The Grotesque

The anecdote related here is that of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and thus a monument of sorts to a young Postwar poet “very fond of Rupert Brooke.”

The performances of Alan Bates as Sir Hugo and Theresa Russell as his American wife Lady Harriet were widely dispraised by critics, some noted Anna Massey as the poet’s mother favorably.

Gentlemen Don’t Eat Poets, it has been called. “We now feed our pigs on sugarbeet pulp,” says Samuel Beckett in a latterly-famous essay. “It is all the same to them.”