JOHN MINTON

Self-portrait, circa 1953.

Francis John Minton (25 December 1917 – 20 January 1957) was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London, and at the same time maintained a consistently large output of works. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books.
In the mid-1950s, Minton found himself out of sympathy with the abstract trend that was then becoming fashionable, and felt increasingly sidelinedHe suffered psychological problems, abused alcohol, and in 1957 committed suicide.[Minton was born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, the second of three sons of Francis Minton, a solicitor, and his wife, Kate, née Webb.

Susan Einzig and the artist John Minton. He had a great influence on her.
"it was at Camberwell that Einzig met the person who would be the greatest influence on her life, the charismatic, mercurial illustrator and painter, John Minton, who, along with Keith Vaughan, was also teaching there. "I was quickly drawn into this group," she said. "We all used to meet at weekends and draw each other. We went to the cinema and discovered the films of Jean Renoir, René Clair and Marcel Carné. We jived and jitterbugged to Humphrey Lyttelton's jazz band every Monday evening. We also got sucked into the drinking scene in Soho. It was all over within two or three years, but in my memory it seems to have been much longer."Einzig took on numerous illustration commissions over the ensuing years, her distinctive black-and-white drawing style gradually shaking off the Minton influence and asserting its own elegant, literary identity. A lifelong love of theatre is often evident in the stage-like construction of many of her drawings.

From 1925 to 1932, he was educated at Northcliff House, Bognor Regis, Sussex, and then from 1932 to 1935 at Reading School. He studied art at St John's Wood School of Art from 1935 to 1938. and was greatly influenced by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who enthused him with the work of French neo-romantic painters. He spent eight months studying in France, frequently accompanied by Ayrton, and returned from Paris when the Second World War began.
At the start of the war, Minton was a conscientious objector, but changed his views and joined the Pioneer Corps in 1941. He was commissioned in 1943, but was discharged on medical grounds in the same year. While still in the army, Minton, with Ayrton, designed the costumes and scenery for John Gielgud's 1942 production of Macbeth. The settings moved the piece from its 11th century setting to "the age of illuminated missals"; The Manchester Guardian wrote that they "should be long remembered" In the same year he and Ayrton held a joint exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London. The Times wrote, "Mr. Minton is seen to have an overcast, gloomy realism, and much intensity of feeling, which he expresses in dark colour schemes, both in a curious and effective self-portrait and in paintings of streets and bombed buildings." Minton's early penchant for dark colour schemes can be seen in his 1939 "Landscape at Les Baux", in the Tate
From 1943 to 1946 Minton taught illustration at the Camberwell College of Arts, and from 1946 to 1948 he was in charge of drawing and illustration at the Central School of Art. At the same time he continued to draw and paint, sharing a studio for some years with Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with Keith Vaughan. Reviewing a 1944 exhibition, The Times remarked that Minton was clearly in the tradition of Samuel Palmer, something frequently remarked on by later critics
 Minton's output was considerable. Between 1945 and 1956 he had seven solo exhibitions at the Lefevre gallery, notwithstanding his work as tutor to the painting school of the Royal College of Art in 1949, a post that he held until the year before his death
 Minton's appearance in this period is shown in a 1952 portrait by Lucian Freud, as well as in self-portraits
Minton's range was wide. Although he is best remembered as an illustrator, he also worked on a very large scale, with unusually big paintings for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain and "two vast set-pieces" for the Royal College of Art, and at the Royal Academy a huge painting of the soldiers dicing for the garment of Jesus, described by The Manchester Guardian as "one of the most elaborate and serious paintings with a religious theme produced since the war." He designed textiles and wallpapers; he produced posters for London Transport and Ealing Studios; and he was highly regarded as a portrait painter. He painted scenes of Britain, from rural beauty to urban decay, and travelled overseas, producing scenes of the West Indies, Spain and Morocco. The Times wrote, "Even when they were ostensibly of Spain and Jamaica, Minton's landscapes looked back to Samuel Palmer for their mood. They were densely patterned and luxuriantly coloured, and it was always the fullness and richness of the scene which attracted his eye and which he painted with such evident enjoyment."
Minton's posthumous fame is principally as an illustrator.Many of his commissions for illustrations came from the publisher John Lehmann. Both men were homosexual, and they were so much in one another's company that some people supposed that they were partners, though the biographer Artemis Cooper thinks it unlikely. For Lehmann, Minton illustrated A Book of Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking (the first two books by the food writer Elizabeth David), travel books such as Time was Away – A Notebook in Corsica, by Alan Ross, and fiction, including The Commander Comes to Dine by Mario Soldati. Other publishers for whom he illustrated books included Michael Joseph, Secker and Warburg and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Although Minton was respected both by the conservative Royal Academy and the modernist London Group.
The London Group is composed of working artists. All forms of art are represented. The group functions democratically without dogma or style. It has a written constitution, annually elected officers, working committees and a selection committee. There are usually between 80 and 100 members and an annual fee is charged to cover gallery hire and organisational costs. The group has no permanent exhibition venue and rents gallery space in London, most recently at the Menier Gallery, Bankside Gallery and Cello Factory. Most years see several new members being voted in, from nominations made by current members. he was out of sympathy with the abstract painting that began to prevail during the 1950s, and he felt increasingly out of touch with current fashion. He suffered extreme mood swings and became dependent on alcohol. He took his own life in 1957 at his London home, taking an overdose of sleeping tablets.
In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's article on Minton, Michael Middleton writes:

Minton is often seen as an illustrator rather than a painter. He certainly extended and enriched the English graphic tradition. In all his varied output, however, may be sensed an elegiac awareness of the evanescence of physical beauty that is entirely personal. His work is to be found in the Tate collection, and many public and private collections at home and abroad. A retrospective exhibition of 1994, curated by his biographer, Frances Spalding, provided a convincing reminder of the range of his gifts. For the historian he must remain a potent symbol of his period.

Every living person has certain feelings about the world around him. It is these feelings, common to all men, which are the raw materials of the artist's inspiration. This he must 'translate', into the structure of an art form, whether music, poetry or painting. The problem of the painter is this 'translation'; that is, he has to create some arrangement of shape, line and colour which convey the idea or the emotion which moved him to paint this particular picture.

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John Minton, 1949
‘Late in the 1940s, as the first wave of post-war American films began to appear in London, the young English painter John Minton - contemporary of Lucian Freud, Keith Vaughan among others - came across the work of an actor named Montgomery Clift; and from that moment on he followed his rise to fame with a fascination that bordered on obsession. He was not, of course, alone in his adulation. Thousands of film addicts were being held spellbound by this new type of folk hero who, unlike his predecessors, was both sensitive and vulnerable. Here was a figure with whom they could identify themselves with frightening ease. To a generation of young men he was a symbol of their frustration and despair; to a generation of young women he was the masculine ideal.


An interest in the cinema had developed early on in Minton's life. Sometimes, as he sat in the smoky darkness watching the images of the Hollywood 'greats' flashing onto the English screen, he found himself worshipping from afar; but it was always from afar. In those days infinite distance separated the glamorous lands inhabited by the gods and goddesses of the American dream from his own personal everyday world. Now the gap was suddenly closed. Montgomery Clift was not only a hero. He also lived in his world, shared his anxieties and endured his sufferings.
A single visit to the cinema was no longer enough. Over and over again he would watch the film performances and on every occasion he experienced strange and disturbing emotions. Admittedly Clift was an actor who could portray inner conflict with extraordinary force, but was it normal for a grown man to be affected in this way? Minton was intelligent enough to realize that the fascination lay deeper. Even in Clift's masculine roles he could perceive bi-sexual undertones.
Could Minton possibly have known that Clift was facing emotional problems that were near to his own? Minton may have heard just a little of Clift’s private life, but not very much. At the time Minton was producing posters for Ealing Studios so he was in contact with the fringe of the film community. Undoubtedly Clift was discussed and in all prob­ability he was told stories of neurotic behaviour and an unconventional life style, but it is unlikely that it amounted to anything more than anecdote and gossip.
Minton's reaction sprang primarily from what he sensed, perhaps unconsciously, in the film performances; beyond the characters that Clift portrayed, behind the script, the set and the make-up, he recog­nized in some inexplicable way a character that was near to his own. The effect was traumatic. For weeks on end the image of Clift's troubled aristocratic features lingered before his eyes and at one point the obses­sion became so strong that he was planning to go to Paris in an endeav­our to meet him. Whether they ever met is not known. It is doubtful; but not impossible. Like many of the episodes in Minton's life the details remain obscure.

Portrait of Minton by Lucian Freud (1952)
By 1950 Clift was an international figure; Minton was only beginning to achieve recognition in London. Externally they appeared as very dif­ferent people, but a closer examination reveals remarkable similarities in their lives and characters. Each of them experienced an unorthodox childhood. In the case of Clift it was his mother who was determined to educate her children in a manner that would fit them for a place in society which she had reason to believe was their natural right In Minton's case it was a wealthy grandmother who was set on doing much the same thing.
In their young days both Clift and Minton received hard knocks. Minton was 12 in 1930 when his father, a comparatively well-to-do solicitor, died leaving the family in greatly reduced circumstances. Clift was 11 when his father went broke towards the end of 1931. Clift and his elder brother were suddenly removed from expensive schools, private tutors and European travel to a frighteningly low standard of living. Minton and his younger brother did their best to reconcile school holi­days at the country home of their wealthy grandmother with the rented suburban accommodation in which their mother now lived with her taxi-driver lover.

John Minton by Cecil Beaton
For children confined within family situations of this kind the normal friendships of adolescence are difficult to establish. Minton spent most of his school holidays with his grandmother where he mixed only with boys of his own social class, led a very conventional life by day and changed for dinner at night. She took him abroad with her, helped to make him socially at ease in sophisticated backgrounds, and arranged for her chauffeur to teach him to drive the Rolls Royce. It was natural enough that when he visited his mother in her suburban flat he felt awk­ward and out of place with the boys who lived in the flat above; and in turn these boys, sensing their different circumstances, made no attempt to establish a friendship. It was much the same with the young Clifts. With their background of private tutors and international education they had nothing in common with their neighbours in the furnished apart­ment in Greenwich Village which they were forced to occupy during the years of the depression.
The reaction of both Clift and Minton to these experiences was identical; they erected screens that would protect them from prying eyes; mental barriers which would shield them from painful enquiries about their family backgrounds. At home, with their own brothers for example, the rapport was immediate; beyond that it was another matter. Close personal friends recall the reluctance of these two men to talk about their families, although there is every reason to believe that this was some­thing with which they had always been very much concerned. Clift would state quite simply that he 'couldn't remember', which may or may not have been true; while Minton would say that his father had gone off to Australia when he was still a boy and had never been heard of again; and this he must undoubtedly have known to be false.
So these two young men, unknown to each other and living on differ­ent continents, began their adult lives with deeply suppressed memories and unresolved conflicts. They had failed to accept the fact, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that they were incapable of facing the fact, that a human being's past can never be wholly suppressed.


On the threshold of manhood they found themselves beset by similar problems. They would have to come to terms with the seemingly unpal­atable fact that by nature they were bi-sexual. 'I could only live with a man', Minton wrote to a friend, 'for though I can desire a woman physi­cally very much and even fall for a girl and all the rest, it is only someone of my own sex that can really affect and shake that part of me that is a painter'; and to a friend Clift said, 'I don't understand it. I love men in bed, but I really love women.' They were both capable of close and intimate friendships with women, but the desire for physical relation­ships with men was always present and neither Clift nor Minton was ever able to resolve the conflicts that were so much a part of their natures.


