It is a Monday morning, after a week’s run of Summer and Smoke, and following the example of Tennessee Williams I have just brewed myself a coffee pot of liquid dynamite, and sitting down immediately after breakfast I am hoping its pressure on my heart will stimulate this article. Tennessee Williams was a proud punisher of his heart and, if I wished to follow his example to the letter, I would just now be preparing myself a little intramuscular injection of a secret formula concocted by my doctor. While I would still hate the business of pushing a needle into my skin, the immediate rush of creative energy, combined with the calming effect of subsequent pills and a single Martini, would give me the necessary strength.
For Tennessee Williams, doctors in all guises — psychologists, pathologists, surgeons — were people to keep closer than enemies. Intimacy with strangers was welcomingly simpler than intimacy with people he had lasting relationships with. As is evident from the candid interviews he frequently gave, he loved to talk about his medical history, as if turning himself inside out for people would beguile them away from making their own judgments. He felt happier with those who didn’t know him well — any lasting intimacy was mistrusted till, by the end of his life, he was pushing away all those who had helped him most. As early as 1945 he told the New York Times: ‘The real fact…is that no one means a great deal to me, anyway. I’m gregarious and like to be around people but almost anybody will do.’ He went on to say, ‘I’m rather selfish in picking my friends anyway…that is, I prefer people who can help me in some way.’
In his plays, intimacy — the struggle for it, the fragility of it, the impossibility of it — is always at the centre of the drama.
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