In Which We Step Back From The Light Of Thomas Lanier Williams

The Broken Mirror

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Not that I like being struck, I hated it, but the keenness of the emotional situation, the material for art.

The notebooks of Thomas Lanier Williams, called Tennessee, retain the defining characteristic of all his writing - they are a half truth. These entries admit much, but not everything. They attempt to explain circumstances, as best they can, but come short of encapsulating his positions in a single artistic or philosophical statement. Surety was a luxury for others who had more enthusiasm for such things. From his point of view, there was a far more pressing dilemma: how could a person so eminently incomplete transcend this in his art?

the cover of Williams' 1941 notebook

3/12/41

Wednesday night.

Very blue. Very down hearted. Thoughts of despair in my feverish head. Very sick last night. Raging fever and pounding heart. The grippe I suppose. Tormented till daybreak. Then felt asleep and woke much improved, fever gone, but weak. Spent the day walking idly about Tampa — wound up at a movie, the usual anesthesia. Visited a bar with plump child-like B-girls & soldiers — called The Broken Mirror.

Home & read a detective story account of the bestial treatment of prisoners in Alcatraz — which made me feel even worse. I feel helpless, unprotected. This little moratorium seems to have stretched its limit and I have written no long play nor do I have a reliable idea for one — and my eye looks worse and I am unbearably shy and had no luck at sex for several weeks.

So I feel wretched & frightened, more than usual.

Tomorrow I will pack off to St. Pete and the beach — God be merciful. Truly.

Thursday, AM.

Just now coughed and spit up a bloodstained phlegm — first time since Mexico. Wasn't even interested really.

Okay. Now we pack up and invade St. Pete and brave the terrors of general delivery. My agent's letters are frightening to me cause I never know when they will pronounce my doom.

Later —

Well, I have arrived in St. Pete and I have a dollar room for the night. Got here in the rain. Fever, headache. Very weak and aching. Lie in my room with a copy of Time.

Audrey's letter contained a cheque without comment. She is bored & irritated no doubt.

A sweet letter from Mother enclosing $5.00 check & May Wright address. I think I will be all right when the sun comes out and this fever passes. A fever is optimistic and imaginative and poetic. The poet's best friend is three degrees of fever.

I have cut out coffee & cigarettes last 2 days. will try to keep it up. so long.

The two defining memes in Williams' notebooks are (1) the search for sex with other men and (2) complaining about his lack of health. Surprisingly, he is quite humble about both of these subjects. (His work was the centerpiece of his confidence; life demanded at least some caution lest his carnal desires destroy him completely.) While he was not above trolling the local bars for intimate companions, it's evident that Thomas Lanier was a quite lonely man, and it is not merely sexual satisfaction but true knowledge of his partner that he craves.

8/12/41

Monday a.m.

America entered the war yesterday, against Japan. Dirty business. I knew some boys on the S.S. Oklahoma reported afire in Pearl Harbor.

on the beach in santa monica

12/18/41

Thursday —

Been back in Nola. about a week.

Crisis is Approaching in my life.

Completing re-write of "Stairs to the Roof" by forced marches. wearing out my nerves - physical wreck - nearly explode every evening.

Restless search for sex — fruitless, and tortured.

I look awful — Clothes shabby, eyes bleared.

Too nervous for any social composure. Feel little hope of production for a play. A commendable efffort — no more I'm afraid. A frantic little caged beast — Me!

En Avant!

12/19/41

A lover tonight. Picked up in Mack's bar. Nice not very goodlooking but pleasant exercise. Gay.

It is about 3:30 a.m. Heart pounding so I can't sleep. The old ticker has been taking a beating lately. Too much coffee. I suppose I am digging myself a grave. But what else would I do? — Today very bitter — play seemed bad. Only the athletic club pulls me thru these days - the hot shower the swim — the quiet, sedative reading room. What will it come to? Yes, the crisis is surely approaching I could probably go on skidding downhill quite a ways — but I am more likely to improve my fortune or crack up.

O how sleepy — Just taken a mebaral — peace except for heart. O how sweet peace is. I am not afraid of death anymore. I am clean and white like an old bone. There is nothing left. Yes. I am purified in a way.

thomas' mother and Grand

There is a tendency to look back at the careers of those we know so well and imagine they enjoyed success in their field at every opportunity. It was famously untrue of Fitzgerald, and although critics, agents and readers immediately saw value in Williams' work, his fiction in particular received a hazy reception. More clear was his marvelous ear for dialogue, for putting all of something in a glib phrase that represented it, and this ability was most obvious to others in his plays.

