TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Funke, Lewis
Tennessee Williams and The Age of Anxiety by LEWIS FUNKE EVER SINCE that memorable night during the spring of 1945-46 when his The Glass Menagerie took wing on the stage of the Playhouse on...
...The course of events is inevitable...
...We lived as well as anyone else...
...Perhaps, if I settled in some country that I liked, such as Italy, I would eventually absorb enough of it to find a new vein...
...Even success—and he already has had more than is given to most—has not given him peace...
...I write about deeply troubled people...
...Leave it to Williams to pack his plays with challenge, to express what he himself is—a lonely, driven man, haunted, as he once remarked, by the ghosts of his ancestors, a plight in which he feels all of us are kin...
...If we walked far enough west we came into the region of fine residences set in beautiful lawns...
...Charges that his characters are sordid irritate him into sharp defense...
...I write of the South," he says, "because the South is where my roots are...
...His grandfather, with whom he lived, was the Episcopal clergyman...
...Gradually, my health broke down...
...He took a clerical job in the shoe company that employed his father...
...If you ask what my politics are, I am a humanitarian...
...It won for me the Critics Circle Prize and the Pulitzer Prize...
...Under that name, too, he published a good deal of lyric poetry that was a "bad imitation of Edna St...
...They don't seem to want or appreciate," he laments, "the value of the catharsis that serious drama affords...
...The woman, too long miserable and alone, physically and spiritually, eventually arranges a liaison with the young man—one that must, as Williams so beautifully sets the action, end in disaster...
...When Williams was about twelve, his father, a traveling salesman, was appointed to an office position in St...
...There never was a moment when I did not find life immeasurably exciting to experience and to witness, however difficult it was to sustain...
...Critical reaction from the professionals has been mixed...
...The only good days he knows are those on which he is writing and writing well...
...It produced a shock and a rebellion that has become inherent in my work...
...He is saying, too, that all of us are condemned to solitary confinement within our own skins for the duration of our lives...
...But I am not an evangelical moralist...
...Again he began taking odd jobs which included running an all-night elevator in a big apartment hotel, waiting on tables and reciting verse in Greenwich Village, working as a teletype operator for the U.S...
...It was, he says with a touch of remorse, "a tragic move...
...I am not a polemical writer...
...She was troubled...
...He calls it Orpheus Descending and, although it clearly does not rate with his top grade efforts—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-^—it is far and away superior to most of the contemporary products through which we sit during the course of a season...
...Williams entered college during the depression but was obliged to drop out after a few years because of financial difficulties...
...A short, stocky little man—diffident almost to the point of shyness—Williams is not one to deny his own restlessness, his own questing for peace...
...This state of the world and of its people troubles Williams evermore because of what he believes to be its adverse effect on the American theater...
...The town, he says, was so dignified and reserved that there was a saying, only slightly exaggerated, that you had to live there a whole year before a neighbor would smile at you on the street...
...The physical and mental wear and tear are frightening, and some day maybe I will not write any more...
...I sat with him in a bar the night before the opening of Orpheus Descending and it was clear that his tensions were not only those generally known to affect playwrights on the eve of an opening night...
...Although Williams' South appears as a sullen, dark, and morbid place, Williams does not mean to preach to it...
...It is my best play...
...Tell me who was sordid in The Glass Menagerie...
...No, my people are not sordid...
...Louis...
...For Williams there is always tension, doubtless even on the best days of his life...
...The story is spare and clean...
...In the South we had never been conscious of the fact that we were economically less fortunate than others...
...In The Rose Tattoo Serafina was earthy and sensual...
...the characters of his plays with their tensions and conflicts are his catharsis, too...
...I think if most people look at others they'll see trouble under the skin...
...degree from the University of Iowa in 1938...
...Life has been considerably easier to sustain since The Glass Menagerie...
...I am glad that I received this bitter education for I don't think any writer has much purpose back of him unless he feels bitterly the inequities of the society in which he lives...
...But it was forced upon my consciousness at the most sensitive age of childhood...
...There is an increasing tension and anxiety in people I know...
...I don't know...
...Yet, even the damners cannot escape the concession that Williams is a master...
...One of the disturbingly few serious voices in the theater, his plays since The Glass Menagerie have been among the season's front rank events...
...This is the age of anxiety...
...They gave him "first-hand knowledge of what it means to be a small wage-earner in a hopelessly routine job...
...Its prime deficiency is its failure to emerge with an over-all illumination, with something to move us by its theme and male us feel deeply the tragic fate of its characters...
...Is that sordid...
...But for Williams the quest for it, the uneasiness of it, go on...
...The fact that his plays and the movies such as Baby Doll have been ill-received in the South troubles him —but this will not change him...
...Neither my sister nor I could adjust ourselves to life in a Midwestern city...
...Whether theater-goers find it worth their while Temains to be seen...
...Christened Thomas Lanier Williams, the playwright concedes that it was a nice enough name, "perhaps a little too nice...
...It is not difficult to understand...
...I think she was rather noble...
...I do not belong with those who see in it another sample of Williams' full power...
...In fact, he wrote a few sonnets before he was twelve and his first literary award was $25 from a woman's club for writing three sonnets dedicated to spring...
...My problem is special, though it is not unique...
...I wrote A Streetcar Named Desire very early in my career...
...And yet, I found myself deeply engrossed, throughout its three acts, by Williams' account of a guileless guitar player and a woman shopkeeper, to whom he brings a renewal of life...
...I can feel it more than I can feel other places...
...The doctor said I couldn't go back to the shoe company...
...Vincent Millay...
...I remember gangs of kids following me home and yelling 'Sissy,' and home was not a very pleasant refuge...
...Williams' first real recognition came in 1940 when he received a Rockefeller Fellowship and wrote Battle of Angels, which never reached Broadway and is the basis for the current Orpheus Descending...
...When I came home from work," he says, "I would tank up on black coffee so I could remain awake most of the night, writing short stories which would not sell...
...All the while he kept "writing, writing, not with any hope of making a living at it but because I found no other means of expressing things that seemed to demand expression...
...Then I began to have a little success with my writing and I became self-sufficient...
...I have no acquaintance with political and social dialectics...
...Undoubtedly some of the spell was woven by* Williams' gift for language and his ability to create strong and violent people...
...I am a moralist, yes...
...As he fidgeted with his cigarette holder—"I've been told not to smoke," he laughed—he noted that writing has become harder for him as he has grown older...
...I love living in the South more than the North or the Midwest...
...I find," he remarked a bit sadly, "that each of my plays since The Menagerie takes more and more out of me...
...For him writing is a catharsis...
...life, that most people settle for make-believe answers—love among them...
...My own reactions are mixed...
...Tennessee Williams and The Age of Anxiety by LEWIS FUNKE EVER SINCE that memorable night during the spring of 1945-46 when his The Glass Menagerie took wing on the stage of the Playhouse on Broadway, Tennessee Williams has been a major force in the American theater, a genius with words, a conjurer of dark and brooding worlds...
...The family left the rectory and moved north...
...It has power enough, and in its dark reverie it manages a dash of humor —not always present in Williams' work—and also of beauty...
...He takes a dim view of the chances for a serious stage now because this very stress and anxiety in life are driving more and more people to seek escapist entertainment...
...These things can be very beautiful, I have always thought...
...He makes no secret of the restless seeking...
...Everything else is variation...
...A playwright usually has only one or two major veins to tap...
...Louis we suddenly discovered there were two kinds of people, the rich and the poor, and that we belonged more to the latter...
...The big hope now for the American theater is the off-Broadway theater which must keep alive the tradition of the serious drama...
...I love the tempo of life there...
...His mother was descended from Quakers...
...It has everything in it that I have to say...
...When he grew up, Williams says, he realized the poetry wasn't much good and "I felt that the name had been compromised, so I changed it to Tennessee Williams, the justification being mainly that the Williamses had fought the Indians for Tennessee and I already had discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages...
...His latest is no exception...
...The two years he spent in that corporation were "indescribable torment" to him as an individual but "of immense value" to him as a writer...
...The school children made fun of our Southern speech and manners...
...After the closing of the play his health was once again impaired, and when Selective Service examined him he wound up 4-F...
...I have absorbed the South...
...But where we lived, to which we must always return, were ugly rows of apartment buildings the color of dried blood and mustard...
...But in St...
...It was a perpetually dim little apartment in a wilderness of identical brick and concrete structures with no grass and no trees nearer than the park...
...I've yet to find people I didn't think were deeply troubled...
...But I do not belong with those who feel that it lacks power...
...If I had been born to this situation I might not have resented it deeply...
...I put myself through two more years of college and received a B.A...
...It sounds like it might belong to the sort of writer who turns out sonnet sequences to spring...
...I don't think deeply troubled people are sordid...
...Good or bad, they all have borne the unmistakable impress of his talent...
...Roughly," he likes to tell you, "there was a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in my blood, which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write about...
...As soon as that was settled I went back South to live with my grandparents in Memphis, where they had moved since my grandfather's retirement from the ministry...
...Before then and for a couple of years afterward I did a good deal of traveling around and I held a great number of part-time jobs of great diversity...
...What I write of the South is what I know and feel about the South...
...I try to write of life as I see it and I try to write of it as purely as I can...
...His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, came on one side from pioneer stock and on the other from early settlers of Nantucket, off the New England coast...
...Through the whole action and mood Williams is saying that ugliness and meanness and cruelty abound on this earth, that essentially everyone is lonely, looking for an answer to LEWIS FUNKE Is drama editor of the New York Times...
...Her husband, a narrow, gruff, and evil bully who married her after her father was burned to death (he was in the pack that burned the wine garden in which the man died), has just returned from a serious operation...
...Around this simple tale he has woven the fabric of the town—the mean, cruel, ugly inhabitants who distrust everyone beyond their boundaries, who could not recognize beauty even though it were thrust at them, who scratch and kill like animals...
...Having said this, Williams nastily added, "But don't bet on it...
...Miss Alma in Summer and Smoke was almost a puritan...
...A wandering guitar player, a lad who has learned some of the unhappy truths of life (that, for instance, "nobody ever gets to really know anybody") arrives at a moment when the woman shopkeeper needs a man to help in the store...
...It was the beginning of the social consciousness which I think has marked most of my writing...
...In this business," he said as he sipped his drink, "there always is the need to surpass what you've done before, or at least be as good...
...Engineers in Jacksonville, Florida, serving as waiter and cashier for a small restaurant in New Orleans, and ushering at the Strand movie house on Broadway...
...One day coming home from work, I collapsed and was taken to the hospital...
...I don't think Blanche DuBois (Streetcar) was sordid...
...Williams wrote consistently while he was working for the shoe company...
...He is troubled only as a man is troubled when he believes he has been misunderstood...
...There is no way to tell whether it will ever bring him the answers and the peace he seeks...
...Tennessee Williams was born in 1916 in the Episcopal rectory in Columbus, Mississippi, an old town on the Tombigbee River...
...The setting for the play is the kind of Southern town that dominates so much of Williams' work...
...I think most of us have deep troubles...
Vol. 21 • May 1957 • No. 5
