In the spring of 1953, William Faulkner went to see a Broadway production of Camino Real, later calling it “the best…a very fine high of poetry.” That same spring, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother to say it was the “most stimulating, thought-provoking artistic play I’ve ever seen in my life!” Camino Real is set in a mental institution, although it is never described as such, because the world at large and human history itself is shown as in confinement. The stage set becomes, in effect, a metaphor for the way individuality has been crushed in the modern world, so that even outstanding historical figures like Casanova and Lord Byron are deprived of their agency.
In her copy of the play, Plath underscored the line that accompanied Don Quixote’s entrance: “the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place.” The famous figures in the play are treated like inmates in an asylum. When Casanova proposes to Camille that they remain there, Plath underlined her response: “Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.” Imagine what incarceration meant to writers like Faulkner and Plath, whose ambitions were as high as the renowned figures in the play.
Both Faulkner and Plath had been institutionalized. It had made them feel powerless and reflected their feelings about a world out of control, one that Williams dramatized, a world in no mood to permit the “high of poetry” that Faulkner so valued in Camino Real. (The play’s title was an ironic allusion to the royal highway that led the Spanish conquistadors to a new world.) In several letters, Plath asked the same question that Faulkner posed in his atomic era Nobel Prize speech: “When will I be blown up?” She was paraphrasing the question a gypsy asks in the play: “Do you feel yourself to be spiritually unprepared for the age of exploding atoms?” Channeling Faulkner, Plath observed that “our nerve reactions can convey worry about the future, until the fear insinuates itself into the present, into everything.” She caught her mother “crying desperately in her kitchen,” worrying as Sylvia did, whether her “tall dreamy kid brother” would be “cut off before he gets a chance.” She felt “a little frantic.… It kind of gets you,” she wrote to her confidant, Eddie Cohen.
Camino Real coalesced for Faulkner and Plath the anxieties she expressed in her journals and that drove him to drink. After her suicide attempt, Plath had been put into McLean Hospital for psychiatric care. On the way to her institutionalization, she had the urge to throw herself out of the car. Every time Faulkner was admitted to a hospital, clinic, or sanatorium, he would demand to be released and cut short his treatment. In Between Grief and Nothing: The Passions, Addictions and Tragic End of William Faulkner, Lisa C. Hickman reports hospitalizations for alcohol abuse that “devolved into madness and misery” in 1936, 1937, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952 in a pattern that would accelerate in the last decade of his life and end, finally, in his death in a sanatorium in 1962, After his institutionalization in 1952, he wrote: “Never in my life have I ever been so unhappy and depressed.” Less than a year after Faulkner’s death, Plath, dreading another institutionalization for her depression, would end her life.
Unlike Plath, Faulkner never tried to analyze the sources of his depression and suicidal drinking, which were so extreme that he suffered blackouts and prolonged periods of incapacitation. Camino Real demonstrated to him that he was not alone in his depression and terror at the state of the world. Plath kept a review of the play and underlined the verdict of New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson: “a sensitively composed fantasy about the hopelessness and degeneracy of life in the world today.”
The corruption and cruelty the critic singled out seem akin to Plath’s view of the world after returning from her month-long internship in New York at Mademoiselle—and confirmed during those first dispiriting days in the hospital after her suicide attempt. Did she identify with the play’s American innocent, Kilroy, who succumbs to what Atkinson calls a “moral plague,” with an “angel of death” delivering his requiem? She underlined the sentence in Williams’s Foreword: “A cage represents security as well as confinement to a bird that has grown used to being in it.” Williams said some theatergoers had run from the bleakness of the play, checking out before the final scene of a play that put their cosmic disquiet on stage. Sylvia Plath had stayed, watching what, in a sense, had happened to her.
So did William Faulkner. One of his favorite characters, Don Quixote, the hero of perpetual delusions and dreams, appears in the play as a “desert rat” at the gate of a walled town, a compound that might as well be an asylum where wild birds are tamed and put in cages. Faulkner feared the institutionalization that would deprive him of the capacity to question things for himself and to remain his own man. In the play, Kilroy, a name World War II American soldiers had inscribed on walls and other property to signify their presence, that they had been there, is a character who encounters Casanova, policed by guards who forbid the “exchange of serious questions and ideas.” This is the McCarthyite period that Plath protested in The Bell Jar and that Faulkner objected to in The Mansion. Plath put a vertical line in the margin to mark Casanova’s words to Kilroy who is warned that he will be separated into his chemical components with countless others, his identity annihilated. “You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit,” Casanova tells Kilroy, “and that’s not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated here! It has to be extinguished.”
Like Faulkner during his many admissions to clinics, hospitals, and sanatoriums, Kilroy looks for a way out. Superintending certain scenes is a “Nursie” who speaks to one of her patients: “Where is my lady bird, where is my precious treasure?” At the Wright Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi, patients like Faulkner received the same kind of petted treatment, meant to be kind, but may well have seemed like infantilization to Faulkner. In the theater, he would have been exposed to the play’s stage directions which had the actors plunging into aisles and seats, breaking down the distance between audience and stage, between the characters in confinement and the audience in its own theater cage. No wonder certain theatergoers could not bear to stay for the whole show, to see Kilroy subdued, silenced, and forced to don a Patsy costume. The irony of the World War II phrase, “Kilroy was here,” became manifested in a character no longer free and no longer a self.
It got worse on stage. Gutman, the man in charge of what can only be called an asylum, announces what could happen to even the bravest and most privileged risk takers: “Adventurers suddenly frightened of a dark room. Gamblers unable to choose between odd and even. Con men and pitchmen and plume-hatted cavaliers turned baby-soft…. When I observe this change, I say to myself: ‘Could it happen to ME?’—The answer is ‘YES’ And that’s what curdles my blood.” Camino Real showed William Faulkner and Sylvia Plath that their agony was not theirs alone, and that only art could address that agony.
On February 11, 1963, Plath in her final hours determined she could not risk another mental hospital stay and asphyxiated herself in an oven. The nurse in the Wright Sanatorium taking care of William Faulkner did not think he wanted to recover. At 11:00 p.m. on July 5, 1962, she put him to bed and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He replied, “I don’t think so.” Sometime after 1:00 am Faulkner sat up on his bed, groaned, fell over, and died.