Submitting Self to Flame: The Artist's Quest in Tennessee Williams, 1935-1954

Author(s): Robert Skloot

Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1973), pp. 199-206
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3205870
Accessed: 08-02-2017 20:11 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Educational Theatre Journal

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 ROBERT SKLOOT

Submitting Self to Flame:

The Artist's Quest in
Tennessee Williams, 1935-1954

This essay will concentrate on the first twenty years of Tennessee Williams'
playwright, poet, and short story writer, giving particular attention to hi
with the dilemma of the artist in the modern world. As we shall see, it is the
according to Williams, undertakes the challenge of answering the crucial questi
How can unity or cohesion be imposed on the various facets of social disju
Williams' early plays and stories, before his work became burdened with the
romantic escapism and sexual sensationalism, the answer to this question is m
and most urgent. What this answer is, and what moral and aesthetic imp
conveys, will be the subject of this essay.

In an article "On a Streetcar Named Success," Williams describes his own situation as
"a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw
fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good
life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created." The
metaphor which Williams uses here, that of climbing out of an abyss, is appropriate in its
description of his view of the human condition. He sees man's life in terms of an
unending struggle against those mighty forces which would tear man from his innate
nobility and break his desire for truth.

The objective of Williams' work, and the work he urges us to make our objective, is the
creation of a humane freedom out of the ashes of experience. CGitics who have taken such
pains to relate the characters or events in Williams' work to his biography are merely
saying what Williams has himself known and proclaimed from the start of his career: that
he is part of humanity, differing from most men only in his sensitivity and in his ability
to describe his feelings in dramatic or poetic terms. Nevertheless, we too are obligated to
create a humane world out of the pieces of the social order; we are responsible for forging
the humane environment in which man can live. As Esther Jackson has written: "For
Williams, reality itself lies shattered. In the fragmentary world of his theatre, new images
are pieced together from partialities: they are composed from splinters of broken
truths." 2 Further, to say that the struggle has purpose is to say that life also has purpose,
an important staterhent in a world which is seen by other men and other artists as
meaningless and absurd.

Robert Skloot is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison.

In American Playwrights on Drama, ed. Horst Frenz (New York, 1965), p. 63.
2 The Broken World of Tennessee Williams (Madison, 1965), p. 36.

199 /

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 200 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

Williams describes art as benevolent anarchy, "benevolent," he writes, "in the sense of
constructing something which is missing." 3 This is a key concept in understanding him
and the worlds of his artistic creation. First, the concept suggests that the function of art
is to describe a higher level of reality to the audience for whom he writes and of whom he
is always aware. This is an ancient idea, classical in the truest sense, for it defines the
artist's mission as a noble and indispensible one. That mission-the creation of a higher
and more permanent vision of reality which can oppose the cruel reality of daily life-is
the artist's work according to Williams. To construct that missing part of human existence
which awards meaning and provides comfort in an unfriendly world is work in which he
invites all men to share. Like many of his characters he wants company in his arduous
task. The work is lonely and painful but necessary and significant; without artists to
dream and hope, and without audiences to share in the dream and hope, humanity will go
over to the beasts.

There is another aspect of his "constructing something which is missing." Not only is
it the task of the artist, it is also the motivating drive of Williams' characters. For the
all-inclusive characteristic which they have in common is their sense-sometimes vague,
sometimes clear-that their lives are tainted by the sense of a void at their core. Williams
calls this our "invisible ballast" in his poem "The Man in the Dining Car." This absence
manifests itself in other significant ways.

Williams' characters, in story, poem, or drama, are physically incomplete, the

physiological emblem of their psychological or spiritual truncation. In his stories, Oliver
Winemiller (in "One Arm") dies in the electric chair, a "broken Apollo." The poet, in the
story of that name, feels his approaching death in the pain of his broken body and
compels the children, his audience, "to understand the rapture of vision and how it could
let a man break out of his body." Anthony Burns is broken in the hands of his black
savior-destroyer (in "Desire and the Black Masseur"), and as a final gesture is the object
of his own cannibalistic sacrifice. In the drama, Laura's limp and Big Daddy's cancer are
more familiar to us. They and others represent all the maimed inhabitants of the world
who are spoken of in the refrain of the poem "Carrousel Tune": "The freaks of the
cosmic circus are men." 4

