The Surrender

Finding myself once again at a loss for something to read last week, I wandered aimlessly among the shelves of my local bookstore, alternately poking fun at the titles and randomly grabbing anything that caught my eye. The result, of course, was that I spent over an hour being incredibly disappointed until I noticed a name that I did not expect to find outside of the tiny plays section: Tennessee Williams. I can’t even be sure how I noticed the slim, white, unimposing volume surrounded by thick, colorful spines sporting their authors’ names in raised twenty-point font, but perhaps it was exactly this contrast that attracted my eye. After all, Tennessee Williams is a name that needs no glitzy cover to find its audience. The man is renowned as the author of plays such as “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “The Glass Menagerie”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and “The Night of the Iguana”. To my surprise, that day in the fiction section I found that Tennessee Williams also wrote a collection of short stories called Tales of Desire (104 pages, $9.95).

Tales of Desire consists of five separate stories: “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”, “One Arm”, “Desire and the Black Masseur”, “Hard Candy”, and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen”. Each story explores the secret cravings of its male protagonist for the company of others of the male persuasion, yet the journey is always new. While the protagonists of “Mysteries” and “Hard Candy” eventually find themselves in the Joy Rio Theater, “Mysteries” deals with the sexual desire and loneliness of an aging watchmaker, while “Hard Candy” is purely about the lust of a retired merchant. Yes, both deal with lust, but Pablo Gonazles in “Mysteries” is attempting to replace his feelings for his dead love by seeking out brief encounters in the theater.

“One Arm” is the story of a man with a sordid past awaiting execution in a southern prison. Desire is something that others have always put upon him, and something which he exploited. In the end, he seeks comfort through physical contact. In the opposite corner, “The Killer Chicken” relates the story of a lawyer who has repressed his sexuality, pushed his desire so far down that he does not even recognize his yearnings when they emerge. Mr. Williams also sets up this story so that the protagonist’s repression of his sexuality results in the repression of his very identity, so that he mirrors his mother’s personality. Perhaps repression is just another word for hiding. In which case, the protagonist of “Killer Chicken” unconsciously hides behind the idea of his mother, throwing up road blocks between his illusion and reality.

In all the stories, desire is something secret to be fulfilled in dark corners; something that, as in “Desire and the Black Masseur”, goes hand-in-hand with shame. “Desire” follows Anthony Burns in his quest to cleanse himself of sin through torture. Burns feels that his desire has swallowed him whole, and he must atone for his sins at the hands of a black masseur that he meets at a Turkish bath. Tennessee Williams brings up an intriguing and somewhat frightening idea in this story. “The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries to as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of clearing one’s self of his guilt” (45). (I could have paraphrased, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to demonstrate Mr. William’s skill as a writer.) Mr. Williams, as an artist, is pointing out that art is a way of compensating for something the artist lacks. I wondered if it were true. If imagination compensates for what reality lacks, and art is an expression of the imagination, then the pursuit of art is the pursuit of compensation. Seems depressing, doesn’t it? What if the pursuit of art, greatness, scientific achievement, etc. were all just a cover? Do we indeed erect skyscrapers, declare war, and cure diseases because we feel incomplete? Our single-mindedness in certain areas of our lives means that we do not have to turn to see our failings. Perhaps. Then desire would be a craving of completion.

The commonality in the stories seems to be that a desire, once fulfilled, results in the death of its carrier, as though desire had filled the physical shell to the brim. The protagonists allow this desire to consume them until they are nothing without it, but it has already been established that this book is not just about sex. It is about the need to be one of two, instead of just one, even if it can only be for a brief moment. The feeling of desire is the connection to Earth. Physical contact allows the protagonists to reaffirm their sense of belonging to the human race since without it they drift like so much flotsam. Yes, the fulfillment results in death, but maybe the brief connection is worth the price.

Next Week: Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett