The Lost Masterpiece of Tennessee Williams

Summer and Smoke was produced on Broadway in 1948, in the overwhelming, unrepeatable first flush of Tennessee Williams’s career. The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 had made him the young hero of the American theater (he was thirty-four when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar). But Summer and Smoke—a tale, set shortly before World War One, of a Mississippi spinster and a hell-raising physician who represent for each other the quality each has repressed—wasn’t taken up by the New York theater crowd as Menagerie and Streetcar had been. Featuring the long-forgotten Margaret Phillips in the role of Alma Winemiller, it received unenthusiastic reviews, ran for only one hundred performances, and was regarded, justifiably, as a minor work until Jose Quintero revived it off Broadway in 1952, at Circle in the Square, with Geraldine Page as Alma—a performance she repeated in a ludicrous but considerably respected Peter Glenville film version in 1961. (Possibly Page was great in the part on stage; it made her reputation. On screen, however, she was simply terrible in it, overwrought yet desiccated.)

By the time the movie came out, Summer and Smoke was considered vintage Williams. The playwright had already begun his slow, agonizing decline. Perhaps no great American writer has ever peaked so early and flailed so long in the increasingly unmerciful public eye. (His late plays seem tortured, as if he’d been strapped down in the desert sun and left, parched and baking, to die.) And though Broadway and the critical establishment could still get excited over a symbol-eaten melodrama like The Night of the Iguana, it must have been apparent that Summer and Smoke came from a freer and less strained Tennessee Williams. And the script does contain some beautiful lines. John Buchanan, the young doctor, trying to calm a hysterical Alma, who’s run over from next door at two in the morning to complain of palpitations, tells her that “space is curved...it turns back onto itself like a soap-bubble, adrift in something that’s even less than space”; Alma, wallowing in depression, answers her fuss-budget minister father’s concern, “What am I going to tell people who ask about you?” with the tart quip, “Tell them I’ve changed, and you’re waiting to see in what way.” And suddenly you catch a whiff of that lavender-and-bourbon sachet—that marvelous capacity for conveying poetic wonder laced with wry self-awareness that none of Williams’s imitators has ever come close to.

The Williams collection contains only a handful of authentic jewels. There is Streetcar, still as amazing a play as any American has written, and the best parts of Glass Menagerie—a misshapen mood piece that, despite its popularity, never really works in production because it’s booby-trapped, possibly unresolvably, by the way Williams conceived the two female characters. There are the crazy, deliriously top-heavy surrealist fable Camino Real (1953) and the hilarious screenplay Baby Doll, which he fashioned, for Elia Kazan, out of a couple of his one-acts and which came out in 1956. And there’s one other. According to Williams, he returned to Summer and Smoke during a summer sojourn in Rome in 1951 and wrote a variation on it, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. He was so happy with the result (and so much preferred it to the original) that he brought it to London, where Summer and Smoke was about to be produced, hoping to substitute the rewrite. But when he arrived, the earlier play was already in rehearsal, so his friend Maria St. Just put the rewritten script away for him in a drawer, where it remained, forgotten, for years. Evidently it was she who reminded him of Eccentricities in the mid-sixties, at which point he reread it, made a few further revisions, and got it produced at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York (in 1964), the Theater Club in Washington, D.C. (1966), and Guildford, England (1967). But it didn’t appear on Broadway until 1976, where it starred Betsy Palmer as Alma and David Selby as John, and—to Williams’s dismay—was poorly received by the critics. (The one glowing review was by Clive Barnes, but he seemed to misunderstand completely what he’d seen.) Later that year, it was mounted on PBS, memorably, with Blythe Danner and Frank Langella—and that was my own introduction to Eccentricities. Danner gave the kind of performance that should have sent reverberations through the American theater—it was in the same league as Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois—but somehow she and this exquisite, newly discovered play managed to escape notice. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been produced professionally since 1979 (when Sandy Dennis played Alma at the Long Beach Theatre Festival). Perhaps there have been amateur productions, but, aside from my own at College of the Holy Cross in 1989, I don’t know of any. The play is scarcely mentioned by anyone who’s written about Williams, and then slightingly: Williams’s biographer Donald Spoto, for example, dismisses it as “a vastly inferior work in which the protagonists lack subtlety and sensitivity, and the writing lacks coherence.” Spoto goes so far as to credit a stupid theory by Williams’s friend Donald Windham that Eccentricities, and not Summer and Smoke, may have been the first written.

