part0021

"Queegqueg no care what god made him shark . . . wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; hut de god what made shark must be one dam Ingin.''

Tennessee Williams' new movie, Suddenly, Last Summer, seems to have infuriated more wowsers than any literary work since Joyce's Ulysses. From north, south, east and west the impassioned voices resound, declaring that Williams is "sick,""morbid,""unwholesome," and generally a sad blend of the unheimlich and the mashugga.

"Almost intolerably evil," fulminates Parents magazine. "Clinical, distasteful, morbid, extraordinarily shocking," howls McCall's. The weeping and gnashing of teeth from other sources is even more heart-rending. One would think that the wisdom of Christ or the immaculate conception of Eleanor Roosevelt had been challenged.

Actually, all that Williams has done is to confront some of the issues which great tragedy has always raised, from Sophocles through Shakespeare, right up to Melville. Suddenly, Last Summer, far from being sick, is Williams' healthiest work—because it is his bravest.

It doesn't see human suffering as an illustration to a theory by Freud or Marx. It doesn't pretend that evil is always due to economics or Oedipus complexes. It will probably not be popular with people who think that Arthur Miller, or Maxwell Anderson, or William Inge, are important playwrights.

Like King Lear, this new Williams tragedy does not pretend to have all the answers; but, like King Lear, it is brave enough to ask all the questions.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

Villon is great because he doesn't pretend to know what he doesn't know. What he does know he tells us in direct language—language so simple that stupid critics have debated several hundred years now on what makes his poetry so strong.

What he knows is that hunger makes the wolf devour sheep, and hunger makes the man kill another for his money, and that people who end up on the gallows are not much different from those who die quietly in bed. He knows these things, intimately, and he says them. He knows that most whores are not glamorous but ugly, and he says that.

Villon doesn't know a damned thing about Professor Lutkopf's essay on Dr. Kleindenken's commentary on what Marx wrote to Engels in 1872. Or, if he does know, he doesn't care—anymore than he cares about Aquinas' commentaries on Aristotle.

Villon is not really much like Tennessee Williams, and I really shouldn't have dragged him into this article, but the two men do have this thing in common, that they are not running for President. Arthur Miller, for instance, is a writer who is always running for President.

Death of a Salesman is to drama what an Eisenhower speech is to rhetoric. There is in it none of the really frightening, terrible, unspeakable quality that makes a great tragedy. Everybody knows why Willy Loman suffered and died; they knew before they went into the theatre.

Death of a Salesman offers, really, nothing but a bland uplift. It tells the Broadway audience what they want to hear, that the liberal left-wing philosophy of the '30s was true after all. It has all of the answers, so it doesn't really ask any of the questions.

The great writer creates situations so true and so urgently significant that he himself often doesn't "understand" them. I mean that very seriously. When Achilles suddenly weeps, in the great interview with Priam at the end of the Iliad, Homer is probably as surprised as the rest of us.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the "poor hungry wretches" that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

Suddenly, Last Summer is this kind of a story. It has no "message," no religious or economic or psychological theory to sell, no relaxing answer to the unbearable tensions it creates. All it has is mystery and horror and a lyric poetry that is shot through with pain and wonder. All it has is the pulsating life of the naked soul of a man who is the greatest dramatic artist since Ibsen.

The story is really quite simple. A psychiatrist with an unpronounceable Polish name that he translates as "sugar" is offered a fantastic sum of money to perform a lobotomy upon a psychotic young girl. The woman who offers the money is Violet Venable, a "southern lady," mother of a recently dead poet, Sebastian Venable.

Dr. Sugar interviews the psychotic young girl, Cathy. He decides that he can cure her without resorting to lobotomy. Through narco-analysis he gradually learns what has driven Cathy into the hiding place we call insanity. Cathy, it seems, has seen Sebastian's death, and it was a gruesome one.

Sebastian was a homosexual who had used Cathy as "bait" to attract young men. He did this once too often, the last time on a tropical island where most of the population is living in that state of starvation which is so common in the world today—and which we rich Americans try so hard to blot out of our consciousness.

Sebastian "caught" several of the ragged, ugly, filthy, starving adolescent boys on this island, using Cathy as "bait." But, with cool selfishness, he used these boys and then carelessly tossed them aside. They were of primitive and ignorant people. They finally united against Sebastian, came for him in a mob, took him, murdered him . . . and devoured his body.

When Cathy is able to remember this and tell it to "Dr. Sugar" she is cured.

This is the whole story. But, of course, to tell it this way is to obliterate its significance. The gruesome act of cannibalism which forms the climax is only the strongest of a series of disturbing images which are the real elements of the dark poem Williams has constructed.

The hospital in which Dr. Sugar works is called Lion's View, for example.

The island where Sebastian dies is called Cabezo de Lobo—head of a wolf.

Violet Venable has an insectivorous plant, given to her by Sebastian, and we see it being fed in the course of the story.

The dinosaurs, one character remarks (inaccurately, but with artistic meaning), perished because they were vegetarians—"the earth belongs to the carnivores."

Violet's garden has in it a statue of a winged skeleton, and this comes between her and Dr. Sugar at a significant moment.

Finally, the place where Sebastian is killed is "the ruins of an old temple," that looked "horrible. . . as if it had been the scene of terrible sacrificial rites."

Sebastian is, indeed, a sacrificial victim, and the winged skeleton reappears briefly in a surrealistic half-image on the screen just before the murder is consummated. Sebastian, actually, is a self-elected sacrifice, like Christ, testifying to a very non-Christian vision of God.

That Sebastian had had a "vision of God" we learn very early in the story. Violet tells us about it, in the longest and most poetic speech Tennessee Williams has ever written. Sebastian saw God in the Galapagos Islands at the breeding-time of the turtles.

Every year at this time the female turtles crawl out of the sea, laboriously lay their eggs, and, hideously tired, crawl weakly back into the sea. In a while the eggs hatch and the young come out and begin their run toward the sea.

But the great birds of the Galapagos know all about the breeding-time of the turtles and they wait for this moment every year. As the young turtles race toward the sea, the birds descend from the sky, thousands of them, in a great black cloud. They attack the infant turtles, turn them over, tear their bellies and devour them.

Of the hundreds of turtles that hatch each year, only about one-tenth of one percent ever reach the sea. The rest are eaten.

When Sebastian saw this natural process he knew in a poetic flash that "God is cruel and creation and destruction are the same." The God he worshipped, the God to whom his poems are henceforth written, was the God of Melville's "shark massacre," the Hangman God of Joyce's Ulysses, the sadistic Nobodaddy of Blake's prophetic poems, the God of Greek tragedy, the God who, in King Lear, kills men for sport.

That Sebastian's vision of God was a true one is the dark, hidden fear of every religious person. The non-dualistic Orient accepts such a thought with equanimity: when Ramakrishna saw the goddess Kali give birth and then devour her own child, he took the vision as a true revelation of the oneness of creation and destruction.

To Buddhist Tibet, this is the unity of yab and yum; to Taoist China, the unity of yin and yang. The Occident perennially seeks to repress this thought, and perennially is haunted by half-awareness of it.

It is the symbolic meaning of the scar that bisects Ahab in Moby Dick, and of the half-obliterated body of "the Runner" in Faulkner's Fable. It recurs again and again in Euripedes, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and dozens of others.

With this clue in mind we can see that the world of Suddenly, Last Summer does, indeed, belong to the carnivores.

Shortly after Sebastian's death, two loathsome relatives turn up to attempt to scavenge as much of his clothing and other possessions as they can get their hands on. (This type of emotional cannibalism also appears in Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.)

Sebastian's homosexuality, we eventually learn, had resulted from his mother's attempts to enforce the neurotic condition she calls "chastity" upon him. (This type of cannibalism by parents upon children is, of course, the chief feature of organized religion, and the principle theme of most of Williams' works.)

Cannibalism is even a characteristic of societies, as well as individuals—the deplorable conditions of the hospital where Dr. Sugar treats Cathy are depicted unblinkingly by Williams; and anybody at all aware of the treatment of the psychotic in this great, rich nation knows that the best that most states do for these unfortunates is precisely as inadequate and horrible as this movie indicates. Some state hospitals are even worse than Lion's View.

