Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom
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Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom
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An extraordinary book; one that almost magically makes clear how Tennessee Williams wrote; how he came to his visions of Amanda Wingfield, his Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Alma Winemiller, Lady Torrance, and the other characters of his plays that transformed the American theater of the mid-twentieth century; a book that does, from the inside, the almost impossible—revealing the heart and soul of artistic inspiration and the unwitting collaboration between playwright and actress, playwright and director.At a moment in the life of Tennessee Williams when he felt he had been relegated to a “lower artery of the theatrical heart,” when critics were proclaiming that his work had been overrated, he summoned to New Orleans a hopeful twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written an unsolicited letter to the great playwright asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on the playwright’s behalf to find out if he, Tennessee Williams, or his work, had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him, those who had led him to what he called the blank page, “the pale judgment.” Among the more than seventy giants of American theater and film Grissom sought out, chief among them the women who came to Williams out of the fog: Lillian Gish, tiny and alabaster white, with enormous, lovely, empty eyes (“When I first imagined a woman at the center of my fantasia, I . . . saw the pure and buoyant face of Lillian Gish. . . . [She] was the escort who brought me to Blanche”) . . . Maureen Stapleton, his Serafina of The Rose Tattoo, a shy, fat little girl from Troy, New York, who grew up with abandoned women and sad hopes and whose job it was to cheer everyone up, goad them into going to the movies, urge them to bake a cake and have a party. (“Tennessee and I truly loved each other,” said Stapleton, “we were bound by our love of the theater and movies and movie stars and comedy. And we were bound to each other particularly by our mothers: the way they raised us; the things they could never say . . . The dreaming nature, most of all”) . . . Jessica Tandy (“The moment I read [Portrait of a Madonna],” said Tandy, “my life began. I was, for the first time . . . unafraid to be ruthless in order to get something I wanted”) . . . Kim Stanley . . . Bette Davis . . . Katharine Hepburn . . . Jo Van Fleet . . . Rosemary Harris . . . Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”) . . . Julie Harris . . . Geraldine Page (“A titanic talent”) . . . And the men who mattered and helped with his creations, including Elia Kazan, José Quintero, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud . . . James Grissom’s Follies of God is a revelation, a book that moves and inspires and uncannily catches that illusive “dreaming nature.”
Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom- Amazon Sales Rank: #233102 in Books
- Brand: Grissom, James
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.51" h x 1.45" w x 6.63" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 416 pages
Review
Praise for James Grissom’sFOLLIES OF GOD “Extraordinary . . . Revisiting his time with Williams, Grissom manages the remarkable feat of unlocking the creative process of America’s foremost dramatist, as well as of a number of actresses, at least one director, Elia Kazan, and one actor, Marlon Brando . . . To cut to the chase, Follies of God is an absolute “must read” for those who admire Williams and his plays, love American theatre, and wish to take a highly idiosyncratic journey into the nature of creativity, the personas of its creators, and their drive to create. In the best sense this book is like no other this reader has encountered. Despite numerous prior studies of Williams’ work, Grissom’s approach provides fresh insights.” --James Fisher, Theatre Library Association “A great work, it is undoubtedly my favorite Williams tome yet . . . It takes a humane artist to capture the quality of another, and Grissom is surely that.” --David Noh, Gay City News “Grissom magically captures the vein and even voice of Tennessee in this beautifully written book about the actresses in his plays. Would that I had been one of them! There is no greater American playwright and Follies of God reveals why.” --Jane Alexander “A portrait of Tennessee Williams, artist and man, that is richer, more enthralling and, yes, stranger, than any that has been committed to publication heretofore. James Grissom has, through an unholy combination of research, intrusion, and empathy, committed half his lifetime to assembling something akin to a living, breathing creation—a portrait of Tennessee Williams that inhabits the pages of his new book Follies of God in all his flawed, erratic, ingeniously creative glory . . . The true achievement of the book lurks within its sentences, muscles its way through its paragraphs. It is the writing itself that astonishes . . . elegant, poetic—even appropriately elegiac—and wry . . . This is an extraordinary work. Not only for those who love theater, but also for those who would seek an understanding of the mind of the artist.” --Vinton Rafe McCabe, New York Journal of Books “James Grissom’s amazing and quite wonderful book, “Follies of God,” deals with the inspirations and heartaches of writing as experienced by Tennessee Williams, America’s finest and most poetic playwright. As a young man, Grissom went to Williams for help as a writer, and found himself being asked to help the master with his own writing. The book is a unique and stirring examination of the profound effect of numerous talented actresses on Williams’ memorable work. Remarkably revealing and extremely touching, Grissom’s book is among the most surprising and provocative journeys into the soul of a writer.”--Peter Bogdanovich “Enchants the mind and ravages the heart.” --Cathleen Medwick, More “Artful . . . A rare biographical find. Editor's recommendation.”--Barnes & Noble “Jim Grissom had amazing access to Tennessee Williams, - and to the great actresses who starred in his plays. His revelations about these remarkable talents coping with the passage of time, are moving and often shocking in their truths. A dazzling piece of writing.”--Lee Grant “Memorable . . . [FOLLIES OF GOD] provides new and valuable insights into the playwright's psyche and life.”--Library Journal “Always thoughtful, sometimes stunning, I see FOLLIES OF GOD as a kaleidoscope for viewing Tennessee Williams, and his time and place in American theater. A little turn, a new surprise, another view forms itself. There's nothing like it.”--Lois Smith “There have been plenty of books written about Williams over the past three decades, but few weave so many voices into an original and compelling portrait. Grissom honors the life and achievement of his doomed correspondent.”--Kirkus “[A] unique personal blend of road trip and literary history . . . philosophical, pragmatic, funny, and devastating . . . Grissom has succeeded in creating a kaleidoscope meditation on the people that entered Williams’ imagination—“the fog”—to become his signature characters.”--Publishers Weekly “James Grissom¹s electrifying and wonderfully readable book about him is the real thing. He has caught the voice, the man, the artist, exactly as I remember him: generous to a fault, astonishingly kind, always a force of nature, a writer to whom poetry came naturally, on paper and in conversation, a great artist perhaps in grief over the loss of his genius . . . yet determined courageously to carry on, working, creating, always illuminated serenely from within even when tormented by his own demons. “Few people have captured so well Tennessee’s strange mixture of fear and admiration for women, his profound understanding (rare among men) of what drives them, their dominating presence in all his work, and his miraculous ability to work the magic of their strengths and weaknesses into some of the most powerful roles in the American theater. Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Katherine Hepburn (not to speak of his own mother and sister), these are among the women whose love, friendship and acting genius brought to life his characters and touched his soul, and Grissom has at last brought to the printed page some of the magic that radiated from Tennessee, even in his saddest moments, and explained so much more than we ever knew about the fierce, charming, and curiously evasive personality of America¹s greatest playwright.”--Michael Korda: author of CLOUDS OF GLORY and CHARMED LIVES “James Grissom's book is peerless . . . in both what it says about the creative sources of America's greatest playwright and in the way that it says it . . . It is, in every sense, one of a kind . . . The results of Grissom's inquiries with some of the most renowned figures of the twentieth century are astonishing . . . from Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, and others, he elicits what are surely the most incisive interviews they ever gave . . . Their observations about Williams, acting, and life [are] chock-full of treasurable insights. And Williams' own extended quotations here are likewise the deepest, the most searing, the most revealing statements he ever offered: a magisterial summing up of a tormented soul for whom salvation was to be found only through language, his lifelong love affair with arranging words on a blank page. [As Grissom] pursues its singular and always surprising course, it reveals Williams to us fully as artist and human being -- a flawed, fearful, self-destructive, achingly vulnerable, gallant, forever questing pilgrim: a genius and a visionary who tragically could never seem to take the measure of his own unparalleled gifts. This is an unexpected masterpiece.”--Foster Hirsch, author of OTTO PREMINGER and THE DARK SIDE OF THE SCREEN
About the Author JAMES GRISSOM studied at Louisiana State University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has written for HBO, Showtime, CBS, and NBC. He lives in New York.Jamesgrissom.blogspot.com
