This article is far too good not to be shared. It is titled “The Catastrophe Called Success,” written by Tennessee Williams, and it exists in Bulgarian translation thanks to the creator of the website librev.com, Zlatko Enev. I have now decided to “pass it on,” because I see it as a continuation of the theme explored in the previous article, “School for Parents — A Spiritual Perspective.”
Thus, Tennessee Williams calls a “catastrophe called success” the unexpected and overwhelming success that his play The Glass Menagerie brought him, catapulting him from the “precarious tenancy of furnished rooms scattered across the country” into an apartment in a first-class Manhattan hotel. This tearing away from “literal obscurity and hurling into sudden fame” is an example of the American Dream fulfilled. The problem is that for a person like Tennessee, this success turns into his greatest nightmare when, against the backdrop of hotel luxury and enthusiastic reviews of his play, he falls into deep depression, inner emptiness, and a spiritual crisis.
Tennessee’s agony lasts about three months, ending with eye surgery and a subsequent departure for Mexico. There, living close to nature, he finds refuge from fame and firm ground beneath his feet:
“My public personality, this little gadget made of mirrors, did not exist here, and thus my natural existence was restored… Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about here—What good is it? Perhaps, in order to get an honest answer, you would have to inject them with a truth serum, but the word they would finally mutter is not suitable for general publication.”
If there is anything good in Tennessee’s success, it is the opportunity it gave him to experience what “success” looks like when it does not make one happy—and to ask the question, “What, then, is the true good?”
“An absorbing interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, which first created some kind of experience that has to be turned into paints or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or whatever else is sufficiently dynamic and expressive—this is what is good for you, if you take your aims seriously at all. William Saroyan has written a magnificent play on this theme—that purity of heart is the only success worth achieving. ‘In the time of your life—live!’ That time is short and it never returns. It slips away while I am writing this and while you are reading it, and the monosyllabic word of the clock says Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposite.”
We usually associate success with becoming Someone, but Someone is a worldly category which, in the face of death, inevitably turns into No One. As it is written on the column left by Omurtag, “Even if a person lives well, they die and another is born.” Security is a satisfying goal only for mediocre minds. Others would fall ill from it. Therefore:
“…the public Someone you become when you ‘make a name’ is a fiction made of mirrors, and the only someone worth being is the lonely and unseen you who has existed since your first breath, and who is the sum of your actions—thereby constantly at risk of being profaned by yourself—and knowing these things, you may even survive the catastrophe of Success!”
— Tennessee Williams, “The Catastrophe Called Success”
Success and the good are closely connected—success is that which is good for us. It is another matter that, in order to understand what that is, we first have to live through a few “catastrophes.”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
