Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer

by Tennessee Williams

  Williams tried later, with Nonno, to find another, gentler way of projecting an artist’s sensibility and destiny. And yet Nonno is at heart as selfish as Sebastian. This time the writer is not condemning him for it; if anything, he is extolling him. Well, to a point. If you neglect the central “n” in the ancient poet’s name, Williams is suggesting No–No. And yet, everything we know about Williams tells us that his feeling about creating art was Yes–Yes. It is impossible to pin down what Williams actually felt, because he felt so many things at the same time; not only are his characters filled with contradictions, but the plays are themselves. Even as I write this introduction, trying to analyze one particular play, I find myself spinning in circles.

  As for his two doomed poets—both die at the play’s conclusion and, together with Val Xavier, the handsome drifter in Orpheus Descending who began life as a poet in Battle Of Angels, they are the only three male characters to expire in the major Williams plays—if selfishness is necessary for Nonno’s art, isn’t it also for Sebastian’s? Nonno, incidentally, ends up writing a beautiful poem, while it is usually assumed that Sebastian’s work is pretentious. But who is to say that Sebastian wasn’t actually a good poet? Williams never lets us hear his work, so he doesn’t really commit himself; with Nonno, he goes for it. Nonetheless, Williams seems to be criticizing himself (the homosexual writer) in the first play, as well as looking beadily at friends like Bowles, and then suddenly justifying himself and the Bowles clique in the second. Except the criticism (in Suddenly) may have an unspoken admiration, and the admiration (in Iguana) may be filtered with criticism. If the observer must argue with himself trying to figure out what on earth the playwright was thinking, so too most probably did the playwright, who had no choice but to write two versions of the same conceit. Dr. Kubie gains the upper hand in Suddenly Last Summer and then loses it again in The Night of the Iguana (written when Williams was no longer in analysis). Sebastian is, nonetheless, the more potent of the two characters. This, despite the fact that he has died before the play begins.

  Of course, Sebastian is only a despicable predator if you believe Catharine’s story. The play ends with an unforgettable line—“I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true. . . .” Which is, by the way, a recycling of the last line of Williams’s original (1955) and final (1973) versions of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof—“wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” In both plays an honest observation is being made; Maggie does love Brick, and Catharine’s story is accurate.

  Or is it? The assumption has always been that Catharine is giving the correct account of what happened to Sebastian on Cabeza de Lobo. Catherine was based, to some degree, on Williams’s sister, Rose. Rose had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in the late thirties; she was delusional and verbalized sexual fantasies, which was especially shocking behavior for a young woman of her time. She was lobotomized in 1943, a tragedy that haunted Williams forever after. If he has used Rose as a blueprint for Catharine, no matter how craftily disguised, would he not therefore be writing, to some degree, about delusion? Would he not be creating a colorful and unspeakable erotic fantasy to match Rose’s? Note too that Anne Meacham, who played Catharine in the original production, radiated acute instability; not someone whose word you would necessarily trust. (“She herself was nothing if not high strung,” said Jerry Tallmer in Meacham’s obituary). The film, on the other hand, had Elizabeth Taylor, an actress so direct that one tended to believe her even if she claimed to be the Queen of Egypt. Such is the power of cinema that when we think of Catharine we think of Taylor, but the original performance was very different, more ambiguous and more disturbing.

  Consider also that Williams was basing Catharine not only on Rose, but on himself as well. There is much of Tennessee in both Sebastian and Catharine. Williams, the artist, was constantly saying things the world did not want to hear. He spoke—or at least suggested—sexual truths that had always remained hidden. But he fictionalized those truths. What came from his pen was not necessarily literal. So if he instructs us to consider the possibility that Catharine’s story is true, should we not also consider the possibility that it isn’t? Cutting open Catharine’s mind is evil, whether her story is factual or not. Mrs. Venable might be cruel and unjust, just as Catharine is highly sympathetic; but that doesn’t necessarily mean the story is accurate. I am not suggesting that it isn’t, but rather that we don’t know. Williams seems to want us to believe it is true, and yet the power of the play comes from the fact that his subconscious is sending out so many mixed signals. Again, his tumult seems inseparable from his genius.

