The American Century: Literature since 1945 687son Gooper; emotion and empathy draw him toward his childless and tortured son
Brick. Brick and his wife Maggie, the “cat” of the title, have in turn to find some way
of living together. Both narratives gravitate toward the discovery of emotional truth:
the need to know and accept oneself. Big Daddy decides in favor of Brick, his natural
heir and spiritual mirror – however warped that mirror may be. Brick and Maggie
start to face the facts about themselves and their relationship. The facts may not be
pleasant, far from it, but they offer the chance of real survival: “I don’t know why
people have to pretend to be good,” Maggie declares, “nobody’s good ... but I’m
honest!... I’m alive. Maggie the cat is – alive!” By contrast, The Night of the Iguana
(1961) has a minimal plot. Weaving together very different characters, Williams
does however explore his chosen theme of waiting for meaning, watching out for
emotional rescue with a characteristic mix of realism and poetic sensibility. This is
not, unfortunately, the case with many of his other plays. Some, like The Rose Tattoo
(1951) and Period of Adjustment (1960), are simply minor comedies. Others, such as
Suddenly Last Summer (1958), stray into a sensationalism unanchored in emotional
reality, the raw, intimate feeling that secures his best work. Still others, among them
Summer and Smoke (1968), Camino Real (1953), Orpheus Descending, and Sweet
Bird of Youth (1959), suffer from an excess of symbolism, an overplus of heavily
signposted meaning that swamps and obscures what Williams was always best at: the
stories of lonely, frightened people wondering how on earth they can endure the
pain of life.
Plagued by alcoholism, drugs, and depressive illness in his later years, Williams
never completely lost his touch. Even in the most disappointing work, there are
moments of corrosive pathos that recall the writer at his best. So, in The Milk Train
Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), there is an extraordinary speech in which the
speaker compares human beings to “kittens or puppies.” No matter how “secure in
the house of their master” “a pair of kittens or puppies” may seem during the day,
the speaker observes, “at night, when they sleep, they don’t seem sure of their owner’s
care for them.” They “draw close together, they curl up against each other.” “We’re all
of us living in a house we’re not used to,” the speaker concludes. “We have to creep
close to each other and give those gentle little nudges ... before we can slip into –
sleep and – rest for the next day’s – playtime.” Moments like this, however, tend to
exist in a vacuum. Williams himself seemed to sense the decline in his own powers,
as he compulsively rewrote material in a desperate attempt to make it work. The
Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, for instance, was revised no less than three
times. He also began to use his plays as confessionals. So, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
(1969) includes an artist suffering a mental and aesthetic breakdown; in Clothes for
a Summer Hotel (1980) Williams used F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as barely
disguised projections of his own sense of falling off and failure. “The losses
accumulated in my heart, the disenchantments steadily increased,” Williams has his
version of F. Scott Fitzgerald declare. “Wouldn’t accept it. Romantics won’t, you
know ... I went back to the world of vision which was my only true home.” Williams
was blessed, or cursed, with an acute sense of the abyss and a compassionate
complicity with those who hurtle into it. In his finest work he could dramatize thatGGray_c05.indd 687ray_c 05 .indd 687 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM