The steaming hot squalor of that place quickly drove me to look for other accommodations, nearer the beaches. And that’s how I discovered the background for my new play, The Night of the Iguana. I found a frame hotel called the Costa Verde on the hill over the still water beach called Caleta and stayed there from late August to late September.
It was a desperate period in my life, but it’s during such times that we are most alive and they are the times that we remember most vividly, and a writer draws out of vivid and desperate intervals in his life the most necessary impulse or, drive toward his work, which is the transmutation of experience into some significant piece of creation, just as an oyster transforms, or covers over, the irritating grain of sand in his shell to a pearl, white or black, of lesser or greater value.
My daily program at the Costa Verde Hotel was the same as it had been everywhere else. I charged my nerves with strong black coffee, then went to my portable typewriter which was set on a card table on a verandah and worked till I was exhausted: then I ran down the hill to the still water beach for my swim.
One morning, taking my swim, I had a particularly bad fit of coughing. I tasted in my mouth something saltier than the waters of the Pacific and noticed beside my head, flowing from my mouth, a thin but bright thread of red blood. It was startling but not frightening to me, in fact I kept on swimming toward the opposite side of the bay, hardly bothering to look back to see if the trajectory of coughed-up blood was still trailing behind me, this being the summer when the prospect of death was hardly important to me.
What was important to me was the dreamworld of a new play. I have a theory that an artist will never die or go mad while he is engaged in a piece of work that is very important to him. All the cells of his body, all of his vital organs, as well as the brain cells in which volition is seated, seem to combine their forces to keep him alive and in control of his faculties. He may act crazily but he isn’t crazy; he may show any symptom of mortality but he isn’t dying.
As the world of reality in which I was caught began to dim out, as the work on the play continued, so did the death wish and the symptoms of it. And I remember this summer as the one when I got along best with people and when they seemed to like me, and I would attribute this condition to the fact that I expected to be dead before the summer was over and that there was consequently no reason for me to worry about what people thought of me. When you stop worrying what people think of you, you suddenly find yourself thinking of them, not yourself, and then, for the time that this condition remains, you have a sort of crazy charm for chance acquaintances such as the ones that were staying with me that crazy summer of 1940, at the Costa Verde in Acapulco.
By the middle of September the bleeding lungs had stopped bleeding, and the death wish had gone, and has never come back to me since. The only mementos of the summer are the scar on the X-ray plate, a story called “The Night of the Iguana,” and now this play which has very little relation to the story except the same title and a bit of the same symbolism. But in both the short story and the play, written many years later, there is an incident of the capture of the iguana, which is a type of lizard, and its tying up under the verandah floor of the Costa Verde, which no longer exists in the new Acapulco.
Some critics resent my symbols, but let me ask, what would I do without them? Without my symbols I might still be employed by the International Shoe Co. in St. Louis.
Let me go further and say that unless the events of a life are translated into significant meanings, then life holds no more revelation than death, and possibly even less.
In September, that summer of 1940, the summer when, sick to death of myself, I turned to other people most truly, I discovered a human heart as troubled as my own. It was that of another young writer, a writer of magazine fiction who had just arrived from Tahiti because he feared that the war, which was then at a climax of fury, might cut him off from the magazines that purchased his adventure stories. But in Tahiti he had found that place which all of us spend our lives looking for, the one right home of the heart, and as the summer wore on I discovered that his desolation was greater than my own, since he was so despondent that he could no longer work.
There were hammocks along the sleeping verandahs. We would spend the evenings in adjacent hammocks, drinking rum-cocos, and discussing and comparing our respective heartbreaks, more and more peacefully as the night advanced.
It was an equinoctial season, and every night or so there would be a spectacular storm. I have never heard such thunder or seen such lightning except in melodramatic performances of Shakespeare. All of the inarticulate but passionate fury of the physical universe would sometimes be hurled at the hilltop and the verandah, and we were thrilled by it, it would completely eclipse our melancholy.
But the equinox wore itself out by late September, and we both returned to our gloomy introspections.
Day after steaming hot day I would go to Wells-Fargo in town for my option check and it wouldn’t be there. It was long overdue and I was living on credit at the hotel, and I noticed, or suspected, a steady increase in the management’s distrust of me.