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. "Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”These were the first words Tennessee Williams spoke to me in that initial phone call to my parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was September of 1982, a fact I noted in a small blue book. The book was new and had been purchased for an upcoming test in World History that I would not be taking because Tennessee invited me to lunch in New Orleans, and I accepted.I know that pleasantries were exchanged, and he laughed a lot—a deep, guttural, silly theatrical laugh—but the first quotation attributable to Tennessee Williams to me was the one I wrote in my small blue book.Perhaps you can be of some help to me.How could I be of help to Tennessee Williams? How, when in fact I had written to him, several months before, seeking his help? From a battered paperback copy of Who’s Who in the American Theatre, I had found the address of his agent (Audrey Wood, c/o International Famous Agency, 1301 Avenue of the Americas), and had written a letter—lengthy and containing a photograph, and, I’m thankful, lost to us forever—asking for his advice on a writing career. I wrote that his work had meant the most to me; that I was considering a career in the theater. I also enclosed two short stories, both written for a class taken at Louisiana State University. It was a time I recall as happy: I was writing, and exploiting the reserves of the school’s library and its liberal sharing policy with other schools. I was poring over books and papers that related to Tennessee and other writers I admired.Tennessee (he told me, by the end of that first phone call, to call him Tenn) was in a horrible “knot of time.” He asked me to imagine a knot of time, but time for me at that point was something from which I was seeking favors, something I was approaching. I did not feel a part of time yet, which can be somewhat attributable to growing up and living in Baton Rouge, a city detached from time, thought, or curiosity. Tenn acknowledged with a laugh that Baton Rouge was a city encased in gelatin.Tenn, however, could see and feel a literal knot of time and people and places encircling him, choking him, pursuing him. While he told me that he could no longer dream, due to age, a lack of flexibility both glandular and creative, and the “monumental accretion of toxins self-administered,” he was, comically, fully equipped to endure nightmares. His most frequent nightmare, one he had endured the night before he chose to call me, consisted of his slow, painful death by means of a massive knot, bearing the image of an enormous boa constrictor as well as an “artistic representation of a penis,” encircling him and squeezing him into darkness and death. The scales of this boa were faces of people and covers of books and posters of plays (both his and others’), travel brochures of trips planned, taken, aborted. The faces of the people and the blurbs on the books and the posters all posed the same question: Where have you been?This time knot was for Tenn a threat, an indictment, and a motivator, and he took it as a primarily positive occurrence. “This thing, this horror,” he told me, “may very well allow me to write at my previous level of power, and it appears to be telling me to plunge into my memories, to plunder them. And those that are most vivid to me are in Louisiana.”Tenn believed that writers, all artists, had several homes. There was the biological place of birth; the home in which one grew up, bore witness, fell apart. There was also the place where the “epiphanies” began—a school, a church, perhaps a bed. Rockets were launched and an identity began to be set. There was the physical location where a writer sat each day and scribbled and hunted and pecked and dreamed and drank and cursed his way into a story or a play or a novel. Most importantly, however, there was the emotional, invisible, self-invented place where work began—what Tenn called his “mental theater,” a cerebral proscenium stage upon which his characters walked and stumbled and remained locked forever in his memory, ready, he felt, to be called into action and help him again.“I’ve got to get home.”When Tennessee Williams was young, when he could dream and felt that time was a destination awaiting his arrival, he would repair to this mental theater, a safe place that operated under his management, where he could close his eyes and open the stage curtains and be not only home, but working.If you’re a writer, you write. If you don’t, you’re dead. You have no home, no reason to be offered a seat at any table, and no reason to live.No play written by Tennessee Williams, however, got its bearings until a fog rolled across the boards, from which a female form emerged.“I do not know why this is,” Tenn confessed to me, “but there is a premonitory moment before a woman, an important, powerful woman, enters my subconscious, and this moment is announced by the arrival of fog. Perhaps it is some detritus of my brain belching forth both waste and a woman. I do not know, but it comes with a smell, and it is the crisp, pungent smell of radiators hissing and clanking and rattling in rooms in New Orleans and St. Louis and New York. Rooms in which I wrote and dreamed and starved and fucked and cried and read and prayed, and perhaps all that action and all that steam creates both this fog and this woman.“I have not seen the fog in years.”Tenn’s primary activity, he told me, was “faking the fog.” When he closed his eyes and summoned his mental theater, he could see the scuffed boards of the stage, the frayed, slow-moving curtains, smell the dust, and feel the excitement of drama forthcoming.