Motivations in The Glass Menagerie

Wednesday night I finished reading Tennessee William's powerful play, The Glass Menagerie. I referenced an article by Williams this past Saturday and have been drinking the story like a daily nightcap since. You can feel the tension ebb and flow throughout as you ache for Tom and Laura. 

There are four characters in the play--five if you count the absent father whose influence hangs like stale air over the family's apartment. Tom is the narrator, Amanda his mother and Laura his handicapped sister whose life now revolves around her collection of glass figurines, and the "Gentleman Caller" who waits in the wings till the climax of the play.

Tom works at a warehouse, supporting the family with a meager income. In the evenings he goes out. Amanda from the start needles him about his smoking and his late nights. Where does he go? He says he goes to the movies. 

In Scene Four Amanda asks, "Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom?"

"I go to the movies because--I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to. the movies."

* * *
What struck me about this statement is how it parallels a central theme in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a mid-1950s bestseller that, along with The Lonely Crowd, said a lot about the shadows that hung over our nation's post-war years. 

The central characters in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit are Tom and Betsy Rath. This Tom had been in the service during the war, and now that he was back in the States in the daily grind of the corporate world, he'd begun to feel himself unable to just accept the drudgery of his working life compared to the adventures he'd experienced abroad. It's interesting that the author, Sloan Wilson, gave his central characters the name of Rath. 

* * * 
In The Glass Menagerie, the character of Amanda is a smothering overbearing presence throughout, micromanaging the lives of her two grown children. Tom escapes into the night, in part, to escape Amanda's perpetual needling and the stifling atmosphere of the apartment.

From the outset we're made aware of the walls Laura has built around her self, the "safe place" that allows her to function. This is another area of tension in the story as Amanda glosses over Laura's interior fragility, sees her daughter in an unrealistic, idealized image. Tom has no such illusions, but out of duty brings home the "gentleman caller" that Amanda desires for her daughter.

Amanda's primary motivation is security. Her husband went rogue a long while ago and her fear is that Tom will abandon her as well. What she doesn't see is that instead of love being her motivating principle, it is fear that impels her to smother the joy out of everything as she compensates with a fake cheer and fake caring. 

The message Amanda needs to take to heart comes from the pen of Robert Burns:
O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
to see oursels as others see us.

Interpretation: 
Oh, would some Power give us the gift
To see ourselves as others see us!
Source: To a Louse

Long Sentences Are Just Fine (If You Can Pull Them Off)

Illustration by the author.

When I first became deliberate about becoming a writer I read every book on writing that I could find in the library and bought the ones I thought best so I could study them. More than one of these books wrote about sentence length. Most urged writers to use short sentences. Most also suggested that writing is more interesting when we vary sentence length. One of these authors, if I recall correctly, stated that we shouldn't write sentences longer than 17 words. 

Like many young writers I took these instructions to heart. Hemingway famously wrote short, punchy sentences, right? Wasn't Raymond Carver a "short sentences" kind of guy?

So I was mildly amused the other night as I read an article by Tennessee Williams about how his life had been changed through the sudden fame garnered by his play The Glass Menagerie. The article first appeared in The New York Times. It drew me in immediately, despite the absence of short sentences. In fact, I really wasn't paying attention at all to sentence length because the storytelling was so engaging.

Now check out this sentence.  

No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind--and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success--there may be some point in comparing the two estates.    

63 words. A paragraph with only one period. But what struck me was the 68-word follow-up paragraph, another single sentence. 

The sort of life that 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.   

The only reason I noticed these two sentences is because I'd listened to a series of lectures on writing longer sentences. The written language is an art form and once you know the rules, it's OK to make your own rules. 

No, that's not the whole of it. I noticed these sentences because I could relate to what he was saying. 

As for Hemingway, he also knew how to vary sentence length. Check out this 125-word sentence that I bookmarked the last time I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. The sentence appears at an intense moment in the story. As you read it, there is a feeling of breathlessness as the motorcycle ascends and the sentence ascends with it. 

And as the motorcycle passed the high gray trucks full of troops, gray trucks with high square cabs and square ugly radiators, steadily mounting the road in the dust and the flicking lights of the pursuing staff car, the red star of the army showing in the light when it passed over the tail gates, showing when the light came onto the sides of the dusty truck bodies, as they passed, climbing steadily now, the air colder and the road starting to turn in bends and switchbacks now, the trucks laboring and grinding, some steaming in the light flashes, the motorcycle laboring now too, and Andrés clinging tight to the front seat as they climbed, Andrés thought this ride on a motorcycle was mucho, mucho. 

For the record, Faulkner has a couple sentences that are more than a thousand words each. 

Are you a writer? Do you restrict yourself with rules about sentence length? What other rules do you bind yourself with? It's never too late to learn a few new tricks.