Tennessee Williams' Sweet Sacred Ibis Of Youth

By Stephen J. Gertz

Cover by C.C. Senf.

"Hushed were the streets of many peopled Thebes. Those few who passed through them moved with the shadowy fleetness of bats near dawn, and bent their faces from the sky as if fearful of seeing what in their fancies might be hovering there..."

An emotionally iffy ancient Egyptian princess, sister to the Pharaoh, seeks revenge on those who conspired to execute her beloved brother, ascends the throne, builds a temple as an elaborate death-trap, drowns them all with sadistic glee, and then kills herself.

It's Tennessee Williams' first published story, his second appearance in print, The Vengeance of Nitocris, issued under his given name, Thomas Lanier Williams, and published by Weird Tales,  the American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine, in 1928. It might just as well have been titled  A Chariot Named Desire, or The Orisris Menagerie. 
 

"I was sixteen when I wrote [the story], but already a confirmed writer, having entered upon this vocation at the age of fourteen, and, if you're well acquainted with my writings since then, I don't have to tell you that it set the keynote for most of the work that has followed" (Tennessee Williams, New York Times interview, as cited by Francesca M. Hitchcock, "Tennessee Williams' Vengeance of Nitocris: The Keynote to Future Works," The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 48, 1995).

A strong if emotionally fragile woman, a close brother-sister bond, a descent into madness, and  death - this is, indeed, Williams territory, with revenge and lurid blood and guts thrown in as a nod to the Bard, Titus Andronicus, according to Hitchcock, William's favorite play by Shakespeare. In this weird tale for Weird Tales, as in so much of Shakespeare - and pulp fiction - everybody dies miserably ever after. It's necropolis-noir.

Little Tommy Williams was in good company in this issue. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, contributed the featured story, Red Shadows, which introduced 17th century Puritan swashbuckler Solomon Kane and is considered to be the first published example of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

This issue also contains Crashing Suns, a story by science-fiction pioneer Edmund Hamilton. Hamilton, in 1946, married science fiction writer, and screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, perhaps best known for her collaborations with William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, 1946);  five Westerns for director Howard Hawks; Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye, 1973); and Lawrence Kasdan (Star Wars' The Empire Strikes Back, 1979). This copy, in fact, belonged to Hamilton and Brackett; their ownership stamp appears on its first page.

"What more horrible vengeance could Queen Nitocris have conceived than this banquet of death? Not Diablo himself could be capable of anything more fiendishly artistic. Here in the temple of Osiris those nobles and priests who had slain the pharaoh in expiation of his sacrilege against Osiris had now met their deaths. And it was in the waters of the Nile, material symbol of the god Osiris, that they had died. It was magnificent in its irony!...

"When in the evening the queen arrived in the city, pale, silent, and obviously nervous, threatening crowds blocked the path of her chariot, demanding roughly an explanation of the disappearance of her guests. Haughtily she ignored them and lashed forward the horses of her chariot, pushing aside the tight mass of people. Well she knew, how-ever, that her life would be doomed as soon as they confirmed their suspicions. She resolved to meet her inevitable death in a way that befitted one of her rank, not at the filthy hands of a mob.

"Therefore upon her entrance into the palace she ordered her slaves to fill instantly her boudoir with hot and smoking ashes. When this had been done, she went to the room, entered it, closed the door and locked it securely, and then flung herself down upon a couch in the center of the room. In a short time the scorching heat and the suffocating thick fumes of the smoke overpowered her. Only her beautiful dead body remained for the hands of the mob."

Sweet Sacred Ibis! The maturation from purple pulp to poetic prose may have been Williams' greatest achievement as a writer, though the recognizable, often delicately tough, real yet unnatural and not quite of this world turn of his language can be glimpsed this early.

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WILLIAMS, Thomas Lanier [Tennessee Wiliams]. The Vengeance of Nitocris. [In Weird Tales, p. 253]. Indianapolis, Indiana: Popular Fiction Publishing, 1928. Octavo. 288 pp. Illustrated wrappers.

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Images courtesy of Between the Covers, with our thanks.
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Of related interest: 

Unpublished Significant Early Tennessee Williams Poem Surfaces. 

Tennessee Williams Rocks the Rare Books Round Up at L.A. TImes Festival of Books.

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Unpublished Significant Early Tennessee Williams Poem Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

Between the end of May and the beginning of September 1937, Tennessee Williams, 26 years old and a student at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote a startling prose poem, one never published and completely unknown to Williams scholars.

