KISS OF LIFE
Tennessee Williams on a romantic reawakening
BY JOHN LAHR
The New Yorker, May 28, 2007
On December 30, 1947, the thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams boarded a ship bound for France, sailing away from America and from the tumultuous success on Broadway, only a few weeks earlier, of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Almost immediately, he hit creative still water, finding it “Frightfully hard to discover a new vein of material.” When, in late 1948, his play “Summer and Smoke” failed on Broadway, William’s confidence dipped still further; he felt, he said, like a “discredited old conjurer.” To his champion Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of the Times, he wrote in June, 1949, “The trouble is that you can’t make any real philosophical progress in a couple of years. The scope of understanding enlarges quite slowly, if it enlarges at all, and the scope of interest seems to wait upon understanding...All artists who work from the inside out, have all the same problem: they cannot make sudden, arbitrary changes of matter and treatment until the inner man is ripe for it.”
2 comments:
I was going to cut this out and send it to you and Beck; it's exactly right. When you get a rejection slip and the guy says, "I'd like to see more of your work", you can't just conjure something up. Mother/Judith
Wow. I mean really, wow. It's so important for an artist to grow and simply experience the thing he is so trying to write about: life.
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