LiteratureSuffering

Tennessee Williams on the Catastrophe of Success

A few of the great playwright’s thoughts on the downside of glory, written in response […]

David Zahl / 7.21.11

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A few of the great playwright’s thoughts on the downside of glory, written in response to the success of The Glass Menagerie, ht PW:

One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

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