In January 1957—two months before the Broadway opening of
Orpheus Descending
—Williams found himself in a hell from which even the big magic of writing could not seem to save him. “For the first time I think I may stay away from rehearsals,” he wrote to Maria St. Just. “I am too destroyed at this time to be of any assistance.” He continued, “Of course I have been through periods somewhat like this before, when the sky cracked and fell and brained me, but this time I seem less able to struggle out of the debris. I’m at a loss to explain it. I suppose it’s partly Mother’s nervous breakdown”—Edwina, suffering from paranoid delusions of being poisoned by her maid and murdered by her chauffeur, was briefly hospitalized in September 1956—“and the shock of Rose’s sudden deterioration when I put her in the ‘Institute for Living,’ which I had hoped would do her so much good. But the unaccountable collapse of my power to work, since work has always been my escape and comfort, is more likely to be the root of trouble.”
Williams longed, as he wrote to Kazan in March, to “recapture some of my earlier warmth and openness in relation to people, which began to go when I began to be famous.” The guitar-toting Val of
Orpheus Descending
incarnated Williams’s moral exhaustion. “He is still trapped in his corruption and engaged in his struggle to maintain his integrity and purity . . . a duality not reconciled,” Williams said, speaking as much for himself as for Val. He spelled out his self-loathing most succinctly not in the play but in the opening minutes of his screenplay adaptation,
The
Fugitive Kind
(1959). “I felt like my whole life was somethin’ sick in my stomach and I just had to throw it up. So I threw it up,” Val tells a judge who releases him from jail in the movie.
When the curtain rises on
Battle of Angels
, the dry-goods store is a reflective, even picturesque museum of the tragedy that the play recounts in flashback; in
Orpheus Descending
, we encounter an altogether more dynamic, foreboding, and oppressive landscape. Williams’s stage directions suggest a crepuscular, deadly world: walls “streaked with moisture and cobwebbed,” the “black skeleton” of a dressmaker’s dummy, a “sinister-looking artificial palm,” a “disturbing emptiness” outside the windows. Even the confectionery that is part of the store is “shadowy and poetic as some inner dimension of the play.” The heart’s calcification is central to the reconceptualization of
Orpheus
; it is the presenting symptom of both of the main characters when they first meet. When Val wanders into town, the sharp-tongued and volatile Lady Torrance, who runs the dry-goods store, pulls a gun on Val; “she’s not a Dago for nothin’!” one character says. Lady has been “coarsened, even brutalized, by her ‘marriage with death,’ ” Williams explained. Val also has been “brutalized by the places and circumstances of his wanderings.”
Where the Val of
Battle of Angels
was full of rebellious romantic gas, the Val of
Orpheus Descending
, who wears a stolen Rolex from his hustling days, is full of moral atrophy. “Corruption—rots men’s hearts and—rot is slow,” he tells Vee, a mystic and painter who is married to the local sheriff and has seen lynchings, beatings, and convicts torn to pieces by dogs. Val understands Vee’s paintings as an attempt to redeem the ugliness they’ve both witnessed, “from seats down front at the show,” he says. He has paid a physical price for his life of indulgence. “Heavy drinking and smoking the weed and shacking with strangers is okay for kids in their twenties but this is my thirtieth birthday and I’m all through with that route,” he says to the wild child Carol Cutrere, who recognizes him from her debauched past. Echoing his creator’s frequent complaint, Val adds, “I’m not young any more. . . . You’re not young at thirty if you’ve been on a Goddam party since you were fifteen.”
In Williams’s rewriting of the Orpheus myth, there are two hells into which Val descends: one is the degradation of his own desires, and the other is Lady’s hell, a sort of trifecta of tragedy imposed on her by the brutish rural world in which she is trapped. Orphaned as a teenager, when her Italian immigrant father, “a Wop bootlegger,” died fighting a blaze in his wine garden—which was set by racists because he sold wine to blacks—she was forced to have an abortion after her aristocratic lover, David Cutrere, jilted her for a society marriage. Of her sadistic and domineering husband, Jabe, one of the gossiping town biddies says, “He bought her, when she was a girl of eighteen! He bought her and bought her cheap because she’d been thrown over and her heart was broken by that.” Lady’s subservience is signaled by her bedridden husband’s constant pounding with his cane on the floor above, which makes him a ghostly, terrifying, annihilating presence. (“He is death’s self,” one stage direction reads.) In his only appearance in act 1, Jabe, returning to his bed after a trip to the hospital, stops to notice a change Lady has made in the store. “How come the shoe department’s back here now?” he asks. “Tomorrow I’ll get me some niggers to help me move the shoe department back front.” Jabe’s voice is the voice of Williams’s father, CC, the contemptuous, bullying Voice of No, canceling out Lady’s imagination and innovation. “You do whatever you want to, it’s your store,” Lady says.
Dressed in black and always at Jabe’s call, Lady is an embodiment of the living death of resignation. “I wanted death after that, but death don’t come when you
want
it, it comes when you don’t want it!” she confesses to David Cutrere, when they finally see each other again at the store. “I wanted death, then, but I took the next best thing.
You
sold
yourself
. I sold
my
self.
You
was bought.
I
was bought. You made whores of us both!” Loveless and full of loathing for her compromised life, Lady feels as corrupted in her own way as Val does. When she flirts with him as he applies for a job—“What else can you do? Tell me some more about your self-control!”—he swaggers, “Well, they say that a woman can burn a man down. But I can burn down a woman . . . any two-footed woman.” Lady is disarmed; she throws her head back “in sudden friendly laughter as he grins at her.” Burning is, of course, a symbol of both desire and purification, which is part of Val’s powerful unconscious appeal to her.
Williams’s spiritual problem was the same as Val’s and Lady’s: how to negotiate a path from corruption back to purity. While writing was his imagined redemption, guitar-playing was Val’s. “I’m through with the life I’ve been leading,” Val tells Lady. “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted. Here is why. (
Picks up his guitar.
) My life’s companion! It washes me clean like water when anything unclean has touched me.” When Val finally plays the guitar—which is autographed with the names of Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, and Blind Lemon Jefferson—he sings about a “heavenly itch,” a will to believe in transcendence, which Williams, too, even in his darkest times, never surrendered:
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
A self-proclaimed outsider, Val confesses to Lady that he’s “disgusted” with the world he’s known, a world composed, he says, of just two kinds of people: “the ones that are bought and the buyers.” Val classifies himself in a third category—“bum”—a dreamer who tries not to be touched by life’s craven hurly-burly. “You rise above it?” Lady asks. “I try to,” Val says, at which point “off-stage guitar music fades in.” Music—specifically the joyous and defiant music of the blues messengers who have signed his guitar—is the agent of Val’s transcendence. The magic of creative freedom is the essence of the story that Val spins for Lady—in the play’s most famous passage—about a bird that sleeps on the wind, never touching earth, except to die:
VAL: You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so it can’t light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky? That’s true. I seen one once, it had died and fallen to earth and it was light-blue colored and its body was tiny as your little finger, that’s the truth, it had a body as tiny as your little finger and so light on the palm of your hand it didn’t weigh more than a feather, but its wings spread out this wide but they was transparent, the color of the sky, and you could see through them. That’s what they call protection coloring. Camouflage, they call it. You can’t tell those birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks don’t catch them, don’t see them up there in the high blue sky near the sun! . . . So’d I like to be one of those birds; they’s lots of people would like to be one of those birds and never be—corrupted!
LADY: . . . I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free, not even nearly. . . . I sure would give this mercantile store and every bit of stock in it to be that tiny bird the color of the sky . . . for one night to sleep on the wind and—float!—around under th’—stars. . . .
(Jabe knocks on floor. Lady’s eyes return to Val.)
Because I live with a son of a bitch who bought me at a fire sale, and not in fifteen years have I had a single good dream.
Val, of course, becomes Lady’s good dream; desire is her escape route from corruption. “Ask me how it felt to be coupled with death up there, and I can tell you,” Lady says, adding, “I endured it. I guess my heart knew that somebody must be coming to take me out of this hell. You did. You came. Now look at me! I’m alive, once more!” Having found him, Lady is desperate to keep him. She latches onto Val like Ishmael to his coffin. In her frenzy, she is ruthless. She threatens to frame Val; she holds his guitar as ransom; she tries to bribe him by offering him the store (“Everything Death’s scraped together down here!—but Death has got to die before we can go”).
