Tennessee Williams’ Fugitive Kind

Donald P. Costello has written an excellent essay (May 1972) about the work of Tennessee Williams in which he discusses characters in terms of their fleeing the corrupt world around them.  They are fugitives longing for repose, a meaningful place, a respite from the pain and suffering of life, and most importantly, a spiritual comfort or at least a release or an understanding of life and their place in it.  Looking at Williams’ plays through this lens and from this perspective is one of the best ways to read and interpret his works.  

This flight can be described as either active – Val (Orpheus Descending), Chance and Princess (Sweet Bird of Youth), Blanche and Stella, Shannon and Hannah – or passive – Alma (Summer and Smoke/Eccentricities of a Nightingale), Laura and Amanda (Glass Menagerie), Brick (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).  Val is an itinerant, looking for a place to settle, to rest, but he is either fleeing or pursued.  Shannon is fleeing from the confines of the church.  Hannah is wandering, like Val, as a pure spirit accompanied by her poet grandfather, but to find a home and settle. Maxine is a fugitive from something (not as clear as the reasons given or intimated for Hannah and Shannon). 

Both Chance Wayne and the Princess del Lago are fleeing age.  The Princess goes on a physical fugue, leaving Hollywood and the revealing close-ups which cannot lie.  Chance accompanies her, hitching his hopes to her fading star, knowing that it is his last chance before his looks and his body will have no more currency.  Stella has fled Belle Reve and the faded Southern aristocracy she hated for the more real but rough life with Stanley.  Blanche has fled because she was ostracized. 

Alma, Laura, Amanda and Brick retreat more than flee – and their retreat is psychological, not physical -  but they are still fugitive from the rude reality that surrounds them. 

The basic given in a Tennessee Williams play is that the earth is a corrupting place.  The word “corruption”, which he uses throughout Orpheus, is his favorite word for the earthly world of men….Similarly Brick…sees the pervasiveness of corruption…and sees “the whole thing” as “a world of mendacity, of lying, and liars…(Costello)

The alley behind Amanda and Laura’s apartment in St. Louis represents the dirt, grime, and corruption of the “real world”. Shannon talks of “the encroaching jungle”, another metaphor of Williams.  ‘The setting of Suddenly Last Summer combines the corrupting jungle imagery with the Williams symbol of devouring: ‘The Venable garden is “like a tropical jungle…There are massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings….”

Characters flee from the repetition, boredom, and deadening life of mundane jobs (Tom in Glass longs for freedom from his warehouse job and the freedom to follow his vagabond father’s footsteps).
Characters want to flee bondage.  In Orpheus Val says about Jabe and extends it to the human race:

I’m telling you, Lady, there’s people bought and sold in this world like carcasses of hogs in butcher shops…there’s just two kinds of people, the ones who are bought and the buyers.

Boss Finley has tried to sell his daughter to a “fifty year-old moneybag”.  Sebastian (Suddenly Last Summer) has used his mother and then Catherine as ‘mere objects to attract male companions’ (Costello).

And so she (Lady, in Orpheus) begins her long monologue of escape through ritual cleansing: “The room will be shadowy, cool, and filled with the murmur of…Yes, rain…Then I’ll dress in white….I won’t have any idea what’s going on in the world…I’ll look in the mirror and see that my hair has turned white.  At last “the white clean wind that blows from the edge of the world”  will so purify her that “finally I will have no body at all.” The perfect, pure state for Williams is to be thus bodiless with no touch of the earthly (Costello).

In Suddenly Last Summer, there is a similar purification or desire for it.

Thus, in Suddenly, the jungle noises which, as in Iguana, represent the corruption of rotting earth, are contrasted with the pure song of a bird….”The raucous sounds in the garden fade into birdsong which is clear and sweet” indicates Williams in his stage directions when Catharine finally tells what really happened to Sebastian.

The resolution of this fugitive dilemma in most cases is predictable and pessimistic. The corrupted world usually wins.  The hope of Maggie loving Brick and giving him salvation from his guilt is unlikely.  Laura retreats into the world of her glass menagerie having given the world a try with the gentleman caller.  Alma chooses promiscuity and chance encounters as a rejection of her search for pure, ideal love that she sought with John.  Blanche, a pure spirit despite her transgressions, becomes mad (chooses madness) as the only safe refuge – like Laura with her glass menagerie – from the harsh realities of life.  Val is incinerated by the forces of the real world when all he wanted to do, consciously or not, was to bring love into the world.  Chance is castrated.

Hannah ends in despair, worse than when she began:

Hannah: Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us.  It’s so quiet here now.
Stage Directions: With a soft intake of breath, she extends a hand before his [Nonno) mouth to see if he is still breathing.  He isn’t.  In a panicky moment, she looks right and left for someone to call to.  There’s no one….

Tom (Menagerie) appears to have beaten the world with his determined release from the prison of his mother and sister; but finds he has not and will not:

Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!

I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out – for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura – and so good-bye.

Sometimes the world loses.  Shannon may or may not have been resurrected.  Maxine says:

I’ve got five more years, maybe ten, to make this place attractive to the male clientele, the middle-aged ones at least.  And you can take care of the women that are with them.  That’s what you can do, you know that, Shannon.
He chuckles happily.

The Princess survives her temporary slight of the world, returning to Hollywood as a star once again.  Although the victory is pyrrhic – age cannot be defeated – she has at least pushed it back more than most could.  Serafina (Rose Tattoo) has found love, even though it is perverse, burlesque one (Alvaro has the head of a clown and the body of her adored former husband), and is pregnant with new life.  All characters in Period of Adjustment live happily ever after – although Williams calls it and Tattoo comedies.

A look through Williams’ lens of the fugitive is revealing and useful.  Life is certainly a drama with protagonists of idealism and antagonists of reality.  Few are only in one realm.  Williams understands this, and writes of this dilemma, this expansive search, this moral heroism, this frequent defeat, but this perennial optimism.

Higher Education Reform–Economics vs. Queer Studies in 18th Century Low Country Slavery

 

Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas) has been an outspoken reformer of higher education, feeling that public universities are not preparing students for the current world.  Worse, the cost of such impractical and unproductive education now has reached $40,000 in Texas; and Perry wants to reduce it to $10,000 and run universities like private businesses which match investment to measurable results.  Of course there has been an outcry of revolt from the academic establishment who, predictably, argue that such economic-based institutions will leech all the intellectual juices from what always has been a rich environment for ideas.  Perry at his provocative best, wants to eliminate “esoteric” courses from the university curriculum and focus, as above, on those courses and majors which will make it easy for graduates to enter the economic, social, and political mainstream.   The Washington Post article is linked below:

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rick-perry-wages-an-assault-on-the-ivory-tower/2011/07/26/gIQAyfrvsI_story.html?hpid=z3

I am all for this idea, with some notable reservations.  As many of you who follow this blog know, I have been immersed in an esoteric subject of my own – Literary Criticism – and cannot imagine a world without Harold Bloom, Jan Kott, Nancy Tischler, A.C. Bradley and others whose writings have provided the insights, guidance, and critical thinking which illuminates Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams (my current interest).

How, then, to assure that intellectual academic activity remain vital, energetic, and creative, while assuring that students graduate with enough practical knowledge to justify what is now a $160,000 investment?

First, I think that states should invest part of the monies that currently go to the state university and college system into technical schools – schools that funded partially by the state, partially by industry which has a vested interest in productive young workers, and partially by the students themselves.  If it can be shown that these technical schools can achieve a high first-job acceptance rate, a high industry retention rate, and above-average salaries, many students will forgo four-year institutions for them.

Second, I would reform the charter of the State Board of Regents and refocus their strategic planning on selecting those courses which are most linked to current and projected economic activity.  IT, computer science, accounting, genetics, resource management, biotechnology, avionics, etc. are obvious choices.  Foundation courses for teaching, nursing, medicine, gerontology, pharmacy, marketing, are others.  Engineering, especially chemical and electrical are equally important.

The curriculum would also have to focus on those disciplines which create a more socially literate society – one whose citizens understand far better than today the structure of democracy and a market economy and the historical precedents which are responsible for its character.  Therefore courses in history, political science, and especially economics and finance are critical.

Now, what about the “esoteric” subjects? Is there a place for them at public universities, supported in part by taxpayers money?  My instinct is let private universities accommodate these interests either through their endowments or through high tuitions or both.  It would be up to them to determine just how esoteric they want their liberal arts departments to be.  I am more of the Harold and Allan Bloom school of The Literary Canon (there are simply some easily defined great works of literature from Aeschylus to Faulkner which even committed post-modernists have a hard time dismissing as “texts” equal to and no better than any other when looked at objectively through the lens of history, gender, etc.), and would hope that scarce resources are invested there and not in “The Transvestite in the Low Country: Queer Slave Journals in South Carolina in the 1780s”.  Keep the Low Country, Slavery, South Carolina, and the 1780s, and lose the rest.

The visual and performing arts present a conundrum, because most people consider them luxuries, rather than essential elements of a society.  Particularly in America where middlebrow culture dominates and grows (popular music, dance, arts need no academic preparation, the middlebrow canon goes.  “We are a populist democracy and the arts come up from the bottom, not given from the top”), the demand for courses in higher education is low.  I am of two minds here.  On the one hand, believing as I do that the high arts, just like their literary companions, are not only essential for a society’s well-being but enobling, necessary for illuminating the human condition, and providing insights into human nature.  Why is Shakespeare necessary? Because he goes beyond history and the Grand Mechanism of its cyclical repetition.  He addresses the human nature which is behind all historical action.

Realigning the higher education system is not easy, to say the least; but I applaud Rick Perry for shaking the cages of the establishment, forcing them to think much more critically and practically about their task of education young people.

Doing Good and Living Well–Heat

 

It has been very hot in DC this summer, and July was the hottest on record.  I was not unhappy, however, because I love early morning warmth and humidity – the air so humid that I can breathe in every fragrance and scent -  the smell of grass, boxwoods, trees and flowers. I love midday when the hot sun hits my back as I walk out of the shade, the hot breeze not cooling but caressing.  I love the late afternoon, still hot but more still, never as fresh and scented as morning, nor filled with birdsongs, but there are the cicadas and more color in the sky than the high white of noon or the darkness of early morning. 

I love the hot weather so much that I have taken all my summer vacations in the Deep South, returning this week to Mississippi for six weeks.  A friend of mine from Mississippi said that it is not hotter there, just hotter longer; and the temperature data confirm that.  They have had just as hot a July as we have, but it will continue far into September and October when, alas, the cold weather begins to set in here.

Travelling as I did throughout Asia and Africa, the heat was always present, always an intrusive, persistent part of life. In Delhi where the pre-monsoon temperatures were consistently 110F which only dropped to 100F during the monsoon but were accompanied by 90 percent humidity. In the days when I lived in Delhi, there was little air conditioning.  Government offices were cooled by “desert coolers” – straw ticks through which water trickled, circulated by a small pump.  This system – plus the darkness  resulting by the ticks covering the biggest window and the thick drapes drawn over the rest – did lower the temperature by fifteen degrees or so, but the air in these chambers was dank, humid, and smelling of wet straw.  The noise of the water pumps and the ceiling fans turned up to helicopter speed killed any conversation below a yell; but it was cool.

There was no insulation in most expat houses – most were just improved cement blocks which retained the heat and the temperature inside during the day was only marginally lower than that outside and hotter at night.  Air conditioners in those days were simply not up to the job of cooling,so we slept on the floor under the most powerful, catching the slightest bit of cool air dropping from it, getting a few hours sleep before the machine iced up, groaned, and stopped working until it was turned off for an hour to let the built-up ice melt.

The hottest night I ever spent in India was in Nagpur in May, the hottest month of the year.  The hotel I stayed in – one of the few in the city – had no air conditioning, and the only way to get temporary relief was to soak a sheet in the bathtub, quickly get under it, turn the ceiling fan to ultra-high, freeze for a few minutes as the water evaporated, then return to the hot, impossible tossing and turning of hours until dawn.  I often crawled out onto the tiny balcony, curled myself up like a contortionist just to get the slight bit of cool being outside provided.

