Tennessee Williams: Form, Union, Plan
Photo by Jill Krementz |
Tenn was
ready to show me how I could marshal my thoughts and focus my energies. He
hoisted himself from the bed, straightened its mussed coverlet, and spread
across its creamy expanse a blizzard of paper. I watched him methodically place
the pieces on the bed, shift and move them around to suit some
interior logic, to achieve some effect, and then we stood over them, looking at
the scribblings and hoping for some sense to come to either of us.
We looked over the bed for some time. Tenn
then pointed at one piece of paper--ivory-colored stationery from Crane’s--
directing me to read it.
On the sheet were the following lines:
“burning and unashamed,” “in secret,” “my father’s guns,” “flush and fierce,”
and “the power to shape human destiny.” The words were written as if they were
lines of poetry, but they made no sense, until Tenn told me that they were
lines he could remember, could almost see,
as if they were white subtitles, on a black screen on a large movie screen,
from Eva LeGallienne’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, which had starred Ingrid Bergman, had been aired on
television, and had led to a meeting between Tenn and the Swedish actress, whom
he liked and wished to work with.
“I carried those words with me to the meeting,”
Tenn told me, “and I felt they were the starting point for a character of mine. Here I had dismissed Ibsen, had
insulted him directly to LeGallienne, and I can now remember, two decades
later, that there had been words--there had been a performance--that had led me
to believe I could write something, go somewhere new.”
Farther down on the page were more lines:
“The thing I’ve been waiting for all these years,” “the wonderful thing will
happen.” Those lines were from A Doll’s
House, and Tenn could see the genesis of Blanche in those words, which he
could remember hearing from so many productions, understanding the meaning of
them, hurting a bit in his heart on hearing them. “I don’t know why I went back
to Ibsen,” he confessed. “I was thinking of LeGallienne, I suppose; trying to
regain a youthful mind, hungry and dismissive.”
On another creamy page: “Weekends, like
life, are short,” the origin of which escaped Tenn on that day, but which I
would learn later came from the Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets. “It’s a good line,” Tenn thought. “A good
line to have open a scene. It came to me. It returned to me.”
On a piece of onionskin: “There is no
beauty here: only death and decay,” a line from Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With A Zombie, although Tenn
did not know that at the time; it had simply stuck with him, had a rhythm he
liked, and a sentiment with which he agreed. He had also written “carnival
music, sadness, music and sugar in the air, and that feeling, heavy on Sunday
afternoons, that play was coming to an end, and the punishments of the real
world were imminent, ready, anxious, and we all, unaware, await their
assignments.”
On an index card: “Congo Square. A shout
to…God, nature, or to perform.”
On a piece of yellow, lined paper he had
written “Buy a candle for your loved one,” under which was written “beautiful
boy,” and in the margin, at an angle and with pressure that indicated it had
occurred to him later and had been hastily added, was the word “Beaurevel.” It
took me almost fifteen years to learn that these lines were evoked from the
film My Forbidden Past, set in New
Orleans, and starring Ava Gardner as Barbara Beaurevel.
On a piece of paper that appeared to have
been pulled, with some effort, from a journal, Tenn had written “All rooms are
lonely when there’s only one person,” which I recognized from Summer and Smoke, but next to it was
written “Isabella Street--Our Lady of Victories/Marist Fathers.”
Another address? Yes, Tenn told me. There
had been a tryst, on Isabella Street, in Boston, deep in the night, a night
that was lavender and cool, and in the brightness of day, he had walked out of
the apartment of the young man, whose handsomeness intimidated him and made him
feel plain and old, and right across the street was an ornate doorway and a
sign indicating that it was an entrance to Our Lady of Victories. “Irony and
amatory exhaustion all at once,” Tenn remembered, “and that is where, I think,
Alma Winemiller was born.”
All across the bed, in different colors of
ink, in handwriting that varied from schoolboy neat to anxious to angry were a
variety of sentiments and quotes.
