Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  I think it was Delmar—that long, long street which probably began near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis and continued through University City and on out into the country—that Rose and I strolled along in the evenings. There was a root-beer stand at which we always stopped. Rose was inordinately fond of root-beer, especially on warm summer evenings. And before and after our root-beer stop, we would window-shop. Rose’s passion, as well as Blanche’s, was clothes. And all along that part of Delmar that cut through University City were little shops with lighted windows at night in which were displayed dresses and accessories for women. Rose did not have much of a wardrobe and so her window-shopping on Delmar was like a hungry child’s gazing through the window-fronts of restaurants. Her taste in clothes was excellent.

  “How about that dress, Rose?”

  “Oh no, that’s tacky. But this one here’s very nice.”

  The evening excursions lasted about an hour and a half, and although, as I’ve noted, we had a physical shyness of each other, never even touching hands except when dancing together in the Enright apartment, I’d usually follow her into her bedroom when we came home, to continue our warmly desultory chats. I felt most at home in that room, which was furnished with the white ivory bedroom set that had been acquired with the family’s “furnished apartment” on Westminster Place when we first moved to St. Louis in 1918.

  It was the only attractive room in the apartment—or did it seem so because it was my sister’s?

  I have mentioned our dancing together.

  Rose taught me to dance to the almost aboriginal standing (non-horned) Victrola that had been acquired in Mississippi and shipped to St. Louis at the time of the disastrous family move there.

  Dad had subleased our first real residence in St. Louis, a very charming two-story Georgian house in the suburb of Clayton, only a block or two from Washington University. The street was Pershing, and across from our house was the home of Virginia Moore, a strikingly handsome poet of that time; she had a brother who took an interest in Miss Rose and dated her several times. I recall having gone about Clayton distributing political leaflets during that disastrous campaign of his. He lost the election and suddenly was confined in a sanitarium for a nervous breakdown. When he was released from the sanitarium, the poor man killed himself, and Miss Rose lost a beau.

  That summer I showed my juvenile poems to Virginia Moore, and how very gracious she was in giving one of them tactful praise.

  In the rented house on Pershing, Miss Rose’s mind again began to slip. Not violently but gradually.

  I remember a drive in the county with young friends. We started, the young friends and I, to laugh at the outrageous behavior of an acquaintance who was losing his mind. Miss Rose turned very grave and stiff in the back seat of the car.

  “You must never make fun of insanity,” she reproved us. “It’s worse than death.”

  And that’s exactly what Mother said when informed that Miss Rose had dementia praecox. This was at a Catholic sanitarium on the outskirts of St. Louis, shortly before Rose was sent away to the State Asylum in 1937. It’s not very pleasant to look back on that year and to know that Rose knew she was going mad and to know, also, that I was not too kind to my sister. You see, for the first time in my life, I had become accepted by a group of young friends and my delighted relations with them preoccupied me to such an extent that I failed to properly observe the shadow falling on Rose. Little eccentricities had begun to appear in her behavior. She was now very quiet in the house and I think she was suffering from insomnia. She had the peculiar habit of setting a pitcher of ice-water outside her door, each night when she retired.

  As I drifted away from my sister, during this period, she drew close to our little Boston terrier Jiggs. She was constantly holding and hugging him and now and then Miss Edwina would say:

  “Rose, put Jiggs down, he wants to run about.”

  Then there was the wild weekend Mother and Dad had gone to the Ozarks, I believe, and Rose and I were alone in the house on Pershing. That weekend I entertained my new group of young friends. One of them got very drunk—maybe all of them did—but this particular one got drunker than all of us put together and he went up on the landing, where the phone was, and began to make obscene phone calls to strangers.

  When our parents returned from the Ozarks, Miss Rose told them of the wild party and the obscene phone calls and the drinking.

  I was informed by Miss Edwina that no one of this group should ever again enter the house.

  This was, for me, a crushing edict, since the group contained my first dear friend in St. Louis, the brilliantly talented and handsome poet, Clark Mills (McBurney).

  After she had tattled on my wild party, during Dad’s and Mother’s holiday in the Ozarks, when I was told I could no longer entertain my first group of friends in the house—I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up them. We passed each other on the landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her:

  “I hate the sight of your ugly old face!”

  Wordless, stricken, and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.

  This is the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect, and one for which I can never properly atone.

  (How time does thread through this “thing,” and such a long span of it.)

  Time is the flow, the continual show,

  Go says the bird, and on we go.

  From the above you can see why I never made much of a mark for myself as a poet.

  Have I told you that at Washington University we had a little poetry club? It contained only three male members. The rest were girls, pretty, with families who owned elegant homes in the county.

  The three male poets were, in order of talent, Clark Mills, William Jay Smith, and the author of these memoirs.

  Of the pretty girls who provided lovely refreshments and décor, I remember only the name of Betty Chapin and the first name of another, the wealthiest, Louise, who took us all out in the family limousine to a ballet performance one night.

  Bill Smith was the handsomest of us three boys and he has turned out to be a “poet of prominence,” now associated with the teaching of that unteachable art at Columbia University.

  Clark’s talent burned very bright in those early years. He published a paperback book of verse called January Crossing, a collection of distinction, jeweled with fine images and a cultivated taste. He was also a French scholar who was later to receive a scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris and to write a study of the French littérateur Jules Romains, whose work I couldn’t read in or out of French. I wish that Clark had devoted himself exclusively to his own work. Artists must be egocentric that way. But he may surely be excused for having written the best translation (in my unbiased opinion) of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre. His translation of the final verse of that greatest lyric by Rimbaud went something, but not exactly, like this:

  Of Europe’s waters I want now only

  the chill, muddy ditch,

  where a child full of sorrow crouches at dusk

  to release from his fingers a paper boat

  as frail as a butterfly’s wing.

