From Tennessee Williams to Irene Selznick

It’s 1950 and Tennessee Williams, now famous, is struggling to complete his next play – The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here). He has gone to Rome to finish it, but finds himself anxious, and in the middle of a heat wave. Elia Kazan, his preferred director, had another commitment (to direct Viva Zapata) – and had also expressed doubts about the play itself, which sent Tennessee into a tizzy. As a matter of fact everyone – Audrey Wood, his agent – Cheryl Crawford – a potential producer – and Irene Selznick – had all expressed doubts about the play. He continued to work. He accepted their comments, and he agreed in the most part – he was struggling so much to complete the play that he felt the struggle had to show in his writing. He felt he had lost the ease of his youth – with becoming famous, etc. He took the comments, he worked, he rewrote, he restructured … and meanwhile, the production began to approach. They found a new director (once Tennessee let the Kazan – or “Gadg” as he was called – thing go) – and they courted Anna Magnani for the part, but she said no (she ended up doing a film version of it). They cast an unknown actress – Maureen Stapleton as the lead. It would make her a star. But before then – was the long struggle to just work on the play, against what felt to Tennessee to be insurmountable odds. Nobody seemed to have belief in it. Nobody was saying, “Yes! This is great! Keep going!”

In the middle of this, he writes a letter to Irene Selznick – who had produced Streetcar, if I’m not mistaken – and had told him her reserves about The Rose Tattoo. I post the letter in full below.

It’s one of the most extraordinary documents from an artist I have ever read.

First of all, he is unfailingly polite to all of these people – they are colleagues, they have had great successes together in the past – he trusts their opinions. He’s never a snot. He is a true old-school gentleman with elegant manners. But the following letter absolutely blows me away. I suppose it’s something I need to hear right now – and I just read it last night … it spoke to me, the truest part of me, the deepest most personal part – where I am most wounded, where rejection hurts the most … and yet where I will not give up hope or self-belief.

This made me think of all of the writers on strike right now. The writers – so often misunderstood, sneered at, looked down upon … and yet to sit down, and still write – in the midst of such an atmosphere – is true courage. That’s art.

You must take the criticism. Yes. If it is worthy, and meant to help – not harm. But there also comes a moment when you must OWN your own artistry, whether or not anyone buys it, gives a shit, or even likes it. It’s a tough concept because naturally artists do need to make money, and value themselves in the context of the market and how the market values them. But there’s a deeper level. There always is. What happens when people DON’T buy? What happens when you hear “No”? And not just once, twice, but thousands of times? Do you crumble? Or do you keep going? Do you let that external “No” become internal?

It’s a question of character, yes. And in this case, character = artist.

It’s an inspiring letter.

April 1950

Dearest Irene:

It was indeed quite a letter, and yesterday afternoon, when I got it, was very black, the bottom of a long, descending arc that began with the play’s completion last month, broken only by the lift given by a brilliantly understanding (though highly critical) letter received from Gadg and a similar one from Molly [Kazan – Gadg’s wife] and the enthusiasm of [Paul] Bigelow when I read it aloud which had to be partly discounted as a friend’s indulgence – a decline which continued by fairly gentle degrees until yesterday afternoon when your letter knocked the goddam bottom out of it and almost the top off me! For that afternoon, and the night that followed, I believed that you were right, that I had passed into madness and that power of communication was gone. Under the circumstances there [was] hardly any other conclusion to draw. Either you were “dead wrong” or I was crazy. Or that thing had happened which eventually happens to most lyric talents, the candle is burned or blown out and there’s no more matches! – Then, of course, came the morning, consistent with its habit. I woke early, recognized Frank [Merlo] and Grandfather and even myself in the mirror – and had my coffee and sat down quietly and rationally to read over the script. Then the amazing thing came about. For the first time since this draft was completed, I liked what I had done and felt that I had done just exactly what I had meant to do in all but a few short passages, that in the play, as a whole, I had said precisely what I had wanted to say as well as it could be said, and the play existed.