12/21/41

Sunday night

Oh last night I was drunk and I kissed Otto and Jerry — the lovely, the young — I charmed them with my rare gaiety and wit — so seldom it flowers but when it does it is fine.

They gave me their lips freely, warmly — and we left them alone with each other to make love. Till 6 a.m. I tagged along with an attractive soldier but finally gave him up as he fell into the clutches of a female whore. Returned home and found Frank had collected an attractive blond youth. He slept between us and the nightingales chirped a little. But I was judicious & respected F's priority tonight.

hungry — broke

Heart bad — I think we draw near the close. So? - Byebye.

I talk about extinction. But do I believe it? Am I not rather inclined to think some startling good fortune is coming?

set design for production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

1/6/42

Tuesday — I have just acquired this new eversharp pencil.

It is 11:15 p.m. I am reading the opening pages of Proust in a book I inadvertently confiscated from the library of the University of Iowa. It is one of the 3 books I own. My collected letters of D.H. Lawrence was acquired in the same way, but deliberately from the public library in New Orleans. Hart Crane was given to prevent me from stealing it "from an idiot."

Why this discussion of my library?

I am frightened thinking of the changes or rather the increased vicissitudes the war might create in my life. I suppose if it did not affect me personally my feelings about it would be only abstractly regretful. Things have to impinge on my own life to matter to me very much. Is that the way with most people? Yes. I am sure that it is.

self portrait of the artist

Well, I have been here about a week — no swimming, just sitting around, writing, eating, going to movies, relaxing in the effortless matrix of "home" created by Grand and Mother and grandfather. Bad for my figure, not much good for my soul. When have I ever done anything for the benefit of my soul? Horse shit.

Well, I must get moving. Where? Undecided as never before. A letter from Audrey will probably precipitate a decision. Macon? New York? Back to New Orleans? Or even, Florida — Mexico? Mexico City would be lovely, wish it were possible.

No, I feel no desire to participate in war work.

O, I might would be glad to be a Florence Nightingale if I could but — incompetent and lazy me. Thank god I don't have to go to camp or fight.

Proust writes, "For a long time I used to go to bed early."

Dear selfish, shameless, heroic, honest sissy — Proust.

We would have understood each other, my dear. How we might have "dished" the world in that cork-lined room of yours. I wonder if you turned over and would I ! heavens!

C'est assez Good night.

Later

Proust bores me tonight — I find myself, "No it isn't quite that involved, dear boy, at least not quite that involuted. The involvement is not so subject to analysis as you make it. A little more impressionism, please!

Williams did have one relationship with a woman. As you might imagine, it was short lived. He doted on his boyfriends, who were routinely younger and less experienced than he himself. He tended to live somewhat in fear of their departure, although he possessed an intense charisma that usually drew people into his orbit.

8/24/42

This evening a stranger picked me up. A common and seedy-looking young Jew with a thick accent. I was absurdly happy. For the first time since my arrival here I had a companion.

I took him all over town, bought him a beer, found him a place for the night. He was a hitch-hiker with a bag of cheese and rolls for food.

It was like cool water after hot thirst, just being with somebody. Left me quiet and relaxed.

I went home and read Robinson Jeffers' extraordinarily good-and-bad verse.

This afternoon I wrote and it was no fun but I got some probably not so bad work done.

No mail. Tomorrow?

The New York silence disturbs me. I guess it will have to be home for a while, at least.

Feel not bad tonight.

Hungry — very little to eat.

Salad for supper.

Milk for lunch.

Coffee for breakfast.

Bon nuit

12/18/42

From five o'clock on I am alone. I swim, exercise, and go out alone to the movie. I return and the floor is quiet. My former friend, the dancer, is in a room with someone else. Desertion!

But last night I had a sudden and hot affair with a party from Wisconsin. I was told that I had a lovely body and the compliment was apparently sincere. As we increase the distance from our youth, such speeches have more and more pathetic value to us. It used to be taken for granted, that we were as desirable to the other as that one is to us. Now we seldom are or we do not see how we could be, for we pursue the younger and lovelier than ourselves — Why do I write in the plural? Is it too sad to say "I"? But I don't think much about losing my youth. It happens and is accepted gradually. I feel very young. In a way. And in a way very old. I do not feel the time sense of much longer living. No, it seems as though it would not be long to the finish. But I started feeling that a number of years ago.

I want to go back to creation.

Strongly, brightly, with a fresh and free spirit and a driving power.

To do the monument.

So long.

with donald windham Williams never attempted much in the way of criticism, but his taste was impeccable. In the following excerpts, he relates his first and ongoing experiences with his peers and progenitors.