It is unnecessary to describe in any detail the patterns of domestic life that resulted from these ambivalent tastes in love. In both establish­ments a series of close male companions came and went in a manner that is all too familiar. Some of these friends and lovers were capable of real affection, others exploited the position in which they found themselves to the full. To the more balanced and mature onlooker it was often an ugly scene.
As might be expected, Clift and Minton treated their companions in a similar fashion. Usually these young men received affection, generosity and consideration; but there were times when they found themselves subjected to astonishing cruelty. Minton has been described as 'the kindest man I ever met' and also as 'the cruellest man I ever met'. No doubt Clift was described in much the same way.
On the evening of May 12 1956, while filming Raintree County, Clift was involved in a serious auto accident when he smashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving a dinner party at the Beverly Hills home of his Raintree County co-star and close friend Elizabeth Taylor and her second husband, Michael Wilding. Alerted by friend Kevin McCarthy, who witnessed the accident, Taylor raced to Clift's side, manually pulling a tooth out of his tongue as he had begun to choke on it. He suffered a broken jaw and nose, a fractured sinus, and several facial lacerations which required plastic surgery. In a filmed interview, he later described how his nose could be snapped back into place.
After a two-month recovery, he returned to the set to finish the film. Against the movie studio's worries over profits, Clift correctly predicted the film would do well, if only because moviegoers would flock to see the difference in his facial appearance before and after the accident. The pain of the accident led him to rely on alcohol and pills for relief, as he had done after an earlier bout with dysentery left him with chronic intestinal problems. As a result, Clift's health and looks deteriorated considerably from then until his death.

John Minton by Russell Westwood (1951) National Portrait Gallery
Two factors aggravated the situation considerably. The first was financial. Clift and Minton both became well-off. Clift's rise to stardom brought him wealth while Minton, although not making real money from the sale of his pictures, inherited a fairly large sum. Both were inherently generous, particularly towards the people to whom they were attracted sexually. For any young man who was poor, ambitious and handsome, a friendship with a person like Clift or Minton had much to offer.
Alcohol was the second aggravating factor. In their young days neither Clift nor Minton drank. Their tolerance was low and their friends of those days have only memories of glasses of milk and endless cups of coffee. Somehow it got a hold and eventually became a major problem.
The director Herb Machiz is reported to have said, 'The real tragedy in most homosexual lives and for a person as sensitive as Monty was having to accept the tremendous disappointment of never finding a mate worthy of him'. This was Minton's problem too; the nightmare that led him first to drink and eventually to suicide.
What they both wanted desperately was to be part of a family and each found in the home environment of a young married couple some­thing they were searching for. Exactly what they were searching for is not so clear. On the surface it appeared that the wife was the object of affec­tion, the element that was lacking in their own lives, but shrewder observers believed it to be the husband who was the real attraction. Certainly the need to belong was an important factor and both of them would have liked to have had children of their own.
A relationship of this kind was doomed to failure. It was more or less acceptable by day, but at night both Clift and Minton perceived the truth of their isolation - that they were not really a part of the family at all. There were times when Clift could stand his loneliness no longer and then he would creep into the bedroom of the young couple, climb quietly into their bed and go to sleep. Minton did the same thing. There was one occasion when Minton's frustration became so great that after his friends had gone to bed he pulled off his clothes, ran out of the house into the winter night and threw himself naked into the snow. With all the sympathy and understanding in the world it was not easy to integrate men like Clift and Minton into a normal home life.
As time passed the search for an ideal companion became more des­perate; and with this insoluble problem the need for drink became greater. There were nights in prison and brushes with the police. Both Clift and Minton suffered broken noses in drunken quarrels. They were robbed left and right. Their health deteriorated and they seemed in­creasingly incapable of taking an objective view of the predicament they were in.

It is perhaps ironical that in spite of all this neither Clift nor Minton was able to conceal his background. They did their best. They wore the correct dress - jeans and T-shirts. They acquired the right vocabulary. Words like shit and fuck punctuated their sentences; and they associated with the right people — out of work actors, deserters from the armed forces and rough trade. Yet it never quite worked. Both sprang from old and respected families. Both were educated, well-read and widely travel­led. However much Clift tried to portray, either on the stage or on film, a working-class character, one could not help sensing that there was something extra there somewhere; a certain breeding and integrity - a touch of class. It was the same with Minton. Twenty years after his death the coroner recalled him as being 'a man of slight build' and then added, 'I should think he came from a good family'; yet the coroner had never seen him alive.
So far no mention has been made of the most important similarity of all. They were both in their different ways dedicated artists who valued integrity more than money or public acclaim. Set-backs or lack of recog­nition never altered an unfaltering belief in the best and it is for this reason that in the characters of both Clift and Minton something always remained that was pure and true.
At the height of his career Clift received public acclaim of a magni­tude that is now difficult to comprehend; and although the hysteria of those days has long subsided the major performances have weathered the passage of time. At a distance of 25 years it is still easy to be moved by films like 'A Place in the Sun' and 'From Here to Eternity'. However much the conventions of film production may have changed, Clift's acting seems as fresh and relevant as it was at the time when the films were released.
In the case of Minton the situation is reversed. After a brief and heady period of success in his own lifetime his work became forgotten. Now there is a noticeable revival of interest and it would be difficult to think of post-war British painting without the name of Minton springing to mind. His last big picture 'The Death of James Dean' is an enduring proof of his involvement in the predicament of the youth of his day.

It is worth considering for a moment the ambience in which this painting was conceived. Dean had modelled his early acting career on Clift. He had discovered his ex-directory number and repeatedly phoned him; but basically they were quite different people and Clift had made no effort to become acquainted with young Jimmy Dean. Yet for some reason Dean's death shocked him. He was in bed when he heard the news and he vomited over the sheets.
Minton was also affected by Dean's death and there is a strange intensity to his portrayal of the scene. It is not one of his best works, but it has relevance to the time at which it was painted and it was consider­able enough to be bought by the Tate. Within a year Minton would also be dead and Clift would have suffered the terrible motor accident from which he emerged a different man. By the end of 1957 the whole char­acter of the decade was beginning to change.

Obituary/Daily Mirror/25th Jan 1957
When Minton took his life in January 1957, an English newspaper described him as being the James Dean of painting. This was incorrect. Only at a superficial level was there any resemblance; and it would have been equally incorrect to suggest that he was the Montgomery Clift of painting. In their personal lives, however, Clift and Minton showed extraordinary similarities and of all the people who came under Clift's spell few could have felt the impact more acutely than John Minton. Both were incapable of preventing private anguish from intruding into their work. The fusion of personal conflict and artistic compulsion en­abled each, in his own way, to reveal a symptom and create a symbol of the culture of the 'fifties.

“I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true…” For those unfamiliar with the play, here is a précis of the girl’s story: last summer, the summer of 1935, she, Catherine Holly, vacationed to the geographically indeterminate Spanish resort town of Cabeza de Lobo with her fortyish cousin, the late Sebastian Venable–aristocrat bon vivant from New Orleans’ Garden District, where he lived with his daiquiri-aficionado mother, Violet, and tended a “fantastical” garden of prehistoric flora. He wrote one poem a year during his summer sojourns with Violet, sojourns which ended with Violet’s recent stroke and subsequent, ugly facial tic, and which continued, that summer of 1935, with the beautiful young Catherine.

Anyway. Last summer, of 1935, Catherine and Sebastian went to Cabeza de Lobo; they went to the beach; Sebastian forced her to wear a one-piece bathing suit of white lisle, which the water made transparent. She was, she soon discovered, his bait, “PROCURING for him”–at least initially. Then, the “homeless, hungry” young men under Sebastian’s keep grew legion, and angry. And one day, interrupting Sebastian’s regular pills-and-salad lunch, this mob, naked and dirty, lunged, pursuing him down the streets of Cabeza de Lobo, some playing tin-can instruments, and eventually rending and devouring him.

