Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers

I've been reading a biography of Tennessee Williams, mainly to find out more about his relationship with Carson McCullers. Tennessee is one of the best-known American playwrights, and one of the first plays that I read in high school was The Glass Menagerie. At the time, it seemed all right to me, though I wasn't especially impressed. It mirrored some of the dysfunction in his family, and, because there was also dysfunction in my family then, I didn't find it particularly interesting. Later on, I came to prefer the film versions of two of his other plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. It helped that some of the best actors of the time appeared in these films: Elizabeth Taylor, Burl Ives, Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The biography I'm reading is a little too chatty for me, and plays have never been a central interest of mine, so I decided to read only the parts that pertain to Carson McCullers. This book repeats some of the same information found in Mary V. Dearborn's biography of McCullers, which I think is better-written, but it adds more context with respect to Tennessee.

Tennessee was six years older than McCullers, and he was impressed by her The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. This resulted in his sending her a fan letter in 1946 and subsequently inviting her to his summer house in Nantucket, as I mentioned earlier. When they met, they bonded, rather intensely it seems. It would appear that, because they were both Southerners, both gay, and had similar artistic sensibilities, they rejoiced as kindred spirits. Tennessee later told James Laughlin "The minute I met her she seemed like one of my oldest and best friends!" Also, "We are planning to collaborate on a dramatization of her last book soon as I get my present play finished." On the other hand, Gore Vidal said "She was a crashing bore, but Tennessee found her sort of tragic and interesting." At that time, Tennessee's live-in boyfriend, Mexican Pancho Rodriguez, had a rather volatile personality, and he came to resent Tennessee's affection for McCullers. Before long, McCullers thought of Pancho as a gold digger. He also was an inappropriate person to mingle within Tennessee's artistic circles: no one liked him, and their relationship eventually failed. I don't know what Tennessee saw in him.

Tennessee later described 1946 as "the last good year before her stroke" (though she probably had an earlier stroke). In 1970, after she had died, he said "To have known a person of Carson's spiritual purity and magnitude has been one of the great graces of my life." 

So, this isn't adding that much to my knowledge of McCullers. I have found it interesting that these two people were able develop such a close relationship. As a practical matter, it helped McCullers when Tennessee encouraged her to make stage adaptations of her fiction. It isn't clear that Tennessee got much benefit from the relationship, though, at the time, it may have enhanced his professional reputation to be associated with her. I was touched when reading the Dearborn biography that Tennessee encouraged McCullers to get psychiatric help and even recommended a therapist. 

I think that the fiction and stage scenes in New York City were a lot more dynamic in the '40s and '50s than they are today. It was all really quite messy for those who participated in it, but people like Tennessee and McCullers seem to have had more fun than the current participants, who are likely to be operating under the constraints of boring corporate overlords now.

Diary

I've been reading Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, and, though I thought I'd finish it, I've just decided to give up. The book was first published in 1974, when Holmes was young, and apparently a Shelley fanatic. While I do believe that Shelley was a good poet, his life was so nerve-racking that it's too painful for me to read about it in the slow-motion manner of this volume. You have to wade through his juvenile correspondences and put up with his ridiculously poor judgement in the first hundred pages – and there are still more than six-hundred pages to go! At the age of eighteen he entered his father's alma mater, University College, Oxford, but was expelled, along with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, after writing and distributing the pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, before completing his first year. At the age of nineteen he persuaded a friend of one of his sisters, Harriet Westbrook, to marry him. She was sixteen at the time. They were married in Edinburgh and lived briefly in York – with Hogg. Looking ahead, after Harriet had a child with Shelley and another on the way, he abandoned her for Mary Godwin, whom he married. Harriet drowned herself when she was twenty-one – and so on. Even though Shelley himself only lived to the age of twenty-nine, I don't think that I can take any more of this. This isn't a criticism of Richard Holmes – I just seem to intensely dislike Shelley as a person.

So I'm still on the lookout for something to read. At the moment I'm fairly cabin-bound, because there has been a lot of snow. I've also been unenthusiastically following the Trump phenomenon. I think that he's so bad that even the conservative supreme court may be forced to act against him. The Democrats are gradually building up some gumption, and I think that we may be close to the nadir right now. Meanwhile, I've been able to find some old films that continue to entertain me.

