Arts and Letters

I’ve written a short tribute to Tennessee but on the way down here from my home I was thinking that perhaps I ought to add something to it. Tennessee was thought of in general—and this reputation was buttressed by all the critics who wrote about him—as a writer who was singularly remote, if not unconscious, of the world of politics.

He was an artist, pure, there was some truth in that, but he wasn't quite as pure as some of our pure critics have made him out to be. I just came across a letter he wrote to the critic Brooks Atkinson in 1952 at a time when I was denied a passport by the State Department to go to Europe. The letter was one of great anguish in which he asks Brooks Atkinson whether he shouldn't follow his instincts and write a public protest against the denial of my passport. But he had been talked out of it by his agent and several other people who thought that he would in turn be denied a passport. And so he desisted, wishing to go on spending part of each year in Italy and Paris. I had known that he felt in that McCarthy period that the country was going down the drain at a great rate and I felt at the time that this apprehension reinforced the tragic element in his plays.

* * * * *

So long as there are actors at work in the world the plays of Tennessee Williams will live on. The autocratic power of fickle taste will not matter in his case; his texture, his characters, his dramatic personality are unique and are as permanent in the theatrical vision of this century as the stars in the sky.

After so long and fruitful a writing life it is usually forgotten what a revolution his first great success meant to the New York theater. The Glass Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theater's history, but it broke new ground in another way, by legitimizing sheer sensibility as a driving force of dramatic structure. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it. In him the American theater found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and an amplitude of feeling that had traditionally found no welcome on the stage. And driving on this newly discovered lyrical line was a kind of emotional heroism that seemed to outflank values themselves; he wanted not to approve or disapprove but to touch the germ of life and to celebrate it with verbal beauty.

His theme, announced at the beginning of his writing life and sustained to the end, is perhaps the most pervasive in American literature where people lose greatly in the very shadow of the mountain from whose peak they might have had a clear view of God. It is the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits who exist in order to remind us of our trampled instincts, our forsaken tenderness, the holiness of the spirit of man.

Despite great fame Williams never settled into a comfortable corner of the literary kitchen. His plays were his confession that demanded courage to write, not talent alone. It could only have been the pride born of courage that kept him at playwriting after the professional theater to which he had loaned so much dignity, so much aspiration, could find no place, over a period of many years, for his plays. If he felt any bitterness he had a right to it, when there were so many millions of ready dollars for whatever trivia a super-commercialized theater might toss before an audience. But whatever his feelings he never lost his humor and a phenomenal generosity toward other artists. A few months before his death I had a letter from him about a play of mine that had had some of the most uncomprehending reviews of my career. I had not seen Tennessee in years but out of darkness came this clasp of a hand, this sadly laughing voice telling me that he had seen and understood and loved my play, and in effect, that we had both lived to witness a chaos of spirit, a deafness of ear and a blindness of eye and that one carried on anyway.

His audience remained enormous—worldwide, hundreds of productions of his plays have gone on each year—but not on the Broadway that his presence had glorified. He would end as he had begun, on the outside looking in—as he once put it, scratching on the glass. But of course, past the suffering the work remains, the work for which alone he lived his life, the gift he made to his actors, his country, and the world.