This paradoxical spectacle of passion is played out around the opening of a confectionery, which Lady is determined to reconstruct as a wine garden and late-night club. The wine garden is a memorial to Lady’s father, a way of avenging his death that is a central part of Lady’s story and her psychology. “Electric moon, cut-out silver-paper stars and artificial vines? Why, it’s her father’s wine garden on Moon Lake she’s turned this room into,” a character explains, just in case the audience missed the visual clues. Lady’s wine garden is a piece of theater, a production in every sense of the word. Her strategy, like Williams’s, is to restage her oppressive history in order to defiantly triumph over it. “To—be
not defeated
!” she swaggers, adding, “
You get me? Just to be not defeated.
Ah, oh, I won’t be defeated, not again, in my life!”
On the day of the confectionery’s gala opening, in act 3, Jabe shuffles downstairs to inspect the room; he immediately understands what’s going on, and he matches Lady’s aggression with his own. “Didn’t I marry a live one,” he says, “with a muted ferocity” to his nurse. “Her daddy ‘The Wop’ was just as much of a live one till he burned up. He had a wine garden on the north shore of Moon Lake. The new confectionery sort of reminds me of it.” Jabe adds, “But he made a mistake, he made a bad mistake, one time, selling liquor to niggers. We burned him out.”
In
Battle of Angels
, Myra expresses her murderous feelings toward Jabe from the outset. Lady, however, doesn’t see her own rage until the news of Jabe’s complicity in her grievous loss calls it out into the open. In act 3, pregnant with Val’s baby and filled with triumphalist hysteria—“Lady, you been a lunatic since this morning!” Val says—she feels absolved of responsibility for anything that happens. “I was made to commit a
murder
by him up there!—I want that man to see the wine garden come open again when he’s dying!” Lady says. She continues, “It’s necessary, no power on earth can stop it. Hell, I don’t even want it, it’s just necessary, it’s just something’s got to be done to square things away.”
Val knows that Jabe is dying upstairs; he also knows that Jabe sleeps with a gun under his pillow. The event is too provocative. “You can’t open a night-place here this night,” Val tells her, balking at changing into his white waiter’s jacket.
LADY: You bet your sweet life I’m
going
to!
VAL: Not
me
, not
my
sweet life!
LADY: I’m betting
my
life on it! Sweet or
no
t sweet, I’m—
VAL: Yours is yours, mine is mine . . .
Although Val confesses in one breath that he feels “a true love” for Lady, in the next breath he’s telling her he’ll wait for her somewhere out of the county. Lady cuts him off. “Oh, don’t talk about love, not to me. Because I know what you are,” she says. When Val learns, in the play’s penultimate beat, that she is pregnant, Lady finally releases him: “You’ve given me life, you can go!” These are selfish, not star-crossed, lovers; Val is caught in the slipstream of Lady’s euphoric sense of liberation, which ends with her “in a sort of delirium” running to the upstairs landing, and “crying out,” “I’ve won, Mr. Death, I’m going to bear!”
Lady’s reckless words betray not only herself but also Val. She literally calls destruction down on both of them. “Oh, God, what did I do?” she says, almost instantly registering her mistake and retreating down the stairs as Jabe’s clumping footsteps are heard. Jabe appears at the landing and fires all the bullets of his revolver into Lady, then tells the gathering crowd that Val has done it. Val bolts for the door only to be intercepted by locals, who pull him outside.
In the offstage commotion—the sound of voices, racing motors, baying chain-gang dogs—Val appears to break away from his captors, only to be cornered and torn apart. The revenge is not Lady’s but Jabe’s. In the end, Lady and Val don’t evade their own corruption; they are claimed by it. Their new lives are defeated by the lethal forces of their old ones. With her dying breath, Lady repeats a line her father used to say: “The show is over. The Monkey is dead.” It’s a reference to a tale she has told Val about her father buying an organ grinder’s monkey, who died in the middle of their busking act. But the strained, strange image resonates with other meanings. Williams himself was the performing monkey whose act was killing him. The garden of his own imagination was in danger of being overrun by destructive forces that he could name but not control.