Who They Were, or Claimed to Be

     "The lewd flesh. Ringworm circling through his crew cut. Excitable, stewing with passions and depressions and petty angers, a taker of every small advantage, a believer in striking hard and fast and first. Daring when the odds looked good. Distrustful but still eager to place trust at the drop of a flattering word. Wiry and short and strong, wound up like a cuckoo clock...Stink Harris came from a family of seven. A brother among sisters. A mechanic, a tinker, Stink took immense pains to care for his rifle, oiling it and cleaning it and keeping it dry during the rains, sleeping curled around it like a boy with his teddy bear, always toying with the moving parts. His weapon, he said, was his best friend. So when Bernie Lynn acted kindly toward him during the first weeks of June, Stink Harris took it very seriously, even spoke to Doc about how in war a guy needs buddies, and how Bernie might make a pretty decent buddy. Wary at first, but then melting, he introduced Bernie by letter to his youngest sister, Carla, and took great pride when his new friend and his favorite sister began exchanging a daily correspondence. He viewed it solemnly. His inquiries were always discreet, hopeful. It ended on June 30, when Stink found Carla's snapshot in Bernie Lynn's wallet. Undressed, his best-loved sister face the camera without the least embarrassment, high  in a midair jumping jack. Stink was made to be betrayed."
     -Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

Characters

      "CASSANDRA WHITESIDE enters at the door on the right. She is dark and strikingly beautiful, of a type rather peculiar to the South--physically delicate with clear translucent skin and luminous eyes as though burnt thin by her intensity of feeling. With people she has a rather disdainful ease, not deliberate or conscious, but rooted in her class origin and the cynical candor with which she recognizes herself and the social contradictions and tragic falsity of the world she lives in. SANDRA is the only woman of aristocratic extraction in the group. Her family is the oldest in this part of the Delta and was once the richest, but their plantation has dwindled with each successive generation. SANDRA has been "going out" for ten years and is still unmarried, which is enough in itself to destroy a girl's reputation."

     -character description from Tennessee Williams' Battle of Angels (1940)

    I'm compiling a list of Tennessee Williams' character descriptions, because they're often my favorite part of reading his scripts--so beautifully written and essential to the humanity of his characters.

Save Me The Waltz 2

     "Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture too. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn't a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest."   -Zelda Fitzgerald

Save Me The Waltz

     "Dancing with David, he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales. She was jealous of his pale aloofness. When she saw him leave the dance floor with other girls, the resentment she felt was not against any blending of his personality with theirs, but against his leading others than herself into those cooler detached regions which he inhabited alone." -Zelda Fitzgerald