‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ by Tennessee Williams

Summary

Whilst on a Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in July / August 2014, I came across a tenpage, typewritten first act (with autograph emendations), of an unpublished and unnamed play fragment by Tennessee Williams. It comprises two separate scenes: the first, eight-page scene is called ‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ and the second, two-page scene is called ‘Armistice’.

There are four characters in the play: Katharine Mansfield [sic], John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda Lawrence. Mansfield and Murry's friendship with the Lawrences is well documented elsewhere, and was significant to all four of them. Having initially met in mid-1913, the two couples became firm friends almost immediately. Both Frieda and Mansfield were technically married to other men when they first met, and the families of both Murry and Lawrence were shocked at the women their sons had taken up with. In July 1914, Mansfield and Murry were witnesses at the Lawrences’ wedding, and Frieda gave Mansfield her old wedding ring, which Mansfield wore for the rest of her life – indeed, she was buried wearing it.

However, the relationship between the couples reached a crisis point in Cornwall in mid-1916. They had been brought together by Lawrence's keen desire to found a community, which he wanted to call ‘Rananim’, a word taken from a Hebrew psalm that their Ukrainian Jewish friend, S. S. Koteliansky, was fond of singing. Such was Lawrence's overwhelming enthusiasm for the project that Mansfield and Murry were browbeaten into returning to England from France, where they had just spent three blissful months in Bandol, and where Mansfield had been rewriting ‘The Aloe’, turning it into what would become one of her most famous stories, ‘Prelude’.

Of the grey granite cottage at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, just outside St Ives, rent £16 per annum, into which Mansfield and Murry moved in April 1916, Lawrence had written:

It is only twelve strides from our house to yours: we can talk from the windows: and besides us, only the gorse, and the fields, the lambs skipping and hopping like anything, and sea-gulls fighting with the ravens, and sometimes a fox, and a ship on the sea.