Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  Within a week, I had submitted my resignation to Dad’s friend, Mr. Fletcher of Continental Shoemakers, and had received a politely phrased acknowledgment of it: “Best wishes for an early return to health. We have all appreciated your many sterling qualities” (my own italics). I do wish I had that letter to frame it in silver …

  It was decided by the folks that I should spend a summer recuperating with Grand and Grandfather at their little home in Memphis.

  And so, as a twenty-fourth birthday gift, I received a permanent release from the wholesale shoe business in St. Louis, and my first full opportunity to approach maturity in my “sullen art and craft,” as Dylan Thomas described the vocation of writing. In my own case, it was oftentimes a desperate commitment, but I have never found anything very sullen about it. Even the best of poets can sometimes put a thing rather badly, as did Stephen Spender when he spoke of “the evening’s grave demand for love.” What’s grave about the genital itch? No matter how romantic one is, the urge to “lay knife aboard” can hardly be regarded as a thing of gravity, confined to the evening hours, as though it were Evensong in a high Episcopal church. Chacun, chacun, perhaps some poets confuse it with kneeling in prayer before the high altar: maybe a practical position, at times, but hardly the right place.

  And so I’m a clown today. I fear it results from reading over my funny melodrama Kingdom of Earth, which Michael Kahn has promised to revive at Princeton to which he will transfer his fine directorial gifts from The American Shakespeare and Hot Cat Theatre at Stratford, Connecticut.

  Everything is next season, next season, and I feel as if next week were all but impossibly remote!

  I wish to God I had the spirit of Bricktop. She was the surprise guest at Chuck Bowden’s dinner party night before last. It was her eightieth birthday: she entered the apartment singing “Quiéreme Mucho,” the song which I always requested her to sing at her club on the Via Veneto of Rome. Then she sang many other favorites of mine and her voice, her enunciation of words and her phrasing are as lovely as ever.

  Michael Moriarty also sang to his own accompaniment on the piano and I still consider him our most promising young dramatic actor …

  Jim Dale of Scapino sang and played a song of his own composition, molto con brio.

  My first play was produced when I was 24 years old and staying in my grandparents’ home in Memphis the summer of 1934. This play (Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!) was successfully produced by The Rose Arbor Players, a little-theatre group, in Memphis. Grand and Grandfather Dakin had a pleasant little house on Snowden Avenue. It was a block or two from Southwestern University and less than that distance from the residence of Knolle Rhodes and his wife and mother and cat. Professor Rhodes and his little family were great friends of ours. They were Virginians of the first rank. Later on Professor Rhodes became the president of the university: in the summer of 1934 he was, I believe, head of the English Department. He got me access to the library of the university and I spent most of those summer afternoons reading there, or at the downtown library on Main Street.

  That summer I fell in love with the writing of Anton Chekhov, at least with his many short stories. They introduced me to a literary sensibility to which I felt a very close affinity at that time. Now I find that he holds too much in reserve. I still am in love with the delicate poetry of his writing and The Sea Gull is still, I think, the greatest of modern plays, with the possible exception of Brecht’s Mother Courage.

  It has often been said that Lawrence was my major literary influence. Well, Lawrence was, indeed, a highly simpatico figure in my literary upbringing, but Chekhov takes precedence as an influence—that is, if there has been any particular influence beside my own solitary bent—toward what I am not yet sure and probably never will be …

  Last night Donald Madden reminded me of my promise to do a new adaptation of The Sea Gull (both of us feel it has never been let out of the confines of the translation straitjacket, not even by Stark Young) and of my longing to direct it, sometime, with Madden in the role of Trigorin, Anne Meacham as Nina or Mme. Arcadina—

  But last night I shook my head a little at this reminder of that ambitious project: I said—no self-pity—I don’t think I have time, now, to undertake anything of a writing nature but this “thing,” my memoirs, and possibly the final version of Milk Train for Michael York and Angela Lansbury …

