Desire and the Black Masseur

Today I re-lived a sequence of events from twenty years ago. In late December 1985, I turned 21 and got a present from my parents: "Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories". At the time, I was in college at U.Va. and was writing a B.A. Honors Thesis in English on Williams, and themes of metatheatricality in some of his plays. One of the chapters was on Streetcar (I should re-read that chapter sometime). Anyway, when I first got this story collection, I thumbed through the contents and found a story that Williams wrote in April 1946, called “Desire and the Black Masseur.” The story is about a timid man who seeks brutal treatment from a black masseur, who ends up eating him completely by the end of the story. Today, I sat on a beach in Hawai'i and looked at the table of contents and picked the same story first. I only remembered later that I had read it first twenty years ago.

There’s a great definition of desire in it: “Desire is something which is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being.”

Today another line made me think of Blanche: “the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt.”