 2, 1997. The typescript published here is a copy of the script used for the 1980 production in Key West, provided by ICM. This typescript originally came from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center collection and clearly matches the one used in the Key West production in every way, except that the Prologue was left out of the performance script. I restored the Prologue, since Williams clearly intended it to be a part of the script and it does in fact support the anti-realistic style of the play.
Nora’s late husband, who appears as an apparition at the end of the play, is named Cornelius, the name of Williams’s father. In A House Not Meant to Stand the main character is likewise named Cornelius, and in Something Unspoken, the main character is named Cornelia. There is also a phone call from a “Mrs. C.C. Bright”; Cornelius Coffin Williams was often referred to as “C.C.”
The “plastic space” referred to in the play is also mentioned in Williams’s novel Moise and thr World of Reason (1975).
The Traveling Companion
The Traveling Companion was originally published in 1981 in Christopher Street magazine. An early draft in the Harvard Theatre Collection, which contains pages both typed and handwritten on the stationary of The Berkeley Hotel in London, is titled Travelling Companions, and opens on the airplane flight to New York rather than with the arrival at the hotel room.
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Copyright © 2008 New Directions Publishing Corporation
Introduction and notes copyright © 2008 by Annette J. Saddik
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The epigraph for Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? from “To Brooklyn Bridge” by Hart Crane copyright © 1972 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
The Chalky White Substance was originally published in issue 66 of Antaeus in 1991; The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. Le Monde was originally published in a limited edition in 1984 by the Albondocani Press, New York; The One Exception was originally edited by Robert Bray and published in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Volume 3, in 2000; Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? was originally published in The Missouri Review, Volume XX, Number 2, 1997; The Traveling Companion was originally published in 1981 in Christopher Street magazine.
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First published as New Directions Paperbook 1106 in 2008
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