  In that summer of 1934, when I first became a playwright, there lived next door to my grandparents in Memphis a family of Jews with a very warmhearted and actively disposed daughter named Bernice Dorothy Shapiro. She was a member of a little dramatic club in Memphis. Their productions took place on the great sloping back lawn of a lady named Mrs. Rosebrough, which accounts for the “Rose Arbor” name of that cry of players. Dorothy wanted me to collaborate with her on a play for the group—she knew that I was a writer and she wasn’t. I wrote a play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!—a farcical but rather touching little comedy about two sailors on a date with a couple of “light ladies.” Bernice Dorothy Shapiro wrote a quite unnecessary and, I must confess, undistinguished prologue to the play. Thank God the prologue was short: that’s all I can remember in its favor.

  The play was produced late that summer. It was not long, either, but it was a great success for the group. On the program I was identified as the collaborator and was given second billing to Dorothy. Still, the laughter, genuine and loud, at the comedy I had written enchanted me.

  Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse.

  I know it’s the only thing that’s saved my life.

  During that same summer of 1934 in Memphis, when I started to realize fully an attraction I had long suspected, to writing for the theatre, I also began to realize more fully an attraction, also suspected for some time, to young men. And, the delicacy of my physical nature.

  One afternoon I went out with two young university students who had become friends of Grandfather. They were exceptionally handsome: one was dark, the other a shining blond.

  In retrospect, I realize that they must have been lovers. They took me out to a lake near Memphis where there was a swimming-beach—and, well, the love-bug bit me in the form of erotic longings for the blond. I believe the interest was reciprocal, for one evening he invited me to have dinner with him at the Peabody Hotel restaurant. We had beers; I doubt that the beer was the true cause of the palpitations that suddenly began to occur in my excitable heart. I went into panic and so did the blond. A doctor was summoned. The doctor was a lady, and an extremely bad doctor. She gave me a sedative tablet of some kind but informed me, gloomily, that my symptoms were, indeed, of a serious nature.

  “You must do everything carefully and slowly,” said this gloom-pot. She told me that with the exercise of care and a slow pace I would live to be forty!

  “Oh, I’m so glad you told him that,” said the poor blond, “he walks much too fast on the street for someone with a cardiac condition.”

  This incident resulted in a return of the cardiac neurosis which had begun to subside late that summer.

  My first and last and only consummated sexual affair with a woman occurred after that, when I had returned for a year of college, in the Drama Department at the University of Iowa, the fall of 1937. The girl was, I suppose, a genuine nympho, and I’ll call her Sally. She was not only a nympho but an alcoholic and she came on with me all of a sudden and like gang-busters, a little before my second long (semiprofessional) play, Fugitive Kind, was performed by the Mummers of St. Louis. That I was having a play performed in St. Louis gave me a certain panache that fall season at Iowa. Sally found me interesting for that reason, I suspect, although, also, I was not a bad-looking young man. I had developed a slim swimmer’s physique and the cataract in my left eye had not yet appeared. Sally had a sort of Etruscan profile, I mean the forehead and nose were on a straight line, the mouth full and sensual and her breath always pleasantly scented with tobacco and beer. She had a terrific build, especially her breast
s, which were about the most prominent on the campus.

  One evening that early fall she borrowed an apartment from a friend, for the purpose of my seduction. I remember how all the right oldies came over the radio, like “Kiss Me Again,” “Embraceable You,” “Oh Promise Me,” and so forth, as if we’d requested them, and we were soon on the sofa, naked, and I couldn’t get it up, no way, no way, and all of a sudden I felt nauseated from the liquor consumed and from the nervous strain and embarrassment. I rushed into the bathroom and puked, came out with a towel around me, hangdog with shame over my failed test of virility.

  “Tom, you’ve touched the deepest chord in my nature, the maternal chord,” she said.

  The next night I took her home to the rooming-house she lived in. She was wearing crimson ski-pants and a white sweater with those great boobs standing out. She turned out the light in the rooming-house parlor and motioned me to the sofa.

