Vieux Carré

"If The Glass Menagerie depicts Williams’ life with his family in St Louis, Vieux Carré depicts Williams’ life once he had left home and gone to New Orleans. It roughly maps onto Williams’ actual biography. The fundamental difference is that Williams did not just leave St Louis and never return; he returned several times, even after his so-called moment of liberation. In Vieux Carré, there’s a sense of romanticism and finality—the character based on Williams can never return. When Williams came to New Orleans, he stayed at a boarding house— 722 Toulouse Street —and had several run-ins with his landlady, many of which he stages in the play. This landlady was very cantankerous, very intrusive. In the play, she coerces free labour from him because she knows he doesn’t have money, so she makes him drum up an advertising campaign for her: Meals for a quarter, in the Quarter. So people are coming to the boarding house, picking up cheap meals, and going on their way. Now, the main crux of Vieux Carré is the writer’s relationship with his first lover, Nightingale. Where The Glass Menagerie has no queer sexuality to speak of, Vieux Carré is notable because there is a love scene at the heart of it. Williams, or the character based on Williams, is initiated into queer life and allowed a fleeting glimpse into queer love through this relationship with a fellow tenant. This relationship is short lived. The writer is still trying to negotiate the sense of shame and guilt associated with homosexuality in American culture in the early 1930s. There is a lot to work through in these negative emotions. But there is also the sense, at the end of the play when he leaves the boarding house, that he will be able to come to grips with his sexuality—if not now, in New Orleans, then at a point in the future. What leads to the writer, who is not named, having to leave the boarding house is the landlady, Mrs Wire, pouring boiling water through holes into the studio of a queer photographer named Biggs, because she thinks he is throwing orgies. She is completely homophobic and decides she is not going to have it, and unleashes a wave of violence onto her tenants. She’s taken to court by Biggs, found guilty of criminal negligence, is fined, and at that point the writer decides he cannot ever come to terms with his homosexuality while living in this boarding house and decides to leave. Vieux Carré was written seven years into the height of the gay liberation movement. Williams had an awkward relationship with the movement; on one hand, he made public statements to the effect of, ‘I’m not a political writer,’ or ‘I’m not going to limit my audience by just writing about queer people.’ But the fact is, the gay liberation movement gave Williams the wherewithal to come out publicly, during an appearance on the David Frost show, where Frost broached the question of Williams’ sexuality very directly. Williams said, and I’ll quote him directly: “I don’t want to cause a scandal, but I’ve covered the waterfront.” So he was outspoken about his sexuality and well-versed in queer sexual subcultures. It seems to me—and I make this case in the book I wrote about Williams—that for Williams to say that he didn’t owe at least some debt to the gay liberation movement, both personally and in terms of his career, it is a bit disingenuous. I think it’s no accident that he makes these explicit pronouncements on television during the 1970s, or that he just so happens to be staging a love scene in the middle of a late autobiographical play, after being so reticent initially. Vieux Carré is both a continuation of The Glass Menagerie but also, in several ways, much more radical than The Glass Menagerie could have ever been, because the sociopolitical climate had changed, allowed him more freedom."