Tennessee Williams Enters Dragon Country

Tennessee Williams Enters Dragon Country ALBERT E. KALSON • IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL (1969) seems a conscious expansion and reworking by Tennessee Williams of one of his earliest one-act plays, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1941). Seen side by side in a new collection of his work, Dragon Country,1 the two plays - the former an account of an American artist's death abroad, the latter an account of D. H. Lawrence's death in France - make clear what has been frequently overlooked in Williams' work: a continuing preoccupation with the relationship and interdependence of life and art. That the dramatist has allowed them to be published together suggests that the two plays span the distance of Williams' entire career-journey, from its explosive beginnings in his belief in the life-force of the Lawrencean artist-hero to its whimpering end, or at least temporary rest-stop, in disillusion and even doubt concerning the validity of his art. In the biographical I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, when Bertha returns from an exhibition of D. H. Lawrence's paintings which has disgusted critics and public alike and asks the dying man, "But why did you want to paint, Lawrence?" he replies: Why did I want to write? Because I'm an artist. - What is an artist? - A man who loves life too intensely, a man who loves life till he hates her and has to strike out with his fist like I struck at Frieda - to show her he knows her tricks, and he's still the master! (pp. 73-74) Williams once knew all the answers; the young playwright seemed to have found the meaning of life and the meaning of art. Just as D. H. Lawrence did, Williams believed that man is part body and part spirit; that without a love both physical and spiritual to make a one-ness of the two, the artist cannot function as an artist must - to embrace his life through his art, or as Williams has Lawrence explain: 61 62 ALBERT E. KALSON I wanted to stretch out the long, sweet arms of my art and embrace the whole world! But it isn't enough to go out to the world with love. The world's a woman you've got to take by storm. And so I doubled my fist and I struck and I struck. (p. 74) But the two kinds of love destroy as they create, and the embattled artist, worn out by the loving struggle, must eventually face death alone, leaving his art as his legacy. As Lawrence awaits death in the Alpes Maritimes alternately battling and loving the Valkyrie-like Frieda, he sits in the light of the soon-to-set sun and longs for the violent savagery of the life he had known in New Mexico. He wants to "get back on a strong white horse and go off like the wind across the glittering desert ... to stand up on the Lobos and watch a rainstorm coming ten miles off like a silver-helmeted legion of marching giants" (pp. 62-63). He knows, however, that he is too weak to return, and Frieda will not desert him. If his robust wife seems at times a vampire sucking the life out of him just as he sucks life from the sun, their struggle clearly has sustained him, has supplied him as artist with the energy and inspiration to do battle with life, to reflect his life in his art. If her love for rum has been too physical, too much a part of the body, it has been tempered by a spiritually balancing relationship with the intellectual virgin, the Honorable Dorothy Brett, or Bertha as Williams calls her in the play. Lawrence has needed them both in his life and in his work - Bertha's cool understanding and Frieda's physical fire - and both are with him at the moment of death. Convinced that he has at last reached the public and so disturbed them that his works cannot be forgotten, Lawrence accepts his death, having elicited from Frieda the promise that he will not be suffocated by clucking hens at...