Love and Cigarettes

Tennessee Williams’s play,
Night of the Iguana, is the story of
a defrocked Episcopal minister, the
Rev. Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon,
who after leaving the ministry,
takes up giving bus tours through
Mexico. On a trip he is leading
with women teachers from a Baptist
college in Texas, Shannon becomes
romantically entangled with the
17-year-old niece of the matriarch
of the group. Though Shannon is
innocent of the charges she lodges
against him, the stern matriarch
decides to ruin Shannon’s
career as a tour guide and in the
process uncovers his past.
Shannon begins to fall apart and
has a nervous breakdown
which leads him to heavy drinking. In order to save his job
as a tour guide, he shanghais the bus and takes the ladies to a
remote hotel on the coast of Mexico near Puerto Vallarta. It is
there in the midst of his despair that he meets Hannah Jelkes,
an attractive itinerant painter, who has resigned herself to
singleness for the rest of her life in order to care for her aging
grandfather.

It is Hannah who begins to nurse Shannon back into
shape giving him spiritual counsel and caring for him as no
one has before. The real breakthrough comes one evening after
dinner when Shannon and Hannah find themselves alone
on the veranda, and Hannah removes a crumpled pack of
cigarettes from her pocket. She discovers only two left in the
pack and decides to save them for later and returns the pack to
her pocket.

SHANNON: May I have one of your cigarettes, Miss
Jelkes? [She offers him the pack. He takes it from her and
crumples it and throws it off the veranda.] Never smoke
those. They’re made out of tobacco from cigarette stubs
that beggars pick up off sidewalks and out of gutters in
Mexico City. [He produces a tin of English cigarettes.] Have
these−Benson and Hedges, imported, in an airtight tin,
my luxury in my life.

HANNAH: Why−thank you. I will, since you have
thrown mine away.

SHANNON: I’m going to tell you something about
yourself. You are a lady, a real one and a great one.

HANNAH: What have I done to merit that compliment
from you?

SHANNON: It isn’t a compliment. It’s just a report on
what I’ve noticed about you at a time when it’s hard for
me to notice anything outside myself. You took out those
Mexican cigarettes, you found you just had two left, you
can’t afford to buy a new pack of even that cheap brand,
so you put them away for later. Right?

HANNAH: Mercilessly accurate, Mr. Shannon.

SHANNON: But when I asked you for one, you offered
it to me without a sign of reluctance.

HANNAH: Aren’t you making a big point out of a small
matter?

SHANNON: Just the opposite, honey. I’m making a
small point out of a very large matter.

In a very, very small way, this scene is reflective of the
one-way love, the grace, that Jesus shows us. It is, in fact, “a
very large matter.”

This is the love that is able to transform our lives, and in Night
of the Iguana, it is the breakthrough for the Rev. Dr. Shannon.
The great difference is that in the world this love is still imperfect.
We all want to be loved the way Hannah Jelkes loves Shannon, but it
still does not bring satisfaction. Shannon still wants it, Tennessee
Williams wants it, and we want it. We want a love that is unequivocal,
a love that is unwavering in the midst of our own constant inconsistency.