Hart Crane’s line, “Relentless caper for all those who step The legend of their youth into the noon,” serves as a symbolic epigraph to Sweet Bird of Youth, in which the characters try to carry their youth into the “noon” of their lives. Quickly flying by the windows at the Royal Palms Hotel while musical strains of “The Lament” are heard in the background, the sweet bird of youth appears to each character and then disappears, never to return.
Once a goddess of the silver screen, Andrea Del Lago is now past her prime seeking pleasure in alcohol, drugs, and young studs whom she dominates, leading them around like lapdogs bound to her by an invisible chain. Wheezing for her oxygen and squinting through her broken glasses, she searches for her Moroccan hashish while ordering her current young stud, Chance Wayne, about as if he were her slave. A sort of lament drifts through the air as the Princess observes it seems to be saying “Lost, lost, never to be found again.” In his “Foreword” to Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams observes, “We are all civilized people, which means we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.” Princess recognizes the savage monster in herself, “the flesh-hungry, blood thirsty ogre” at the top of the beanstalk lost in the beanstalk country, exclaiming to Chance, “When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BE ME. I’m an older hand at it . . . with much more aptitude at it than you have . . .” In the final scene after she dreams of her “come back” as an aging actress with talent, she is aware of the fleeting nature of such “success” and encourages Chance to join her: “I’ve climbed back alone up the beanstalk to the ogre’s country where I live, now, alone . . . Chance, we’ve got to go on.”
What once was, no longer is. Chance’s girl Heavenly is no longer fifteen, innocent, uncorrupted, and pure. Having presumably contracted venereal disease from Chance during one of his return visits to St. Cloud, she suffered a hysterectomy and, as her father crudely observes, was “spayed like a dawg.” Her father, who could have saved her by letting her marry, as she says, “a boy that was still young and clean,” exploited her by trying to pressure her into marrying “a fifty-year old money bag” from whom he wanted something. This scenario of abuse was repeated over and over. Feeling “dead, cold, empty, like an old woman,” Heavenly explains to her father, “I feel as if I ought to rattle like a dead dried up vine when the Gulf Wind blows”—a description that is echoed by the Princess when she says “What am I? I know, I’m dead, as old as Egypt . . .”
Even Boss Finley has experienced the passing of the sweet bird of youth—his daughter observes that he married for love, but that he wouldn’t allow his daughter to do the same. At one point when he looks at his lovely daughter Heavenly, Boss Finley’s reveries carry him back to a time of youth and innocence, his own. Williams tells us in the stage directions: “It’s important not to think of his attitude toward her in terms of crudely conscious incestuous feeling, but just in the natural terms of almost any aging father’s feeling for a beautiful young daughter who reminds him of a dead wife that he desired intensely when she was the age of his daughter.” Now his mistress Miss Lucy represents the lie that he has been living. While thriving on Finley’s money, she mocks the old man by writing on the walls of the ladies’ room at the Royal Palms Hotel: “Boss Finley . . . is too old to cut the mustard.” Could there have really been an idyllic time past, as he explains in his “populist messiah” campaign speech, when he came “down barefoot out of the red clay hills as if the Voice of God called” him.
In spite of the names St. Cloud and Diamond Key, a grand hotel, a grove of royal palm trees, and a stage design that opens up under a star-lit sky, the world of Sweet Bird of Youth is a spiritual wasteland, the ogre’s country at the top of the beanstalk, a land sold to the power brokers of oil interests, a “city of flames” where the “unsatisfied tiger” rages “in the nerves jungle,” a place where the “Voice of God” has long been gone. “Lost, Lost,” Princess explains, we are all living in “places of exile from whatever we loved.” Perhaps the Heckler has the answer when he shouts, “I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of.” In the world of St. Cloud, God is apparently dead.
In this savage land of culprits and victims, predators and preyed upon, and those who are bought and those who do the buying, the “American Dream,” like God, is a long time gone. Ironically, its spirit echoes throughout Sweet Bird of Youth. Chance Wayne sets forth from St. Cloud believing in optimism, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency; that his is a land of infinite possibilities; that it is possible to rise from rags to riches; and that individual merit and worth are valued. He has a dream that he will not relinquish under any circumstances. Boss Finley begins his political career as “a man with a mission, which he holds sacred, and on the strength of which he rises to high public office.” Greed, pride, selfishness, opportunism, cynicism, being “Number One,” finding the easy way to wealth, asking “What’s in it for me?” have brought about the rise of ogres and monsters in beanstalk country. American has become the beanstalk country.
Political rhetoric runs throughout the world of Tennessee Williams. Sometimes it is partially disguised; at other times, direct and powerful. Ideas involving political power brokers and ruthless industrialists dominate the atmosphere of Sweet Bird of Youth. Boss Finley is the predator politician, but he is, ironically, also the prey of forces more powerful than he, such as his state’s governor and the corporate oil barons. According to Joseph Heller in Catch-22, “Every culprit is a victim; and every victim, a culprit.” Orwell’s Big Brother, Heller’s Milo Minderbinder, and Williams’ own Syndicate in Baby Doll, the Klan in Orpheus Descending, Gutman and Generalissimo in Camino Real, and Red Devil Battery operatives in The Red Devil Battery Sign, show the individual to be powerless in the face of forces too big and overwhelming to be taken in battle. To entice Heavenly to join his campaign willingly, Boss Finley tries to coax her into going to New Orleans on a spending spree, explaining, “I made a pile of dough on a deal involvin’ the sale of rights to oil under water here lately.” He thinks he is the one doing the buying; but, in another turn of irony, he is the one who has been bought. Young Tom Finley has turned his young supporters for his father’s candidacy for office into a gang of juvenile delinquents, capable of beating hecklers into silence and castrating a black man in a display of their fragile and corrupt power. Echoes of Heller’s omnipresent “mobs with clubs” in his surreal depiction of the Eternal City of Rome in Catch-22 (“Hell”) appear throughout the political action of Sweet Bird of Youth. Shakespeare’s power broker Bolingbroke in Richard I, Robert Penn Warren’s “just a country boy” Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, Huey P. Long (Machiavellian governor of Louisiana), and Orval Faubus (governor of Arkansas who opposed Segregation) might be considered proper analogues to Boss Finley. His name is “Legion.”
The genius of Williams involves his use of classical allusions, Biblical stories, mythic archtypes, fairy tales and legends, and historical analogies from the past and present in his plays. He almost always twists, even inverts them, challenging us to discover the ironic and often grotesque transformations of the originals. Is Andrea Del Lago’s “Sleeping Beauty” brought to life by a gigolo carrying a canister of oxygen? Who is Jack, who is the ogre, what beanstalk is Jack trying to climb, and what treasure is he trying to steal?
Williams observes the unities of time, place, and action in Sweet Bird of Youth as the onstage course of events occur on Easter Sunday, from late morning until late night. This sharpens the focus of the conflict significantly. References made to Good Friday expand the religious dimensions of the play. How might this be considered a story of death, resurrection and salvation? How is the passion of Christ distorted in this dramatic analogue?
Trying to dominate the disturbance in the hall at his political rally in St. Cloud, Boss Finley proclaims: “Last Friday, Good Friday, I seen a horrible thing on the campus of our great State University, which I built for the State. A hideous straw-stuffed effigy of myself, Tom Finley, was hung and set fire to in the main quadrangle of the College.” He goes on to explain, “This outrage was inspired . . . inspired by the Northern radical press. However, that was Good Friday. Today is Easter. I saw that was Good Friday. Today is Easter Sunday and I am in St. Cloud.” This takes place simultaneously with the overwhelming and systematic beating of the Heckler. This is not the resurrection of his political career dreamed of by Boss Finley.
Chance Wayne is also attempting a resurrection of sorts. This is his last chance to recapture the heart of Heavenly; defeat the keepers of her Southern, “virgin,” white persona; and carry her off to Hollywood to co-star with him in a movie to be called “Youth.” He rides into town driving the Cadillac convertible of a movie star, has his name paged continuously at the Royal Palms Hotel, flaunts his movie contract, and declares a new day dawning. Brought to face the reality that he is past his youth, the corrupter of his girl, filled with rot, and the victim of time, he accepts the cards has been dealt. When Princess warns him that he is to be castrated if he does not leave with her, he tells her, “That can’t be done to me twice. You did that to me this morning, here on this bed, where I had the honor, where I had the great honor . . . .” Might this be considered a sort of crucifixion, one without a resurrection? Chance is unable to prove anything through his suffering and “death.” He questions, “Something’s got to mean something, don’t it, Princess? I mean like your life means nothing, except that you never could make it, always almost, never quite? Well, something’s got to mean something.” The story has been drastically changed to one involving defeat and tragedy rather than rebirth and resurrection.
In a final turnabout, Chance is savior to Alexandra Del Lago. There is a resurrection in Sweet Bird of Youth that goes significantly beyond her comeback as a movie star with creative talent. Born again, she enthusiastically exclaims to Chance, “Chance, the most wonderful thing has happened to me . . . Chance, when I saw you driving under the window with your head held high, with that terrible stiff-necked pride of the defeated which I know so well; I knew that your come-back had been a failure like mine. And I felt something in my heart for you.” Feeling something for someone other than herself, she goes on, “That means my heart’s still alive, at least some part of it is, not all of my heart is dead yet. Part’s still alive. . . . Chance, gave me hope that I could stop being a monster. . . . You gave oxygen to me.” Instead of being a monster in beanstalk country, perhaps she has become a unique “lady of the lake,” one who has dared to see her self-reflection in its glassy waters, accept it for what it is, and “go on” to a new reality that awaits her.
COLBY H. KULLMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI