Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (62 page)

Period of Adjustment
, directed by George Roy Hill, felt like a hit in Philadelphia; then, in New Haven, a frost settled “on more than the pumpkins,” according to Williams. “I crept around like that man who’d slaughtered 5,000,000 Jews in Nazi Germany, I drank a quart of liquor a day; and then the bleeding started. . . . Only Thornton Wilder and his sweet old maid sister were nice to us there,” he wrote to St. Just. Nonetheless,
Period of Adjustment
opened on Broadway on November 10, 1960.
The
New Yorker
was the most virulent of the lukewarm press in its disapproval, referring to the play as “a turbid stew of immiscible ingredients.” The rest of the reviews were sufficient for
Period of Adjustment
to eke out 132 performances and to secure a movie sale. “I figure that I have had my day in the Broadway theatre,” Williams told St. Just. (Kazan “would have saved [it], if he’d staged it,” he wrote to Wood, months later in a postmortem.) When the time came to stage his next play,
The Night of the Iguana
, Williams’s name alone was, for the first time, no longer sufficient to guarantee a theater.

Back in 1959, Frank Corsaro had asked Williams to contribute a one-act play to be performed as part of a double bill with William Inge’s
The Tiny Closet
at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Williams sent Corsaro a twenty-one-page sketch based on “The Night of the Iguana,” a short story he had written in 1946 inspired by his stint in Mexico after his heartrending breakup with Kip Kiernan. The story focused almost entirely on Miss Edith Jelkes, a hysterical, reclusive thirty-year-old Southern spinster who is living at a lonely, envious distance from the two other guests—gay writers—at a ramshackle Mexican hotel. Drawn to the older writer, Miss Jelkes intrudes into the couple’s solitary idyll:

“Your friend—” she faltered. “Mike?” “Is he the—right person for you?”

“Mike is helpless, and I am always attracted by helpless people.”

“But you,” she said awkwardly. “How about you? Don’t you need somebody’s help?”

“The help of God,” said the writer. “Failing that, I have to depend on myself.”

The older writer makes a clumsy pass at Miss Jelkes; she fights him off, but their brief botched sexual encounter severs “the strangling rope of her loneliness.” Her predicament is mirrored by the plight of an iguana, who has been cruelly caught and tethered under the hotel veranda and is finally cut free from his torture.

Corsaro found the characters two-dimensional—the writer was “a bit of a louse,” he recalled. He telephoned Williams to try to cajole him into giving them more depth. “As we’re talking, something is coming to me,” Williams replied. In Williams’s recalibration of the story into “an expression of my present, immediate psychological hassle,” as he described it to Corsaro, the tale became more about spiritual exhaustion than sexual frustration. Almost nothing of the original story ended up in the script, which Williams considered “more of a dramatic poem than a play.”

The Night of the Iguana
deposits a defrocked-priest-turned-tour-guide, Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, on a hilltop in a tropical Mexican paradise, positioned strategically between the awe of creation and the awe of disintegration—news of world war is reported from the radios of some jocund German guests (who did not appear in the short story), the world is at a spiritual tipping point, and so is the feverish Shannon. As he climbs the hill to the Costa Verde Hotel, he is on the verge of a second nervous breakdown. Down below him, a busload of unhappy ladies from a Texas women’s college—“a football squad of old maids”—complain loudly about the tour, of “the underworlds of all places” that he has taken them on. Shannon is a kind of pilgrim, a “man of God, on vacation” who has lost his way, trying vainly to wrestle under control his lust for young girls and alcohol. Scrambling uphill for the solace of male company—the hotel’s owner, Fred Faulk—he is almost immediately walloped with more calamity: Fred has died, and Shannon comes face to face with Maxine, Fred’s predatory widow who has, in her newfound freedom, been entertaining herself with local youths.

In this revised drama, whose theme, according to Williams, is “how to live beyond despair and still live,” Shannon is the hysteric, and Miss Jelkes is transformed, for the purposes of dramatic debate, into the calm, saintly, androgynous Hannah Jelkes, a guest at Maxine’s hotel. “Ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated,” the stage directions say. Unlike the story’s Edith Jelkes, “a dainty teapot,” Hannah Jelkes is an intrepid Nantucket artist and traveling companion to the wheelchair-bound, ninety-eight-year-old Nonno, “the oldest living and practicing poet on earth” who is struggling to finish his last poem. Nonno, which means “grandfather” in Italian, was Merlo’s nickname for Reverend Dakin.

