Always fond of travel and changes of locale, Tennessee Williams writes to James Laughlin from Rome, about his admiration for Van Gogh and his inability to write anywhere near Broadway, where so many of his plays were performed.
45 Via Aurora, Rome
Dear Jay,
These days the melancholy task of collecting the wildly scattered papers, letters, manuscripts begun and abandoned, sorting out, throwing away or packing: the sad and exhausting business that always puts a long-drawn period to my stay in a place: wondering if anything is worth keeping except a few letters from friends but not quite daring to obey the impulse to make a bonfire of it all. This stay in Rome has been relatively felicitous. Sunny. Peaceful. I have made some good friends here such as Frederic Prokosch and that unhappy young egoist Gore Vidal who is now in Paris and a great number of ephemeral bird-like Italians, sweet but immaterial, like cotton candy: I shall remember all of them like one person who was very pleasant, sometimes even delightful, but like a figure met in a dream, insubstantial, not even leaving behind the memory of a conversation, at least seeming that way now, but possibly later invested with more reality: ghosts in the present: afterwards putting on flesh, unlike the usual way. Anyhow, Italy has been a real experience, a psychic adventure of a rather profound sort which I shall be able to define in retrospect only. I also have a feeling it is a real caesura: pause: parenthesis in my life: that it marks a division between two very different parts which I leave behind me with trepidation. The old continuity seems broken off now, by more than just travel and time. I have an insecure feeling more acute than usual. It is certainly not a good point at which to return to Broadway, but that is what I must do after a brief period in London for the Helen Hayes production of “Menagerie”. Right after that, in July, I must return to New York for rehearsals of “Summer & Smoke”, which is an uncertain quantity.
How right you are about the prizes! They mean nothing to me except that they make the play more profitable. Even so I shall probably not make much out of it. All I made out of “Menagerie” – after taxes and living expenses – was $30,000. If Streetcar had not been a success I would have been broke again in two years. It is evident that I have not been well-managed financially, but there is nothing that I can do about it without devoting my life to personal care of my earnings. It bothers me mostly because there are people I want to help and am not able to as much as I should. – Oh! While I’m on the subject of Streetcar – I thought the first format was infinitely preferable to the second: would it be possible to revert to it if there is another edition? All that I didn’t like about the first was the color. The design was quite wonderful. The present is the worst I’ve ever seen on a New Directions book! I am afraid there must have been a total misunderstanding between Audrey and Creekmore. Unfortunately I was too busy at the time to make my own reactions clear to him.
About the stories: there is one very important change I want to make: the cutting of a certain passage in the story ONE ARM. Windham and I both feel that it cheapens the story, it is the #5 of my typed manuscript with the sentence: “They gave him half a tumbler of whiskey to loosen his tongue” and ends on page seven with phrase: “assured the youth’s conviction and doomed him to the chair”. It was put into the story later and can be removed without affecting the continuity. Please make sure this deletion is made on the proofs. It concerns the blue-movie which was made on the broker’s yacht and it really cheapens the story.
I suggest that you send me the proofs c/o Hugh Beaumont, H.M. Tennant Ltd., London. (Address is Globe Theatre, I believe.) I am afraid they might not reach me here before I start north in my Jeep with Margo who is arriving on the twenty-sixth. I may even start before she arrives and have her meet me in Paris or London. There is to be a congress of Gypsies near Arles on the 24th of May and I should like very much to see it, as well as the town where Van Gogh wrote and painted the fiercest expressions ever made of this world’s terrible glory. I wish that God would allow me to write a play like one of his pictures, but that is asking too much. I am too diffuse, too “morbido” – that wonderful Italian word for soft!
[…]
Carson and I exchange letters continually and we talk about making a home together. I doubt however that we could agree upon a location. She likes places near New York: I could not live anywhere that close to Broadway and continue to function as anything loosely resembling an artist.
Windham’s novel is the finest thing, in some respects, that I have read in American letters: the quality is totally original. I wish that you were in a position to make him the necessary advance: he would need about a thousand dollars: for it is a book which only New Directions should publish, no one else. It is literature of the first order, the order of angels! However Audrey is sending it around to publishers like Dodd-Mead who have no idea what it is worth artistically, now and to be. I am afraid he will settle with them simply because he needs money. I am lending him some but naturally he is reluctant to take it and anything of that sort is deleterious to a friendship. I am afraid of the book being mutilated by uncomprehending suggestions and demands from a commercial house. I have never quite understood your lack of excitement over Don as a writer. (apparent.) I do understand the difficulty of advancing money, however, when one is not a commercial publisher. That I do understand thoroughly. I am one of those who feel that New Directions has been notably altruistic concern, the only one that exists. I also feel, however, that Windham’s novel would be a sound investment financially as well as artistically if it is handled by an understanding house. Windham is now in Rome [illegible] you will see him here or in Europe.
Ever – 10.
FURTHER READING
Playwright Franco D’Alessandro wrote a pleasant essay on Tennessee Williams’ “Roman Muse,” which can be found here
Venture here to read an extensive interview with Tennessee, conducted on his 70th birthday
An installment of NPR’s Lost and Found Sound which follows the story of a rare, archival audio recording made by Tennessee Williams in a New Orleans Penny Arcade ca. 1947 can be listened to here