I came to Bishop’s poetry late in life, but the wait was worth it. I especially like four poems, one of which, “Faustina: or Rock Roses” was introduced to me by my daughter-in-law, who is a redoubtable poet in her own right. The others I discovered on my own, and I love them all.
“The Fish” was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1946, when Bishop was thirty-five years old and little known, but the poem was immediately famous and brought her to the attention of poetry lovers everywhere. It describes a great fish that she may have caught off Key West but threw back in the water when she saw, and felt in her own body, its desperate gasps for life. “Sestina” is a lovely sestina—the name of the verse form she chose for it—that describes a grandmother who is reading the jokes from the almanac and talking to a child to hide her tears. The little girl has drawn a picture of a house with a man in front of it who has buttons like tears. You have to read this poem over and over to feel—not just understand, that’s easy—its depth. Finally, there is “One Art,” also well known and justly so. The refrain goes like this: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and the poem lists a number of things the poet has lost, which end with a person who is not named but who must have been deeply loved. Read the poem and you will see why this has to be so. Bishop died in 1979; she never married but she had many friends.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
1911–1983
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
Thomas Lanier (“Tennessee”) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911 and was brought up in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, a clergyman, not only gave him his first taste for literature but also introduced him, during his parish visits, to the kind of suffering that often imbues Williams’s plays. His father was a struggling shoe salesman, and so Williams’s education was interrupted more than once by the requirement of working for a living. His first plays, poems, and stories were written at night, after he had completed the day’s work, a regimen that led him to a breakdown in the mid-1930s. After completing college he roved through the South and performed as a singing waiter in Greenwich Village, in New York City, ending up like Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, where he lived for much of his life; they were the same age. His house, too, has a plaque on it, but it’s hidden. His first work to be produced was a collection of four one-act plays, American Blues, which enjoyed a modest success in 1939.
Obviously a promising young playwright, he received various grants that allowed him to keep on writing. The first fruits were disastrous: a play that closed in Boston without ever reaching Broadway. After further struggles this was followed by The Glass Menagerie, the major hit of the 1944 Broadway season.
The Glass Menagerie introduces themes that are found in most of Williams’s later works. A declassed Southern family is eking out a living in a tenement apartment. The mother (played beautifully by Laurette Taylor in the original production) would like to find a suitor for her frail, crippled daughter, Laura, who is so shy that she retreats into the fantasy world of her collection of glass animals. There is no real hope for any of the characters, yet they elicit great sympathy from the audience and from readers.
A Streetcar Named Desire was produced on Broadway in December 1947, with a cast that included Jessica Tandy as Blanche and introduced Kim Hunter as Stella, Karl Malden as Mitch, and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. The opening of the play, with that extraordinary cast, was one of the high points in twentieth-century American theater. Streetcar won for its author both the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and established him solidly as one of the most important playwrights writing in English.
The plot of A Streetcar Named Desire is not complex. The two leading female characters are sisters: Stella is married to a crude Polish man and is about to have a baby; Blanche appears on the scene at the beginning of the play and admits that she has lost the family home and because of “nerves” has had to take a leave of absence from her job as a schoolteacher. From their first meeting Stanley doesn’t believe Blanche’s account of her situation, and of course he turns out to be right; in fact, Blanche is an alcoholic nymphomaniac who has been fired from her job because she has seduced one of her students.
Stella and Stanley are intensely happy together before Blanche arrives; he adores Stella, and his powerful sexuality surrounds her with an aura of pleasure and contentment. But Stella is also drawn to Blanche, to her fragile hold on a sort of “higher” existence that Stella has been willing to give up for Stanley. The conflict between Blanche and Stanley is evident from their first words to one another. Each of them hates the kind of person the other is, but at the same time they are sexually attracted to one another. At the crisis of the play Stella goes to the hospital to have her baby and Blanche is left alone in the small apartment with Stanley. He rapes her, or she seduces him—it’s not really clear—but thenceforth the three cannot live together. Stella arranges for Blanche to be taken to a state mental institution. The last scene, when the doctor and nurse come for Blanche, is profoundly moving. Blanche leaves, her head held high, but she knows, as does everyone, that she has nothing to look forward to. Stanley reaches for Stella; at least they have each other.
Critics have discovered in A Streetcar Named Desire all sorts of trenchant commentaries about the Southern way of life and the conflict between an older genteel lifestyle that is being overthrown by the brutal, crass realism represented by Stanley Kowalski. But these discoveries seem to me quite beside the point. Stanley, Blanche, and Stella are not universal figures, as, for example, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is universal. Streetcar, as its names announces, is about desire, and the consequences and effects of (sexual) desire. Blanche gives a hint of this in one of her very first speeches. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields.”
If the characters are not universal, the subject is, and that is one reason why Streetcar is an unforgettable play.
RICHARD WILBUR
1921–
Poems
Translations
Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921 and was educated at Amherst College and Harvard, where he studied English literature. His first books were published in 1947 and l950; he was still a young man but was already recognized as an important poet. In 1955 he began to publish translations of Molière's plays; these are, I believe, the recommended versions, which include The Misanthrope and The School for Wives. When I desire to read a play of Molière I first look to see if Wilbur has translated it, which is not always the case. In addition to his versions of Molière, Wilbur also wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s great musical comedy Candide. If he had done nothing else, I would be happy to include him in this book. But of course he has done a great deal more. Among other things, he has won practically every honor and award an American poet can win, including two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and was for several years Poet Laureate.