  Her caresses were wildly successful. She unzipped the front of her ski pants and I fucked her with my overcoat on. We were interrupted once or twice by other roomers returning. She would zip up her pants and I would button my coat but no one was much fooled and no one cared, for it was a raffish house. The roomers would go upstairs at once and we would at once return to our wild break-through of my virginal status.

  I took to it like a duck to water. She changed positions with me, she got on top of me and rode my cock like a hobbyhorse and then she came and I’d never imagined such a thing, all that hot wet stuff exploding inside her and about my member and her gasping hushed outcries.

  I was not yet in love with Sally but terribly impressed with myself. I got home long after midnight. I went straight to the men’s room at the ATO house. Another brother was peeing as I peed, and I said, “I fucked a girl tonight.”

  “Yeh, yeh, how was it?”

  “Oh, it was like fucking the Suez Canal,” I said, and grinned and felt a man full grown.

  Then it was every night for about two and a half or three months before the start of the Christmas holidays. We repeated the same scene with more and more satisfaction on both sides, I believe. I learned how to hold back my orgasm. But in those days I could have one and still keep it up.

  There was the weekend interval of my play’s opening, put on by the Mummers, a semi-pro theatre I worked with in St. Louis.

  Then I got my first taste of blood drawn by critics.

  It was a much better and more promising play than the first long play, Candles to the Sun, but the critics put it down. Afterward there was a desperately drunk party in someone’s downtown hotel room. I made a sudden dash for a window but was tackled and I cannot say reliably whether or not it was my intention to jump.

  The point is that I already knew that writing was my life, and its failure would be my death …

  I had wonderful friends in those days and I think I deserved them because I responded so warmly to any warmth that was offered. Sally consoled me, showing not the least disappointment in the flop of Fugitive Kind. Things went on as before between us.

  One night she said to me, in a whisper on that living-room sofa, “Tom, I want to show you something.”

  She started to go down but I was shocked and wouldn’t let her.

  Then the last night before vacation for Christmas, we took a room in a shady hotel in town and spent our first night naked in bed together. Somehow it was a bit of a comedown from our nights on her rooming-house sofa. She had her beer under the bed and kept drinking between love-making and her breath turned a little sour.

  When we’d slept a while and woke up and I tried to kiss her, she said, “No, no, baby, I’ve got a mouth full of old chicken feathers.”

  When I returned from the holidays she wouldn’t see me. She said something had happened and she’d tell me later. It was several days later when we met again that she told me she was pregnant.

  I didn’t believe her. I suspected she was dating a new boy and I was right.

  It was a short affair, but a very deep one we’d had and I think that she had loved me as long as I’d satisfied her but now she was with a real stud and she was letting me out.

  I had, during all that time I was involved with Sally and for months afterward, no interest in a member of my own sex.

  After she had irrevocably dismissed me in favor of the new stud, I tried to date other girls.

  Somehow I didn’t manage.

  There were two very beautiful young men who acted in a play at the University Theatre, a dramatization of a Jane Austen novel. One was the actor Walter Fleishman, as he was called then, who actually, some years later, made a screen debut in the film based on the life of Valentino. He had a fantastically perfect body. The other beautiful young actor in the Jane Austen play, based on Pride and Prejudice, asked me to have dinner with him one night—he was troubled over something, he said, and he didn’t know how to tell me what it was. But after a few beers he did.

  “Y’know, I went in Fleishman’s bedroom last night and he was in there naked and I—well, I—I don’t know how to tell you but I felt something like I wanted to touch him like a man does a woman, y’know.”

  He kept his long-lashed eyes on the table. His face was beautifully flushed.

  I had an ideal opening and I suspect he had intended to give me one.

  When I finally spoke, I said to him, “There’s nothing about it to be upset over.”

  “It isn’t a natural thing,” he whispered.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s a perfectly natural thing and you’re just being silly.”

  I walked him home to his dormitory and we shook hands good night.

  It was to secure a private place in which Sally and I could make love that I had elected to share an apartment with an outrageous young Middle Eastern student, whom I’ll call “Abdul.”

  “Abdul” was a notorious girl-chaser and he had gotten in bad with the local police because of his intemperate tactics.

  However, when I was looking around for an apartment, he had one which he wanted to share. He was a scrawny, dark young man and the apartment was not attractive, naturally, and it was always filled with the odor of his cooking, a strong, sweetish odor.

  He was a good enough companion except that he would sometimes come home all liquored up and inform me that when he was drunk he’d just as soon fuck a girl or a boy or a goat: he once tried to enter my bed and encountered savage resistance which persuaded him that I was no willing substitute for girls and goats.

  One night he was arrested and he called the apartment and begged me to come to the lockup and obtain his release. Fortunately he had the money for the fine. I went to the jailhouse and he was in the tank with a bleary-eyed bewhiskered old alcoholic and Abdul was trying to communicate with him. He kept shouting at him, “You pees, too? You pees, too?”

  It seemed that on this occasion Abdul had been arrested for pissing in an alley behind a bar.

  My efforts to entice Sally to the apartment were only once successful and she came with her new boy-friend, which seemed a bit like rubbing Siberian salt in my wounds as she could not keep her hands off him during the dinner prepared by Abdul.

  She did allow me a few minutes of private talk in an alcove.

  “I love you, Tom, and I don’t want to hurt you, sweetheart, but I’m just no good, I’m not pregnant, I made that story up, in fact I’ve lost one ovary from an operation, but the point is I’m a sex-fiend, I want it from one after another and I’d fuck up your life.”

  She let me kiss her and hold her for a moment, then she returned to her new young man. I was desolate, for a while. But then I became a close friend of a young man named Lomax and his Negro girl-friend; they were marvelous companions and were also in the school of drama.

  I had been cast as a page boy in Richard of Bordeaux and they said they’d make me up for it. They painted my cheeks, rouged my lips and tousled my hair into curls. Then Lomax put me into my page-boy outfit and brought me in for the black girl’s inspection.

&nbs
p; “See what I mean?” he asked her. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Then I looked in the mirror and I knew. I looked like a young girl …

  In the page boy’s part I had only one line. I had not recovered from my dreadful shyness. Throughout the scene in which I appeared I had to sit on the forestage, polishing a helmet, all the while my throat getting tighter and tighter with apprehension at delivering that one line. I simply had to say that somebody had arrived at the gates. But when my cue came, the sound that issued from my constricted throat was quite unintelligible and would always bring down the house—it was like a mouse’s squeak. They said it was effective, however. I suspect, though, that I was merely on the stage because I looked so well in the make-up applied by Lomax.

  I recall having one other part on the stage of the great theatre at the University of Iowa. It was in a play about the Penitentes and I was drafted into a scene of flagellation among the young monks. I’ll never forget one line from the show, home-written on the campus. An actor was floundering bare-shouldered about the stage, lashing himself with his whip and he cried out loudly, “Tonight there will be much glory in the Morada” (the Morada being the subterranean chamber in which these flagellations were practiced).

  The Christ figure, the one who performed as victim with the ritual crucifixion, was Fleishman, the leading young actor that year. He was elevated nearly naked upon the cross—and it was his virile young beauty that drew me back toward my more predominant sexual inclination.

  Sally began to fade out of my libido.

  Others of my own gender began to fade in.

  Once during the rehearsals for Richard of Bordeaux, Lemuel Ayers, who was a postgraduate student at Iowa and who had, like myself, fallen into the displeasure of E. C. Mabie, head of the Drama Department, was walking around the men’s locker room quite naked before a performance. He was like a young saint out of Italian renaissance painting—darkly gleaming curls, and a perfectly formed body.

  Once we had met at dusk in a tiny zoo on a hill. No one was around. There was, just at the moment we saw each other, a great flutter of wings.