Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (10 page)

After the curtain came down for the last time, Taylor threw her arms around Dowling. “Eddie, I can’t remember anything,” she said. “Does it look like a success?”

I said, “Well, Laurette, you must have left your hearing aids home because there’s never been such . . . ”

She said, “Well, I never pay attention to applause. But the quiet during the performance, Eddie. What is the quiet?”

“We learned from thirteen or fourteen weeks in Chicago, Laurette, about the quiet.”

“But,” she said, “New York isn’t Chicago. They’re intelligent in New York.”

I said, “Laurette, this isn’t a matter of intelligence. These are basic emotions, my dear girl, and haven’t you caught on yet to the kind of play we’re doing?”

She said, “Oh, don’t give me all that nonsense.” She said, “Why wasn’t there some reaction to my funny lines? I didn’t get one so-and-so.”

I said, “Well, you’ll find out very soon.”

The number of people who came backstage to see the actors was so large that the Playhouse’s safety curtain had to be lifted to allow the euphoric spillover crowd to loiter onstage. “It was like after a World Series game when they come down out of the stands. That’s what it was,” Dowling said. He continued, “We went on for a long time after. . . . I don’t suppose there’s been a hit since like it. Certainly no actress before or since has ever made the impression this woman made. She’s a legend along with Bernhardt and Duse, and all out of that little play.”

To the sharp eye of the
New Republic
’s Stark Young, who wrote the most evocative and informed response to the play, Taylor was “the real and first talent of them all.” “Here is naturalistic acting of the most profound, spontaneous, unbroken continuity and moving life,” he wrote. In later years, Williams would recall the rest of the cast as “pretty run-of-the-mill,” but his memory of Taylor’s peerless performance never lost its luster. “Her talent was luminous in a way that exceeded the natural. There was a rightness about her that you could not see beyond,” he wrote after she died in 1946. “Once in a while, only once in a while and not long, the confusion and dimness about us so thickly is penetrated by a clarity, an illumination of this kind, which makes it still possible to believe that the tunnel in which we move is not closed at both ends.”

Afterward, the first-nighters filed off to a party in Williams’s honor that Wood was hosting at the Royalton. Williams was too stunned to socialize. He and Windham disappeared into the balmy night. They walked the city for hours and forgot about the party. “I don’t remember feeling a great sense of triumph,” Williams said. “In fact, I don’t remember it very well at all. It should have been one of the happiest nights of my life. . . . I’d spent so much of my energy on the climb to success that when I’d made it and my play was the hottest ticket in town, I felt almost no satisfaction.” Williams’s word for this moment in his life was “providential”—“suddenly, providentially, ‘The Glass Menagerie’ made it when I was thirty-four.” As if to underscore the inexplicable nature of the play’s good fortune, he kept in his scrapbook a published astrological chart showing “a planetary tie-up” the night of the premiere “that is amazing.”

To the young playwright Arthur Miller,
The Glass Menagerie
augured what he called “a revolution” in New York theater. “In one stroke,” Miller wrote, “ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history. . . . In [Williams], American theatre found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and amplitude of feeling.” “It seems to me that your glass menagerie began a renaissance of our theatre . . . the climate of creation was invigorated,” his friend Carson McCullers wrote years later, assessing the seismic impact of the play.

It was not only the American theater that was reborn. Edwina Williams, to whom her dutiful son gave half his royalties—
The Glass Menagerie
would run for 563 performances—was also reborn, liberated by her new wealth to leave her disastrous marriage. “I was happy to have my freedom,” she said. “The walls of the house had resounded with wrath for too many years and now there was peace at long last.” Laurette Taylor was reborn as a legend in her time. “The postman can ring twice,” she said. “From here on I’m just kicking the clouds around.” And overnight, in the public’s mind, Tom Williams was reborn as Tennessee Williams, playwright. The day after the opening, according to the front page of the
New York Times
, “there was a feeling of release—release from a hard winter and a promise of release, soon, from at least some of the cares of war.” The day was Easter Sunday, 1945.

