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After the Fox: The Influence of D. H. Lawrence on Tennessee Williams

Henry I. Schvey

On 6 July 1939, on a road trip to California with a friend, Tennessee Williams checked out a volume of D. H. Lawrence’s letters at Laguna Beach Library. The letters created an immediate impact, and he jotted down this entry in his journal: “Today I read from D. H. Lawrence’s letters and conceived a strong impulse to write a play about him—his life in America—feel so much understanding & sympathy for him—though his brilliance makes me feel very humble & inadequate” (Notebooks 155). A few days later, he wrote with even greater enthusiasm, “The D. H. Lawrence project grows strong and clear—like the beginning of a great new day—sunrise—It is like being dedicated to something big at long last! Hope I can find the strength for it.—I must—I shall—somehow—” (157). Although Williams never completed the projected full-length play about Lawrence’s life, producing instead some fragments and a one-act dramatization of Lawrence’s death entitled I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, his discovery of the English novelist’s work, life, letters, and attitude toward physical human connection and sexuality had an enormous effect on his early career. Indeed, in the preface to the published version of I Rise in Flame, Williams credited Lawrence’s work as “probably the greatest modern monument to the dark roots of creation” (I Rise [2000] 288).

¶2

In its simplest terms, Lawrence represented validation of a complete break from the social and sexual mores Williams experienced in his repressive, straitjacketed upbringing in St. Louis. The English novelist’s work helped Williams crystalize his understanding of his own vocation as a writer and allowed him to accept his physical desires, which he once described as his “mad pilgrimage of the flesh” (Notebooks 133), as equal to his intellectual side.

¶3

The goal of the present essay is to track Lawrence’s imprint on Williams’s work, particularly at the impressionable time following the young playwright’s liberation from St. Louis. While Williams never specifically repudiated Lawrence’s influence, the essay also indicates why the Lawrencian model was particularly important in his early period, and why after fully developing his own voice, it was necessary to leave Lawrence behind.

¶4

In certain works Lawrence was not merely influential but central: for example, the poem “Cried the Fox” is dedicated to the English novelist, and the full-length play You Touched Me!, written by Williams in collaboration with Donald Windham, is an adaptation of a Lawrence story by the same name. In other works references to Lawrence are overt (e.g., the one-acts Adam and Eve on a Ferry and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, wherein Lawrence and his wife Frieda appear as central characters) or relatively obvious (e.g., The Case of the Crushed Petunias, wherein a Lawrencian male character arrives to reshape a young woman’s life). In still other works, such as Battle of Angels, the novelist’s presence is more oblique but no less significant.

¶5

In his biography of Williams, Lyle Leverich articulates some biographical similarities that drew the young American to Lawrence’s life and work: “What stirred Tom most forcefully were the striking parallels between his and Lawrence’s early lives. As children, both were slight and frail because of a life-threatening illness. Both had unhappy, abusive fathers whom they hated and possessive mothers who fought endless battles with their husbands in an effort to protect their sons” (322). Such similarities between the authors’ childhoods are important, especially since some may be surprised to see the openly gay Williams use the phrase “one of my idols” (Memoirs 94) to describe the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who staunchly self-identified as heterosexual (though this formulation oversimplifies both authors’ complicated and changing responses to sexuality). However, more important than biographical analogies between the writers’ upbringings is Lawrence’s emphasis on the sanctity of the body—as opposed to the sterile intellect and social convention—which offered the younger writer an invitation to see the world in an entirely new way. Williams initially summarized his understanding of Lawrence’s aesthetic and the appeal it held for him in a preface to You Touched Me! (1943), the adaptation of the Lawrence story he cowrote with Donald Windham:

The message of Lawrence: his praise of life and abhorrence of the negative . . . his insistence on the hot, quick, direct vital contact between people as opposed to the deadness of polite social relations. His belief in the almost mystic importance of physical communion. His hatred of shut-in places and people and his belief in the dynamic acceptance of life—Going out, not in. His opposition to sterile intellectualism. Love of honesty, his pure, light, fearless attitude toward reality. The power of the unconscious fighting its way through restrictions, taboos. The life force. (qtd. in Moschovakis and Roessel, Introduction xxix–xxx)

¶6

Lawrence’s emphasis on the physical (and its connection to the life of the spirit) provided both inspiration and guidance to a young writer just beginning to trust himself and his material. In many of the works that followed, this influence seems palpable and explicit; in others, it is more indirect. But regardless of whether we employ the term “influence” in specific instances, it is clear that Lawrence had a direct and pervasive impact on Williams’s career, particularly at this early, formative stage.

¶7

At the time he discovered Lawrence’s letters, the twenty-eight-year-old Williams was entering a new and exciting phase of his life. At long last he had bidden farewell to St. Louis, reinvented himself as “Tennessee,” and secured a prestigious new agent, Audrey Wood. Furthermore, he had submitted a group of four one-act plays to the Group Theatre under the title American Blues (winning a much-needed one-hundred-dollar prize for his efforts) and received news that his short story “The Field of Blue Children” had received an acceptance from Story, along with a welcome twenty-five-dollar prize. The time was ripe for something new.

¶8

The previous December, he had fallen in love with New Orleans, but on 20 February 1939 (the day before Mardi Gras), he suddenly fled the city (Selected Letters 149n). A few months later he would write to Wood, “I don’t like the crumby sort of Bohemian studio life that an impecunious writer is subjected to in a large city—I got too much of that in the ‘Vieux Carre’” (179). Perhaps the Quarter was a bit too stimulating for a young writer beginning to discover both his vocation and sexual orientation. The Quarter’s “rotten-sweet odor,” described in the poem “Mornings on Bourbon Street” (Collected Poems 72–73), suggests that despite its many attractions, New Orleans must have felt threatening, its casual hedonism so profoundly different from the moral strictures he had left behind in St. Louis. In his journal, he describes the “rather horrible night” of his first homosexual encounter, an “amorous advance” that left him “sick at the stomach” (Notebooks 153). For someone raised in a sexually repressive, puritanical middle-class home, the charged atmosphere of New Orleans left him confused about who he really was: “Am I all animal, all willfull, blind, stupid beast? Is there another part that is not an accomplice in this mad pilgrimage of the flesh?” (133). Written with remarkable perspicacity a few years later, Auto-da-Fé, a one-act play set in New Orleans, revisits and perhaps illuminates Williams’s conflicted state of mind at the time: in it, a young man living with his mother in the Vieux Carré, simultaneously pulled and repulsed by illicit desires, ultimately finds no way to reconcile them other than by setting fire to his house—and to himself.¹

