Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  269 “utterly unaware of his own tragedy”: Ibid.

  269 “The violets in the mountains”: LOA1, p. 842.

  269 “like mad”: Milbert, “Stage Manager’s Rehearsal Account,” BRTC.

  270 “During these sessions”: Ibid.

  270 “All day—Williams and Kazan”: Ibid.

  271 “Kilroy represents freedom to you”: Ibid.

  271 “You, Kilroy, you’re really jazzed now”: Ibid.

  271 “You’re alone and you’re scared”: Ibid.; Wallach, Good, Bad, p. 151.

  271 “Profoundly depressing”: N, Feb. 10, 1953, p. 563.

  271 “I wanted a production”: KAL, p. 497.

  272 “It made the fantasies”: Ibid.

  272 “The rehearsals are shaping up”: N, Feb. 20, 1953, p. 563.

  272 “at least half of which were dancers”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 5, 1953, L2, p. 472.

  272 “pro-and-confusion”: Walter Winchell, “The Broadway Lights,” New York Daily Mirror, Mar. 22, 1953.

  272 “Some actually hiss it”: Williams to Konrad Hopkins, Feb. 28, 1953, LLC.

  272 “I’m not sure ‘Camino Real’ ”: Elia Kazan, “Playwright’s ‘Letter to the World,’ ” New York Times, Mar. 15, 1953.

  273 “militant incomprehension”: Williams to James Laughlin, Apr. 5, 1953, L2, p. 472.

  273 “The worst play yet written”: Walter Kerr, “Camino Real,” New York Herald Tribune, Mar. 20, 1953.

  273 “an enigmatic bore”: Richard Watts Jr., “An Enigma by Tennessee Williams,” New York Post, Mar. 20, 1953.

  273 “overall bushwah”: John Chapman, “Symbols Clash in ‘Camino Real,’ ” New York Daily News, Mar. 20, 1953.

  273 “Camino Unreal”: Eric Bentley, What Is Theatre? Incorporating the Dramatic Event and Other Reviews 1946–1967 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), p. 74.

  273 “ ‘Camino Real’ is a serious failure”: Louis Kronenberger, ed., The Best Plays of 1952–1953 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953).

  273 “You’re heading toward the cerebral”: Walter Kerr to Williams, Apr. 13, 1953, as quoted in Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 188.

  273 “the first real bop play”: Robert Sylvester, “A Stroll along ‘Camino Real,’ ” New York Daily News, Mar. 23, 1953.

  273 “As theatre, Camino Real”: Brooks Atkinson, “Camino Real,” New York Times, Mar. 20, 1953.

  273 “it surpassed its flaws”: M, p. 167.

  273 “I knew that I was doing”: Ibid., p. 166.

  273 “I was hardly conscious of anything”: Williams to Konrad Hopkins, Apr. 14, 1953, LLC.

  273 “a marvel of controlled cool empathy”: M, p. 167.

  274 “I’ve come out of the production”: KAL, p. 497.

  274 “How dare you”: M, p. 167.

  274 “I believe it to be a very great play”: Letters to the Editor, LLC. Sitwell also wrote to the New York Times, Apr. 5, 1953: “I have long thought Mr. Williams a playwright of very great importance. I now believe him to be a very great playwright. . . . Why are people who can see a little deeper to be deprived of a work which throws a blinding light on the whole of our civilization? Verbally, intellectually, and visually (the décor is amazing) it is a most extraordinary work.”

  275 “What I would like to know”: Williams to Walter Kerr, Mar. 31, 1953, L2, p. 464.

  275 “A Statement in Behalf of a Poet”: Signed letter by Jane and Paul Bowles, Lotte Lenya, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, John La Touche, and Gore Vidal, among others, sent to newspapers, Columbia.

  275 “The controversy over ‘Camino Real’ ”: Walter Winchell, New York Daily Mirror, Apr. 6, 1953.

  276 “Concerning Camino Real”: “Concerning Camino Real,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 1953.

  276 Post’s “Sidewalks of New York”: Carl Gaston, “Sidewalks of New York,” New York Post, Apr. 23, 1953.

  276 “The Talk of the Town, Indeed!”: New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 15, 1953.

  276 “Bloody but unbowed”: RMTT, p. 206.

  277 “I can’t believe that you really think”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 24, 1953, L2, p. 462.

  277 “psychopathic bitterness”: Brooks Atkinson, “Tennessee Williams Writes a Cosmic Fantasy Entitled ‘Camino Real,’ ” New York Times, Mar. 20, 1953.