The portrait was Williams’s tender homage to his proud, histrionic grandfather: Nonno is a home to Hannah, just as Reverend Dakin’s presence in Key West gave Williams “a sense of really having a home.” “When he died, something in me died, too, and it’s hard to revive it,” Williams wrote to Katharine Hepburn, when pitching her to play Hannah Jelkes on Broadway. “He didn’t like my plays, although he would never admit it to me directly, but he always would say to others ‘Tom is a poet, he will be remembered as a poet’—In his middle nineties he could recite Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’ by heart, and quote long speeches from Shakespeare. . . . He wanted his Manhattan with two cherries before dinner every evening, could charm lady birds out off bushes, loved eau-de-cologne, even perfume.” Williams explained to Corsaro, “When the old keep serenity and dignity and sweetness in them as long as he did, life turns to poetry and, without that, to cold prose. Their memorial is almost a religious recognition of them.” (Williams’s subtitle for the original play was “Three Acts of Grace”; in its post-Spoleto 1960 version, it was subtitled
Southern Cross
and “dedicated to the memory of Reverend Walter Dakin.”)

In the short story, which was written in the full flush of Williams’s romantic rebirth in Mexico, Edith Jelkes glimpses salvation in the carnal. In the play, however, Shannon, who is set upon by both a nubile teenage tourist he has seduced and her outraged guardian, has been betrayed by his carnal impulses, driven out of his church for fornication and heresy, and he strains beyond them for transcendence. “See? The iguana? At the end of its rope? Trying to go on past the end of its goddam rope? Like
you
! Like
me
! Like Grampa with his last poem!” he says.

The play was a sort of summa of Williams’s warring urges, of his humiliated Puritan soul, fighting a pitched, and likely losing, battle against self-destruction. “It’s horrible how you got to bluff and keep bluffing even when hollering ‘Help!’ is all you’re up to,” Shannon says. His “reaching-out hands”—“as if he were reaching for something outside and beyond himself”—perform the emblematic gesture, at once a plea and a prayer, with which Williams ends the second act.

“My life has cracked up on me,” says Shannon, trapped, like Williams, by his past, his appetites, his lost goodness, his isolation, his winded hankering for grace. “I am a little bit in the condition of the Reverend Shannon right now,” Williams told Corsaro in 1960, in the early stages of their collaboration, “as a result of corresponding tensions, I mean correspondingly great, which have gone on longer than anyone but a tough old bird like me would be able to survive, even physically.”

As Williams’s relationship with Merlo continued to unravel, Shannon’s tormented voice became a kind of fever chart of his isolation and self-loathing. “We—live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really,” Shannon confides to Hannah. “But when you live on the fantastic level as I have lately but have got to operate on the realistic level, that’s when you’re spooked, that’s the spook.” Devoured by fear and feeding off it for inspiration, Williams faced the same predicament. “Don’t ask me why I’ve fallen into this state,” he wrote to Wood from Egypt in late October 1959. “Because I couldn’t tell you except to say that something ‘spooked’ me somewhere, sometime, somehow, and I can’t shake the spook. The lucky thing is that I’m writing about just exactly that thing.”

Hannah Jelkes, by contrast, is a model of containment and compassion; she is a new type of Williams heroine, one who speaks for his embattled moral side, holding out the hope of an escape from the self. (She was also his first non-Southern lady.) “Hannah is not a loser,” he explained to Corsaro, his “other Sicilian Frankie.” “She is profoundly understanding and compassionate but still a fighter and winner. She doesn’t bow to the terms as Alma, or crack under them completely as Blanche who could only accept a doctor’s arm at the end. She rises to a sort of necessary pride and austerity like the Oriental concept of living with a ‘cool’ God.” Williams went on:

She is unseduced by any worn-out and weakly sentimental concept of Christian-Hebraic philosophy of human behavior, but—and yet—she, out of her austerity, her coolness, can escape from herself, her personal dilemma and crisis, to concern for a captive lizard: she forms a workable synthesis between the Western and Eastern concepts of morality. And feeling.

Hannah’s stoic composure puts into bold relief Shannon’s hysteria and his compulsion to use his woundedness—his “Passion Play performance,” as Hannah calls it—as a lure, as well as a lament. Through his connection to her, Shannon achieves what Williams couldn’t manage in life: “understanding and kindness, between two people at the end of their ropes.”

