dual personalities

Today is the birthday of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) proud son of our flyover town and my flyover university. He didn’t actually graduate and I don’t think he was overly fond of it, but we like to claim him. He is buried here–against his wishes. He left most of his money to the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee (an Episcopal school) in honor of his maternal grandfather, Walter Dakin, an alumnus of the university. When his sister Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution, she bequeathed $7 million from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South.

Tennessee wrote some famous plays–quite a few, in fact. Hollywood made some good movies out of those plays, although they all contain a lot of acting. One that is somewhat less fraught is  The Night of the Iguana (1964) with Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. I have always  liked it.

And I always liked the poem that Nonno, Hannah’s grandfather, spends the play writing:

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?”

A toast to Tennessee Williams then, on his birthday!