Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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wondered, in another story, whether the "A" of adultery might not stand for admirable. Williams is full of similar moral ambivalence. His oppressive, superheated tropics are Poe's "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir," and his characters some times seem like Poe's spectral phantoms of a locked-in ego, walking somnambulically to their dooms. Williams shares Melville's somber cosmic dread. It was of the Encantadas, the desolate islands of the Galapagos, that Melville wrote: "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist." And it is "on the beach of the Encantadas" that Sebastian, the poet of Suddenly Last Summer, who later would himself be eaten, saw, as his mother relates it, a skyful of carnivorous birds swoop and attack myriads of newly hatched sea turtles, "tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh . . . and when he came back, he said, 'Well, now I've seen Him'—and he meant God . . ."

Poe in The Business Man and Melville in The Confidence Man aimed scathing, satirical barbs at the rising commercial spirit of the 19th century. Williams finds an ethical void at the heart of urban industrial civilization and poses against it the values—the honor, gallantry and chivalry—of the dead agrarian Southern past. "Let there be something to mean the word honor again," pleads Don Quixote in Camino Real.

D. H. Lawrence said of the great 19th century U.S. writers: "You must look through the surfaces of American art and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness." In Williams', case, the childishness is to assume that he has devoted a life span of writing to the creation of a cartoon strip of regional ogres with which to titillate jaded libidos.

Danger: Narcissism. Williams sometimes runs a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushes where he should dam. Occasionally his characters are too busy striking attitudes to hit honest veins of emotion. His symbols have been known to multiply like fruit flies and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger is the unhealthy narcissism of most modern art. From the caves of Altamira to the Apollo Belvedere, pagan art looked outward and celebrated man. From the cathedral of Chartres to the music of Bach, religious art looked upward and glorified God. Modern art looks inward, contemplating the artist's ego, to the point of myopia and hallucination. Williams has often come close to drowning in introspection. But he has always been saved by his urge to reach out and touch his audience and thus achieve his own surest moment of self-transcendence.

On the rack of guilt, in the slough of doubt, more homeless than any migratory bird, Tennessee Williams wrestles with his fears. "I pray a lot, especially when I'm scared," he says. No one who sees The Night of the Iguana will need to be told the words. They are in Nonno's poem:

How calmly does the orange 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?

*Her account; medically impossible.