ACTS OF GRACE

Tennessee Williams knew well that memory can be a ponderous burden, a tie that shackles the individual to a past from which he or she would perhaps love to escape, but that paradoxically, memory can be a blessing, a prop sustaining one during hard times. Among the treasured memories that bolster me is one of a bitterly cold, snowy evening in Chicago when I experienced perhaps the most remarkable epiphany in theater that I have ever known. I had driven to Chicago in 1961 from Memphis, where I was teaching, for a two-fold purpose: to visit friends and to see the out-of-town premiere of Williams’s latest play, The Night of the Iguana. I had come to love the plays of Williams not only through my connection to him as a Southerner, Mississippi-born as I was, but also through my love of English Romantic poetry, for in those works was to be found the roots of much of the dramatist’s philosophy and method.

Nothing had prepared this life-long resident of the Deep South for the bitter chill of that Midwest City which was, unknown to me, on the verge of a real blizzard. As we walked from the parking lot to the Blackstone Theatre, we were very near Lake Michigan, and the wind whipping around us was sharply brutal. The warmth of the theater lobby was more than welcome, mixed with the excitement of being present at the birth of a new Williams work, an unknown play, waiting in the wings to astound.

The cast of that original production was perhaps as fine as any that has been assembled for The Night of the Iguana. Bette Davis, who had been performing mostly in movies for a number of years and thus had an unfortunate tendency to look out into the audience when she was “off camera,” nevertheless embodied the earthiness of Maxine, described by Williams as “affable and rapaciously lusty.” Patrick O’Neal was certainly effective as Shannon although he did not bring to the role the appropriate near-madness that is evident in Richard Burton’s portrayal in the movie. And Alan Webb was a touching Nonno, exhibiting the humor and pathos that are components of the old poet’s character.

Not surprisingly, however, it was Margaret Leighton, who performed most memorably in her luminous creation of Hannah—the kind of woman Tennessee may have believed his sister Rose might have been had her life not been wrenched out of shape by mental disorder and the draconian method employed to control it. The playwright needed and would surely have welcomed such a calming and centered woman as a companion, a benefit he seems to have been denied, surrounded as he was by his “dragon ladies,” as he dubbed many of his female friends. Only a few years before his death, Tennessee declared Hannah Jelkes “the greatest female character I ever created.” Hannah is also the calm, comforting force that Blanche DuBois and Alma Winemiller might have been, had they been freed of the pressure of their psychological dysfunctions.

That night I left the theater changed, having experienced that powerful Katharsis about which Aristotle wrote. I had been swept up completely in the action of the play and felt, as I had when, as a child, I would spend most of an afternoon in a darkened movie theater and walk out into the shock of the sunshiny world. Early the next morning, as I drove south, fleeing the snow that was transforming everything in sight, I knew that I had witnessed a theatrical miracle. I have seen many great performances in many great plays since that night, and a number of them have been unforgettable—Cherry Jones as Hannah, for example, Annalee Jefferies as Blanche DuBois, and Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas in Master Class—but that Chicago Iguana, with Margaret Leighton’s Hannah remains the touchstone of all my theater experiences.

The Night of the Iguana was to be Tennessee Williams’s last critical success in the theater. When I announce that it is my favorite of his plays, I am as often as not greeted with surprised looks and the inevitable question: why? The reason is a simple one. A play is an olio of words, ideas, characters, plot, setting, and design, and Iguana has all of those in perfected form. Tennessee was engaged most of his life in the struggle between the faith of his childhood and the growing skepticism brought on by the vicissitudes of life. With this play the answer seems finally to have come, so that like Hannah, although he has been “far from sure about God,” at this point he is no longer “as unsure as I was.” When I asked the late Cleanth Brooks what his favorite work of Faulkner was, he replied without hesitation, “Absalom, Absalom! Because it has more of Faulkner in it than any of the others.” For me, the same is true of The Night of the Iguana; the life of Tennessee Williams is embodied in this play far beyond what can be termed “autobiographical.”

In the short story of the same name that preceded The Night of the Iguana, one autobiographical element of the play is made clear. A character named Edith Jelkes, is described as a member of “an historical Southern family of great but now moribund vitality,” a reflection of the playwright’s descent from several prominent Tennessee ancestors. Edith’s family, we are told in the story, were “turbulently split” into two groups, one with over-active libidos, the other almost lacking in passion Among them was an abundance of “nervous talents and sickness, of drunkards and poets, gifted artists and sexual degenerates, together with fanatically proper and squeamish old ladies of both sexes who were condemned to live beneath the same roof with relatives whom they could only regard as monsters.” One can only imagine the perhaps perverse pleasure with which Williams penned that passage in the short story, reflecting upon his own family with a somewhat jaundiced humor.

The setting in which the characters in great plays gather to act our their life dramas is often a confined space: the home of George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for example, or the “Hell” of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Tennessee excelled in creating the claustrophobic locale; the Wingfield’s cramped St. Louis apartment in Menagerie or the French Quarter apartment of Streetcar. In The Night of the Iguana, the hill on which the hotel is located evokes mythological and Biblical mountains on which enlightenment may come or where sacrifices are made. Taken in the latter sense, it is compared by Hannah to the hill on which Christ was executed, when she observes that Shannon’s crucifixion while tied up in the hammock takes place “on a hill so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.”

The characters of the play, most of whom are “at the end of their rope,” are perhaps more trustworthy when talking about themselves than some of those in Streetcar or Menagerie; Blanche and Amanda both tell the truth sometimes, but “tell it slant.” Shannon and Hannah—note the similarities of the names—have both spent their lives in a search for the truth, although they have chosen different paths to this dark night of the soul. Shannon, despite his past, considers himself a gentleman, as he repeatedly reminds Miss Fellows, and he tells Hannah that she is “a lady, a real one and a great one.” Shannon is haunted by a spook much in the same way Hannah endures her “blue devils.” Both feel the strong need to believe in “something or in someone.”

Tennessee described Maxine, the third major character, in a note to Bette Davis during rehearsals: “Everything about her should have the openness and freedom of the sea. . . . She’s the living definition of nature . . . She moves with the ease of clouds and the tides.” The widow Maxine, though untroubled and even unaware of the philosophical questions that concern Shannon and Hannah, is nevertheless vulnerable and searching for human connections. In the character of Nonno, Tennessee pays tribute to his beloved grandfather, Rev. Walter Dakin, who had died in 1955 at the age of ninety-seven. Nonno’s full name is Jonathan Coffin, the surname taken from Williams’s own New England family line. Other characters, including the teenaged temptress Charlotte and her “guardian,” Judith Fellowes, and the four obnoxiously healthy German tourists exulting in the firebombing of London on the other side of the world represent, in existential terms, those who according to Kierkegaard are in deepest despair because they do not realizes that they are in despair at all.

The Night of the Iguana reveals a change in religious and philosophical attitudes from the naturalistic world-view found in Streetcar and Summer and Smoke, to an almost eastern serenity and acceptance. In Streetcar, flesh wins the battle against spirit, as Stella “hang[s] back with the brutes,” and in Summer and Smoke Alma is unable to effect a balance between the demands of body and soul and so moves toward a world of physical abandon. But in The Night of the Iguana, a balance seems to be achieved through the good and graceful ministry of Hannah, who has pulled herself up by sheer force of will into a realm in which she can still empathize with and aid those struggling with the material. (Shannon refers to her as “Miss Thin-Standing-Up-Female-Buddha.”) There is no longer the brutality, the deliberate cruelty of Stanley and others, except as exhibited by the Mexican youths toward the iguana and the rather abstract cruelty exhibited by the Germans (“Fiends out of Hell,” Shannon calls them, “with the . . . voices . . . of angels.”)

It would be difficult to over-emphasize the abiding influence of his Southern Protestant upbringing, with its emphasis on reading the sonorous prose and poetry of the King James Bible and singing the equally literary hymns, on Tom Williams the boy, and on the playwright he became. This religious influence was a fact that he continued to assert unabashedly in a world in which less and less credence was given to belief by the literary and theatrical circles in which he moved. But he was a Southerner, and from the Deep South at that, where, Alfred Kazin observed, Protestants “did not deal in pale abstract words only on Sunday but in the reality of the deity and man’s relation to Him.” Rick Bragg observed in a New York Times article on Willie Morris’s funeral that the service had a very religious tone, “this being Mississippi, where people talk about God without feeling funny about it.” Tennessee continued to refer to himself throughout his adult life as a “puritan,” even when his actions might have suggested otherwise, and he made no attempt to hide his abiding faith from his friends. Nowhere is the religious component of the playwright’s life more evident than in The Night of the Iguana.

