Williams and McCullers worked that summer sitting across from each other at a big table in the dining room. He was rewriting what became the third full-length play of his professional career, Summer and Smoke; she was adapting her third novel, The Member of the Wedding, into a play, unsatisfied with a version begun by someone else. There was a wind-up Victrola with a silver horn that spun out Sousa marches and “Santiago Waltz.” The recordings, pompous and silly, evoke a small-town orchestra playing in a gazebo. Williams inserted just such an orchestra into his play. Southerners in New England, they drank Johnny Walker during the day, hot rum with tea at night. Day and night they took walks along the beach, enjoying the sunsets and the aurora borealis, which was unusually bright that year. Carson was mooning over a woman who kept pigs. On a visit to Carson’s would-be lover, Williams shared enough Johnny Walker with the pigs to get them drunk.
In his plays, Williams depicts writers who know each other socially as squabbling rivals, trading banter: Hemingway and Fitzgerald bicker in his Clothes for a Summer Hotel; and in The Notebooks of Trigorin, Williams’ version of Chekhov’s Seagull, the short-story writers Treplev and Trigorin describe each other with withering dismissals. In Williams’ life, catty remarks were tossed at him and thrown back to his friends Donald Windham, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote—that is to say, other gay writers of his generation whose criticism Williams endured, even as he tolerated their work as playwrights (yet somehow passing on to them that he knew himself to be the superior dramatist). No one could be quite so wounding to Williams as these men who knew enough to cut close and deep. Williams gave as good as he got. Gore Vidal, in an unintentionally self-revealing review of Williams’ Memoirs titled “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” cracked that “the Bird seldom reads a book,” to which Williams replied, “He means I seldom read one of his.”
Among living writers that Williams considered his peers—Carson McCullers, Yukio Mishima, Jane Bowles, William Inge, and a few others—there was mutual respect and not so much sniping, at least until Inge grew successful enough in the 1950s to pose a genuine threat.
What we know about the lives of these writers that Williams befriended and respected (as writers) brings to mind something essential about Williams and that circle of friends. They were in pain. McCullers contracted rheumatoid arthritis when she was fifteen. By the time she was 31, a series of strokes had left her paralyzed on the left side. The hand with which she held her cane was curved like a hook and shivered involuntarily. Jane Bowles, after a serious fall from a horse when she was sixteen, lived with chronic discomfort and, like McCullers, walked with a pronounced limp. Bowles suffered a massive stroke when she was forty, leaving her incapacitated until her death at 56. Inge’s mental illnesses could be just as debilitating. By the end of his life he recognized that the psychiatric treatments he’d received had only increased his agonies. Mishima’s highly developed abdominal muscles were impossible without willfully self-imposed pain, something Mishima made into an art form. Williams’ childhood illnesses—eye surgeries performed without anesthesia and various adult ailments, from hemorrhoids to heart palpitations—were augmented by crippling depression and panic attacks.
Something else these friends shared was a strong work ethic. McCullers, who dictated a memoir as she was dying, called it “the grace of hard work.” Williams, from out of the depths of depression, managed to write every morning. Mishima’s output is astounding. By the time of his death at 45 he had completed 34 novels, over fifty plays, 25 books of short stories, and at least 35 books of essays. What Jane Bowles considered her finished output included much, much less: one novel, one full-length play, a ten-minute puppet play, and eleven stories. She worried over her words painfully, yet she was compelled to undertake the ordeal of writing much as Mishima was compelled to undertake the rigors of bodybuilding.
Along with hard work, they drank hard, and they drank together when they could. They enjoyed themselves shamelessly, with the exception of Inge, whose accommodation with American middle-class respectability included Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, teaching in a high school, and visits to a well-meaning analyst. But for all that, Inge continued to break out of bounds, followed by bouts of hot shame. Williams, much less scrupulous, went to the same shrink, fell off the wagon in two weeks, and boasted about it in interviews.
Drinking fueled their shared æsthetic. Ecstasy is a higher value in their work than sobriety, even if ecstasy lasts a shorter time. An inevitable crash was the price, one they all knew about intimately and paid for in their lives. Suicide was always a possibility. Williams and McCullers tried it, McCullers’ father and her husband succeeded. Mishima’s suicide, a ritual disemboweling, planned for months, was so in character with his writing that it can be considered the last of his dramas. Inge’s short play The Love Death, written between 1968 and 1970 and published posthumously, begins with a failed writer tricking his psychiatrist into revealing the number of sleeping pills it takes to kill oneself, which number the writer then swallows. In 1973, Inge asphyxiated himself inside his garage while seated behind the wheel of his new Mercedes.
Thinking of the roses that recur in their titles or the names of their characters, roses that blossom and shatter, scattering petals, spurred by the Romantic impulse to give all and then fall, exhausted, these writers understood sacrifice and martyrdom. Mishima was photographed as St. Sebastian (in a book titled Ordeal of Roses). In Vieux Carré, the dying painter Nightingale, before he’s carried off on a stretcher, holds his easel “over his head like a crucifix to exorcise a demon.”
The flipside of their pain is that they were successful, on their own terms and in the greater world. They were fashionable—and ambitious. They wanted their plays on Broadway; they wanted Hollywood films made from their works, with Hollywood stars and important directors. In the 1950s they got what they wanted. They won awards. Mishima won many prizes in Japan, and his Kabuki plays were performed by the National Theater of Japan. Inge won a Pulitzer and an Oscar, Williams two Pulitzers. Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play in 1950. Williams won the same award five times, and Inge won it too. They were photographed by celebrity photographers, and there was interest enough about them for potential scandal.