Telegram to parents about the Broadway opening night of
The Glass Menagerie

The news of Williams’s reversal of fortune arrived at his parents’ household by telegram a few days after the opening:

REVIEWS ALL RAVE. INDICATE SMASH HIT. LINE BLOCK LONG AT BOX OFFICE. LOVE, TOM.

Well, not quite all raves. The
New York Times
, not for the first time, missed the point, and the boat. Lewis Nichols, in his review, dismissed
The Glass Menagerie
as “snatches of talk about the war, bits of psychology, occasional moments of rather flowery writing.” Stark Young fired back in the
New Republic
: “Such a response and attitude as that Mr. Nichols expresses helps to tie our theatre down. What we need in the theatre is a sense of language, a sense of texture in speech, vibration and impulse in speech. Behind the Southern speech in the mother’s part is the echo of great literature, or at least a respect for it. There is the sense in it of her having been born out of a tradition, not out of a box.” Although, in public, Taylor was fond of telling the press that “in playing Amanda you’re riding on the audience’s shoulders,” in private, she knew it was the playwright’s shoulders the character rode on. “The whole week has been fantastic: such bravos! Such notices!! Such raves!!!” she wrote to her son on April 8. “The play and that remarkable fellow Tennessee Williams have (as you can see) come under the wire, and no matter how marvelous the actress—The Play’s the Thing.”

WITHIN A MONTH of the play’s opening, V-E day brought an end to the war in Europe, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. Fueled by longing and by loss, the republic, which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of Depression and five years of war, assumed, seemingly overnight, a new momentum, a glorious and guilt-ridden race for its own survival. Recalling this time as “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history” in his novel
American Pastoral
, Philip Roth wrote, “Sacrifice and constraint were over. . . . The lid was off.” In the next decade, American per-capita income would triple, the greatest growth of wealth in the history of Western civilization. Inevitably, given such enormous social and economic change, the American consciousness also underwent a sort of mutation. “Everything was up for grabs,” Arthur Miller said. “They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self.” He added, “It was a difference in the idea of the individual.” Over the next decade, this cultural journey to the interior was manifested in the shift from social realism to Abstract Expressionism, from Marxism to Freudianism, from theatrical naturalism to Williams’s “personal lyricism.” It is not insignificant that Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, one of the iconic expressions of postwar America, was originally titled
The Inside of His Head
.

“There is no dynamic in life or art without form,” Clifford Odets wrote in his journal in 1940. “So what is to be the new dynamic of democracy?”
The Glass Menagerie
answered that question. With its combination of exhaustion and exhilaration, the play looked both backward and forward in time, both outward and inward. Its romantic posture, its debate between self-sacrifice and self-interest perfectly captured the nation’s mood. The characters in
The Glass Menagerie
are born out of the scarcity and the stasis of the prewar thirties, not the buoyant postwar forties. But through its resilient Narrator, hell-bent on seizing his life and finding his personal fulfillment, the play pointed toward accidental but transcendent survival. “Overcome selfishness!” Amanda hectors Tom, who, in the end, embraces it. The garish sexual, emotional, and spiritual struggles of the individual, what Walt Whitman called “the destiny of me,” were the focus of Williams’s concern. The self-involvement that made Williams’s plays inaccessible to a wartime audience now in peacetime made them resonant.