“When I was young,” Tenn told me, “I never sought out a woman, a character. She came to me. She had a story to tell, urgently, violently, fervently. I listened and I identified, and I became her most ardent supporter and witness. I cannot get a witness for me and I cannot be a witness for anyone! I cannot find a woman who will speak to me on my stage.”So Tenn sought the women elsewhere, searched for fog in movie theaters, on television screens, and in the pages of magazines, in stacks of photographs. He failed to find fog in literature, because, he explained, “I am a very visual person. I need to have the shape and movement and intent of a woman before me.”In his homes, in hotel rooms, in lodges and athletic clubs and as a guest of others, Tenn would pull out his typewriter or his pad of paper (which he called the “pale judgment” awaiting his ministrations), move close to a television set, and wait for a woman to speak to him. With friends like Maria St. Just and Jane Smith, whose love for and patience with him were boundless, he would sit in movie theaters for up to three consecutive showings, because a “wisp” of fog was emanating from the screen.“I have not seen the fog in years,” Tenn repeated. “But your letter made me believe it still existed.”Writing early in the morning or deep into the night, Tenn kept his television set on, the volume set to low, a radio or a phonograph playing the music of people who had led him to fog-enshrouded stages in the past. An image would come across the screen and catch his eye, the volume would be raised, and a voice would speak to him. Tenn had notes and diagrams and plot outlines scrawled on envelopes, napkins, hotel stationery, menus from restaurants and diners and airport lounges. Once, he delicately constructed a plot outline on a paper tablecloth, which the waiter neatly folded and presented to him along with the check.He consulted psychics, tarot-card readers, tea-leaf diviners. He placed himself in tubs of warm water and tried to experience rebirth, so that he could emerge from his liquid prison young and alert and full of creative and glandular flexibility, free forever of the impending time knot.Time and the ever-present pale judgment haunted him, jeered at him, reproached him. In the home of a friend, a fellow writer, he once walked over to a desk holding a ream of white paper and violently pushed it to the floor, then shoved it from view behind a desk. “I will have none of that from you!” he admonished the pile of paper, and went on with his visit.Where have you been? the scales of the time knot asked him.“Well, where the hell have you been?” Tenn once yelled out. “I was very loyal to my women, to my plays, to the construct of words. Where are they? Oh, they’re all on tour, baby, and I’m here with silence and clean air and a condemned theater. My heart and eyes are failing, but those gals are doing fine.” In Tennessee’s mind, Amanda and Blanche and Alma and Serafina and the Princess were errant daughters, each of whom who had been carefully listened to and coddled and husbanded by him, their “queer Lear,” and were now on stages telling their stories—the stories that had come to him in the fog—and he was off on his heath, yelling and whining and drinking and fighting off the time knot.“Sometimes,” he told me during that first phone call, “I think the fog has been replaced by something else. I feel that there is a wind tunnel inside of my head, and inside my head, within my very brain, there are leaves flying about, and each leaf is an idea.”When I finally met Tenn, he placed two fingers on his forehead, as if pushing against the pressure within, and he told me that the nights were spent scurrying after these leaves, trying to catch and collect them and find some meaning and comfort in them. He had also come to believe that the specks in his eyes, darting and floating, were reflections of these leaves moving across his brain, and if he could only marshal them, calm them down, and make the many dots one whole entity, he would have a character, a play, a woman, an idea.“I am incapable of containing it,” he told me, “this mulch, this confetti, until I can find some form in which to place it. A shadow box of the cerebellum; a case of curiosities plucked from my subconscious; a brilliantly white page framed in gold that I can approach and admire for its order and cleanness and say to it, in front of it, ‘Yes, I have something to add.’ ”Because he believed that the spots in his eyes, the floaters in his vitreous humor, were actually reflections of his cerebral leaf storm, Tenn took to staring into white tablecloths, looking upon blank white walls, and facing the sky, blinking and rolling his eyes, hoping to focus and find a connection.“I’ve heard of connecting the dots,” he laughed, “but this is ridiculous.“I try to approach the whiteness of the page, the pale judgment, as if I were a neophyte priest, and the paper is the host,” Tenn confessed to me. “I approach it gingerly and ask it to be patient. I see upon it the darting leaves in my brain, and I pray they will alight on the page and have some meaning. Or I touch it gently, a frightened queer faced with his first female breast, a nipple that seeks attention and ministration. ‘Forgive me,’ I say to it, ‘I don’t know my way around these parts.’“I start with anything—one lone sentence—and I ask the leaves, I ask the page, for the next line, the next phrase.”Sentence after sentence would follow, and Tenn would write them down, fervently, eagerly. Later, once we had met, once he had decided to trust me, I would write them down for him, and the bits of papers, the pages yanked from journals, and the old bills and envelopes—all littered with words—would pile up.“I think we can help each other,” Tenn told me in that first phone call.