Anton Chekhov

Why can't I write like Chekhov? I could gouge my good eye out because I can't do something lovely and haunting like "The Sea Gull."

Thomas Wolfe

Scene after scene has the stamp of genius on it.

Whether the total effect will be as powerful as the parts is a question doesn't modify the fact that here is a man who has left his stamp on our human consciousness — and a very great stamp it is.

The picture of Webber's homecoming — particularly Randy and his boss — are as fine as anything of the kind I have seen — finer — Men like Wolfe — and the mess of this world — how do you reconcile it? You don't — can't. The world is ruled by Randy's bosses. The Tom Wolfe's are observers — but their work makes them a threat to their evil masters. They lift the scales from the slaves' eyes - if the slaves dare to let them.

William Saroyan

Saroyan is likeable enough with his somewhat calculated but fresh candor and probably has for many a charm. I felt too much space between us.

Miguel de Cervantes

Love him.

Hart Crane

I've been reading a lot of Hart Crane's poetry — like it but hardly understand a single line — of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect — much of it has at least the atmosphere of great poetry — it is a lot of raw material, all significant and moving but not chiselled into any communicative shape.

TLW's New Orleans

Andre Gide

Miss Gide seems to have been an old auntie all her life! Her writing has never moved me though I observe its excellencies. She is a bit dry for my fruity tastes. I doubt that she and I would have hit it off — still, she has some qualities I would enjoy. However I don't have the impression, from her journal, that she liked anyone really very deeply except Miss Gide, whom she pretends to deprecate but whom I think she regards as a girl of destiny pretty much all the way through.

Perhaps I envy the length and felicity of her days.

D.H. Lawrence

When I met other writers, I knew without knowing how different altogether Lawrence was. They may have been good writers, but Lawrence was a genius.

Friedrich Nietzsche

"The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."

Was it possible that all things could be so useless and indefinite as Nietzsche made them look?

November 1947, letter to Pancho Rodriguez

In my life there has been so much real tragedy, things I cannot speak about and hardly dare to remember, from the time of my childhood and all the way through the years in between that I lack patience with people who are spoiled and think that they are entitled to go through life without effort and without sacrifice and without disappointment. Life is hard. As Amanda said, "It calls for Spartan endurance." But more than that, it calls for understanding, one person understanding another person, and for some measure of sacrifice, too. Very few people learn until late in life how much courage it takes to live, but if you learn it in the beginning it will be easier for you...

Of all the people I have known you have the greatest and warmest heart but you also unfortunately have a devil in you that is constantly working against you, filling you with insane suspicion and jealousies and ideas that are so preposterous that one does not know how to answer them. It is a terrifying thing. You must face it and make a determined effort to master it now before it becomes too well-established.

with his brother

"Body Ache" - Britney Spears (mp3)

"Don't Cry" - Britney Spears (mp3)

The new album from Britney Spears is entitled Britney Jean, and it will be released on November 29th.

with his sister rose

In Which We Reveal Our Deadly Intentions

On Tennessee Williams

by KARINA WOLF

“High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” Tennessee Williams’ remarks at the death of his sister allude to the difficulty of living with mental illness -- his relationship with his schizophrenic sibling had been fraught.

Rose was a perpetual source of concern, constraint, and provocation for the family, and while the playwright was in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie, his parents allowed surgeons to lobotomize her. Psychosurgery has often been coercive at best, and the operation is medieval in its imprecision. The doctor severs the brain’s prefrontal lobe by inserting metal spikes through holes in the skull or through the eye sockets. The surgery left Rose permanently compromised and terminated her hopes for recovery.

Williams called Menagerie a memory play. Perhaps this designation was meant to excuse its elliptical narrative; certainly it alluded to the story’s biographical conflict, about a mother’s hope for her daughter’s return to normalcy and the sibling who acts as mediator. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted, “that those emotions that stir...are nearly all rooted...in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself...a web of monstrous complexity...from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.”

For the Williams family, madness was an impenetrable cloister. The diplomacy of insanity demands anticipation, misdirection, suppression. A spouse or visitor can never comprehend the hidden hurts that bind, the minutely calibrated behaviors and the disappointed hopes in the family of the disturbed. Outside the tempest, one bears witness. It’s arguable that most writers create memory plays in one way or another; that Williams would name his form reflects how intimately these conflicts branded him.

*

I came late to Tennessee Williams. Maybe this is a function of the American paradox. To paraphrase a Yankee poet: we Americans contradict ourselves, we are a multitude. I hope the purpose of literature isn’t just to reify the importance of our own concerns, but the gentility of the South, its norms and mores and modes of expression seem utterly alien to this Northerner.

