MILL'S CLASSICAL INTERESTS

Mill began learning Greek at the age of three and Latin at eight. From about the age of twelve his Greek and Latin reading focussed on works “such as were worth studying, not for the language merely, but also for the thoughts”. He mentions especially Demosthenes, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintillian. His father laid special emphasis on Plato. Throughout his literary career, from his discussion of Sedgwick on education in Cambridge to his own rectorial address on education in St Andrews, Mill retained a keen interest in Classical studies and their place in education. Moreover, he took an active part in encouraging the study of Classical antiquity among readers who were beyond the years of formal education. In 1834-35 he published 'Notes on some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato' - really an abbreviated translationcum- paraphrase. In 1840 he reviewed two publications on Plato. In 1846 and 1853 he reviewed two sections of the multi-volume history of Greece by his friend and (with some qualifications) ally, George Grote, and in 1866 and 1873 he reviewed Grote's works on Plato and Aristotle.

INTRODUCTION

Books III and IV of A System of Logic lie at the heart of Mill's empiricist enterprise, ambitiously aiming to provide “a reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and to a scientific test, such as the syllogism is for ratiocination” [Autobiography, CW I: 215-17). Mill's lengthy examinations 'Of Induction' and 'Of the Operations Subsidiary to Induction' constituted, in his own estimate, the principal part of his theory of logic, because - by the arguments of Book II - inductive inference was the only form of 'real' inference capable of leading us to genuinely new knowledge. Since deductive processes enable us to do no more than 'interpret' inductions, identifying the particular cases which fall under general propositions, it is induction alone “in which the investigation of nature essentially consists.” Consequently, “What Induction is ... and what conditions render it legitimate, cannot but be deemed the main question of the science of logic - the question which includes all others” (A System of Logic, CW VII:283).

INTRODUCTION

Mill's Utilitarianism was not written as a scholarly treatise but as a series of essays for a popular audience. It was first published in three instalments in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and appeared in book form in 1863. Fraser's Magazine was a magazine with a general audience and the essay was written with this readership in view. Although many commentators have examined the arguments Mill puts forward in this work in isolation from his other writings, in fact it cannot be properly appreciated unless it is placed in the context of the larger body of his work. In particular, this work needs to be read against the background of his more scholarly writing in A System of Logic and in his editorial footnotes to James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind [Logic, CW VII and VIII; James Mill 1869).

John Stuart Mill is rightly considered to be a major figure in the history of utilitarianism,- his theory is a touchstone to which contemporary ethical theorists regularly return for insights. Yet at the same time, Mill's utilitarianism is boldly revisionist, breaking free of many of the constraints and confines of the narrower and simpler utilitarianism of his predecessors Jeremy Bentham and his father James Mill. Although John Stuart Mill was carefully educated and prepared by his father to be the transmitter and torch bearer of Benthamite utilitarianism, he instead radically transformed it.

John Stuart Mill held, with his father, James Mill, and with all utilitarians, that the end of morality and of practice in general is to maximize the general welfare of humankind. However, to achieve any end, including this ultimate end, requires a knowledge of the means to that end, a knowledge of causes and effects that may be used to realize the end. Practice can only be as solid as the theoretical knowledge of fact upon which it is based. But the younger Mill disagreed with his father and the older generation of utilitarians on the nature of that knowledge and on the methods to be used to justify claims to have acquired such knowledge. To be sure, both the older and the younger Mills must be counted within the empiricist camp, with regard to the nature of human knowledge.On this view, human knowledge begins and ends in sense experience, and knowledge of causes is, as Hume argued, knowledge of matter-of-fact regularities (cf. James Mill 1869, L350, 4O2ff).

Tennessee Williams's reputation as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century seems secure. Now just over a dozen years after his death, his plays are frequently revived, he continues to provoke critical inquiry, and he is one of the few American dramatists still taught in undergraduate literature surveys. Considering his prolific output, however, he is renowned for only a handful of plays, all dating from the first fifteen years of a forty-year professional career. Indeed, one might surmise that Tennessee Williams's critical reputation during his life soared, then plummeted, and that his later works were produced and tolerated only because of the early masterpieces; moreover, that his stature is entirely dependent upon a few well-wrought dramas: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana. It is no coincidence that these plays enjoyed long, successful New York runs, for critical acclaim and commercial appeal usually coexisted on the Broadway of Williams's time.

The thirty-two-cent United States postage stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams, issued in 1996, features a portrait of Williams in a white linen suit against a twilight sky and, in the background, a streetcar. The choice of the streetcar as the only element in the design that can be specifically tied to one of Williams's plays testifies to the centrality of A Streetcar Named Desire in his dramatic canon as well as in the American cultural consciousness. Whether or not A Streetcar Named Desire is Tennessee Williams's “best” play, or even his most performed play, it is probably the one most closely identified with the dramatist, and it is certainly the one that has elicited the most critical commentary.

