Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

store’s joyless proprietress, Myra, and the other local womenfolk. “Decent is something that’s scared like a little rabbit,” he tells Myra. “I’ll give you a better word, Myra. . . . Love.” Val’s vagabond swagger captures the women’s imagination: they ogle him, they are confounded by him, they fantasize about him, they pursue him. His presence broadcasts the primacy of passion over reason; in Two Rivers, it makes him an almost immediate subject of scandal and concern. “Passion is something to be proud of,” the town’s wild child and cynic, Cassandra (“Sandra”) Whiteside, tells him, one fugitive kind to another. “It’s the only one of the little alphabet blocks they give us to play with that seems to stand for anything of importance.” While the women of the town project their longing onto Val, the threatened men set out to drive Val’s free spirit away and finally to destroy it.
    The battle of the play’s title is the clash of the romantic life force versus the philistine death force: a simulacrum of Williams’s own battle to shake off the constrictions of his repressed upbringing and to redefine himself both as a man and as an artist. “We of the artistic world are the little gray foxes and all the rest are the hounds,” he wrote from Mexico, where he had gone to write in 1940. “The butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker—also the typewriter rent man and the landlord, Etc.—are our natural enemies. We expect no quarter from them and are determined to give them none. It is a fight to the death, never mistake about that.”
    There’s no question into what camp Myra belongs when she makes her second entrance into the mercantile store; she’s dressed in “shiny black satin with large scarlet poppies”—symbols of sleep and death, which align her with her dying husband, Jabe, as “an enemy of light.” Her talk percolates with resignation. “You heard me cussing when I come downstairs? Inside I cuss like that all the time,” she tells Val. “I hate ev’ry body; I wish this town would be bombarded tomorrow and everyone daid. Because—I got to live in it when I’d rather be daid in it—an’ buried.” Over time, Val opens Myra up to her sexual nature and to love. Through passion, she is reborn.
    Battle of Angels
bore witness to Williams’s quest for spiritual transformation, for “new patterns,” as an antidote to “this welter of broken pieces, wreckage, that floats on the surface of life.” “I have spent so many years making myself over in such a way as to get along with bastards, cultivating a tough skin, rejecting my tender responses before they are rejected,” he said. The regenerative power of the primitive—the shedding of psychological skin—is signaled by Val’s snakeskin jacket, “a shameless, flaunting symbol of the Beast Untamed!” and an emblem of both his protean metamorphosis and his wild, feral nature. After Val is lynched, Christ-like, by an angry mob of townsmen, the snakeskin is the only part of him that remains. Hung up by the Conjure Man on the back wall of the dry-goods store in the play’s last moment, the jacket glows in a shaft of sunlight—a radiance that clearly suggested the sacramental. The Conjure Man, the final stage direction reads, “seems to make a slight obeisance before it. The religious chant from across the wide cotton fields now swells in exaltation as the curtain falls.” The moment announces Williams’s romantic credo: instead of dedicating himself to God, he made a god of the self.
    A TELEGRAM CALLING Williams back to Broadway in the winter of 1940 found him in Acapulco:
    BETTER RETURN AT ONCE. WE ARE CASTING YOUR PLAY FOR IMMEDIATE PRODUCTION.
    —
    Theresa Helburn, Theatre Guild, New York
    .
    Since the late twenties, Eugene O’Neill had been the Theatre Guild’s star playwright and its claim to fame. Although the Guild was on a winning streak, with five hits in a row, including
The Philadelphia Story
, with