I want to be among them when I die on a letto matrimoniale and with that euphoric image of a lovely young gardener who can double as chauffeur.
Why not? A persistent dream has meaning, and is sometimes fulfilled.
Out of Friggins in 1970, and home to Key West, where I was confronted by what seemed to me maddening evidence that Ryan had not expected me to survive. He had not only built an exorbitantly costly kitchen with a big stained-glass window as if it were a cathedral but he had had erected a completely new patio that seemed to belong in Beverly Hills. My survival and my return to Key West were such an obvious disappointment and—yes, you might say an affront—to His Lordship.
He had been gaily cruising the town in the steady company of a lady who shared his profligate habits. She came, at his invitation, to dinner one night. I slammed into the bedroom and informed him, when he followed, that I would not come out until she had left the house.
Pitiful! (For him.) He had to drive her home …
A week or so later Ryan himself was evicted. It was my dear friend Mary Louise Manning who engineered that imperative action.
I had refused to host a large party that he had arranged at a very expensive restaurant; he had gotten up in a rage and stalked out when I said I had not invited any of the guests and that I was not entertaining them.
About midnight I was seated in the living room with Mary Louise Manning, the composer Alec Wilder, and John Young, when Ryan came in drunk and evil and began to taunt me.
I took him on, verbally. Mary Louise grabbed my wrist and then said to Ryan, “Tom’s pulse is racing, he’s in no condition for this, pack your things and get out of the house right away.”
She told John Young to stay with me that night and he remained there, as secretary pro tem, through the spring of 1970 as I gradually and painfully recuperated from the nearly fatal confinement at Friggins.
Confinement has always been the greatest dread of my life: that can be seen in my play Out Cry.
I considered Out Cry a major work and its misadventure on Broadway has not altered that personal estimate of it, especially since I was able, between production and publication, to edit out the material that impeded its flow, and to improve that opening monologue which had been mangled by dissension between author and director and by the latter’s refusal to attempt rewrites submitted in Washington. My feelings toward the director became very bitter because of his autocratic behavior. I was still convinced that Genevieve Bujold opposite Michael York could have given the play a drawing power that would have held it on Broadway until it found its audience. Cara Duff-MacCormick is a gifted young actress but her name and her stage presence were insufficient for Out Cry’s very special requirements. At the interval on opening night at the Lyceum, I heard someone descending from the balcony with me observe that the play had been better in its Chicago tryout the year before, and I turned to the stranger and said, “Thanks, I agree.”
Still, it held the audience on opening night: there were no coughs, no fidgeting in seats: there was an atmosphere of attentive gravity. Nevertheless I felt the production was doomed and had arranged for a limousine to pick me up at the theatre half an hour before the final curtain and whisk me (with my friend) out to La Guardia, for a red-eye flight to Miami. I understand that the actors received an ovation at the curtain and certainly both deserved them. Dear Michael had worn himself to the bone. Little Cara had stood her ground like a Trojan, and possibly she, best of all involved, aside from the author, understood and loved the play’s meaning. She had a tendency, off-stage, to be carried away by emotion, and at a lunch in Washington she had turned to me and said, “I think it’s the best play ever written.”
And she blushed when I laughed at this youthful extravagance of feeling.
Oh, but my God, how I do need these youthful extravagances of response which are now the breath of life to me!
The daily papers of Manhattan did not destroy the play: they were not “money notices” but exhibited no impulse to destroy.
Clive Barnes was cautiously respectful. With the exception of Leonard Harris, I disregard TV reviews. I suppose they were generally negative.
To say that I disregard TV reviews is hardly the total truth. How could I dare to disregard any review which determines the life or death of a production? What I meant was that I place no particular value upon their critical faculty. However it was not I, but David Merrick, who barred a TV critic from the Manhattan premiere.
It took me a full year, at least, to recover from the Lyceum production. I suspect that I am not yet recovered from it and that this languid attitude which I feel toward completing The Red Devil Battery Sign and the other play, This Is, stems from that year-old wound: the bleeding is slow and protracted.
Suddenly one gets the act together again and goes on: there is no alternative to it but death in my case …
I have suddenly undertaken to correct what I’ve gradually come to recognize as the principal structural flaw in Small Craft Warnings, the long monologue of the bartender Monk coming directly after the long monologue of Quentin, the homosexual film-scripter, which is much the most effective piece of writing in the play, and since the play’s values are so largely verbal, Quentin’s speech is obviously the climax, at least of Act One. I have, for the past few days, submitted three drafts of rewrites, opening the play with Monk’s monologue and having him open the bar. This gives a feeling of form to the play: its beginning with Monk opening his place, alone and frightened of his angina, and in the end closing the place, having accepted as a companion, faute de mieux, the pitiful derelict, Violet, whom he has at least persuaded to take a shower upstairs.
