Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Kazan once told Williams that he should never talk to actors; his combination of shyness and vagueness would make any suggestions more confounding than clarifying. “You get the impression, out of frustration really, ‘Oh, I don’t think he’s read his plays even. He doesn’t know anything about them,’ ” Geraldine Page recalled. “You want to shake him and knock him on his head and say, ‘Open up and let me in to talk to you.’ That ‘you’ that’s way back in there, inside, that does the writing.” She continued, “I imagine the number of people who have been able to really share that part of his work with him on a conversational level are very few.”

  Kazan, of course, was one of them. For Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams insisted that Kazan allow him “a close, undisturbed working relationship between you and me: no others.” He felt an almost Oedipal connection to his director, which showed itself when he returned to the theater the day after his panicky scene. A young man—an Actors Studio “listener,” unknown to Williams—was sitting beside Kazan, in the place usually reserved for the author. Convinced that the person had been “brought in to rewrite my work” and “jealous of his proximity to Gadg,” Williams took a seat against the back wall. During the lunch break, he was introduced to the visitor, and his paranoid suspicions evaporated. For subsequent rehearsals Williams took his “rightful place next to our great white father.”

  As the play struggled to find its form in the Philadelphia tryout, the issue of whom Williams would collaborate with to solve its many structural and technical problems threatened to destroy the production and ruin his working relationship with Kazan. The problem was primarily Molly Day Thacher and her brusque opinions. “O.K. I’ll play it cool and deal with MK’s notes, but only on condition that from now on, in or out, there be no further exposure of my frayed nervous-system to notes, or discussions within my hearing, of this play . . . except between you and me,” he wrote to Kazan. “I must not be demoralized at this point by the little group of well-wishers that close in for the kill when a play is in trouble. The moment that happens I’ll close the play.” The people to whom he would talk, he explained, were Kazan, Crawford, Mielziner, Wood, and “nobody else at all.” Williams felt demoralized, exhausted, and under siege from other would-be advisors. “I will throw my typewriter at them if they come near me,” he warned Kazan. “I will call on the Dramatists Guild for protection of my rights as an author to have exclusive control and authorship of this script. I have written a play about castration but refuse to enact the role of victim-protagonist in it.”

  When under attack, Williams could fight his corner with ferocious intelligence. In Philadelphia, sensing that Kazan was trying to “correct” his play in a “willfully, fatally wrong way”—he sparred even with his trusted director. “The sick fury that I felt last night at the demolition of the finest last scene that I’ve ever written, and I’ve almost always been best in my last scenes, has now died down and I am still alive, the fury is gone, just the sickness remains,” Williams began a note to Kazan. Before launching into the most blistering, clear-eyed attack he’d ever leveled at Kazan, Williams praised his work with Newman (“You have given him, or drawn out of him, a really great performance”) and his smooth handling of the play’s flawed and faltering second act (“You have staged it as only you could. Nobody can equal you at obscuring the worst in a writer”). What threatened “to sever the Gordian knot of our friendship,” however, was Williams’s contention that Kazan was also “obscuring the best of my writing, in fact I might almost go so far as to say that you have obscured the play.” At issue was Kazan’s attitude toward the Princess:

  Your direction of her in the bar-scene, where the play is most eloquently stated—the tragedy of people that need each other not reaching each other—seems, as I told you last night, as if you regarded that scene as a bit of lousy writing, a bunch of dummy lines, and that you wanted to throw it away by obscuring it with busy-busy direction which is not even interesting or good as direction alone.—I realize that you had built up a tension, a momentum, through your masterful staging of the crowd scene in the bar which a quietly passionate, lyrical scene between Chance and the Princess would appear to break. Actually, it’s needed there!—I mean a break of pace, of momentum, of fury. It’s set up that way in the script. They retreat to the gallery and the palm garden—everything is set up for an effective counter-point of something tenderly human, meaningful and dramatic in a quiet way, with the influence of music and what you will have on the back-drop: sky and palm-garden. It’s in this scene that you could score as a director who deeply understands and loves the true meaning and values of the material with which he is working, but you sacrifice it for what I suppose you regard as powerful staging, and I think you’re so wrong!—but do you still care what I think?

  In Kazan’s strong hand, Williams sensed a certain hostility, which had as much to do with Kazan’s growing frustration with his role as an interpretive artist as it did with Williams. (Kazan had recently finished his first original screenplay, for Wild River, and was in the process of translating William Inge’s prose version of Splendor in the Grass into screenplay form.) “You know how suspicious, how paranoiac I can be and so often am, so you will not be surprised that I suddenly felt, last night, that your direction of Act III, your use of the Princess in it, was one of those unconscious acts of aggression that our analysts expose in us to our dismay—and that the aggression was really directed at the play’s author, perhaps because you feel that I identify with the Princess and that I am a cheap, pretentious old bitch,” he wrote in another furious note to Kazan. “Well, you’re right in a way, but only in a way and to a degree. I am haunted all the time by ‘the goddam end of my life,’ by which I don’t mean my physical death but my death as an artist: I am haunted by that terror, and that’s why I drink as I do, and why I work compulsively as I do, shouting at life: ‘IT AIN’T SO!’ ”

  Williams was not wrong. “A sort of distortion was going on,” Kazan admitted decades later in his autobiography. “I remember I felt an irritable impatience as I’d worked on those plays”—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth—“and, with it, a need to speak for myself at last. Here was born, I must suppose, the resolve to stop forcing myself into another person’s skin but rather to look for my own subjects and find, however inferior it must be to Tennessee’s, my own voice.” In Philadelphia, incensed by laughter at the Princess in act 3—“the most truly powerful and moving scene in the play”—Williams called Kazan out about his competitiveness:

  A director of your skill and perception could not do such a thing without knowing what he was doing: consequently I must regard it as deliberate aggression, as an expression of disdain which you obviously now have toward me as a writer. You knew, you couldn’t help knowing, that in the character of Ariadne del Lago I was expressing and tragically purging my own fearful dilemma, my own obsession, my terror, of losing my power as an artist and being obliged to live out the rest of my life with liquor and drugs and whores to stand the most unbearable loss that anybody can suffer, and one that I wasn’t suffering through any thing except terror of it. Don’t regard this as mere Narcissism. I take a pretty objective view of myself, I see what I am in a clear mirror, which is merciless. This in its conception and writing is a scene of tragic stature, and pure dramatic theatre, the best I can do and have ever been able to do. The audience is meant to recognize the pathos of this woman . . . neither that nor her fiercely honest monologue while the phone-call is being put through, could be laughed at if it were played as conceived and written.—I don’t mean it just incidentally when I add that it is also the sacrifice of a great talent in Gerry.

  “I must know if you are now, finally, willing to regard me, and me alone, as your co-worker in the salvage operation that lies before us,” Williams concluded, threatening otherwise to close the play, in which both men had large financial, as well as artistic, stakes. (Williams had invested $100,000 in the show; Kazan, $37,000.) Kazan took Williams’s heat and agr
eed to return to their “original” version, which he felt “was more moving than the one we are playing now.” In that version, Kazan said, “you watch the growing guilt, growing awareness of guilt which leads up to [Chance’s] staying and submitting to (wanting the expiation of) castration.” Because of cuts in the storyline, Kazan concluded, the bar scene in act 2, as it played in Philadelphia, was “shallow.” “It seemed to be on the surface, concerned with external events. Occurrences in a bar! And instead of being INSIDE Chance, we are on the outside watching him bullshit and moan. . . . He seems like a callow and callous fool. The girl says they ripped my guts out. And he says I got it made. And carries on in the bar as if he still had a chance with her.” The scene’s construction was the problem, Kazan said, and he set Williams the task of rearranging the narrative elements so that Chance’s crushing realization of his guilt mounts gradually. “If this is realized too early and he behaves semi-casually after it, then he stays for reasons that do not MOVE us,” Kazan said. He added, “I think you and Audrey and I should have one fundamental talk. I’ll ride up on the train with you or do or be anything and anywhere you want. But IT IS NOT TOO LATE to right ourselves.”