The piece, titled The Body Awaits, a monologue spoken by a bum in a St. Louis flophouse, appears to be related to Williams' fourth apprentice play, Fugitive Kind, also written in 1937 and occurring in a flophouse. It is unclear whether the piece was working preparation for Fugitive Kind, or, alternatively, grew out of it, Williams sensing something that he wanted to develop independently from the play.

The work is eerily prescient of his sad, later years. It begins:

I am tired. I am tired of speech and action. If you should meet me upon the street and still know me in spite of my present condition I would prefer that you passed me without salutation. Your face is unknown to me now. I do not remember your name. Maybe we drank together once or shared grub in a jungle of flop-house somehwehre [sic] in a different state or different city but that was a long time ago.

And ends, in this draft:

Death is the last convenience. Perhaps it will be a truck skidding close to a corner on which I stand. Accident or on purpose? Who cares! A step or two forwards or backwards and the whole thing's done. The body awaits identification at the city morgue. Will you perform a post-mortem? In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home.

In corrected typescripts of two different versions of Williams's working drafts, the earlier is typed on both sides of a single sheet, double and single-spaced in blocks of text on the first side, with several versions of some lines; on the reverse a portion is  double-spaced, with a line by line layout.

These two drafts contain about twenty-five words in Williams's hand in pencil.

The later version is double-spaced on four pages (including two drafts of the second page), and has thirty-four words and other corrections in pencil, by Williams. It's signed in type and dated June, 1937.

Thomas A. Goldwasser, of Goldwasser Rare Books, currently offering the typescript, said,  "It is particularly interesting to see the budding playwright experimenting with voices and phrases and trying to expand his imaginative world."

Williams typescript/manuscript material is extremely difficult to acquire. "Almost all such Williams  material is held by institutions, and rarely appears for sale," Goldwasser notes.

Here we have, pre-Tennessee, Thomas Lanier Williams III, unhappy in childhood, depressed in adolescence, and only two years after a nervous breakdown, contemplating, in his mid-twenties, a void in the heart, exhaustion with life, a turning within and away from the world, and an acceptance if not welcome of death.

It ends with what would become Williams signature language, a soft, stylized tongue never heard in real life, the song of a splendid bird with broken wing who sought compassion for all the injured and sung with a voice desperately seeking lyric poetry in a brutal prose world. In the beginning he saw his end with a yearning to return to the refinement that he never knew as a child yet mourned just the same, the Never-Neverland of a tortured Peter Pan from Mississippi who sought grace in all things but experienced its subversion by gross reality.  Tennessee Williams was Blanche DuBois. In The Body Awaits, Blanche lies with her brothers, the lost, helpless souls wounded beyond salvation.

"In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home."

The body awaits delivery to where the mind has already arrived, to that supernal place where nightmares subside, dreams are never disturbed, and the kindness of strangers is no stranger.
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Image courtesy of Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Blow Out Your Candles, Tennessee

Archives, Museums, and Literary Festivals Celebrate Williams Centennial.

By Nancy Mattoon

Tennessee Williams At
The 20th Anniversary Production
of The Glass Menagerie.
(Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.)

Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be ! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger -anything that can blow your candles out !

- for nowadays the world is lit by lightning ! Blow out your candles, Laura - and so good-bye.

--Last lines of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Had he not choked to death on the plastic cap from a bottle of baby aspirin, Thomas Lanier Williams would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2011. His accidental death was the end of a decades-long slide into depression, alcoholism, and addiction, for one of America's three great playwrights of the 20th century. (The others being Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller.) But Williams's legacy is secure, with his best plays constantly revived, and even his lesser-known, late works inspiring new productions as their Gothic, black comic sensibility is discovered to be oddly well-suited for the 21st century stage. And along with theater companies around the globe, archives, libraries, and literary societies with ties to Williams are also pulling out all the stops to mark what has been called "The Tennenniel."

Williams Signs The Author's Door
During A 1973 Visit to The Ransom Center.
(Photo By Franks Armstrong, Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center.)

The Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin is presenting Becoming Tennessee Williams from February 1, 2011 - July 31, 2011. This centenary exhibition draws on the Ransom Center's extensive collection of Tennessee Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and artwork to illuminate the process by which Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams. "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams," said Charlotte Canning, curator of the exhibition and professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at Austin. "He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."

1994 United States Postal Service Stamp Honoring Williams.

(Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.)

The exhibition is drawn from the Ransom Center's collection of Williams material, which is one of the primary archives of his works. The Center acquired Williams's own papers between 1962 and 1969. That collection documents his career thoroughly, especially his plays The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, and includes more than 1,000 separately titled plays, short stories and poems, correspondence, and newspaper clippings. The collection expanded in 1964 when the Ransom Center purchased the correspondence between Williams and his longtime literary agent, Audrey Wood.

1974 Window Card For
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
(Image Courtesy of THNOC.)

In 1965, the Center also acquired the Williams family papers from his mother, Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams, along with other important manuscripts from then-Gotham Book Mart owner Andreas Brown. The Center continues to build the Williams collection and recently purchased an extensively revised first-draft screenplay of A Streetcar Named Desire."These rich holdings at the Ransom Center allow us to better understand how these extraordinary works came into being," said Canning. "Glass Menagerie, Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are just a few of the masterpieces the exhibit follows from early drafts to full-fledged productions. We believe visitors will find themselves as much in awe of Williams as we are."

Desire Streetcar Sign Box, ca. 1935.
(Image Courtesy of THNOC.)

Meanwhile, Williams's adopted hometown of New Orleans, setting for perhaps his greatest work, A Streetcar Named Desire, celebrates his 100th birthday with both an art exhibit and a literary festival. The Historic New Orleans Collection(THNOC) and the Al Hirschfeld Foundation have collaborated to present Drawn to Life: Al Hirschfeld and the Theater of Tennessee Williams. The exhibition and its companion catalog bring together highlights from the collection’s permanent holdings and dozens of drawings by the legendary artist.

Streetcar A La Hirschfeld.
(Image Courtesy of THNOC.)

Hirschfeld was the foremost artistic chronicler of Williams’s productions on and off Broadway for six decades. His drawings create a virtual archive of the playwright’s career, effectively capturing the essence of the superb performances of the magnificent actors who portrayed his characters on stage and screen. From Marlon Brando, to Elizabeth Ashley, to Richard Burton, to Katharine Hepburn, to Bette Davis, to Uta Hagen, to Jessica Tandy, all are instantly recognizable here, demonstrating their own brilliance through Williams's immense gallery of great theatrical roles.

Poster For NOLA's
Williams Literary Festival.

The Big Easy will also be celebrating its favorite adopted son at the 25th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. This five-day fete, March 23-27, truly covers the waterfront, honoring Williams with acting master classes, panel discussions, a scholars' conference, comedy improv, a poetry slam, an erotica reading, writing competitions, a breakfast book club, French Quarter literary walking tours, a book fair, and even a "Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest." Theatrical and literary luminaries scheduled to appear include Carroll Baker, Shirley Knight, Grace Zabriskie, Zoe Caldwell, Armistead Maupin, Robert Olen Butler, John Waters, Rex Reed, Winston Groom, and Dorothy Allison.

Souvenir program for
A Streetcar Named Desire, 1948.
(Image Courtesy of THNOC.)

The many celebrations and theatrical revivals marking the centennial of Tennessee Williams are a reminder of the timelessness of his writings. As Williams once remarked to his literary agent: "I have only one major theme for my work which is the destructive impact of society on the non-conformist individual." That theme resonates more and more as technology continues to make the world less personal. As they steadfastly cling to their defining idiosyncrasies, Williams' characters are standard-bearers for the artistic temperament. Perhaps his greatest creation, Blanche DuBois, says it best "I don't want realism. I want magic. I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth."
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Norman Mailer By Norman Mailer and Other Author Self-Portraits

One night in the mid-1960s, while working as a bartender at the Village Vanguard, the storied New York City jazz club, Burt Britton found himself all alone with Norman Mailer at last call.

“What do you want from me, Kid,” Mailer inquired.

Screwing up his courage, Britton blurted out, “draw me your self-portrait.”
Mailer
Now, over forty years later, that self-portrait by Mailer is one of 213 self-portraits of writers, photographers, musicians, and athletes that Britton solicited. His collection is now being offered at auction by
Bloomsbury – New York on September 24, 2009: Arthur Miller
Portrait of the Artist: The Burt Britton Collection

Britton was in a great position to meet a who’s who of writers. After his stint at the Village Vanguard, in 1968 he began to work at the Strand book store in New York, and in 1978 moved to New York's famed literary institution, Books & Company, now, alas, defunct.




Borges

Paul Bowles Tennessee Williams Nelson Algren

It’s an extraordinary collection and Book Patrol is very pleased to be able to provide a sneak preview.
Octavio Paz






Hunter S. Thompson Kurt Vonnegut Edward Gorey







William S. Burroughs



Tom Robbins
Joseph Heller








Edward Abbey Anthony Burgess