¶9

Perhaps alarmed by the potential conflagration he saw rising within, Williams set off with his friend Jim Parrott on a road trip to Parrott’s uncle’s pigeon ranch in Los Angeles. Armed with the news of his award from the Group Theatre, Williams felt—perhaps for the first time—a true sense of liberation and validation about his calling. “My next play,” he excitedly wrote in his journal, “will be simple, direct and terrible—a picture of my own heart—[. . .] I will speak truth as I see it—distort as I see distortion—be wild as I am wild—tender as I am tender—mad as I am mad—passionate as I am passionate[. . . .] It will have in it at least a passionate denial of sham and a cry for beauty.”²

¶10

Instead of writing a play about the poet Vachel Lindsay, as he had initially proposed in a June 1939 letter to Wood (Selected Letters 175–76), he wrote the agent proposing a work about Lawrence: “I feel a far greater affinity for Lawrence than Lindsay and the elements of his life here in America are so essentially dramatic that they require little more than a re-arrangement to be transferred directly to the stage” (179). Then, in a somewhat rambling note (which he misdated), Williams laid out his plan to the novelist’s widow, Frieda:

Dear Mrs. Lawrence:

Writing this letter is rather insane as I have no idea of your exact address, I am only vaguely persuaded that you are still living in New Mexico, in the vicinity of Taos. Briefly, I am a young writer who has a profound admiration for your late husband[’s] work and has conceived the idea, perhaps fantastic, of writing a play about him, dramatizing not so much his life as his ideas or philosophy which strike me as being the richest expressed in modern writing. (185)

Williams arrived at Taos in 1939, feeling bored and lonely, the landscape looking to him “like a dead planet, the moon!” (194). Describing the village as “an abandoned phoenix’s nest” (an explicit allusion to the Lawrencian symbol of the phoenix and to the writer’s absence), he wrote glumly, “I will probably get all I want from this place over the week-end & go on then to St. Louis” (qtd. in Leverich 318). Impatient about his meeting with Frieda, he assumed he would find “a bunch of tired esthetes” and that “[w]hatever was living in them must have died with Lawrence” (Selected Letters 194). Instead, the visit proved transformative: “They treated me as though I had known them all their lives,” he wrote of Lawrence’s widow and her friends Mabel Dodge and Dorothy Brett. Of Frieda herself, he wrote, “You should see her. Still magnificent. A valkyrie. She runs and plunges about the ranch like a female bull—thick yellow hair flying—piercing blue eyes—huge. She dresses madly—a hat & coat of bob-cat fur—shouts—bangs—terrific! Not a member of the female sex—but woman” (qtd. in Leverich 319). Williams’s characterization of Frieda—dynamic, unabashed, archetypal, an embodiment of reinvented categories of sex and gender—says much about how the young playwright was thinking about gender definitions at the time.

¶11

In 1966, Norman J. Fedder published The Influence of D. H. Lawrence on Tennessee Williams. Fedder’s study is flawed in significant respects, rendering a new investigation of the subject necessary. As a result of the limited state of Williams research (particularly biographical investigation) available to scholars in the mid-1960s, Fedder was unable to benefit from the more nuanced and detailed understanding of Williams’s life that Leverich, Donald Spoto, John S. Bak, John Lahr (and of course Williams himself, in Memoirs) have all provided.

¶12

A more significant problem with Fedder’s study is the critic’s morally censorious tone toward his subject. The use of an author’s sexual orientation and subject matter to discredit his or her work is not unique to Fedder and plagues much of the criticism of gay playwrights (the case of Edward Albee is noteworthy) in the mid- and late twentieth century. Nevertheless, Fedder’s book is useful in that its approach is perhaps illustrative of exactly the bourgeois morality and restrictive sex and gender classifications Williams was using Lawrence to oppose decades earlier.³ Williams’s mother, Edwina, epitomized this rigid, puritanical mindset and was the model for both Mme. Duvenet (the prudish, self-righteous mother in Auto-da-Fé), and later, of course, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (1944).

¶13

Indeed, in The Glass Menagerie, Lawrence makes a cameo appearance as the author of a forbidden text (presumably Lady Chatterley’s Lover) that Amanda Wingfield refuses to admit into her home. Accusing Tom of “doing things that you’re ashamed of,” Amanda admits, “I took that horrible novel back to the library—yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. [. . .] I cannot control the output of diseased minds or the people who cater to them— [. . .] BUT I WON’T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE!” (161). Lawrence’s novel is invoked here to signal an aspect of Tom Wingfield’s struggle with his mother and with what she represents. More can be understood about the nature of this struggle if one studies Williams’s earlier, explicit engagements with Lawrence’s work and Lawrence as an idea, beginning with the poem Williams wrote at the time he visited Frieda.

¶14

Williams’s poem “Cried the Fox,” dated “Taos, 1939” (Collected Poems 6–7, 224), bears the inscription “For D. H. L.” and was inspired by Lawrence’s 1922 novella “The Fox.” The fox image recurs in many guises throughout Lawrence’s work, and it is no coincidence that Williams also returns often to this metaphor. In Lawrence’s “The Fox,” the animal can be read as a symbol of male sexuality and defiance, whose insatiable appetite subverts the attempts of two young women to maintain a farm by themselves, exclusive of men. Predatory and sly, Lawrence’s fox is a biblical threat: a “demon” that is “difficult as a serpent to see” (9). While the fox will be similarly predatory when Williams and Windham import the metaphor into their dramatic adaptation of Lawrence’s “You Touched Me,” it is important to note that more often, Williams adjusts Lawrence’s image to emphasize the isolation of the fox and society’s simultaneous need for and persecution of it.

¶15

Williams’s poem describes the animal in its archetypal guise as fugitive, evading the forces (dogs and hunters) that seek its capture. The fox insists on a “fatal returning” to “places that failed me before,” even if this spells his own doom; he will run “in circles / narrower, narrower still” until his “brush hangs burning / flame at the hunter’s door.”

¶16

In the Lawrence novella, the fox that creeps unsuspectingly into Nellie March and Jill Banford’s chicken farm is seen as both emblem and harbinger of the male animal creeping into the female subconscious. As Lawrence writes, “[W]henever she [March] fell into her half-muses, when she was half rapt, and half intelligently aware of what passed under her vision, then it was the fox which somehow dominated her unconsciousness, possessed the blank half of her musing” (12).

¶17

Soon after, this prototypical male animal, in the form of Henry Grenfel, descends in the flesh, but unlike March’s dream vision, where the fox symbolically violates her (“the fox [. . .] whisked his brush across her face, [where] it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain” [120]), this human beast proceeds literally to disrupt—then destroy—the women’s union by proposing marriage to one, then eventually murdering the other by felling a tree he knows will crush her.

¶18

For Lawrence, then, the male outsider deliberately overturns and then destroys the female peace that has been constructed to keep him out. Grenfel’s deliberate killing of his rival (“In his heart he had decided her death. [. . .] The inner necessity of his life was fulfilling itself” [64, 65]) indicates that for Lawrence the male, once opposed, seeks to destroy an order that threatens his exclusion.

¶19

Williams examines the fox in a substantially different way in his poem dedicated to Lawrence. In “Cried the Fox,” the animal’s male sexuality does not threaten and subvert through violence: instead, the fox is on the receiving end of the violence. Significantly, in the poem the fox is persecuted for its “cry,” both “lonely” and “passionate,” which conveys the animal’s subversive message. Instead of symbolizing the excluded and ostracized heterosexual male as in “The Fox,” Williams’s fox is identified with the voice of the artist, who, like the fox, lives as a fugitive from the rest of mankind. The poem’s image of the reddish, flamelike “brush” that “hangs burning” at the hunter’s door connects the fox not only with the red-bearded Lawrence (and, by extension, Williams himself) but also with another of Lawrence’s favorite symbols: the phoenix rising from its nest of flames, included on the cover or as the frontispiece in many editions of Lawrence’s work. The poem thus associates the fox, the phoenix, Lawrence, and Williams with each other and with the song of the outcast, renegade artist, whom society would destroy.

¶20

The maleness of the fox is here less important than its archetypal guise as Reynard the Fox, the sly trickster figure of medieval literature who evades the forces (dogs and hunters) that seek its capture. Significantly, Williams’s fox insists on a “fatal returning” to “places that failed me before,” implying that the fox knows it is making choices that spell its doom. The fox’s foreshadowed death is portrayed as self-sacrificial (“his heart breaking nearly”), and his “lonely, passionate bark,” which simultaneously laments and galvanizes the pursuit, suggests that for Williams the animal represents the artist’s compulsion to beckon an otherwise unresponsive, indifferent world to heed his cry, even if the world’s attention will do nothing but destroy him.

¶21

While Williams was unable to complete his planned full-length play about Lawrence’s life, fragmentary drafts do survive. The editors Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel have cobbled together two drafts from 1939 (found at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas) to form the one-act play Adam and Eve on a Ferry.⁴ Set on the sun porch of a villa in the French Alps, where Lawrence and Frieda lived shortly before the novelist’s death from tuberculosis in 1930, the play describes a meeting between the debilitated novelist (wearing dressing gown and shawl) and a female admirer who has come to visit. Essentially the play is a less fantastic version of what would later become The Case of the Crushed Petunias. In Adam and Eve, Williams’s Lawrence character offers his own brand of sex therapy to the “spinsterish” Miss Ariadne Peabody. After an introduction in which the famous writer playfully and sarcastically pokes fun at the quivering American woman, Lawrence abruptly says, “Tell me about your lover.” The remainder of the play concerns Miss Peabody’s admission that there has indeed been a lover but that the name and place of their proposed assignation have been forgotten: “My brain was a blank, a blank! All that I knew was that somewhere in the city at half past five the man whom I had been waiting for all of my life to meet—was waiting for me!” (179).

¶22

Deducing that the woman’s physical sensations of pain (“There in the side where he touched you!” [181]) are a result of this apparently chance encounter with a strange man on a ferryboat from Oakland to San Francisco (“These pains had started the night that the stranger pressed you!” [182]), Williams’s Lawrence-as-therapist-and-detective concludes that the woman is the “victim of hundreds of years of wrong-thinking. Prudery, shame, sterile intellectualism denying the body, pointing shame at the flesh!” (183). After the Lawrence character helps her remember the man’s name (Adam) and the hotel room in which their meeting was to take place, the woman hastily leaves, vowing to return immediately to the Golden Gate Hotel to seek her lost love.

¶23

More sketch than fully realized play, Adam and Eve on a Ferry offers Williams’s own version of what he took to be Lawrence’s attitude toward physical sexuality, its usefulness, and its importance. With I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, Williams converted Adam and Eve into a complete one-act more broadly concerned with Lawrence as a person and as an artist. Again, Williams employs the location of the small cottage on a cliff in Vence, a town in the hills of southeastern France where the English novelist died at age forty-four. The play opens in late afternoon, when the sun has begun its descent, and when it finally sets, the ailing but still titanic red-bearded Lawrence will have died. The setting sun and Lawrence’s red beard are mirrored in the wall hanging described in the stage directions: “woven in silver and scarlet and gold, is a large banner that bears the design of the Phoenix in a nest of flames—Lawrence’s favorite symbol” (I Rise [2000] 291).⁵ The dying artist is attended by his German-born wife and inseparable companion, Frieda, who herself contributed a prefatory note to the published version of the play. (“The theme of it is the eternal antagonism and attraction between man and woman. This was between Lawrence and me too,” she wrote [F. Lawrence].)

¶24

Despite the Lawrence character’s weakened, tubercular condition in I Rise in Flame, husband and wife are still engaged in a physical struggle emblematic of their antagonistic but fiercely loving relationship. The play’s opening moments depict Lawrence grabbing Frieda’s wrist as she tries to take from him a small jar of orange marmalade left on the doorstep by one of Lawrence’s ardent female admirers. The orange marmalade may be seen as a reduced, domesticated version of the “fierce red sun” the dying Lawrence still craves (I Rise [2000] 292). He and the Frieda character fight over the tiny jar as if it were the essence of life itself. The marmalade is the first of many references to the ebbing sun and to the dying artist’s drive to devour every precious moment of life before it vanishes forever. Williams dramatizes Lawrence’s well-known idea of the war between the sexes (played out with many variations in Lawrence’s works, including his greatest novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love) by having Lawrence and Frieda engage in a love-hate struggle throughout the play. The real-life Lawrence wrote of death as a solitary pursuit, something a man needed to do alone—or at the very least, without a woman present. This ambivalence between requiring human contact and at the same time pushing it away in I Rise in Flame is an accurate depiction of Lawrence’s mood swings in the weeks before death. At the sanatorium in Vence, the real-life Lawrence shouted at Frieda to leave him alone, saying, “your sleeping here does me no good.” However, when she later returned, he told her, “Don’t mind. You know I want nothing but you, but sometimes something is stronger than me” (qtd. in Feinstein 238). In the play he describes himself as a “lonely old animal” (I Rise [2000] 295), one who insists repeatedly that he be permitted to die alone, holding on to his ferocity and anger until the very end, although the two published versions of the play offer significantly different descriptions of the Lawrence character’s death. In the 1951 version originally published by New Directions (reproduced in the 2000 Library of America edition), Frieda and her companion Bertha wait within as Lawrence goes outside for his final encounter with the dying sun. Bertha begs to rush to the dying artist, but Frieda recalls his demands—“Don’t follow” and “no women!” (303, 295)—until she hears Lawrence’s anguished cry “Frieda!” and runs to his side, speaking the final lines “wildly, with infinite tenderness” in German: “Ich komm’, Ich komm’, mein Liebchen!” (303). However, in the Dramatist’s Play Service acting edition, first published in 1953 and included in the collection of short plays published in 1970 as Dragon Country, Frieda and Bertha remain at a distance until the great man has finally died. Only when Lawrence’s lifeless body slumps to the floor does Frieda permit her companion to rush to his side: “Now.—Go to him.—It’s finished” (I Rise [1970] 75).