I assumed that the Theatre Guild had dropped their option of Battle of Angels and lost all interest in me. The other young writer, still unable to scribble a line that he didn’t scratch out with the groan of a dying beast, had no encouragement for me. He felt that it was quite clear that we had both arrived at the end of our ropes and that we’d better face it. We were both approaching the age of thirty, and he declared that we were not meant by implacable nature to go past that milestone, that it was the dead end for us.
Our gloom was not relieved by the presence of a party of German Nazis who were ecstatic over the early successes of the Luftwaffe over the R.A.F. When they were not gamboling euphorically on the beach, they were listening to the radio reports on the battle for Britain and their imminent conquest of it, and the entire democratic world.
My writer friend began to deliver a pitch for suicide as the only decent and dignified way out for either of us. I disagreed with him, but very mildly.
Then one day the manager of the hotel told me that my credit had run out. I would have to leave the next morning, so that night my friend and I had more than our usual quota of rum-cocos, a drink that is prepared in a coconut shell by chopping off one end of it with a machete and mixing the juice of the nut with variable quantities of rum, a bit of lemon juice, a bit of sugar, and some cracked ice. You stick straws in the lopped-off end of the coconut and it’s a long dreamy drink, the most delectable summer night’s drink I’ve ever enjoyed, and that night we lay in our hammocks and had rum-cocos until the stars of the Southern Cross, which was visible in the sky from our veranda, began to flit crazily about like fireflies caught in a bottle.
My friend reverted to the subject of death as a preferable alternative to life and was more than usually eloquent on the subject. It would have been logical for me to accept his argument but something in me resisted. He said I was just being “chicken,” that if I had any guts I would go down the hill with him, right then and now, and take “the long swim to China,” as I was no more endurably situated on earth than he was.
All that I had, he told me, was the uncontrolled emotionalism of a minor lyric talent which was totally unsuited to the stage of life as well as the theater stage. I was, he said, a cotton-headed romanticist, a hopeless anachronism in the world now lit by super fire-bombs. He reeled out of his hammock and to the verandah steps, shouting, “Come on, you chicken, we’re going to swim out to China!”
But I stayed in my hammock, and if he went swimming that night, it wasn’t to China, for when I woke up in the hammock, and it was daylight, he was dressed and packed and had found an elderly tourist who had a car and was driving back to Texas, and had invited us to accompany him in his car free of charge. My friend hauled me out of the hammock and helped me pack for departure.
This old man, he declared, referring to our driver, is in the same boat as we are, and t
he best thing that could happen to all three of us is to miss a turn through the mountains and plunge off the road down a chasm, to everlasting oblivion. On this note, we cut out.
We had just reached the most hazardous section of the narrow road through the mountains when this other young writer asked the tourist if he couldn’t take over the wheel for a while. Oh, no, I exclaimed. But the other writer insisted, and like a bat out of hell he took those hairpin turns through the Sierras. Any moment, I thought, we would surely crash into the mountain or plunge into the chasm on the road’s other side, and it was then that I was all through with my death wish and knew that it was life that I longed for, on any terms that were offered.
I clenched my hands, bit my tongue, and kept praying. And gradually the driver’s demonic spirit wore itself out, the car slowed, and he turned the wheel over to the owner and retired to the back seat to sleep off his aborted flirtation with the dark angel.
The Night of the Iguana is rooted in the atmosphere and experiences of the summer of 1940, which I remember more vividly, on the emotional level, than any summer that I have gone through before or after—since it was then, that summer, that I not only discovered that it was life that I truly longed for, but that all which is most valuable in life is escaping from the narrow cubicle of one’s self to a sort of verandah between the sky and the still water beach (allegorically speaking) and to a hammock beside another beleaguered being, someone else who is in exile from the place and time of his heart’s fulfillment.
A play that is more of a dramatic poem than a play is bound to rest on metaphorical ways of expression. Symbols and their meanings must be arrived at through a period of time which is often a long one, requiring much patience, but if you wait out this period of time, if you permit it to clear as naturally as a sky after a storm, it will reward you, finally, with a puzzle which is still puzzling but which, whether you fathom it or not, still has the beautifully disturbing sense of truth, as much of that ambiguous quality as we are permitted to know in all our seasons and travels and places of short stay on this risky planet.
At one point in the composition of this work it had an alternative title, Two Acts of Grace, a title which referred to a pair of desperate people who had the humble nobility of each putting the other’s desperation, during the course of a night, above his concern for his own.
Being an unregenerate romanticist, even now, I can still think of nothing that gives more meaning to living.
Tennessee Williams
1961
THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
by Tennessee Williams
I
Opening onto the long South verandah of the Costa Verde hotel near Acapulco were ten sleeping rooms, each with a hammock slung outside its screen door. Only three of these rooms were occupied at the present time, for it was between the seasons at Acapulco. The winter season when the resort was more popular with the cosmopolitan type of foreign tourists had been over for a couple of months and the summer season when ordinary Mexican and American vacationists thronged there had not yet started. The three remaining guests of the Costa Verde were from the States, and they included two men who were writers and a Miss Edith Jelkes who had been an instructor in art at an Episcopalian girls’ school in Mississippi until she had suffered a sort of nervous breakdown and had given up her teaching position for a life of refined vagrancy, made possible by an inherited income of about two hundred dollars a month.
Miss Jelkes was a spinster of thirty with a wistful blond prettiness and a somewhat archaic quality of refinement. She belonged to an historical Southern family of great but now moribund vitality whose latter generations had tended to split into two antithetical types, one in which the libido was pathologically distended and another in which it would seem to be all but dried up. The households were turbulently split and so, fairly often, were the personalities of their inmates. There had been an efflorescence among them of nervous talents and sickness, of drunkards and poets, gifted artists and sexual degenerates, together with fanatically proper and squeamish old ladies of both sexes who were condemned to live beneath the same roof with relatives whom they could only regard as monsters. Edith Jelkes was not strictly one or the other of the two basic types, which made it all the more difficult for her to cultivate any interior poise. She had been lucky enough to channel her somewhat morbid energy into a gift for painting. She painted canvases of an originality that might some day be noted, and in the meantime, since her retirement from teaching, she was combining her painting with travel and trying to evade her neurasthenia through the distraction of making new friends in new places. Perhaps some day she would come out on a kind of triumphant plateau as an artist or as a person or even perhaps as both. There might be a period of five or ten years in her life when she would serenely climb over the lightning-shot clouds of her immaturity and the waiting murk of decline. But perhaps is the right word to use. It would all depend on the next two years or so. For this reason she was particularly needful of sympathetic companionship, and the growing lack of it at the Costa Verde was really dangerous to her.
Miss Jelkes was outwardly such a dainty teapot that no one would guess that she could actually boil. She was so delicately made that rings and bracelets were never quite small enough originally to fit her but sections would have to be removed and the bands welded smaller. With her great translucent gray eyes and cloudy blond hair and perpetual look of slightly hurt confusion, she could not pass unnoticed through any group of strangers, and she knew how to dress in accord with her unearthly type. The cloudy blond hair was never without its flower and the throat of her cool white dresses would be set off by some vivid brooch of esoteric design. She loved the dramatic contrast of hot and cold color, the splash of scarlet on snow, which was like a flag of her own unsettled components. Whenever she came into a restaurant or theatre or exhibition gallery, she could hear or imagine that she could hear a little murmurous wave of appreciation. This was important to her, it had come to be one of her necessary comforts. But now that the guests of the Costa Verde had dwindled to herself and the two young writers—no matter how cool and yet vivid her appearance, there was little to comfort her in the way of murmured appreciation. The two young writers were bafflingly indifferent to Miss Jelkes. They barely turned their heads when she strolled onto the front or back verandah where they were lying in hammocks or seated at a table always carrying on a curiously intimate sounding conversation in tones never loud enough to be satisfactorily overhead by Miss Jelkes, and their responses to her friendly nods and Spanish phrases of greeting were barely distinct enough to pass for politeness.
