TORONTO—Four days before the New York opening of his play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Tennessee Williams published an essay in the New York Times about the perils that instant success can bring to a hard-working author.
Williams’s previous play “The Glass Menagerie” had become a big hit three years before, propelling him into a depressingly frivolous lifestyle of comfort and luxury. He decided to take a step back, abandoning his fancy hotel suite and heading to a simpler life in Mexico. He emerged with a deeper understanding of his craft.
“One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. … But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation,” Williams wrote, going on to explain that “purity of heart is the one success worth having.”
“The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction … that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious about your aims,” he added as advice to writers.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” must have sprung from this epiphany; it went on to lasting success on Broadway, an equally famous film starring Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh, and garnered Williams a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. Its vivid characters continue to fascinate us today.