  277 “Has this play alienated”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 24, 1953, LLC.

  277 “flood of correspondence”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Apr. 3, 1953, L2, p. 468.

  277 “You have no idea how much”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Apr. 3, 1953, LLC.

  277 “Of course soon as the notices”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Apr. 22, 1953, FOA, p. 75.

  277 “The work was done”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Apr. 1953, L2, p. 474.

  278 “long-exceeded”: Williams to James Laughlin, Apr. 3, 1953, LLC.

  278 play by Donald Windham: The Starless Air opened at the Playhouse Theatre in Houston, May 13, 1953. Williams had to ban Windham from the theater; their friendship never recovered. “I have a brand new appreciation of Gadg. I always loved and admired him, but when I consider how many times I ‘blew my top’ at poor Windham and how often Gadg must have wanted to scream at me, but never did, I feel a real awe of his composure or control.” (Williams to Brooks Atkinson, June 25, 1952, BRTC.)

  278 “with a little painting in oils”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Apr. 22, 1953, FOA, p. 75.

  278 “shut out”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Apr. 3, 1953, L2, p. 468.

  278 “I have nothing more to expect”: Williams to James Laughlin, Apr. 5, 1953, ibid., p. 473.

  CHAPTER 5: THUNDER OF DISINTEGRATION

  279 “I believe I said”: N, May 8, 1936, p. 33.

  279 “If only I could realize”: Ibid.

  279 “thrombosed hemorrhoids”: Williams to Gore Vidal, Jan. 27, 1954, L2, p. 514.

  279 “Don’t think I ever spent such a night of pain”: N, Dec. 28, 1953, p. 609. The 1946 operation was the traumatic removal of his appendix and infected intestine in Taos, New Mexico, which was, he told Kenneth Tynan, “where the desperate time started.” (Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 27, 1955, TWLDW, p. 306.) Of his 1953 ailment, Williams wrote, “It is relentless, constant, burning, aching. Frightens & appals one to think what misery, what anguish, our bodies are capable of. And this one such a sordid one, too. It might at least be in a decent place.” (N, Dec. 29, 1953, p. 609.)

  279 “this pain eclipses thought”: N, Dec. 28, 1953, p. 609.

  279 “a great storm has stripped me bare”: Ibid., Aug. 19, 1953, p. 583.

  280 “pinkies”: N, July 4, 1958, p. 713.

  280 “All hell is descended on me”: N, Dec. 29, 1953, p. 609.

  280 “not auspiciously”: Ibid., June 5, 1953, p. 567.

  280 “These suspicions of mine”: Ibid.

  280 “One gets tired of begging”: Ibid., July 1, 1953, p. 571.

  280 “treated like a stupid, unsatisfactory whore”: Ibid., July 10, 1953, p. 571.

  280 “Conversation had fallen to the level of grunts”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA; also quoted, N, p. 572.

  280 “What a sorry companion I make”: N, July 17, 1953, p. 575.

  281 “ ‘The Horse’ and I never laugh”: Ibid., p. 575.

  281 “dreary”: N, Aug. 24, 1953, p. 583.

  281 “juvenile poetics”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 14, 1953, L2, p. 502.

  281 “on the one big thing”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 307.

  281 “work and worry over work”: Williams to Donald Windham, Dec. 20, 1949, ibid., p. 249.

  281 “physical deterioration and a mental fatigue”: N, Aug. 19, 1953, p. 583.

  281 “and they were not too good”: Ibid., Dec. 4, 1953, p. 601.

  281 “Audrey wrote me a devastatingly negative”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Oct. 15, 1953, FOA, p. 79.

  281 “Death has no sound or light in it”: N, Oct. 20, 1953, p. 601
.

  282 “Was so disheartened”: Ibid., Oct. 1953, p. 595.

  282 “If anything goes wrong”: Ibid., Dec. 29, 1953, p. 611.

  282 “And on that morning”: CP, “Cortege,” pp. 30–33.

  283 “I’m such a coward”: N, Dec. 30, 1953, pp. 611–13.

  283 “If I am ever even relatively well”: Ibid., p. 615.

  283 “whispered”: Ibid.

  283 “He says you should have an operation”: Ibid., Jan. 1, 1954, p. 619.

  283 “that old breast-beating”: Ibid., Jan. 2, 1954, p. 621.

  283 “to make no more incontinent demands”: Ibid., Jan. 5, 1954, p. 623.

  283 “Oh, how I long to be loose again”: Ibid., Jan. 1, 1954, p. 619.

