Everything about the night was intentional, almost thematic. The food, the conversation, the pace. We even had Kopi Luwak coffee—made from beans that pass through a civet’s digestive system—once prized for its rarity and smoothness, now better understood as a symbol of how appetite, prestige, and story can sometimes outpace substance.
The evening revolved loosely around the idea of the Vieux Carré, French for “Old Square,” the historic heart of New Orleans. The French Quarter. Old streets laid out centuries ago. A place where music, food, decay, beauty, and excess all coexist. Vieux Carré is also the name of a classic cocktail—and the title of a play by Tennessee Williams set in that very neighborhood. Without realizing it at the time, the setting had already chosen the author.
I hadn’t really read much Tennessee Williams before. So over the next few days I read "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Glass Menagerie". I wasn’t blown away by either. They’re interesting, important, and historically significant—but by today’s streaming standards, they feel restrained, even dated. I can see why Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski added a whole new gear to Streetcar—his infamous “STELLA!” practically lives outside the text now—but on the page, the plays felt a bit like the playwright’s name itself: great titles, evocative, suggestive… but not electrifying for me.
What did stop me cold was an essay.
Before Streetcar opened in New York in December 1947, Tennessee Williams published an essay in The New York Times Drama Section titled “A Streetcar Named Success.” And in that essay, Williams is not writing about theater so much as he is writing about the danger of arrival.
He begins by describing how abruptly success came to him after The Glass Menagerie—how one life ended and another began almost overnight:
I will quote a lot of this essay - It stayed with me for days.....
“I was snatched out of a virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence… My experience was not unique.
Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans.
The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed.
This was security at last. I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment.
In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surfaces of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rainstorm flooded the suite.
I lived on room-service. But in this, too, there was disenchantment. Sometime between the moment when I ordered dinner over the 'phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it.
Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.
I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well of cynicism rose in me.
Conversations all sounded like they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends' voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy.
I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them.
I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery. I got so sick of hearing people say, "I loved your play!" that I could not say thank you any more. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another. I was walking around dead in my shoes, and I knew it but there was no one I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take him aside and tell him what was the matter.
This curious condition persisted about three months, till late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation, mainly because of the excuse it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask.
It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye.
When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world.
I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on pavements and human voices especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birds'. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.
Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called "The Poker Night," which later became "A Streetcar Named Desire." It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.
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 whitehot 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. You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you "have a name" is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition--and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!
It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her,
(note: William James uses the term in his 1907 book Pragmatism. There is a certain worship of success in American life, a devotion to what he calls the “bitch-goddess Success.”)
with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidneyshaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that's what you are or were intended to be.
Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about--What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth-serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.
(Note- I am reminded of the Guy de Maupassant quote that is understood to be a pithy summary of his outlook on life and desire: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”)
Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!"
(note: William Saroyan & The Time of Your Life (1939) Saroyan wrote the play in the late 1930s, on the eve of war, in a moment when America was anxious, disillusioned, and unsure what “winning” even meant anymore. The line comes from the play’s epigraph and recurring moral center: “In the time of your life—live!” And the idea —“that purity of heart is the one success worth having”—is Saroyan’s explicit thesis.)
That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
Reading this essay, it struck me that Williams wasn’t just describing a personal crisis. He was diagnosing a cultural one. What he feared in his own life—the confusion of success with safety, prosperity with meaning—is a trap that has always haunted the American Dream. And when opportunity is severed from virtue, the dream quietly becomes a nightmare.
Every February, I try to observe some kind of fast. I don’t want to go into the details now, but reading Williams—and thinking through where success, comfort, and attention quietly reshape us—has already begun to influence what that fast will look like this year. Rather than a withdrawal for its own sake, it feels more like an experiment in resistance: a way of paying closer attention to what I consume and what consumes me. I’ll be curious to see where it leads, and perhaps when the month is over, I’ll have something worth reporting—not as a conclusion, but as an experience.
Update: This is kind of bizarre, but in trying to capture the mood of this amazing essay from Williams- I felt I needed a more bleak symbol... so it landed at the tragedy of Howard Hughes-
Song: The Last Days of Howard Hughes
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