random observations
This play is written for both the stage and the screen and the part of Benjamin D. Murphy was created with Burgess Meredith in mind. It was written involuntarily as a katharsis of eighteen months that I once spent as a clerk in a large wholesale corporation in the Middle West. This eighteen months’ interlude, my season in hell, came at a time when I was just out of high school and the world appeared to be a place of infinite and exciting possibilities. I discovered how badly mistaken it is possible for a young man to be.
I escaped to college.
I left the others behind me—Eddie, Doretta, Nora, Jimmie, Dell—and I never went back to see if they were still there. I believe they are.
THIS PLAY IS DEDICATED TO THEM.
I dedicate it to them and to all of the other little wage-earners of the world not only with affection, but with profound respect and earnest prayer.
I know that there is a good deal of didactic material in this play, some of which will probably burden the reader. When I was half way through it the United States of America went to war. For a moment I wondered if I should continue the work. Or should I immediately undertake the composition of something light and frothy not only in spirit but matter? I decided not to. I am not so good at writing what I want to write that I can afford to write something else. So I kept on . . . with this feeling about it. Wars come and wars go and this one will be no exception. But Benjamin Murphy and Benjamin Murphy’s problems are universal and everlasting. Also—this! Volcanic eruptions are not the result of disturbances in the upper part of the crater; something way, way down—basic and fundamental—is at the seat of the trouble. At the bottom of our social architecture, which is now describing such perilous gyrations in mid-air, are the unimportant little Benjamin Murphys and their problems . . . and if there is something at the bottom that started the trouble on top, what could be more appropriate at this moment than inspecting the bottom?
Let’s take a look!
EDITOR’S NOTE
In his “random observations” Williams has obviously adjusted the chronology of events to fit his recently adjusted birthdate. He was not “just out of high school” when he went to the shoe factory, but at age 22 just out of his third year at the University of Missouri. Likewise, his “escape” was to Washington University in 1936 at age 25. At the end of 1938, while he was at home jobless, penniless, and desperate, he learned of a Group Theatre playwriting contest for writers under 25. Tom was 27, but felt justified in dropping the years spent at the factory as “lost time.” He sent four one-acts under the title American Blues, and two long plays, Fugitive Kind and Not About Nightingales, for the first time signing himself “Tennessee Williams.” Winning an award of one hundred dollars for his one-act plays brought him to the attention of agent Audrey Wood who launched his Broadway career.
Williams never had a deep regard for reality, but his lie caught up with him through the years. Stairs to the Roof, with its obviously autobiographical college graduation scene was perhaps the first example. As biographers listed his birthdate as 1914 instead of 1911 and reporters delved into his background, the dissimulation about his age grew troublesome. It was when Kenneth Tynan in 1955 proposed to write a major piece on the playwright that Williams finally confronted the myth, writing Tynan: “I think it would be fitting for you to give the true date of my birth, March 26,1911.”