  283 “I am doing what I dreamed”: Ibid., Jan. 16, 1954, p. 627.

  284 “all the emotional content”: M, p. 109.

  284 “get a grip on”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 1, 1954, L2, p. 525.

  284 “I’m . . . pulling together”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 21, 1954, ibid., p. 541.

  284 “I do think it has a terrible sort of truthfulness”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 1, 1954, ibid., p. 525.

  284 “work script”: RBAW, p. 165.

  284 “I was terribly excited”: Ibid.

  284 “passing through”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, June 1954, L2, p. 534.

  284 “at just about the pit”: N, June 9, 1954, p. 643.

  284 “I’m just holding on”: Ibid., June 3, 1954, p. 637.

  285 “Am I worthy of it?”: Ibid., Aug. 13, 1954, p. 653.

  285 “my soul”: Ibid., June 6, 1954, p. 639.

  285 “begun to develop”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 307.

  285 “That’s a very dangerous thing”: Ibid.

  285 “Once the heart is thoroughly insulated”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 307.

  285 “Maybe Frank can help”: N, June 9, 1954, p. 643.

  285 “the Delta’s biggest cotton-planter”: LOA1, p. 880.

  285 “In this version”: RBAW, p. 165.

  285 “a synthesis of all my life”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 31, 1954, L2, p. 558.

  285 “A man can be scared and calm”: N, Dec. 30, 1953, p. 615.

  287 “This click that I get in my head”: LOA1, p. 936.

  287 “a cemetery of refusals”: Masud Khan, Hidden Selves: Between Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1989), p. 57. “Hysteria is not so much an illness as a technique of staying blank and absent from oneself, with symptoms as a substitute to screen this absence. The question arises: what has necessitated this need for blankness and caused this dread of psychic surrender through the early mother-child relationship in the hysteric? Or to put it differently: why does the hysteric’s inner life become a cemetery of refusals?”

  287 “Born poor, raised poor”: LOA1, pp. 911–12.

  287 “Skipper is dead!”: Ibid., p. 91.

  287 “But how in hell on earth”: Ibid., p. 913.

  287 “Did Brick love Maggie?”: Williams, “About Evasions,” FOA, p. 110.

  288 “I’ve gone through this”: LOA1, p. 890.

  288 “I never could keep my finger”: Ibid., p. 892.

  288 “There is torment in this play”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, June 1954, L2, p. 536.

  288 shift from self-dramatization to self-justification: TWLDW, p. 321.

  288 “I’m not sure self-pity”: Williams to Ted Kalem, ca. 1962, Columbia.

  289 “When you’re feelin sorry”: Tennessee Williams, “Drinky-Pie” (unpublished poem), Harvard.

  289 “It has gotten so bad”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, June 1954, L2, p. 535.

  289 “For the New Year”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Dec. 25, 1953, LLC.

  290 “Of course I wrote it for you”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Aug. 18, 1954, WUCA.

  290 “Will return with 2 other plays”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, 1954, HRC.

  290 “I still wish it could be a full evening”: Audrey Wood to Williams, July 19, 1954, HRC.

  291 play was unfinished: “This play has tremendous potential, but it has to be finished,” she told him. RBAW, pp. 165–66.

  291 “To me the story is complete”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 1954, L2, p. 543.

  291 “I’m quite exhausted”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, ibid., p. 548.

  291 “both hot for it”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Oct. 17, 1954, FOA, p. 101.

  291 “The only thing I want is Kazan”: Ibid.

  291 “You are on the threshold”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Sept. 16, 1954, WUCA.

  292 “I’ve occasionally lied to playwrights”: KAL, p. 73.

  292 “a brilliant first draft”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Oct. 20, 1954, WUCA.

  292 “PLEASE PLEASE stop”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Oct. 18, 1954, WUCA.

  292 “I’m scared to death”: Ibid.

  292 “I have no good suggestions”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Oct. 20, 1954, WUCA.

  292 “the richest land”: LOA1, p. 929.

  292 “no-neck monsters”: Ibid., p. 883.

  292 “From Manager to Owner”: HRC.

  293 “My father had a great gift for phrases”: Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 198.

  293 “strikes the keynote of the play”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 3, 1954, L2, p. 551.

  293 “reached beyond”: M, p. 168.

  293 “a monster of fertility”: LOA1, p. 942.

  293 BIG DADDY: (He snatches the glass from Brick’s hand): Ibid.

  294 “long drawn cry of agony and rage”: First draft of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, HRC.