  SWEET BIRD DIDN’T get uniformly rave reviews—Time and The New Yorker adamantly dissented—but Williams got his Broadway blockbuster. At the opening night, on March 10, 1959, he was called up onto the stage of the Martin Beck for a bow. “If this be blockbustering, we need more blockbusters. This is the noise of passion, of creative energy, of exploration, and adventure. Even in excess, it is enormously exciting,” concluded the Herald Tribune. “One of his finest dramas,” the New York Times said. “A play of overwhelming force” was the Post’s verdict. The combination of seven positive daily-newspaper reviews and the news of Geraldine Page’s extraordinary performance—“a tigress with the voice of a trumpet,” Walter Kerr called her—provided enough heat at the box office to propel Sweet Bird of Youth to a run of 383 performances.

  Success immediately rewrote the public story of the play. “Kazan was marvelous: so patient and understanding during the whole ordeal,” Williams wrote to Atkinson, thanking him for his Times review. “But I think these ordeals are WRONG! TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY WRONG! . . . I had never been through such a gruelling work-out in my—how many years on Broadway—19!—The whole trouble was in Act Two, as I see it. I just couldn’t seem to write that damned act, I loved Act One and Act Three, but Act Two had to be forced out of me by all hands on deck. There must have been at least ten versions of it and I still don’t know if we wound up with the right one: but at least we seemed to get by with it, with everybody but Tynan and Time, but ‘getting by’ with something is not, I know, the worthiest aim of an artist.”

  Williams had, in fact, written Sweet Bird with Atkinson’s critical precepts in mind. In November 1958, he called Kazan’s and Mielziner’s attention to an essay on tragedy that Atkinson had published in the Sunday Times. “He thought the writing and the performance must rise to a level of eloquence and truth that will justify the point of view, however black it may be,” Williams said. “I think this statement should serve as a warning for our production, since we need a good notice from Brooks. I don’t want to suck up to any critic’s artistic predilections unless I can sincerely buy them. In this case, I do. If he means what he says, I buy it. And so I am trying like hell to work into the last few minutes of this play some kind of summation comparable to Blanche’s last line in Streetcar: ‘Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ I think the audience, even the intelligent audience, and the good critic, will want something out of our main protagonist, Chance, besides his destruction. They’ll want it to mean something to him. And to them. Otherwise it may seem like shooting cat-fish in a barrel. . . . I think that can only come out of a moment of dignity in him, which if I can find the words for it, he should express.” In the last moment of Streetcar, Blanche threw herself into the arms of the doctor taking her to the asylum; with Chance’s eloquent last lines in Sweet Bird, Williams threw himself into the arms of the audience.

  In answer to the withering review in The New Yorker by his friend and early champion Kenneth Tynan, Williams opted for unbuttoned, rather than courtly, address. “Pride and dignity say SILENCE! ALOOFNESS!—All shit,” he wrote to Tynan, adding, “What hurts and bewilders me is a note of ferocity in your notice. . . . I’m fighting the sort of game that you are peculiarly able to recognize with a real comprehension, and believe me, I have never surrendered knowingly to anything that I knew was false or cheap but in your piece about the play you imply that I have. WHY?” The virulence of Tynan’s dismissal—“None of Mr. Williams’ other plays has contained so much rot,” he wrote—signaled an uncharacteristic refusal to think. In his vitriolic defensiveness, Tynan ignored the play’s argument, which, as Williams’s letter implied, struck a very particular, personal, and shared chord. “My complaint is that you didn’t listen to Act One and Act Three which rank with the best work I’ve done,” Williams told him.