The heat was a presence even when it was cool. Surprisingly Delhi and most of North India in the winter can be just above freezing at dawn; but this relief lasted only a few months before the inexorable building of heat continued until the monsoon.  The absence of heat in a hot country only heightened the fact that the heat would return.  Indians wore sweaters until the temperature hit 90F, and the first year I spent in Delhi and noticed this, I knew we were in store for some serious heat.  After a year, I did the same thing, refusing to give up my sweater until the Indians did, reluctantly holding on to the relative cool of Spring.  The Fall was the same in reverse.  Indians put the sweaters back on at the first sign of cool, clearly noticeable in pockets in strange places – around a curve under low-hanging trees, going from one colony to another. 

Travelling in the interior was difficult because of the heat.  The car – with no air-conditioning and an often-broken firewall – was unbearable.  The rest houses stifling at all hours of the day except the early morning, and field trips out to remote villages over rutted tracks in blazing heat were an adventure.  The spicy, blazing hot food, often served at lunch made a siesta impossible – you belched fiery belches, lay still under helicopter fans which never cooled, stumbled back into oven-hot cars for more airless offices or baked villages.

There is no doubt in my mind the hottest I have ever been – Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, at that time a city that was really a large village with one paved road, few services, but pleasant, quiet, and friendly.  The daytime temperatures routinely hit 120F in the shade (I think only Niamey, which I never visited was hotter), there were few trees to provide shade for the car, there was little power so the saving tradition of India – ceiling fans – was absent.   Inside the car heated by the direct sun was at least 140F.  The only time I have ever had to quit, give up, and go back to my feebly-air conditioned room to quaff water and stretch out in the darkness was in Ouagadougou on one of these torrid days.  I felt weird – I couldn’t tell whether I was hot or cold.  I couldn’t concentrate, I was disoriented.  Scary, but it happened only once.  I was not as immune to high temperatures as I thought.  Yes, it was a dry heat, but over 110F it doesn’t matter.  At 110F+ I actually closed the windows of the car to block the furnace-like wind which hurt the eyes and ears.

Bombay was hot – well over 90F – for the entire year except for a brief period in December and January.  In May and early June the temperatures were always near 100F and the humidity – like Delhi in the pre-monsoon period – nearly 100 percent.  Going out was almost unbearable; but in an apartment in a city with very, very few amenities (for expatriates at least), I had to get out.  The excursions were short, debilitating, and totally enervating.  I returned totally soaked, dehydrated, and wiped out.  The twitchy air conditioning and the super Bombay Black (hashish laced with opium) which I had just purchased were my only refuge.

My greatest “development” sinecure was Haiti in the winter.  I travelled there in Baby Doc’s days, and the country was peaceful, crime-free, warm, and delightful.  I would leave icy Washington in the morning and be sipping rum punches on the porch of the Olaffson in the evening.  I loved Haiti.  I found every excuse to go there, extended my stay each trip.  I ate great French food in Petionville, went dancing to the meringue in Carrefour, went to the beach every weekend, did very little work, had long, civilized lunches by the pool.  Ahhhhhh, “development”!

I liked Kigali as well.  It was hot, too, but never scorching because it was at 5000 ft.  Just cool enough in the evening for a light sweater to eat on the terrace at the Mille Collines or eat outside at one of the many good restaurants nearby.

I couldn’t believe how cold it was in Lesotho in August – enough so that there was ice on the birdbath and the small hotel I stayed in on one field trip.  Somehow Africa and India have to be always hot, and the cold was a surprise.  In India hundreds of people die every year from the cold in parts of Bihar and eastern UP.

So, I love the heat, but it can be oppressive, brutal, and unbearable.  I love the heat, but I always have air conditioning to return to – a refuge which makes my claim a bit shaky.  I can state unequivocally that I hate the cold.  Washington winters are just about bearable, and I always think ‘go south’ in January.  There has never been any doubt in my mind about which I would prefer – unbearable heat or unbearable cold.  You can always survive the heat, but the cold is a bitchin’ killer.