A Provisional Stemma for Drafts, Alternatives, and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo (1951)

A Provisional Stemma for Drafts, Alternatives, and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo (1951)1 BRIAN PARKER PREAMBLE Tennessee Williams was a compulsive writer and reviser. His headlong intuitive mode of composition is described vividly by Clark Mills McBurney, a St. Louis poet who shared his family's basement with Williams in 1937 for what they aptly nicknamed the "writing factory." I could never have imagined anyone working as he did. He would do, say. a half page or two pages, and it was fast - he was fast on the typewriter - he would be operating as if blindly. He was never sure if he knew where he was going. but when he got there when he finished that passage and it might not be righl- he'd toss it aside and start all over again. While he would do the whole business over, it would go in a different direction. It was as if he was throwing dice - as if he was working toward a combination or some kind of result and wouldn'l have any idea of what the result might be but would realize it when he got there. You know, usually one sits down and writes page one, two, three, four, and so on - but he would write and rewrite and even in the middle of a passage, he'd start over again and slant it another way.2 Another St. Louis friend of the same period - Willard Holland, who directed some of Williams's first plays for a theatre group called The Mummers compares him to "a typewriter that never stopped writing" and describes the two of them having to put a final script together mosaic-style with scissors and paste from a multitude of drafts and alternatives.3 Williams was still composing in the same obsessive and maniacally improvisatory style when he wrote The Rose Tattoo, as he makes clear in replying to a letter in which Elia Kazan had criticized a shapeless early draft of the play Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 279 280 BRI AN PARKER that Williams called the "kitchen sink" version because everything possible had been crammed into it: I have this terrific creative will in me tearing and fighting to get out and from its own fury creating its own block [,] so I work. more or less blindly: the good values are from the unconscious, so often when I am finished I have no idea what 1have done, what is good or bad in it.4 He would often try the same material out in different genres - poem, short story, short play, full length play, novel, fi lm script, or television scenarioclaiming that no work could be considered complete till he had finished thinking about it; and, most typically, in revising he rewrote whole scenes, then revised independently in pencil on multiple carbon or mimeo copies before retyping from the beginning yet again, mixing revised pages with unaltered pages but saving all discards - to which he was likely to return later - in one large, undifferentiated pile. Moreover, in keeping with his ideal of "plastic theatre" (that is, with drama in pelformance, where visual and non-semantic aural effects can have as much semiotic importance as the playwright's words), he liked to "workshop" his plays during the rehearsal and try-out periods - and even during (and after) the run - revising in response to suggestions from his actors and directors: particularly if the latter was Elia Ka2an, who for a long time he expected would direct The Rose Tattoo. Most of these drafts and revisions are undated and many are unpaged, so working out a sequential stemma for the materials behind any Williams play presents tremendous problems, particularly since, at this time, not all surviving copies have been located nor have all available small fragments been related to the main line of development. Any such stemma as this must declare itself tentative and provisional, therefore; but, since no developmental analysis orcritical edition is possible without such sequencing. a beginning must be made; and the major stages of revision at least can be identified with some degree of certainty. Archival materials for The Rose Tattoo have been located in the Billy...