Tennessee Williams

A Literary Life

J. Bak

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137308474
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This Literary Life draws extensively from the playwright's correspondences, notebooks, and archival papers to offer an original angle to the discussion of Williams's life and work, and the times and circumstances that helped produce it.

1

Columbus to Columbia (via St Louis): Separating Fact from Fiction

It is unorthodox, and perhaps even unethical, to begin a biography of a writer’s life in medias res. Where are the early years that formed him? Where are the faces and places of his childhood? Surely, a historical biography on Tennessee Williams should begin in Columbus, Mississippi, and not in Columbia, Missouri. Such a biography, like Lyle Leverich’s classic Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995), would cover Williams’s childhood from his birth in Columbus on 26 March 1911 (and not 1914, as he would later tell the Group Theatre and early interviewers) to the months he lived with his grandfather, Walter Edwin Dakin, and his beloved grandmother, Rosina Otte ‘Grand’ Dakin, in their rectory in Clarksdale, Mississippi, or in Memphis. As Leverich notes, Tommy Williams, during these early years, was ‘growing up more a minister’s son than the son of a traveling salesman, whom he scarcely recognized as a father’.¹ Then, the biography would follow the Dakin/Williams family north (briefly) to Nashville, then back south to Canton and then Clarksdale, all the while in the company of the playwright’s mother, sister, and grandparents, since his father, Cornelius Coffin, or C.C. for short, had spent his time on the road drumming first men’s clothing and then men’s shoes. The biography’s introductory chapters would eventually terminate with his mother Edwina and his sister Rose following his father north again, this time to St Louis, where C.C. accepted a promotion to assistant sales manager at the International Shoe Company. Such would be the opening chapters of that historical biography, similar to those chapters we can already find in Leverich’s Tom, as well as in the biographies written by his mother Edwina and his brother Dakin, just to name a few.

This is not that biography.

Instead, it begins in St Louis in the summer of 1918, when Williams was already seven years old, for that is arguably when and where Williams’s ‘literary life’ began. One could argue the case, as indeed many have, that Williams’s youth in the South formed him much more as a writer than St Louis ever did. Surely his serious illnesses at age five – diphtheria and then Bright’s disease – had a significant impact on his literary affections; first bedridden then confined to the house for nearly two years, Tommy had turned from ‘a little boy with a robust, aggressive bullying nature’ into a ‘decided hybrid’, whose imaginative games and stories and aesthetic sentiments were honed during a time of relative isolation.² After all, he considered himself to be a southern writer, and the South is his locale of choice in his plays and in many of his stories.

I do not wish to debate that point. Arguably, though, St Louis and the Midwest had shaped Williams, too, more than he had himself considered or at least had imagined, in particular his early political and artistic credos. It is my contention in the opening of this literary biography to confirm that St Pollution – as Williams would later refer to St Louis – had at least as strong, if not a stronger than previously considered, role in transforming Thomas Lanier Williams III, the distant cousin of Civil War poet Sidney Lanier, into Tennessee Williams, the poet–playwright who championed the lowly, disenfranchised flotsam of American society.³

Because of that childhood illness and those frequent uprootings that ultimately landed his family in the industrial city of St Louis and its many (first unfashionable, then later highly bourgeois) suburbs, Tom Williams was a shy, unassuming boy who would sooner take to his books than to his fellow classmates. His world in the South, inhabited by his sister Rose, their black nurse Ozzie, and all of the characters in his grandfather’s library, was one built on stories and playacting. His world in St Louis for the next ten years – one dominated by nearly a dozen social-climbing removals from boarding houses to apartments to rented then purchased houses in increasingly upscale districts of St Louis and stymied by the conservative ideals and gaping divides between the city’s haves and have-nots – was built instead on escapism and on social activism. This chapter will explore these two themes in the early writings of Tom Williams.

Finding it difficult at first to make friends with local boys his own age at the Eugene Field Public School, or Stix School later (returning to St Louis after a brief respite in Clarksdale in 1920), Williams sought companionship in the escapist protagonists of his writings. Williams would later fantasize about fleeing to exotic climes aboard a Merchant steamer; he would actualize certain escapes to summer camp in the Ozarks and, eventually, to college in Columbia, Missouri. This need to escape – be it the oppressive conservatism of St Louis, the volatile reproaches of a drunken and disillusioned father, or the choking repression of a puritanical mother – stayed with Williams throughout his life. Even before he had the financial freedom to drift between cities and over continents, Williams was the perennial vagabond, the archetypal poet-gypsy. And when he finally left St Louis for New Orleans in December 1938, he fled more than his father’s suffocating house to which he would make brief returns always on the way to somewhere else. Williams, it would seem, was ultimately fleeing from himself. But that Jamesian doppelganger he left behind in his parents’ attic, where cigarettes and black coffee fuelled his nightly production of poems and stories – duly submitted and duly rejected – pursued him throughout the remainder of his life. Though Tommy Williams, then Thomas Lanier III or simply Tom, became Tennessee Williams en route to New Orleans, he had begun the transformation much earlier. Having escaped one past, he never really stopped looking for a future and sought it out in nearly every corner of the world.

