Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  Next morning I followed his advice, I went to Wichita in a day coach and checked into a hospital where I was subjected to quite an ordeal. They diagnosed appendicitis, too, but kept me in the hospital for several days, subjecting me to X-ray examinations. I noticed the doctors whispering together. They would shut up when I came near them in my hospital gown, waiting for the next examination. They said I probably had a chronically irritated appendix. After about three days they released me. I went back to the town in Oklahoma, where the car was now permanently installed in the garage. The owner—who was the meanest son of a bitch I’ve known in my life, during which I’ve known quite a few mean red neck sons of bitches—told me that the bearings had burnt out and that he couldn’t say when he’d be able to get it repaired.

  So the next morning I set out for Taos by train.

  I got there and the pain got there with me. In fact it was now much worse. My friend had taken a house for us but I couldn’t sleep and I had no pain-killing drug or sedative tablets.

  The next day I went to a little hospital which had been established in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan and which was run by a pair of handsome young doctors. The nurses were Catholic nuns. It was a charming little hospital in some respects. The doctors were wise enough to give me a blood count. They were shocked by my quantity of white blood cells, and said that I must have a perforated appendix to account for this and that I must have immediate surgery if I expected to live.

  That was evening. My friend sat in the hospital with me and I made out my last will and testament while the young doctors shaved my groin for surgery. I had nothing to leave but the playscript of Battle of Angels and I left it to my friend. He took the will and tore it to pieces. (He always had moments of great style and this was one of them.) I was carted to the operating room. As I went under ether, I had a sensation of death. I went out trying to tear the ether mask off my face and shouting, “I’m dying, I’m dying.”

  When I came to I was back in my hospital room. A nun who was the hospital pathologist was cheerily bustling about the room. She told me that I had been on the operating table for seven hours.

  “You’ll probably be all right for a while,” she informed me. “Of course we all have to die of something sooner or later.”

  When the young doctors came to my room later that day, I told them what the pathologist had said to me, that I thought I must be dying. There was a great disturbance. They were furious at the pathologist and gave her a great dressing down. Soon she rushed into my room and said, “I don’t care what you’ve got, it’s nothing to me.”

  The doctors informed me that they had removed what they called a “Maecles Diverticulum” of the small intestine (a medical rarity), which had contained pancreatic tissue and that it had been at the point of bursting and that had accounted for the great number of white blood cells.

  In a few days I was out of the hospital, free of pain, and in contact with Frieda Lawrence.

  She wanted to take me up to the Lawrence ranch in the mountains, and off we went. For some reason, the altitude, I guess, I became wildly exhilarated. We had stopped at a cantina along the road and purchased a big jug of wine and we drank and laughed as we went up the mountain and then all at once I found myself breathless. “Please stop the car, I can’t breathe!” I got out and stood under a pine tree but the breathlessness continued. We must have been about eight thousand feet up in the mountains and we commenced a wild race down. It was like something out of a chase scene in the movies. Frieda drove that car like a firetruck and I kept drinking wine and struggling to breathe. We went straight back to the hospital. One of the doctors said, “Of course you couldn’t go up eight thousand feet with your heart after a seven-hour operation.”

  I have never talked much about that experience in the spring of ’46. It marked the beginning of about three years in which I thought I was a dying man. I was so convinced that I was dying that, when Bill Liebling told me, in New York, to buy a new suit, I was reluctant to buy one as I didn’t think I was going to live long enough to justify its purchase.

  When I first returned to Manhattan that late spring, my dear friend Professor Oliver Evans arranged for me to stay with an elderly lady who lived alone in a two-floor apartment. The elderly lady with whom I stayed was of high social position and wealth but she was ill and lonely, companioned only by servants. She had an odd diversion, or hobby, which was clipping from newspapers and periodicals everything she could find about the newsworthy Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom she regarded as a saintly crusader against the Bolshevik terror in the States. Her other diversions were dancing after dinner in her living room and lunching or dining at an exclusive club. We loved dining and lunching with her but were somewhat embarrassed by her postprandial suggestion: “Shall we dahnce?” She was so very ill and so very thin, it was like dancing with a skeleton in silk. She insisted that her doctors could find nothing wrong with her but “a few little adhesions after her operation.” She was very touchingly quaint.

  About this time I found a new companion, one whom I encountered after the one who prefers to be unmentioned by any name in this book left me.

  The new companion was serenely accepted by our hostess. He danced with her gladly. He served as model for her technically accomplished but conventional portraits.

  One day the charmingly eccentric old lady said to me: “I want to give you a party. Pick out some friends from this book.”

  The book she handed me was the Social Register of New York and the only friend, a distant relation, whom I could find in it was a Mrs. Inman, née Coffin, a lady of high degree but afflicted with periods of deep melancholia. Some months before she had returned from Europe with half a million dollars in Belgian lace. Then deep melancholia struck her, the lace was left out of whatever fine lace should be kept in for moth protection, and the moths ate it up. Oh, well. Tant pis. She was nevertheless on the upgrade from her psychic syndrome and she came to the party, very silent but benignly present. I’d had to confess to my hostess that this relative was the only acquaintance I could find in the register.

  The lady appeared to be about to drop dead at this information, but she recovered from it gracefully after a while.

  “Oh, you artists!” she said.

  And then she permitted me to invite the friends I had from my own social echelon in New York. And I am happy to say that she had a lovely time at the party.

  Now I must invent, much as I dislike invention in these memoirs, a name for my new companion I met in New York. He was sort of an off-beat Saint and so I’ll call him Santo. The dark side of his nature (since overcome) was a drinking habit that made him, at times, disturbingly unpredictable and startling in his behavior.

  He didn’t understand that I had a number of young platonic friends in New York; he suspected that I had nothing but business associates and lovers, often combined. This was certainly not at all the case.

  One afternoon in Manhattan I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Algonquin having a pleasant chat with an old friend and his boy-friend, when into the Algonquin lobby, crowded with suburbanite types, much like the matrons out of New Yorker cartoons, in rushed Santo. In a tempest of rage he shouted at my decorous young guests, “You two are the two biggest whores on Broadway.”

  The lobby was evacuated by all of the suburbanite ladies in a flash as Santo went on with his invectives. At last he turned on me. “Go over to the Royalton and see what I’ve done!”

  (We were staying at the Royalton Hotel, directly across Forty-fourth Street from the Algonquin.)

  Well, I went over there and I discovered that he had literally ripped to shreds all of my clothes, that he had demolished my typewriter and suitcase. But, for some reason, he had left my manuscripts undamaged.

  Of course I should have parted company with Santo right away, but he was pitiably contrite. I had made plans to go to the island of Nantucket, on which the Coffin side of my family had once flourished, and I didn’t want to go alone, so I permitted Santo to go alo
ng with me. On Nantucket we rented a gray frame house a bit outside of town and for some reason I remember its address clearly: 31 Pine Street.

  Now about this time I had written a letter to Carson McCullers, a writer I didn’t know, full of very sincere praise of her new novel, The Member of the Wedding. And in the letter I told her I was very anxious to meet her.

  It must have been a persuasive letter for it was just a few days later that she came to Nantucket. She got off the ferry looking very tall and wearing slacks and a baseball cap and grinning her delightful crooked-toothed grin.

  After our affectionate greetings, I said that I wanted to go to the beach for a swim. She said that suited her fine and we went to the beach, Santo very drunk but coming along.

  At the beach a scene occurred which seems rather funny in retrospect. Carson and I had changed into bathing suits but Santo was still in the bathhouse and all at once a great disturbance began inside there. Then Santo came dashing onto the front gallery. Along this front gallery was a long row of rocking-chairs and in each chair was seated an old lady. For some reason Santo did not like the way they looked and he turned his rage upon them.

