Thoughts from Tennessee:

Thoughts from Tennessee

The following excerpts from Williams own writing go some way toward defining some ideas central to Streetcar, such as desire, truth, sin and guilt, as well as clarifying the means Williams used to get his ideas across in that play and nearly everything else he wrote.

On desire: Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being. . . . 

            For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because the householder’s funds were not sufficient these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of makeshift arrangements, devised by a person to cover his or her incompletion. The individual feels a part of him- or herself to be like a missing wall or a room unfurnished and tries as well as s/he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask one devises to cover this incompletion. . . 

By surprise is one’s desire discovered, and once discovered, the only need is surrender, to take what comes and ask no questions about it. . . . 

(From his short story "Desire and the Black Masseur") 

 

On the truth of character: The truth about human character in a play, as in life, varies with the variance of experience and viewpoint of those that view it. No two members of an audience ever leave a theatre, after viewing a play that deals with any degree of complexity in character, with identical interpretations of the characters dealt with. This is as it should be. I know full well the defenses and rationalizations of beleaguered writers a defensive species      but I still feel that I deal unsparingly with what I feel it the truth of character. I would never evade it for the sake of evasion because I was in any way reluctant to reveal what I knew of the truth. But ambiguity is sometimes deliberate and for artistically defensible reasons. . . . 

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left at the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions, which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human existence. . . . 

My characters make my plays. I always start with them, they take spirit and body in my mind, nothing that they say or do is arbitrary or invented. They build the play about them like spiders weaving their web, sea-creatures making their shell. I live with them for a year and a half or two years and I know them far better than I know myself. But still they must have the quality of life which is shadowy. . . . 

It seems to me that Luigi Pirandello devoted nearly his whole career as a playwright to establishing the point I am making in this argument. That "Truth" has a protean nature, that its face changes in the eyes of each beholder. Another good writer once said: "Truth lies at the bottom of a bottomless well." 

("About Evasions," from his collected letters titled Five O'Clock Angel)

 

On the loneliness inherent in human life: [The human condition] is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don’t. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, "We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins. . .

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of [his] life. . . . 

(Preface, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) 

 

On dread and the modern writer: . . . An invented adversary might say to me at this point: "I have read some of these books, . . . . I don’t know why anybody should want to write about such diseased and perverted and fantastic creatures and try to pass them off as representative members of the human race! . . . But I do have this sense you talk about. . . . this sense of fearfulness or dreadfulness or whatever you want to call it. I read the newspapers and . . . I think that the confusion of the world is awful. I think that cancer is fearful, and I certainly don’t look forward to the idea of dying, which I think is dreadful. . . . Isn’t that having what you call the Sense of Dreadfulness or something?" My hesitant answer would be          Yes, and no. Mostly no.  And then I would explain a little further, with my usual awkwardness at exposition:  . . . The true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything sensible or visible or even, strictly, materially, knowable. But rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about, which underlies the whole so-called thing. It is the incommunicable something that we shall have to call mystery which is so inspiring of dread among modern artists . . . . 

. . . But you still haven’t explained why these writers have to write about crazy people doing terrible things! . . . 

You are objecting to their choice of symbols. 

Symbols, are they? 

Of course. Art is made out of symbols the way your body is made out of vital tissue. Then why have they got to use ? 

Symbols of the grotesque and the violent? Because a book is short and a man’s life is long. . . . 

You mean it’s got to be more concentrated? 

Exactly. The awfulness has to be compressed. 

But can’t a writer ever get the same effect without using such God damn awful subjects? 

I believe one writer did. The greatest writer of modern times, James Joyce. He managed to get the whole sense of awfulness without resorting to externals (symbols) that departed on the surface from the ordinary and the familiar. . . . He used a device that is known as the interior monologue which only he and one other great modern writer could employ without being excessively tiresome.

What other? 

Marcel Proust. But Proust did not ever quite dare to deliver the message of Absolute Dread. . . The atmosphere of his work is rather womb-like. The flight into protection is very apparent. . . . 

(His introduction to Carson McCullers Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1950) 

 

Why he wrote what he did and what he was trying to express

Q: Surely you’ll admit that there’s been a disturbing note of harshness and coldness and violence and anger in your more recent works? 

A: I think, without planning to do so, I have followed the developing tension and anger and violence of the world and time that I live in through my own steadily increasing tension as a writer and person. . .

Q: Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? 

A: Indeed I do think that I do. . . . The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no person has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any person has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole [although, frankly,] I have never written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe in myself . . . 

            I don’t believe in "original sin." I don’t believe in "guilt." I don’t believe in villains or heroes only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.  This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world we live in. Why don’t we meet these people and get to know them as I try to meet and know people in my plays?

            [And] I’m inclined to think that most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true calling. 

            This sounds terribly vain and egotistical.  I don’t want to end on such a note. Then what shall I say? That I know that I am a minor artist who has happened to write one or two major works? I can’t even say which they are. It doesn’t matter. I have said my say. 

(From "The World I Live In: Tennessee Williams interviews himself," 1957) 

On Streetcar and Writing Itself

In Williams own Where I Live: Selected Essays he recalls that as a final act of restoration [in the wake of Glass Menageries overwhelming success] I settled for a while at Chapala, Mexico, to work on a play called The Poker Night, which later became A Streetcar Named Desire.  It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.  The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable. . . .