¶25

The play’s third character, Bertha, was based on Lawrence’s English painter friend Dorothy Brett (whom Williams also met in Taos) and functions largely as a messenger, bringing news about the London exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. She informs the couple that Lawrence’s pictures have been eviscerated by the critics and described as “disgusting” (I Rise [2000] 300). While both women wait for what they assume will be the inevitable explosion, to their surprise, Williams’s Lawrence is delighted by the critics’ condemnation: “Ah! . . Success! They said I couldn’t paint? That I draw like a child? They called my figures grotesque? Lumpy, obscene, misshapen, monstrous, deformed?” Told he was unable to draw a straight line, he responds, “I can draw a crooked line, Frieda. And that is the reason that I can put life in my pictures!” (300–01).

¶26

In response to Bertha’s inquiry about why he chose to paint at all, Lawrence’s speech succinctly describes his credo as an expressionist artist for whom the medium is less important than what is being expressed.⁶

Why did I want to write? Because I’m an artist . . . What is an artist? . . A man who loves life too intensely, a man who loves life till he hates her and has to strike out with his fist like I struck out at Frieda . . . To show her he knows her tricks, and he’s still the master! [. . .] Words weren’t enough . . . I had to have color, too. I took to paint and I painted the way that I wrote! Fiercely, without any shame! This is life, I told them, life is like this!Wonderful! Dark! Terrific! They banned my books and they wanted to burn my pictures! (302)⁷

¶27

Satisfied that his paintings were not burned by the police who raided the exhibition, Williams’s Lawrence asks for his shawl and prepares for death as the “young blond god” of the sun “is beginning to be seduced by the harlot of darkness” (301). However, Lawrence’s words also prophesy inevitable renewal: “he won’t stay down. He’ll climb back out of her belly and there will be light. In the end there will always be light . . . And I am the prophetof it!” (302).

¶28

Williams’s play about Lawrence’s death is both an homage to Lawrence and a critical investigation into his ideas. The Lawrence whom Williams conjures in I Rise in Flame wants to dominate Frieda but also reveres her as a worthy adversary. At one moment, the Lawrence character can observe, “If only I had your throat between my fingers”; at another he claims, “Don’t believe me . . . I love you” (293, 296). Theirs is an eternal battle for supremacy that neither is allowed to win. As the Frieda character says, “Men love death . . . Women don’t. Men cut wounds in each other and women stop the bleeding,” to which Lawrence responds, “Yes. By drinking the blood” (293–94).

¶29

During the same year in which he visited Frieda Lawrence in Taos and wrote “Cried the Fox” and I Rise in Flame, Williams was also at work on a new play, Battle of Angels, usually remembered both as his first professional production and (following the Theatre Guild’s two-week run in Boston) one of his greatest failures.⁸ Although Lawrence is not explicitly referenced in Battle of Angels, the play represents perhaps the apotheosis of Lawrence’s influence on the American playwright. In the prompt copy of the play’s original director, Margaret Webster, he wrote the following dedication: “For D. H. Lawrence—who was, while he lived, the brilliant adversary of so many dark angels and who never fell, except in the treacherous flesh, the rest being flame that fought and prevailed over darkness” (qtd. in Leverich 396).

¶30

In Battle, Williams does not celebrate the Lawrence who mythicized sexual conflict but the sexually potent Lawrencian prophet symbolizing renewal and light. A significant portion of the play’s plot is indebted to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Lawrence’s novel, the married Lady Chatterley falls in love with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, whom the text opposes to the life-denying forces represented by her invalid husband, Clifford; in Williams’s play, Myra Torrance is wedded to the dying, cancer-ridden Jabe. Like Connie Chatterley, she falls in love with a virile outsider, Valentine Xavier, and in both works, the lower-class male lovers are haunted by possessive women from their past (Mellors by Bertha, Val by the woman from Waco).

¶31

It seems fair to argue that the play’s failure rests in part on the still inexperienced playwright’s relying too much on the incorporation of Lawrencian themes and symbols. John Gassner’s 1948 comment that Williams “appeared to have been fixed on D. H. Lawrence somewhat too strongly [. . .] to master the play’s problems” may have led him to rewrite the unsuccessful Battle as Orpheus Descending in 1957 (4).

¶32

In the figure of Xavier, Williams created a personification of the Lawrencian life force—both self-portrait and Christ figure. The name is taken from Williams’s eighteenth-century ancestor Valentine Sevier (1702–1803), and Williams had once considered using it as his pseudonym before choosing Tennessee. Xavier (pronounced “Savior”) is also a Christian martyr who arrives at the town of Two Rivers, Mississippi, attempting to heal the sick townspeople through a life-affirming philosophy based on love, as suggested by his name, Valentine. He comes in peace, but, Christ-like, suffers a gruesome martyrdom at the hands of a violent mob. After he is threatened with a blowtorch, his clothes are torn off and he is dragged out to the “lynching tree,” an obvious symbol of crucifixion (Battle 120). Eventually all that remains of Val is his snakeskin jacket, its material associating it simultaneously with Christ’s resurrection (through the snake’s ability to shed its skin and be reborn) and with the biblical serpent. In keeping with Williams’s aforementioned desire for his next play to create a picture of his own heart, Valentine is also a writer working on a book about “[l]ife” (31), scribbling poems on shoebox lids, just as Williams did at the International Shoe Company and as his alter ego Tom Wingfield will do in The Glass Menagerie.

¶33

Valentine may be a thinly disguised portrait of the artist, but he is also the embodiment of Lawrence’s archetypal man: part animal, part demigod. He is a feral outsider who attracts others, particularly women, into his sensual orbit, yet remains free. Indeed, Val is another version of Lawrence’s fox, forever untamed: “I lived like a fox. I hunted and fished [. . .] I used to lay out naked in a flatboat with the sun on me” (Battle 51). The fugitive nature of the fox in “Cried the Fox” recurs when the prophet character Cassandra Whiteside (who refers to him as “Snakeskin,” both alluding to his distinctive jacket and foreshadowing Val’s connection with images of rebirth) says to Val, “You an’ me, we belong to the fugitive kind. We live on motion” (97). Val also shares the isolation of the fox in the poem: despite his attractiveness to others, he laments, “We’re all of us locked up tight inside our own bodies. Sentenced—you might say—to solitary confinement inside our own skins” (50). Despite his isolation, Valentine is able to provide the barren Myra with the gift of renewal. She has been unable to conceive and is obliged to tend to her dying husband, Jabe, until Val arrives offering rebirth through contact with the world of the senses; “Oh God,” Myra says, “I knew that I wouldn’t be barren when we went together that first time. I felt it already, stirring up inside me, beginning to live!” (107). Almost certainly, Lawrence was thinking of Val as kin to Mellors in Lady Chatterley, who also heals through bodily touch.