  At the top of his voice, addressing these very proper old ladies, he shouted, “What are you looking at? You’re nothing but a bunch of old cock-suckers!”

  Well, I don’t suppose this would create such a tremendous sensation today, but I am surprised that back then, in 1946, the old ladies didn’t all fall out of their rockers in a swoon.

  Carson was delighted. “Tennessee honey,” she said, “that boy is wonderful, you are lucky to have him with you!”

  I was by no means convinced of this, but we went home and we set up housekeeping at 31 Pine Street. This was before Carson was ill. She was a good cook and she put the house in order while she prepared good meals. It was all quite nice for a time. She had the downstairs guest room and Santo and I slept upstairs. Santo was temporarily subdued. Carson played the piano and created an atmosphere of harmony about the place.

  One night there was a great thunderstorm and all the windows broke on one side of the house and they were never repaired.

  A pregnant cat climbed in one of the windows and had a large number of kittens on Carson’s bed. Santo served as midwife. With the tender side of his nature, and a certain animal intuition which he possessed, he gave the cat, during her time of delivery, teaspoons of whiskey to keep her energy up. This is the only time that I have seen an animal drink whiskey but it worked and the mother cat provided us with eight or nine kittens. The cat had a bad habit, though, of bringing old fish-heads into the house, through the broken windows. This did not bother Carson; in fact she put up with anything and everything. That summer we sat at opposite ends of a table and worked together, she on her dramatization of The Member of the Wedding and I on Summer and Smoke, and in the evenings we read aloud to each other our day’s work.

  Later on that summer her husband, Reeves McCullers, came to join us. He was an ex-marine and I didn’t particularly like him at that time. He was not good company. He seemed morose and introverted and so was I and he interrupted my happy companionship with Carson.

  I was still not well, in fact I got so that I could not keep down food, I would vomit almost everything I ate, and so the summer ended with my returning to New York and entering a hospital again. I stayed there a week. They gave me various medications and soon I was able to return to New Orleans.

  After that summer Carson and I remained friends, and over the years the memories accumulate. I think of three important times in my life when Carson was there, all of them exits in which Carson and I took part: three of the longest, the most agonizing exits that I can remember.

  One was from the birthday party given for Dylan Thomas by my publishers, who were also his. When I was introduced to him, all that he said by way of acknowledgment was this put-down: “How does it feel to make all that Hollywood money?”

  In retrospect it was thoroughly understandable and excusable, but then it stung me badly. Carson he simply ignored. After a few moments, she said, “Tenn, honey, take me out of here!”—This was after her stroke, and as I led her out of the birthday celebration, she trembled in my supporting arm and the exit seemed to be everlasting.

  Another exit was more painful.

  Carson had made the mistake of attending the opening night party of her play, The Square Root of Wonderful and the greater mistake of remaining there till the reviews came out.

  They were simply awful.

  Carson again said to me, “Tenn, help me out of here.” And it was an even longer and more agonizing exit.

  The third exit we made together was also from an opening night party: the opening in New York in 1948 of the Margo Jones production of Summer and Smoke. On this occasion it was I who said to Carson: “Let’s get out of here.” It was also a long and agonizing exit, everyone staring at us, the notices out … And those notices were not very good. I was living then in a Tony Smith designed apartment on East Fifty-eighth Street. When I woke in the morning, it was to a record of Mozart. Carson had already arrived in the apartment and put the record on to comfort my waking moments.

  Well, I was not in the mood for comfort or for pity, which is really not comforting, much … so I told Frank Merlo (who will appear later in this book; I lived with him for a long, long time) to cut the Mozart off and to see Carson to a cab before I got out of bed.

  I wanted to get back to work: alone, and right away.

