A SUMMER OF DISCOVERY

In those days there was, and for all I know still may be, a share-the-expense travel agency through which people whose funds were as limited as mine, that summer of 1940, got into contact with others who owned cars and were going in roughly the same direction.

A preliminary meeting and interview would be arranged in the office of the agency which was located in the lobby of a rather seedy midtown Manhattan hotel. It was about as embarrassing as applying for a job, perhaps even more so, for a man who is offering you a job can turn you down with some polite little dissimulation such as, “I’m looking for someone with a bit more experience in this type of work.” But if you were turned down by a car-owner at this agency, you knew it could only be because you had failed to make an agreeable or trustworthy impression. Inevitably you were nervous and guilty-looking.

On this occasion, the summer that I had decided to go to Mexico for no more definite reason than that it was as far from New York as I could hope to get on the small funds at my disposal, the agency introduced me to a fantastic young honeymoon couple. The bridegroom was a young Mexican who had come up to New York to visit the World’s Fair, then in progress, and had encountered and almost immediately married a young blonde lady of ambiguous profession whom he was now preparing to take home to meet his parents in Mexico City.

He had already met with so many unexpected expenses that he needed a paying passenger on his trip home, but it was obvious that my nervous manner aroused suspicion in him. Fortunately they had an interpreter with them, at the meeting, and the bride was more accustomed to and less distrustful of nervous young men. She felt nothing at all alarming about me, and through the interpreter persuaded her bridegroom to accept me as a traveling companion.

They didn’t speak the same language in more ways than one and so the young lady, as the journey proceeded, began to use me as her confidant. About her ambiguous profession she had thoroughly deceived her new mate but she was very uncertain that his well-to-do parents in Mexico City, if we ever got there, would be equally gullible. And so, on the long way South, she would rap at my motel door almost every midnight to tell me about their latest misunderstanding or misadventure, and these clandestine conversations were the best psychological therapy that I could have had in my own state of anxiety and emotional turmoil, which was due to my feeling that my career as a Broadway playwright had stopped almost where it had started and what would follow was unpredictable but surely no good.

The journey was erratic as a blind bird’s and took at least twice as long as would be reasonably expected, and the shared expenses were staggering by my standards. However my state of mind and emotion were so depressed that I was fairly indifferent to all practical concerns, even to a bad cold that turned to influenza, to the almost continual dream-state that comes with high fever and chills.

I never again saw this odd young couple after the morning when they delivered me to the YMCA building in Mexico City but, a year or two later, the bride sent me some fairly worthless articles of clothing which I had left in the trunk of the car, along with a note containing sentimental references to the wonderful trip that we had enjoyed together and hoping that sometime, somehow, we’d be able to enjoy another, and I thought to myself as I read it, this poor young woman has gone out of her mind.

Nobody had warned me that Mexico City was, in altitude, one of the highest cities in the world. I felt all the time as if I had taken Benzedrine, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stay still. Surmising at last that I was allergic to atmosphere at the 7,500-foot level, I took a bus to Acapulco, some other young American having described it as a primitive place with much better swimming facilities than the “Y.”

So I set out for Acapulco, with chills, fever, heart palpitations, and a mental state that was like a somnambulist’s, apparently not bothering to inform Audrey Wood, my agent, the Theatre Guild, or the Dramatists Guild that my address would no longer be c/o General Delivery in Mexico City, an oversight which led to much complication some weeks later. Actually I was suffering from incipient tuberculosis, the scars of which are still visible on X-ray lung photos.

In Acapulco, I spent the first few days in a fantastic hotel near the central plaza. All the rooms opened onto a large patio-garden containing parrots, monkeys, and the proprietor of the hotel, who was so fat that he could hardly squeeze into a room at the place. Much of his time was devoted to cosmetic treatments which were administered in the patio. Every morning a very lively young barber would arrive to touch up the proprietor’s hair with henna and give him a marcel wave and a cold cream facial. Since the dyed, waved hair was quite long and the proprietor spoke in a falsetto voice and was always clad in a bright silk kimono, I wasn’t quite sure of his sex till I heard him addressed as Señor something-or-other by one of his employees.

The steaming hot squalor of that place quickly drove me to look for other accommodations, nearer the beaches. And that’s how I discovered the background for my new play, The Night of the Iguana. I found a frame hotel called the Costa Verde on the hill over the still water beach called Caleta and stayed there from late August to late September.

It was a desperate period in my life, but it’s during such times that we are most alive and they are the times that we remember most vividly, and a writer draws out of vivid and desperate intervals in his life the most necessary impulse or, drive toward his work, which is the transmutation of experience into some significant piece of creation, just as an oyster transforms, or covers over, the irritating grain of sand in his shell to a pearl, white or black, of lesser or greater value.

My daily program at the Costa Verde Hotel was the same as it had been everywhere else. I charged my nerves with strong black coffee, then went to my portable typewriter which was set on a card table on a verandah and worked till I was exhausted: then I ran down the hill to the still water beach for my swim.

One morning, taking my swim, I had a particularly bad fit of coughing. I tasted in my mouth something saltier than the waters of the Pacific and noticed beside my head, flowing from my mouth, a thin but bright thread of red blood. It was startling but not frightening to me, in fact I kept on swimming toward the opposite side of the bay, hardly bothering to look back to see if the trajectory of coughed-up blood was still trailing behind me, this being the summer when the prospect of death was hardly important to me.

What was important to me was the dreamworld of a new play. I have a theory that an artist will never die or go mad while he is engaged in a piece of work that is very important to him. All the cells of his body, all of his vital organs, as well as the brain cells in which volition is seated, seem to combine their forces to keep him alive and in control of his faculties. He may act crazily but he isn’t crazy; he may show any symptom of mortality but he isn’t dying.

As the world of reality in which I was caught began to dim out, as the work on the play continued, so did the death wish and the symptoms of it. And I remember this summer as the one when I got along best with people and when they seemed to like me, and I would attribute this condition to the fact that I expected to be dead before the summer was over and that there was consequently no reason for me to worry about what people thought of me. When you stop worrying what people think of you, you suddenly find yourself thinking of them, not yourself, and then, for the time that this condition remains, you have a sort of crazy charm for chance acquaintances such as the ones that were staying with me that crazy summer of 1940, at the Costa Verde in Acapulco.

By the middle of September the bleeding lungs had stopped bleeding, and the death wish had gone, and has never come back to me since. The only mementos of the summer are the scar on the X-ray plate, a story called “The Night of the Iguana,” and now this play which has very little relation to the story except the same title and a bit of the same symbolism. But in both the short story and the play, written many years later, there is an incident of the capture of the iguana, which is a type of lizard, and its tying up under the verandah floor of the Costa Verde, which no longer exists in the new Acapulco.

Some critics resent my symbols, but let me ask, what would I do without them? Without my symbols I might still be employed by the International Shoe Co. in St. Louis.

Let me go further and say that unless the events of a life are translated into significant meanings, then life holds no more revelation than death, and possibly even less.

In September, that summer of 1940, the summer when, sick to death of myself, I turned to other people most truly, I discovered a human heart as troubled as my own. It was that of another young writer, a writer of magazine fiction who had just arrived from Tahiti because he feared that the war, which was then at a climax of fury, might cut him off from the magazines that purchased his adventure stories. But in Tahiti he had found that place which all of us spend our lives looking for, the one right home of the heart, and as the summer wore on I discovered that his desolation was greater than my own, since he was so despondent that he could no longer work.

There were hammocks along the sleeping verandahs. We would spend the evenings in adjacent hammocks, drinking rum-cocos, and discussing and comparing our respective heartbreaks, more and more peacefully as the night advanced.

It was an equinoctial season, and every night or so there would be a spectacular storm. I have never heard such thunder or seen such lightning except in melodramatic performances of Shakespeare. All of the inarticulate but passionate fury of the physical universe would sometimes be hurled at the hilltop and the verandah, and we were thrilled by it, it would completely eclipse our melancholy.

But the equinox wore itself out by late September, and we both returned to our gloomy introspections.

Day after steaming hot day I would go to Wells-Fargo in town for my option check and it wouldn’t be there. It was long overdue and I was living on credit at the hotel, and I noticed, or suspected, a steady increase in the management’s distrust of me.

I assumed that the Theatre Guild had dropped their option of Battle of Angels and lost all interest in me. The other young writer, still unable to scribble a line that he didn’t scratch out with the groan of a dying beast, had no encouragement for me. He felt that it was quite clear that we had both arrived at the end of our ropes and that we’d better face it. We were both approaching the age of thirty, and he declared that we were not meant by implacable nature to go past that milestone, that it was the dead end for us.