I realize how very old-fashioned I am as a dramatist to be so concerned with classic form but this does not embarrass me, since I feel that the absence of form is nearly always, if not always, as dissatisfying to an audience as it is to me. I persist in considering Cat my best work of the long plays because of its classic unities of time and place and the kingly magnitude of Big Daddy. Yet I seem to contradict myself. I write so often of people with no magnitude, at least on the surface. I write of “little people.” But are there “little people”? I sometimes think there are only little conceptions of people. Whatever is living and feeling with intensity is not little and, examined in depth, it would seem to me that most “little people” are living with that intensity that I can use as a writer.
Was Blanche a “little person”? Certainly not. She was a demonic creature, the size of her feeling was too great for her to contain without the escape of madness. And what about Miss Alma? Was she a “little person”? Certainly not. Her passion gave stature to the drama as it does to Lee Hoiby’s opera.
Make of the paradox of my life what you will, I have made an honest effort to make sense of it.
Well, it’s true I’m a fighter and have come a long way from St. Louis, but there has been a long period of defeat in my life, ever since Frankie left. But then I felt my life was as finished as his and I gave up the battle. It’s different now. I have a desire to continue, and there are important new projects.
My God, I sound like Nixon!
Here I would like to insert, more briefly than its dramatic content may seem to call for, my voyage to Bangkok in 1970. I went on the voyage under the bizarre misapprehension that I was to undergo there an operation for suspected breast cancer, the surgery to be performed by none other than the surgeon of the King of Thailand.
During my long and inadvertent cruise of the Mediterranean earlier that year I had noticed a little swelling under my left nipple. It gave me no pain and caused me little concern. But when I was visiting New Orleans shortly afterwards, I visited a well-known doctor for consultation about my heart condition. He noticed the swelling in my chest.
He said to me, “Carcinoma of the breast is extremely rare in men but rare things do occur.”
I assured him that I would certainly agree with him on that.
He advised me to cancel my plans for a trip to
Bangkok and to have the swelling removed at once. But I had my heart set on continued voyaging, and my determination to proceed to the Orient was reinforced by the assurance of a friend that he knew the king’s surgeon personally, and I would be accepted as his patient.
The American doctor was unhappy about the delay involved in another transoceanic cruise before the surgery could be performed, but my course could not be shaken, and so early that fall I set out upon a lovely cruise of the Pacific, shadowed only slightly by the progressive swelling and the prospect of surgery in the fabled city of Bangkok.
The S.S. President Cleveland put in at several ports on the way there, including Honolulu, and I believe it was in Honolulu that I had a couple of mai tais on the night ashore and revealed to some talkative persons that I might, at the end of the voyage, be subjected to an operation for cancer of the breast.
It astounded me what a commotion this casually mentioned prospect caused among the journalists of Yokohama, our next port of call. I was surrounded, immediately on debarkation, by photographers and newsmen and interpreters.
As the flashbulbs bedazzled me, the interpreters kept shouting: “Is it true you’ve got cancer, Mr. Williams?”
This visit, lasting only a couple of days, was to be my last encounter with Yukio Mishima. I was staying at a hotel in Yokohama while the ship was in port, and Yukio drove out to the port one evening to have dinner with me.
At this point I suspect he had already decided upon his act of hara-kiri, which took place only a month or two later while I was still in Bangkok. I noticed when he entered the hotel bar that there was a tension and gravity about him which leads me to believe that he had already decided upon the act, which I think was performed not because of political concern about the collapse of the old traditions in Japan but because he felt that, with the completion of his trilogy, he had completed his major work as an artist.
It was touching to me that his principal concern was over my drinking, although I had, at dinner, only a cocktail and a little wine. He phoned me the next day, to tell me to watch my drinking habits …
After Yokohama we put in at Hong Kong. From there I flew to Bangkok. I stayed at the Hotel Orient, occupying a suite which had been sanctified by the former occupancy of Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham.
The news of my (alleged) breast cancer had followed me there. No sooner was I settled in my suite than the social hostess of the hotel phoned me to say that newsmen were awaiting me for a conference in the dining room below.
This was true. A long table was occupied by excited journalists, interpreters and cameramen.
The first question put to me was a shocker.
“Is it true, Mr. Williams, that you have come to Bangkok to die?”
Having come to Bangkok with quite different purposes in mind, I burst into laughter.
“The only place I’d go to die, if I had any choice,” I told them, “is Rome, not because it’s the home of the Vatican but because it’s always been my favorite city in the world.”
I promised you a brief story and I’ll try to stick to that promise.
It turned out, unsurprisingly, that the surgeon who was to perform the operation for suspected breast cancer was not only not the king’s surgeon but had never, he laughingly admitted, met a single member of the royal family. He was just a surgeon of the Siamese army with medical training in the States.
I liked him, though.
The operation was performed under casual, if not primitive, circumstances: I was still more worried about my heart than this alleged breast cancer, and all the while the operation was performed I held my little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets in my hand. It was performed under local anesthesia which wore off in medias res; the operation lasted about an hour, and the pathological report was gynecomastia, which is a fairly commonplace enlargement of the male mammary gland in cases where the liver has been abused by heavy drinking at some earlier time in life.
I had no hospital room reserved in the little clinic. Immediately after the operation’s conclusion I had a long swig of sherry. Then I left with a little company of Thai youths to the best restaurant in town, where we feasted on steak au poivre with vintage wines.
The rest of my stay in Bangkok was a dream which I hope to have again someday. I wish that I had space here to extol its exotic delights!
I returned to the States via San Francisco, and for the first time in my life I found my name hitting the headlines. The headline went something like this: “Tennessee Williams jokes about Cancer and Death.” And I was described as “ugly, elegant and arrogant.”
All that was five years ago and now I am looking for another good excuse to return to Bangkok: perhaps I already have one, of a nonsurgical nature.
This is the first time since the summer of 1946 that I have attempted to write with another person in the room with me. In 1946 it was Carson McCullers who sat at one end of the long Nantucket work table and I at the other, she dramatizing The Member of the Wedding and I struggling with the tortures of the damned, meaning Miss Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke. But the other person now is a young prodigy—not yet protégé—and I am quickly forgetting his presence, it is a warm and dreamy presence like that of Carson, and he is as absorbed in working on the rental typewriter the management sent us up as I am on knocking out these trivialities.
I have just hung up the phone on a call from Eric Mann, the revolutionary who once, last winter, spent the night sleeping on the living-room floor here. He had gotten in the habit of sleeping on hard surfaces in the prisons of Amerika, as he’d call it. I don’t know how deep I am into this Kafka spelling of a beautiful word like America; in fact, I suspect it is not my thing at all.
My thing is revolution, personal and artistic, I trust, but not militant and not underground, and I feel it will accomplish itself, possibly even during my lifetime, without general violence.
Violence! All of my old psychiatrists, but especially Dr. Lawrence Kubie, the Frenchman, told me that I had it in me, and right he was about that. Except that my violence is all verbal.
And yet I do not run away from possible physical combat, and this brings me to a startling incident which occurred during intermission last night at the New Theatre. I was seated in the men’s dressing room when all at once all the technical people and the beautiful (bit-part) policeman rushed into the auditorium where violence had erupted. I leapt up and broke through their ranks to confront the chief instigator of the disturbance. I didn’t know what I was saying or doing, it had been a strange day, but I heard myself shouting, “We’ve all put our hearts in this play. If you don’t like it, I am the man who wrote it, talk to me!” Then I found myself confronting a young man about twice my height, his face inflamed with frustrated fury. At once everybody was around me, trying to hustle me out of the fracas. The important thing is that I wasn’t scared, although he might have plastered me into the woodwork, so to speak. It seems that I am dangerously impervious to what may happen to me when I’m insulted and confront the insulter.
You see, I do love my “Small Craft.”
I felt disoriented, because of the shock of learning that Small Craft will run two weeks short of the six months I had in mind for it, at the New Theatre. So I went to my doctor and he gave me a fairly powerful shot of Ritallin, a drug related to speed, and one which was given me by a hotel doctor in Chicago last summer when I called him and told him that I didn’t feel strong enough to get out of bed but I did get out of bed after he gave me the shot.
I’ve always gotten out of bed after shots of speed so yesterday evening, coming down from the Ritallin injection, I performed like a mad creature at the top of the play. I garbled my lines and then I said to Gene Fanning, who plays Monk, “Have I said that already? Okay, I’ll say it again.” And when that goddamn weather broadcast comes over the (fake) radio: Monk says to me, “Small craft warning, Doc.” And I turn to the audience, full front, and I say, “Yes, that’s the title of the play and I’m the star,” the audience
howled with merriment. But I can assure you that poor Gene Fanning—who loves the part he plays and plays it legitimately always—glared poisoned daggers at me.
Unfortunately I am the “star”: they put my name above that of Peg Murray and I hasten to assure you that I have protested. Hell, I’m not even an actor, I am just appearing on stage to beef up the summer box-office. Yet I have something. I know how to be outrageous. And when I wish to play legitimately now, I think that I do it and well. For instance last night, when I (in the role of Doc) came back to the bar after killing off a pregnant woman, whose premature child was stillborn—well, Doc doesn’t exactly kill her off, literally, but, as Doc confesses to Monk, while she was hemorrhaging to death he could have called for an ambulance for her. But Doc says that he considered the probable consequences to himself, and while he was considering these consequences, the woman died.
But I’m not really like Doc, you know. I wouldn’t have paused a moment to call the ambulance for her, despite the probable consequences to me as a doctor who’d lost his license through alcoholism and was still clandestinely practicing.
Oh, there are similarities between me and Doc, agewise and even perhaps in depth of self-abasement. But thank God I would have called the ambulance for the little woman regardless of consequences, not just given the man living with her in the trailer a fifty-dollar bill I’d received that day for performing an abortion.
You see how this play, closing at the New Theatre the end of this week, lives hauntingly in me still? I will not permit it to close. In New York, yes, but I’ll somehow compel ECCO to give it the tour it has earned.
After several nights without sleeping medication, I managed yesterday to score for two dozen Nembutals from a doctor and I made up for the nearly sleepless nights past by sleeping on a single yellow jacket, as Marion called them, from midnight until 9 A.M. I got up with the expectation that the long sleep would restore my energy for work, but the reverse was soon apparent.