Well, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale certainly isn’t a play for people who have fond feelings about Summer and Smoke. It’s no mere renovation of the earlier version, tightened up and given a fresh paint job. It’s really a different play altogether.

Summer and Smoke is Victorian melodrama with an intended O. Henry twist. Alma, the minister’s daughter, is in love with John, the doctor’s son, with what she believes is a pure and idealized romantic love. She thinks he can be heroic if he resists the temptations of the sensual part of his nature, which he, to his father’s disgust, embraces wholeheartedly, showing up at home in the middle of the night, smashed out of his head, after gambling and whoring in the seedy section of town. The cast of characters includes a stock-company Latin tamale, oozing sex, who has a rich, vulgar, alcoholic father determined to buy John for her. The play contains several stock scenes: in one, John takes Alma to one of his haunts, where his advances and the sounds of the cockfight below drive her away; in another, hysterical with unadmitted jealousy over his liaison with Rosa Gonzales, Alma telephones saintly old Doc Buchanan (who’s battling an epidemic in another town) to report the scandalous goings-on in his house and the Doc ends up dead, shot by drunken Señor Gonzales.

John, understandably furious at Alma’s interfering, forces her to look at the anatomy chart that’s had a prominent place on stage throughout the play; he yells that her insides aren’t made of rose leaves, that, like everyone else, she has a brain that’s hungry for truth, a belly that’s hungry for food, and a sex that’s hungry for love. “I reject your opinion of where love is, and the kind of truth you believe the brain is seeking!” is Alma’s reply to his bullying, “There is something not shown on the chart.” (John sardonically points out here that “Alma” is Spanish for “soul.”) It isn’t until the end of the play that Alma acknowledges the desire implied by that damn chart (one of Williams’s most insistent and irritating symbols) and kisses him on the mouth. But she’s too late: sobered by his father’s murder, he’s abandoned his old, wild ways, become the hero Alma had faith he could be (carrying on his dad’s fight, he conquers the epidemic), and gotten engaged to one of Alma’s young voice pupils, whom Williams makes sure to describe as “healthy.” In their final exchange, Alma and John explicate the title. She assures him that “the girl who said ‘no’—she doesn’t exist any more, she died last summer—suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her,” while he explains, “I’ve come around to your way of thinking, that something else is in there, an immaterial something—as thin as smoke....” In Alma’s words, “The tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance.”

Except for isolated patches of dialogue, nothing in the play works very well. It comes across as awfully callow, seeming to emerge from an imagination far younger and simpler than the one that produced Streetcar. (Summer and Smoke appeared in New York later, but was actually written earlier than Streetcar; its maiden production in Dallas, preceded the New York opening of the more celebrated play.) And despite the rigid schematics—the rectory and the doctor’s office are side by side on the stage, and the script underscores the opposition between Alma and John with the regularity of a metronome—it comes across as dramatically shaky, too. Perhaps that’s because you can’t believe in Gonzales or Rosa or cherubic Nellie Ewell, the healthy girlchild, and because Doc Buchanan, Sr., the fount of wisdom when he advises Alma, encouraging her to recognize her potential for sexual passion (he’s meant to be her “good” father, while the Reverend Winemiller, milky and repressive and utterly self-absorbed, is her “bad” father), suddenly switches roles when John enters and he becomes the patriarch in a prodigal son play.

