Merlo’s steadfastness stabilized Williams and brought him unexpected happiness. All artists who work from the inside out, have all the same problem: they cannot make sudden, arbitrary changes of matter and treatment until the inner man is ripe for it.”ĭuring this stalled period, Williams was falling in love with Frank Merlo, a high-spirited twenty-five-year-old Sicilian-American, who was to be his companion and factotum for the next fourteen years.
The scope of understanding enlarges quite slowly, if it enlarges at all, and the scope of interest seems to wait upon understanding. On December 30, 1947, the thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams boarded a ship bound for France, sailing away from America and from the tumultuous success on Broadway, only a few weeks earlier, of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Almost immediately, he hit creative still water, finding it “frightfully hard to discover a new vein of material.” When, in late 1948, his play “Summer and Smoke” failed on Broadway, Williams’s confidence dipped still further he felt, he said, like a “discredited old conjurer.” To his champion Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of the Times, he wrote in June, 1949, “The trouble is that you can’t make any real philosophical progress in a couple of years.
Darrell D’Silva and Zoë Wanamaker in “The Rose Tattoo.” ANDRZEJ KLIMOWSKI
