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9. “Entitled to Write About Her Life”: Tennessee Williams and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
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STANLEY:. . . . now the cat’s out of the bag! I found out some things! STELLA: What—things! STANLEY: Things I already suspected. But now I got proof from the most reliable sources—which I have checked on! —A Streetcar Named Desire “Who are you anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfsheim—that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs—and I’ll carry it further to-morrow.” —The Great Gatsby Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) was Tennessee Williams’s last Broadway production during his lifetime. This “dream play” about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald was a critical and commercial failure that devastated Williams. In many ways he never recovered from this failure. Its effect is perhaps best captured in the oft-quoted recollection of José Quintero, the play’s director, who remembers that, on the morning after its out-of-town opening in Chicago, where, aside from a positive review from Claudia Cassidy, the notices had not been very good, he found the playwright “in front of the Art Institute”: “He was sitting on the steps, in the snow, like some halfdemented creature. I said, ‘What are you doing, Tom?’ He said, ‘I’m waiting for them to open because this is a place for artists where I 9 “Entitled to Write About Her Life” Tennessee Williams and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Jackson R. Bryer can catch my breath to go on living’” (Galligan 46). The play fared no better in New York, where Robert Brustein, cruelly but not atypically , began his assessment: “You couldn’t possibly be interested in my opinions of a work you’ll never get a chance to see; and I suspect the playwright would just as soon let the moment pass in silence while he licks his wounds and ponders his next move (perhaps a®ight to Three Mile Island on a one-way ticket)” (Brustein 27). Brustein’s prediction was correct. The play, which had opened on March 26 (Williams’s sixty-ninth birthday), closed on April 16, almost a month before Brustein’s review appeared. And in the years since its inauspicious debut, it has received little attention from Williams scholars and critics. In an admittedly cursory survey, I have found, aside from passing mentions, just three full-length essays on the play (by Thomas P. Adler, Hilton Anderson, and Peter L. Hays) and a brief but incisive two pages in Bigsby’s Volume 2 on Williams, Miller, and Albee in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (125–27). Most of those who have written about Clothes have taken their cue from Elliot Martin, the producer of the original production, who observed, “It’s not about the Fitzgeralds, it’s about a brother and sister, about Tennessee and his sister. . . . it’s a play with a certain transferred paranoia—from the situation of Rose to that of Williams himself who . . . was blaming the critics and the media for his own failures” (Spoto 345). Williams himself lent additional credence to Martin’s assertions when, in many of the interviews he gave prior to and during the run of the play, he acknowledged his sympathy for and understanding of the Fitzgeralds. Like Scott, Williams observed, “At one point I went through a deep depression and heavy drinking. . . . And I, too, have gone through a period of eclipse in public favor ” (Weatherby); he added that the Fitzgeralds “embody concerns of my own, the tortures of the creative artist in a materialist society. . . . They were so close to the edge. I understood the schizophrenia and the thwarted ambitions” (Sandomir 5). At least one reviewer of the New York production agreed: Jack Kroll suggested that the play “may be really about the tension, both creative and lacerating, between the male and female elements in Williams’s own psyche.” Adler’s essay, along with most of the briefer comments on the play, also read it pretty much entirely in terms of Williams’s life and career. “The autobiographical impulse remains uppermost in Hotel,” 164 Jackson R. Bryer according to Adler (6), who then proceeds to place it artistically, thematically, and chronologically with respect to The Glass Menagerie , Out Cry, Sweet Bird of Youth, Summer and Smoke, and Vieux Carré. Partly because this territory has already been covered and also because I am not a Williams scholar and have some credentials as a Fitzgerald critic, my interest here is less...