I recognized Williams, at last, in the works of contemporary film-makers: in the febrile moods of Wong Kar-Wai (an entire section of Blueberry Nights is lifted straight from Streetcar), in David Lynch’s pathological normality and expressionist experiments. When discussing All About My Mother, in which a character plays Blanche Dubois onscreen, Pedro Almodovar acknowledges a debt to Williams but insists that his character performs scenes from Streetcar as preparation to negotiate her own conflicts.

We can all learn from his conceit. The Spanish director dedicates his film to “women who act.” The idea, of course, is that "woman" and "performer" are exchangeable terms – and therefore the film is dedicated to more than biologically-mandated actors. Certainly, to be gay when Tennessee Williams was alive was to perform. And to be insane in the South of Tennessee Williams is a highwire act.

Despite the good breeding and the heavy drawl that earned him the handle “Tennessee,” Williams is not the most Southern of writers. He aspired to Southernness, and he came from a family with a society name (Lanier), but he was also gay, which left him at odds with the culture beyond his gothic family. (When queried about the provenance of her son’s toxic female characters, Williams mother regularly issued the disclaimer: “I have no idea where he comes up with them.”)

*

When you think of Tennessee Williams, what do you think of first? Marlon Brando’s tortured screams and the comfort from the woman he loves, when he shoves his brutish head against her belly. It’s hard to imagine a character of more inchoate passion than Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski.

You have to understand Williams' cultural genealogy. He is the descendant of Artaud, Brecht and Cocteau. He was aiming for a theater of gesture; after all, when it works, writing is more of a sculptural than a logical art. “I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action,” he wrote. Suddenly, Last Summer has nothing in common with contemporaneous dramas by Miller or Osborne – its roots are in European Expressionism and the Gothic romance of the Brontës. Williams’ emotional landscapes are elemental and volatile and poisonous. The Southern artifice is just a fractal outgrowth of the characters’ pathologies.

Williams’ success also coincided with the development of method acting, itself an exponent of rawness, not merely of naturalism. I find I can’t really talk about Williams without talking about film because that is how I was introduced to him – through the framings of Elia Kazan and Joseph Mankiewicz – and how I finally understood him – through his filmic imitators.

Even so, it took me a long time to understand the appeal of the plays. At a young age I could discern how Marlon Brando’s performance differed from the mannered banter of other actors. But he was repellent – it’s only later that you can see he’s appealing, how his coarseness is an antidote to the delusions of his wife and her sister.

In Suddenly, Last Summer I found my skeleton key. There are more famous and more revived works, but Suddenly, to me, is the yardstick by which all others can be measured. The play contains Williams’ archetypal characters: the fragile woman-girl “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”; the arachnid mother; the depressive young man who must mediate an arena of monsters.

In the drama, brilliant and sensitive Dr. Cukrowicz is charged with eliciting funds from wealthy socialite Mrs. Venable in order to build a new psychosurgical hospital. The price of the new building is clear: Dr. Cukrowicz must perform a lobotomy on Mrs. Venable’s niece, who has been unmanageable since the death of Mrs. Venable’s son. Kathy, the niece, was witness to Sebastian’s violent and mysterious demise while the two were on vacation in Spain.

Before meeting the patient, Dr. Cukrowicz presses Mrs. Venable to specify her niece’s illness. The diagnosis is imprecise, but the affliction is universal: “Memory. She lacerates herself with memory.”

There’s that word again. Caught in memory, the self becomes two mirrors facing one another – an endless feedback loop in which the singular ego, or identity, gets lost. You start searching for yourself. As Kathy does, you start writing your diary in the third person.

A bizarrely un-Southern triad of players enact the filmic version of Suddenly, Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn is the widow Venable, whose name seems to be a conflation of veniality and veneration. Her comportment is loathsome to her niece and subservient to her beloved son. Hepburn struts around in the headgear and outfits of an older version of her screwball character from Bringing Up Baby, but here the gaffes reveal deadly intentions.

Elizabeth Taylor has always been decadent; the instability we associate with her compensates for any thinness in performance. Her beauty is dated but manifest. She was made for perfume commercials or the affectless formalism of Last Year at Marienbad; she's perfect for the film, where the framing creates the drama as much as anything she says. Her power is not only her illness but in her knowledge. There’s something about Sebastian that Mrs. Venable wants to contain.

Montgomery Clift’s Dr. Cukrowicz has a welcome detachment. In essence, he’s allowed entry to the family secrets as he tries to determine whether to agree to perform the lobotomy. As he defers his decision, the surgeon develops an odd intimacy with his patient. He lights her cigarettes like a lover, allows her to wear high heels and Paris-bought fashions.

Clift, like Brando, was an actor of his moment. He embodied a new technique and carried a vulnerable, pansexual mien – a type of male so repellant to John Wayne that the star refused to socialize with Clift when they shot a film together. Clift was tortured by the sensitivities that can go hand in hand with addiction. He was further handicapped by changes to his appearance after a gruesome car accident. Marilyn Monroe once said of Clift that he was the "only person I know who’s in worse shape than I am.” Because the crew indulged his poor behavior, Hepburn reportedly spat in the face of the director at the end of filming.

It’s spot on casting, though, for a character who must serve as a Williams stand-in. As the ethical surgeon, he dithers, asking Mrs. Venable, "I can't guarantee that a lobotomy would stop her—babbling!!!" To which the aunt responds, "That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?"

Mental illness, particularly hysteria, has often been the affliction of women. Straight men may offer protection, comfort, diagnosis or salvation; but illness is a feminine domain. The pseudo-diagnosis of hysteria is similar to that vague term with which Kathy is classified, “dementia precox.” Even the doctor knows that this is a blanket categorization, empowering the doctor and belittling the diseased.

In many of Williams' plays, the arrival of a man offers hope and redemption – all thwarted by the hysterical behavior of the patient. There’s the sense that madness is consequent to a family imbalance that has no outlet. At best, the patient can achieve an awareness of the illness as it damages host and those around her. Think about Britney Spears’ helpless dissociation as she markets her bi-polarity versus the adult recognition of Sinead O’Connor, who talks with self-awareness about her disease, even as she periodically erupts into mad behaviors.

All this is to say: madness is viral. The lives of those surrounding the afflicted are irradiated by pathology. As in Grey Gardens, the illnesses must be symbiotic or the unit fails.

*

Something has failed in Williams’ Gothic spook sonata – a character has died and another must be silenced. So what is the need on the part of Mrs. Venable to hide from the strange facts about Sebastian? She can hardly speak the truth about him: his mother, and then his cousin, act as nurse/muse/procurer for the gay poet. As Kathy rightly says: “Sebastian wasn’t a man, he was a vocation.”

Like a good actor, Williams finds himself in his characters. Tennessee was prone to depression and limited by endless sensitivities. Certainly, his suffering must’ve inspired the troubled Doctor as well as the relationship between Kathy and Sebastian, which trespasses into Wuthering Heights’ incestuous taboos.

Williams’ first erotic experiences were closely linked to his sister: his concern for Rose transferred to the student pianist who arrived at the house regularly to practice with his sister. Williams writes: “For the first time, prematurely, I was aware of skin as an attraction. A thing that might be desirable to touch. This awareness entered my mind, my senses, like the sudden streak of flame that follows a comet. And my undoing... was now completed.”

A shocking ambivalence of thought and sensation tortured him, "Yes, Tom, you're a monster!" he told himself. "But that's how it is and there's nothing to be done about it. And so continued to feast my eyes on his beauty."

In Suddenly, Last Summer the self-loathing and the compulsion are both present. As much as Tennessee had to battle with his domineering mother and fragile sister, he himself was also damaged.

Mrs. Venable’s speech about Sebastian suggests something of Tennessee’s delicacy:

A poet’s vocation is something that rests on something as thin and fine as the web of a spider, Doctor. That’s all that holds him over!—out of destruction....Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed!

And then there are Williams’ letters. When his good friend Carson McCullers considered visiting him in Rome, Tennessee warned her: “You must remember all the bad things about me, my sensuality and license and neurotic moodiness at times – all the irregularities of my life and nature – I cannot put all those things into a letter! – and then ask yourself if you could really endure a close association or would I perhaps add to your worries and your emotional strains.”

Who is the greater monster in Suddenly, Last Summer? Mrs. Venable, who wishes to suppress the truth, or her son, who uses people to perverse ends? Williams imbues a toxicity to all. Kathy is fragile, but the entire family is mad. Ultimately, the doctor elicits the story of Sebastian’s behavior and violent death with a serum – as if the truth will solve the family’s pathology.

Truth, in fact, is Williams' second subject. In Streetcar, Blanche Dubois admits: “I don’t want realism. I want magic. I don’t tell the truth. I tell it as it ought to be....A line can be straight or a road. But the heart of a human being?” And here I find the greatness of Williams: truth and lies coexist – as do love, hatred, and indifference. Sane or mad, the human heart is troubled because it embraces contraries.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbles here.

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