Tennessee Williams | dual personalities

Tag: Tennessee Williams

No blushing here

by chuckofish

I am reading Jeremiah these days and it is just too relevant to our world today.

Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.

–Jeremiah 8:12

Speaking of blushing, I watched a movie which I had DVR’d on TCM–Suddenly Last Summer (1959)–which seems all too apropos for our time. I had not seen it since I saw it on television long ago as an adolescent who really had no idea what was going on. I understand now what all the sturm and drang was about, dreamed up by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal.

The plot centers on Catherine Holly, a young woman who, at the insistence of her wealthy aunt, is being evaluated by a psychiatric doctor to receive a lobotomy after witnessing the death of her cousin Sebastian Venable while traveling with him the previous summer. Elizabeth Taylor stars as Catherine and Katharine Hepburn co-stars as her aunt, the mother of the dearly departed Sebastian. They compete outrageously throughout for the over-acting prize while Montgomery Clift lurks nearby as the surgeon who has been engaged to do the lobotomy, looking as if he is concentrating hard on remembering his lines. Of course it takes place in New Orleans. There is even a Venus Fly-trap symbolizing fill-in-the-blank. Thankfully, the doctor has his doubts about who is the actual crazy person and (spoiler alert) it all works out in the end.

It must have been pretty shocking back in 1959 and not surprisingly it did quite well at the box office, but I have to agree with the New Yorker critic who called it “a preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism.”

Now, of course, all that incest, homosexuality and cannibalism is perfectly normal and we church-going types are the “weird” ones. C’est la vie.

Funnily enough (or not) no one won any Oscars that year for Suddenly Last Summer. It was the year of Ben-Hur…but what a hilarious selection of Best Actress nominees!

I would have voted for Doris Day.

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March 26, 2019

The kindness of strangers

by chuckofish

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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.

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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?”