High Tea with Tennessee

Tennessee said to me: "Writing is very difficult, isn't it, Mees Feehl!" Yes, yes, I do mean Mr. Williams, Mr. Tennessee Williams. It was quite a moment. Very serious. In that seriousness, frontal seriousness, was a great weight which would have rendered the moment memorable, had he not been who he was, I think.

I had been over to see him at the Elysees Hotel, where he kept a suite. Me and Michael Kingman, who knew him (how's another story, so if you don't mind, I'll leave it out of this one.) But I was looking for a play to do at the Boat Basin Theater, and thought he might have one for me. What the hey, right?

The plan had been we were going to pick him up and then we were going to go out for lunch. But he said he had fallen down and would we mind having lunch there with him? He was shorter, stronger, stockier and much handsomer than I'd have thought. He had his beard on, and a rather nice robe.

We ordered BLT's and coke and sat on his bed and watched Hamlet on TV. We (Tennessee and I) laughed a lot. It's such a funny play. I didn't think it was such a hot production. It had Claire Bloom as Gertrude and I don't remember who else, and it was prosaic and OK. But he was so grateful for and aware of the enormous phenomenon of the play that he was less concerned with evaluating the production than I, or he was more resigned to the probability of relative mediocrity and this was actually relatively decent. He was punctiliously polite, almost officious, and he carried his importance like a visible thing that he knew I could see and that he had to move around him to sit down like the train of a King's robe.

We talked about new plays he was working on and how the critics had been out to slaughter him lately - the last few years - and how I would go down to Key West and stay with him and he would sort through some scripts - he also suggested that Camino Real might - would - work beautifully out there at the Boat Basin. Camino with the accent on the Cam.

But, he said, you must check with my agent (at that time Mitch Douglas) at ICM. We spoke of Audrey Wood, speaking of agents. I had just directed a reading of a Carson McCuller's mishmash, which she (Audrey) had come over to New Dramatists to see. Incredibly tiny, and rude, with a rudeness that immediately declared itself to be of legendary stature, and thus charming. She seemed to have the conceit that it was a logic based rudeness, the product of economy. He said he had not spoken to her in eleven years and was clearly eager for any detail about her, any gesture I could reproduce, even my own critical comments about her which he then distilled and correlated with his familiar image of her. (Actually, she was not rude at New Dramatists - her style was made manifest to me at her office, on other occasions.)

Anyway, he knew absolutely nothing about me, knew not that I had the slightest interest in anything beyond producing: that I had enormous pretensions as a primary source was not part of the me for whom he had been prepared. So, when he came out with that line about writing, I was the more moved, and nearly responsive from that place of true sense of self that is always visible but rarely the functional axis of the persona. The part that was watching, knowing damn well its own contempt for cowtowing to other writers, adulating their success, or worse, for God's sake - making oneself small in order to use their importance to make oneself feel important.

Now comes the subtle and personal part of this story. As he said this line about writing being difficult, just as we were leaving, and gave me an impaling look...I just kind of looked at him and stuttered, and said, feeling my presumptuous aspects greatly – and, yes, I said, yes. Many things occurred during the fleeting moment. One of those which actually comprises but a few seconds and yet provides fuel for many trains of thought, for many epiphanies

I thought - 'I'm forced to acknowledge that I'm a "writer" - oh, heavenly father, where do I turn?' I suppose unto itself this thought carries no threat but it extends itself to say and 'now I must indeed write'. Then, too, and this is hideously hard to articulate, his words ran straight across the grain of one of my integral, evolving ideas, which stems from, or can best be introduced by means of the following parable.

When I was in the sixth grade my teacher (Miss Sward) took our class to the local Fine Arts Museum, where we looked at a lot of paintings. The kids looked confused and annoyed by most of the paintings, which included a fine Thomas Eakins, a Mondrian, and various other things. Finally they all ended up in front of a picture of a coke bottle half full of coke, on a windowsill in a bay window. Outside the window snow was pouring down. The whole thing was very literal, extremely ordinary, and while greatly simple, in my opinion, at least, not great. I suppose it was a kind of cross between an Andy Wyeth and a Jasper Johns. Literal and extravagantly pedestrian. It wasn’t a bad painting, and may even have been a good painting, but my point is that it was of a certain genre. And painted in real oils. Well, the kids all loved it, and the teacher, and the student teacher. And this is what they said. "Gee", they said, "that must have taken a really long time to paint!"

Now what this has meant to me, this episode, is evidence that Calvinism afflicts the greater American public thus: we have moral standards without morality, and our aesthetic judgment does not really exist, except by association with a clock, with punching in, in fact.

It's been important to me to differentiate between effort and value. In my eighteenth year I stayed up for three days straight with the help of some buffered amphetamine tablets, to write an essay on the "nature of effort". It is one of those huge, pivotal sociological misunderstandings which fascinate me. I like to trace individual apathy or criminality to beliefs, to concepts that are supported tacitly, not through evil intention, but through self-perpetuating fallacies, throughout the civilization.

And in my own experience of writing and of painting, it has become manifestly, incontrovertibly clear, irrefutable and significant, that what is least accessible is ease, that what can lead to illumination is a stilling of that which is assiduous, that which strives compulsively.

The paradox, and of course we are, as usual, mired in the sticky stuff (I think it must have a non-ethereal form, it's so dominating!) is that effort is required to achieve ease: continuous active pursuit of self-knowledge, and continuous and developing attempts to understand the relationship of the self to others, of any unit to any other. And all of this seemed to me to be incorporated in this writer's lucid simple question, and it was with a sense of collusion and with a challenge that he looked thus at me. I swear it. I'm getting feverish now, as I insist that he held much in his voice and eyes as he looked at me, and I stuttered back.

Note: it is now 2019. Rereading this anecdote, I notice that I did not do well enough with my description of the impact of Tennessee’s injunction to write. (When he said ‘Writing is very difficult, isn’t it, Miss Fehl?’ it felt like an injunction.)

The real process, I think, that involved difficulty in identifying with being a writer (and still does), is that it’s easy to say one is a writer, but it’s not just that discipline takes will power, it’s that will power isn’t enough, because writing really is different from getting the lawn mowed, or the clothes mended.

Commitment to writing is more than a commitment to spending a certain amount of time each day doing it. I still seek that discipline. There’s nothing mystical or even zen about my observation. It’s just that art calls upon one’s inner self, and there are no rules, in the end, about how to achieve what is called ‘expressing oneself’. Looking back, I think my anecdote reveals the depths of my fear of rejection, or, perhaps, fear of success…dressed up in the tension between effort and ease! That tension exists for every artist. It’s just a characteristic of working in the arts, not a paralyzing agent!