  Williams was haunted by Rose’s lobotomy and wracked with guilt for not being able to prevent the surgery. The specter of lobotomy hangs over Suddenly Last Summer. The play is driven by two questions: what is the story Violet wants cut out of Catharine’s mind, and will the actual cutting take place. The fear of that sadistic operation permeates the jungle garden where the play is set. But, again, is that fear even more personal than one might suspect? Was Williams afraid that somehow his own truths, as well as his fantasies, his gift for elaborate storytelling, would be cut out of him? Did he think that somehow he would meet the same fate as his sister? Didn’t they, in a sense, have a similar illness, except Rose turned hers into babble and Williams turned his into art? I think Catharine’s fear mirrors the writer’s. And of course, we never know how the issue is resolved for Catharine, just as Williams had no idea what his own fate would be when he wrote the play. And that outcome would ultimately mirror his worst fears.

  As he grew older, his dependence on alcohol and narcotics became legendary and ultimately contributed to his death. Looking at the reports of his last days, and indeed his erratic final writing, it is difficult to believe that the drink and drugs didn’t take their toll on his brain as well as his body. It seems to me that some of his brain cells were diminished or reduced. He had begun, creatively, to babble. He had, in essence, self-lobotomized. In the end, he was becoming Rose. The irony is that whereas the author of Suddenly Last Summer dreads, deplores and fears the idea of a lobotomy, some part of him also yearns for it.

  If Williams’s mind was more confused subconsciously when he wrote Suddenly Last Summer than it had been or would be when creating his other major work, rarely has his craft been as focused. The play is daring in its construction; it is basically two arias with connective tissue. The second half is one person telling a story. And there is no resolution. And yet it is as tight and taut as anything he ever wrote. There is not a single wasted word. There is none of the wondrous disorder of Orpheus Descending. It’s as if he had to totally discipline himself in order to give his contradictory mind some dramatic direction. And rarely has the poet in him merged so comfortably with the dramatist. For the poetry in Suddenly Last Summer is purely of the theater. Names like Cabeza de Lobo and the Encantadas look dimly exotic in print, but they become utterly evocative and mysterious and even frightening when spoken. Catharine’s account of the journey becomes transcendent when acted. Words, phrases, sentences assume a rhythm onstage that they do not possess on the page. The play, in its vision of Sebastian, seems to make the idea of poetry look foolish, and yet the writing of it honors poetic imagery in a way that exceeds almost anything else in modern theater. So even its glory resides in the center of a contradiction.

  The true genius of Suddenly Last Summer is that you believe it; not just Catharine’s story, but the whole damn thing. As you read it everything seems to make sense, despite the fact that really it makes no sense whatsoever. A woman entering old age, acting as sexual bait (Violet before her stroke)? A doctor dedicated to removing unfortunate memories from a woman’s brain who then injects her with a mysterious truth serum, which might validate those memories? A handsome, dissipated poet who, after twenty-some years of traveling for just such a purpose, still can’t figure out how to negotiate a blowjob on his own? One shouldn’t really overanalyze Suddenl
y Last Summer. Trying to figure it out can land you in Lion’s View. You just have to go with it. It is “intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire” (Williams, writing about Paul Bowles’s novel, The Sheltering Sky). Williams, of course, might have been describing his own work, his own dark cloud, which finally because of—not despite—its many contradictions pulsates with fire and has insinuated itself into the collective subconscious of twentieth-century art.

  Martin Sherman

  SUDDENLY LAST

  SUMMER

  TO ANNE MEACHAM

  Suddenly Last Summer and the one-act play Something Unspoken were presented together under the collective title of Garden District at the York Theatre on First Avenue in New York on January 7, 1958, by John C. Wilson and Warner Le Roy. The plays were directed by Herbert Machiz; the stage set was designed by Robert Soule and the costumes by Stanley Simmons. Lighting was by Lee Watson and the incidental music was by Ned Rorem. The cast was as follows:

  MRS. VENABLE: Hortense Alden

  DR. CUKROWICZ: Robert Lansing

  MISS FOXHILL: Donna Cameron

  MRS. HOLLY: Eleanor Phelps

  GEORGE HOLLY: Alan Mixon

  CATHARINE HOLLY: Anne Meacham

  SISTER FELICITY: Nanon-Kiam

  Something Unspoken is published in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays.

  SCENE ONE

  The set may be as unrealistic as the decor of a dramatic ballet. It represents part of a mansion of Victorian Gothic style in the Garden District of New Orleans on a late afternoon, between late summer and early fall. The interior is blended with a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin. The colors of this jungle-garden are violent, especially since it is steaming with heat after rain. There are massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings and thrashing sounds in the garden as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of savage nature. . . .

  The jungle tumult continues a few moments after the curtain rises; then subsides into relative quiet, which is occasionally broken by a new outburst.

  A lady enters with the assistance of a silver-knobbed cane. She has light orange or pink hair and wears a lavender lace dress, and over her withered bosom is pinned a starfish of diamonds.

  She is followed by a young blond Doctor, all in white, glacially brilliant, very, very good looking, and the old lady’s manner and eloquence indicate her undeliberate response to his icy charm.

  MRS. VENABLE: Yes, this was Sebastian’s garden. The Latin names of the plants were printed on tags attached to them but the print’s fading out. Those ones there— [She draws a deep breath.] —are the oldest plants on earth, survivors from the age of the giant fern-forests. Of course in this semitropical climate— [She takes another deep breath.] —some of the rarest plants, such as the Venus’s-flytrap—you know what this is, Doctor? The Venus’s-flytrap?

  DOCTOR: An insectivorous plant?

  MRS. VENABLE: Yes, it feeds on insects. It has to be kept under glass from early fall to late spring and when it went under glass, my son, Sebastian, had to provide it with fruit flies flown in at great expense from a Florida laboratory that used fruit flies for experiments in genetics. Well, I can’t do that, Doctor. [She takes a deep breath.] I can’t, I just can’t do it! It’s not the expense but the—

  DOCTOR: Effort.

  MRS. VENABLE: Yes. So goodbye, Venus’s-flytrap—like so much else. . . . Whew! . . . [She draws breath.] —I don’t know why, but—! I already feel I can lean on your shoulder, Doctor—Cu? —Cu?

  DOCTOR: Cu-kro-wicz. It’s a Polish word that means sugar, so let’s make it simple and call me Doctor Sugar. [He returns her smile.]

  MRS. VENABLE: Well, now, Doctor Sugar, you’ve seen Sebastian’s garden.

  [They are advancing slowly to the patio area.]

  DOCTOR: It’s like a well-groomed jungle. . . .

  MRS. VENABLE: That’s how he meant it to be, nothing was accidental, everything was planned and designed in Sebastian’s life and his— [She dabs her forehead with her handkerchief which she had taken from her reticule.] —work!

  DOCTOR: What was your son’s work, Mrs. Venable?—besides this garden?

  MRS. VENABLE: As many times as I’ve had to answer that question! D’you know it still shocks me a little?—to realize that Sebastian Venable the poet is still unknown outside of a small coterie of friends, including his mother.

  DOCTOR: Oh.

  MRS. VENABLE: You see, strictly speaking, his life was his occupation.

  DOCTOR: I see.

  MRS. VENABLE: No, you don’t see, yet, but before I’m through, you will. —Sebastian was a poet! That’s what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet and—vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet, I mean you can’t separate them, I mean—well, for instance, a salesman’s work is one thing and his life is another—or can be. The same thing’s true of—doctor, lawyer, merchant, thief! —But a poet’s life is his work and his work is his life in a special sense because—oh, I’ve already talked myself breathless and dizzy. [The Doctor offers his arm.] Thank you.

