Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (78 page)

Under his peppy regime, Barnes churned the water while Williams rode the waves. “I need the fact or the illusion of continuing activity in the theatre which is—any theatre—the only real home I have had in so many years,” Williams told him. He was, he told Lasky, “boiling with something, and I don’t know what it could be if it isn’t an absolutely imperative call of action. Audrey keeps insisting that I am crazy. I am. Like a back-house rat! I know exactly where I am at, now, and I am going to
go on
!” The undefined but passionate “something” that Williams described was more profound than the hubbub of his career: he longed for a rebirth. “I am making a number of changes, and pray that God will give me the strength to be a bit of a Phoenix after all,” he said.

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Williams sent off the final draft of a new play,
Small Craft Warnings
, to its director, William Hunt. The play, which had begun as the one-act
Confessional
, had been written out of a despair “just this side of final,” Williams said. It marked his transition to sobriety and his reconnection with the world. A necessarily cautious work that Williams considered “minor,”
Small Craft Warnings
is a collage of mostly static character sketches: a collection of derelict lost souls who gather in a California seaside bar to drink, carouse, look for love, and flounder eloquently in the avant-garde of suffering. It has no plot structure, no real dynamic besides that of language sometimes beautifully used. “I have no intention—and no power—to change it much from that state of being,” Williams told Hunt. To the
Times
, he said, “The thing you mustn’t lose in life is the quality of surprise. I lost it at the time I was writing this play.”

When Harold Clurman came to review
Small Craft Warnings
in the
Nation
, he observed that the play almost felt like a revival—“it repeats the mood and mode of much earlier work.” In a way, it did. But after nearly a three-year theatrical absence from New York, Williams had reemerged with a somewhat different song, one that engaged new tropes for newly tempestuous times. The Stonewall riots of June 1969 and his own coy coming-out on
The David Frost Show
in 1970 (“I don’t want to be involved in some sort of a scandal, but I’ve covered the waterfront”) had emboldened Williams to portray homosexuality directly for the first time, rather than simply implying it. Because of his complicated, at once unabashed and guilty feelings about his sexuality, Williams was no poster boy for the strident absolutes of the emerging gay liberationists; and despite his increasing interest in progressive politics, he was also avowedly “not a person dedicated primarily to bettering social conditions.” He was too oblique and allusive a writer for polemical drama.

Nonetheless, the student demonstrations, the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the furor of anti-Vietnam protests abroad and political chicanery at home compelled him to embrace the romantic idealism of the youth culture that was rising up around him. “Young people were the world. It was all suddenly visible to me,” he said. His primary incentive for mounting
Small Craft Warnings
, he told Hunt, was to explore “the only thing at this point in my life worth my personal belief and conviction”: “this possibly ingenuous but truly and deeply felt commitment to what I’ve observed and experienced in a new generation.” He went on, “I have struck an elegiac tone over and over during those awful years when I really had no other note to strike. Now, strangely, you might say incongruously, I do have this new non-elegiac but affirmative thing to say to an audience. And it just might make the difference between rejection and acceptance of the work.”

Into his own struggle for psychic regeneration—“I am too ornery a mother to let go,” he said—the sixty-year-old Williams had absorbed the youth culture’s hankering for radical transformation. Dotson Rader, a baby-faced twenty-nine-year-old writer for the
New Republic
and other magazines, with a left-wing pedigree that included four arrests for protests against the war, was Williams’s Chingachgook, a raffish guide to this wild political territory. After a teenage breakdown, the Minnesota-born Rader had rebelled against the strictures of his preacher-father’s Puritan fundamentalism and his military-school education and cut out to New York. By the time Williams had met him, he was a contributing editor to the
Evergreen Review
, America’s foremost avant-garde magazine and part of Grove Press, which published works by many of the firebrands who were fueling the protest movement: Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, Amiri Baraka. Rader was soon to publish a provocative, successful first novel,
Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things
.

Tall, adventurous, and wayward, Rader knew the counterculture’s high-rollers and lower-riders. Dressed in black leathers, Frye cowboy boots, and a black Rancher hat, which he donned for his nighttime crawls with Williams, he even looked the part of pathfinder. Rader’s curious mixture of fun and ferment made him a controversial figure among some of Williams’s older, stuffier friends, including Vidal, St. Just, and Ruth Ford, but that only added to his renegade appeal for Williams, who enjoyed setting the cat among the pigeons. Rader was, Williams said, “indispensable” to his project of staying contemporary. “You gave me charm and lightness and I love you for it,” Williams told him later.

Rader was in his full outlaw regalia the first time he met Williams, at a SoHo party, where he was introduced by his friend Candy Darling, the drag queen and Andy Warhol “Superstar,” who was Williams’s date (and who would be cast as a replacement for the hapless and homeless Violet, in the original production of
Small Craft Warnings
). “We both seemed much older than we were,” Rader said, recounting Williams’s flirtatious opening conversation in his memoir:

“How much do you get a night?”

“One hundred bucks,” I replied, playing along.

He paused, rolling his blue eyes at Candy, his heavy black-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose. “Well, baby, what do you charge to escort an older gentleman to dinner?”

“Fifty bucks.”

Feigning shock, he felt in his pockets for money, pulled out a few bills. . . . “Do you suppose we could settle for

?”

“I want to meet your underground friends,” Williams wrote to Rader in August 1971. “Would they take me seriously or just say, ‘Oh, that old fart!’ And put me on? It will not be easy for you to make your friends believe in me as, for so many years, I have passed as an establishment writer because they preferred to see me that way, never bothered to get the message at all.”

