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Tennessee Disagrees

The Cat On A Hot Tin Roof playwright protests TIME's review

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Tennessee Williams

Sir:

Much as I am flattered by your reference to me as “the high priest” of something, even something called ”merde” [Oct. 1], I must put in my two cents’ worth of protest. The gentleman quoted, Dean Fitch, may have gone to Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but he went to it with a pair of tin ears and came out of it with a tin horn to blow. Cat is the most highly, intensely moral work that I have produced, and that is what gives it power. It is an outcry of fury, from start to finish, against those falsities in life that provide a good fertilizer for corruption. What it says, in essence, through the character of Big Daddy, is this: when your time comes to die, do you want to die in a hotbed of lies or on a cold stone of truth?

Tennessee Williams, CHARLOTTE AMALIE, V.I.