Miss Jelkes was not at all inured to such offhand treatment. What had made travel so agreeable to her was the remarkable facility with which she had struck up acquaintances wherever she had gone. She was a good talker, she had a fresh and witty way of observing things. The many places she had been in the last six years had supplied her with a great reservoir of descriptive comment and humorous anecdote, and of course there was always the endless and epic chronicle of the Jelkeses to regale people with. Since she had just about the right amount of income to take her to the sort of hotels and pensions that are frequented by professional people such as painters and writers or professors on sabbatical leave, she had never before felt the lack of an appreciative audience. Things being as they were, she realized that the sensible action would be to simply withdraw to the Mexican capital where she had formed so many casual but nice connections among the American colony. Why she did not do this but remained on at the Costa Verde was not altogether clear to herself. Besides the lack of society there were other drawbacks to a continued stay. The food had begun to disagree with her, the Patrona of the hotel was becoming insolent and the service slovenly and her painting was showing signs of nervous distraction. There was every reason to leave, and yet she stayed on.
Miss Jelkes could not help knowing that she was actually conducting a siege of the two young writers, even though the reason for it was still entirely ob
scure.
She had set up her painting studio on the South verandah of the hotel where the writers worked in the mornings at their portable typewriters with their portable radio going off and on during pauses in their labor, but the comradeship of creation which she had hoped to establish was not forthcoming. Her eyes formed a habit of darting toward the two men as frequently as they did toward what she was painting, but her glances were not returned and her painting went into an irritating decline. She took to using her fingers more than her brushes, smearing and slapping on pigment with an impatient energy that defeated itself. Once in a while she would get up and wander as if absentmindedly down toward the writers’ end of the long verandah, but when she did so, they would stop writing and stare blankly at their papers or into space until she had removed herself from their proximity, and once the younger writer had been so rude as to snatch his paper from the typewriter and turn it face down on the table as if he suspected her of trying to read it over his shoulder.
She had retaliated that evening by complaining to the Patrona that their portable radio was being played too loudly and too long, that it was keeping her awake at night, which she partially believed to be true, but the transmission of this complaint was not evidenced by any reduction in the volume or duration of the annoyance but by the writers’ choice of a table at breakfast, the next morning, at the furthest possible distance from her own.
That day Miss Jelkes packed her luggage, thinking that she would surely withdraw the next morning, but her curiosity about the two writers, especially the older of the two, had now become so obsessive that not only her good sense but her strong natural dignity was being discarded.
Directly below the cliff on which the Costa Verde was planted there was a small private beach for the hotel guests. Because of her extremely fair skin it had been Miss Jelkes’ practice to bathe only in the early morning or late afternoon when the glare was diminished. These hours did not coincide with those of the writers who usually swam and sunbathed between two and six in the afternoon. Miss Jelkes now began to go down to the beach much earlier without admitting to herself that it was for the purpose of espionage. She would now go down to the beach about four o’clock in the afternoon and she would situate herself as close to the two young men as she could manage without being downright brazen. Bits of their background and history had begun to filter through this unsatisfactory contact. It became apparent that the younger of the men, who was about twenty-five, had been married and recently separated from a wife he called Kitty. More from the inflection of voices than the fragmentary sentences that she caught, Miss Jelkes received the impression that he was terribly concerned over some problem which the older man was trying to iron out for him. The younger one’s voice would sometimes rise in agitation loudly enough to be overheard quite plainly. He would cry out phrases such as For God’s sake or What the Hell are you talking about! Sometimes his language was so strong that Miss Jelkes winced with embarrassment and he would sometimes pound the wet sand with his palm and hammer it with his heels like a child in a tantrum. The older man’s voice would also be lifted briefly. Don’t be a fool, he would shout. Then his voice would drop to a low and placating tone. The conversation would fall below the level of audibility once more. It seemed that some argument was going on almost interminably between them. Once Miss Jelkes was astonished to see the younger one jump to his feet with an incoherent outcry and start kicking sand directly into the face of his older companion. He did it quite violently and hatefully, but the older man only laughed and grabbed the younger one’s feet and restrained them until the youth dropped back beside him, and then they had surprised Miss Jelkes even further by locking their hands together and lying in silence until the incoming tide was lapping over their bodies. Then they had both jumped up, apparently in good humor, and made racing dives in the water.