The Trip to Echo Spring (13 page)

Experiences of this kind kept recurring. Unlike any other writer's diary that I've encountered, Williams used it only rarely to reflect on the mechanics of his work. Instead, his grand theme (and the published version of
Notebooks
runs, with extensive, meticulous footnotes, at an almighty 868 pages) is the unremitting drama of his physical self, which is to say sex, illness, anxiety and self-medication in the form of alcohol, Seconal and the sedatives he called
pinkies,
though from the 1960s onwards speed injections also take a role.

The difference between this voice and the voice of the plays and essays is so profound that at times it's hard to believe they belong to the same person. One is large-hearted and attentive to human pain; the other self-interested, his attention directed not out into the world but inward, illuminating as if by torchlight the smallest shifts in his own person, from the condition of his stools to the disgust he experiences after ejaculation.

It's discomfiting to encounter this other Williams, just as it's discomfiting to come across the punch-drunk, bullying Hemingway of the later letters, or to glimpse the welter of misery that floods John Cheever's diaries. Because it's so evidently raw, one tends instinctively to believe this sort of material represents a writer's truest, most secret self: the kernel of their being. I'm not sure, though, that it's anything like such a simple matter. ‘So I turn to my journals. I always do when things look bad. That's partly why I seem such a morbid guy in these journals,' Williams wrote on 16 March 1947: a statement that ought to stand as a warning that with any of this type of material one has entered no more than a single room in what might be called the mansion of the self.

A version of this thought crops up as a stage direction in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
the greatest of all Williams's plays and the one he turned
to after
Streetcar. Cat
is, like a classical tragedy, set in a single location over the course of a unified stretch of time: a bed-sitting room in a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta on the night of Big Daddy's sixty-fifth birthday. Big Daddy is a cotton millionaire, the owner of ‘twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile'. He believes he's just been given the all-clear from cancer, but in fact he's riddled with it (‘it's spread all through him and it's attacking all his vital organs including the kidneys and right now he is sinking into uraemia'). Over the course of the evening, the truth leaks out, both about his illness and about the causes of his son's drinking.

Brick is a former pro-football player and has, as his wife Maggie puts it, ‘fallen in love with Echo Spring'. His ankle's in a cast, after jumping hurdles drunk on the Glorious Hill High School track the night before. When the curtain rises on the first act, he's in the shower. Maggie rushes in, rattling out a torrent of anxiety about his drinking and their estrangement and Big Daddy's will and the manipulative presence of Brick's brother Gooper and his wife Mae. As for Brick, he's off some place in his head alone, almost entirely oblivious to the drama gathering in the big house.

In the second act, the family members who have crowded into Brick's room disperse, and he and Big Daddy are left alone together. During their fraught conversation, Big Daddy suggests, tentatively and with some trepidation, that his son's relationship with his best friend Skipper might not have been entirely
normal
. Brick responds with a swift disavowal but his detachment has been broken for the first time in the play. At this pivotal moment, the playwright himself bursts on to the page with the longest of the many italicised stage directions that exist between the lines of dialogue.

The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to ‘keep face' in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the ‘mendacity' that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in a thundercloud of common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character, just as a great deal of mystery is left in the revelation of character in life, even one's own character to himself.

He sounds, particularly in that last emphatic sentence, as if he's trying to convince someone of something. In fact, this printed declaration represents an overspill from a more private argument. From the moment he read the first draft, Williams's director and long-term collaborator Elia Kazan loved
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
but he was unconvinced by the character of Brick, the married alcoholic who, as another stage direction has it, possesses the ‘charm of that cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle'. In Williams's original version, Brick doesn't change in his disinclination to love his wife or show more than the most grudging attention to his family, even when he learns his father's dying of cancer. His energy is directed exclusively towards his own personal mission, which is to drink enough Echo Spring to bring on the
click
: the moment when all the agitating noise in his head goes blessedly to silence.

On 29 November 1954, Williams wrote miserably in his diary: ‘Got a 5 page letter from Gadg elucidating, not too lucidly, his remaining objection to the play. I do get his point but I'm afraid he doesn't quite get mine. Things are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don't always “progress”.' Two days later, in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he elaborated this gut instinct into an impassioned letter, in which he sets out in detail his thoughts about both Brick and the alcoholic character in general:

I ‘buy' a lot of your letter but of course not all . . . To be brief: the part I buy is that there has to be a reason for Brick's impasse (his drinking is only an expression of it) that will ‘hold water'.

Why does a man drink: in quotes ‘Drink'. There's two reasons, separate or together. 1. He's scared shitless of something. 2. He can't face the truth about something. – Then of course there's the natural degenerates that just fall into any weak, indulgent habit that comes along, but we are not dealing with that sad but unimportant category in Brick. – Here's the conclusion I've come to. Brick
did
love Skipper, ‘the one great good thing in his life which was true.' He identified Skipper with sports, the romantic world of adolescence that he couldn't go past. Further: to reverse my original (somewhat tentative) premise, I now believe that, in the deeper sense, not the literal sense, Brick
is
homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment: a thing I've suspected of several others, such as Brando, for instance . . . he's the nearest thing to Brick that we both know. Their innocence, their blindness, makes them very, very touching, very beautiful and sad. Often they make fine
artists, having to sublimate so much of their love, and believe me, homosexual love is something that also requires more than a physical expression. But if a mask is ripped off, suddenly, roughly, that's quite enough to blast the whole Mechanism, the whole adjustment, knock the world out from under their feet, and leave them with no alternative but – owning up to the truth or retreat into something like liquor . . .

You know, paralysis in a character can be just as significant and just as dramatic as progress, and is also less shop-worn. How about Chekhov?

The letter ends: ‘This play is too important to me, too much a synthesis of all my life, to leave it in hands that aren't mine.' It's possible that this last comment is meant as a debater's flourish, a way of winning Kazan's sympathy. I don't think so, though, since it's also reiterated in the published version of the play, which opens with a note entitled ‘PERSON – TO – PERSON' that begins: ‘Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it. It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emotions that stir him deeply enough to demand expression . . . are nearly all rooted, however changed their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself.'

Even when a writer makes a statement as frank and unequivocal as this, there are those who will resist it. The interrelation of life and art
makes certain sensibilities deeply uneasy, perhaps out of embarrassment and perhaps from a desire to see art as separate from the contaminating muck of personal concerns. Inevitably, this uncomfortable subject came up at the Tennessee Williams Scholars' Conference, which took place a few days after I arrived in the city. The conference ran in tandem with the Tennessee Williams Festival, which had been in existence a quarter century and was that year celebrating the centenary of Williams's birth.

All week the real city, whose material is crumbling green and pink plaster, was infiltrated by the more plastic city of the plays. Almost every hotel and theatre in town was hosting some sort of event. There were performances and lectures, and a competition in the street in which ‘contestants vie to rival Stanley Kowalski's shout for “STELLAAAAA!!!” in the unforgettable scene from
A Streetcar Named Desire'.

One afternoon, as I walked past the open windows of the Sonesta, I saw Carroll Baker eating her lunch. Decades earlier she'd played the nubile, thumb-sucking lead in the film
Baby Doll
. Now her hair was white-blonde, not gold, and her perfect face a little swollen. The night before I'd heard her speak in Le Petit Theatre about her long friendship with Tennessee. In the course of the evening she described an apartment he kept in Manhattan, which was preposterously tiny even by the standards of that hive-like city. ‘Why don't you move?' she asked, and he pointed out a little vine of night-blooming jasmine that had worked its way up to the window. She said other things too, but that was the one I wrote down in the dim light of the upper circle, because it seemed so touching that a man who felt almost perpetually lonely and out of place, who believed he could maintain his meteoric
rise only by vast and unremitting effort, might stay in an apartment so claustrophobically tiny that the elevator gave him panic attacks, just because he felt kinship with a plant.

The Scholars' Conference took place at the Williams Research Center on Chartres Street. I got there early too, and found myself among a chattering crowd of men in sand-coloured blazers, their hair subject to the sort of damp-combing that made me nostalgic for England. Papers were being presented on a diversity of topics, from ‘The Whoredom of a Loveless Marriage in Williams' Plays' to the role of Italian culture in
The Rose Tattoo.

The speaker I'd come to hear was Dr. Zeynel Karcioglu, a Turkish-American ophthalmologist who had in the years of his retirement become preoccupied by the role of illness in Williams's work. His paper ‘Diagnosing Tennessee: Williams and his Diseases' began by discussing the litany of health problems he'd suffered from since childhood. Some were the delusions of a hypochondriac, but among the verifiable conditions were diphtheria, a sclerotic heart valve, gastritis, dyspepsia, the old injury to the left eye, genital warts and a benign fatty lump in his nipple, which, predictably enough, he told the press was breast cancer.

‘Williams,' the doctor said, ‘was very knowledgeable about illness, though it was hard to tell if he was really experiencing symptoms or imagining them,' adding that his interest in the afflictions of the body informed much of his work. His next statement was more controversial. He raised the possibility that the chaotic structure of the late plays in particular might be due to brain damage caused by alcohol addiction: that Tennessee's habit of using broken sentences and incomplete dialogue could suggest a form of aphasia, an acquired language disorder
that is seen in chronic alcoholics and which manifests itself as a difficulty with word retrieval and sentence creation.

The conference began to buzz. After Dr. Karcioglu had finished a man raised his hand and when called upon announced firmly: ‘Aphasia is
the
disease that was discovered by the early twentieth-century avant garde – the Dadaists, Samuel Beckett.' Another added: ‘The focus on pathology devalues his artistry. The use of aphasia is a factor in Southern speech that he was trying to replicate. He was a very conscious artist.' Dr. Karcioglu accepted these possibilities, conceding that it wasn't implausible that Williams was aware he was suffering from aphasia and purposely exposed it in his work, forcing readers to see ‘his own inner world of confusion'. He added that his hypothesis needed checking, perhaps by quantifying incomplete sentences in the plays of the 1940s and 1950s with those written more recently.