304
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Have you met him?" I asked. "Yes, I met Pinter and he is a lovely
man. We agreed that Jane Bowles is a great prose writer. Her novel,
Two Serious Ladies
is my favorite. I like "A Day in the Opening" as
the best of her short stories. And she wrote a very beautiful play
called
In a Summer House.
She died about a year ago and was about
ten years younger than myself. But I like Pinter, he has a very elusive
style... " "A very understated style, isn't it?" Marie said. "Pinter gets
all his points by understatement; Tennessee gets his by overstate–
ment.
In
Pinter you get very little but in Tennessee you get a lot. You
know what I mean?" Marie explained
to
me.
In
Out Cry
the metaphor for the theater is the theater itself and
therefore "the door and the wall," as Tallulah said, "are real, even
though the play may not be. " The players in
Out Cry
perform their
"two character play" to a pretend audience. Thus, to the dialogue
between the lyric and the realist theater, Tennessee adds a few lines:
Plays don't have to be realistic for another reason; reality no longer
enchants us with its pain. As Felice says, "Even pain has a limit."
Reality can no longer pose a threat to a man because even pain has a
limit. Reality can no longer pose a threat to a man because it is only
one of the guises of
existence.
Imagination is just" as valid to
existence as is reality. Hence, Tennessee's new emphasis is now not
on conflict, but mime and dance.
There are two images of Tennessee we should keep in mind, one
as a poor starving young poet and the other one of a rich young poet.
In
the first, he is literally starving in some little town in Florida, the
name's not important. Anyway, he finally lands a job as a teletype
operator, but the guy working with him is a nut, just out of the
asylum. Tennessee has the graveyard shift with the nut. The nut tells
beautiful ·stories, and Tennessee is amused. He loves crazy people,
then and now. He's had a lot of experience with it. Everything is
going along fine until the
bo~s
warns him about his inefficiency.
The employer practically gets on his knees, "Please, Williams, don't
make me fire you in times like these when there just aren't any men
around!" But one day, the lunatic and the poet botch a teletype
message and the boss has to let the poet go, but retains the service of
the lunatic. Tennessee beat it back to New York where he got a job in
a hotel as a bell boy.
In
the other image he is rich. He is the darling of the literary
scene in New York, London, Rome, wherever he goes. At the end of
an announcement of a new play by Tennessee Williams would
usually be attached notes like this: "Tomorrow, after having read the