¶34

The young playwright may have sacrificed his own theatrical instincts in favor of an allegorical depiction of Lawrence’s ideal of human renewal in Battle of Angels, but he was evidently not entirely without a sense of humor about the debacle. As he did throughout his life, Williams showed uncommon resilience in the face of failure, and his next work was as much self-parody as it was thinly veiled criticism of the audience and culture that rejected the extravagant violence and sexuality of Battle of Angels.

¶35

Set in “Primanproper, Massachusetts,” The Case of the Crushed Petunias (written in February 1941—just months after Battle of Angels “bombed in Boston,” as the theater industry saying goes) is a playful allegorical fantasy on the Lawrencian theme of vitality. The play depicts an innocent young New England “maiden,” Miss Dorothy Simple, owner and proprietor of the Simple Notion Shop, which has a double row of petunias growing outside (101). The shop’s name, through both its literal reference to small objects associated with sewing and its pun on “simple notions” (i.e., innocent ideas), takes a playful jab at Miss Simple’s naïve, spinsterish lifestyle. When Miss Simple discovers that her petunias have been “deliberately and maliciously” crushed, she calls the police (101). Soon after, the character called the Young Man, “shockingly large and aggressive,” enters her shop and promptly confesses his misdeed: “Okay, I’ll tell you why [I did it]. First, because you’d barricaded your house—and also your heart—behind that silly little double row of petunias!” (102–03). Suggesting she plant “wild roses” instead, the Young Man encourages her to understand her position in the universe: “This miraculous accident of being alive!” (105–06). He works for “LIFE, INCORPORATED” (as opposed to a rival concern, “DEATH, UNLIMITED” [108]) and informs her, “Boston’s a state of mind that you’ll grow out of” (111). He urges her to abandon her shop and meet him near Highway 77, an uncivilized place by “the wild plum tree—at the broken place in the long stone wall—where roots have cleft the rocks and made them crumble” (111).9 A police officer cautions her against leaving Primanproper, warning that she is heading toward a place “overgrown by brambles” where “the moon at night makes such confusing shadows people lose their way, go dangerous places, do outrageous things!” (113). Once she has left the town, he says, she can never return again. However, Miss Simple decides to leave and embrace life instead. The play ends with her bidding her old world “Good-bye forever!” (114).

¶36

While this fantasy never directly references Lawrence, it is imbued with his philosophical embrace of the instinctive, primitive, and sensual (and male) over the virginal and repressed (i.e., the female). As the Young Man’s poem (playfully addressed to the petunias) indicates, the short play is a plea for direct, honest masculinity in opposition to female repression:

They note with consummate disdain

all that is masculine or plain

They blush down to their tender roots

when men pass by in working boots

All honest language shocks them so

they cringe to hear a rooster crow (104–05)

The play endorses rejection of the rational and socially acceptable in favor of “senseless acrobatics, cartwheels in mid-air . . . pagan dances!” (114). As with both Mellors in Lady Chatterley and Val in Battle of Angels, Williams invokes male energy as a means of liberating sexually repressed womankind.

¶37

Both Crushed Petunias and Battle of Angels may be said to reflect the atmosphere of sexual repression that pervaded Williams’s childhood and adolescence in St. Louis. His brother, Dakin, observed that their mother was “president of the anti-sex league.” Dakin further reported that “[s]he didn’t believe in sex, she avoided it completely” and that physical touch was completely absent in their home: “She didn’t react well to anything physical. We never had it, and didn’t expect it” (qtd. in Lahr 53). With what Williams called his mother’s “monolithic Puritanism” as his immediate past (qtd. in Lahr 53), the liberating force of Lawrencian freedom is hardly surprising.

¶38

In her essay on Lawrence’s “The Fox,” the novelist Doris Lessing observed something in Lawrence that reveals precisely what drew Williams to him: “no writer has ever identified so strongly with the wild, and with beasts. The old shamans did, the storytellers. For them and for Lawrence an animal was never what it seemed” (18). The essence of being human for Lawrence was to respond to the animal caged within the civilized self. Animals in his work (horses, foxes, rats, etc.) seem to speak from some chthonic underworld that a mechanistic society has rendered forbidden.

¶39

Williams’s next full-length play, Stairs to the Roof, is a study of what he found most compelling in Lawrence’s writings—this primal longing for freedom. Indeed, the play’s subtitle, “A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That Are Kept in Cages,” seems almost to derive from Lawrence’s poem “Wild Things in Captivity”: “Wild things in captivity / while they keep their own wild purity / won’t breed, they mope, they die” (Complete Poems 484–45).

¶40

Stairs is an expressionistic fantasy based on Williams’s own self-described “season in hell” (Notebooks 214n365), the period of time he spent working at the International Shoe Company between 1932 and 1935 after his father forcibly removed him from the University of Missouri for failing a compulsory course in R.O.T.C.

¶41

Instead of the sole fox in “Cried the Fox” (free but fugitive, whose passionate loneliness drives him to summon the very companionship that would kill him), Stairs contains a group of caged foxes longing for their release. The play’s hero, Benjamin Murphy, abruptly jettisons wife, home, and job at Continental Shirtmakers for a life of freedom, symbolized by his discovery of some miraculous, unseen “stairs to the roof,” leading to the top of the skyscraper where he works. At the end of the play, Ben and his companion (known only as the Girl) ascend the stairs—then magically disappear (with the assistance of a metaphysical deus ex machinanamed Mr. E) to attain their freedom.

¶42

The play is set in an unnamed city that is clearly St. Louis, the site of what Williams felt was his own imprisonment. Ben and the Girl find themselves near the zoo in Forest Park, where they hear foxes barking in their cages. The Girl asks, “I wonder what they’re crying for?” and Ben replies, “The same thing we’re crying for. They long for the hills and freedom the same as we do” (56). After knocking out the zookeeper, Ben releases all fifteen foxes from their cages. The scene concludes with all the zoo animals newly awakened and roaring at once.

¶43

As the play moves toward its conclusion at the top of the roof, the style moves further and further away from realism. The couple notices a swan by the edge of a lake. When the Girl reaches out to touch it, Ben responds, “It isn’t domestic—it’s wild. It’s heard of the cages that tame creatures have built to capture the wild of heart” (68).

¶44

In the following scene, the Girl and Ben arrive at a phantasmagoric carnival in the middle of the park, which is dominated by a giant Ferris wheel. Accompanied by calliope music in the background, the lovers attend a midnight performance of Beauty and the Beast performed by mummers—intended, Williams writes, for the “hungry-souled captives of the city let out for a night” (70). The ensuing play-within-a-play does not advance the plot but offers remarkable insight into the importance Lawrence’s ideas held for Williams, in which the sex act—even when presented as violent and nonconsensual—is tied to something mystical, visionary, and even redemptive.

¶45

This brief interlude begins with Beauty, described in the stage directions as “a lovely dark girl in tights and sequins,” confronted by the Beast, “an ugly giant-like creature in the robes of a monk” (70). When Beauty evades his solemn invocation to “Let us pray!” the monk throws off his robes and forcibly presses the girl to the ground, sexually violating her. After this rape scene is pantomimed, a mummer performing the character “Reader” emerges to explain the conclusion to this “little morality play” (71). Having been violated by the Beast, Beauty is miraculously restored to her original purity:

He was astonished—she was not besmirched.

Her face was holy as a nun’s at church. (73)

This fantastic act of renewal is completed by the Beast’s own transformation into a handsome young man “in pink tights and fig leaf” (73). Beauty’s explanation is that the sexual act itself has been transformative, for both victim and aggressor:

I owned no beauty till it felt thy need,

Which, being answered, makes thee no more Beast,

But One with Beauty! (73)

¶46

This strangely redemptive rape scene—an uncomfortable relic of its era, hard to digest in the twenty-first century—seems thematically and stylistically out of place, even as the play has moved from the harsh expressionism of its opening scene to the carnival’s surreal conclusion depicting the Girl isolated in an “eerie blue atmosphere of a landscape by Salvador Dali” (75). However, the Beauty and the Beast interlude reveals the profound impact of Lawrence’s vitalist philosophy on Williams’s imagination at the time of the work’s composition. Not only does the fairy tale’s invocation align with a Lawrencian predilection for violent conflict between the sexes, as well as his association of the animalistic with the primordial, it also underscores Lawrence’s notion of the sexual act (even one that may be coercive) as something potentially restorative in a mechanized age.

¶47

Lawrence’s story “The Princess” (1924) offers an interesting analogy with the Beauty and the Beast scene in Stairs to the Roof. Written after Lawrence had left England, the story is set in New Mexico. It depicts a young Englishwoman, Dollie Urquhart, who has been raised by her eccentric father as a delicate “princess”: “Only you, my little Princess. You are the last of the royal race of the old people; the last, my Princess.” As a result, the “dainty little thing” has been preserved like an insect trapped in amber. Lawrence writes, “She was always grown up; she never really grew up” (475). In this, she is reminiscent of Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, who is described as having “something prematurely spinsterish” (135) about her, or “putting on airs” (139). Dollie never explores her feelings about male companionship until after the death of her father. But at the age of thirty-eight, her curiosity returns, and she eagerly undertakes a long and treacherous ride on horseback through a rocky landscape, led by her Mexican guide, Romero. The landscape is similar to the journey the spinsterish Dorothy Simple undertakes at the conclusion of The Case of the Crushed Petunias, where Miss Simple’s double row of petunias, once intended to barricade her from expressing her feelings and desires, has been mysteriously trampled by the Young Man as a prelude to her sexual awakening.

¶48

Like Miss Simple, who eventually leaves Boston to go off on a dangerous journey “overgrown by brambles” where she will discover “senseless acrobatics [and] do pagan dances” (113–14), the Princess must undertake a pilgrimage into the heart of the self. In “The Princess,” she climbs a steep incline on her sorrel mare. It is a journey that, as so often in Lawrence, is both presented with geographical precision and loaded with sexual implication:

In front now was nothing but mountains, ponderous, massive, down-sitting mountains, in a huge and intricate knot, empty of life or soul.[. . .] It frightened the Princess, it was so inhuman. She had not thought it could be so inhuman, so, as it were, anti-life. And yet now one of her desires was fulfilled. She had seen it, the massive, gruesome, repellent core of the Rockies. She saw it there beneath her eyes, in its gigantic, heavy gruesomeness. (496–97)

¶49

After traversing this barren yet magical landscape, she and Romero end up in a shack where they decamp to spend the night. Unable to sleep because of the frigid mountain air, Dollie craves warmth and protection from the Mexican, calling to him that “it is so cold.” He answers, “You want me to make you warm?,” to which Dollie’s assent is taken as acquiescence to the sexual act. However, as soon as Romero holds her in his arms, Dollie, who has wanted to be alone with Romero all along, now “wanted to scream to him not to touch her. She stiffened herself. Yet she was dumb” (504). In this combined scene of attraction and repulsion, Lawrence explores an area of human sexual experience whose essence is ambiguity.

¶50

As soon as the sex act has been consummated, Dollie wants to leave. Romero, “suffused with pride and luxury” at his male conquest, asks, “Don’t you like last night?” Her reply, “Not really,” ignites a fire that will ultimately consume them both. Romero is incensed that Dollie “want[s] to do a man down,” while she responds to his conquest with stony, inviolate resistance. Romero throws her clothing into the icy lake and imprisons her in the isolated mountain shack. Whereas Romero attempts to “expend his desire for her” in “a sombre, violent excess,” Dollie longs only to be “alone again, cool and intact!” (509). The story concludes tragically, with Romero shot by the Forest Service and the Princess descending into madness, confusing the facts of her violation and imprisonment to suit her own version of the truth: “Since my accident in the mountains, when a man went mad and shot my horse from under me, and my guide had to shoot him dead, I have never felt quite myself” (512).

¶51

In the 1970 volume Sexual Politics, Kate Millett describes Lawrence as a novelist who “goes to every length to make the lot of the independent woman repellent” (260) and dismisses the story “The Princess” in a single footnote as “an account of a Mexican guide who rapes and imprisons an American in the mountains—a story done with infinite malice and sexual enmity” (286n176). The statement and the dismissal oversimplify Lawrence’s detailed exploration of sexuality, both male and female: “The Princess” is not a simple story of phallic oppression but an examination of an aspect of the complex dynamics between men and women, one that gives the reader an indication of how to read the Beauty and the Beast scene in Stairs to the Roof.

¶52

The Beauty and the Beast scene concludes with a piece of comic business: once the play-within-a-play is done, the actor who plays the Beast “go[es] crazy”—the stage directions indicate, “The Beast has resumed his ugly mask and is choking Beauty” (73–74). Ben leaps onto the stage and comes to the rescue. The mummer playing the Reader says the Beast actor is “Russian! He don’t understand no English!” Ben offers the Russian a token of peace in the form of an oversized candy cane he has won at the carnival and says: “Peace is re-established! The peppermint stick is broken in friendship! That, my friends, is the secret of good fellowship!” (74). This incongruous conclusion may offer yet another way of reading the play-within-a-play, though the presence of a threatening Russian “Beast” and the idea of reestablishing peace also point to the playwright’s having World War II on his mind while writing. (Stairs was completed in December 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an event Williams called “the end of the world as we know it” [qtd. in Hale xvii].)

