American Blues

Who hasn’t heard of New Orleans? The city where, in the infamous houses of Basin Street, jazz was born; where black musicians, as famous as baseball champions, intoxicated by smoke and life, blew congested spasms into their trumpets and saxophones, wringing from the notes a clinking sound of burnt-out lives. A city in which European immigrants, buccaneers and adventurers lynched one another, amidst its muddy waters spilling from the Mississippi Delta. Picturesque, of course. But this picturesqueness is not what interests Tennessee Williams. His gaze, clear and feverish, rests on the Midwest, on the shifting frontier, on the Deep South, on the ports where civilisations and races touch and collide. Williams’ characters, and even more frequently his protagonists, are creatures forced to compensate for the cruel inadequacies of reality with a desperate recourse to the imagination. These are stories of the suburbs, not of the metropolises. Marginal stories of a lost society, where human fragility resonates most starkly.