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Barnett, David. "Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1945–1948 and 1964)." the Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies

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Barnett, David. Barnett, David. "Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1945–1948 and 1964)." The Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014. 64–76. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 24 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472515452.0010>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 24 September 2021, 03:29 UTC. Copyright © Brenda Murphy 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER 4 SUMMER AND SMOKE AND ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE (1945 – 1948 AND 1964) Emotional Paralysis: Summer and Smoke If Th e Glass Menagerie was an attempt to capture Rose Williams on paper, Summer and Smoke was even closer to home. Th roughout his life, Williams would refer to its protagonist, Alma Winemiller, or “ Miss Alma, ” as the character who was most like him. In a 1973 interview, he said that Alma was his favorite, “ because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle. Miss Alma grew up in the shadow of the rectory, and so did I. Her love was intense but too late. Her man fell in love with someone else and Miss Alma turned to a life of profl igacy. I ’ ve been profl igate, but, being a puritan, I naturally tend to exaggerate guilt ” (C: 228). In 1961, he said that Alma ’ s heart palpitations, a condition from which Williams also suff ered, arose from “ caging in something that was really quite diff erent from her spinsterish, puritanical exterior, ” and that the caged fi gure was “ an obsessive fi gure with me as a writer ” (C: 83). Perhaps most tellingly, as he was sailing to Europe after the New York premiere of Summer and Smoke , he wrote in his journal that he was worried about overworking the particular vein in his writing of “ loneliness, eroticism, repression, undefi ned spiritual longings: the intimate material of my own psyche is what I have fi lled my work with, and perhaps built it on ” (N: 489). Th is is a pretty good description of the material of Summer and Smoke . Miss Alma ’ s particular affl iction, her panic attacks, was something Williams knew intimately in the months before and while he was writing the play. In the fall of 1944, faced with the upcoming rehearsals of Th e Glass Menagerie , he was in a state of panic that was understandable, given his experience with Battle of Angels a few years 64 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 6644 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:350:28:35 AAMM Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale earlier. His journal for those months contains many descriptions of his physical symptoms. In October, he wrote that he was “ suff ering a severe case of nerves – physical manifestations – I have attacks of panic – mostly on street – must rush into bars for drinks to steady myself – I get breathless – I have a weight on my chest – how much is sheer anxiety, how much real cardiac symptoms I don ’ t know ” (N: 415). Th ese attacks subsided once the rehearsals actually began, and he found the experience of working with Eddie Dowling and Margo Jones much less trying than working with the Th eatre Guild had been. In the months following the success of Menagerie , Williams experienced a period of depression because, as he wrote in Memoirs , “ I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance. Also, I had spent so much of my energy on the climb to success, that when I had ‘ made it ’ and my play was ‘ the hottest ticket in town, ’ I felt almost no satisfaction ” (M: 92). Pursuing his perennial strategy of travel to escape, he went to Mexico, where he found a good deal of peace throughout the summer. After traveling to New York in September, 1945, and witnessing the mediocre reception accorded by the critics to You Touched Me! , the play he had written with Donald Windham, he returned to New Orleans and the bohemian French Quarter where he felt comfortable. Th e next 2 years were a period of moving among New Orleans, Nantucket, Key West, Provincetown, Los Angeles, and New York, as he worked on the plays that would become A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke , two very diff erent realizations of the themes that were currently obsessing him. Interestingly, it was when he worked on Summer and Smoke , then called “ Chart of Anatomy, ” that his panic attacks returned. In November 1946, he wrote in his journal of the “ nightmarish ” state of his psyche: “ Th e iron jaws of a trap seem to hold me here in a little corner, backing away from panic. I cling to little palliative devices – the swimming pool – the sleeping tablets – reading in bed – sometimes movies – the familiarity of Pancho [Amado Rodriguez y Gonzales] ” (N: 447 – 9). His experience translated directly into Alma ’ s attacks of “ blind panic ” (P1: 579) and “ nervous heart trouble ” (581), her 65 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 6655 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:350:28:35 AAMM The Theatre of Tennessee Williams “ swallowing air ” (582), and her growing dependence on her prescription for sleeping tablets, which Dr John Buchanan warns her could turn her into a “ dope-fi end ” (610), but which she calls “ the telephone number of God ” (642). Williams became anxious while he was working on the play, and he never felt that it fully expressed the experience that he wanted to convey. In April, he wrote to New Directions publisher James Laughlin that the play “ was a disappointment and a pretty bad one. In fact, I was so depressed over it that I am surprised that I was able to go on working. Th e basic conception was very pure and diff erent from anything else I have tried. It was built around an argument over the existence of a ‘ human soul ’ but that got pretty thoroughly lost in a narrative that somehow slipped to the level of magazine fi ction, or worse ” (L2: 93). Williams had worked most intensely on the play during the summer of 1946, which he spent in the company of Carson McCullers in Nantucket, while she worked on the stage adaptation of her novel Th e Member of the Wedding , a productive literary partnership that was reminiscent of the days of the “ literary factory ” he and his friend Clark Mills McBurney had set up in McBurney ’ s St Louis basement. Th e play, originally intended to be produced by Guthrie McClintic for Katharine Cornell, was quickly deemed unsuitable by this grand dame of the theatre. Aesthetically, it was conceived along the lines of Th e Glass Menagerie , with a strong element of modernist subjectivity and a Jo Mielziner set to short-circuit any assumption of realism. Early versions had a narrator, but this idea was soon scrapped in favor of silent fi lm sequences which were to be incorporated into the action. Williams put the silent fi lm sequences in and took them out of the play several times as he worked on it, fi nally eliminating them completely. Th ere are many fragments of these scenes among the Summer and Smoke manuscripts at the University of Texas, including a confrontation between John and his father; a scene in which Alma calls the police about the wild party that John is throwing; and a scene in which Alma helps John give inoculations to cotton pickers to help contain a fever epidemic (N: 446). Th roughout the play ’ s composition, its production by Margo Jones at her Th eatre ’ 47 in Dallas, and its New York premiere, Williams 66 TTheatre.indbheatre.indb 6666 110/11/20130/11/2013 110:28:350:28:35 AAMM Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale continued to be dissatisfi ed with Summer and Smoke at the same time that he had high aspirations for it. At a low point in October 1946, he wrote in his journal that it seemed “ grotesque, a creation of disease ” (N: 445). Writing to Margo Jones from Rome in February 1948, after her Dallas production, he warned her that they should not open the play, which they were co-producing, in the same cities where Streetcar had had its pre-Broadway tryouts because “ I am dead certain that Streetcar is a much, much better play . to me ‘ Summer ’ was a devastating failure in comparison to what I meant it to be, and one of the bitterest I have had. I am talking about the script, you understand ” (L2: 157). In December, 1948, he noted in his journal that the whole history of the play was “ fraught with the most abysmal discouragement: abandoned fi ve or six times, I nevertheless picked it up again each time and went doggedly on with it, and the result is a play that is good enough to impress some people – not myself and not many but some – as the best of the four long plays I ’ ve had presented ” (N: 489). He continued to rewrite the play and radically changed it in the version that would become Eccentricities of a Nightingale , fi rst produced in Nyack, New York, in 1964. While Williams took full responsibility for the weaknesses in the script, he came to blame Margo Jones ’ s direction for failing to fully realize his vision on the stage. Jones was a close friend, and he gave her a great deal of credit for protecting him and Th e Glass Menagerie from the crasser instincts of Eddie Dowling, so he had been eager to have her produce and direct this poetic play to which she was passionately dedicated.
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