Tennessee Williams: Revenge and Surcease
“Revenge,” he said, “is at the center of everything we do.”
Tennessee Williams told me that he never sat before a blank page to begin writing unless and until he was angry about something. “Revenge,” he said, “is at the center of everything we do.”
But did he mean revenge?
Tennessee stood by the use of the word, claiming that with each completed work, successful or not, he and his mother had finally, metaphorically, gotten out of town. After all the aborted attempts to escape the prison of life with their father— the anger, the abuse—the work was what got them to the river, to the next town, away. Safe, free.
“Surcease,” he told me. “The most beautiful word in the world.”
“Well,” Mike Nichols said in 1992, “surcease and revenge are two different things entirely. But if Tennessee wants us to believe that revenge was the foundation on which his work—and the man—stood, well, who are we to deny him? I don’t believe it. I never knew a writer more tortured to be produced, understood, appreciated, so he did not want it to end, so I say no to the surcease. The revenge was something he might have wished to visit upon his critics. That I can understand. We have all suffered at the hands of the little people over on the other hill, sharpening their claws and throwing spitballs, which I think—I am not sure—is a line from Gore [Vidal]. Look, I told Tennessee one day about a bad review James Baldwin got in the New York Review of Books. It was for If Beale Street Could Talk. The utter dismissal of this novel by this non-entity, who taught at Rutgers. As Gore noted, not even a good school. Well, who knows about that man now? Who cares about that man? [That man’s name was Thomas R Edwards. It continues to mean nothing.] Do you think Baldwin got all bent out of shape over that review? Not with me, he didn’t. Did he curl up and rage and moan? I don’t think so. But Tennessee would go on and on about what a critic had said. So his revenge might have been for them. You know, I’ll show them. I’ll rise again. Well, it’s very silly, very juvenile. Revenge is not good for work, for the health. The best revenge is silence, and a return to the desk, the canvas, the dance floor. Wherever you toil.”
Marian Seldes hoped it was not true about Tennessee and revenge. “I would not want that to be true,” she told me, in 1982, when I called her and shared with her some of Tennessee’s words. “I see so much of revenge in people. It destroys people. It’s a depletion. I think what Tennessee is saying is that he’s hurt. I have heard him quote, with perfection, almost every bad review he’s received. Those reviews are etched within him. He wants somehow to find them and erase them. He wants somehow to talk to the critics and get them to change their minds. He wants them to be wrong to a greater degree than he wants to be a good writer again. He keeps saying he wants to write well again, so do it! I told him this myself. We know he can do it. Does he? The worst form of revenge he’s taking is on himself. He is doing damage to himself that no critic could manage. Work stands. Work survives. Critics do not. It hurts what they sometimes write or say, but there is movement, time passes, and if the work is good, people accept it. Then you have surcease. The anger and the pain recede.”