Tennessee Williams. Clothes for a Summer Hotel. New York: New Directions, 1983. Print.

Clothes for a Summer Hotel is an interesting play about some interesting people. The main characters are F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Ernest and Hadley Hemingway show up. But this is not a lighthearted Midnight in Paris. This is a play about the crack-up.

Did conflict and professional jealousy ruin the Fitzgeralds’ marriage? How much did alcohol contribute? Were they faithful to each other? Why did Zelda go crazy?

These are questions people still ask today. Williams’ play takes a look at some of these questions. Some are answered ambiguously. Some biographers disagree with some of Williams’ conclusions. Nevertheless, the story Williams tells becomes a tender tragedy like The Glass Menagerie.

We see tension between the couple. If acted well, we should see that Scott still loves Zelda. Zelda appears to be “acting out,” trying to draw attention. She, too, still uses terms of endearment when speaking to Scott.

Williams wrote that he intended to “outrage” Christianity. The symbols in The Glass Menagerie show this. Fitzgerald, though outwardly rejecting Christianity, confessed that he could never entirely get free of its teachings. So Fitzgerald in this play acknowledges that his marriage with Zelda is a covenant, and even if they are “prone to wander,” that covenant remains intact.

Williams called Clothes for a Summer Hotel a ghost play. Williams claimed that no play is realistic or ought to be. Here he has some of the characters as ghosts who interact with those who are still alive. Scott in this play is actually the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald visiting Zelda at Highland Hospital in North Carolina shortly before she dies.

In The Glass Menagerie, Williams spoke of “the slow and implacable fires of human desperation.” In Clothes for a Summer Hotel, there is a simmering intensity as well. The image of fire comes to symbolize the play. The burning bush in this play does not prophesy. It burns with latent energy. The passion of the fire ultimately burns the hospital down with Zelda trapped inside.

A medievalist might say there was a sanguine imbalance in our protagonists. True, but as Zelda’s contemporary and kindred spirit, Edna St. Vincent Millay, wrote:

     My candle burns at both ends;
     It will not last the night;
     But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
     It gives a lovely light.           (“First Fig”)