Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (66 page)

IN
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
, Nonno, “a minor league poet with a major league spirit,” struggles throughout the play to finish his last poem. When he finally speaks it at the finale, the poem tells the story of a piece of nature’s perfection—a golden orange—as it plummets to the ground, only to lose its radiance to “the earth’s obscene, corrupting love.” The orange dies, the poem says, “Without a cry, without a prayer / With no betrayal of despair.” The poet, one of the “beings of a golden kind,” asks for a similar grace. The completion of the poem is the answer to Nonno’s prayer. The ability to express himself manufactures courage and calm; it reverses the natural order of things. Where death turns everything into nothing, art makes everything into something. Speaking “in a loud exalted voice,” Nonno achieves eloquence, then almost immediately dies, with a grateful, not a “frightened heart.” “Yes, thanks and praise” are Nonno’s last words as he drifts poignantly out of consciousness.

For Williams,
The Night of the Iguana
was also, in effect, an act of grace. Exercising colossal will, and fearing, like Shannon, that “my . . . brain’s going out now, like a failing—power,” Williams had drawn out of himself a well-formed, eloquent expression of his internal world. Onto the absurd, problematic nature of his existence—his losses, his longings, his self-loathing, his unexplained and unexplainable emptiness—he had imposed a meaning. Some critics complained of the aimlessness of the plot. (“The play may seem meaningless, shapeless, a little unreal,” Harold Clurman said in the
Nation
, while conceding that it was “the best American play of the season.”) The fact was that
Iguana
lacked the melodramatic fireworks of Williams’s earlier work; its main event was not an external battle but an internal one: the spectacle of one man’s losing struggle to save his soul.

The positive reviews of
Iguana
called attention to the unusual depth of its lyricism: Williams was “writing at the top of his form” (the
Times
), “at his poetic, moving best” (the
Daily News
); it was “perhaps the wisest play he has written” (
Time
), “one of [his] saddest, darkest and most contemplative plays” (the
New York
Post
). The intensity of its language was in direct proportion to the precision of its metaphor. Williams himself was at the very psychological crossroads that his characters dramatized: like Nonno, he felt his brain and his talent dying out; like Shannon, he was pulled toward the amnesia of self-destructive indulgence; like Hannah, he was exhausted by a lifetime of solitary struggle.

At the finale, Shannon retreats to the beach for a swim with the bawdy Maxine. “I can make it down the hill, but not back up,” he tells her. “I’ll get you back up the hill,” she says, “half leading half supporting him,” according to the stage directions. Maxine, with her siren song, lures Shannon back onto the rocks of his own deracinating addictions; she offers to make him her companion in waywardness—he can help manage the Costa Verde and continue his habit of fornication, pleasuring the women guests to his heart’s content. It’s an ambivalent ending, which plays, on the surface, as a cheerful one: Shannon “chuckles happily” as he heads down through the rainforest. (John Huston’s outstanding film adaptation, with Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, and Ava Gardner, makes this ironic penultimate scene into an upbeat final one.) The play may be “a dream of immobility from which the dreamers never awake,” as Walter Kerr claimed in his follow-up
Herald Tribune
review, but by the end, Shannon is finally in motion, and the vector of his momentum is decidedly downward. “Shannon has given up and is being sentenced to Hell” was how Patrick O’Neal interpreted it.

Williams gives Hannah the last words in the play and the last image. “Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It’s so quiet here, now,” she says. Only then does she realize that Nonno has slumped in his chair, dead. “She looks right and left for someone to call to,” the stage directions read. “There’s no one.” Hannah is alone with her grief and her terror; like Williams, she must soldier on under new circumstances, with only the memory of love and loyalty to guide her.

“I’M SORRY YOU’RE not feeling well,” Kazan wrote to his frazzled friend at the beginning of 1962. “Put part of it down to after-opening slump.” He continued, “One thing you should try to cultivate just a little bit is the ability to enjoy success, even if you consider it partial, still it is there, and very real, you really do
accomplish
you know.” But in the punishing struggle to bring
The Night of the Iguana
to life, Williams had sniffed the winds of theatrical change, and his accomplishments were no solace. Despite
Iguana
’s acclaim, Williams did not win the Tony Award; he was snubbed in favor of Robert Bolt’s middle-brow British historical play
A Man for All Seasons
. More significantly,
Iguana
did not get a national tour. “I think my kind of literary or pseudo-literary style of writing for the theatre is on its way out,” Williams said. If Williams had been Broadway royalty, he was beginning to feel deposed.

As early as 1960, Williams and his thematic tropes had become sufficiently common currency to be parodied from the Broadway stage by the most sophisticated comedy team of the era, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In their sensational show
An Evening with Nichols and May
, Nichols, playing the playwright “Alabama Glass,” took a very long gulp from the tumbler beside him, and then drawled, “I want to tell you tonight about my new play, ‘Pork Makes Me Sick in the Summer.’ ” He went on:

It is a simple story of degradation. The scene is a basement apartment in the Mexican quarter of Detroit. Before the action begins the husband of the heroine, Nanette, has committed suicide on being accused of

being a homosexual. Distraught, she has an affair with a young basketball team, after which she turns to drink, prostitution and putting on airs. During the course of the three acts she gradually begins to go downhill and, finally, she disintegrates and has to be put away.

Williams saw the show; according to Mike Nichols, however, he didn’t go backstage. “I didn’t and don’t blame him,” Nichols said. “The piece was nastier than necessary, especially if you add my voice and character when doing it. It was less Williams than Capote, whom I truly disliked. I always felt bad about this since I admired Williams inordinately and still do.”

By 1962, a new wave of American and European playwrights was bringing to their storytelling an allusive minimalism, which challenged both Williams’s florid narrative style and his hegemony. Williams was beginning to feel not just old but old-fashioned. “I’m so tired, so terribly, terribly tired. And now anything that I do is going to be compared to the savagely truthful work of the best New Wave playwrights,” he complained to the director Herbert Machiz in the fall of 1962, after seeing a preview of Edward Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, which he judged to be “one of those works that extend the frontiers of the stage.” The spareness of Samuel Beckett—whose
Waiting for Godot
Williams helped to produce in its debut American production—and the “astringency” of Harold Pinter drove him “crazy with jealousy.” Speaking of Pinter’s
The Caretaker
, which was competing with
Iguana
on Broadway, Williams was almost in awe. “While I’m in the theatre, I’m enthralled by it and I say, ‘Oh, God, if I could write like that.’ If only I were twenty-five and just starting out, what these boys could have given me.” During the course of the year, he’d written two “long-short or short-long plays” under the collective title
Slapstick Tragedy
that were perhaps, he told Jay Laughlin, “my answer to the school of Ionesco.” “They’re not just funny, they’re also supposed to be sad: I mean ‘touching,’ ” Williams explained. “Who is touched and by what is the big question these days, which are the days of the untouchables, the emotional astronauts. In which I’m beginning to feel like Louisa May Alcott or the early Fannie Hurst.”

If Williams couldn’t die, he could imagine his death. So, too, could Flora Goforth, the indefatigable “dying monster” of
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, the play that Williams was working on for the 1962 Spoleto Festival—“a poem of death,” he called it—about the last two days of an imperious wealthy woman’s existence on her mountaintop estate in Italy, where she has gone to finish writing her memoirs. “Ahhhhhhhh, meeeeeeeeee! . . . Another day, Oh, Christ, Oh, Mother of Christ!”—the first lines that Mrs. Goforth delivers, from offstage—sounded the unmistakable note of Beckett’s tragicomic ennui.

Throughout his life Williams’s work had always been a kind of mother to him, nourishing and containing him. The title
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
—its reference to the drying up of a life-giving supply evoked the breast, even if it didn’t name it—signaled both a pining for his fecund youth and a profound sense of abandonment. (Subsequent play titles, such as
Small Craft Warnings
and
The Mutilated
, about a woman and her humiliation at losing a breast, also hinted at his fear of losing his power.) Walter Kerr, in his review of
Milk Train
, unwittingly hit upon the psychological issue at the center of the play, which was not just the drying up of the milk of human kindness but the drying up of Williams’s trust in his unconscious. “Which brings us to Mr. Williams’ own predicament,” Kerr wrote. “He has not yet heard from his muse, from his mind, from his typewriter, what needs to be said.” “Courageous title, by the way,” the twenty-six-year-old director John Hancock said to Williams during his subsequent production of
Milk Train
for the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. “He looked at me carefully and replied, ‘That’s right, baby. Glad you appreciate that.’ Of course he knew what he was writing about. The content of the exchange was clear. He’d always been a house on fire, but he couldn’t read the smoke signals anymore.” As Williams kidded on the square to Hancock, he was “ ‘the daid Mistuh William.’ ”