“As we were working, pages kept coming in from Williams until I had ninety pages of script,” Corsaro said of the Spoleto version of
The Night of the Iguana
, which had a completely new, almost symphonic, tone. He added, “I knew I had something very special.” So did Williams. “I’m tired, the energy’s low from the long, hard screaming I’ve done for help, for light and forgiveness,” he wrote to Atkinson in the summer of 1959. “But I’ve just now finished a scene about forgiveness, and help, and maybe there is some light in it to make up for the fatigue. I think the hate of the world has worn itself out, for a while—There never was hate of people—and if ‘the hazards’ of this long trip are lucky I will come back with a play or two for you that you may be able to like as well as admire technically.” In May 1959, Williams wrote to Wood, “I think the play for Spoleto can be made very good.” “Tenn dear, you’re right to say that in this latest work of yours there is all your heart. ONE FEELS IT!” Anna Magnani wrote after reading
Iguana
. “Once I said to a journalist . . . ‘the characters of Tennessee Williams are always looking at the sky/heaven.’ And it’s true! They are always seeking salvation, in the purest and most noble sense.”

IN THE THIRTY months or so that it took to complete
The Night of the Iguana
, Williams’s world, like Shannon’s, came down around him. He lost his longtime director, Kazan, and then his most consistent and insightful public champion, Brooks Atkinson, who retired from the
New York
Times
in the spring of 1960. The rumble of paranoia began to shake even Williams’s bedrock faith in Audrey Wood. “In all the letters and phone-calls and talks between us about the ‘Iguana’ there was a great area of ambiguity, which unnerved me and made it harder for me to complete the work with any confidence in it,” he wrote, forgetting his own initial doubts about the play’s viability. “You never said
clearly
, I am deeply interested in this work and think it is valuable. So I had to represent myself and make my own decisions about its production some of which may have been faulty.”

Finally, Williams lost his longtime lover. In the battle of attrition with Merlo, Williams officially waved the white flag on January 2, 1961. “Dear Horse: or Saint Francis,” he wrote:

I guess you win, like Mizzou in the Orange Bowl Game. Thirteen years, the longest war on record, but that’s not a nice way to put it. Anyhow I am going back to Key West since I feel like I have a ton of lead in my legs and island-hopping doesn’t seem possible for me.

Please be a good winner. A good winner respects a good loser, which I hope I will be. He enjoys his victory over him, but he treats his surrendered opponent with courtesy and consideration, not rubbing his nose in the ground.

I hope to behave as my father did when he lost but I hope that unlike him, I won’t be locked out of the house. I have no Knoxville to go back to, and no widow from Toledo. If it should not turn out to be an honorable capitulation, I suppose I could still employ a traveling companion who would take me away to Europe but then victory, yours, would lose its glory and even its just reward, and I do mean just because I think to have passed thirteen years with me, the gloomy Hun of all time, must merit a crown in heaven.

Blanche was a bit of a Hun, too, but I think she was quite sincere when she said, “Thank you for being so kind, I need kindness now.”

Kindness in one makes kindness in the other. Love, T

Williams’s courtly request put a shellac of civility on his own cruelty. Prior to the tryout of
The Night of the Iguana
at the Coconut Grove in Miami in August 1960, Merlo had gone up to New York for medical tests to explain a mysterious loss of weight and energy, which Williams attributed to drugs. In Merlo’s absence, Williams took up with a painter. Alerted by a Key West friend who had walked in on Williams’s frolics, Merlo flew home unannounced. (Merlo was no stranger to Williams’s provocations; earlier in the year, by his own admission, Williams had spent an afternoon in a drunken orgy with three queens in a South Beach hotel, after which he returned home for a home-cooked dinner with Merlo. “I set myself down at our patio table like a king, waiting to be served. The kitchen door banged open and past me sailed a meat loaf, missing my head by inches,” Williams recalled. Before bolting in their car, Merlo managed to throw the succotash, the salad, and the Silex of coffee at him as well. “When people I care for turn violent,” Williams told Gore Vidal solemnly, “I have no choice but to withdraw from the field. I abhor violence of any kind.” “There was no use in saying that Frank had a good case for throwing a lot more than a leg of lamb at the maddening Bird,” Vidal wrote in his memoir
Palimpsest
.) Having come home to Williams and the painter, Merlo “declined to eat and he hardly spoke . . . his great eyes fastened upon the painter and me,” Williams wrote in
Memoirs
. “Then the scene exploded. Like a jungle cat, Frankie sprang across the room and seized the painter by the throat and it appeared to me that the painter was being strangled to death—that is one evening when I am pretty sure Frankie was deep under drugs.” Williams called the police; Merlo slept at a friend’s house. The next day, as Williams prepared to decamp to a Miami motel with his painter and his papers, Merlo ran down from the porch. “Are you going to leave me without shaking hands, after fourteen years together?” Merlo said.