Diary

Ordinarily I would have found an appropriate book and be commenting on it by now, but there is a hit-and-miss aspect to finding the right book, and it can be extremely time-consuming.  For example, I had no idea that I would like the biography of Carson McCullers as much as I did, and it turned out to be one of my favorites of 2024. My scientific interests are mainly focused on evolutionary biology, and new findings in that field emerge very slowly: one might die waiting for new revelations. I am currently reading a short book by Rosemary Ashton which analyses George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. I like Ashton a lot, and she understands George Eliot very well, but I don't consider that novel to be one of Eliot's best: it seems to appeal more to women than to men, and Simone de Beauvoir loved it. I'm also starting on an old biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I think has more substance, at least in terms of the number of pages. Shelley is not one of my favorite poets, though he is probably more interesting than Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden or Ted Hughes. I liked him in 1974 at the time of my wedding, and I had the best man read "Mutability." That turned out to be an appropriate poem for a marriage that lasted eleven years. As far as poets go, from a biographical standpoint, they can be more interesting than others if they write well, are hyperactive and die young. That sort of applies to Carson McCullers too. Though this is a cliché, there is a fine line between creative genius and craziness, and, for example, I don't think that Beethoven was someone whom I would want to know personally. I don't think that Shelley was crazy, and he is associated with a few others I've been reading about. His wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein and was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose biography I read some time ago. And the Shelleys were both influenced by Rousseau. They have many English literary connections, including Shelley's friendship with Leigh Hunt, who later became a friend of G.H. Lewes, making tenuous connections with George Eliot and Charles Darwin. These kinds of connections add an interesting density to the subject matter that rarely occurs in the U.S. There was an intense cultural density in London and Paris, and the only American city that comes close is New York.

My evening entertainment continues to be short snippets of good films. I'm currently watching "Babette's Feast," which I think is very good, though it is very slowly paced. Then I'll probably rewatch "It Happened One Night" and "Annie Hall," which I like a lot but haven't seen in years. I continue to watch the evening news, but, because of the Trump phenomenon, I frequently mute it and sometimes just turn it off. I can only take so much of Trump, who seems like a talking orangutan, especially with his friend, Elon Musk, the talking chimpanzee. I also find the interviews with Trump supporters in congress insufferable and just turn them off. I am reminded of Trump's complaint that modern toilets don't flush well, and think to myself that, with all of his Republican supporters in Washington, he must have the cleanest anus in the world and only needs a toilet for urination. Trump and Musk seem to be at the center of the largest disinformation campaign in American history, and I think that they should both be in jail now. As an investor, I find them both quite dangerous, and I'm now seriously considering investing in gold for the first time. Although I think that the political situation will eventually correct itself, this is probably the first time in American history with a simultaneously corrupt president, congress and supreme court. You have to be intellectually handicapped not to notice this – but, unfortunately, Americans have always been intellectually handicapped if you believe H.L. Mencken.

This winter is turning out to be more normal for Vermont, and there has been snow on the ground most of the time, with temperatures below zero occasionally. The bird feeder is very popular now, and I may have to buy some more sunflower kernels soon.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I just watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the first time in many years and thought I'd write about it today. The film seems to be a little different from the novel, perhaps because it may be based on a play that had been based on the novel. This makes the main characters sharply-focused, and the acting and directing skills necessary to make it were a little more demanding than in the case of most films. The popularity of films and plays can be social phenomena in themselves and in some cases bear little relation to the intentions of the author. When I was in college, the Samuel Beckett play, "Waiting for Godot," was wildly popular and had made Beckett famous; reading about it now, it seems that the play became popular primarily because viewers read their own meanings into it, and those meanings were not ones intended by Beckett, who, before that play, had been an obscure Irish writer. When I saw a college production of it, it didn't make much sense to me. A similar phenomenon can occur with films, and I don't think that Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, particularly approved of the film. Popular films and plays can take on a life of their own in relation to the intent of the original author, and, as I've said, I think that the best literary works shouldn't have film versions. However, I think that Kesey was a run-of-the-mill participant in the Beat movement, which, though it played an important role in American arts from the postwar years up until the 1960's, doesn't have much of a discernable legacy in the present. There may still be some surviving elements in jazz, in writers such as László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, who died in 2021, and perhaps even in the early music of Bob Dylan, but for the most part the Beats are ancient history already.

