Tennessee Williams and Sports
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began to devour the body . . . It took him twenty-four hours to eat the splintered
bones clean” (211). A complex, intricately disturbing narrative, “Desire”
perverts the aims of athletic training—to get in shape and to display the body
beautiful. The manipulating, pounding fingers of the revengeful masseur-trainer
bring agony, dismemberment, and horror. In this story of sadomasochistic
bondage, Williams shows us not a healthy body but a demonized body where the
masseur may in fact be the dark Other residing in Bums himself. As his name
suggests. Bums wants to suffer in atonement for wiiatever offenses he may have
committed. But in terms of sport motifs and allusions, the masseur’s hands also
symbolize the dark antithesis of the Negro pitcher’s arm in Williams’s poem
“Dark Arm.” A small biographical detail sheds light on the “physical culture”
context of “Desire and the Black Masseur.” Writing to Windham from the Via
Aurora in Rome on June 3, 1948, Williams described a massage he had received
that day:
There is a lovely swimming pool. I have an attractive masseur
^\ilo comes in three mornings a week to give me massage and
exercises. He came yesterday and I am still aching all over! I
have lost about 15 pounds due mostly to lack of fat in the diet
but my clothes all look as if they had been designed for the fat
one in Laurel and Hardy. {Windham 207)
Clearly, Williams’s experiences at the masseur’s were the felicitous opposite of
Anthony Burns’s. But once again Williams compellingly links health, “physical
culture,” to the popular entertainment of his day—^Laurel and Hardy—just as he
had negatively compared Big Black’s physical appearance to the ugly black
faces of wooden dummies at amusement parks.
In one of his apprentice plays. Not About Nightingales (1938),
Williams painfully punctures the myth of sport as an honorable, even glorious
route to fame that “Dark Arm” may seem to presage. Dramatizing one of the
worst instances of prison abuse in American history. Nightingales, reveals ^\4lat
happens to a clean-cut young athlete named Swifty (Jeremy Trout) when he is
framed for a crime he did not commit and locked in a cell with hard-talking and
acting convicts. In Episode Six of Nightingales, entitled “Mr. Olympics,” cellblock leader Butch O’Fallon gives Swifty, the new boy, the treatment: ‘"Butch
jerks Swifty up by the collar and hoists him by the seat o f his pants to the upper
bunk"' (51). ITie only welcome Swifty receives is from C^eenie, Williams’s fost
gay character, who erotically observes: “He looks athletic” (52). Fearing that he
will go crazy locked up in a prison cell, Swifty claims that his earlier victories as
a high school athlete (he “held the 220 state record for three years”) might be his
salvation: