On an airplane earlier this week, my seatmate asked me if I thought the book I was reading might get turned into a movie or a TV show. I told him I wasn’t sure; I had just started the book and didn’t know if I even liked it. I started telling him about the book, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad, from the perspective of Briseis, Achilles’ concubine. It turns out my seatmate was familiar with both the book itself and its source text.
Across all three versions of the Iliad that I’ve read, the relationship between the Greek soldier Achilles and his companion Patroclus looms large. My seatmate and I discussed the centrality of their relationship and for some reason I started to think about another text that feels very important to me: Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the first play I acted in with adults, which made me feel like a very important person of course. I acted in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in two productions, so I was weirdly intimately familiar with this play by the time I was like thirteen-years-old. In both productions, I was one of the “no-necked monsters”, a.k.a. one of the kids. My big moment was busting into Brick and Maggie’s bedroom and exclaiming: “You’re jealous! You’re just jealous because you can’t have any baaaaaaaabies!”
So this week, I couldn’t help but wonder… to what extent is that a retelling of Achilles and Patroclus, too? Like Achilles, Williams’ Brick is a hero — a fallen one, a former star athlete, but the echo of a hero nonetheless. Like Achilles, Brick is favored by the powers that be — the wealthy patriarch at the center of the play, Big Daddy, prefers Brick to his other son, Gooper. (I mean, Williams’ named the nagging, social-climby son with four annoying kids “Gooper” for crying out loud.) Like Achilles, Brick shared a close companionship with another man. For Achilles, there was Patroclus and for Brick, there was Skipper. Both were surrounded by people that clocked the irregularity of their relationships, and both were irrevocably changed by their companions’ deaths.
When Patroclus dies, Achilles, who has refused to fight in the Greek/Trojan war for weeks, immediately breaks his self-imposed protest and kills Patroclus’s killer, Hector. He then ties Hector’s corpse to his chariot and repeatedly drags it around camp at full speed for several days until Hector’s elderly father sneaks into enemy territory to beg him to stop. Achilles’ rageful grief is palpable. He treats the corpse of his companion’s killer with specific, emotional violence; he seeks not just to kill the man who killed Patroclus, but to disrespect all evidence of his existence, literally dragging the corporeal reminder through the mud over and over and over. The pain that Achilles inflicts on Hector’s body — and transitively on Hector’s still living loved ones — implies Achilles’ internal pain. Only someone in deep internal turmoil could inflict such deep external turmoil.
Brick, on the other hand, does not die after Skipper’s death by suicide. Instead, married to a woman he doesn’t love or even like, Brick is condemned to another kind of death: an alcohol-induced stupor, perhaps Williams’ literalization of a long-term loveless marriage. If Achilles’ grief is active, Brick’s is passive: Brick sinks deeper into stagnation not by what he does do, but by what he doesn’t do. He is impaired physically by an injury from his football days and mentally by his constant drunkenness. So he sits and paces, chuckling and shuffling, but rarely entering or exiting. He is just there.
If Brick echoes Achilles and Skipper echoes Patroclus, Williams’ Maggie echoes Homer’s Briseis. Maggie and Briseis are the third points in these strange love triangles, both bound to men interested in maintaining their union, but more deeply committed to and invested in their male companions. By the end of the Iliad and its retellings, Briseis is pregnant with her and Achilles’ child. By the end of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Maggie is pregnant with her and Brick’s child, if not literally then textually. Though she may be infertile (yeah, my line was actually important!!!), Big Daddy believes Maggie when she tells him she is pregnant, and the play ends, rather ominously imho, with Maggie claiming that she aims to “make the lie true.”
Years after acting in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and one year after reading the Iliad, I wrote a play about two girls named Allegra and Tara falling in love. There is no Maggie or Briseis, no jilted lover or trapped concubine; there are only the two girls. Like Achilles and Patroclus and like Brick and Skipper, Allegra and Tara share a relationship that transcends categorization, which they struggle to articulate to themselves and to each other. But unlike Achilles and Patroclus and unlike Brick and Skipper, Allegra and Tara do not lose each other. They do not die. They do not grieve. Instead, they find each other and they live.
At some point on the airplane ride, I told my seatmate I was a writer and about this newsletter. He then downloaded the Substack app, found us here, told me to leave him alone for a while. He proceeded to read my writing for the next couple hours (a terrifying, thrilling, surreal experience). He turned to me every now and then, to confess joyfully that he also loved Carbonara pasta, to ask a question, or once, to read a line I’d written out loud. “It feels achy, gorgeous, devastating, nourishing, bewildering, clarifying,” he read, before telling me that’s how he feels about reading; he feels insatiable. I thought then of earlier in the flight, when he told me that before the prevalence of television or even radio, he used to read encyclopedias cover to cover.
There is a tenderness in the sheer magnitude of Achilles’ grief, of Brick’s tragicness, and hopefully, too, of Allegra and Tara’s shared admission of love. I think this is the thing we hunger for: that tenderness, that big, huge, terrible, stunning ache. We tell these stories same and we tell them different so that we might feel that tenderness, so that we might simultaneously soothe and feed the ache. We are temporarily sated and temporarily soothed, but we are insatiable, unsoothable. We as in Achilles, Patroclus, Briseis, Brick, Skipper, Maggie, the no-necked monsters, and we as in Homer, all the people that were Homer, we as in Tennessee Williams, we as in me, writing, and we as in you, reading.
Share this post