  Tynan, who was the most astute theater critic of his era, confessed to having been “dismayed and alarmed” by the play; he used wit to cover up Sweet Bird’s central argument about the spiritual attrition of fame—a new theme in Williams’s oeuvre and a subject that also went to the core of Tynan’s own spiritual malaise. For Tynan, the play had hit a very raw nerve. Like Chance, who is ravaged by envy and guilt, Tynan relentlessly sought the public gaze and the legitimacy of the famous; and like the play’s hero, he was full of self-loathing, compelled to pretend, as he put it, “to be somebody—anybody—else.” “Something always blocks me,” Chance says. By middle age, Tynan, a legendary enfant terrible, also found himself terribly blocked. “Still a non-smoker, but alas, a non-worker,” he wrote to Louise Brooks. Williams’s heroism lay in writing through his block; Tynan’s tragedy was that he couldn’t.

  About the vexed issue of act 2, which dramatized the ruthless Boss Finley and his corrupt pursuit of power (“Big Daddy rewritten in the deep dyes of Victorian villainy”), Williams told Tynan, “You were obviously totally alienated by the dreadful but necessary Act Two. It is dreadful in my opinion. Maybe it really isn’t dreadful at all but a very accomplished way of linking up the elements of a little play to those elements that make it a big one. That is Kazan’s opinion, at least, anyhow, and I think Kazan has this time done a really wonderful job.” To the columnist Max Lerner, Williams gave a more fanciful explanation of the play’s luridness. “As an artist grows older he is almost always inclined to work in broader strokes,” he wrote. “The delicate brush-work of his early canvasses no longer satisfies his demands of himself. He starts using the heavy brush, the scalpel and finally even his fingers, his thumbs, and even, finally, a spray-gun of primary colors. Act Two is written with that heavy brush, scalpel and spray-gun. Delicacy, allusiveness are thrown to the winds in writing, staging, performance. And I honestly think that was the only way to do it, and that if we hadn’t done it that way the play would have failed to reach the mass audience that it seems to be reaching.” He added, “Some day I am going to write a piece about the importance of sheer excitement in the theatre!—both seriousness and dramatic excitement!”

  But of all Williams’s postmortems of the play and himself, the most revealing was his letter to Kazan after Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., which Kazan also directed, won the Tony Award for Best Play. “You are tired but not half as tired as I am: I was BEAT!—and I don’t mean ‘Beatific,’ just dead beat,” he wrote. “I kept my critical faculties almost entirely intact, or so I believe, but I couldn’t function on anything but the most hack sort of level and consequently a play that had the makings of greatness fell short of its mark. So the critics, rightly, gave their award to a play that set itself a much lower mark, and not only met it but passed it.” The structure of Sweet Bird violated an essential rule. Williams, who streamlined the play after its first production, explained: “the rule of the straight line, the rule of poetic unity of singleness and wholeness,
because when I first wrote it, crisis after crisis, of nervous and physical and mental nature, had castrated me nearly.”

  THE SUCCESS OF Sweet Bird propelled Williams, like the Princess, still farther “back alone up the beanstalk to the ogre’s country where I live, now, alone.” He was bigger than ever. By the end of 1959, the movie adaptations of Suddenly Last Summer and Fugitive Kind had been released; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was about to go into production, with Sweet Bird of Youth soon to follow. “Are you driven and compelled as I am to keep at it, at it, at it!—because nothing else means enough,” Williams asked Kazan three weeks after the opening of Sweet Bird. “I bet you feel like I do, that you have been through the meat-grinder. The consolation is that you turned our ground-up bits into successful chopped sirloin.”

  Kazan counseled his exhausted friend to stop work for a while. “You are giving me the same advice that Kubie gave me but with an important difference. You know me and care about me as a man and I don’t think Kubie did except at moments,” Williams responded. He continued, “There was a wonderful, beautiful speech, by far the best that Miller ever wrote, at the end of Death of a Salesman, something about him being ‘Out there in the blue’—nothing solid beneath him to fall back on, to support him, except whatever natural, enduring power to rise or strength to stay up that he owned. That describes you and me. We are ‘out there in the blue’ with no net under. I’m SCARED! I think a lot more than you are. Out of my fright, as much as out of my love of creation, now, I am still working compulsively. The love of the work is greater than ever but the fear is too. The question is: If I go on this way, how long can I do so?”