"Freaks" is the harsh word which inspires Williams to create his most troubled
characters. The word is organized society's term for the incomplete people whose
presence irritates and disturbs the vulgar and insensitive "normality." These "freaks"
become victims of the world's cruelty, cruelty which often is manifested in the
destruction of individual freedom, often seen in the denial of sanctuary or rest. Thus,
Lucio in "The Malediction," the narrator in "The Angel in the Alcove," Miss Lucretia
Collins in Portrait of a Madonna, Joe, the writer in The Long Goodbye, the title character
in Hello from Bertha, the lady of Larkspur Lotion, Aunt Rose in The Long Story Cut
Shbort, Jacques Casanova and the Wingfields are all either evicted or threatened with

3 Quoted in Tennessee Williams, "Something wild...," Intro. to 27 Wagon Loads Full of Cotton
(New York, 2nd ed., 1953), pp. vii-viii.
4 The poetry quoted in this essay is found in the volume In the Winter of Cities (New York, 1964).
The stories to which I refer are found in two collections, One Arm and Other Stories (New York,
1948) and Hard Candy (New York, 1954). The plays are found in numerous single and anthologized
editions. The title of this essay is taken from Williams' poem "Part of a Hero."

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 201 / WILLIAMS, 1935-1954

eviction from their places of refuge by the greedy or insensitive representatives of

organized society. Their predicament is stated in the poem "Lament for the Moths":

Enemies of the delicate everywhere

Have breathed a pestilent mist into the air.

The condition of Williams' characters stimulates them to embark on what may be

called a "quest for completion" which may take one of two forms: a personal, often
sexual, experience which can transcend the misery of an unfulfilled heart, or a spiritual
encounter which will place them in a position to respond to the higher vision, the artist's
vision, which their encounter will produce. Myra, in "The Field of Blue Children,"
attempting to pacify the hungry desire for meaning, turns to poetry. In the story "The
Night of the Iguana," it is to account for something missing that Miss Edith Jelkes, on the
hot night of the storm, ventures down the verandah to engage in something other than
her "real gift for vicarious experience." Cora and Billy, the lusting, drunken couple in
"Two on a Party," roam all over America in search of the "lyric quarry." Moony, who
has "some original ideas about some things," in the intense frustration of his empty life
cries out to his wife, "My God, Jane, I want something more," and nearly tears himself
free to search for that missing part of himself. In the story "The Important Thing," Flora
speculates about her life to come: "Again and again later on the search would be made,
the effort to find something outside of common experience, digging and rooting among
the formless rubble for the one lost thing that was altogether lovely. .. ."

A state of incompletion, then, is the condition of the oppressed people who inhabit
Williams' world, and their struggle to overcome their condition is the action which his art
describes. The unique part of his vision is that it is infused with a compassion for the
plight of his characters which reaches to the deepest part of our understanding; it gives his
early work a brooding often melancholic texture which no other American playwright
possesses. But rather than detracting from the quality of his art, this compassion enriches
it because it is based on an indomitable belief, an insistent faith in the worth of the most
fragile and broken human soul. Perhaps this is Williams' special contribution to the
American drama: his intuition of, and insistence on the value, significance, and necessity
of the broken pieces of humanity.5

In his early drama, not the lowest creature is exempt from the responsibility to create
his dream of a better world. For Laura and Casanova, for Moony and Bertha, for Crazy
Willie and Alma, and for all the "maimed creatures deformed and mutilated" to whom La
Madrecita refers, there is compassion and understanding; they are victims, and this is the
lot of all people who possess the artistic temperament.

II

It is Gutman in Ten Blocks on the Camino Real who, at the "moment when we look
into ourselves.. . with a wonder which never is lost altogether," asks the important
questions: "Can this be all? Is this it? Is this what the glittering wheels of the heavens
turn for?" The answers to these questions are given by Williams' characters as they

s "The answer given by Williams reflects the gradual usurpation of the pagan idea of tragedy by the
Christian concept of human worth." Esther M. Jackson, p. 87.

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 202 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

respond to the anguish of life with three interlocking strategies: (1) the search for love or
togetherness, (2) the quest for purity, and (3) the discovery of beauty. These modi
operandi are, by turn, the physiological, moral, and spiritual actions which comprise the
plots of his stories and his plays; they are a response to the three forces which oppose the
success and happiness of the characters in Williams' work: (1) society, (2) the characters'
own personal limitations, and (3) time.

The search for togetherness is the strategy which awards solace and comfort to life. All
of Williams' people who are possessed of and plagued by the artistic temperament are
reaching out to make contact with others, with creatures who are often as incomplete as
those who initiate the contact. Simply, if the world is an unfriendly and cold place to live
in, there is warmth and comfort in deep, trusting companionship; the idea of
togetherness, and even love, is very alive in Williams' work. His fragile people seek each
other out; whatever anguish they feel, they know that the pain of life can be softened in
the presence of others who are similarly pained, as we hear in the concluding lines of the
poem "The Interior of the Pocket":

The way small animals nudge one another at night,

as though to whisper,
We're close! There is still no danger!

The scenes where lonely and hurt creatures reach out to each other are the most
touching in Williams' work. Pitted against the strength, the cupidity and the vulgarity of
the organized world, they often have only their numbers with which to face the
onslaught. They are the moths, the roses, the stars, the leaves, the earth which gather in
order to ward off the enemy: the predators, the winds, the night, and the frost which
seeks their destruction. They are usually fugitives against their will and often the aged
fighting to glimpse their youth for the last time.

In "The Important Thing," Flora and John, after their sexual encounter, touch each
other and understand that they are "unable to help each other except through knowing,
each completely separate and alone-but no longer strangers. .. ." "The Strangest Kind of
Romance" refers to the Little Man and his sole companion, an alleycat, to which he says:
"As long as we stick together there's nothing to fear. There's only danger when two who
belong together get separated." This is the realization which Grace and Cornelia come to
in "Something Unspoken." Cora and Billy, questing for "the lyric quarry," come to rest
in seedy motels, "in the night, hands clasping and no questions asked. In the morning, a
sense of being together no matter what comes...." A similar relationship exists between
Kamrowski and his half-Indian mistress whose nicknames and natures are exactly
complementary: Rubio y Morena; in "The Vine," Rachel returns to Donald because only
in being together in the hard times that have befallen them can they endure the sorrows
of existence. In the Lady of Larkspur Lotion it is the alcoholic writer who befriends and
sustains Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore, as does the Porter the lunatic and destitute Miss Lucretia
Collins before she is packed off to the asylum in Portrait of a Madonna. Moony remains
in his bleak apartment, cradling his child to protect it from evil, standing among the
debris like the hobby horse, strong, beautiful, but impractical, wooden, and stationary.
With good reason do Williams' plays, stories and poems take place in motels, hotels,
rooming houses, whorehouses, or decrepit and crumbling houses, for it is in these
environments that his transients are most vulnerable and most desperate to touch another

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 203 / WILLIAMS, 1935-1954

wandering creature before they are evicted, committed, or destroyed, all the while
contesting to the limits of their fragile strength the demons of greed, drink, bad luck,
disease, and death.

Williams' characters confront another common enemy in their search for togetherness:
time. He is concerned with time in two ways. First, he believes in the artist's ability to
freeze time in order to create the timeless higher vision of reality. Second, he asserts that
we, as artists and audiences, are constantly aware of the inescapable fact of our own
mortality and this compels us to attempt to create that timeless vision. In Williams' work
it is the terror of growing old that filters so often into his characters' consciousness, and it
is this terror which lends urgency to the conflicts which show man attempting to fill his
life, or at least prolong the "quest for completion." "The diminishing influence of life's
destroyer, time, must be somehow worked into the context of the play," writes
Williams.6

There is no worse pain in Williams' world than that felt when looking back on life and
feeling only emptiness, in scrutinizing the pilgrimage and seeing no traces of existence left
behind. The fame and success represented by Mr. Charlie's solid gold watches gives way to
the inescapable fact that he is timing the few remaining moments on the many remaining
timepieces gathered during his wandering, unmemorable life. Much of Williams'
symbolism grows out of this concern, especially the symbols taken from nature and thus
naturally incorporating "the short bloom and the long fading out" as it is expressed in the
story "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio."

Williams would have it that a way to postpone the coming of death is through the
imagination. As a last resort, we can recede into memory and relive through the
imagination the time when life had purpose, love, hope, and beauty. As T. S. Eliot knew,
time the destroyer is also time the sustainer. For Williams' characters, for Amanda,
Marguerite and Serafina, the past (often embellished and exaggerated) is a refuge, a world
which promises if not salvation, at least the opportunity to disguise the harsh truth of the
present.

The world of gentlemen callers, of Southern hospitality on rich Delta plantations is a

sanctuary, a place which acknowledges, as Williams insists we understand, that the
possibilities in life for beauty and purity and love ultimately reside in and issue from the
human imagination. In this way Williams' characters are at one with their creator and
their lives are identical with his. In their self-contained, artificial worlds, pain can be eased
when the imagination is applied to the transformation of everyday experience, of ugliness
into loveliness, of cruelty into courtesy, of occurrences into events. Art "snatches the
eternal out of the desperately fleeting," and violets break rocks when sown by the
imagination.

Thus, the final two strategies employed by Williams' characters, the quest for purity
and the discovery of beauty, have the power to fill the void in lives which are incomplete.
When all else fails, purity and beauty depend on the power of the imagination, they reside
in the province of the artist. Whether the struggle to secure them is successful or not,

6 Tennessee Williams, "The Timeless World of the Play," intro. to The Rose Tattoo and reprinted in
American Playwrights on Drama, p. 88.

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 204 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

these qualities describe for Williams, his characters, and for us, values in a corrupt and
cruel society; the imaginative recreation of them is the proof that they are always
possible.

It is natural, then, that many of Williams' characters are employed (or unemployed) as
artists, writers and poets. They are the special, sensitive people who work at in public
what all of us (as Williams would have it) must do in private. They search for beauty
professionally, and thereby engage in the most noble of human endeavors; "to the poet,"
writes Signi Falk, Williams "has given a nobler sense of values and a compassion for
humanity." 7 When life's ugliness becomes unbearable, it can be transformed through the
imagination, as Tom Wingfield, scribbler of verses, attempts to do. In coming to the
defense of the "Lady of Larkspur Lotion," the writer comes to the defense of all creators
of beauty: "Is she to be blamed because it is necessary for her to compensate for the
cruel deficiences of reality by the exercise of a little-what shall I say?-God-given
imagination?" Two aging spinsters are supported only by the apocryphal love letter of the
poet Byron. Joe struggles at his typewriter to order his life through memory before he
takes his long goodbye. Myra in "The Field of Blue Children" cries out the poets' truth:
"Words are a net to catch beauty! " The music of the brilliant violinist Richard sustains a
young woman in the moment of her greatest trial in "The Resemblance Between a Violin
Case and a Coffin." Kamrowski, Alma, even Kilroy who writes his testament on a wall,
are special people for Williams, for he knows that artists struggle hardest and it is they
who suffer most. He knows this because he is one of them.

III

If the artist struggles to create beauty, the non-artist is under no less an obligation to
discover it and preserve it in the world around him. We all live, says Williams, under the
same obligation and must act to save ourselves through the aesthetic transcendence of
time, the creation of something missing, and the perception and protection of beauty. As
men and as artists, he declares, we need to establish an enclave where the imagination can
range free and fearlessly. We need to demand of society and of ourselves a place where we
can see our dreams played out; we must insist, however antisocial this behavior may be,
on certain prerogatives which are ours by virtue of our humanity.

Beauty, purity, and love exist in Williams' world, forged by the creative will of the
artist, discovered and preserved through the agency of the imagination. And so we come
to the crucial points: that Williams' struggle is identical with his characters' struggle, that
in telling their story, he tells his and humanity's, that his art is the witness and proof that
man's struggle is necessary and significant, and that it promises hope and is itself evidence
of hope for the impoverished spirit of man. Williams writes of the possibilities of art in a
poem called "The Legend":
Those stunted bushes,
the ones with the hard red berries,
accepted the fire almost as a benediction,

7 Tennessee Williams (New York, 1961), p. 164. Falk continues: "The poet is always the romantic
who rebels against conventions and who demands for himself a wild freedom which is incompatible
with an urban society."

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 205 / WILLIAMS, 1935-1954

and passed it on,

from tree to little tree,
from branch to branch,
till silently all the hillside quivered with light.

Because beauty is such a fragile thing, Williams knows it can be found in the strangest
places, just as he knows how easily it may be destroyed. On the simplest, physiological
level, its enemy is disease, the reason why so many of his characters, especially the
beautiful characters, suffer from a wide assortment of sicknesses. The Poet has a broken
body, Oliver Winemiller has one arm. The Old Man in "The Strangest Kind of Romance"
is a sightless visionary: "That's all that life has to give in the way of perfection," he says,
"The warm and complete understanding of two or three in a close-walled room with the
windows blind to the world." Bertha's debilitating illness is never named, nor is the
wasting disease of the half-Indian mistress who sustains the life of Kamrowski. The
Violinist Richard, so beautiful in his youth, is suddenly cut down by pneumonia. The
extraordinary body of Pablo Gonzales in "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" turns to fat. Dr.
Grey in Three Players of a Summer Game dies of a brain hemmorhage, and the man who
takes Mary Louise Grey as his mistress, the handsome Brick Pollitt (who appears later in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) drowns his beauty in alcohol. Moony's wife Jane has an infection
of the breast, all-American Kilroy has a heart as big as the head of a baby, Big Daddy is
being devoured by cancer.
These various malignancies from which Williams' people suffer describe not only the
crippled nature of mankind, but the omnipresent threat to the beauty which mankind
inherently possesses. Still, no matter how mendacious is society, no matter how cruel is
nature, man for Williams has the capability to become beautiful; in this way, man is the
instrument of his own salvation. "It is well to remember," reads a line in his poem "A
Wreath for Alexandra Molostvova," "the chill of the vault made warm by the entrance of
roses." The appearance of disease insures the presence of the thing diseased, the demise of
beauty calls back the time when it flourished. It is the poet who, by transforming and
intensifying everyday experience into a higher vision of every man's possibilities, is the
one who is vulnerable to the greatest pain. His obligation, sacred and inescapable, is
fraught with danger. But hurt is a price that must be paid, and so we realize the other
reason for the appearance of the deformed or dying people in Williams' work: the
bringers of fire are burned by their gift, but in such a way that even pain can be endured
because of the purpose which caused it. The wounds mark them as men cursed but not to
be cursed, for they are heroic in the true Promethean sense. They labor to purify the
world through their own destruction. This is the meaning in the opening lines of the
poem "Part of a Hero":

I don't suppose that he will be able to build those

fires much longer
as part of himself must burn like a match struck to light them
and yet I continue to see him every morning
collecting dry sticks for his tiny conflagration.

IV

No work better summarizes Williams' artistic quest than the short play The
Purification. At its conclusion, the specific truth sought after by the court has been

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 206 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

achieved, bur forever concealed in the deaths of the Rancher and the Son. The judge
turns to the audience, not to the court, steps outside the drama and says, "The play is
done! " What we see in The Purification is not only the search for truth by an imaginary
community, but the search for truth and purity on the part of the poet. The truths by
which man lives and the poetic truths to which the playwright attests are joined in the
Judge's final remark. In the dramatic action of this theatrical event, the characters and
their creator both speak to us of man's obligation to seek truth, to struggle to create a
humane environment in which man can live. Human dignity and self-respect, purity of
heart and devotion to one's vision of truth are what has value and meaning to Williams
and his characters. Cruel and mendacious people, like Luisa in this play, can never
understand this, and the Rancher and the Son who both understand and possess these
values are unable to articulate them. So it is left to Williams the poet to describe the truth
for the rest of the characters and the audience, by creating the experience of beauty and
the vision of purity which man must have to survive and to flourish. What is being
described here and elsewhere is the function of art, for it is through art that the world
achieves its purification. The Judge understands and concludes as we must:
we seem to have bred

some feeling of honor amongst us,

deeper than law.
That is good.

This content downloaded from 147.210.116.181 on Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:11:55 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms