PARTISAN REVIEW
burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across
the stars and in the middle you can see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes 'Awwl' "
Though it may seem a far step from the raucous and self–
advertising propaganda of Kerouac's bohemian group to the profes–
sional theater world of Tennessee Williams, the very subject of Wil–
liams's plays is always this same loneliness. When Williams, minus
the stage lights and hocus-pocus of his director, is read for himself,
as in his execrable fiction,
The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone
and
the stories collected in
One Arm,
one discovers that his subject is not
merely the fantasy world of the utterly lonely, but that in fantasy
even the sexual fulfillment of his characters has a brutal and mechan–
ical quality, as
if
one mental category dully followed another without
any stimulus or color from direct experience. In the title story of
One Arm,
a Negro masseur not merely violates his white patient,
but literally butchers him; this same hellish oppression of sexual fan–
tasy, like a nightmare from which the dreamer may never escape
into the unpatterned relief of the real world, dogs us in some of
the more violent stories of Carson McCullers, in the most recent novel
by Nelson Algren,
A Walk On The Wild Side,
and in the last sec–
tion of Paul Bowles's
The Sheltering Sky,
where a young American
wife, maddened after her husband dies in the desert, is captured by
an Arab and added to his harem.
I wish I could describe some of these new novels and plays in
greater detail, for what is most striking about so many of them is
the fact that despite the surface sexual violence, they seem little con–
cerned with sex itself, with the
physicality
of sex; in many of these
books there are simply not enough people about, in .actual human
relation of any sort, for sexual activity to take place. On the con–
trary, many of the newer writers use sex exactly as a drunken and
confused man uses profanity-as a way of expressing anger, irrita–
tion, exasperation, and thus of breaking through the numbing despair
of isolation. And indeed, isolation of the most crippling and stupefy–
ing sort, the kind of isolation that makes it impossible to break the
lockstep of one's thoughts, the isolation that imagines anything
be–
cause it has contact with nothing, but which, in the imagination of
loneliness, cannot give us the color, the tactile feel of anything, only
the abstract category to which the experience belongs,
is
the really
significant experience behind
thi9
literature.
