Tennessee Williams talking about "the playwright's illness"

Tennessee Williams talking about "the playwright's illness"

'Someone interviewing me asked me why writers are so preoccupied with disease and death.

"Any artist dies two deaths," I told him, "not only his own as a physical being but that of his creative power, it dies with him."

A play is submitted to so many people and to so many conditions, alterable or not, and to such bafflingly varied interpretations by those to whom it's submitted that it's a wonder the author isn't stricken with incurable vertigo and plummeted irretrievably into a pit of snakes and madness.'

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs." Chapter 11 page 242


   

Tennessee Williams about: Being a writer

Being a writer (Tennessee Williams)

"What is it like being a writer? I would say it is like being free.

I know that some writers aren't free, they are professionally employed, which is quite a different thing.

Professionally, they are probably better writers in the conventional sense of "better". They have an ear to the ground of best-seller demands: they please their publishers and presumably their public as well.

But they are not free and so they are not what I regard a true writer as being.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

It means any number of freedoms.

It means the freedom to stop when you please, to go where and when you please, it means to be voyager here and there, one who flees many hotels, sad or happy, without obstruction and without much regret. 

It means the freedom of being. And someone has wisely observed, if you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anything at all?"

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs" Chapter 11 page 230.


   

The fear of writing about our past depression states.

"It is difficult to write about a period of profound, virtually clinical depression, because when you are in that state, everything is observed through a dark glass which not only shadows but distorts all that is seen. It's also hazardous to write about it, since the germ of it still lingers in your system and it could be activated again by thinking back on it."

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs" Chapter 9 page 202


  

The Actor's Studio and Tennessee Williams' times of success.

"Kazan had cast the entire show out of the Actor's Studio, an organization that was a very important thing in the great days-I guess I should say the prosperous days- of Broadway, during my time in the forties and the fifties. Those were two great decades of the Actor's Studio. Nearly every great actor of promise studied there. And the Actor's Studio technique fitted so well my type of play. And, the Actor's Studio-with Kazan, Strasberg, and Bobby Lewis-was a great place for actors to go and compare notes on each other's work and it gave them a sort of home base."

"Tennessee Williams: Memoirs" chapter 9 pages 166-167


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"What happened when Albert Einstein met Charlie Chaplin?" The Independent

Wednesday, 28 April 2010

"Most convergences between tremendously distinguished writers, however, tend to end in bathos. Take the head-spinning evening of 18 May 1922, at the de luxe Hotel Majestic in Paris, where a moneyed couple of London arts patrons called Sydney and Violet Schiff hosted dinner for 40 people to celebrate the first performance of Stravinsky's ballet Le Renard, performed by the Ballets Russes under the great impresario Serge Diaghilev. The Schiffs had a reputation for pulling diverse but brilliant people together; their guest list on this night, however, was exceptionally ambitious. Along with Diaghilev and Stravinsky, they'd invited Picasso, Proust and James Joyce. A perfect quintet of the arch-modernists of the 20th century, five men at the cutting-edge of innovation, the "breaking of forms" and the jettisoning of the past. Would they like each other? Would they strike sparks? Would they agree to collaborate? Would they chat in ordinary human words?

Joyce arrived drunk at 11pm. He'd failed to rent or borrow a dinner suit for the glittery occasion and was, reportedly, embarrassed about being under-dressed. For a time he sat with his head in his hands, gazing at his glass of champagne. Marcel Proust swanned in at 2.30am, having just got up (he was writing the Sodom and Gomorrah chapters of A La Recherché du Temps Perdu, and working through the night in his sealed-off, cork-lined room.) He homed in on Stravinsky and asked, "Doubtless you admire Beethoven?"

"I detest Beethoven," said Stravinsky shortly.

"But cher maître," Proust protested, "surely the late sonatas and quartets ... "

"Are even worse than the rest," said Stravinsky.

Joyce, meanwhile, had fallen asleep. When he woke, he found Proust standing before him, asking, "Do you like truffles?" "Yes I do," said Joyce. History does not record if the two literary Titans munched their way through a box of chocolates together, but it's pleasing to imagine the sight.

How elevated was their conversation? Apparently Proust said, "I have never read your works, Mr Joyce," and Joyce replied, quick as a flash, "I have never read your works, M. Proust." So there. Joyce later claimed that he tried to talk to the Frenchman about the allure of chambermaids (clearly Joyce didn't know his interlocutor very well) but Proust wanted to talk about duchesses, and Joyce didn't know any. To change the subject, Joyce complained about his eyes and how they were giving him headaches. "But my stomach!" said Proust. "My stomach!"

And that was it, except for an ill-tempered cab-ride home, when Joyce lit a cigar and opened a window. Proust, allergic both to cigar smoke and open windows, talked non-stop, while Joyce glared at him and finally took the cab grumpily on to his home. "Of course the situation was impossible," Joyce later reflected. "Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end." Actually Proust's was more truly at an end – he died in November that year."