When A Streetcar Named Desire premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on December 3, 1947, Tennessee Williams was essentially known to the public for one other play, The Glass Menagerie, which had ended a 561-performance run at New York's Playhouse Theater just sixteen months earlier. The elegiac tone and coming-of-age crises of The Glass Menagerie did not prepare theatregoers for the searing adult drama of A Streetcar Named Desire, with its references to unspeakable aspects of sexuality. Indeed, one reviewer called it the product of an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind,” and another found it “not a play for the squeamish.” And yet, it was recognized as “an enormous advance over that minor-key and too wet-eyed work, The Glass Menagerie.” It fulfilled the promise of the earlier work and catapulted Williams to the front rank of American dramatists. A Streetcar Named Desire ran for 855 performances and became the first play ever to win all three major awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.

If such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, and Clifford Odets dominate American theatre in the first half of the twentieth century, and Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, and, among many others, David Mamet the second half, Tennessee Williams animates the middle years of the century. In a very real sense, then, Tennessee Williams inhabits a central place within the American theatre. The centrality of Williams's theatre, however, has less connection with chronology and more with the original nature of his theatrical imagination. While O'Neill was the tragic dramatist and Miller remains the theatrician of the ethical, Williams emerged as the poet of the heart. He took quite seriously Yeats's epigraph: “Be secret and exult.”

Ultimately Williams would become less secret about his life and art, and his exultations less clear of purpose, but he worked assiduously in creating poetic stage moments, moments in which social fact, psychological collapse, and eroticized encounter form a still point in which the imagination, itself, becomes the last refuge for his fated characters. In Williams's cosmology, of course, the imagination is the source of both great strength and weakness.

In 1955, Williams published his now notorious “reading version” of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which contained two versions of the third act. The one that Williams called the “Broadway Version” was developed in collaboration with director Elia Kazan and the other participants in the play's original production. Williams also included an earlier version from one of his pre-production scripts. In a “Note of Explanation” that introduced the “Broadway Version,” Williams went out of his way to explain how helpful Kazan's advice had been to him over the years. At the same time, he intimated that the changes he had felt forced to make in order to have Kazan direct Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had violated his sense of artistic integrity. Noting the influence that “a powerful and highly imaginative director” could have upon the development of a play, both before and during production, Williams asserted that he and Elia Kazan had “enjoyed the advantages and avoided the dangers of this highly explosive relationship because of the deepest mutual respect for each other's creative function: we have worked together three times with a phenomenal absence of friction between us and each occasion has increased the trust.”

WILLIAMS ON FILM: SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS

In the English-speaking world, the two principal performance arts, theatre and film, have developed together in the twentieth century. An important common element of the British and American commercial theatres is that each has enjoyed a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with the respective national cinema since the beginning of the sound film era. In the case of Great Britain, this relationship was eased for several decades by the proximity of the commercial film studios, most of which were once located in the Greater London area, to the West End theatrical district; such proximity made it possible, in many cases almost inevitable, for creative personnel in the theatre to work part-time on film prolects, and vice-versa. The move of the American film business to California from its New York base at the beginning of the studio period (c. 1912-20) posed difficulties for actors, writers, directors, and production artists wishing to work in both fields, and yet many have done so. Indeed, in the nineties, this trend shows no sign of abating, even with the dispersal of film production into a number of regional centers outside California.

BIOGRAPHIES

The publication of the long-awaited first volume of Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, makes 1995 a year of important contributions to Williams studies. Leverich, the biographer authorized by Williams in 1979, relies heavily on Williams's early journals to sketch a portrait of a man divided between the public “Tennessee” and the private “Tom.” The first volume ends with the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, so the student interested in Williams before fame will find much of interest here. Leverich's book offers detailed documentation for all his sources. Documentation is what is missing from Bruce Smith's account of Williams's last years, Costly Performances. Tennessee Williams: The Last Stage (1990). Smith seems more intent on proving the importance of his own friendship to Williams than on providing new information about the playwright's last years. Those interested in the first production of Clothes for a Summer Hotel might find Smith's book useful, centering as it does on the difficulties Williams encountered in staging his last full-length play.

Perhaps because he wrote verse even before he turned to short fiction and drama (his poems, in fact, began to appear in little magazines as early as 1933, prior to his first plays being given amateur productions), Tennessee Williams often used poetry - his own and that of others - as intertext in his works for the stage. Over a dozen of his full-length plays in their printed versions feature epigraphs from writers as various as Sappho, Dante, Rimbaud, Yeats and, an especial favorite of his, Hart Crane. Both Summer and Smoke (1947) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) incorporate a poem that provides a key to the drama. In the former, the Southern parson's daughter, Alma Winemiller, recites William Blake's “Love's Secret,” albeit in altered form, at her literary club gathering, not only foreshadowing the course the action will take as she loses Dr. John Buchanan to another, but also hinting at the rejection that may be visited upon a somehow forbidden '”Love that never told can be.” In the latter, the 97-year-old minor poet Jonathan Coffin (called Nonno) exuberantly declaims his final poem - only slightly revised from one the playwright himself wrote on a visit to Mexico in 1940 - about the decay that inevitably follows the ripening of all things living, pleading for the “courage” necessary to endure in the face of awareness of mortality.

Though Williams expressed himself, sometimes quite candidly, about his private life, he was always reluctant to give information about his working methods. Yet he repeatedly mentioned the influence of three writers - D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov - and cited numerous others; from an examination of recent criticism it is possible to compile a list that includes Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Luigi Pirandello, Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and Thornton Wilder. I shall examine the effect on Williams's works of his acknowledged mentors and determine the guise of their presence in the plays. A recent investigation about the significance of Oscar Wilde in this context adds a new perspective on Williams's modes of reading and borrowing and on the subtle planes of intertextuality in his work.

D. H. Lawrence's influence on Tennessee Williams was documented by Korman J. Fedderl as early as 1966. Fedder's analyses of thirty years ago are still persuasive but his conclusions need revising now that the respective statures of the two artists are more accurately assessed. There is external evidence that Williams had read the works of D. H. Lawrence. In 1939 already he had manifested his admiration for the English novelist by visiting Lawrence's widow, Frieda, in Taos, New Mexico and by promising her to complete a play about her husband.

This, Tennessee Williams proclaimed to be his own creed as an artist. Like his “Poet” of the short story by that name, Tennessee Williams was a natural romantic whose very existence was one of “benevolent anarchy” (“The Poet,” 246). His artistic creed (a term of some significance to a man nurtured in theology) signals the primacy of the artist, not God. He was dedicated to: (I) the power of “design” or artistic control over the material world; (2) the “mystery” of color or the non-rational, supernatural gift of beauty, affecting the artist and the audience; (3) the “redemption” of all things by “beauty” - an act of salvation by means of created and experienced splendor; (4) the “message” of art, the need to communicate the artist's vision of reality to the audience; and (S) the “blessedness” of his hands - his conviction that he is the chosen vessel for this important work.

In The Seagull Chekhov's Trepliov insists that “We need new art forms . . . and if they aren't available, we might just as well have nothing at all.” The statement is not without its irony given Trepliov's own incapacity, but it carried the force of a playwright who was himself dedicated to such innovation. Fifty-five years later, and in a world as much in transition as Chekhov's, Tennessee Williams was conscious of trying to create just such a new form, a “plastic” theatre which owed something, indeed, to the Russian writer for whom a detailed realism was never really a primary objective. As Stanislavsky had remarked of Chekhov's work, “At times he is an impressionist, at times a symbolist; he is a 'realist' where it is necessary.” A tracery of the real was an essential scaffold for his exploration of character and subtle recreation of mood, but his characters inhabit more than a tangible world and reach for something more than the merely material.

During the fifties Williams's plays were eclectic. His two great box-office successes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which grapples with greed, mendacity, and homosexuality, and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), an indictment of Southern bigotry, demonstrated his facility with naturalism. On the other hand, he wrote several non-naturalistic plays: The Rose Tattoo (1950), inspired by his relationship with Frank Merlo, a carnivalesque comedy celebrating the Dionysian; Camino Real (1953), an allegory about being trapped in a fascist state; Orpheus Descending (1957), a tragic love story set in a racist, brutally materialistic, dying South, Williams's version of the myth of Sisyphus; and Suddenly Last Summer (1958), in which Williams depicts the destructive nature of the writer and of homosexuality. Of the latter plays, Camino Real seemed the most egregiously misunderstood.

Williams's idea for Camino Real first came to him when he was sick in a desolate corner of Mexico. III, friendless, penniless, he felt as though he would never escape. He also thought that he would never be able to write a great play again:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a great critical and financial success for Tennessee Williams. The play opened on Broadway on March 24, 1955, ran for nearly 700 performances, and won all the major awards, including Williams's second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The MGM film adaptation in 1958, although deplored by Williams, was lucrative and made the playwright financially secure for the rest of his life. Major New York revivals in 1974 and 1990 confirmed the appeal of Cat to successive generations of theatregoers. To give the dimension of a Broadway career to these bare facts of success is my intention in the pages that follow. The inner story of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof begins with Williams's need to reverse a pattern of failure that became alarming with the early closing of Camino Real in 1953. But writing in this “place of stone,” to quote the original epigraph of Cat, occasioned the practice of a deceptive realism that satisfied both the economic law of Broadway and the artistic prompting of Tennessee Williams's endangered career. In this work of mediation, the realistic conventions of the Southern literary plantation were used to obscure Williams's skepticism for the theatre of “de-monstration.”