  294 This play is about what the second act is about”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Oct. 18, 1954, WUCA.

  295 “I am left at the end of Act II”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Oct. 20, 1954, WUCA.

  295 “to get what you want”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Oct. 1954, L2, pp. 549–50.

  295 “had committed himself (verbally)”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Oct. 29, 1954, FOA, p. 103.

  296 “More melody in your voice”: KAL, p. 541.

  296 “the core of the play very hard”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 3, 1954, L2, pp. 551–52.

  296 “This is a play about good bastards and good bitches”: Ibid.

  296 “Vitality is the hero of the play!”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, LLC.

  296 “and concentrating on the character of Margaret”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, N, p. 658.

  297 “Maggie the Cat”: “Last week Margaret Lewis Powell died in a nursing home in North Carolina. . . . We all called her ‘Maggie the Cat,’ and indeed she was a survivor. Tennessee knew her and had heard all the stories from Paul [Bigelow] and me. . . . I do think Tennessee took the name from her. She was very beautiful.” (Jordan Massie to Lyle Leverich, May 19, 1995, LLC.) “He seemed more interested in stories about Maggie than in her. That same summer he got to know Big Daddy. Obviously, the seeds were planted and subsequently grew into a major play in the Williams canon.” (Jordan Massie to Lyle Leverich, June 5, 1995, LLC.)

  297 “I think a lot of you”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Nov. 7, 1954, FOA, p. 106.

  297 “no-neck monsters”: LOA1, p. 883.

  297 “Honey! I’m writing about your spirit”: FOA, p. 107.

  297 “You can be young without money”: LOA1, p. 908.

  297 “always had to suck up to people”: Ibid., p. 907.

  297 “The dress I married you in”: Drafts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, HRC.

  298 “I introduced them”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 8, 1952, HRC.

  298 “made me cry with happiness”: James Laughlin, The Way It Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin, eds. Barbara Epler and Daniel Javitch (New York: New Directions, 2006), p. 184.

  298 “Jamesie! A RUSSIAN!”: Ibid., pp. 184–85.

  298 “Darling!”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Mar. 27, 1954, FOA, p. 90
.

  299 “My God!”: FOA, p. 91.

  299 “broken her engagement to a multimillionaire”: John Lahr, “The Lady and Tennessee,” The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1994, p. 81.

  299 “I think you are one of the world’s”: Ibid.

  299 “She is so strong-willed”: Ibid.

  299 wandered around Europe: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 5, 1954, L2, p. 538.

  299 “Poor little Maria”: Williams to Audrey Wood, undated, ibid., p. 540.

  299 “All hell has broke loose here”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 1954, ibid., p. 547.

  300 “Maria and I are writing letters”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 10, 1954, HRC.

  300 “an artist of outstanding merit”: FOA, p. 112.

  300 “The help she needs”: Williams to James Laughlin, Dec. 3, 1954, James Laughlin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

  300 “I don’t think anyone has ever upset me”: James Laughlin to Williams, Jan. 9, 1955, James Laughlin Papers.

  301 “exciting ideas about the doomed heroine”: FOA, p. 112.

  301 “There is no point in pretending”: Brooks Atkinson, “Williams Play Revived by Originals Only,” New York Times, Mar. 4, 1955.

  301 “He was in kind of strange shape”: Lahr, “Lady and Tennessee,” p. 82.

  302 “He thought she could help him”: Ibid., p. 81.

  302 “Maria was living in a tiny, tiny flat”: Ibid., p. 82.

  302 “I am not at all sure”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 23, 1954, L2, p. 554.

  302 “He loved it”: Ibid.

  302 “Loathe every minute of it”: N, Dec. 3, 1954, p. 663.

  303 “the poem of the play”: L2, p. 559. This phrase appears in a manuscript fragment held by HRC, which is mentioned in the L2 source cited.

  303 “I do get his point”: N, Nov. 29, 1954, p. 663.

  304 “I’m going to do the Williams play”: Elia Kazan to Molly Day Thacher, undated, WUCA.

  304 “I ‘buy’ a lot of your letter”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 31, 1954, WUCA.

  304 “the romantic world of adolescence”: Ibid.

  305 “Brick gives me a pain”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Feb. 3, 1955, WUCA.

  305 “Tenn, it’s the job of the playwright”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Feb. 11, 1955, WUCA.

  305 “go a little further””: Elia Kazan to Williams, Jan. 5, 1955, WUCA.

  305 “BIG DADDY: What did you say to him?”: Ibid.