A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958) BRIAN PARKER I PREAMBLE Any attempt to sequence the manuscript evidence behind Suddellly Last Summer must be even more tentative than previous stemmala for The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roofl because not only are extra drafts for the play sure to surface in the next few years (as with the other plays), but the evidence for Suddenly Last Summer also presents problems of its own. Like the other three plays, Suddenly Last Summer shares the difficulties of Williams's obsessive rewriting and accretive mode of composition. His habit was to work by the intuitive "feel" of a situation rather than by a detailed outline , compulsively typing new drafts at great speed, then revising by hand, often independently, on the many working carbons or mimeograph copies he made for each draft; constantly fidgeting with details but, more characteristically , rewriting in larger scenes or whole acts, then fitting various sections of separate drafts together experimentally like mosaics. During rehearsals, tryouts and even Broadway perfonnances he would continue vigorously "workshopping " his scripts in response to suggestions from his actors and director, often continuing to revise (as in this case) after a play had been favourably reviewed, was already in print, and had been released as a very successful movie. Moreover, he rarely dated drafts, frequently returned to material from superseded versions (so that there is never a simple, straight line of development to trace) and had a habit of mixing revised pages with pages from earlier drafts that needed no change, then collecting the various stages of discard together into large undifferentiated piles.2 Besides these general difficulties, manuscript evidence for Suddenly Last Summer has its own problems. For example, there are comparatively few drafts of the whole play, and the fragments which comprise most of the manuModern Drama, 4t (1998) 303 304 BRIAN PARKER scripts are much harder to locate in a process of linear development, particularly as one can never be sure that material collected together in any particular file was actually written at the same time, since Williams shuffled his revisions so persistently. This problem is compounded by what we may risk tautology to call "retroactive emendation," which is a feature of manuscripts in several of the plays but is particularly noticeable in drafts of Suddenly Last Summer. Like many writers without a detailed plan, Williams seems to have had the habit of priming his imagination by rereading previous drafts before beginning each morning 's work, and during such rereadings to have altered earlier character names by pencil annotation to bring them into line with the stage of composition he had currently arrived at - a process that might happen several times. Thus, "Sandra" is altered to "Valerie" and then to "Catharine" (spelled first with an "e" before the "T," then with an "a"); "Bertie" (occasionally "Albert") becomes "Sebastian"; and the European city where he dies is first "Barcelona" (a favourite haunt of Williams in 1957,3 where there was indeed a public "Playa di San Sebastian" which was notorious for begging and sexual pickups ), changed briefly to "Villa Rosa" (the name of an infamous transvestite club in Barcelona that still flourishes), then to the "Cabeza de Lobo" (Wolf's Head), which is its locale in the final version and is used as a main title for several of the drafts.4 Sebastian's mother is firs.t called "Mrs. Hobson" (or "Aunt May"), then "Mrs. Satterlee" (or "Aunt Barbara"), before settling down as "Mrs. Venable'" (or "Aunt Violet"); while her attendant (who is a nurse, not a secretary, in the early drafts) varies from "Miss Porter" through "Miss Austin" to "Miss Foxhill" - sometimes within the same file of fragments. Catharine'S mother, Mrs. Holly, at various times is called "Elsie," "Grace," "Harriet" and (in the film outline, Harv. 9) "Sally," though she has no given name in the final version of the play, and changes from being the daughter of Mrs. Venable's sister to being the sister of Mrs. Venable's husband. And in some early drafts the Doctor is a "dark young man" called "Gwendle" (once "Gwendlebaum...