Writing About Your Obsessions

Close Study: “One Arm” by Tennessee Williams

Read it here, in Internet Archive.

Tennessee Williams is regarded as one of the best playwrights of the 20th century, and rightfully so. But what makes his plays so amazing—their tension, their neurotic and conflicted characters, and their lonesome, complicated settings—can be found just as readily in his short stories.

“One Arm” contains all of Williams’ classic themes: loneliness, confession, irony, queerness, America, and death. In it, a one-armed male escort named Oliver Winemiller is given the death penalty for randomly killing one of his clients. The publication of Oliver’s trial catapults him into celebrity, and many of his clients end up writing him letters that sing his praises while he awaits the day of his death. These letters and his correspondence with them unlock something in Oliver: he had been a stoic for most of his life, and ironically, as his death draws near in a prison he’ll never escape, he is suddenly brimming with life.

If you don’t read this story, at least read these paragraphs from the final page, imbued with poetry and irony:

During the last few hours his attention returned to the letters. He read them over and over, whispering them aloud. And when the warden came to conduct him to the death chamber, he said, “I would like to take these here along with me.” He carried them into the death chamber with him as a child takes a doll or a toy into a dentist’s office to give the protection of the familiar and loved.

The letters were resting companionably in the fork of his thighs when he sat down in the chair. At the last moment a guard reached out to remove them. But Oliver’s thighs closed on them in a desperate vise that could not have been easily broken. The warden gave a signal to let them remain. Then the moment came, the atmosphere hummed and darkened. Bolts from across the frontiers of the unknown, the practically named and employed but illimitably mysterious power that first invested a static infinitude of space with heat and brilliance and motion, were channeled through Oliver’s nerve cells for an instant and then shot back across those immense frontiers, having claimed and withdrawn whatever was theirs in the boy whose lost right arm had been known as “lightning in leather.”

The body, unclaimed after death, was turned over to a medical college to be used in a class room laboratory. The men who performed the dissection were somewhat abashed by the body under their knives. It seemed intended for some more august purpose, to stand in a gallery of antique sculpture, touched only by light through stillness and contemplation, for it had the nobility of some broken Apollo that no one was likely to carve so purely again.

But death has never been much in the way of completion.

I’ll admit, I’m not sure I like the last line of this story—it feels a bit frivolous and achingly poetic. But I think this passage captures Williams’ raw power and imagination. Oliver is an interesting, ironic character, imbued with many childlike qualities despite the Adult life he lived, and written in a way to be both admired and feared from a distance. (Williams once said he could only write characters he felt physical desire for.) And Oliver’s death is written in a haunting, ironic, beautiful way, as though his death is more meaningful than random, more cosmic than tragic. But Oliver’s story is ironic, given that he only discovers the value and beauty of life when he’s sentenced to die. No wonder he enters the death chamber like a child, given that, in many ways, he’s only recently been born.

Tennessee Williams pulls no punches in torturing his characters (and his readers with them). I admire his ability to hone his characters’ voices, set startling scenes, and interrogate realities fundamentally unlike our own. His characters are often navigating circumstances I will never find myself in, but that doesn’t make them any less real and human.

On Literary Preoccupations

The above short story comes from Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories, a 600-odd page book spanning decades of Williams’ work. Reading through it, I was struck that nearly every story contained the same recurring themes: death and unfulfilled desire.

How do you write about the same things over and over again? How do you do that without getting repetitive or boring?

I think most writers write from a place of obsession. You need to be obsessed with something in order to write about it, especially if you’re writing a longer-term project (novel, memoir, poetry collection, etc.). The obsession can be tangible, like baseball or cooking or dysfunctional families. Or, it can be more abstract, like unrequited lust and our cosmic, existential loneliness.

It’s the latter that applies to Williams. A bright, unnerving filament of want and weariness lights its way through Williams’ work. In story after story, someone wants something taboo or illicit; someone dies; someone dies because of their wanting; someone lives only in the shadow of a want they had and lost.

If we want to be Freudian about the whole thing, this isn’t too surprising, given Williams’ life story. He grew up under the household of an abusive, alcoholic father, struggled for many years to establish himself as a writer, and spent much of his young adulthood as a vagrant. Plus, while he did have flings and feelings for women, he spent most of his adult life exploring his homosexuality, which was both taboo and a punishable offense (not to mention, incredibly lonely). The fact that he wrote so many stories with queer and queer-coded characters, particularly in the 40s and 50s, was no small act of bravery.

So his preoccupations with death and desire seem obvious in hindsight. Nonetheless, he built a career out of those preoccupations. How do you do that?

Let me start answering that question with two relevant, but seemingly contradictory quotes on writing:

• “Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.” —May Sarton
• “The advice to ‘write what you know’ is great if you want hundreds of books and articles each year about American creative writing graduates and their dull infatuations with their dull identities. It’s the literary equivalent of a Tesco in Milton Keynes – harmful to your ecology of passions.” —this text post on Tumblr

How are both of these quotes true at the same time? Do 15 year olds really know that much? (Some do.) Should writers only write what they know? (They shouldn’t.)

What connects these two quotes, and what made Tennessee Williams such a potent, dynamic writer, is (forgive me this cliché) the power of imagination.

Williams projected his preoccupations into the most seemingly random and unalike characters. He certainly pulled from his life experiences (so many of his characters are vagrants, degenerates, and neurotic individuals). But he is rarely autobiographical, and it never feels like he’s writing about himself or his “dull identities.” This is something I love about fiction, that it creates a stage for us to explore our feelings and selves and neurotic obsessions through the lives and stories of other people. Which is not to say that fiction answers the questions we ask—usually, fiction raises more questions than it answers. But those questions simply catapult us into the next story, the next essay, the next poem.

It’s important to note that there are certainly wrong ways to “write what you don’t know.” Namely, telling someone else’s story, or telling a story you’re not authorized to tell. (If you paid attention to literary news in the past few years, you might remember the uproar over the publication of American Dirt. I won’t speculate on whether the author should or shouldn’t have published the novel, but this LitHub article summarizes it well and asks similar questions about what can we write about?)

Nonetheless, great fiction bridges the gaps between one’s self and the world. Williams’ preoccupations came from his life story and his struggles with his own identity, but his fiction took those preoccupations, put them in the world around him, and shone a new and spectacular light on his own neurotic obsessions. If obsession is raw ore, fiction is the chisel that chips it into a multifaceted diamond. In Williams’ work, life refracts, and even pain glitters.

So, what are your obsessions and preoccupations? What do you find yourself writing and thinking about over and over again? If you’re afraid of getting repetitive or boring, don’t be. Instead, think about how you can explore your obsessions with new characters, different settings, unique conflicts, unexpected outcomes. Rather than writing what you know, transform what you know, or take the leap and write what you don’t have answers to.

And, give in to your imagination. One theme can last a writer a lifetime, so long as they have the creativity.