The Trip to Echo Spring (14 page)

As it happens, the idea that alcohol might be affecting his ability to write had occurred to Williams. Waking in a Madrid hotel room early one October morning in 1953, he wrote in his black-backed notebook:

Looked through the new play script and was so disheartened that I closed it and prepared to descend to the bar. What most troubles me is not just the lifeless quality of the writing, its lack of distinction, but a real confusion that seems to exist, nothing carried through to completion but written over and over, as if a panicky hen running in circles.

Some structural change in my brain? An inability to think clearly and consecutively? Or simply too much alcohol?

The prospect of returning to America with this defeat in my heart which only drink can assuage is a mighty dark one.

If I'd seen this quote in isolation I would have assumed it referred to one of the very late works –
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,
say, or
Clothes for a Summer Hotel.
Both possess a panicked, indistinct quality, as if the writer is no longer capable of producing a consecutive sequence of thoughts. Instead, the play he's describing is
Cat
, which despite its structural near-perfection was from the moment of its conception deeply entangled with Tennessee's drinking.

Like
The Glass Menagerie, Cat
had its origins in a short story: ‘Three Players of a Summer Game', which was published in the
New Yorker
in November 1952. It anticipates the later play in the identity of two characters: Brick Pollitt, a Mississippi planter with a drinking problem, and his wife Margaret – though all she can be said to share with Maggie the Cat is her exceptional vitality.

The story has about it a wistful, distanced quality that makes one think of Fitzgerald. Brick throws raucous, liquored parties that resemble in their confusion the night in
The Great Gatsby
when Tom gets drunk and breaks his mistress's nose. Brick himself is a drinker in the gentle, self-deceiving mould of Dick Diver, and as in
Tender is the Night
his demise is associated with a corresponding gain in potency for his wife. He lectures the workmen repairing his house on his strategies for getting sober. After a while, he drifts back indoors and stays there half an hour. ‘When he came back out, it was rather shyly with a sad and uncertain creaking of the screen door pushed by the hand not holding the tall glass.'

The play that grew out of this melancholy material seems from the uncertain evidence of the journals to have been started at some point in 1953, at a time when the casual observer might have been forgiven for thinking Tennessee among the luckiest men alive. In 1948, he'd won a Pulitzer Prize for
A Streetcar Named Desire
and a few months later had re-encountered Frank Merlo. In those early years, Williams and the Little Horse spent a good deal of their time in Europe, drifting around Mediterranean cities and resorts. Dinner with Noel Coward, Gore Vidal or Peggy Guggenheim, followed by white or half-white nights with the beautiful street boys of Madrid, Amalfi, Rome. Happy days, one might think; but the Williams who sat up late drinking Scotch and scribbling in his journal, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in an admonitory second, was not by any means awash with the pleasures of la dolce vita.

The first reference to
Cat
in the notebooks is the disheartened one from October 1953 that describes the lifeless quality of the writing. (The following year, in a letter to his agent, he pinpoints its origins as ‘the play that threw me into such a terrible state of depression last summer in Europe, I couldn't seem to get a grip on it'.) Still, he kept slogging away, juggling the script with edits to
Baby Doll
. With the advance of winter, he moved from Venice to Rome and then to Granada and on over the sea to Tangier, where he wrote in pencil in his looping hand:

The sun shines over the straits of Gibraltar as I sit impotently before the portable Royal and my glass of Scotch, and a blank white wall.

By November he'd had enough of this fugitive existence. He flew back to America, arriving in New York in time to attend Dylan Thomas's funeral (an event John Berryman also attended). A month later disaster struck. On the night of 27 December he woke with a frighteningly painful rectal swelling, and within two days was installed in a shabby little hospital on the outskirts of New Orleans. ‘All hell is descended on me,' he wrote in the small hours of the first morning, ‘retribution for all my misdoings and the things undone.' Within an hour he'd called the nurse and had a hypodermic injection of morphine ‘on top of 3 Seconals and several whiskies. Perhaps a mistake but I'm beginning to feel like Miss Alma's water lily on that chinese lagoon' – a reference to the intoxicated heroine of his recent play,
Summer and Smoke
.

The next day he was transferred to another hospital, where he waited miserably for Frank to visit. The operation initially offered was twice postponed, and the next few nights were purgatorial. ‘If I could just give myself to the steady peace of the rain,' he wrote hopelessly in his notebook. ‘Now I am doing that, giving myself to the steady peace of the rain,' adding as an afterthought: ‘I guess fear must be the most interesting of all our emotions. We engage in it so much.'

This terror, which was intensified by the suspicion yet again that he was suffering from cancer, spread through
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
like smoke from a fire. There'd been no Big Daddy in ‘Three Players of a Summer Game', though there was a doctor who succumbed to a brain tumour (described, horribly enough, as a ‘fierce geranium that shattered its pot'). Still: no pain like fox teeth in the gut; no terror of extinction, or that compulsion to truth-telling that comes when death is very close.

The promised operation never took place. After a few days the symptoms faded and Williams was allowed to return home to Key West. For a couple of months he was bothered only by what he called his ‘cardiac neurosis', but then in March he developed a troubling numbness in his feet. He described this condition as dropsy, though his physician informed him uncompromisingly that he was suffering from early peripheral neuritis ‘induced partly by liquor' – a condition caused by the adverse effects of alcohol on vitamin B12 absorption. His reaction to this diagnosis was once again weighted towards denial. ‘Of course I would love to believe the good doctor but I don't quite believe him,' he wrote: a statement that indicates how hard it is to realise agency or accept the deleterious consequences of one's own behaviour.

Still, he kept on moving. In New Orleans he experienced yet more palpitations while finishing a first act of
Cat
that seemed disappointing and somehow low voltage. He suffered from claustrophobia and sleeplessness, which he medicated sometimes with glasses of milk as well as those old faithfuls, Seconal and Scotch. On a visit to New York, his dear smelly dog Mr. Moon died in the night, giving a single heartbreaking cry, like the goose in Chekhov's story. In Spain he read
Sons and Lovers
and watched the bullfights he'd later discuss with Hemingway, whose book
Death in the Afternoon
he read admiringly that summer. In Rome it was noisy and he became anxious and very tanned. While staying in the city, on the morning of 12 July 1954, he tried to get some larger perspective on his troubles.

Here's the dilemma, let's face it. I can't recover any nervous stability until I am able to work freely again, and I can't work freely until I recover a nervous stability.

Solution? – Much less clear.

Just not working doesn't solve the matter for the need to work, the blocked passion for it, continues to tear me inside.

Working against exhaustion bit by bit wears me down even further.

Then is there no way out? None except through some bit of luck – another name for God. Of course it is true that I go through these cycles repeatedly, constantly, but now the downward curve is fiercely relentless and the little upturns are very little indeed, relatively insignificant, little circles inside a great descending arc which is still descending.

On it went: up, then down, and down again. A loving phone call with Frank, from one European city to another. A panic attack in a cinema, stemmed when he staggered into a bar, pale and terrified, and knocked back two double Scotches in quick succession. A few weeks later, in Sicily, he sat in his friend Franco's bar till closing time and then walked with him down the main street, reassured by the music drifting from a nearby club. But when he turned for home alone, the club had closed and panic rose in him as he strode faster and faster down a road that seemed to stretch on endlessly, his chest constricted and his breath coming in gasps. On the hill up to the sanctuary of the Hotel Temio it reached a climax, and he stopped and grabbed a leaf of wild geranium and looked up at the stars, which he'd heard somewhere were supposed to be an antidote to fear. His lungs were whistling and when he got into his room and took a Seconal he wrote: ‘someday, I fear, one of these panics will kill me'.

After that, there's only one more European entry, written the next morning. Then there's a gap before the journal is resumed in America on Saturday, 27 November. Much of this entry and the longer one that follows the next day were written on aeroplanes, which filled Williams with such unholy terror he had to knock himself almost senseless with alcohol and drugs. His condition at Tampa airport, a few legs into the arduous journey from Key West to L.A., was not exactly good to start off with. In recent days, he'd been experiencing:

A
double
neurosis, 2-barrelled, the fear of speech, and the cardiac neurosis (augmented by fairly frequent palpitations, ‘jolts', and general anxiety which made it necessary to carry a flask of whiskey with me wherever I went). Wakings at night, usually after 3 hours sleep and oppressive dreams, with that feeling of being near panic, sometimes just going downstairs for a drink seemed like a challenging, perilous undertaking.

He carried on writing aboard the plane, recording every flinch in mood. (‘After all, what older friend than anxiety do I have? Or should I say acquaintance? Yes, I should!') Then the pilot announced the length of the flight. This was a nasty shock, since Williams had forgotten to factor in the time difference. He went to the men's room with a glass of water and his flask, two Seconals in his coat pocket, and continued his diary there. In it, he promised himself a haircut in New Orleans, and trade: ‘The best I can get! And I promise myself I will get some. Okay? Sure.' The impression is of a man so desperate for reassurance he's split himself in two.

The next morning, after the promised night in the Quarter, he boarded yet another plane, priming himself with two and a half martinis before take-off. The flight was very turbulent, and he went into the lavatory again to drink, recording from inside his regret at having forgotten to bring any books by Hart Crane, the writer he most loved. Mid-afternoon found him grounded again, this time in the lounge at Dallas airport. ‘I wonder if they serve liquor in El Paso? or sell it? Not sure my flask will serve 5 more hours,' he asks anxiously, before recording the answer: no.

Hurtled into the air once more, he returned to his old refuge: ‘for a nip of my most precious elixir, which must be husbanded most prudently now'. He gazed at his face in the mirror, the ‘old puss', and then out at the mountains visible from the window against the setting sun. At last they reached Los Angeles. ‘Never again take a plane without a
full bottle
on me!' he instructed himself, adding: ‘See you later – after 2 martinis at the airport bar, I trust.' Two days later, ensconced in the Beverly Hills Hotel, he got up and wrote that impassioned letter to Elia Kazan, which asks ‘Why does a man drink?', and answers, with a kind of reflexiveness that should be impossible: ‘1. He's scared shitless of something. 2. He can't face the truth about something.'

In ‘Three Players of a Summer Game', the first Brick makes a telling statement. ‘A man that drinks,' he says, ‘is two people, one grabbing the bottle, the other one fighting him off it, not one but two people fighting each other to get control of a bottle.' I'm not sure they're always so active, but the idea that a drinker contains two people is a way of approaching what is otherwise baffling or miraculous: the fact that this listing man locked in the lavatory three
thousand metres above the mountains of Southern California, lost in contemplation of his own image, could retain in some unobliterated part of himself the necessary clarity to set down on paper what he saw there, which is to say the self-deceiving nature of the alcoholic. How else to explain that in the midst of such confusion and self-harm, he was able to produce a play like
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, with its uncompromising portrayal of the drinker's urge to evade reality?

You can know, and you can not know, all at once. You can vote for truth and still let what Maggie the Cat once described as a fire in a locked house rage inside yourself, unchecked and all-consuming. Put it down to the drinker's doubleness, like the first Brick said, or else to something Williams wrote in another letter that winter, while sitting at his desk in Florida: ‘the startling co-existence of good and evil, the shocking
duality
of the single heart'.