Department of Alchemy 4-273

Once in a while at Houghton Library (Harvard U), I come across a famous writer/author/playwright/professor/screenwriter/what-have-you whose publicly unfamous (yes, I mean not-infamous) scribblings stand out like a wild jackal in Kenmore Square. Today, we in Technical Services came across once such beautifully-composed discovery:

Tennessee Williams

“If I were given a word-association test and the word I was given was playwright, meaning American playwright, I am dreadfully afraid that my immediate, associative response would be “stuffed owl”. Could this be the unfortunate consequence of working too much in hotel-bedrooms where all too often the only good writing surface is the top of a bureau with a mirror above it? Sitting before this bureau-mirror, you look up, gloomily reflective, from your slow mutilation of a clean white piece of paper and if you wear horn-rimmed glasses on a round face, the image that you see resembles an owl’s so much that, on dull mornings, there is an impulse to utter a long-drawn, mornful hoot and to hunch and shrug your shoulders a bit, as if the straight back chair in which you are seated is the branch of a tree in a cold, dampish field with no field-mice in the grass. Yes, such is the charm of most playwrights. Ask any actor or director is [sic] I speak not truth on this subject.”