¶53

In the final scene of Stairs to the Roof, on the roof of the office building in which the play began under the looming presence of an oversize clock, the metaphysical dematerialization of the couple is magically completed. What began as expressionist dystopia in the style of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, with office workers moving with “rigid, machine-like motions above their imaginary desks” (Stairs 3), is transformed into utopian fantasy. Williams’s stage directions describe the ecstasy that has overtaken mundane reality: “Below this region the world may be grooved repetition, but here it is the transcendental—Light, light, light! The last high reach of the spirit, matter’s rejection, the abstract core of religion which is purity, wonder and love” (Stairs 90). In an afterword written in 1947 for the premiere of Stairs to the Roof at the Pasadena Playhouse, Williams commented on the play’s having a “moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today” (101).

¶54

In 1942, the year after he wrote Stairs to the Roof, Williams and his friend Donald Windham collaborated on the play You Touched Me!, based on the Lawrence story with the same title.¹⁰ The play was subtitled A Romantic Comedy, a surprising choice for Williams, since as he noted, “Lawrence did not have humor in the popular sense” (qtd. in Moschovakis and Roessel, Introduction xxx). Like “The Fox,” with which it invites significant comparison, Lawrence’s “You Touched Me” concerns the invasion by a man into a female-dominated world. Matilda and Emmie Rockley are sisters in their mid-thirties who live with their ill father in an abandoned pottery house. While the women seem pleased with life in the defunct structure, Lawrence suggests that the world in which “grey clay had ceased to spatter its mud” is in fact a place of death, and that the women are deeply unsatisfied (“Hadrian” 92). Into this sterile world returns Hadrian, an orphan “charity-boy” (98), adopted at age six and now returning home as a young man in his early twenties. The two older women show contempt toward the arrival of their “cousin” as a social inferior and “little mannie” (96). The episode that gives the story its title concerns Matilda’s nighttime intrusion into her father’s room, where Hadrian is asleep; mistaking the sleeping figure for her father, “[s]he laid her fine, delicate hand on his brow. It seemed fresh and smooth—very fresh and smooth. A sort of surprise stirred in her, in her entranced state” (99).

¶55

Although she tries to rectify her mistake, her accidental touch has released something powerful both in Hadrian and in Matilda herself. Although she attempts to reassert her social control over the “sly” charity boy (97), something has irretrievably changed. Like “The Fox,” “You Touched Me” examines the intrusion into—and invasion of—an apparently secure and isolated female world by a single man. And once this touch has happened, it cannot be undone: “I know it was a mistake—” Hadrian says after the incident, “but I shan’t forget it. If you wake a man up, he can’t go to sleep again because he’s told to” (106). At the end of the story, Matilda and Hadrian, despite their differences in age and social class, kiss at the bedside of their dying father and agree to marry.

¶56

While less violent than “The Fox,” the story is similarly connected with Lawrence’s investment in the miracle of physical touch. In a 1929 essay, “Men Must Work and Women as Well,” Lawrence noted what he saw as a trend in modern civilization toward “greater and greater abstraction from the physical, towards a further and further physical separateness between men and women” (282), concluding that it was essential for “men and women, individuals, to try to get back their bodies and preserve the other flow of warmth, affection, and physical unison” (284). This priority is expressed by the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who proclaims,“I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings [. . .] and the touch of tenderness” (287).

¶57

In May 1942, Windham had already completed an outline and several scenes of a projected adaptation of Lawrence’s “You Touched Me” before showing it to Williams. Initially dismissing it as a simple love story, Williams sprang up at two a.m. to tell Windham, “It’s all of life this story. You and me and the Touch. It’s all of life” (qtd. in Leverich 445). Williams later described this epiphany as being “like one of those Chinese poems that are written in almost invisible script on an infinitesimal slip of paper. Dropped in a cup of hot tea the paper expands and unfolds and finally floating on the top of the cup is a poem” (qtd. in Leverich 445).

¶58

While Windham began the project, it was Williams who noticed the deeper parallels with Lawrence’s work, specifically “The Fox”: “It is basically the same story as ours, the two women and man triangle[. . . . T]he symbol of a fox is used very effectively—the boy is like a fox raiding a hen-coop[. . . . I]t has some stuff in it we can use in the play, notably the fox—I don’t know just how to use it yet but I think we can” (Windham 29). Williams’s decision to connect the two stories was critical to the play’s conception and action, as the playtext depicts the advance of a formidable male animal (Hadrian) on the innocent Matilda, who has not yet awoken to her sexual essence and must be “touched” into life, despite the strictures of Emmie, who, in the Williams-Windham comedy, is Matilda’s spinster aunt rather than her sister.

¶59

The change in Emmie’s role is crucial, as it foregrounds and isolates Matilda as the object of Hadrian’s desire, and—even more significant—establishes her innocence and vulnerability. What is a delicate psychological study of male-female relations in Lawrence’s story now becomes the stuff of romantic comedy, with Aunt Emmie cast as a puritanical antagonist necessary to fuel the conflict.

¶60

Emmie’s first words—the opening words of the play—establish both the centrality of her antagonism and the importance of the fox metaphor to the dramatic adaptation: “The fox was at it again last night[. . . . The] chickens have been—decimated! Oh, that fox!—nothing stops him! Barbed-wire, fox-hounds, traps, poisons—nothing! But just let him call on us—I’ll give him a hot reception” (Williams and Windham 5). Moments later, Emmie leaves Matilda gazing dreamily into space as Hadrian enters, described in quintessentially Lawrencian terms:

There is something about him which the unsympathetic might call sharp or fox-like. It is a look, certainly, that might be observed in the face of a young animal of the woods who has preserved his life through tense exercise of a physical craft and quickness; an alert, inquisitive look [. . . . W]e will not say that he has red hair, but hair of that color would suit his kind of vital, quick awareness. (12)

¶61

In its depiction of innocence, You Touched Me! clearly anticipates The Glass Menagerie (1944), written concurrently with the adaptation. Indeed, the romantic comedy may be seen as the obverse of Williams’s breakthrough play. Its heroine, Matilda, is a shy girl like Laura Wingfield, and Matilda is “polishing silver and washing little glass ornaments” when we first meet her. Indeed, Matilda is described as having the “delicate, almost transparent quality of glass” (5). Emmie’s role is to cut Matilda off from the sensual woman locked within, whom Hadrian (like Mellors in Lady Chatterley) accesses by breathing life into her through touch.

¶62

Near the end of You Touched Me!, Matilda’s father, Captain Rockley, explicitly affirms the Lawrencian binaries between the forces of life and death that have thus far been implicit in the play: “Some people have got that power—of turning life into clay. You’re one of that kind, Emmie. [. . .] But others have got a different kind of power. Their touch turns clay into life. Hadrian’s one of that kind—” (94). Rockley refers to his foster son’s arrival as a means of reanimating his daughter, releasing her from what he perceives as Emmie’s death grip: “But now he’s back. He’s here—and in spite of your will to prevent, he’s going to breathe the breath of life back into this poor clay figure you’re making of my daughter” (95).

