i THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. Among her 18 books on American drama and theatre are Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992), Understanding David Mamet (2011), Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television (1999), The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (2005), and as editor, Critical Insights: Tennessee Williams (2011) and Critical Insights: A Streetcar Named Desire (2010). In the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama: THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT by Katherine Weiss THE THEATRE OF MARTIN CRIMP (SECOND EDITION) by Aleks Sierz THE THEATRE OF BRIAN FRIEL by Christopher Murray THE THEATRE OF DAVID GREIG by Clare Wallace THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF MARTIN MCDONAGH by Patrick Lonergan MODERN ASIAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–2000 Kevin J. Wetmore and Siyuan Liu THE THEATRE OF SEAN O’CASEY by James Moran THE THEATRE OF HAROLD PINTER by Mark Taylor-Batty THE THEATRE OF TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER by Sophie Bush Forthcoming: THE THEATRE OF CARYL CHURCHILL by R. Darren Gobert THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Brenda Murphy Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Erin Hurley LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Brenda Murphy, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Brenda Murphy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3025-1 PB: 978-1-4081-4543-2 ePub: 978-1-4081-4533-3 ePDF: 978-1-4081-4532-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To George vi Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 The 1930s’ Plays (1936–1940) 9 2 Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending (1939–1941 and 1957) 35 3 The Glass Menagerie (1942–1945) 51 4 Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1945–1948 and 1964) 64 5 A Streetcar Named Desire (1945–1947) 77 6 The Rose Tattoo and Camino Real (1951 and 1946–1953) 91 7 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1951–1955) 107 8 Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth (1953–1959) 121 9 The Night of the Iguana (1940–1948 and 1959–1961) 135 10 The Later Plays (1961–1983) 149 Critical Perspectives 181 All in the Timing: The Meanings of Streetcar in 1947 and 1951 181 Bruce McConachie A Broken Romance: Tennessee Williams and America’s Mid-Century Theatre Culture 205 John S. Bak vii Contents “A Vast Traumatic Eye”: Culture Absorbed and Refigured in Tennessee Williams’s Transitional Plays 232 Felicia Hardison Londré “There’s something not natural here”: Grotesque Ambiguities in Tennessee Williams’s Kingdom of Earth, A Cavalier for Milady, and A House Not Meant to Stand 243 Annette J. Saddik Conclusion 263 Notes 267 Chronology 270 Further Reading 278 Notes on Contributors 293 Index 295 viii ACKnowleDGments My heartfelt thanks are due to the libraries and their staffs that made the research for this volume not only possible but also pleasurable: my home library, the Homer Babbidge Library of the University of Connecticut, which provided me with research space as well as help and resources; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which has the richest source for Williams manuscript materials and one of the kindest and most helpful library staffs I have ever encountered; and the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, and the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, all of which provided important material for this study. I am grateful to Mark Dudgeon at Bloomsbury Methuen Drama and series editor Patrick Lonergan for their invaluable advice and support, and for giving me the opportunity to write this book, which is the result of 30 years of thinking about, writing about, and teaching the works of Tennessee Williams. I would also like to thank my students in two courses on Tennessee Williams at the University of Connecticut in 2011–12. They inspired me with the sense that Williams’s works are exceedingly relevant to life in the twenty-first century and were not only tolerant but enthusiastic as I tried out many of the ideas in this book on them. As always, my husband, George Monteiro, contributed his unique critical acumen at crucial stages and moral support throughout the writing of this book. The University of the South has granted permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts by Tennessee Williams. Copyright © 2013 The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the University of the South, Estate of Tennessee Williams. All rights reserved. ix LIST of ABBREViations C Devlin, Albert J. (ed.), Conversations with Tennessee Williams (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986). CP The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, eds. David Ernest Roessel and Nicholas Rand Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2002). CS Tennessee Williams Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1985). L1 The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume I 1920– 1945, eds. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler (New York: New Directions, 2000). L2 The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume II 1945– 1957, eds. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler (New York: New Directions, 2004). M Memoirs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975). N Tennessee Williams: Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). NSE New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak (New York: New Directions, 2009). P1 Tennessee Williams Plays: 1937–1955 (New York: Library of America, 2000). P2 Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957–1980 (New York: Library of America, 2000). T1-T8 The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, 8 Vols (New York: New Directions, 1971–1992). x IntroDUction As she tries to explain her son Sebastian’s life to Dr Cukrowicz in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Violet Venable says, “his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet. I mean you can’t separate them” (P2: 102). This was famously true of Tennessee Williams. From the time when he made the decision to be a playwright and entered the University of Iowa’s playwriting program in 1937, his life was arranged around writing. His intimate relationships were either short-term liaisons that did not interfere with his work or, as with Frank Merlo and Amado Rodriguez y Gonzales, arrangements in which his partner also served as his “secretary,” or what would now be known as his personal assistant. This is the way he generally referred to Merlo, with whom he shared an intimate 14-year relationship, outside his close circle of friends, and it was not simply a cover for a gay relationship in the homophobic 1950s. He paid him a salary, and it was well known in Williams’s circle that Merlo not only helped with his work, but also ran the household, made the travel arrangements, and generally removed the burdens of everyday life from Williams so he would be free to write without annoyance. The home in Key West, Florida that Williams shared with Merlo, with its little studio built to his specifications for writing, was his favorite and most productive place to work, but his house in New Orleans and the many apartments and hotel suites he occupied after he could afford something more comfortable than a room at the YMCA were also arranged around his writing. Williams traveled often, sometimes by himself, but most often with Merlo or, after Merlo’s death in 1963, with a paid “travel companion” who took care of the details. Besides escape from whatever demands were pressing at the moment, what he was seeking in his travels was a place where he could write, which meant access to a swimming pool where he could get the self-prescribed therapy for his nerves that he found so necessary, as 1 The Theatre of Tennessee Williams well as both new scenes, sensations and experiences, which stimulated his creative juices, and a quiet place where he could be alone with his typewriter in the mornings. As described by many observers, Williams’s daily writing was obsessive. His longtime friend, director Elia Kazan, remarked that, every morning, no matter where he found himself, what condition he was in from the night before, or whom he was with, he would get out of bed, roll a sheet of paper into his portable typewriter, and become Tennessee Williams. This was his life. During the few periods when he experienced writer’s block, he suffered from terrible bouts of anxiety which did not subside until he was able to write again. When Dr Lawrence Kubie, with whom he was in analysis in 1957 and 1958, prescribed a hiatus from writing as a way to “lie fallow” and recharge his creative power, he wrote to Kazan that without his work, he was “unbearably lonely” and his life “unbearably empty” (N: 711).