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for anything other than laughter,” Wood recalled.
    At the meeting, the producers demanded major cuts; Williams handed them a rewrite of the final scene. “I will crawl on my belly through brimstone if you’ll substitute this,” he said. The Theatre Guild panjandrums, however, were not in the mood for promises. Lawrence Langner, one of the Guild’s directors, rambled on about the Guild being an art institution. “If we were not,” he said, “we would all be sunning ourselves in Florida . . . but since we continue to be art producers we are struggling in Boston with an unknown playwright.” Williams looked at Wood and giggled. Langner caught him at it. “At that moment,” Wood later wrote to Williams, “I realized whatever would befall you in the future you would hold your own and ‘whether the cup with sweet or bitter run’ you would stand up and take it. And by God you have—and do and will—continue.”
    But there was still more “bitter” for Williams to endure. The outraged word of mouth of Theatre Guild subscribers was that the play was dirty, a view that was reinforced by some of the newspaper critics. A member of the Boston City Council called the play “putrid” and demanded its closure, adding, “The police should arrest the persons responsible for bringing shows of this type to Boston.” The police commissioner demanded changes in the dialogue, which was thought to be “improper and indecent”; the assistant city censor, arguing that “too many of the lines have double meanings,” also threw his weight against the play. The odium around
Battle of Angels
reached as far afield as Williams’s hometown Mississippi newspaper, the
Clarksdale Register
, which slapped down its native son for writing “DIRT” and giving a false picture of the Delta.
    “Tennessee was completely taken by surprise and greatly shaken,” Webster said. “It seemed to me that if ‘Battle of Angels’ was nothing else it was certainly clean, certainly idealistic,” Williams told her. For about half the play’s run, according to Williams, “censors sat out front and demanded excision from the script of practically all that made it intelligible, let alone moving.” To counter the City Council furor and to speak up for the beleaguered playwright, Miriam Hopkins held a press conference in which she addressed the accusations of “dirtiness,” which she called “an insult to the fine young man who wrote the show.” “You can tell them for me that I haven’t gotten to the point where I have to appear in dirty plays,” she said, adding that “dirt” was in the eyes of the beholder. “MIRIAM HOPKINS SAYS BOSTON COUNCIL SHOULD BE THROWN IN HARBOR WITH TEA,” bannered one of the Boston papers the next day.
    A few days later, at another production meeting, Williams was told that
Battle of Angels
would close in Boston without transferring to Broadway. “You don’t seem to see that I put my heart into this play,” Williams retorted. “You must not wear your heart on your sleeve for daws to peck at,” Webster told him. “At least you are not out of pocket,” Theresa Helburn chimed in. Recalling the moment, Williams said, “I don’t think I had any answer for that one, any more than I had anything in my pocket to be out of.” After a two-week capacity engagement,
Battle of Angels
closed, in Williams’s words, “for recasting, re-writing, re-everything.” Williams, who had expected to make eight hundred dollars for the run, ended up with two hundred. “What a failure!” he wrote to James Laughlin.
    “Nothing whatever in this whole experience could have encouraged the author to go on writing for the stage,” Webster said. “And it was that which troubled me most.” The Guild sent out an unprecedented and defensive newsletter to its subscribers, explaining that “the play was more a disappointment to us than to you”; it concluded, “ ‘Battle of Angels’ turned out badly but who knows whether