Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (71 page)

Williams’s desolation was so great that he fled immediately back to Key West, leaving his mother and brother, who had flown in from St. Louis for the opening, to fend for themselves in New York. “I felt very badly about leaving New York before Mother left,” Williams wrote to Dakin. “But I was simply unable to endure another day in that place, after the fate of ‘Milk Train II.’ ” He added, “Everything has gone so wrong this year that the time to come could hardly be anything but better. I try to keep in mind that Chinese philosophy ‘Mei you Guanchi,’ ‘no sweat,’ but it’s been really tough going.”

Williams subsequently claimed that Merlo’s death was the catastrophe that precipitated his seven-year depression—his “Stoned Age,” as he called it. He likened his collapse to the slow-motion destruction of a building by dynamite. “It occurred in protracted stages, but the protraction gave it no comfort,” he said. The loss of Merlo certainly shook him; the real unmooring catastrophe, however, was the loss of his literary power, that sure connection to the green world of his imagination. “The colored lights” that had sustained him since childhood were starting to flicker. “I work but I have no faith left in what I am doing,” he wrote to Lanier in January 1964, three weeks after
Milk Train
’s second humiliating collapse. He added, “I work too much under liquor that kills the critical sense for a couple of hours and gives the illusion of doing what you’re not really doing.”

“I am floundering in the boon-docks of my life and at the present time, I see no way out,” a grim Williams wrote to Nicklaus in April, who was now more or less living a separate life. “Must try to believe there is one, besides the last one.” He added, “Gloom is heavy and tiresome. I must discard it somehow or no one will be able to bear me.” Entombed in grief, unable to write or to reach out to friends, Williams hid himself away in Key West. Marion Vaccaro was enlisted to keep him company; in May, she camped out at Duncan Street, a stay that seemed to her like “an extended visit to Grant’s Tomb.” “I came for a weekend and have been here over 2 weeks,” she wrote to the producer Chuck Bowden, another of Williams’s stonewalled but stalwart friends. “Every time I plan to go back to Miami, he says, ‘Wait till tomorrow.’ . . . Every night we plan to go out to dinner, he backs out and says, ‘Let’s have a sandwich here.’ . . . Between us, we fix lunch, listen to the news on TV, and those fascinating ‘Search for Tomorrow’ soap operas, and commercials with the sound turned off. We have been out to dinner three times—and once in a while for a late swim—only wish I knew what to do—hate to leave him here but can’t stay indefinitely—since apparently I am no solution. . . . Tom looks fine—outside—it’s something else—and I am not the answer, even if he does hold on to me.”

Williams may have been uncommunicative with his friends, but they communicated their worries to one another. “I have been hoping each day that there would be some word from Tenn that would open the door to him so I could be of some help,” Bowden wrote to Vaccaro in mid-June. “If I call him outright I am afraid he will react against us—more importantly you—feeling that we are ganging up against him. . . . I am afraid to make bad matters worse if I force much harder at the moment.”

Even the novelty of summer travel couldn’t shake Williams’s depression. With Vaccaro in tow, he spent three weeks in Barcelona and a month in Tangiers. “He was in such a depressed condition that I hesitated to leave him,” Vaccaro wrote to Henry Field, a Miami psychotherapist whom Williams knew. “Apparently there was no one he could put up with, and he was frightened of being alone. I stayed near, but there were days when we scarcely spoke, beyond ‘good morning,’ ‘What shall we have for supper.’ ” She added, “I wonder if I was any help at all. . . . He had been talking so much of doing away with himself that I simply couldn’t just go away and leave him in his black world.”

On his return to New York, Williams learned that in his absence the Sixty-Fifth Street apartment, which he’d shared with Merlo, had been looted twice; he moved into a duplex next to City Center on Fifty-Fifth Street. Williams took the seventeenth floor; his roommate on the sixteenth floor was his young Tennessee cousin, Jim Adams, who was studying ballet and the dramatic arts. Adams, whom Williams said had been “bitten by the culture bug on both cheeks of the ass,” suggested Williams see his analyst Ralph Harris. In the first few months of treatment, even though he was living a celibate life, visiting Harris at eight every morning Monday through Friday, and going to bed by 10:30 every night, Williams exhibited signs of breakdown. The symptoms—insomnia, loss of curiosity, loss of sex drive—were sufficiently serious for Harris to monitor him over the weekends. “He calls me up on Saturday and Sunday to check on my mental and physical state, too,” Williams wrote to Paul Bowles that September. “He is very anxious for me to resume some kind of sex-life but I have no interest in it, it seems like something I’d never heard of.”

When he felt he needed to lift his spirits, Williams popped Elavil, an antidepressant. “To believe in pills you have to believe in magic, but maybe they do help a bit and I have always clung to some belief in magic,” he told Bowles. “Tom came here to dinner, alone, on Monday,” Bowden’s wife, the actress Paula Laurence, reported to Vaccaro in mid-September. “I think he looks better—slimmer—and I think he
is
better. Not happier, but more open and inclined to talk about how he feels. He goes to the doctor every day and swims and did some excellent work on the plays”—
The Gnadiges Fraulein
and
The Mutilated
. (Williams had returned to rewriting two one-act plays he’d written in 1962, under the collective title
Slapstick Tragedy
.) Bowden, Laurence explained, was planning to produce them, for a February opening. By late January, Williams was writing to St. Just about the double-bill. “I am going into rehearsal in a couple of weeks with a couple of very odd plays,” he wrote. “I don’t suppose the critics or public will know what to make of them, and I can’t say that I do either. But it is better to be occupied with something rather than with nothing.” By the end of the month, however, Bowden postponed the show. He was unable to raise enough money for a Williams production, even with major theatrical talent—Alan Schneider, Margaret Leighton, Kate Reid, and Zoe Caldwell—attached. Williams now had to face a harrowing new prospect: not only had he lost his inspiration, he seemed to have lost his audience.

Williams first found his audience as the Second World War was ending. In 1945,
The Glass Menagerie
’s elegiac tone of promise and regret caught the wave of history and rode it to glory. Almost twenty years to the month later,
Slapstick Tragedy
caught the undertow. America was back at war, fighting an undeclared battle both abroad and at home, and wartime was no time for Williams’s particular brand of talent, as he himself had shrewdly concluded as early as 1940. War terrified and isolated the country, making it increasingly suspicious of ambiguity and resistant to thought. “We are not soft people and the war is making us even harder,” Williams had written to Mary Hunter in 1943. “There is a great deal of pity and tenderness in all of us, but when a certain balance is broken by things that create exhaustion, I think the underground devils come out—which makes for naked and savage kinds of creation.”

Like the citizens invoked in the prologue of
The Glass Menagerie
—“matriculating in a school for the blind . . . having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy”—Americans of the floundering, bewildered sixties had their fingers forcibly pressed down on a social fabric that was unraveling under the pressure of racial unrest, radical political protest, and social, cultural, and aesthetic upheaval. “We are on the verge of Armageddon and await an apocalypse,” the usually even-handed Harold Clurman, dean of American theater critics and co-founder of the Group Theatre, noted in the
Nation
in 1967. The theatrical paroxysm—whether the grimace of laughter that refused suffering (Joe Orton, Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous), violent physical transformation (Jerzy Grotowski), startling enactments of rebirth (Sam Shepard, the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre), or the absurdist context of no context (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and so on)—held up a mirror to the desperation of the times. To more overtly political playwrights, such as Arthur Miller, this agitation signaled a “thrilling alienation.” “Once again we were looking almost completely outside ourselves for salvation from ourselves,” he wrote in
Timebends
. “In the absolutely right and necessary rebellion was only a speck of room for worrying about personal ethics and our own egoism.”

In this roiling atmosphere, however, Williams’s confessional style didn’t play well; his solipsistic Southern voice sounded both familiar and trivial. As one critic, writing in
Life
, put it, “The new theatre is lunging into uncharted waters; Williams is caught looking in the rearview mirror. Other playwrights have progressed; Williams has suffered an infantile regression.” The mission to which Williams’s great plays of the forties and fifties had been dedicated—the emancipation of desire and the celebration of the wild at heart—no longer held the same subversive romantic novelty. The underground, in all its political and psychosexual extremes, was now out in the open and making a public spectacle of itself. “The permission that Williams helped create sort of robbed him of a platform,” the playwright Tony Kushner said. “He found himself a revolutionary in a post-revolutionary era. By the time the sixties rolled around, the things that Williams had liberated were everywhere irrelevant.”

