Camino Real: “Make voyages! — Attempt them! — there’s nothing else …”

Tennessee Williams had a long relationship with New Directions Publishing, due to his close relationship with James (Jay) Laughlin, founder of the company (at age 22!). Laughlin was committed to modernist writers, the ones experimenting with new forms and expressions. Started in 1936, New Directions is still going strong, but it started by publishing such writers as William Saroyan, Wallace Stevens, James Agee, Marianne Moore. They brought out novels, plays, anthologies of poems. They also reprinted things that nobody else would, and so they are responsible for the continuing life of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s haunting eerie The Crack-Up, for example. Tennessee Williams started out by having his poems published at New Directions (his correspondence with Jay Laughlin is a fascinating look at their decades-long working relationship), and they have also issued his plays. Most of my Williams paperbacks are New Directions-issued.

Jay Laughlin

New Directions has come out with new trade paperbacks of some of Williams’ plays and I have secured some review copies. I own all of these plays already, either in collections or singly, but each play has been re-issued with new introductions, additional material, and scholarly essays, so it’s been a great joy reading all of that. In the case of Sweet Bird of Youth (my review here), the new paperback includes the one-act version of Sweet Bird, something I had never read before. It is fascinating to me to see how a work progresses, to read an earlier version and see how the playwright wrestled with ideas, themes, form … and then compare it to the final version. New Directions has put a lot of work (and what feels to me like love) into these re-issues, and they are essential reading for any Tennessee Williams fan.

Camino Real, produced by Cheryl Crawford and directed by Elia Kazan in 1953, was a failure. A resounding failure. Critics were baffled by this “experimental” piece, with characters such as Casanova, Lord Byron and Don Quixote strolling in and out of the action, and many audience members got up and walked out. Where was the playwright of Streetcar and Glass Menagerie? What was this??? It closed in two months. Everyone involved was very shaken up by it. Williams appears to have gone back to more commercial writing after this (Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was his next play), a reaction to the rejection of Camino Real. But he never lost belief in what he had written. He knew it was something special. He often referred to it as one of his favorites of his own plays. The critics turning their backs on him was disheartening, and scary, although near the end of his life he seemed to have made some sort of peace with it, as he expressed in this 1981 interview:

I’m very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don’t permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O’Neill — he had to die to make ‘Moon’ successful. And to me it has been providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity — my sister Rose did not manage this. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do — for me, that’s enough.

That’s really all you can do.

I believe time has not yet vindicated Camino Real, although there have been some great regional productions. It is a tough play, no mistake about it. It puts great demands on the director, the scenic designer, the actors, and the audience. It is not a realistic play. Its language is highly poetic. Yet what language. It includes some of the best passages Williams has ever written. Here is a monologue from Lord Byron:

A poet’s vocation, which used to be my vocation, is to influence the heart in a gentler fashion than you have made your mark on that loaf of bread. He ought to purify it and lift it above its ordinary level. For what is the heart but a sort of — A sort of — instrument — that translates noise into music, chaos into — order … — a mysterious order! — That was my vocation once upon a time, before it was obscured by vulgar plaudits! – Little by little it was lost among gondolas and palazzos! – masked balls, glittering salons, canopies and carpets, candelabra and gold plate among snowy damask, ladies with throats as slender as flower stems, bending and breathing toward me their fragrant breath — Exposing their breasts to me! Whispering, half smiling! – And everywhere marble, the visible grandeur of marble, pink and grey marble, veined and tinted as flayed corrupting flesh, — all these provided agreeable distractions from the rather frightening solitude of a poet. Oh, I wrote many cantos in Venice and Constantinople and in Ravenna and Rome, on all of those Latin and Levantine excursions that my twisted foot led me into — but I wonder about them a little. They seem to improve as the wine in the bottle — dwindles … There is a passion for declivity in this world! And lately I’ve found myself listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees – instead of the single — pure-stringed instrument of my heart … Well, then, it’s time to leave here! — There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go! I’m going to look for one, now. I’m sailing to Athens. At least I can look up at the Acropolis, I can stand at the foot of it and look up at broken columns on the crest of a hill — if not purity, at least its recollection … I can sit quietly looking for a long, long time in absolute silence, and possibly, yes, still possibly — The old pure music will come to me again. Of course on the other hand I may hear only the little noise of insects in the grass … But I am sailing to Athens! Make voyages! — Attempt them! — there’s nothing else …

Camino Real takes place at a literal dead-end, in some unknown Latin American town, described by Williams in the stage directions as:

The plaza is scene fitfully by this light. It belongs to a tropical seaport that bears a confusing, but somehow harmonious, resemblance to such widely scattered ports as Tangiers, Havana, Vera Cruz, Casablanca, Shanghai, New Orleans.

Misfits, outlaws, faded icons, and rejects all gather here, with the implicit understanding that there is no way out but by dying. Into this environment walks a brash American named Kilroy (played by Eli Wallach in the original production – read his memories of playing it here). Kilroy cannot accept that this is the end. He has more hope, more life in him. It takes him some time to “get the joke”. The play unfolds in separate sections, almost like a chorus, with different voices and characters surging forward and then subsiding. (Here’s an excerpt from the play here). Williams had originally called the play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, and the play is broken up into literal “blocks” – Block I, Block II, Block III, etc. This was his original version, a longish one-act, and Kazan was in love with it and used it as workshops for actors at the Actors Studio. Kazan’s belief in Ten Blocks made Williams, who had already been fiddling with the play for a couple of years, want to turn it into a full-length, with an eye towards production.

This story is well-known to me, from Williams’ letters, and the various memoirs written by Cheryl Crawford, Eli Wallach and Kazan. But how wonderful that in this New Directions re-release, the original Ten Blocks on the Camino Real is included. I had never read it before! Since it is shorter than the full-length, it feels much more blatantly episodic than the full-length. Characters surge forward and then disappear. It is a strictly surreal type of work, but with language grounded in yearning reality. This is Williams’ particular territory, and there are times, with all of his great plays, that I think he was never so much himself as when he was writing Camino Real. Something else is going on with him here (something that really becomes clear when you read the full-length alongside the shorter version). Despite the literary characters and famous “cameos”, Camino Real feels closest to Williams’ actual essence than some of his more commercial work, as amazing as all of that stuff is. I think Williams must have had a goosebumpy sensation that he was getting to the “heart of the matter” with Camino Real, as close as he could get to his own heart of darkness, his terror of madness, his desire to flee, flee flee … Escape. What happened when no more avenues of escape were allowed him?

Williams comes back to this theme again and again in his work. I suppose you could say it is THE theme of his life.

Camino Real expresses that theme in a bald and open manner that makes the play like something out of a nightmare. I could see it being done quite effectively with backdrops of de Chirico’s dreamscapes of industrialization, dwarfed human beings, crushed statuary (echoes of Ozymandias), and something dreadful coming around the corner, in the puffs of smoke from trains, and long slanted shadows. People look around in such a landscape and feel frightened, but they cannot express why. Is it possible to … live? To connect? To break through fear and actually experience another person?

The New Directions paperback has an introduction by playwright John Guare. He describes being at Yale in the late 50s, early 60s, as a student. At the time, Williams’ play Period of Adjustment (my post about it and an excerpt here) was playing in New Haven, and Guare found it kind of depressing. A romantic comedy from Williams? What had happened? He was a young man, an outcast a little bit, feeling out of it at Yale, and wondering where his “tribe” was, of like-minded artists. It was a tough time to be coming up as a playwright, because you still had the giants of Williams and Miller dominating the landscape. How to distinguish yourself? How to find the story you had to tell? Around this same time, a production of Camino Real was put on by the undergraduate drama students at Yale.

And it changed everything for Guare. Guare said he had not paid much attention to Camino Real. He was “embarrassed” by it. He liked the big commercial plays of Williams the best. He describes (and you can sense his emotion here) what it was like to re-discover the play:

Where had this play been? Everybody argued about it. What’s it about? Is it political? Is it existential? If it’s an allegory, it’s an allegory of what? I could answer that. It was the allegory of me!

It was the allegory of my existence in 1960. That terror on that stage was my terror. It sfear of the terra incognita beyond the city walls – its understanding of how it feels not to be understood and be trapped and yearn for escape on il fugitivo, any transport that might take me to freedom which might perhaps be only another ring of hell … I was Kilroy. How can this Kilroy not end up with the other corpses in the Camino Real street cleaner’s barrels? Get lost? How could I be anything but?

Camino Real needed to tell its truth so urgently that it had to break the fourth wall between the stage and us out there in the audience. It spoke with a rage and a joy. It was so funny. The live music wouldn’t let you sit still. This play didn’t give me any answers but it sure spoke to the problems.

Camino Real also must have given voice to the terror of the Dramat undergraduates who had surrendered to the spirit of Tennessee’s play. They were all about to graduate out of the safety of school and plunge into the real world – the question of the moment for everyone was the eternal: how will I live my life? Who’ll speak for me?

After this mind-blowing experience (which changed everything for Guare: he made friends, he found his tribe, and he found the courage to write what he wanted to write – Williams’ play was the guide), Guare describes the effect of the play on his generation. I said in the piece I wrote about Camino Real that the play predicts the experimental theatre of the 60s 15 years earlier. It was so ahead of its time. And it was better than so much of what came after. But people like Lanford Wilson, Guare, Edward Albee, directors like Andre Gregory … all took up the torch of Camino Real in their productions in the 60s. Balm in Gilead owes much to Camino Real. Williams was there before they were. He set the stage. He also paid the price, in critical failure which chastened him for years. Nobody “got it”. They slaughtered him. Critics hate to be proved “wrong” about someone they have anointed. They can be especially vicious and obtuse when it comes to their former darlings. Williams could not be allowed to think he could do whatever he wanted. They would remind him what they valued in him and it was NOT Camino Real. I think the critics were dead wrong, in this case.

Guare finishes his introduction with:

In the early part of that last century, Braque and Picasso realized they could paint as well as anyone ever could. But what woul dhappen if they removed everything they can do. Of course I’m simplifying like crazy, but the point is they did start over and what came up was cubism, a starting point of modernism that gave us a new way of looking at the world. That’s the purpose of experimentation. Find new tools. Develop new muscles. See what happens. Why not take the gamble?

And remember that audience for whom you write: the ones who want questions asked and not be given simple answers, the audiences who want the terror, the fear – the ecstasy.

A half century later, I teach that playwriting class at the Yale School of Drama. I’ve learned to appreciate Ibsen. I’ve found nourishment in the work of playwrights as diverse as Horton Foote and Joe Orton. But the core is still Tennessee and the voyages he urged us to make and then make again in Camino Real. Get lost? We constantly have to keep getting lost on a Camino Real of our own making to find a new route to a destination which we hadn’t planned.

To learn that the path to that “green country” is through the Camino Real – pronounced either way.

Always keep a Camino Real in your typewriter, computer, yellow legal pad – whatever you write your plays on – keep working on the impossible play – the play written for the freaks and outlaws, the dreamers without a plan, the fugitives, the desperados, yourselves. Writing for them might not make you the big bucks, but they’ll keep you alive.

This new deluxe version of Camino Real is essential to my library and has certainly deepened my understanding of the context of this, Williams’ most troubling and confrontational (and difficult) work. Guare’s enthusiasm is mine. I found myself getting so caught up in his introduction that I stopped reading it and cut right to the play again, reading it all the way through.

I come back to it time and time again. In dark days, I have often said to myself: “Make voyages! — Attempt them! — there’s nothing else …”

Easier said than done, perhaps. But Williams’ plays can act as guideposts. A dim light in the darkness. Saying: Follow me. I have no idea if this is the right way … but I know for sure that it is A way … Let’s see where it takes us …