I think that this film may have an added dimension because, as I wrote earlier, the director was a Czech, Miloš Forman. Jack Nicholson may have been given the part of Randle McMurphy based on his participation in the film "Easy Rider," released in 1969. That film, I think, though a low-budget one, contains anti-establishment elements that could be said to carry over into "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Forman came from an anti-totalitarian arts environment in the Eastern Bloc, working roughly in the same tradition as Milan Kundera and perhaps some of the early Soviet dissident writers. Being a dissident in Eastern Europe is quite different from being a dissident in the U.S.: Alexei Navalny, an enemy of Vladimir Putin, recently died at the age of forty-seven, whereas Bob Dylan, who once wrote protest songs, is now eighty-three years old and a multimillionaire. 

The story line of this film is fairly simple. McMurphy is a prisoner in Oregon who had been found guilty of having sex with a minor, though he had denied knowing her age. Not liking prison, he was able to get himself transferred to a psychiatric hospital. His ward at the hospital is managed by Nurse Ratched, who has been maintaining an orderly environment with strict rules and a regular medication schedule for patients. The patients have a diverse range of psychiatric symptoms: some have severe symptoms and clearly could not function on their own in society, whereas a majority are relatively normal and are there as a matter of personal choice. Nurse Ratched administers a ludicrous group therapy session in which several of the patients don't have the slightest idea what is going on. McMurphy completely disrupts the environment by developing relationships with some of the patients and encouraging them to be more adventurous. One day, he and a group escape by stealing a bus and then stealing a boat to go fishing in the Pacific Ocean. He also arranges to bring along one of his girlfriends. Later, he sets up a large party after hours, with two of his girlfriends and a lot of booze smuggled in. One of his friends, Billy Bibbit, who has a terrible stutter, ends up sleeping with one of the girlfriends. When Nurse Ratched arrives in the morning, the ward is in shambles, and she finds Billy in bed with the woman. After she threatens to tell Billy's mother, he commits suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken glass. McMurphy becomes enraged and attempts to strangle Ratched, but he is pulled off her by the attendants.

In the course of his stay, McMurphy develops a close relationship with Chief, a tall Native American who has been pretending to be mute and deaf. When McMurphy realizes this, they begin to talk in private. He plans to escape with McMurphy at some point. After the strangulation incident, for which Ratched gets a neck brace, McMurphy is taken away. It isn't clear what happened to him until the end. He is returned to the ward at night. When Chief sees that he has been lobotomized, he suffocates him with a pillow and then breaks out by lifting up a large sink and throwing it through a window. In the final scene, he is shown running toward a forest.

Although I suppose that there are several ways that one might interpret this film, I prefer to see it as a critique of how American society employs thought control techniques in order to maintain a docile conformity in American life. While McMurphy does have some antisocial tendencies, in this film he engages his community in a way that they mostly appreciate and from which they benefit. This appeals to me because I have always been annoyed by the mindless conformity within the U.S. I think that this view of the film is supported by the fact that the hospital staff decides that McMurphy has to be permanently disabled by brain surgery when they could simply have returned him to prison. I think that some viewers make out Nurse Ratched to be a heartless villain, whereas I see her as an ordinary American who is just doing what she thinks is her job, which happens to encourage conformity and limited self-expression. If you ever wonder why political developments follow the direction that they do in this country, you can find clues in this film. So, overall, I still think that this to be one of the best American films, which includes the script, the acting and the filming.

The Current Situation

Since I'm still having a lot of trouble finding something to read, I thought that I'd write a bit about the world situation, particularly the return of the chaos-inducing Donald Trump, and what this means for all of us. There is a palpable sense of despair and panic at the moment, and I'm sure that millions of people would like assurances or guidance of some sort. 