Our gloom was not relieved by the presence of a party of German Nazis who were ecstatic over the early successes of the Luftwaffe over the R.A.F. When they were not gamboling euphorically on the beach, they were listening to the radio reports on the battle for Britain and their imminent conquest of it, and the entire democratic world.

My writer friend began to deliver a pitch for suicide as the only decent and dignified way out for either of us. I disagreed with him, but very mildly.

Then one day the manager of the hotel told me that my credit had run out. I would have to leave the next morning, so that night my friend and I had more than our usual quota of rum-cocos, a drink that is prepared in a coconut shell by chopping off one end of it with a machete and mixing the juice of the nut with variable quantities of rum, a bit of lemon juice, a bit of sugar, and some cracked ice. You stick straws in the lopped-off end of the coconut and it’s a long dreamy drink, the most delectable summer night’s drink I’ve ever enjoyed, and that night we lay in our hammocks and had rum-cocos until the stars of the Southern Cross, which was visible in the sky from our veranda, began to flit crazily about like fireflies caught in a bottle.

My friend reverted to the subject of death as a preferable alternative to life and was more than usually eloquent on the subject. It would have been logical for me to accept his argument but something in me resisted. He said I was just being “chicken,” that if I had any guts I would go down the hill with him, right then and now, and take “the long swim to China,” as I was no more endurably situated on earth than he was.

All that I had, he told me, was the uncontrolled emotionalism of a minor lyric talent which was totally unsuited to the stage of life as well as the theater stage. I was, he said, a cotton-headed romanticist, a hopeless anachronism in the world now lit by super fire-bombs. He reeled out of his hammock and to the verandah steps, shouting, “Come on, you chicken, we’re going to swim out to China!”

But I stayed in my hammock, and if he went swimming that night, it wasn’t to China, for when I woke up in the hammock, and it was daylight, he was dressed and packed and had found an elderly tourist who had a car and was driving back to Texas, and had invited us to accompany him in his car free of charge. My friend hauled me out of the hammock and helped me pack for departure.

This old man, he declared, referring to our driver, is in the same boat as we are, and the best thing that could happen to all three of us is to miss a turn through the mountains and plunge off the road down a chasm, to everlasting oblivion. On this note, we cut out.

We had just reached the most hazardous section of the narrow road through the mountains when this other young writer asked the tourist if he couldn’t take over the wheel for a while. Oh, no, I exclaimed. But the other writer insisted, and like a bat out of hell he took those hairpin turns through the Sierras. Any moment, I thought, we would surely crash into the mountain or plunge into the chasm on the road’s other side, and it was then that I was all through with my death wish and knew that it was life that I longed for, on any terms that were offered.

I clenched my hands, bit my tongue, and kept praying. And gradually the driver’s demonic spirit wore itself out, the car slowed, and he turned the wheel over to the owner and retired to the back seat to sleep off his aborted flirtation with the dark angel.

The Night of the Iguana is rooted in the atmosphere and experiences of the summer of 1940, which I remember more vividly, on the emotional level, than any summer that I have gone through before or after—since it was then, that summer, that I not only discovered that it was life that I truly longed for, but that all which is most valuable in life is escaping from the narrow cubicle of one’s self to a sort of verandah between the sky and the still water beach (allegorically speaking) and to a hammock beside another beleaguered being, someone else who is in exile from the place and time of his heart’s fulfillment.

A play that is more of a dramatic poem than a play is bound to rest on metaphorical ways of expression. Symbols and their meanings must be arrived at through a period of time which is often a long one, requiring much patience, but if you wait out this period of time, if you permit it to clear as naturally as a sky after a storm, it will reward you, finally, with a puzzle which is still puzzling but which, whether you fathom it or not, still has the beautifully disturbing sense of truth, as much of that ambiguous quality as we are permitted to know in all our seasons and travels and places of short stay on this risky planet.

At one point in the composition of this work it had an alternative title, Two Acts of Grace, a title which referred to a pair of desperate people who had the humble nobility of each putting the other’s desperation, during the course of a night, above his concern for his own.

Being an unregenerate romanticist, even now, I can still think of nothing that gives more meaning to living.

Tennessee Williams

1961