With Rader, Williams went places and met people far outside his usual ambit—young people who didn’t know him or want anything from him. “How liberating that was!” Rader said. “It must have been like when he was young and still unknown and penniless. When people liked him for himself. The affection was disinterested.” The pair spent a lot of time in subterranean New York haunts. “In a night, we’d go to dinner, two-three parties, two-three bars, and pick up people as we went, ending up back at whatever hotel or apartment he was at. The laughter went on until late,” Rader said. “Being places where respectable people thought it unsuitable to be seen, he formed a kind of cockeyed solidarity with those who shared with him a hatred of the rich . . . the cake-eaters who despoil the poor, who eat the earth.” Williams told Rader, “For you . . . being part of the movement has become a bit too familiar . . . but for me it is quite fresh and exhilarating as mountain air.”

With Dotson Rader, 1972

Among the things that attracted Williams to the antiwar movement, according to Rader, “was the fact that young people, most especially those committed to media-centered action, made him feel alive, in contact with history, in a way that books and theatre did not.” Through them, he was able to rejoin life and the cultural conversation. “My bringing Tennessee to anti-war and other left events—demonstrations, protests, meetings—didn’t make him radical,” Rader said. “It simply brought him home politically to the place where his heart already was. He detested authority in general, and felt like an outsider with no loyalty to the undemocratic dominant class, which is why he didn’t vote anymore.”

Williams, who was by his own admission “drifting almost willfully out of contact with the world,” may not have gone in search of the bold-faced names of the counterculture, but he found them. Rader introduced him to leading feminists (Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan), underground figures (Robert Mapplethorpe, Christopher Makos, Parker Tyler, Charles Ludlam, Gregory Corso, Cal Culver), and uptown grandees (Peter Glenville, Pat Kennedy Lawford, George Plimpton, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Anthony Perkins). Williams also kept company with some of the movers and shakers of the Movement (Dave Dellinger, Tom Seligson, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby, Gus Hall, William Kunstler). Over time, Dellinger, the radical pacifist, became an admired friend to whom Williams later lent his Key West house. Williams also befriended Eric Mann, of Students for a Democratic Society, and Mark Kluz, who had been imprisoned for his antiwar activities. (Williams thought of these men as “pure revolutionaries,” but in his own political enthusiasms he was no purist. Offered a choice between going dancing with gay friends on Fire Island and meeting Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic priest and activist who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Williams chose Fire Island.)

When New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller let the National Guard and state troopers loose on rioting Attica prisoners in 1971, a decision that resulted in forty-three deaths, Williams and Rader joined the outraged public protest. “It is impossible to overstate how morally repugnant the system was in his eyes,” Rader said. Of the Left’s challenge to authority, Williams wrote to Rader:

It becomes very easy, thinking of it, to abandon hope: but that hope is all that we’ve got: to give meaning to our lives. . . . The bright side is the strength of our moral leadership: the blacks (“We’re willing to do the dying”). The unwavering resolution of Dave Dellinger and the brilliance of his mind, tempered by humanity. That quality in Abbie Hoffman that made me feel in the presence of a holy man. And all our true caring for each other. It really is, for me, a religious conversion, my first one that is

socially

humanly meaningful. We must be constantly on guard against finks and ego-trippers and opportunists. There are questions we mustn’t even ask, information we must not have, such as: do we have an arsenal? Are we armed at all, in case it comes to fighting for our lives. . . . I am not yet ready to know Weathermen or share their secrets, not because I can’t be trusted but because it is mortal danger to trust almost anybody—the blacks are right about that.

Inevitably, to raise both money and visibility for the Movement, Williams was drawn into political action by Rader, who was helping put together a massive benefit on December 6, 1971, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, which was organizing the event, had gathered a panoply of celebrity supporters in order to break the press blackout on their activities and “to subvert the media image of protesters as a bunch of wild-eyed, drug-crazed violent hippies trying to overthrow the government,” according to Rader. Unbeknownst to Williams, Rader had included Williams’s name on the letterhead of the “Remember the War” Benefit Committee—in a list that included, among other distinguished and outspoken progressives, Rennie Davis, Jules Feiffer, Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, and Martin Duberman. Williams, however, was balky about being used as bait for the mass media. “I must be rehabilitated as a playwright before I can offer much power to the movement,” he told Rader. “Baby, I am wise as a shit house rat and know what I’m doing. You will hear and see. I got politics in my blood, and you know that I can use it to both our advantage if I do it my way.”

Williams’s way was to write a poem entitled “Ripping off the Mother” for
Evergreen Review
, and a polemic, “We Are Dissenters Now,” for
Harper’s Bazaar
—and to donate both fees to the People’s Coalition. In the
Harper’s Bazaar
piece, Williams railed against “pig-dom.” Invoking the pioneer heritage of his distinguished family tree, he recounted how one of his female ancestors had been scalped by Indians but survived. “Some of her [blood] is still running on through my arteries this morning shouting to you ‘Right on.’ ” Williams continued, “We’re all dissenters now. . . . You don’t have to spell America with a ‘k’ to know the condition it is in. . . . More than one side can cry ‘Charge!’ and surely the side with love for and faith in humanity will finally prevail over those whose faith is only in death and whose love is a lust for blood.”

Still, Rader pressed Williams for more active participation. He wanted him to speak at the event: the playwright’s first public statement against the Vietnam War would obviously be newsworthy. But Williams proved hard to snare. In mid-November, in desperation, Rader wired him: