Tennessee Williams: “What’s To Do?”

Tennessee Williams was under contract in 1943 to MGM. He was assigned to write scripts for Lana Turner, etc. It did not go well. He enjoyed just being paid to basically sit around. He worked on other projects, most notable a work percolating in his mind called The Gentleman Caller. He was also working on another play called Malediction, and also writing poetry and short stories. All being funded by MGM as he was NOT writing scripts for them. He lived in a little bungalow in Santa Monica and found the Palisade a marvelous mate-hunting ground. But he was a bit adrift. He clearly wasn’t churning out pages that pleased the MGM big-wigs. He had been working on The Gentleman Caller for about a year. One of his ways of working that I find fascinating is that when he was struggling with a script, often he would write it out as a short story. It was a way of getting deeper into the narrative, and the story he was trying to tell. So he was at that stage of the development of what would end up being Glass Menagerie. In 1941 he had written a draft of a short story called Portrait of a Girl in Glass. Clearly, it was the beginning of his percolating with a particular idea. Then he began the script, The Gentleman Caller (which, unfortunately, no longer exists in any draft-form). Then, in 1943, adrift in Hollywood, stuck as an artist, a bit blocked and unhappy, he went back to the short story to try to hammer it out.

I’ve been reading the magnificently edited Notebooks of Tennessee Williams. He kept a diary his whole life, with periodic breaks (sometimes years long). Here is an entry from June, 1943. All of the notebooks have this unblinking honesty about himself and his process (inner and outer), and this one, in particular, struck me, with its willingness to sit in his own sense of being stuck, and to also talk himself out of the rut. He grapples.

His demons were strong. He never felt like he was doing enough. Although he got up every single day and wrote, he still felt lazy. This is something any writer anywhere will recognize. There is always more you can be doing, but inspiration is a fickle thing. Most of the creation of art comes out of stubbornness, and stick-to-it-iveness, and a kind of bullheaded gumption … all of which Tennessee had. He is brutal with himself. An artist has to be. But brutality without corresponding gentleness is useless. If all you do is beat yourself up, you won’t get any work done at all. I know many an artist who has the self-loathing part down, but can’t seem to get down to some serious work.

Williams is just speaking off the cuff here. It’s his diary. But it is revealing. And comforting. To see him, a man I admire so much, struggle, and wrestle, with the same things I do.

Wednesday, 23 June 1943

June 23-
Just read over the typed copy of “Portrait”.
A failure – dismal.
Worse than the thin little story it was before, with awkward, splashy writing, straining for effects it never achieves – a few good paragraphs only.
Read over “The Malediction” for comparison.
The artist would seem to have dwindled, though “Malediction” itself starts off pretty badly. So you see it isn’t safe or simple.
You don’t just work the steam up and write.
I’ve gotten into a pretty mess, haven’t I?
What’s to do?
Leave it alone.
Go on playing the cat’s game.
Get on the scooter and ride home in the sun and take a swim and meet Margo.
Maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems right now.
But it is a failure.
Don’t touch anything but the play and whatever the studio requires.
Off the Turner script.
I’m afraid the ego was too ambitious and optimistic.
I’m not much of an artist, even at best.
So long. Take it easy.
Always be brave and patient.
Now and again our honesty and effort prevails over weariness and the negation and something comes out that isn’t wholly abortive.