First, let me specifically describe how I see Donald Trump. I see him as a stupid person who has been obsessed for most of his life with being perceived as important. From what I observe, he seems to have no particular talent, and he lacks the intelligence and creativity to come up with anything useful for others. In every public appearance of him that I've ever seen, he presents himself as a successful executive whom others flock to for advice. But this is all made-up, and no savvy people take him seriously. As a result, he became surrounded by sycophants who were generally also stupid, and, particularly after he was coached by Roy Cohn, he became extremely hard-nosed, is accustomed to using his underlings to do his dirty work for him, and he also became comfortable lying constantly. It seems that his primary business tactic was to work with small players for services and underpay them in order to maintain a profitable business. His main skill, to this day, is the avoidance of paying full prices for services that he has commissioned. Because of his enormous inheritance from his father, it was easy for him to win court cases against people who lacked his resources. As a matter of habit, he has continued the same technique right up to the present, and because no other person as unscrupulous as he is had ever reached his political level in the U.S. before, he was able to evade jail time for obvious crimes. In historical terms, one would expect that he would be in jail now.

The other aspect of Trump's ascent is the general political entropy that has occurred in the U.S. since about 1993. When business-friendliness became popular in both parties, the power of money gradually took over politics in the U.S. This is more conspicuous today than ever with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Rupert Murdoch, among others, attending the second inauguration of Trump. This isn't a real show of support and simply reflects a calculated attempt to benefit their businesses. In private, to them Trump fits the definition of a useful idiot. To be fair though, I also have to point out that the tech billionaires have their own set of psychological deficiencies. The point really is that the U.S. was not originally intended to be the world headquarters for pathological money-grubbers, and this is the spectacle that we're witnessing now.

I'm not about to predict world history for the next one-hundred years, but it isn't that hard to see how things will end for Trump. The rule of thumb is probably "Once an idiot, always an idiot." This means that Trump isn't about to successfully create a new world order for oligarchs. The more likely scenario is that Trump will completely screw things up, because that is what he usually does. He doesn't have a coherent ideology, and, for the billionaires, this is just a temporarily convenient arrangement for them. Because Trump doesn't understand or care about the needs of others, it isn't possible for him to intentionally make a positive contribution to society. This means that it is impossible for him to have a positive legacy when he leaves office. Only he and his friends will benefit, there will be no useful policies enacted, and the U.S. federal government may be left in shambles. The people who voted for him will generally be worse-off, and he and his advisors will probably continue to be charged with crimes. The powerful people who are supporting him now have already prepared their justifications and alibis, and the world will move on. No significant new world alliances will be formed, and within four years, Trump will have permanently departed. His health seems to be poor, and he could potentially die from natural causes while still in office. People like him are not usually assassinated, but that is also a possibility.

I won't belabor my points and will just say that Trump will eventually be remembered as the stupid fat guy who screwed things up for the world for a few years. If you can just sit tight and weather this, you should be fine. There are still real questions about where new technology is taking us, whether climate change will be addressed, etc., but that has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Diary

I've been reading Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen, which I think is good, but I haven't become excited enough to plow through it. It is probably a lot more interesting than the film, with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which I vaguely recall seeing long ago. The film is said to take many liberties with the book. Dinesen, who was Danish, writes well and is skilled at capturing the feel of the natives and the land. It is a memoir of her years, from 1913 to 1931, at a 4500-acre coffee farm near Nairobi. The farm was one hundred miles from the equator, but at an elevation of six thousand feet, making the climate quite unusual. It is not a particularly happy story, because she contracted syphilis from her husband, who managed the farm poorly and divorced her, and she never recovered fully from the illness. The farm eventually failed, and she left. She did have a romance with a neighbor, an English soldier, but he died in a plane crash in 1929. As I wrote earlier, she had lunch with Carson McCullers and Marilyn Monroe in 1959 while visiting the U.S. I think that this book may have been the inspiration for The Farm in the Green Mountains, by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, which I discussed earlier, because there are stylistic similarities. This would also explain why Alice and her husband, two Germans, suddenly became enthusiastic about becoming Vermont farmers. Obviously, rural Vermont during the 1940's was not as exotic as rural Kenya during this earlier period. Nevertheless, even though Out of Africa is well-written, I think it would appeal more to a cultural anthropologist or to a historian of colonialism in Africa than to me. For this reason, I am setting it aside and may or may not resume reading it at a later date. 

I am still a little burnt out on the biography/memoir genres and plan to stay on scientific/theoretical books for the time being. I continue to look for biographies but haven't found an appealing one recently. As far as my other activities are concerned, my investment survival instincts have been triggered by the looming commencement of the second Trump administration. He didn't do much damage during his first term, because the economy wasn't bad and the pandemic was the main issue. He mishandled the pandemic, and there would probably have been vaccines whether he was president or not. This time it looks as if there may be a larger window for him to cause economic and diplomatic chaos. For this reason, I sold all of my stocks last Friday and am waiting to see how things play out beginning next week. I managed to make large profits on Nvidia and the four main quantum computing stocks, which all plunged today. I would hate to see a significant economic downturn, but it would probably be worth it if it resulted in the removal of Donald Trump and ended the MAGA movement. Trump isn't even in office yet, and Steve Bannon is already attacking Elon Musk. I find it embarrassing to live in a country where Donald Trump and Elon Musk dominate the news media. As far as investments go, I think that Nvidia will pick up again, but that actual advances in quantum computing may be years away, and the recent run-up was primarily a meme-stock phenomenon.

The winter is turning out nice and white, with an almost continuous light snowfall for several days. The total accumulation hasn't been much, and I've only cleared the driveway twice so far. There is plenty of wildlife to watch. Deer come through the yard to eat dried fruit from one of the trees. Yesterday morning, a red fox chased a squirrel by the house. The squirrel successfully jumped onto the house and escaped.

Diary

With a fifty percent reduction in the number of household members, things get quite slow here during the holidays. However, I do have close relatives nearby, so there is always some activity. I haven't felt much like reading but will be starting again shortly; I recently gave up on another book. I've been watching a free MasterClass presentation by Jane Goodall. I like her and mostly agree with her, but I already know almost everything that she's saying. I was mainly interested in her early life, and found that an extremely fortuitous sequence of events led to her career success. If she hadn't made her way to Africa in 1957 and accidentally met Louis Leakey, you may never have heard of her. I was surprised that there was practically no research on chimpanzees at that time, and she was probably the first person to notice that chimpanzees are essentially the same as humans socially. This, along with genetic studies, eventually led to a vast improvement in our understanding of human evolution, though she is an ethologist and isn't particularly interested in that line of research. The origin of the divergence between chimpanzees and humans seems to have been that our ancestors were more environmentally stressed and began to occupy savannahs, whereas chimpanzees remained in forests. When this occurred, hominids developed bipedal gait. Because of their increased mobility and stresses, they became more cooperative and developed language. Although she is slightly New Agey, Goodall's views are very similar to those of other naturalists, such as E.O. Wilson. It is also quite clear that she despises much of contemporary life because of its environmental destruction and mass consumption. Though she doesn't quite say it, she doesn't approve of the American lifestyle at all. She grew up in England during World War II and became accustomed to rationing, and you can see in her a simmering hatred of corporate greed and consumer waste. We need many more people like her who dedicate their later lives to saving the planet. She doesn't put it this way, but if aliens were to visit Earth today, they would conclude that it has a toxic infestation of humans. I still have several more segments left to watch, which are mainly about environmental activism.

I have also been watching news coverage of the Jimmy Carter legacy, and he was quite different from subsequent presidents, mostly in a positive way. He didn't do well in office, but that was mainly due to bad luck. He inherited high inflation from the Republicans: when I bought my first house in 1980, the mortgage rate was thirteen percent! He also had geopolitical problems with Iran. However, he did a very good job negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel. Overall, it didn't help him that he was a complete outsider in Washington, and his staff was referred to as the "Georgia Mafia." Nevertheless, his Christian values, intelligence and work ethic, I think, made him a better person than any of his successors. It also helped that he had a supportive wife from his hometown. Who would want to be married to Nancy Reagan or Melania Trump? Although I'm an atheist, I've always noticed that people who adopt actual Christian values usually are better than other Americans. One of the greatest social problems of today is that self-identified Christians in the U.S. don't seem to see that Donald Trump is completely lacking in Christian values, and if it wasn't for Trump's glaring stupidity, it would be tempting to call him the leader of a satanic cult. As a thought experiment, try imagining him volunteering for Habitat for Humanity after he leaves office: picture Donald and Melania holding hammers and building houses for poor people. Dream on.

At the moment I don't have any house issues, which up to now occupied much of my time. Yesterday I added a clothesline to the back porch in case I need it. If everything keeps going smoothly, I may have to recruit some mice to start another mouse infestation just to keep busy. I have a little more to do on weekdays. I am following the stock market and am currently invested in AI and quantum computing. It would be nice if there were another meme stock rally, but that seems unlikely under the current conditions.