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Standing Ovation By Joe Da Rold Back in 1982, Grissom wrote to the great American playwright, seeking his advice on a writing career. Instead, Williams suggested Grissom could be of help to him. “I need to know that I mattered,” “Tenn” explained. “Be my witness.” In the months that followed Williams gave him the names of scores of actresses who had inspired him to create his legendary characters. “The true story of my life is one that should be told through my influences.” By the end of the same year, Williams was dead, leaving Grissom with scores of bluebooks filled with stories and names. It was now time to honor Tenn’s request to interview the women that meant most to him. What Williams and Grissom have created here is a history of mid-century American theatre, and it is quite amazing.The actresses who came out of his personal fog included Lillian Gish, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page, Kim Hunter, Kim Stanley, Marian Seldes, Mildred Natwick, Francis Sternhagen, Katherine Hepburn, and more. In many cases we get to hear their opinions of each other personally and professionally. Williams tells of his deep personal friendship with Maureen Stapleton and his long, intimate relationship with playwright and competitor William Inge. Considerable light is shed on the success and failure of Actor’s Studio, and had Lillian Hellman been a part of this story, we would have record of the three great American playwrights working in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Unexpectedly, we even get to hear Williams’ admiration for the plays of John Guare and Edward Albee. The most curious omission is of any mention of Williams’ last great play, “The Night of the Iguana,” especially since it starred two women mentioned respectfully elsewhere: Margaret Leighton and Bette Davis. Considering that there are so many interviews that had to be edited and connected, Grissom is deserving of a standing ovation. The value of this remarkable work is that Grissom has preserved not only the voice of Tennessee Williams, but so many theatrical legends who are now gone.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Amazing insight By Michael A. Willhoite Tennessee Williams was a tragically self-dramatizing and erratic artist, and at the same time a pure genius. This fine book is a good complement to John Lahr's masterful biography of last year. It fills in a lot of the blanks necessarily skated over by Lahr for the sake of concision. Grissom's interviews with the actresses are even more revelatory than his conversations with Williams. Especially valuable are his discussions with Katharine Hepburn. Her appraisals of other actresses on page 353 are fascinating, and I could willingly have read several pages more of them. Williams's reputation regularly waxes and wanes, but ultimately his best work will assure him a place in the pantheon, surely our finest dramatist. Everyone who has ever sat in a theatre or trod its boards will gobble this book down like candy. I certainly did.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A unique classic. By Penrose This is not an ordinary book - it is a rarity. I liken it to a marvelously unique, new quilt fashioned from precious, extraordinary, sometimes antique fabrics and pieces of tapestries - all sewn together to create a cohesive, one-of-a-kind whole. This is not a biography - it is a collection of interviews and reflections with Tennessee Williams himself and all those women who truly mattered and deeply affected him. Williams sent Grissom off on a quest to find those women and discover if he and his work truly mattered to them. As Tenn states, ". . . we remain blind, without identity, until someone witnesses us. . . I'm afraid that only in the company of these people, all of our witnesses, many of whom frighten us, can we learn who we are and what we've done." Grissom met with Williams briefly toward the end of his life. Grissom's mission, imposed on him by Williams, ended up covering a period of 25 years - with remarkable, illuminating interviews with our greatest actors, directors and artistic luminaries: Kim Stanley, Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton, Marion Seldes, Lois Smith, Eva Le Gallienne, Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, Elia Kazan, Kim Hunter, Jo Van Fleet, Geraldine Page, among others.Comparisons to Lahr's biography on Williams are irrelevant. This is not a traditional, chronological biography, but yet it is biographical in the highest sense because no book I have read helps you to understand William's psychology and process as this one does. The section on Jessica Tandy and the evolution of "Streetcar" is revelatory. Williams has always been one of my favorite playwrights and I now have a much greater understanding of his intentions, creative process and the neurotic tendencies that drove him to write in that singularly unique voice that he found within himself.Grissom's writing ties the disparate parts together with a musicality and directness that complements Williams' writing. It is easy to discern that Grissom took great pains to document all the interviews as carefully and truthfully as possible. His detail and precision makes the scattered, often fragmented mind of Williams clearer and more comprehendible. And in doing so, Grissom gives Tenn the wings to finally fly, knowing that his work will always matter, resonate and endure.
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