Not a ballet, not a libretto, but a play with living characters and a theme of poetic truth, handled with more precision and stringency than ever before in my writing, and in a style, a medium (yes, highly plastic and visual but with those elements an integral, active and very articulate instrument of the play’s total expression – not just “effects” for the sake of “effects” or symbols for the sake of being artily symbolic – but a way of saying more clearly, strongly and beautifully those things which could not have been said so well in language if they could have been said at all in language – a progress which I think very marked in the true use of theatre (as distinguished from forms of verbal expression) – a medium worked out with tremendous difficulty in exact, or nearly exact, accord with the very clear and strong conception that it sprang from?

For the first time in my life I knew that I must take a solitary position of self-belief, as an artist, and that I could take it proudly because I had earned it. I had not skimped or scanted or hedged or cheated anytime, anywhere, during the year and four months in which I had struggled with the adversaries of doubt and disappointment and fatigue, the many mornings that were brick walls and the few that came open, the exhausting see-saw of exhilaration and despair, the continual, unsparing drain of all I had in me to give it. That was the history of it, and this was the culmination. I had to believe. I believed.

I hope you will forgive me now for indulging myself in argument with some of your points of objection. It will do me good. You say the emotion is “felt by the characters but not shared by the reader”. I wonder if emotions in a play are usually, or even ever, shared by the reader? If they were, would there be any point in the production of a play, in translating it from the cold page to the warm and living instruments of the stage? Would there be any real need for great actors and brilliant directors and for designers and technicians? I don’t think a play is so different from a sheet of music, and there are not many people who can read a sheet of music and hear the music in a way that would obviate an orchestra or singer. The parallel is particularly fitting to this particular play which consists, so much, as you have observed, of signals, notations, as though to various instruments whose playing together will create the expression. Then you say: “Were I to see rather than read the play, I fear I would be at a loss to understand the sources of sustained crisis under which Pepina labors”. I venture to guess that with the collaboration of someone like [Anna] Magnani and someone like Gadge you would find these “sources” far easier to understand, for then the play would come out of the notes and signals and would live before you. “Sustained crisis” is true. But throughout the play (which is about a “sustained crisis”) that condition is fully documented and justified. It opens, for instance, with a highly emotional woman telling her passionately loved husband that she is to bear him a child. A crisis. The death of the husband is, of course, another crisis. But how is either of these difficult to understand? In the following acts of the play – the visual and violent “knife-scene” with the daughter, the devastating revelation of the husband’s betrayal, first the struggle against it and finally, gradually, the acceptance of it – this, too, is sustained crisis, but I can’t for the life of me see how it would seem not motivated, not comprehendible to any of us who have loved or suffered any great loss or disillusionment in our lives, I don’t expect this sustained crisis, which is the play, to be felt in reading but I cannot doubt that in performance, with skill and power, an audience could be made to feel it deeply and to enjoy its katharsis. I was well-aware, while writing the play, that the high pitch of emotion in the characters, in keeping with their race, temperament and most of all with their situation, (the crises in which they’re involved) might make exhausting demands on everybody concerned. For this reason many of the scenes are deliberately low-keyed, particularly in the writing, the speeches, and the intensities are given quiet, almost submerged, forms of expression and the burden transferred as much as possible from the actor to the visual, plastic elements which you condemn as “effects”. Scenes are cut-off and under-stated but always with at least some (muted) expression of the essential things, and the contrapuntal use of the children is like a modulated counter-theme or “cushion” to these intensities – (this will come out much more clearly in the final draft, for the separate play of the children developed very late in the play’s composition). The great advance I have made in this play – technically, as a theatre-craftsman – is what you call its “penalizing minimum” of dialogue and the effects which you seem to think are extraneous ornamentation.

No, I feel no resentment about your letter and I do feel gratitude for your writing me what I hope was exactly what you felt, although I suspect you could have eliminated the pacifying reference to “ballet or libretto” and said, more bluntly, more kindly cruelly – I dislike it intensely! You’re not the only one who does. I think Audrey and Bill are probably just as disappointed in it as you are. Who knows, at this point, who is right? But I would like to see it tried, produced, and I shall make an effort to see it.

Thanks and all the love as ever,

Tenn.