The Troubled Flight of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird: From Manuscript through Published Texts

The Troubled Flight of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird: From Manuscript through Published Texts DREWEY WA YNE GUNN Tennessee Williams has seldom been able to resist revising or rewriting his plays. Of his eighteen full-length plays published as of autumn 1979, thirteen have appeared in print, and seventeen been produced, in more than one version.' Critics have rarely examined the differing texts, but in general one can say that Williams's final revisions are the superior versions. As he reworks a play, he usually tightens its structure and sharpens its dramatic values. However , one notable exception to this pattern exists: Sweet Bird ofYouth. The three successive texts , 1959- 1962, represent rather a sequential degeneration of Williams's artistic control, for in each revision the structure, the development of the characters, and the focus of the play become progressively less coherent. The fact is all the more lamentable since even the first published text ofthe play represents a failure in vision. After working and reworking elements that went into Sweet Bird for at least nine years, Williams had in 1958 arrived at an unpublished script of great literary and probably considerable dramatic merit. But for some reason, when the play went into production in New York the following year, he frantically rewrote it and in the process lost sight ofhis initial concept. The manuscripts at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin allow us to follow the growth and unification of Williams's ideas as he came to this 1958 version, and likewise pennit us to understand the extent of the play's deterioration in printed form. As Vivienne Dickson shows in the only other published study of the evolution of a Williams play (A Srreetcar Named Desire), the playwright frequently starts with various story possibilities in mind and explores characters in different ways before settling on a plot outline.' The play will then go through several stages as he develops this story. Williams has said that he writes "three or four drafts when not more than two should be necessary, simply because I did not acquire in my green years the right kind of technical habits."3 Sweet Bird of Youth grew out of a varied assortment of one-act plays and sketches, Sweet Bird: Manuscript through Published Texts 27 some dating as far back as 1949. About 450 pages of manuscript at the University of Texas remain from this incubatory stage. They are often in a fragmented and confused state, since Williams shuffled pages of dialogue freely from one version to another as he revised and then Stored discarded scripts in a rather chaotic fashion. Thus it is sometimes difficult to know exactly how the material fits together. In general, however, one can recognize three distinct sets of characters and themes which finally came together in Sweet Bird. The characters from one set to another share anumber of common names, though these are often assigned to widely differing types. From the beginning, Williams was apparently aware that his disparate plot threads would one day be woven together. A first group of sketches, made up of three different series, centers around the downfall of Boss Finley, a corrupt politician with all the prejudices of the Old South. One series of very fragmentary sketches concerns his loss of control over his henchmen, with whom he has been involved in some unspecified illegal traffic. In a second series, the Boss has cancer of the larynx and hemorrhages during a major campaign speech. A number of pages relate the effect his career has had on his daughter, Rose, but her character varies greatly from one sketch to another. In one version, she is a lost innocent; in another, rather corrupt herself. Yet a third series, the most developed, revolves around the Boss's problems with his mistress. Generally also called Rose, though sometimes Candy, she is the prototype for Miss Lucy in Sweet Bird. In one of the more finished playlets, she is found alone on New Year's Eve 1949, angry because the Boss is celebrating in the company of his wife at an important state function from which a mistress is naturally excluded. The playlet is...