“The aim of art is to represent not the
outward appearance of things, but their inward significance, for this and not
the external mannerism and detail, is their reality.” It was attributed to
Aristotle, and was firmly written across a clean and faded piece of paper.
“From Kazan,” Tenn said, “years ago.”
“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one
reaches simplicity in spite of oneself by approaching the real meaning of
things.” A quote from Brancusi and given to him by Jane Smith, and which he had
carried with him for years. In a fainter hand, in pencil, was written the name
Bartlett Hayes. When I asked Tenn about the name, he could not recall the quote
from the man, but he recalled loving it. I found it years later, and Jane Smith
would confirm it for me: “At least twice in the past, Western civilization has
altered its solid appearing environment to emphasize the world of the spirit:
it overlaid the structure of early church architecture with the tangibility of
color provided by the Byzantine mosaic. It converted the heavy stones of the
Romanesque church into the mystical glass of the Gothic cathedral. In his
search for the inner Truth, modern man has penetrated the structure of solid
matter and finds there space and energy of which his five senses give him no
inkling.”
Another page: “A play about Christ. The
man, not the icon or the savior, but the man, flawed and giving and hunted.”
Beneath this precis were these lines
of poetry:
“The healing of
His seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life’s throng and press,
And we are whole again.”
Tenn had written “Whittier,” and he meant
John Greenleaf Whittier and the poem “Our Master.” On the bottom of the page
were these lines, attributed to Walt Whitman:
Do
you see, oh my brothers and sisters?
It
is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--
It
is eternal life--it is happiness.
In
this earth of ours,
Amid
the measureless grossness and slag,
Enclosed
and safe within its central heart,
Nestles
the seed of perfection.
“Title of Christ play: Grossness and
Slag: A Tale of the Christ.”
The words were dizzying. Plot outlines.
Opening lines of plays or short stories or novellas. Stage directions,
Descriptions of the face of an actress. Questions about a Ouija board.
Speculation on the spiritual carnage that might or might not reside,
intrinsically, at 10050 Cielo Drive or at the El Palacio apartments, and how
Lillian Gish and Stella Adler might have both been, if only temporarily, privy
to evidence of supernatural or demonic influence. I looked at Tenn and his face
was pale and his eyes were darting across the notes he had written. His lower
lip was pulled into his mouth and he was working it as if chewing a cud.
I remember that I asked this question: “What
is all this?”
“This,” he replied quickly, “is proof of
what I need to remember, and what I need to master. It is also the most
important thing I can teach you--that you can take away from this time we’ve
spent together.”
Form, union, plan.
Writing, life, death--everything, he
stressed, once again--is navigation. Getting from one place to another,
traveling safely and wisely, driving and walking defensively, seeing the
sights, observing the customs and the civilities, and then finding the way home
again, safely and in one’s right mind, and recounting what has been seen and
smelled and felt and learned.
You form it; you bring it together; you
navigate it across a page.
There were lines on pieces of paper and
there were lines on the counter of the bathroom, and they might both allow
Tenn’s mind to recall what he saw and felt and who he was and wanted to be on
Isabella Street, on Coliseum, on Royal, in Clarksdale or St. Louis, or,
he pointed out, “here and now with whatever is left to work with.”
He paused a moment. “You ask me what all
this is, and it’s just the notes of a man--a writer, yes--who’s lost his way.
What is that great line Forster had about Cavafy?”
I did not know the line.
“Oh, find it if you can. It suits me
perfectly, and I wish I could have it here, among my travel notes, for my
mental dopp kit.”
Tenn looked at me. It was a look that
managed to be sad and sweet and thoughtful. I felt he was considering
something--a dismissal or a reappraisal. Instead, he clasped his hands together
and announced that he believed we could get something from the notes on the
bed, and I could get something from our time together. “I believe, foolish
though it may be,” he announced, “that I can find my way.”
The E.M. Forster quote about Cavafy, which I
found later, reads “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely
motionless at a slight angle to the universe.”
© 2015 by James Grissom
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