“maybe now the parade”: The Exigencies of Sexual Survival in Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear

“A catalogue of unattractive aspects of his personality would be fairly extensive,” Tennessee Williams wrote of his father some eighteen years after the latter’s death, “but towering above them were, I think, two great virtues . . . total honesty and total truth, as he saw it in his dealings with others” (Memoirs 13). That is, despite the abusive remarks that Cornelius Coffin Williams made in Williams’s boyhood about his son’s effeminacy, laziness, and exasperating impracticality—and despite Cornelius’s drunken tyrannizing over, and eventual abandonment of, his family—Williams’s father modeled for his son an admirable repugnance for people who cheat or take unfair advantage of others, and who carry about them what Big Daddy, in the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (MGM, 1958), terms an “odor of mendacity.”¹

Williams extended to sexual behavior his own disgust with dishonesty, insisting that people have the courage to acknowledge the nature of their desires. For Williams, appetite—in particular, sexual appetite—is the most natural thing in the world, yet the majority of people are so ashamed of the basic realities of human nature that they drape themselves in a cloak of gentility, feigning a disinterest in, or outrage over, sexual matters. In the process, they render themselves hypocritical and grotesquely unnatural. Artists and other independent spirits who have been socially marginalized because of their sexual behaviors are tacitly applauded by the plays for their willingness to admit the truth of their desires and to actively pursue what Williams terms “the lyric quarry” (“Two” 286); they prove heroic in their sexual selfishness. Such honesty is not without its own problems, needless to say, and throughout his life and career Williams brooded over the question of how an individual can exercise the courage to satisfy his or her appetite without physically brutalizing or being unkind to others. At what point, Williams repeatedly asked, does courageous defiance of social convention in the pursuit of gratification risk becoming insensitivity to the needs of one’s partner, if not the outright exploitation of another person?

The last of Williams’s plays to be produced in New York City in his lifetime, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) is the culmination of his lifelong concern with the ambivalent nature of sexual selfishness. In Williams’s works, shame does not result from having one’s sexual proclivities exposed to a censorious world. For Williams, rather, one has reason to feel ashamed only at having denied someone a comfort that was desperately needed, or at preying upon those who are weaker or more vulnerable than oneself. Few writers have explored as honestly as Williams the heroic resolve necessary for the sexually squeamish to overcome their inhibitions in order to enjoy a fuller life. (Witness the transformation of Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke and, especially, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.) But, likewise, few have been as insightful or, at times, as frank as Williams when writing about the experience that Shakespeare describes as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” that is “lust in action” (Sonnet 129, 1–2). In Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Williams resolves a tension that pervades his work at least since the career-making The Glass Menagerie (1945) almost forty years earlier. In the process he concludes a lifelong debate regarding the morality of his own sexual agency that seems to have troubled him since before the life-altering summer—what in his Notebooks Williams calls “that brilliant little summer of 1940” (501)—that he spent at age twenty-nine in Province town, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed his first extended adult love relationship.

“Ex[ig]encies of desperation” and “The negotiation of terms”

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is, like The Glass Menagerie, a memory play.² In 1980 a playwright, who is identified only as August, recalls the events of a summer spent living in a shack on the beach some 40 years earlier when he came into his own both sexually and artistically. Like The Glass Menagerie (in which Williams revisited his...