Well, here we are in only the third entry of this series, and already we are departing slightly from the focus on books in the strict sense. But the above find seemed suited to the spirit of the Easter Eggs, and I couldn't pass it up. It was certainly news to me that Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, had composed the incidental music to Tennessee Williams' play—the one that first made his reputation—though I had known that Bowles was also a working composer, in addition to his literary output.
In watching the heartbreaking—and, apparently, painstakingly restored— 1966 CBS Playhouse rendition of Williams' highly autobiographical work, one is struck by the haunting music box theme that recurs throughout it. One was even surprised that an apparently low budget production had put this degree of effort into adding a score to the play. Now it makes sense. This is actually the original Bowles music that was written to accompany the play's theatrical performances.
Should it come as such a surprise that Bowles and one of Williams' most famous works are connected in this way? Perhaps it wouldn't if I hadn't just finished a biography of Francis Bacon that also somehow kept ending up at Bowles' door in Tangiers.
Perhaps the proper version of the "six degrees" of separation game that one should play with modern literary and cultural figures is not to trace them back to Kevin Bacon (no relation to Francis), but to sexually ambidextrous ex-pats living in North Africa. Just think - you'd only have to find enough degrees to draw a line from any given figure back to Gide, Forster, Flaubert, Bowles, Burroughs, or Bacon, and you're through. How hard could that be?
By the way—watching the 1966 CBS Playhouse performance of The Glass Menagerie was, I have to admit, my first time seeing the play in any form. Its name was for me always among that list of theatrical "greats" that have become so familiar as to lose any capacity for arousing interest or curiosity. But having finally seen it, one realizes all over again—just as one does when reading the plays of Arthur Miller, say—that the classics became classics for a reason.
The play is, of course, Williams' own life. But the playwright is hardly alone in milking his own experience. As much as I am embarrassed by the fact that my tentative literary efforts always end up turning into sheer autobiography, I take comfort from the many parallels between Joyce's life and that of his protagonist, "toothless kinch," Stephen Dedalus. And Flaubert, of course, famously declared that Emma Bovary was moi.
Now, having seen The Glass Menagerie, I will add Williams to the list of those who have wrung artistic sublimation from making mortifyingly direct exploitations of their unique life circumstances.
One notes that both the young Tennessee Williams and Tom Wingfield (good god, he even gave the play's protagonist his own initials. And oh, by the way, Tennessee's birth name was "Thomas")—both men, as I say, worked in a shoe factory. Williams couldn't even bother to make it a button factory or a handkerchief one. Such is the instinct of the novice playwright to put their experiences directly onto the stage.
This, however, is of course a superficial view. Because Williams is not only Tom; he is also Laura. The fragile creature on the run from life—the frail black sheep of the family who lives under threat of being deemed a failure.
Tom may be one half of his creator: the idealized conscientious self: the one on whom the family's crushing responsibilities and burdens of guilt rest; the one who lives under the shadow of the sins of the father. He may be the only one realistic enough to see Laura's situation; who is willing to tell their wild-eyed mother that Laura is "peculiar" and lives in a world of her own.
Yet it is he who in the end is chased out the door as a "selfish dreamer," and whose lack of awareness of the circumstances around him lays the groundwork for the social catastrophe that unfolds in the play's final act. And it is the mother who ultimately grasps the truth of the tragedy of their lives. If the nature of the dramatic arc, as Sidney Lumet once summarized the classic formulation, is pity and terror building toward release, there can be few more heart-wrenching moments of catharsis than when Tom and Laura's mother, having resisted the use of the word throughout the entire play, refers in her final screeching monologue to Tom's sister as "crippled."
It is a familiar enough point that the more rigid class societies of Europe seldom produced the kinds of searing meditations on the longing for impossible dreams of success, the pressure families place on their members to fulfill them, and the staring terror of failure, as the great American playwrights of the 20th century. And for obvious reasons. The tragedy that Williams unfolds here is one that is distinctly and familiarly American, and in that sense it awakens an immediate sense of nostalgia and identification in anyone who grew up in this country.
I feel somewhat embarrassed, therefore, that I reached the age of 30 before seeing a play that is so immediately and viscerally me, and us. But I suppose it's better late than never. And it is in the nature of this work that one feels, even watching it for the first time, that one knew it all along.
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