INTRODUCTION TO
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER

Paul Bowles moved to Tangier in 1947. A respected composer, he had written the music for the original production of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, as well as incidental music for the Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Summer and Smoke in 1948. Once ensconced in Morocco he became an admired writer and translator of fiction. But more than anyone, he opened North Africa as an enticing and available garden of delights for the aesthetic homosexual community of his day. If you strip it down to the basics, he wasn’t in Tangier for the hummus. Tennessee Williams often visited him. Cabeza de Lobo, in Suddenly Last Summer, is a fictionalized version of the Moroccan seaside town Asilah, where Bowles had a house. It is in Cabeza de Lobo that the poet Sebastian Venable meets his grisly end. A generous description of Sebastian’s final journey might be “the quest of a highly civilized man for an anti-civilized truth.” Which, as it happens, was Norman Mailer’s assessment of Paul Bowles’s life. I don’t think Bowles was a precise model for Sebastian, but surely he and the aesthetes who followed him to Morocco are somewhere in the stew.

Ah, Sebastian Venable. What a wonderful name. One of the most despicable characters Williams ever created, surely. One thinks of him as a character; it comes as a shock to remember he never actually appears in the play. But he comes blazingly alive in the monologues of his worshipping mother, Violet, and his distraught cousin, Catharine. Jerry Tallmer, the critic of the Village Voice when the play was first produced, called Suddenly Last Summer, in what was an unusually candid review for its day, “a wild, bold acknowledgment of homosexuality and a searing attempt to exorcise it and become ‘healthy.’ ” Williams had very publicly entered psychoanalysis shortly before writing the play. In those days, many psychoanalysts believed that homosexuality was at best a dangerous neurosis, and none more so than Lawrence Kubie, Williams’s charismatic doctor. Kubie treated many prominent, albeit closeted, gay men in the arts; in essence, if not in actuality, he attempted to cure them, and according to Williams, suggested that he give up both gay sex and writing. A double cure, I suppose. Williams did neither. He wrote Suddenly Last Summer in the mornings and went to sessions with the good doctor in the afternoons. His attitude to what he was writing, and then what he was saying, must have been ambiguous and conflicted. Williams seems to mock Sebastian and pour contempt on him (which would have pleased Kubie), and yet might he not have admired him as well? What if Violet’s laudatory description of her son possessed some kind of truth?

A minor poet travels the world accompanied by a woman. He is selfishly dedicated to his art and will exploit those around him to stay true to it. But, sadly, his creativity has run dry. He ends up, with his young companion, in a distant tropical hellhole. A partial description of Sebastian, certainly, but equally a description of Nonno in The Night Of the Iguana. This play, written only three years after Suddenly Last Summer, features a variation of the same character, sexual content aside, but this time Nonno (his real name, Jonathan Coffin—another gem), is as admirable as Sebastian is not. It would seem that there was something Williams could not get out of his system, something he had conflicting and changeable views about. It is often assumed that Williams, in recounting Sebastian’s “journey,” was writing about homosexuals as both devouring and being devoured, but it seems to me more likely that he was writing about artists in the same terms. Or perhaps, to him, the two were indistinguishable. Williams wasn’t baring his soul to Kubie because of contentment; he was plagued with guilt, fear, and insecurity, much of which revolved around both his writing and his sexuality, the latter being a matter of public disgrace and criminality in the fifties. Perhaps it explains Kubie’s suggestion to give up both.

Suddenly Last Summer certainly perplexed Dr. Kubie, whose abhorrence of matters gay was tested to the limit by Sebastian’s fate. In a letter to Williams, after seeing the play, he confessed to being mystified by “the fantasy of eating and being eaten,” which is “pretty cloudy to me.” Poor Kubie. He was confused because the artist was confused. But as Williams was an extraordinary artist, the confusion seems not like confusion, but an enormous truth. But what truth?

Williams tried later, with Nonno, to find another, gentler way of projecting an artist’s sensibility and destiny. And yet Nonno is at heart as selfish as Sebastian. This time the writer is not condemning him for it; if anything, he is extolling him. Well, to a point. If you neglect the central “n” in the ancient poet’s name, Williams is suggesting No–No. And yet, everything we know about Williams tells us that his feeling about creating art was Yes–Yes. It is impossible to pin down what Williams actually felt, because he felt so many things at the same time; not only are his characters filled with contradictions, but the plays are themselves. Even as I write this introduction, trying to analyze one particular play, I find myself spinning in circles.

As for his two doomed poets—both die at the play’s conclusion and, together with Val Xavier, the handsome drifter in Orpheus Descending who began life as a poet in Battle Of Angels, they are the only three male characters to expire in the major Williams plays—if selfishness is necessary for Nonno’s art, isn’t it also for Sebastian’s? Nonno, incidentally, ends up writing a beautiful poem, while it is usually assumed that Sebastian’s work is pretentious. But who is to say that Sebastian wasn’t actually a good poet? Williams never lets us hear his work, so he doesn’t really commit himself; with Nonno, he goes for it. Nonetheless, Williams seems to be criticizing himself (the homosexual writer) in the first play, as well as looking beadily at friends like Bowles, and then suddenly justifying himself and the Bowles clique in the second. Except the criticism (in Suddenly) may have an unspoken admiration, and the admiration (in Iguana) may be filtered with criticism. If the observer must argue with himself trying to figure out what on earth the playwright was thinking, so too most probably did the playwright, who had no choice but to write two versions of the same conceit. Dr. Kubie gains the upper hand in Suddenly Last Summer and then loses it again in The Night of the Iguana (written when Williams was no longer in analysis). Sebastian is, nonetheless, the more potent of the two characters. This, despite the fact that he has died before the play begins.

Of course, Sebastian is only a despicable predator if you believe Catharine’s story. The play ends with an unforgettable line—“I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true. . . .” Which is, by the way, a recycling of the last line of Williams’s original (1955) and final (1973) versions of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof—“wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” In both plays an honest observation is being made; Maggie does love Brick, and Catharine’s story is accurate.

Or is it? The assumption has always been that Catharine is giving the correct account of what happened to Sebastian on Cabeza de Lobo. Catherine was based, to some degree, on Williams’s sister, Rose. Rose had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in the late thirties; she was delusional and verbalized sexual fantasies, which was especially shocking behavior for a young woman of her time. She was lobotomized in 1943, a tragedy that haunted Williams forever after. If he has used Rose as a blueprint for Catharine, no matter how craftily disguised, would he not therefore be writing, to some degree, about delusion? Would he not be creating a colorful and unspeakable erotic fantasy to match Rose’s? Note too that Anne Meacham, who played Catharine in the original production, radiated acute instability; not someone whose word you would necessarily trust. (“She herself was nothing if not high strung,” said Jerry Tallmer in Meacham’s obituary). The film, on the other hand, had Elizabeth Taylor, an actress so direct that one tended to believe her even if she claimed to be the Queen of Egypt. Such is the power of cinema that when we think of Catharine we think of Taylor, but the original performance was very different, more ambiguous and more disturbing.

Consider also that Williams was basing Catharine not only on Rose, but on himself as well. There is much of Tennessee in both Sebastian and Catharine. Williams, the artist, was constantly saying things the world did not want to hear. He spoke—or at least suggested—sexual truths that had always remained hidden. But he fictionalized those truths. What came from his pen was not necessarily literal. So if he instructs us to consider the possibility that Catharine’s story is true, should we not also consider the possibility that it isn’t? Cutting open Catharine’s mind is evil, whether her story is factual or not. Mrs. Venable might be cruel and unjust, just as Catharine is highly sympathetic; but that doesn’t necessarily mean the story is accurate. I am not suggesting that it isn’t, but rather that we don’t know. Williams seems to want us to believe it is true, and yet the power of the play comes from the fact that his subconscious is sending out so many mixed signals. Again, his tumult seems inseparable from his genius.

Williams was haunted by Rose’s lobotomy and wracked with guilt for not being able to prevent the surgery. The specter of lobotomy hangs over Suddenly Last Summer. The play is driven by two questions: what is the story Violet wants cut out of Catharine’s mind, and will the actual cutting take place. The fear of that sadistic operation permeates the jungle garden where the play is set. But, again, is that fear even more personal than one might suspect? Was Williams afraid that somehow his own truths, as well as his fantasies, his gift for elaborate storytelling, would be cut out of him? Did he think that somehow he would meet the same fate as his sister? Didn’t they, in a sense, have a similar illness, except Rose turned hers into babble and Williams turned his into art? I think Catharine’s fear mirrors the writer’s. And of course, we never know how the issue is resolved for Catharine, just as Williams had no idea what his own fate would be when he wrote the play. And that outcome would ultimately mirror his worst fears.

As he grew older, his dependence on alcohol and narcotics became legendary and ultimately contributed to his death. Looking at the reports of his last days, and indeed his erratic final writing, it is difficult to believe that the drink and drugs didn’t take their toll on his brain as well as his body. It seems to me that some of his brain cells were diminished or reduced. He had begun, creatively, to babble. He had, in essence, self-lobotomized. In the end, he was becoming Rose. The irony is that whereas the author of Suddenly Last Summer dreads, deplores and fears the idea of a lobotomy, some part of him also yearns for it.

If Williams’s mind was more confused subconsciously when he wrote Suddenly Last Summer than it had been or would be when creating his other major work, rarely has his craft been as focused. The play is daring in its construction; it is basically two arias with connective tissue. The second half is one person telling a story. And there is no resolution. And yet it is as tight and taut as anything he ever wrote. There is not a single wasted word. There is none of the wondrous disorder of Orpheus Descending. It’s as if he had to totally discipline himself in order to give his contradictory mind some dramatic direction. And rarely has the poet in him merged so comfortably with the dramatist. For the poetry in Suddenly Last Summer is purely of the theater. Names like Cabeza de Lobo and the Encantadas look dimly exotic in print, but they become utterly evocative and mysterious and even frightening when spoken. Catharine’s account of the journey becomes transcendent when acted. Words, phrases, sentences assume a rhythm onstage that they do not possess on the page. The play, in its vision of Sebastian, seems to make the idea of poetry look foolish, and yet the writing of it honors poetic imagery in a way that exceeds almost anything else in modern theater. So even its glory resides in the center of a contradiction.

The true genius of Suddenly Last Summer is that you believe it; not just Catharine’s story, but the whole damn thing. As you read it everything seems to make sense, despite the fact that really it makes no sense whatsoever. A woman entering old age, acting as sexual bait (Violet before her stroke)? A doctor dedicated to removing unfortunate memories from a woman’s brain who then injects her with a mysterious truth serum, which might validate those memories? A handsome, dissipated poet who, after twenty-some years of traveling for just such a purpose, still can’t figure out how to negotiate a blowjob on his own? One shouldn’t really overanalyze Suddenly Last Summer. Trying to figure it out can land you in Lion’s View. You just have to go with it. It is “intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire” (Williams, writing about Paul Bowles’s novel, The Sheltering Sky). Williams, of course, might have been describing his own work, his own dark cloud, which finally because of—not despite—its many contradictions pulsates with fire and has insinuated itself into the collective subconscious of twentieth-century art.

Martin Sherman