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

Katharine Hepburn, by 1940 it was looking for a new literary star to hitch its wagon to. For the Guild and for Williams, the choice of
Battle of Angels
was a big roll of the dice.
    Flushed with a sense of both victory and age, Williams was suddenly overwhelmed with elegiac memories of the raffish life he’d only just begun to live. “I am becoming more and more a complete hedonist,” Williams wrote to a friend about his sensual education south of the border, around the time that the Theatre Guild summoned him back to the United States. In a Mexican cantina, he sat down in a wicker chair and recorded some of the most vivid moments of his “twenty-six years of living”:
    I remembered particularly the
    Vieux Carré
    of New Orleans where I first learned how a poor artist lives. I remembered the Quarter Rats, as we were called. The prostitute Irene who painted the marvelous pictures and disappeared, Helen who entered my life through a search for a lost black cat, the jobless merchant seaman, Joe, who wrote sea-stories more exciting than Conrad’s which were destroyed when the house he lived in burned. . . . The sunlight rich as egg-yolk in the narrow streets, great, flat banana leaves, and the slow, slow rain. The fog coming up from the river, swallowing Andrew Jackson on his big iron horse. . . . Life getting bigger and plainer and uglier and more beautiful all the time. I remembered thumbing a ride from Santa Monica to San Francisco to see William Saroyan and the Golden Gate Exposition. Saroyan wasn’t there but the fair was marvelous. . . . I remembered days of slightly glorified beach-combing in Southern California. Picking squabs and dropping one feather for each bird in a bottle and collecting afterwards two cents for each feather. Selling shoes across from the M-G-M lot in Culver City and spending lunch hour watching for Greta Garbo. Never with any success. Taking care of a small ranch up Canyon Road in Laguna Beach. And the sound of dogs barking a long way off at night when the moon started rising. . . . School-days in Mississippi. Walking along aimless country roads through a delicate spring rain with the fields, flat, and wide, and dark, ending at the levee and at the cypress brakes, and the buzzards wheeling leisurely a long way up. Dark life. Confused, tormented, uncomprehendable and fabulously rich and beautiful.
    When Williams got up, he noticed the American journalist and bon vivant Lucius Beebe sitting at a rival cantina in a crisp white linen suit. He crossed the plaza to share his news. Beebe thrust out his hand in congratulation and asked Williams how he felt in this triumphant, life-changing moment. “Old,” Williams said, adding, “The irresponsible days of my youth are over.” There was a silence, then Beebe smiled and said, “Has it occurred to you that the play might be a failure?” “No,” Williams said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” “You’d better think of it, Son,” Beebe said.
    Williams’s emergence on the theatrical scene in the winter of 1940 was poised to fill a peculiar vacuum in the field. By 1940, William Saroyan had gone from being Broadway’s great white hope to a figure of fun. “Will Saroyan ever write a great play?” Rodgers and Hart joked in “Zip,” the show-stopping striptease in
Pal Joey
that sent up Gypsy Rose Lee’s intellectual pretensions. After the failure of Clifford Odets’s 1940
Night Music
, the Group Theatre, which over the decade had fought the good fight to broaden the expressiveness and seriousness of American theater, was in the process of collapsing. (It officially disbanded in 1941.) Odets had been the Group’s literary star and its meal ticket. In plays such as
Waiting for Lefty
,
Awake and Sing!
,
Golden Boy
, and
Rocket to the Moon
—full of lament and liveliness—he had captured since the mid-thirties the heartbreak of the American soul under capitalism. The disappointment of
Night Music
and the collapse of the Group sent Odets