Williams claimed that
Milk Train
was the most difficult of his plays to write. Woven from the tattered strands of his imploding life, the play is a kind of fairy tale of his own decline: The name “Goforth” was an echo of Williams’s mantra of endurance, “En avant!” (The title itself was an acknowledgment of his fear of creative paralysis, of the extinction of his “go forth” spirit.) The insignia on a flag that marks the first and last moments of Mrs. Goforth’s residency in her mountaintop aerie—“a golden griffin. A mythological monster, half lion, and half eagle”—is a simulacrum of Williams’s own family coat of arms: a fighting lion above a peacock. Even the epigram, from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” proclaimed Williams’s lostness: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is.”

In a letter to John Hancock, Williams claimed that
Milk Train
was “a portrait. An allegorical portrait.” The allegory was in Mrs. Goforth, the pill-popping Georgia “swamp-bitch” who is trying to complete her “demented memoirs” and whose willful perversion and mysterious empowerment were a simulacrum of the destructive and creative sides of Williams, vying for domination of his overworked, balky imagination. A kind of broken, exiled, clownish monarch, Mrs. Goforth was a compendium of Williams’s deliriums—his stagnation, his fierce battle to defeat the enemy Time through literary endeavor. (“We’re working against time, Blackie,” she tells her beleaguered secretary, who tries to make sense of the diva’s scattershot ramblings about her six husbands and her famous life as an international beauty.) Mrs. Goforth acted out Williams’s own refusal to accept the inevitability of decline. As Blackie says, she “apparently never thought that her—legendary—existence—could go on less than forever!” “A legend in my own lifetime, yes, I reckon I am,” Mrs. Goforth says at one point, adding, “I’m a little run down, like a race horse that’s been entered in just one race too many, even for me.” To Hermione Baddeley, the first actress to play her, Williams wrote:

I beg you to play the broken queen of a corrupted material domain who knows she’s broken and the domain is corrupted, and offers her abdication, not her surrender, her strength, not her dissolution. She is a Napoleon wearing a sort of badge of honor on her regal garment. . . . She was a queen of the world as it is, and we know what it is. She’s exiled to Elba, yes, but exiled monarchs have pride, and speak out proudly. Their voices don’t lose the proud and imperious tone, no matter how they’re reduced, circumstantially. . . . Suddenly facing the false premise of their position, on a mountain, they remember how hard they had to climb up there, what it cost them in their hearts, now dying, and no matter how exiled and lonely they are on Elba, they know they fought as best they could however completely they lost. It’s only at the end, as everything dims out, that they appeal for the comfort of a death angel, and even then, without shame in the appeal. Their pride stays with the appeal.

Mrs. Goforth is at the watershed between life and death when her castle keep is breeched by Christopher Flanders, a sweet-talking, insistent “death angel,” the author of a slim volume of poetry and a maker of mobiles who takes his name from the First World War killing fields of Belgium. Chris is, from the outset, associated with art and the higher mysteries of creation. Williams characterized him as “a guest desperately wanted but not invited.” He’s an interloper who trespasses on Mrs. Goforth’s hilltop compound, intent on bringing her some kind of salvation that will assuage her desire and ease her out of life. “Sometimes, once in a while, I’ve given [people] what they needed even if they didn’t know what it was,” he tells Mrs. Goforth of his ministrations. “I can’t explain Chris,” Williams said. “I can only reveal Mrs. Goforth.” Unlike Mrs. Goforth, who was modeled on divas well known to Williams—Tallulah Bankhead, Anna Magnani, himself—Chris was impossible for Williams to explain precisely because he was not a person but a phenomenon: an emissary of the intuitive, the imaginative, the mystical: those unconscious realms over which Williams felt he was losing his grip. At its most literal dramatic level, Chris embodies the question that Williams was asking about his own imagination: Can it be trusted? Will it deliver? Can you lose it by abusing it?