Tennessee Williams and Sports
presence of others. He had bought a rubber swinuning cap
wiiich he carried up to the beach with him to a secluded spot
where he could put it on unobserved and take a swim by
himself, for he felt that a man wearing a swimming cap was
somewiiat ludicrous-looking and not in the bright tradition.
(193)
But, as he loses his looks after marrying a girl called Gretchen, w4iom he later
abandons, ''the manly assurance petered out of Jimmie and he began to lie
around the apartment in shorts. . . not even much caring to go to the beach
anymore” (194). Such would have been Williams’s own fate had he succumbed
to losing his looks, his health, and his desire for fame. "The Interval” reads like
a gloss on Williams’s fears over his short-lived career as an MGM screenwriter,
translated through Jimmie’s initial delight in sports because of the attention he
hoped they would gamer and then in his pudgy and sorrowful retreat fi’om them
(Kolin "Williams’s 'Interval’”).
Like Jimmie, Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird o f Youth is an aspiring
Hollywood star wliose previous achievements in sports only deflate his current
dreams by contrast. Attached to movie star Princess Kosmonopolous by a most
tenuous service contract. Chance returns to his hometown of St. Cloud wliere he
is remembered as a handsome diver by Miss Lucy, Boss Finley’s mistress:
Y’know this boy Chance Wayne used to be so attractive I
couldn’t stand it. But now I can, almost stand it. Every Sunday
in summer I used to drive out to the municipal beach and
watch him dive off the high tower. I’d take binoculars with me
and then he put on those free divin’ exhibitions. You still dive.
Chance? Or have you given that up? (87)
Though Chance admits that he still dives, his ambitions for stardom, like his
name, have waned. With "thinning” hair, fleeting youth, and degrading rumors
about his being a "beach boy” in California, Chance is hardly the golden athlete
Miss Lucy fantasizes about. Williams gives Chance a sport—diving—that has
ominous, Freudian implications for this stud-star wlio will be castrated by Boss
Finley for violating his daughter Heavenly. By the end of the play. Chance will
not be able to go "diving” as he once did in his youth in St. Cloud. The sport fits
the dream, and the crime, in Williams’s play.
An early (circa 1943) Williams poem, "Dark Arm, Hanging Over the
Edge of Infinity,” celebrates the body of an athlete who has neither aged nor
been maimed. Addressed to a "Sleeping Negro” pitcher whose "fingers” are
"dangling emptily” {Collected Poems 87) just after he had made a masterly
throw, Williams’s poem exhorts this baseball powerhouse to grasp the
significance of his next move. Sexualizing the black athlete’s body, Williams