He’s not the only inconsistency, either. Alma tells John that “life is such a mysteriously complicated thing that no one should really presume to judge and condemn the behavior of anyone else”— which is probably as close to a statement of Williams’s philosophy as any of his characters ever makes—but she never stops judging and condemning him. And though her moralizing seems clearly to be the expression of her hysteria, we’re led to believe that, in the end, it has a profound influence over him. If Williams means this shift to be part of the irony of the turned tables, it sure doesn’t ring true. I assume he got stuck in that nineteenth-century quagmire, not realizing how much morality he was dredging up—that he didn’t intend John’s conversion to play with the eleven-o’clock finality it always assumes in performance. When they’re alone together on stage for the last time, Alma asks John if he’s happy, and he replies, “I’ve settled with life on fairly acceptable terms. Isn’t that all a reasonable person can ask for?...It’s best not to ask for too much.” These lines seem to imply that his metamorphosis has numbed him in some way—removed his life force. But his subsequent speeches leave us with the impression that he feels Alma has given him something wonderful that has changed him irrevocably, and it’s impossible to hear them without thinking, “Aha! So he’s a better man for the experience.” So we’re left with a little homily—melodrama instead of drama.

In Summer and Smoke, Williams was clearly trying for the fleet, impressionistic quality he would bring to Streetcar. His stage directions insist, “Everything possible should be done to give an unbroken fluid quality to the sequence of scenes.” But the play is too weighed down by archaic dramatic ideas to move with the quicksilver speed he’d envisioned, and the structure is a mess. When John returns to his hometown, Glorious Hill, Mississippi, the victor in the war against the fever bugs, and the locals gather at the station to present him with a loving cup, you feel you’ve been wrenched ahead into the wrap-up. It’s as patently absurd as the final episode of some glossy Hollywood soap from the fifties where the surviving characters reappear in bluish-white wigs so you’ll know time has passed. But the play does have a memorable, bittersweet ending—Alma, recovering from John’s rejection, picks up a young traveling salesman at the stone fountain in the town square. This tête-à-tête  at the feet of Eternity (the name of the fountain) is the play’s grace note. It brings the drama full circle; the opening scene is also set at the fountain, on the Fourth of July, when John lobs a firecracker under Alma’s bench, symbolically inflaming this Episcopalian virgin. (In Williams’s original script, Alma and John are children in this scene; the acting edition amends it to make productions more practical. The alteration is a big improvement.) And it suggests the kind of audacity that gave birth to Blanche DuBois: you sense that Alma’s salvation will be a sexual one, and that it will come at the hands of strangers, like that of Nellie Ewell’s mother, “the merry widow of Glorious Hill,” who loiters at the train depot to pick up men. You can feel Williams drop the Victorianism of the John Buchanan plot like a sandbag and float into the twentieth century; life becomes again the “mysteriously complicated thing” it was in Streetcar, beyond judgment and condemnation. At the end of the play, you sense that Williams knew where he was going, even if he couldn’t figure out how to get there.

In The Eccentricities of a Nightingale he finally maps out that route. This later version of the material is a beautifully crafted, supremely confident piece of work; without seeming to struggle for it, Williams achieves the fluency he begged for in the stage directions of Summer and Smoke. Written with infinite tenderness, like a benediction (and like Eugene O’Neill’s great Moon for the Misbegotten), the play is about the magic of human sexuality, about mysteries we can’t solve, and its structure—three acts of three scenes each—is redolent of fairy tales. (Act III, Scene Two, even ends in a puff of magic.) All the scenes take place at magical times—the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year’s and the Fourth once again; Williams sprints from holiday to holiday, presenting his story in flashes of brilliant color and feeling. You recognize all the poetic elements from Summer and Smoke—the stone angel, the fireworks display, even the anatomy chart (it sits prominently in the doctor’s office, but, blessedly, no one alludes to it). But this time Williams has discovered the right impressionistic setting for them.

Once again Alma, the daughter of a minister and his dementedly childish wife (his cross to bear, as he keeps reminding Alma), lives next door to the dashing, brilliant, young John Buchanan, whom she has loved for as long as she can remember. As in Summer and Smoke, she teaches voice and sings at public occasions, and belongs to a group of self-proclaimed intellectuals, the town’s misfits, who gather once a week to present papers and read verse and drama aloud. Williams reprises the painful scene where she convinces John to make an appearance at one of their sessions and he departs prematurely, throwing her into confusion and finally rage. The play ends, once more, at the fountain, with an encounter between Alma and a young salesman, and Alma’s final moment on stage is a silent communion between Alma and the angel—Williams calls it “a little parting salute.” But just about everything else has changed. John isn’t a rake, wearing down the patience of his dear old dad; he’s a sensitive and naturally generous young doctor whose fascination with Miss Alma worries his overbearing, possessive mother. Old Doc Buchanan never makes an appearance in this version; he remains in the wings, silently ailing. Rosa Gonzales and her father have also been cut, along with Nellie Ewell.

Mrs. Buchanan shares the town view that Miss Alma is an eccentric who has probably inherited a touch of her mother’s lunacy. She conspires to keep John away from Alma, going so far as to invent a house call John has to make in his father’s place so that she can rescue him from the misfits’ weekly gathering. She and the Reverend Winemiller double each other; both convey the official opinion that the emotional expressiveness of Alma’s singing, her high-flown diction, her friends, even her habit of scattering crumbs to the birds in the town square are embarrassing signs of eccentricity. Yet as Williams portrays them, the Reverend in his rectory with a lavender woollen shawl wrapped around him and Mrs. Buchanan in her Santa Claus outfit, distributing Christmas gifts through the neighborhood, or rubbing her son’s feet for him by the fire in his bedroom, are far more grotesque figures than Alma, so we immediately discount their point of view. Besides, both are highly interested parties: Mrs. Buchanan is motivated by her proprietariness about her son and her vision of how his life ought to turn out (and there’s clearly no room in it for a Miss Alma), while the Reverend Winemiller is disturbed by anything that might make him look bad in the eyes of the town. (He keeps his crazy wife Grace hidden away as much as possible.)

Alma is precious, of course, to Williams—and to us. She’s one of his poets, like Blanche DuBois and Tom Wingfield, and I’d say that, after Blanche and Stanley Kowalski, she’s his most extraordinary creation. She’s linked with Eternity, the angel, whose pose is a “gracefully crouching position with wings lifted and hands held together in front to form a cup from which water flows.” Alma is borne on the wings of her own honesty and integrity and poetic imagination. She’s an eternal suppliant for love, and she is, for John and for us, the cooling salve in this horrid little town. Flighty and affected and unguarded, she can also make you want to look away in embarrassment for her. (Her closest equivalents might be Katharine Hepburn’s Alice Adams, Agnes Moore- head’s Fanny Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons—both characters out of Booth Tarkington—and Maggie Smith’s Judy in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.) Dressed in pale yellow when we first meet her, she’s also linked with sudden, perilous, flaming eruptions of beauty—with the fireworks display (her first line, which she repeats at the end of the play, is “The first skyrocket! Oh, look at it burst into a million stars!”); with the wavering candles she wanted her Sunday school children to wear at the Christmas pageant (she was overruled by the dreadful Mrs. Peacock, who screamed that the costumes Alma had sewn for them were flammable, so “they marched in holding little stumps of wax!...as if a wind had blown all the candles out”); with the fire that, as family legend has it, destroyed the Musée Mécanique run by her Aunt Albertine’s paramour, Mr. Schwarzkopf, and burned the lovers to death; with the Christmas snow, the first to fall on Glorious Hill in a century, that gets in her eyelashes and makes her see rainbows, and the sun-dazzled ice that turns the trees into “huge crystal chandeliers”; and especially with the fire in the cold room she and John rent for an hour, which dies ignominiously and then, without warning, flames again, phoenix-like, when he removes the veil from her face and kisses her lips.

Alma’s outbursts of emotion—in song and in her daily life—are no more controllable than these flames. She rushes from feeling to feeling as the play scurries from holiday to holiday, underlining the tremulousness and breathlessness with which she meets life. She doesn’t understand why she’s mocked by others in Glorious Hill, mimicked at parties, spied on when she feeds the birds, criticized for her overemotionalism, and the idiosyncrasies in her speech; she doesn’t do these things by choice—they’re part of who she is. Her father, who frets over her affectations and accuses her of gilding the lily, is sure she can control them—correct them. “Your hands fly about you like a pair of wild birds!” he tells her; he urges her to fold them together neatly, like a little steeple. He doesn’t see what we do: that she’s touched by poetry, like Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. And her eruptions produce some of the most remarkable poetry in American drama, especially in the scene where she confronts John after he’s deserted her club meeting:

Oh, how wise and superior you are! John Buchanan, Junior, graduate of Johns Hopkins, magna cum laude!—Brilliant, yes, as the branches after the ice storm, and just as cold and inhuman!... You sat among us like a lord of the earth, the only handsome one there, the one superior one! And oh, how we all devoured you with our eyes, you were like holy bread being broken among us.—But snatched away!... Oh, I suppose you ’re right to despise us, my little  company of the faded and frightened and different and odd and lonely. You don’t belong to that club but I hold an office in it!... And when you marry, you’ll marry some Northern beauty. She will have no eccentricities but the eccentricities of beauty and perfect calm. Her hands will have such repose, such perfect repose when she speaks. They won’t fly about her like wild birds...they won’t reach above her when she cries out in the night! Suddenly, desperately—fly up, fly up in the night!—reaching for something—nothing!—clutching at— space....

In Summer and Smoke, John leaves the misfits’ meeting of his own volition, presumably driven to distraction by the intellectual posturing and childish squabbling of Alma’s friends. The John of Eccentricities has too much compassion to deliberately humiliate Alma in that way—but when his mother arrives for him, with a threadbare excuse, he accedes to her wishes. Act I of Eccentricities is called “The Feeling of a Singer”; Act II, ironically, “The Tenderness of a Mother”; and on one level we can see these two women, the singer and the mother, as a pair of moons orbiting around John, who, sensitive to the concerns of both, is often in the position of tending to one or the other. Rather than being the play’s central figure, he exists in relation to Alma, the protagonist, whom he engages, advises, listens to, accompanies, and finally makes love to. Williams has accomplished something very unusual with John Buchanan: he’s created a figure almost in repose who is still a flesh-and-blood character, who functions independently and with a rather mysterious balance and integrity. (Unlike Alma, he never celebrates holidays, except to give his mother pleasure; his world is a steady current.) For at least half the play Alma and John share the stage, alone together; Williams has written five separate scenes for them (including all of Act III, Scenes One and Two). And yet John isn’t an antagonist for Alma; he’s a catalyst for and a reflection of the changes that go on inside her. Summer and Smoke, with its conventional conflict, is probably more comfortable for theatergoers; Eccentricities is a far more radical attempt at impressionism—again like The Member of the Wedding, where all the drama is in the growth of the central (adolescent) character and the playwright deliberately puts all the big dramatic events offstage, during scene breaks. It’s astonishing that Williams can make the delicate mechanism of the Alma-John scenes work, but with the right actors—like Blythe Danner and Frank Langella in the PBS production—it does, brilliantly.

When the play begins, Alma is trapped in the suffocating respectability of the rectory and crying to get out. She’s appalled by her father’s genteel, bland suggestions about how to comport herself when she sings. She’d rather not sing at all than be imprisoned inside the steeple of his Puritanism. Her mother escaped it by retreating into childish sensuality and egocentricity. (In Summer and Smoke, Williams blames Mrs. Winemiller for her own condition: in a stage direction he calls her “a spoiled and selfish girl who evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness.” In Eccentricities he clearly shifts the blame to the Rev. Winemiller—Grace fell apart on their wedding night.)

Grace Winemiller is associated in this play with unchecked impulses (her reined-in husband’s nightmare)—she clamors for ice cream, she blurts out whatever happens to be at the top of her mind (she mortifies her daughter by announcing, when John and his mother stop by the rectory for a Christmas visit, “Alma’s in love with that tall boy!”), she reveals the traces of a constant interior monologue (“She sounds like a small running brook or a swarm of bees and her face changes expression as her interior world falls under light and shadow”), and she can’t stop talking about her sister Albertine, who used to live in the rectory and whose escape took the form of an elopement with the bigamous Mr. Schwarzkopf. Grace doesn’t just tell the story; she relives it, claiming to receive letters from the long-dead Albertine and mysterious messages that Schwarzkopf is about to set fire to his museum of mechanical marvels. Ruined by an unwise investment in a non-mechanical snake that died on him, Schwarzkopf, in desperation, did indeed burn down the Musée Mécanique for the insurance money. The Aunt Albertine story, which ends with her perishing in the fire, her hand clutching a button from her lover’s coat so she wouldn’t die empty-handed, is like the grimmest of Grimm fairy tales, or a tale of enchantment reimagined by Poe.

Albertine is Grace’s alter ego—she’s the one that got away. And increasingly, as the play goes on, Alma identifies with her aunt too. She tells John that she was christened Albertine, her name changed to Alma after the Schwarzkopf scandal, but “your name can be changed more easily than your blood and the instincts in it.” She samples John’s cigarette, because Albertine smoked, and she even takes to wearing a plumed hat, as Albertine did. It’s the plume on her hat that she touches “as if to see if it were still there” when she salutes the stone angel in the final scene.

John is crucial to Alma’s escape—which comes in the form of a discovery of her own sexuality—not only because he’s the object of her desire, but also because his admiration and respect for her ground her, reassure her of the strength of her own eccentricities. When Mrs. Buchanan calls her clownish, disturbing, demented, he insists on her sanity and beauty, focusing on her eyes: “They’re never the same for two seconds. The light keeps changing in them, like, like—a running stream of clear water....” When Alma’s hands clutch at space, John sees something in that space (a soap-bubble “hanging adrift in something that’s even less than space”— Williams lifts the image from Summer and Smoke) and shows it to her; when she replies, “Then even space is a prison!— not—infinite...,” he assures her that it’s “a very large prison, even large enough for you to feel free in, Miss Alma.” John, who’s associated with the corporeal world of laboratories and hospitals, who favors profane music to sacred, who is unmistakably a sexual being, is Alma’s necessary escort out of her father’s thin-blooded, asexual world. But the play doesn’t place her under his tutelage in any way; he calms her, but the qualities she reveals amaze him—her boldness, her integrity, and especially her honesty, which he says is the plume on her hat. (The last act is titled “A Cavalier’s Plume.”) In his office, after her outburst, she responds to his warm breath on her frozen fingers (the emblem of her virginal terror of sex) and to the shot of brandy he’s poured for her:

ALMA: All human breath is warm—so pitifully! So pitifully warm and soft as children’s fingers.... [She turns her face to him and takes his face between the fingers of both her hands.] The brandy worked very quickly. You know what I feel like now. I feel like a water lily on a—Chinese lagoon.... I will sleep, perhaps. But—I won’t see you—again....

JOHN: I’m leaving next Monday.

ALMA: Monday....

JOHN: Aren’t there any more meetings we could—go to?

ALMA: You don’t like meetings.

JOHN: The only meetings I like are between two people.

ALMA: We are two people, we’ve met—do you like our meeting? [John nods, smiling. ] Then meet me again!

The final act of Eccentricities is as mysteriously beautiful as John’s definition of space. And it’s the exploration of a mystery, prepared for by others in the play (the snake at the Musée Mécanique who swallowed his blanket, Alma’s allusion to the proverb, “Before you love, you must learn to walk over snow—and leave no footprint”). On the unusually cold New Year’s night in this historic, snowy Mississippi holiday, John takes Alma out to the movies, but there’s a snapping tension in the air. (Williams directs their dialogue in Act III, Scene One to be “charged as though it were a quarrel,” though is isn’t overtly one.) Overwhelmed by the experience of being on a date with the man she loves, she’s spoken barely a word all evening, and she’s disappointed in herself and disappointed in how their time together has turned out. She insists they stop in the freezing square, where she talks about the unsuccessful evenings she’s spent with other men (“wide, wide stretches of—uninhabitable ground between us”) and about Aunt Albertine and Mr. Schwarzkopf. Finally, she confesses her love, almost casually: “Remember what mother said when she burst into the room Christmas Eve? ‘Alma has fallen in love with that tall boy!’—It’s true, I had, but much longer ago.” And then, startlingly, she invites him to take her to a rented room. He does so reluctantly—a gesture of Southern-gentlemanly concession, like coming to her meeting because she asked him to or leaving it because his mother was so insistent. In this chilly room, where they drink Chianti and she tries to revive the fading fire by tossing the plume from her hat into the fireplace because “something has to be sacrificed to a fire,” he tells her that whatever happens between them can’t go beyond that room because he’s not in love with her. “I wasn’t counting on that, tonight or ever,” she assures him.

JOHN: God, you sit there and tell me that you ’re expecting nothing?

ALMA: I’m not telling you that. I expect a great deal, but for tonight only. Afterward, nothing, nothing at all.

JOHN: Afterward comes quickly in a room rented for an hour.

ALMA: An hour is the life-time of some creatures.

JOHN: Generations of some creatures can be fitted into an hour, the sort of creatures I see through my microscope, but you’re not one of those creatures, you ’re a complex being, an hour isn’t a life-time for you, Alma.

ALMA: Give me the hour and I’ll make a life-time of it.

But the fire won’t start, and John, who’s also a poet, sees it as a symbol—“Sometimes things say things for people. Things that people find too painful or too embarrassing to say....” Alma acknowledges, graciously, gallantly, that their experiment has been a failure (“How gently a failure can happen! The way that some people die, lightly, unconsciously, losing themselves with their breath....”) and warmly, without rancor or regret, wishes him a happy New Year:

But now—it’s another year.... Another stretch of time to be discovered and entered and explored, and who knows what we’ll find in it? Perhaps the coming true of our most improbable dreams!—I’m not ashamed of tonight! I think that you and I have been honest together, even though we failed!

Then, Williams tells us, “something changes between them.” John kisses her, and the fire revives itself. Awed, Alma asks, “Where did the fire come from?” and John answers, “No one has ever been able to answer that question!” Obviously Williams wishes to preserve the mystery of sexual attraction, so it’s unwise to over-analyze what happens at the end of this scene. But I think Alma’s honesty and gallantry are at least in part the aphrodisiac that stirs the smothered fire.

The Epilogue takes place on another Fourth of July, “an indefinite time later.” Another soprano is singing offstage; Alma has become a disreputable town character, no longer invited to sing at public occasions. But now, when the townspeople mock her, she faces them off; someone in the shadows laughs at her and “she turns about abruptly, imitating the laughter with a rather frightening boldness.” She picks up the young salesman in the square as, we gather, she has picked up many other men (in Summer and Smoke he’s her first conquest). And after delivering her own distinctive vocal tour of Glorious Hill, which focuses our attention on her rebellion (she speaks of the steeple on the Episcopal church, her now dead father’s church, as culminating in “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven”) and on her present confidence in her instincts and her senses (“The name is carved in the stone block at the base of the statue, but it’s not visible in this light, you’d have to read it with your fingers as if you were blind”), she whisks him off to shady Tiger Town. We might be tempted to read the Alma of the Epilogue as a pathetic specimen, but Williams salutes her: he writes this scene as her triumph—over the town, over her father, over whatever repressive forces have tried to turn her against her own true nature. As the salesman rushes off to hail a taxi, he says, “Don’t get lost, don’t lose me!” and Alma replies, “Oh, no, I’m not going to lose you before I’ve lost you!” She is bound to make one more lifetime out of one more hour. Magnificently eccentric to the last, wearing proudly the plumed hat John rescued from the fire, she fades out with the radiance of the skyrocket that bursts into amillion stars.