A similar mutation had taken place across the Atlantic, in the late fifties, when the lords of British West End theater—Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward—had found themselves deposed almost overnight by a new wave of playwrights. For nearly two decades, Rattigan had been the West End’s most successful playwright; at one time, in the forties, he’d had three plays running in adjacent theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue. Unable to fathom how deeply the welfare state’s working-class ethos had altered the British imagination, he protested to Kenneth Tynan. “Why pick on me?” he had asked the critic who had led the bloodthirsty charge for the new guard. It was not just the plays but the pukka upper-middle-class personas of Rattigan and Coward that the public and the critics were rejecting. A few years later, caught in the slipstream of different but equally ferocious social crosscurrents, Williams found himself similarly dismissed
and
despised. But where Rattigan had retreated to Hollywood and Coward had taken himself on the road as a cabaret turn, Williams, defiant and heartbroken, pressed on.

The widening division within American society between young and old, progressive and reactionary, antiestablishment and establishment was mirrored in New York’s theatrical landscape. The time was confrontational; the mood, polemical; the aesthetic, presentational. The adventurous “avant-garde” fare moved downtown to small Off-Broadway venues; by the mid-sixties, Fourteenth Street had become a kind of Maginot Line, dividing intellectual theater from escapist theater. At the birth of Off-Broadway, in the late fifties and early sixties, Williams had been part of the experimental repertoire at Caffe Cino and La MaMa; for reasons of commerce and kingship, however, he insisted that his major work be staged on Broadway. Writing in the
New Republic
in 1966, Robert Brustein, one of the swamis of postwar dramatic criticism who that year founded the Yale Repertory Theatre company, observed that “the Broadway audience has changed its character radically over the past fifteen years.” He went on, “To playwrights of previous generations, the customer was always a known quantity, but few dramatists today have any clear idea about who this middle-aged behemoth is or how to feed it.”

Faced with the growing public and critical resistance to his work, Williams was confounded; he groped for ways to reconnect with his perplexed and wayward public. As early as 1964, he began to experiment with a freer, more surreal form of storytelling that, he said, “fits people and societies going a bit mad.” The second part of
Slapstick Tragedy
,
The Gnadiges Fraulein
, a clown play first published in
Esquire
in 1965, was, for Williams, an act of theatrical and personal artificial respiration. “It’s harder as you get older,” he said in 1965, a year before
Slapstick Tragedy
was finally mounted on Broadway. “You have to work much harder and much longer on everything you do. The human animal is subject to attrition, he gets tired. And he has to go to wonderful doctors like Doctor Max.” The manic
Gnadiges Fraulein
was written while Williams was on Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamines. Set in “Cocaloony Key,” the play is a funhouse reflection of Key West. A group of zany characters, dodging the buzz-bombing, scavenging Cocaloony birds at the end of the municipal pier, live, like their author, under a state of perpetual siege, but with this difference: they are detached from pain.

Williams’s rambunctious one-act was a preemptive strike against his critics; it was also an identification with them. (“I decided they were right,” he said later, of the deluge of bad press he received in the sixties.) With its slapstick high jinx,
The Gnadiges Fraulein
sends up the themes and the lyricism that the critics had dismissed as hysterical and passé, mocks Williams’s self-pity, and subverts his gloom. The first beats of the play lampoon Williams’s own florid Southern idiom. “Everything’s southernmost here because of a geographical accident making this island, this little bit of heaven dropped from the sky one day, the southernmost bit of terra firma,” Polly, the gossip columnist of the
Cocaloony
Gazette
, drawls. She goes on, “I did the southernmost write-up on the southernmost gang-bang and called it Multiple Nuptials, which is the southernmost gilding of the southernmost lily that any cock-eyed sob-sister and society editor, even if not southernmost, ever dreamed of. . . . Yais, everything’s southernmost here, like southern fried chicken, is southern-
most
fried chicken.”