And they had secret sex lives. In the 1950s, Williams and Inge were closeted and promiscuous. According to reliable sources, they had sex with each other. Bowles, McCullers, and Mishima were heterosexually married, but before and during their marriages they had sex with members of their own sex. They were careful to keep their secrets to themselves—enough to avoid the law and maintain what was then considered good taste and a decent reputation. After they died, some of their heirs maintained historic façades, but these have collapsed with the weight of time. We know now some of the specifics of Bowles, McCullers, and Mishima in bed because their lovers have squealed. Williams characteristically spilled his own details in his Memoirs.
Their sexual activity gave them ready metaphors for their writing: enslavement, abandonment, weakness in wanting the thing that would destroy them, and, especially and always, having a secret, knowing a secret, keeping a secret, sharing a secret. At an early age their unconventional sexuality estranged them from conventional parents and peers. They identified with freaks because they knew what it was to be one. Bowles, who was born Jewish, called herself “Crippie the Kike Dyke.” Mishima’s father mocked him as effeminate, and Williams’ father called him Miss Nancy. Inge was called a sissy by the other boys in Independence, Kansas. Bowles and McCullers were both “boyish.” In each other’s company they were open enough about who they slept with. The society they chose to enter held freewheeling soirées in out-of-the-way places: Tangiers, Key West, and the Brooklyn boardinghouse where Carson McCullers and Jane Bowles sometimes roomed (separately) with Gypsy Rose Lee and W. H. Auden. Carson had a crush on Gypsy, though Williams denied it was consummated. He was wrong.
Yet, for all that, they were lonely—profoundly lonely. They fell in love with inaccessible people, which seems fair because they were themselves inaccessible. In reading each other, in knowing each other, I do not think they were any less lonely, just lonely together. In Camino Real, Williams has Don Quixote say: “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” Being alone together is often, if not always, the basis of friendship in Williams’ plays.
Alone together or together yet alone, in life off-stage Williams offered his friends adventures to share, often through road trips. In early 1939 he hitched cross-country from New Orleans to Malibu with the clarinet player Jim Parrott. He once proposed that Carson McCullers run off with him to set up a ranch in the West with his sister Rose.
Plays by Williams in which friendship is a major theme inevitably suggest a rush out the door: off to a picnic in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, to the Pacific Coast in Vieux Carré, or to a ranch in Texas with photogenic cattle in Period of Adjustment. That traveling companions might arrive at contentment is possible, but unlikely. As with the lovers he created, friends in Williams’ plays share fantasies: the starving ladies in Vieux Carré pretend to eat at fancy French Quarter restaurants; the suburban husbands in Period of Adjustment expect to become successful ranchers. Usually the women who are friends in Williams’ plays want to make homes together and squabble, as in Crève Coeur and Something Unspoken. There are exceptions: the chippies in A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot run off together and squabble.
At home or out the door, true friends are rare in plays by Williams. Lovers are more likely. Attempts to migrate from friend to lover usually fail—The Night of the Iguana is the great exception—and are inevitably painful and embarrassing. In Summer and Smoke, Eccentricities of a Nightingale, and Vieux Carré, the frustrations of the friend who wants to make love, and the difficulties of the beloved who does not, are the occasion of shame, anger, and glorious speech. This from Vieux Carré: “I’ve come to expect and almost to accept as if God—the alleged—had stamped on me a sign at birth—‘This man will offer himself and not be accepted, not by anyone ever!’” Friendship in a play by Williams is declared as vehemently as love, and if necessary with force, as in this exchange from Period of Adjustment:
George: Keep your rotten hand off my shoulder.
Ralph: Break it off me. I’m sorry I ridiculed your affliction.
George: (Pause.) Apology accepted.
Forceful friendship, like much else in Williams, is based on gentle handling, a little willful deafness or cloudy vision, and the haze of a drink or two. The full light of examination can blight friendship, as it does for Brick and the unseen Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail,” Mishima wrote in his novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Dim light allows Blanche in Streetcar to seem virginal, permits the aging Nightingale to visit the young Writer in Vieux Carré, and allows the Writer to pass for Mrs. Wire’s son as he sits beside her in the dark. An excruciating one-act by Williams sums up a failed friendship with its title “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow,” what with the horror of crawling “in this country of endured but unendurable pain [where]each one is so absorbed, deafened, blinded by his own journey across it, he sees, he looks for, no one else crawling across it with him.”
Along with much else, what Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Yukio Mishima, Jane Bowles, and William Inge shared with each other, with readers, and with theatergoers was a vision that, lonely as we might be, wounded, hurt, unable to heal each other, yet aware, if not always comforted by the thought, that we might, not crawl, but soar or float, perhaps with liquor, with words, with sex, or with other illusions, into other worlds of delight and through this one of pain, alone together as friends.
David Kaplan is curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival and author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (2006).
Discussion1 Comment
So much of Williams life points to a Broadway Theater buff who made it his vocation. I could see Williams in intimate interludes with cast parties flirting with actors and requesting convivial support from stage directors. In fact one reason why his dramatic dialogoue is so effective is because in a broad scope it is very much like the homosexual seduction that takes place in dressing rooms as men are putting on make up, and playing sexual games. Williams will always be notorious for being Broadways most encouraging homosexual. It is no wonder so much of his life seems to be in backstage fellatious wet dreams and of course his drifting into lovers arms as a means of escaping homophobia.