The only literary work to confront these issues as boldly as Suddenly, Last Summer is Melville's Moby Dick . The classic description of a sea-battle—"men cannibally carving each other's live meat on deck" while the sharks "carve the dead meat" of the bodies thrown overboard—would be just the same if you turned it upside down and put the men in the water and the sharks on the deck, "a shockingly sharkish business enough for all parties." Ishmael, reflecting on this, considers "the propriety of devil-worship," just as Williams' Sebastian does.

While the sharks eat a whale in the water, Stubb eats steak off the same whale in his cabin. "Go to the meat-market," Melville tells the reader: "Cannibal! Who isn't a cannibal?"

The all-time classic in this chain of thought also occurs in Moby Dick, in the great scene where the "grandfather whale" is harpooned and killed. Melville writes:

From the points where the whale's eyes had once been, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered . . . to light the gay bridals of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

We begin to realize that, once these issues are raised, it doesn't really matter whether a man "believes in God" or not. "God," after all, is just a short-hand symbol for our attitude toward the nature of the universe.

Most soi-disant "freethinkers" and "atheists" can't accept the notion that Ultimate Reality is really this sharkish, any more than religionists can accept it.

The Book of Job dares to raise the question—that is its eternal glory—but then hastily buries it under a cloud of meaningless rhetoric. Only the greatest works of art have dared to stare unblinkingly at the question without attempting to smooth it over or bury it—works like Medea, King Lear, Moby Dick, Beethoven's Fifth, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children and The Disasters of War.

The theological writings of Kierkegaard and Tillich make honest attempts to confront this question; and I respect these two men more than I respect the banal flow of bilge that issues forth from the "philosophers" of the American Humanist Association.

(If the Reverend Schaef wants to write to the Realist again and renew his charge that I am a theologian in disguise, I will admit that he's not completely wrong—but I'm only a theologian in the sense that Antonin Artaud was.)

But, is everything completely black and sharkish in Williams' view of the universe? Well, it has to be granted that it is not. Dr. Sugar does, finally, cure Cathy, through that discipline of unmitigated psychological honesty which is the essence of psychotherapy; and a universe in which such honesty and such cures are possible cannot be all bad.

Indeed, the East which accepts the unity of good and evil, yin and yang, with such equanimity, has never forgotten that if the evil is omnipresent, why, then, so must be the good.

And even Melville's vision—at the climax of Moby Dick, when the great Whale Armada comes before us—includes the significant detail that, with slaughter rampant all around them, the young whales at the center of the school are copulating and the mother whales are suckling their young.

"And thus," Melville writes, "surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights. . . the creatures of the center fearlessly indulge in peaceful concernments .. . yea, in dalliance and delight."

A few sentences later, Melville boldly declares the Oriental doctrine of the undefiled essence: ". . . and while planets of woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland I still bathe in eternal joy."

But Melville was no fatuous optimist, as we have seen. At the end, Ahab and whale destroy each other and, in ironic last testimony to the unity of the opposites, Ishmael returns to life floating on a coffin.

And, similarly, Williams' Dr. Sugar, though he can cure one girl, has obviously no illusions about himself or his science. The doctor has frightened eyes. Montgomery Clift's sensitive portrayal brings this home to us in scene after scene, and two of the characters remark upon it.

Nietzsche once wrote: "When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." And the mystic Eckhart is even more direct: "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."

Sebastian Venable spoke of the young boys he preyed upon as "tasty" and "delicious"; he used them selfishly, then cast them aside. He could only know the carnivorousness of the creative principle so well if it was within himself— in the depths of his own perverse and poetic heart.

That is how Dr. Sugar understands his patients, also; and that is why he, too, has frightened eyes.

"All these people who go around protesting against the nuclear tests," a friend of mine once said to me—"they never have the guts to face the problem in the only place where it can be handled—by facing the thing in themselves, in all men, that wants the Bomb to go off."

This is a far cry from the fatuous liberalism and optimism of the old- fashioned "humanist" and "freethinker," but perhaps the Realist is sufficiently aware of 20th Century history and 20th Century psychology to allow it to be expressed by one Negative Thinker.