¶63

In the world of romantic comedy that Williams and Windham depict in You Touched Me!, such binaries may be effectively contrasted. In the end, Hadrian is a fairytale prince able to awaken his sleeping beauty Matilda with a life-affirming kiss. But in The Glass Menagerie and the plays that followed, Williams complicates what Lawrence offered him, transforming it into something quite different and more deeply personal.¹¹ It is true that Tom strikes a distinctly Lawrencian tone when countering Amanda’s argument that the world “is full of young men employed in warehouses,” his retort to his mother seemingly conjuring Lawrence verbatim: “Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts is given much play at the warehouse!” (173–74).

¶64

In Williams’s deeply personal memory play, however, the notion that a foxlike male can simply enter the Wingfield home and breathe new life into his sister is no longer viable. Instead of Hadrian, who “snatches Matilda off her feet,” carrying her away to a new life “forward,” Jim O’Connor, the imagined savior in The Glass Menagerie, nervously (and inadequately) proffers a “Life Saver”: “Would you—care for a—mint? Peppermint? Life Saver? My pocket’s a regular drugstore—wherever I go . . .” (229).

¶65

The transition from You Touched Me! to The Glass Menagerie represents a shift from fully embracing the Lawrencian ideal toward uncovering Williams’s own complicated artistic voice. Subsequent works like Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire may referencethe Lawrencian model of sexual antagonism, but they deny simple solutions. In these later works, Williams resisted what he ultimately considered Lawrence’s “tangent obsessions, such as his insistence upon the woman’s subservience to the male” (I Rise [2000] 288).¹²

¶66

Maturing as an artist meant Williams understood both what Lawrence offered him and what he had to reject. He also needed to recognize the presence of both male and female aspects in his own nature, especially the latter. As a result, the “Promethean figure” of John Buchanan, “brilliantly and restlessly alive in a stagnant society” (Summer 132), does not simplistically transform the “prematurely spinsterish” Alma Winemiller, so full of “excessive propriety and self-consciousness” (135). Rather, the two characters change places, absorbing parts of one another. Alma, whose name emphasizes her connection with the spirit and who once praised the pure spirituality of the Gothic cathedral (“How everything reaches up, how everything seems to be straining for the something out of the reach of stone—or human—fingers?” [197]), must ultimately learn to realize “I have a Doppelgänger. I looked that up and found that it means another person inside me, another self” (241), and Alma’s other self must acknowledge the physical touch of those human fingers. The play’s final action reveals the geographic, emotional, and sexual journey Williams made from St. Louis to New Orleans. When he first arrived in New Orleans, a homosexual encounter nauseated him. Now, as Alma waves goodbye to the stone Angel of Glorious Hill, she sheds the skin of her former self and heads off with a stranger to Moon Lake Casino, a place whose character, she discovers, is “[g]ay, very gay” (256).

¶67

Summer and Smoke reveals a new complexity in Williams’s understanding of Lawrence’s life force, a complexity taken even further in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Here the force is no longer idealized as Promethean but revealed in the vulgar masculinity of Stanley Kowalski, described by Blanche DuBois as a “survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle!” (323). Indeed, the play’s opening image reenacts precisely this primitive ritual, as Stanley heaves a “red-stained package from a butcher’s” up to his wife, Stella, simply yelling the word “Meat!” (244).

¶68

For Stella, Stanley represents “a different species” (258); he may provide erotic gratification by smashing light bulbs with the heel of her slipper, but this kind of violent love (which Stanley terms “get[ting] the colored lights going” [373]) is far from Mellors’s or Valentine Xavier’s healing touch. The connections among Lawrence, Williams, gender, sexuality, passion, and violence have drawn critical attention for decades: in a 1960 essay entitled “What Mr. Williams Has Made of D. H. Lawrence,” the Lawrence scholar Keith Sagar simplistically argues that Stanley’s “‘drive’ is apparently endorsed by the play” (6), even going so far as to quote the playwright John Osborne, who wrote that “Williams’s women . . . all cry out for defilement, and most of them get it. . . . The female must come toppling down to where she should be—on her back” (qtd. in Sagar 7). In addition to being crass, such readings of the play (the obverse of—and perhaps precipitating—Millett’s similarly one-dimensional misreadings of Lawrence ten years later) completely misunderstand and oversimplify what Williams is doing with Lawrence and what Streetcar is about. But while twenty-first-century audiences and critics may no longer view Stanley Kowalski simply as the embodiment of a new form of “phallus worship,” as Eric Bentley suggested in the 1950s (qtd. in Sagar 7), it bears repeating that Williams argues neither for Blanche’s decaying world, nor for Stanley’s brute force and “[d]eliberate cruelty” (Streetcar 397).

¶69

In Streetcar, Williams critically interrogates Lawrence’s notion of the primitive, a notion that he had formerly embraced and that had inspired the young artist toward personal and artistic freedom. In its essence, Lawrence’s vision extolled the antirational:

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not. (Collected Letters 180)

Streetcar, then, is neither simple endorsement nor simple repudiation of Lawrencian dogma. Rather, Williams presents the tension between the liberating and predatory aspects of Lawrence’s “belief in the blood” as a gamble with potentially tragic stakes. The play ends with a seemingly unequivocal line: “This game is seven-card stud” (419). But in the tragedy of Blanche’s physical and mental destruction at the hands of Kowalski’s “life force,” Williams boldly asserts an artistic vision of his own, independent from Lawrence’s gospel of the blood.

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——. The Glass Menagerie. Williams, Theatre, vol. 1, pp. 123–237.

——. I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix. Dragon Country, New Directions, 1970, pp. 55–75.

——. I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix. Plays, 1937–1955, Library of America, 2000, pp. 287–303.

——. Memoirs. New Directions, 2006.

——. Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays. Edited by Nicholas Moschovakis and David Roessel, New Directions, 2005.

——. Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton, Yale UP, 2006.

——. Orpheus Descending. Williams, Theatre, vol. 3, pp. 217–342.

——. Plays, 1937–1955. Library of America, 2000.

——. The Pretty Trap. The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays, edited by Thomas Keith, New Directions, 2011.

——. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1, 1920–1945. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New Directions, 2000.

——. Stairs to the Roof. Edited by Allean Hale, New Directions, 2000.

——. A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams, Theatre, vol. 1, pp. 239–419.

——. Summer and Smoke. Williams, Theatre, vol. 2, pp. 113–256.

——. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. New Directions, 1971–92. 8 vols.

Williams, Tennessee, and Donald Windham. You Touched Me! A Romantic Comedy in Three Acts. Samuel French, 1947.

Windham, Donald, editor. Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940–1965. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.