One of those corners, which he would later celebrate in The Glass Menagerie, was wherever Rose happened to be at the time, be it in their bedroom in Nashville (to where the Williams family had moved when Walter Dakin accepted the ministry of the Church of the Advent in December 1913⁴) or in Clarksdale (after his childhood illness in the summer of 1916) or in Rose’s white room in their ‘dismal over-crowded flat’⁵ on 6554 Enright Avenue in University City (a middle-class suburb in western St Louis that, with its ‘vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular-living units’, was more the setting for The Glass Menagerie than was the fashionable Westminster Place address where they had first lived on arriving in the city). Rose was not only Williams’s muse, now as forever; she was also his security blanket, his small craft harbour, his God so suddenly. As Williams later described in his essay ‘The Author Tells Why It Is Called The Glass Menagerie’ (1945):

The apartment we lived in was about as cheerful as an Arctic winter. There were outside windows only in the front room and kitchen. The rooms between had windows that opened upon a narrow areaway that was virtually sunless and which we grimly named ‘Death Valley’ for a reason which is amusing only in retrospect.

[…] Something had to be done to relieve this gloom. So my sister and I painted all her furniture white; she put white curtains at the window and on the shelves around the room she collected a large assortment of little glass articles, of which she was particularly fond. Eventually, the room took on a light and delicate appearance, in spite of the lack of outside illumination, and it became the only room in the house that I found pleasant to enter.⁶

These were the years of brother-sister bonding which would see them throughout their lives. As Williams recalled from his earlier days in Clarksdale:

My sister and I were gloriously happy. We sailed paper boats in washtubs of water, cut lovely dolls out of huge mail-order catalogs, kept two white rabbits under the back porch, baked mud pies in the sun upon the front walk, climbed up and slid down the big wood pile, collected from neighboring alleys and trash-piles bits of colored glass that were diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds. And in the evening, when the moonlight streamed over our bed, before we were asleep, our Negro nurse Ozzie, as warm and black as a moonless Mississippi night, would lean over our bed, telling in a low, rich voice her amazing tales about foxes and bears and rabbits and wolves that behaved like human beings.⁷

But, as Leverich points out, war hit the nation and the Williams family, and that peace which Tom and Rose and the rest of the Williamses-Dakins knew in the South was about to be upended.⁸ With so many men being sent to Europe to fill the military ranks for the Great War, workers became scarce,⁹ and Williams’s father, who throughout the young Tom’s formative years was frequently on the road, could not refuse the position offered to him at the Friedman-Shelby branch of the International Shoe Company (which bought out the local company in 1912), and the family followed him to St Louis. From that summer of 1918 until the winter of 1938, Williams lived on and off in the city he would grow to detest (and would ultimately be interred), and life would never be the same, despite the several respites he would enjoy on returning to his grandparents’ home in the South.

Another of those lugubrious corners was his grandfather’s Episcopalian rectory on 106 Sharkey Avenue in Clarksdale, Mississippi. While Grand frequently came north to St Louis to help Edwina out with the house, Williams, now in the fourth grade, returned alone to Clarksdale in the spring and autumn terms of 1920 to live with his grandfather. Even back in the South, Williams was so tormented at school that he had found sanctuary more in his art than in his grandfather’s rectory. Williams describes in a May–June 1920 letter to his sister how he had sketched a ‘Ranbow’ [sic] comic paper for her and planned to write about the wedding of a character named Jane H. Rothchild, a suffragette who is frightened that ‘Wido’ Rose L. Williams will ‘paint up so much’ that she will attract all the potential ‘million’ suitors.¹⁰ These early artistic endeavours carry with them much of what would preoccupy Williams’s many later plays and stories, namely a young woman’s struggle to stave off loneliness.

One final corner into which the young Williams sought refuge was the Ben Blewett Junior High School, an experimental school that a few years later instilled in him so profoundly his love of the trope that he began writing – and publishing – his work at a tender age. Williams had become an avid reader since his stay in Clarksdale, where he had the run of his grandfather’s impressive library, and St Louis’s famed educational system only fuelled that desire for stories. Recognized for his reading skills and literary talents, Williams was placed in an advanced reading group at Blewett, which he entered on 31 March 1924, and his mother rewarded his literary efforts with a second-hand typewriter. Williams also discovered an audience beyond himself and Rose. In November 1924, Williams published his first piece of writing, ‘Isolated’, in Blewett’s biweekly newspaper, The Junior Life. It is a short prose piece of 251 words (Philip Kolin calls it a short story¹¹) that established early that signature theme of loneliness. ‘No wonder’, he wrote in it, ‘that I felt like Robinson Crusoe doomed to a lifetime of isolation’.¹²

In ‘Isolated’, the thirteen-year-old Williams proved himself a wordsmith and a dramatist. The piece ignores exposition and rushes headlong toward climax, for the narrator describes being drawn to White Fan Island ‘on that fateful Friday’. Why it was to be ‘fateful’ we are not told at first, but the narrator constructs a dramatic situation from which he later emerges unscathed but not unaffected. He rows a boat against the current toward the island in the middle of the river with the intention of going fishing. More Huck Finn (or Rip van Winkle) than Crusoe here, the narrator soon falls asleep on the warm sand and is awakened by the rising flood waters – of what, we do not learn. During those two hours, waters rushed through the river at a rapid pace, wreaking havoc along the shores. It was not a storm, as that would have woken the narrator. He speaks instead about a ‘thaw in the far North’, but no thaw in the space of two hours would have created such a flood, despite the signs the narrator saw beforehand in the river’s strong current. Perhaps a dam broke upstream; perhaps it was, as it would often be later in Williams’s work, an act of divine intervention not unlike the deluge described in Genesis and his later play Kingdom of Earth (1968). At any rate, the narrator is stranded (presumably his own rowing boat that took him to the island was washed away by the flood) and awakes to see ‘from shore to shore […] the torches of searching parties who were reclaiming the dead bodies’. Drama is heightened when he is rescued just as the flood waters ‘washed over the last hillock of my erstwhile refuge’.¹³

It is unclear if the piece was even remotely autobiographical. Williams scholars like Philip Kolin and Allean Hale find that assertion dubious. As Hale writes in a letter to Kolin: ‘Tom might have recalled an island in the Meramec River or in a place in the Ozarks where he went to camp in the summers. Or it could have been a memory of Clarksdale, Mississippi or from summers near Knoxville. Too many possibilities. He probably just invented it’.¹⁴ Whatever its history and its genre, ‘Isolated’ contains many of the themes and images of later Williams work (in particular water or a refuge that proves later to be a trap, as Kolin points out) save one: the happy ending. Perhaps still optimistic as an eighth grader, Williams drew victory from the clutches of tragedy, though the narrator has no doubt been traumatized by the sight of dead and bloated bodies flowing past him on his receding hillock. Endeavours such as these earned Williams the nickname ‘Tom Williams – Our literary boy’ from his peers, and ‘mah writin’ son’ from his mother Edwina.¹⁵

Despite his forays into prose fiction, the young Williams was first and foremost a poet whose ‘sympathies were with the Romantics’.¹⁶ In his early hand at poetry, Williams found kinship with John Keats, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, and later Hart Crane.¹⁷ This can be seen in his first published poems in The Junior Life, ‘Nature’s Thanksgiving’ (25 November 1925) and ‘Old Things’ (22 January 1926), both written when he was fourteen.¹⁸ While ‘Old Things’ is lyrical in its nostalgic depiction of an old man sitting alone in ‘the silence of the garret, midst things of long ago’,¹⁹ ‘Nature’s Thanksgiving’, which speaks of the ‘Bob-White […] whirring’ and the ‘wood-brook […] singing / And happily sobbing’, has much in common, stylistically speaking, with his ‘Sonnets for the Spring’, written eleven years later in March 1936 when he turned twenty-five:

[…] (Singer of darkness, Oh, be silent now!

Raise no defense, dare to erect no wall,

But let the living fire, the bright storm fall

With lyric paeans of victory once more

Against your own blindly surrendered shore!)²⁰

Williams’s future as a writer, much to the dismay of his father, was already taking shape. As Hale rightly notes, ‘At fourteen, he had found his vocation’.²¹

By sixteen, Williams had learned one important lesson about writing: that his imagination could earn him money. The older he became, the more Williams needed a way to escape the nightmare that wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbrevations
• 1 Columbus to Columbia (via St Louis): Separating Fact from Fiction
• 2 University City to Clayton (via Memphis): Looking for a Publisher in Spring
• 3 University City to New Orleans (via Iowa City): Academic Blues versus ‘American Blues’
• 4 New Orleans to Hollywood (via Acapulco): Mañana Es Otro Día
• 5 Hollywood to Rome (via Chicago): The ‘Catastrophe’ of his Success
• 6 Rome to Rome (via Nearly Everywhere Else): ‘Comfortable Little Mercies’
• 7 New York to New York (via Miami): A Battle of Angles
• 8 Tokyo to St Louis (via Spoleto): The Stoned(wall) Age
• 9 Key West to New York (via Bangkok): In Search of Androgyny
• 10 Chicago to St Louis (via Vancouver): ‘Right (Write) On!’
• 11 Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index