Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams

Author:Tennessee Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

INTRODUCTION TO

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER

Paul Bowles moved to Tangier in 1947. A respected composer, he had written the music for the original production of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, as well as incidental music for the Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Summer and Smoke in 1948. Once ensconced in Morocco he became an admired writer and translator of fiction. But more than anyone, he opened North Africa as an enticing and available garden of delights for the aesthetic homosexual community of his day. If you strip it down to the basics, he wasn’t in Tangier for the hummus. Tennessee Williams often visited him. Cabeza de Lobo, in Suddenly Last Summer, is a fictionalized version of the Moroccan seaside town Asilah, where Bowles had a house. It is in Cabeza de Lobo that the poet Sebastian Venable meets his grisly end. A generous description of Sebastian’s final journey might be “the quest of a highly civilized man for an anti-civilized truth.” Which, as it happens, was Norman Mailer’s assessment of Paul Bowles’s life. I don’t think Bowles was a precise model for Sebastian, but surely he and the aesthetes who followed him to Morocco are somewhere in the stew.

Ah, Sebastian Venable. What a wonderful name. One of the most despicable characters Williams ever created, surely. One thinks of him as a character; it comes as a shock to remember he never actually appears in the play. But he comes blazingly alive in the monologues of his worshipping mother, Violet, and his distraught cousin, Catharine. Jerry Tallmer, the critic of the Village Voice when the play was first produced, called Suddenly Last Summer, in what was an unusually candid review for its day, “a wild, bold acknowledgment of homosexuality and a searing attempt to exorcise it and become ‘healthy.’ ” Williams had very publicly entered psychoanalysis shortly before writing the play. In those days, many psychoanalysts believed that homosexuality was at best a dangerous neurosis, and none more so than Lawrence Kubie, Williams’s charismatic doctor. Kubie treated many prominent, albeit closeted, gay men in the arts; in essence, if not in actuality, he attempted to cure them, and according to Williams, suggested that he give up both gay sex and writing. A double cure, I suppose. Williams did neither. He wrote Suddenly Last Summer in the mornings and went to sessions with the good doctor in the afternoons. His attitude to what he was writing, and then what he was saying, must have been ambiguous and conflicted. Williams seems to mock Sebastian and pour contempt on him (which would have pleased Kubie), and yet might he not have admired him as well? What if Violet’s laudatory description of her son possessed some kind of truth?

A minor poet travels the world accompanied by a woman. He is selfishly dedicated to his art and will exploit those around him to stay true to it. But, sadly, his creativity has run dry. He ends up, with his young companion, in a distant tropical hellhole.

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