  In New Orleans, in the autumn of 1947, I obtained one of the loveliest apartments I’ve ever occupied. It was on the second floor of Dick Orme’s residence near the corner of St. Peter and Royal, and since Dick worked in an antique store and had exquisite taste, the apartment was beautifully furnished. What I liked most about it was a long refectory table under a skylight which provided me with ideal conditions for working in the mornings. I know of no city where it is better to have a skylight then New Orleans. You know, New Orleans is slightly below sea level and maybe that’s why the clouds and the sky seem so close. In New Orleans the clouds always seem just overhead. I suppose they are really vapor off the Mississippi more than genuine clouds and through that skylight they seemed so close that if the skylight were not glass, you could touch them. They were fleecy and in continual motion. I was alone all day. Consistent with my habit, which I still follow today, I would rise early, have my black coffee and go straight to work.

  I was going on with the writing then of Summer and Smoke, but the play was a tough nut to crack. Miss Alma Winemiller may very well be the best female portrait I have drawn in a play. She simply seemed to exist somewhere in my being and it was no effort to put her on paper. However, the boy she was in love with all her youth, Johnny Buchanan, never seemed real to me but always a cardboard figure and I knew it and it distressed me but I kept at the play for a couple of months, I wrote several drafts of it. Then one evening, when I thought it completed, I read it aloud to a young man who was friendly to me. He kept yawning as I read and so I read badly and when I finished, he made this devastating remark: “How could the author of The Glass Menagerie write such a bad play as this?”

  I was crushed for a few days, but then I took up where I’d left off with Streetcar, which I was then calling The Poker Night. I wrote furiously on it. For despite the fact that I thought I was dying, or maybe because of it, I had a great passion for work. I would work from early morning until early afternoon, and then, spent from the rigors of creation, I would go around the corner to a bar called Victor’s and revive myself with a marvelous drink called a Brandy Alexander, which was a specialty of the bar. I would always play the Ink Spots’ rendition of “If I Didn’t Care” on the jukebox while I drank the Alexander. Then I’d eat a sandwich and then I’d go to the Athletic Club on North Rampart Street. It had a pool that was fed by an underground spring of artesian water and it was cool from the underground and it would pick me up.

  I continued to think I was dying of pancreatic cancer. But then my grandfath
er, the Reverend Walter Edwin Dakin, came to live with us. He had cataracts on both eyes and was nearly deaf. Grand and Grandfather had together been the source of the greatest support and kindnesses to me all my life. By then Grand had died, but I remember her great dignity, especially during the summer after I had received my diploma from the University of Iowa, and Grand and Grandfather were living with us in St. Louis. Grand had entered the terminal state of her malignancy and she had been forced to give up the little house in Memphis.

  Grandfather was even then almost totally deaf and he had to crouch before the radio to get the news, which was all he cared about in the broadcasts. Grand would stand terribly thin and tall and stork-like just behind the front window curtains, and when Dad’s Studebaker came charging up the drive, she would turn in a panic to my grandfather and cry out, “Walter, Walter, Cornelius is coming, will you hurry upstairs, don’t let him see you down here!”

  But poor Grandfather, it took him forever to mount those stairs and he was always overtaken in his escape effort by the slam-door entrance of C.C.

  “Oh, there’s the ole hound-dawg,” Dad would mutter. But he would always turn to Grand and say, “Good evening, Mrs. Dakin,” and she would say to him, “Good evening, Cornelius.”

  And then, instinctively she would cross over to the piano and play a soothing étude by Chopin to smooth over the abrasive incident as best she could.

  Dinner would be served almost immediately after Dad’s return to the house from the office, via his favorite bar. He would not show any physical sign of inebriation except the fiery red of his little piercing blue eyes.

  All that is not the worst of me surely comes from Grand, except my Williams anger and endurance, if those be virtues. Whatever I have of gentleness in my nature, and I do have much in response to gentle treatment, comes from the heart of Grand, as does the ineluctable grace and purity of heart that belong to the other Rose in my life, my sister.