Tennessee Williams’s THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE
St. Andrew’s Day
“Has it ever struck you, Connie, that life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? It's really all memory, Connie, except for each passing moment. What I just now said to you is a memory now — recollection. Uh-hummm…”
Mrs. Flora Goforth in Tennessee Williams's, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
Even with a plot that falls flat, Tennessee Williams always succeeds in devising colorful characters and quotable lines. I have never designed costumes for Tennessee Williams’s play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore set in Italy. Rarely is the play even staged, though its themes of attraction, memory, and transience are intriguing to me.
1995 US Postal Service 32 cent stamp honoring playwright Tennessee Williams from my personal collection
The main character, elegant Flora Goforth, is a rich, but lonely older woman, painfully enduring an illness in her villa on the Almalfi Coast. While her assistant Blackie takes notes to create her memoir, they are visited by a mysterious young poet Christopher Flanders, with the nickname “Angel of Death.” In the quote above, Flora is talking to her friend Connie, the witch of Capri, the Marquesa Constance Ridgeway-Condotti, pondering the ephemeral quality of life.
Today is St. Andrew’s Day, the patronal feast day of my church in Birmingham, Alabama. We celebrate tonight, but we are also sad, because the Angel of Death has recently taken away two of our longtime members. Both of their lives now are “all memory,” just like the titular milk train. From the early 1930s to the late 1960s, the milk trucks transported the velvety liquid from farms and creameries to dairy lovers in the city. Even as Williams wrote this play in 1963, milk trains were disappearing, as highway transport trucks nabbed their business. What a change that was.
Change is a theme of Milk Train. The present moment, the passing moment moves to the next moment, and the next. And we are left with memories of the past — and a hope for the future. We truly only live in the present moment, and then it changes, and then life reshapes. Life is fragile and the more we walk the earth, the more we realize all things are metamorphosing all the time.
Mrs. Goforth has led a full and voracious existence, but her illness refashions her life toward a certain death. Though Flora talks about how the fleeting moments pass us by, in reality, she becomes fearful of her impending eternal loneliness and tries to seduce Chris. Startlingly, he rebuffs her. Though his Angel of Death nickname comes from his propensity for being with older women as they are nearing their end, his essence is spiritual and he simply desires to diminish her anxiety and soften her suffering.
Why do we watch — or read — plays like this that are 60 years old? 100? 500? 2,500 years old? In this case, observing Flora’s humanity in a time of mutation and as her life reaches culmination teaches us, illuminates mortality, answers questions, forces us to ponder our own situation.
As in life, there are beautiful moments in the play, but they change and the action moves on. Flora reminds me that I cannot cling to what made me happy in the past, who I was, who I knew, how I functioned, where I lived. Nothing remains the same forever, or even for short whiles. And what if it did? Would that be life on earth?
Andrew, the saint we celebrate today, seizes the moment. Why do we care about the lives of people 2,000 years ago? Jesus sees Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea. He invites them to come with him and fish for people. When Jesus calls him, Andrew follows. He leaves his old life, his family, his profession, his town, his past, and his future.
Flora — in a negative way — and Andrew positively, both show me that as I grow older, I have to live more in those passing moments. I have to catch what is occurring. I have to detach both from the past as I knew it, and the future as I would like to have it. I have to live in the present as it is, facing reality without my coloring or veiling it. Memories enrich my life. Future dreams spark hope. But to fully appreciate this transient existence, I have to live life, experience life, encounter beautiful, terrifying life as it is happening to me right now.