Out of the depredations of his childhood, Williams set about remodeling his own character. “I build a tottering pillar of my blood / . . . against the siege of all that is not I,” he wrote in “The Siege.” His early diaries and letters strained under the pressure of his self-invention; at times, in their urgency, they took on an almost religious tone. During his apprentice years—“that long upward haul as a professional writer, that desperate, stumbling climb”—he prayed to Hart Crane, whose poems he carried in his jacket pocket: “I am thy frail ghost-brother. Thy equal wanderer. Guide me,” he wrote in his diary. Sometimes, he beseeched Anton Chekhov too: “Breathe into me a little of thy life!” he pleaded. He lit votive candles for his own success and succor. “I will burn one for you and for me . . . a
ten-cent one
!” he wrote to a friend. “We will be purified and redeemed!—I work hard these days. For me there is either success or destruction sooner or not so sooner & so I
work.
”

Williams re-created himself on the grandiose plan of Artist, a “Homo Emancipatus—the Completely Free Man.” “The poet, the dreamer . . . fights a solitary battle against the world’s dullness—the others, conscious of no such enemy in the field think him a mad man who is struggling with phantoms,” Williams wrote inside his volume of Hart Crane. But there was a price to be paid along the way to his hard-won freedom, a price in torment and loneliness. “When will the cool white time of healing arrive?” he prayed in his 1940s diary. “When will the fingers of peace be laid on my forehead? Oh, days ahead—give me a sign! Give me a candle to walk by! Oh it’s so bewildering, uncertain where I stand. Courage, my lad—en avant.” The heaven he sought was his own individuality. “Am I still looking for God? No, just for my self,” he said.

In
The Glass Menagerie
, Amanda’s first full sentence is about grace. “We can’t say grace until you come to the table,” she calls to Tom. Grace is again invoked as the Gentleman Caller sits down to break bread with Laura and the rest of the family. “I think we may—have grace—now,” Amanda says. But grace is granted at the finale only to the Narrator, Tom Wingfield. Haunted, restless, guilt-ridden, searching for a truth that keeps him in perpetual motion, he is released by the luck of talent into the world, no longer earthbound but airborne by his imagination. Through his literary ability—as the interior pantomime of Amanda and Laura at the finale demonstrates—Williams’s storytelling is the act of grace, redeeming his life and the lives of others with a meaning and a beauty that feels like blessing.

With the success of
The Glass Menagerie
, that long-delayed something that Williams lived for—“the time when I would first catch and hold an audience’s attention”—had arrived. He recognized it now for what it was: a simulacrum of the child’s longing to be held. “We come to each other, gradually, but with love,” Williams wrote in the play’s introduction. “It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.”

The hubbub of Williams’s new life began almost immediately. He was photographed by
Vogue
in broody profile with a raincoat over his shoulder; he was interviewed in
The
New Yorker
’s Talk of the Town section; within a week—with his royalties estimated at a thousand dollars a week—he was complaining to the
Times
about the burdens of the American tax system. “I guess I’m getting spoiled,” he told the reporter. “That’s the second time in my life I’ve ordered room service.” Embossed invitations went out, inviting Williams’s newfound society to meet “Mrs. Edwina Williams, Miss Laurette Taylor, and The Reverend Walter Dakin” over “tea and cocktails” at Sherry’s. “This is the twilight of an era in the theatre,” Williams had written a friend in 1943. “God knows what’s coming next.” The answer, as it turned out, was him.

CHAPTER 2

The Heart Can’t Wait

What do I want? I want love and creative power!—

Get it!

—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,

, 1938

“May God be merciful to me and open some door, some avenue of escape,” Williams had prayed in an early diary; now, with the success of
The Glass Menagerie
, mercy rained down on him. The play won every major theatrical prize except the Pulitzer. In September 1945, Williams’s romantic comedy
You Touched Me!
—“a last, desperate throw of the literary dice in the direction of Broadway” is how he described it in 1942—opened at the Booth Theatre, with Montgomery Clift in the lead. Williams’s “drizzle puss self” seemed to evaporate. Although subsequent editions of
The Glass Menagerie
appended his famous 1947 essay, “The Catastrophe of Success,” which made a legend of the “spiritual dislocation” that accompanied his sudden good fortune, in the early months of his renown Williams was caught up in the rollicking velocity of his fame.