A Developmental Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's "Camino Real"

A Developmental Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's "Camino Real" BRIAN PARKER' PREAMBLE Tennessee Williams wrote compulsively. typing at great speed. then revising with pencil on the many working carbons he made for each draft. For over forty years he spent five to six hours at his typewriter every morning. no matter where he was. partly as therapy - he said only his writing saved him from a mental breakdown like that of his sister. Rose - but also as the one consistency in his otherwise anarchic life. He worked by the intuitive "feel" of a scene rather than from a plan or outline. constantly fidgeting with small changes of wording but. more characteristically. rewriting in larger units of who1e scenes or acts. He claimed that no work could be considered fixed until he had stopped working on it. and explained to one of his interviewers: Finishing a play, you know, is like completing a marriage or a love affair. ... You feel very forsaken by that, that's why (love revising and revising. because it delays the moment when there is this separation between you and-the work.l He was apt to put the same material through many different forms: poem. short story. one-act play. full-length play (redrafted many times). novel. and film or television script. though not necessarily in that order; shorter versions often postdate longer ones. He tried the same material out as comedy. tragedy. or farce. and often mixed genres to approximate the contradictory "ambiguous " effect he felt was true to human experience and behaviour. And in keeping with his "plastic theatre" manifesto in The Glass Menagerie. which stresses the importance of non-verbal aspects of. plays in performance. he increasingly rewrote in collaboration with his directors and actors during rehearsals and try-out performances. A good example is his collaboration with Elia Kazan and the members of Actors Studio in evolving a full-length Modern Drama. 39 (1996) 331 332 BRIAN PARKER Camino Real. By the end of his career this had evolved into the full Off-OffBroadway mode of "workshopping" scripts in successive perfonnances over several years. In this, as in many other techniques, Williams was a dozen years ahead of his time. Williams almost never dated revisions, but he threw nothing away; many brilliant experiments were discarded, but he was also apt to return to earlier drafts, so there is never a simple, straight line of development; and, to compound confusion, he had a habit of mixing revised pages with pages from earlier drafts that needed no change, then collecting the discards into one undifferentiated pile. There is thus an immense amount of archival material behind Williams's very extensive oeuvre, which is scattered in some dozen depositories over the United States. For ten years after his death, his executor, Maria 51. Just, blocked scholarship on this materiaP; consequently, since her death in [993, Williams's scholars have been faced with the huge task of collating materials in the various depositories and working out the bibliographical history of the major plays, so that the sequence of drafts can throw light on the way those works evolved, the imaginative fields that Williams was working in, the choices he made, and the distortions imposed by box office considerations or his interpreters' opinions. Williams was the most influential and widely performed playwright writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century , and to understand him properly such bibliographical analysis is essential. It has been estimated (by the rare-books librarian at Harvard) that it will tike at least two generations of scholars to complete. The present essay is just a beginning. Known drafts of Camino Real are in four main locations: the New York Public Library's Billy Rose Collection at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (NYPL); Columbia University in New York (Col.); the University of Delaware at Newark (Del.); and the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin (Tex.). In addition, one very important late draft is owned by a private collector, Mr. Fred Todd of San Antonio, Texas (Todtf). Other draft material is likely to emerge in the future, however, particularly when the Elia...