Tennessee's Long Trip

TENNESSEE'S LONG TRIP /Allean Hale Seeing The Glass Menagerie first led me to Tennessee Williams. Igrew up in St. Louis, not far from his neighborhood, and the place names in that play were nostalgic for me. Like Williams, I went to the University of Missouri, took the same writing courses under the same teachers, enteredmy firstplays in the dramatic arts contests there. By coincidence I followed him around in life: to Nashville, New Orleans, to the University of Iowa. As I continued to writeplays—andhe was the outstandingplaywright on the horizon—!studied his work and, wherever he'dlived, collectedinformation about him. Digging a Williams play is like archaeology: under the realsurface are layers of Christian symbolism, Greek myth, his own mythology of Williams archetypes , not a few Freudian fossils, all on a bedrock of autobiography. This is what makes them so exciting to explore. His writing is organic: a phrase becomes a poem becomes a story becomes a one-act and finally a full-length play. For this reason, andbecause he kept four or five pieces on his workbench at once, their chronology is debatable. Here the plays are given in order of composition rather than ofproduction. As to the theory this article presents, I can only give the evidence and say that i believe it's all there, in the text—and in uncovering it try to get inside theplaywright's own imaginative process. IN THE YEAR of the Iguana, 1962, Tennessee Williams was enshrined on the cover of Time as "barring the aged Sean O'Casey, the greatest living playwright. . . ." He had won two Pulitzer prizes, four New York Critic's Circle awards, had had seventeen New York openings in sixteen years. Yet by 1969, after In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Time had him "on the sickbed of his talent" while Stefan Kanfer in Life, in a savage review excerpted as a full-page ad in the New York Times, dispatched him as having no talent, having suffered "infantile regression," being a burned-out cinder. With the success of Small Craft Warnings ten years later, Time had to dust off its old story and declare with no reservations that Tennessee Williams was "the greatest living playwright in the western world." It was as if he had been away during that decade, or dead, although occasionally phrases like "aging master" and "living legend" floated back from exotic ports. Two attempted interviews with him underscored his ghostiiness: "A Dream of Tennessee Williams" (Esquire , November 1969), and "Tennessee Williams Survives" {Atlantic, November 1970). The author said from Singapore that he^vas fighting to recover from a mental breakdown. Depression over a string of failures, the loss of his companion of fourteen years, his bouts with The Missouri Review · 201 drugs and drink had led to a hospitalization he referred to as "the loony bin" and to cruising China seas. The real man was on a trip through Dragon Country, "the country of pain." A book of plays so entitled published during this period should have been a clue that the author was alive, working, and sane. Actually, during his infirmity Williams had produced a novella, some stories, three long plays and six or more short ones, ail virtually unnoticed. This work divided along opposite lines, reflecting a split within the writer himself. On one side were: The Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle), the old red clay and white trash of Williams' cotton country; The Knightly Quest, a better satire than the bad homosexual pun of its title would indicate; and Confessional, which became Small Craft Warnings, a thirties slice-of-life saloon-asmicrocosm drama. Ail of these were reminiscent, earthy, backward in direction. Williams' new direction was outward bound. The settings were existential, and he seemed to be going metaphysical, experimental— and oriental. A hint of Japanese first shows in The Night of the Iguana, which Williams wrote in 1959. The stage directions seem peculiar for a New England spinster in a play laid in Mexico; Hannah "removes her Kabuki robe from a hook and puts it on as an actor puts on a costume." She "stands motionless as a painted figure ... a goldlacquered Japanese...