This is the truth of the girl, and the one at the centre of Tennessee Williams’ strange play, also made into a strange film in 1959 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz–a truth, such as it is, that only Williams could have told, full of his trademark paradoxes, both dunderheaded and profound. In the play, it is a truth that Sebastian’s domineering mother, Violet, wants “cut out” of Catherine’s brain via a lobotomy–an echo of Williams’ sister’s own lobotomy, done, he claimed, to prevent her from telling of their father’s molestation–blackmailing one Doctor Cukrowicz, the one who utters those last lines, after having drawn out Catherine’s tale.

It is, as well, a truth that stung the gay establishment that emerged after Williams’ improbable tenure as one of post-war America’s leading artists. For 1970s representationalists like Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, Suddenly, Last Summer was “the kind of psychosexual freak show that the Fifties almost demanded”: Sebastian Venable, the cannibalized dandy who only appears in Williams’ play as a spectre, dead from the beginning and given shape only by the conflicting stories of Violet and Catherine, was an invert-pervert who got what was coming to him. The famousdocumentary-film adaptation of Russo’s Celluloid Closet highlights the sequence of Sebastian’s demise in the 1959 film–remembered by Catherine, played by a luminous Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her early pulchritude, her face appearing and receding in a matte shot over views of a pursued Sebastian whose own face is never shown. In the documentary, this pursuit is intercut with another, that of Frankenstein in homosexual director James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. “Since he lives as a monster, he must die as one,” says a woeful, admonishing Lily Tomlin in voiceover.

It is a facile interpretation–abetted, some say, by the bit of trivia that Tennessee Williams underwent psychotherapy around, among other things, his same-sex desire, the year before he wrote the play–and it positions Suddenly, Last Summer as a reprehensible text written by a self-loathing homosexual, however grandiose in ego. This interpretation is indeed so facile that it has not held water beyond the necessary politics of liberation that drove the gay movement forward in the 1970s, at the time of The Celluloid Closet‘s publication, and then in the 1990s, when the documentary was released, during the second decade of the AIDS crisis.

What contradicts this is the simple fact that gays have loved and do love Suddenly, Last Summer, tremendously. At a screening of the film last year at the Lightbox, I sat amid a row of 20- and 30-something friends, mostly gay men, all transfixed, yelping, sighing, clapping, screaming. There was an effusiveness competition afterward: who loved it most? In explanation of this phenomenon it is suitable to begin with the most obvious riposte to Russo: there is nothing more deliriously and proudly gay than Suddenly, Last Summer, despite or, indeed, because of Sebastian’s absence. This fact has inevitably been taken up by queer theorists that have emerged in The Celluloid Closet‘s wake. Sebastian is of course present, everywhere. Phrases like “the obsessive metaphorics of queer anality” have been used (in this case by Brett Farmer), and they echo the defiantly entertaining, even defiantly risible, qualities (gays used to call this sensibility “outrageous,” a subsidiary of camp) that permeate the text.

With Suddenly, Last Summer, Williams has created a sort of gay-style infection: actions of an effaced homosexual are visible in all characters, the world they inhabit becoming obvious as a bauble of his own making. This is, as Michael D. Klemm of CinemaQueer.com points out, brilliantly represented in the film version, in which, during Catherine’s story, Violet’s hand caresses a page of Sebastian’s notebook, the one containing the cumulative poems, only one per summer, that he writes every year. The page is Sebastian’s last, from 1935, and it is blank, but Catherine’s story and Sebastian’s actions suggest, of course, that what happened that summer, and what was his entire life for that matter, constitutes his final poem, in which everyone is implicated.

In turn, what film is gayer than Mankiewicz’s? Gore Vidal co-wrote the script with Williams; in addition to gay-icon Taylor, the doctor is played by Montgomery Clift, Taylor’s gay best friend, known for his martyred, Saint Sebastian—like characters, and here appearing after a disfiguring car accident, thus adding to that renown. Violet is played by Katherine Hepburn, who gobbles up every line and scene. What’s more, the film, as Gore Vidal points out in The Celluloid Closet, was oddly beloved by the then-collapsing Breen Code: it showed a homosexual ostensibly being punished for his crimes. Vidal then claims that the film’s so-called degenerate qualities–incest, cannibalism, pederasty, as identified with extreme distaste by The New York Times‘ Bosley Crowther–made straight, mainstream America flock to it in droves, to see that “something evil” that one poster’s tagline said that Catherine saw. Like Sebastian’s Venus flytrap, the text seems designed to ensnare, perhaps also to assimilate.

The task of articulating those aforementioned “obsessive metaphorics of queer anality” do not interest me terribly. It seems so exhausting, and the play and film give so much pleasure. I do believe in a distinctive gay-male aesthetic, but for me, however complex and rich it is, it is stubbornly intuitive, built on history as well as circumstance, and able to be understood and practiced by those who are not gay males. It is for this reason that I contend that Suddenly, Last Summercan be a very important gay-male text while still not having a gay-male character in its dramatis personae, and even having that character conjured and killed as a result of his decadence.

Let us return, as is my preference, to the text, and to Dr. Cukrowicz’s final lines, “I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true….” Tennessee Williams disliked Mankiewicz’s film–this may be because of frenemy Gore Vidal’s having had a hand it, or the bad notices it got–claiming it “made unfortunate concessions to the realism that Hollywood is too often afraid to discard,” and that it is not a “literal” study of “such things as cannibalism…” Was he serious or just being petulant? Is Catherine actually, as Violet hopes, delusional? Where is the truth here? In an excellent twist, Catherine tells us that, at the start of traveling with her cousin, she began to use the third person in her diary. “I turned into a peacock,” she says later, referring to a Schiaparelli dress Sebastian had bought for her. “Of course, so was he one, too…” Clearly, the simultaneous resplendence and disturbance of artificial metamorphosis–the ability to transform oneself into a symbol, arguably something upon which queer, not merely gay-male, aesthetics turn–is at the heart of Sebastian’s cunning.

Sebastian’s own dramatizing of his naughtiness is another kind of delirious fiction in the play: “Cousin Sebastian said he was famished for blonds,” goes one of Catherine’s lines, one that tends to solicit admiring giggles from viewers of the film. The intonation–a declaration of intention couched in high drama–is not unlike Williams’ notoriously lavish stage directions, themselves clues to the play’s aims: “The set may be as unrealistic as the décor of a dramatic ballet,” begins Scene One’s notes. One might also point to some of the dialogue being written in all caps, or to the intrusions of music, which occur in almost every Williams script but are often left out by contemporary directors who see them as gauche. Here is the classic definition of melodrama: literally, drama with music. In Suddenly, Last Summer, it is “lyric” music of the “Encantadas,” the Galapagos Islands, where, as Violet relates at the beginning of the play, she and Sebastian had witnessed flesh-eating birds descending on a beach full of newly hatched turtles. In Williams, even the menace of raw nature–an absolute fixation of the playwright’s–cannot be related without nondiegetic flummery.

Thus the truth of Suddenly, Last Summer can only be the truth of its construction, of which Sebastian is the formidable spire. Williams, in his most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, gives a female character, Blanche Dubois–always, of course, strongly resonant to gay men–the rare chance to act as tragic hero in the Aristotelian/Shakespearean sense: hers is a pitiful and fearful demise, built on a sensational flaw, one she is allowed to have, and one with which she is, arguably, honourably bestowed. Sebastian, the rich ne’er-do-well, is more inhuman, but does a similar dance with morality and mortality. His death completes his desire to, as Catherine says, become “a sort of image.” And so his death is not a shrill condemnation, as Russo posits. Sebastian’s death, like his namesake saint’s, is glamourous, made all the more so by its inherent concealments, its insoluble mysteries, its blatant and hysterical fabrications.

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