Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan by Nancy M. Tischler (review)

98 MODERN DRAMA May overtones of complexity that the poet-playwright Hubert discusses and that are to be found in Dr. Williams' short stories. This sensitive projection of American idiom has given the playlets the flavor of life and, no doubt, is in large measure respousible for the year's run that Many Loves has enjoyed in repertory. More nearly topical than the other plays, Tituba's Children skilfully conjoins through character and atmosphere the Salem witch trials and what Dr. Williams construes as a similar witch hunt during the McCarthy era. After dramatically showing the cruelty unleashed on such dignified innocents as Giles Cory and the bewildered Sarah Good by the hysterically malicious and hard-faced little New England girls (Tituba's children) of the seventeenth century, the drama interweaves the parallel plights of Mac and Stella, disguised respectively as Giles and Sarah, in the Washington of 1950. Irresponsible columnists become the latter-day witches, abetted by Senators Pipeline, Yokel!, Gasser, and Wise. But it is the less topical and experimental A Dream of Love that may well prove to be the most durable of all the plays. Carefully detailing the setting of furniture and paintings and the appearance of the characters, Dr. Williams has drawn on his own experience as a physician in characterizing his Dr. Thurber, who as also a poet has his "dream of love" which leads him into an enduring devotion to his wife but also into casual affairs with other women; for the dream, as Doctor Thurber's poem makes -clear, (p. 122) is not only of love but of desire as well. Or, in terms of the poem itself, love is not only "All white!/ a locust cluster/ a shad bush/ blossoming" (p. 122) but also "Yellow, yellow, yellow/ .... a honeythick stain/ ... spoiling the colors/ of the whole world-." (p. 126) Yet the final dream of love, as Dr. Williams has said, is realized by Dr. Thurber's wife, Myra, after his death during an assignation in a hotel room. The play is thus finally Myra's tragedy, with her ultimate recognition and acceptance of her rival's role in her husband's life, with a clearer definition of her own relationship to her dead husband, and with an awareness, as the variations in his poem show, that love may also be "a northern flower" or "a wild/ magnolia bud-j ... on the blackj sky," (pp. 191, 193) Reappearing as a spirit after his death, Dr. Thurber discourses paradoxically on the nature of his fidelity and on the ties between woman and the creative imagination; and the presence of the colored maid Josephine and the' milkman adds further dimensions to the dream of love in the most complex of Dr. Williams' plays. Such complexity is virtually absent from the final play in the volume, The Cure, which Dr. Williams first drafted after a stroke some ten years ago. Here the interrelationship of healing and love, which Dr. Williams has treated so sensitively elsewhere, is not controlled through form, and the lack of aesthetic distance permits exaggerated situations and abrupt and thinly motivated action to converge into unconvincing melodrama and sentimentality. But this failure .cannot obscure the vitality of the collected plays as a whole; nor can it dim the probability that a viable and cogent American drama and poetry must take their cue from Dr. Williams rather than, say, from Mr. Eliot. Benjamin T. Spencer Ohio Wesleyan University TENNESSEE WILliAMS: REBELLIOUS PURITAN, by Nancy M. Tischler, The Citadel Press, New York, 1961, 319 pp. Price $5.00. Professor Tischler's deceptively journalistic opening words, "Tennessee Williams is a latter-day romantic," and her breezy concern with the dramatist's schizoid 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 99 poetic vision, may seem to belie the solid values of her critical focus upon Wil· liams' own image of him$elf as a "rebellious Puritan." Declaring her subject to be "the most important 'contemporary American dramatist," she summarizes her procedure: I have dealt with his plays, stories,poems and articles as these have mutually reflected and influenced his life. and with the audience and critical reactions to them as these have mutually reflected or influenced his work and the...