  DOCTOR: Mrs. Venable, did your doctor okay this thing?

  MRS. VENABLE [breathless]: What thing?

  DOCTOR: Your meeting this girl that you think is responsible for your son’s death?

  MRS. VENABLE: I’ve waited months to face her because I couldn’t get to St. Mary’s to face her—I’ve had her brought here to my house. I won’t collapse! She’ll collapse! I mean her lies will collapse—not my truth—not the truth. . . . Forward march, Doctor Sugar!

  [He conducts her slowly to the patio.]

  Ah, we’ve made it, ha ha! I didn’t know that I was so weak on my pins! Sit down, Doctor. I’m not afraid of using every last ounce and inch of my little, leftover strength in doing just what I’m doing. I’m devoting all that’s left of my life, Doctor, to the defense of a dead poet’s reputation. Sebastian had no public name as a poet, he didn’t want one, he refused to have one. He dreaded, abhorred—false values that come from being publicly known, from fame, from personal—exploitation. . . . Oh, he’d say to me: “Violet? Mother? —You’re going to outlive me!!”

  DOCTOR: What made him think that?

  MRS. VENABLE: Poets are always clairvoyant! —And he had rheumatic fever when he was fifteen and it affected a heart-valve and he wouldn’t stay off horses and out of water and so forth. . . . “Violet? Mother? You’re going to live longer than me, and then, when I’m gone, it will be yours, in your hands, to do whatever you please with!”—Meaning, of course, his future recognition! —That he did want, he wanted it after his death when it couldn’t disturb him; then he did want to offer his work to the world. All right. Have I made my point, Doctor? Well, here is my son’s work, Doctor, here’s his life going on!

  [She lifts a thin gilt-edged volume from the patio table as if elevating the Host before the altar. Its gold leaf and lettering catch the afternoon sun. It says Poem of Summer. Her face suddenly has a different look, the look of a visionary, an exalted religieuse. At the same instant a bird sings clearly and purely in the garden and the old lady seems to be almost young for a moment.]

  DOCTOR [reading the title]: Poem of Summer?

  MRS. VENABLE: Poem of Summer, and the date of the summer, there are twenty-five of them, he wrote one poem a year which he printed himself on an eighteenth-century hand press at his—atelier in the—French—Quarter—so no one but he could see it. . . . [She seems dizzy for a moment.]

  DOCTOR: He wrote one poem a year?


  MRS. VENABLE: One for each summer that we traveled together. The other nine months of the year were really only a preparation.

  DOCTOR: Nine months?

  MRS. VENABLE: The length of a pregnancy, yes. . . .

  DOCTOR: The poem was hard to deliver?

  MRS. VENABLE: Yes, even with me! Without me, impossible, Doctor! —he wrote no poem last summer.

  DOCTOR: He died last summer?

  MRS. VENABLE: Without me he died last summer, that was his last summer’s poem. [She staggers; he assists her toward a chair. She catches her breath with difficulty.] One long-ago summer—now, why am I thinking of this? —my son, Sebastian, said, “Mother?—Listen to this!”—He read me Herman Melville’s description of the Encantadas, the Galápagos Islands. Quote—take five and twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot. Imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot, the sea. And you’ll have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles—extinct volcanos, looking much as the world at large might look—after a last conflagration—end quote. He read me that description and said that we had to go there. And so we did go there that summer on a chartered boat, a four-masted schooner, as close as possible to the sort of a boat that Melville must have sailed on. . . . We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn’t written about. We saw the great sea turtles crawl up out of the sea for their annual egg-laying. . . . Once a year the female of the sea turtle crawls up out of the equatorial sea onto the blazing sand-beach of a volcanic island to dig a pit in the sand and deposit her eggs there. It’s a long and dreadful thing, the depositing of the eggs in the sand pits, and when it’s finished the exhausted female turtle crawls back to the sea half dead. She never sees her offspring, but we did. Sebastian knew exactly when the sea turtle eggs would be hatched out and we returned in time for it. . .