The Forests Behind The Night of the Iguana
After winning America's most prestigious literary prize, the Pulitzer Prize—and the Drama Critics' Prize as well—with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams achieved one of his great popular successes with The Glass Menagerie. He later commented on the event in an essay, "The Catastrophe of Success."
Since that time, especially in the last few years, he has had great difficulties; at a certain point all of America turned against him, so to speak, in a flood of public attacks, both in the daily press and in literary magazines. After being a popular literary golden boy he suddenly stood alone, truly with his back to the wall, against the dreadful power which resides in an almost univocal press. The burden of the attack was that he was "unhealthy," "negative," "un-American," that he "rooted around in filth," etc., etc. People no longer liked his latest works, his pessimism, his portrayal of the U.S., his "immorality," his cultural criticism, etc. The campaign against Williams was so violent and so destructive that for awhile it looked as if he had broken down under it. The press accounts told the whole world that he promised to mend his ways; he was said to have stated that his "negative period was over" and that he would write more healthy things in the future.
It is of course possible that a man who stands completely alone can lose heart and give in. But if that is the case, the genuflexion has only been a temporary breakdown for Williams: His real answer to the smear campaign was the play The Night of the Iguana, which is currently playing at the National Theater under the Norwegian title "Iguana-natten."
What does this answer sound like?
It is necessary to glance back at a few of his earlier pieces, in particular at those which have contributed to his unpopularity with the critics—first and foremost at two (in my opinion) sovereign masterworks: Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer. The Night of the Iguana continues and refines the themes of these plays. To be sure, it has roots in all of Tennessee Williams' production—which includes poems, short stories and at least one novel; but here it is natural to look for those roots in the genre which has made him world-famous, in the drama. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is likewise part of the forest which surrounds The Night of the Iguana.
Williams' fundamental theme is cruelty in three variants: The cruelty of human beings (the masses' cruelty to the individual), the cruelty of nature (in the animal-organic processes themselves), and the cruelty of God (as the one responsible for the whole cosmic-metaphysical system of cruelty, hunger, decay and death). That his plays to a rather high degree are full of overwrought, ruined and supersensitive people is a logical result of the fact that Tennessee Williams' own meeting with reality, as seen through his writings, has been one big breakdown. And as reality looks today—a world blanketed with a poison gas of hate and dread, and with the slain from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Hitler's death camps as our time's greatest historic expression—it is hardly any exaggeration to claim that this breakdown has good reasons. The person who walks around today with good nerves, "healthy" and positive, suffers not only from a dulled understanding, but from what is worse: a dulled heart.
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