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SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER: WILLIAMS AND MELVILLE THE NEW YORK CRITICS accorded Tennessee Williams' long one-act play, Suddenly Last Summer,! a confused reception when it was originally produced in New York. Though practically all of them praised the craftsmanship of the play, its content was generally written off as merely more Williamsian sexual sound and fury, signifying nothing. The theme was reported by one critic as being "the difference between coldly sane brutality like the mother's and passionately insane brutality like the birds' and the murderers',"2 while another called it «the iniquity of the truth not told, festering."3 Harold Clurman, in The Nation, even professed to see in the play an allegory of the original production of Orpheus Descending. The play is a product, he said, of "the author's experience, suddenly last spring, with the criticS."4 It is my thesis that the theme of the play may be clarified by taking as a starting point the Melville allusion in the first scene and tracing its implications through the play. This study, I am convinced, will show that the concern of the play is with neither the failure of Orpheus Descending, nor the iniquity of hiding the truth, nor the contrast between "natural" and "unnatural" evil, but with the very Melvillian problem of the nature of the universe, in this case, the universe of sex. It is in the first scene that the dead Sebastian is characterized. Dr. Cukrowicz and the audience see him, through the veil of his mother's adulatory description, as an emotionally sterile and physically effete, rapidly aging Young Man who, butterfly-like, flits with his mother from watering place to watering place in search of the sun and, perhaps , of vitality. A pretentiously amateur poet, he produces an annual "Poem of Summer": in its difficulty of delivery, an ironically convincing proof of his sterile invention. It is also in this first scene, however, that Sebastian is established as an inquirer, in his way, into the nature of the universe. Mrs. Venable describes Sebastian's fascination with Melville's description of the Encantadas and their retracing of Melville's voyage there. While on the Encantadas, they have witnessed the terrible spectacle of the flesh-eating sea-birds devouring the newly hatched sea-turtles on their way to the safety of the water. Sebastian's fascination with the sight is explained by Mrs. Venable thus: 1. Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer (New York, 1958). 2. Henry Hewes in Saturday Review, Jan. 25, 1958, 26. 3. Richard Hayes in The Commonweal, May 30... 1958, 233. 4. Harold Clurman in The Nation, Jan. 25, 1950, 87. 396 1961 WILLIAMS AND MELVILLE 397. I can tell you without any hesitation that my son was looking for God, I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's-nest of the schooner watching this thing on the beach till it was too dark to see it, and when he came down the rigging he said, "Well, now I've seen Him!," and he meant God.-And for several weeks after that he had a fever, he was delirious with it:It is obvious that the play is built upon the horrible irony of Sebastian's death echoing this morbid· spectacle; if the irony represented only the just punishment of a conupt and corrupting man, we would be justified in condemning the naIvete of this resolution. Examination of the play will, however, show that the irony is deeper than this. Sebastian's vision of evil is not an isolated act; it is the basis of his whole existence. We are prepared for this by the set which is revealed at the first curtain: Sebastian's garden, a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin. The colors of this jungle-garden are violent, especially since it is steaming with heat after rain. There are massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, tom out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant...

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