How does this involvement with faith manifest itself in Tennessee’s dramas? As a student at the University of Iowa, he would have been well aware of the development theater history from ancient Greece to Rome to medieval Europe to the later flowering of playwrights and plays in twentieth century America. He was aware of the significance of such dramatic genres as mystery, miracle, and passion plays, and through his family, he would have become acquainted with the The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and allegorical works such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Late in life, he told a theater director who was dramatizing Pilgrim’s Progress that it had been “the single most important influence on my work.” Even given Williams’s tendency to exaggerate, one must assume that there is some truth in the assertion.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, grace is defined in numerous ways, but the one most pertinent here is “The divine influence which operates in men to regenerate and sanctify, to inspire virtuous impulses, and to impart strength to endure trial and resist temptation.” However, it is also defined as “the free and unmerited favor of God,” which may be that “amazing grace,” which some Christians believe “can save a wretch like me.” Being in “a state of grace” is being “under divine influence,” and “fallen from grace” is the state of having lost the connection to God. In Williams’s hands, grace is the ability to endure life, no matter how appalling, a quality exemplified in the lives and actions of Hannah and her grandfather. Hannah, with her “delicate sadness,” has supported her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather in their seemingly endless travel around the world, when it would have been simpler to remain in Nantucket where friends and perhaps surviving family might offer support. She has done what the old poet wanted in order to make his life richer, and that is part of her grace.

Hannah is a peacemaker, much like Tennessee’s grandmother, Rose Dakin, who during the turbulent family years in St. Louis, came to visit, bringing with her grace from the deep South. Hannah’s grace is simple and without ostentation, but she recognizes in Shannon a desire for grace that coexists with self-indulgence. Struggling to free himself, he complains, “A man can die of panic,” and Hannah replies that he enjoys his “Passion Play performance” that occurs “in a hammock with ropes instead of nails . . .” In contrast to his “almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion,” Hannah, who is surely just as beset as Shannon, suffers in silence and seems to have achieved that peace St. Paul describes, “which passeth understanding.”

The Night of the Iguana is deeply involved in the nature of God, but there are other themes and motifs at work here as well. It is not surprising that Hannah, as the moral center of the play, is the speaker who voices most of these. She defines “home” as “a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest—rest—live in, emotionally speaking.” She believes that “We all wind up with something or with someone, and if it’s someone instead of just something, we’re lucky....” She believes in accepting “whatever situation you cannot improve” and, like Blanche DuBois insists that “Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent.” The epigraph to the play is an Emily Dickinson quatrain from the poem “I Died for Beauty,” in which two souls rest in adjacent tombs, one of whom died for beauty, the other for truth:

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

Embodied in those lines is the major moral of the play, I think, because Tennessee, like E. M. Forster, believed that it was essential for human beings to “connect,” to “communicate. “People need human contact,” Shannon insists and the action of The Night of the Iguana centers on the breaking down of barriers between the characters, freeing them from their narrow cubicles and allowing them to reach out to each other.

In his poem about Herman Melville, W. H. Auden wrote that late in his life, the novelist “sailed into an extraordinary mildness,/And anchored in his home . . . ,” having learned that we are “introduced to Goodness every day” and his name is Billy Budd. Finally, for Melville, “The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.” Tennessee seems to have undergone something of the same epiphany, and her name is Hannah Jelkes. With the setting free of the iguana, a “a little act of grace” on the part of Hannah and Shannon, and the setting free of Nonno, after the completion of his last poem, on God’s part, and the consequent setting free of Hannah herself, peace has replaced the chaos in which the play began. Toward the end, Nonno says “it! is! finished!”—which are among the last words of Christ. Nonno’s final poem, which is perhaps haps the best one Tennessee ever wrote, illuminates several themes of the play, including the Romantic dichotomy between the real (“the earth’s obscene corrupting love”) and the ideal worlds (“native green”), and the human need for grace and for courage in the face of one’s always impending death.

Kenneth Holditch

New Orleans

June 2009