A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays [antikvár]

FOREWORD* When I came to my writing desk on a recent morning, I found lying on my desk top an unmailed letter that I had written. I began reading it and found this sentence:' We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.' Then I went on to say:' I am afraid that I observe fewer of these amenities than you do. Reason ? My back is to the wall and has been to the wail for so long that the pressure of my back on the wall has started to cnunble the plaster that covers the bricks and mortar.* Isn't it odd that I said the wall was giving way, not my back? I think so. Pursuing this course of free association, I suddenly remembered a diimer date I once had with a distinguished colleague. During the course of this diimer, rather close to the end of it, he broke a long, mournful silence by lifting to me his sympathetic gaze and saying to me, sweetly, 'Tennessee, don't you feel that you are blocked as a writer?' I didn't stop to think of an answer; it came immediately off my tongue without any pause for planning. I said, *Oh, yes, I've always been blocked as a writer but my desire to vmte has been so strong that it has always broken down the block and gone past it.* Nothing untrue comes off the tongue that quickly. It is plaimed speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant. It was literally true. At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable. It immediately became my place of retreat, my cave, my refuge. From what? From being called ¦ Written prior to the Broadway opening of Swed Bird qf Tauth and published in the New Tork Times on Sunday, 8 March 1959.