The Glass Menagerie: From Story to Play

THE GLASS MENAGERIE: FROM STORY TO PLAY "Not even daring to stretch her small hands outl-nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." Tennessee Williams scrawled these words from e. e. cummings at the top of the last page of The Glass Menagerie sometime after finishing the one-act play that was to grow into his first successful work. The quotation suggests the gentle, elegiac tone that he tried to attain, and since the last half of the passage survived as the play's epigraph, it apparently expressed Williams' later feelings too. The fragile pathos of Laura Wingfield's life was Williams' original inspiration in his short story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and theater audiences continue to respond to the basic human appeal of the play. In "Portrait" the narrator feels compassion for Laura, who "made no positive motion toward the world but stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move." In this early story we can already recognize Williams' other trademarks : the theme of Tom's flight from "a dead but beautiful past into a live but ugly and meaningless present" (William Sharp, TDR, VI, March, 1962, 161), the images of leaves torn from their branches, the hundreds of little transparent pieces of glass, the tired old music of the dead past, and the emotional undercurrent of sexual passion roaring through the entire story. These themes, I suppose, show Williams ' kinship with D. H. Lawrence; and Tom, no doubt, suggests the figure of Paul Morrell or Aaron Sisson. But the later revisions show Williams' real talents as a playwright, none of which he inherits from Lawrence: his breadth of sympathy, his sense of humor, his brilliant dialogue, and his talent for building highly charged dramatic scenes. Evidence survives for at least four stages in the composition of The Glass Menagerie: (1) The sixteen page story entitled "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" (written before 1943 and published in One Arm and Other Stories, 1948), where attention is on Laura, the narrator 's sister. (2) A sixty page one-act play in five scenes, of which twenty-one pages survive in the C. Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia. It is clear from the existing fragments that Williams had the main lines of his play firmly in hand at this stage. Here the clash between Tom and Amanda, the painful relationship between (142) 1965 The Glass Menagerie 143 Amanda and Laura, and the contrast between Jim and Tom have become as important as Laura herself. This script was probably written before Williams went to California to work on a movie script in 1943 and before he worked up a synopsis for a film named The Gentleman Caller (Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams, p. 92). (3) A I05-page play manuscript, now in the C. Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia. This complex document contains ten kinds of paper, is written on at least six different typewriters , and has four different kinds of handwritten pencil or ink revisions. It may represent about eight to ten layers of revision, but for the sake of clarity, I will refer to only the final stage of the third version: the manuscript as it stood when Williams sent it off to his agent in the fall of 1943. He called this the "reading version," and it is very close to the Random House edition, published in 1945 and reprinted by New Directions in 1949. However, this printed edition (which unfortunately has gotten into the college anthologies) contains several errors and a few alterations. The long version of the manuscript is in seven scenes and is a development and expansion of episodes in the one-act version. At this stage the major emphasis in the play is on memory, Tom's memory. It is a play about growing up as Tom must recognize the fatal choice between Laura's glass animals and Jim's gross materialism. (4) The acting version, published by the Dramatists Play Service in 1948 (and revised again sometime in the mid-fifties). This purports to be "a faithful indication of the way the play...