Marian Seldes: Hell
"I think guilt is a kind of hell, and I think Tennessee [Williams] felt guilty about his gifts being misused or not used wisely."
Tennessee Williams asked me to find some witnesses to state that he and his work had mattered. He referred to me as the canary in the coal mine of his need. There was a list of questions he wanted me to ask.
One of these questions was: “What is your definition of hell?”
I will be offering some responses. Here is what Marian Seldes said:
Well, I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell, so I don’t know what to say. I am going to assume that Tennessee was speaking of a state of mind, a condition, that is hellish, and I do believe in such a thing. I think we find ourselves in a sort of hell, and I often think we go there on our own and stay there out of fear or laziness or a strange sort of comfort. I have known people who enjoy their pain. I do not understand this, but I know that Tennessee was often guilty of this.
I have known of this saying for so long now: Judgment Day comes by the hour. I know that is described as karma, but I think it’s a sort of adjustment that has to occur when people behave in a certain way. I think guilt is a kind of hell, and I think Tennessee felt guilty about his gifts being misused or not used wisely. This is what I remember him telling me. That regret is a sort of hell. I enter a sort of hell when I think I haven’t been helpful to someone or to something. That is a sort of hell. It is a judgment—a self-judgment—that is very painful. I think Tennessee was engaged in a lot of self-judgment.
You have to move past this. If you remain in the judgment phase, you can’t escape or grow. All of the energy that Tennessee utilized to speak of how he no longer mattered or how we was so abused by the critics or some of his peers should have gone into new work, new productions. I remember Tennessee saying that he felt his life was wasted. Well, his life was not wasted. A lot of his time was wasted, and I think that was his hell.