  Only Clark paid any serious attention to my efforts at verse. His taste was impeccable but imposed very gently. When I didn’t indulge in sophomoric extravagance, he’d say, “I like this, Tom,” but when I wrote purple, he would say to me, “Tom, this is too facile.”

  At dusk in the early sixties I was about to enter my Manhattan apartment on East Sixty-fifth when Clark Mills appeared like an apparition on the walk and stopped and greeted me. It was winter and in his dark coat he looked somberly academic. Either Frankie was dying or was already dead and I was unable to respond at all naturally and freely. All I could think was: “He must know I’ve turned queer.” The conversation was pitiably brief and embarrassed.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “—Is that you, Clark?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�What are you doing now?”

  He told me that he was connected, now, with Hunter College. He stayed there, with gentle patience, a few moments longer, but I was unable to say, “Clark, come in.” So then, a ghost of our youth, he nodded in the winter dusk and continued on his way.

  I’m sure he understood.

  Someday, probably, he will re-emerge as a poet from what has apparently been a long hibernation.

  Bill Smith’s talent has matured along more or less methodical lines: I like it because I like Bill but it doesn’t thrill me, alas.

  Returning to St. Louis and the thirties.

  Rose had a “serious” St. Louis beau. He was a junior executive at International, a young man of very personable appearance, social grace and apparently of great and unscrupulous ambition. For a few months he was quite attentive to Rose. They dated, I think, several times a week, they were almost going “steady,” and Rose would tremble when the telephone rang, desperately hoping the call was for her and that it was from him.

  This was while Dad’s position as sales manager of Friedman-Shelby branch of International was still, if not ascendant, at least one of apparent permanence and continued promise.

  But Dad was playing fast and loose with his position. He was continually alarming the “establishment” and International by his weekend habits. Significantly, he had not been elected to the “Board of Executives,” despite the fact that he was the best and most popular sales manager of International, and the only one who delivered speeches. His speeches were eloquent—and pungent. He did not talk much about his success at oratory but I think it pleased him enormously. He got up there on the platform before the assembled salesmen much in the style of his political forebears running for high offices in East Tennessee.

  “Now you boys and I all remember when we used to have to go around the corner and have a cigarette for breakfast …”

  I mean like that—and they loved it.

  But the scandal occurred—the episode at the all-night poker party at the Hotel Jefferson in which Dad lost an ear that had to be replaced by plastic surgery. This marked the beginning of the end for Dad’s possible ascendancy to “the Board” at International.

  It also marked the end of Rose’s dates with her handsome and unscrupulously ambitious “beau,” who no longer was a potential husband.

  Her heart broke, then, and it was after that that the mysterious stomach trouble began.

  But you don’t know Miss Rose and you never will unless you come to know her through this “thing,” for Laura of Menagerie was like Miss Rose only in her inescapable “difference,” which that old female bobcat Amanda would not believe existed. And as I mentioned, you may know only a little bit more of her through “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.”

  Nowadays is, indeed, lit by lightning, a plague has stricken the moths, and Blanche has been “put away” …

  One evening Dad, seated gloomily in the little “sunroom” on Enright, called out to Rose, “Sister, come here, I want to discuss something with you.”

  He told her that he was in danger of losing his job at International—this was after the ear incident—and that she must prepare herself for self-support.

  Somehow or other—precisely how I don’t recall—she did obtain employment as receptionist at the office of some young dentists. The job lasted only one day and ended upon the most pathetic note. She had been unable to address envelopes properly, the young dentists had discharged her and she had fled weeping into the lavatory and locked herself in.

  They called us at home and we had to go to the office to persuade her to leave her place of retreat.

  Rose was removed in 1937 to the State Asylum in Farmington, Missouri. We went out to visit her.

  “Tom, let me show you my ward.”

  She conducted me through it: it was too awful to believe, all those narrow little cots and hard wooden benches. Under one of the benches was crouched a young girl in a catatonic condition.

  “Rose! What’s wrong with her!”

  (My God, what a question!)

  With no apparent discomposure, Rose replied, smiling, “She’s on her bad behavior today, that’s all.”

  Years later, about 1949 or 1950, Rose was living with an elderly couple on a farm near the asylum—having been so tragically becalmed by the prefrontal lobotomy, which was performed in the late thirties.

  I arranged for her to come to Key West for a visit, accompanied by the farm-lady caretaker. Grandfather was with me.

  He came rapidly stumbling out of the house as the car arrived.

  “Rose, here is Grandfather!”

  “No, no, no!” she cried out. “He’s an old impostor!”

  The disastrous visit lasted for only four days and during this time she would eat nothing in the Key West house except a can of Campbell’s soup and one of chili, and only when the cans had been opened by me.

  At this time Miss Rose was being afflicted by what she called “crime-beasts.” Whatever she touched that could be shaken, she shook to remove the “crime-beasts” from it. The house was under a terrible shadow despite the radiant weather of early spring in Key West. The adventure was abandoned: Rose and her cow-like companion returned to the Missouri farm …

  At this time Miss Rose wrote letters almost daily.

  I remember one that began with this phrase: “Today the sun came up like a five-dollar gold piece!”

  She was devoted to the small children on the farm and especially to the canary and each of her childish little letters contained an account of how they were doing, such as “Chee-chee [the canary] seems happy today.”

  “Today we drove in town and I purchased Palmolive shampoo for my crowning glory.”

  Soon I had her removed to an expensive sanitarium called “Institute for Living” in Hartford, Connecticut. When I visited her there, a few months later, I was consternated and furious when I was informed that Miss Rose had been put into the violent ward. They told me that she had knocked an old lady down. I demanded to see Rose at once.

  “I didn’t knock her down,” said Miss Rose—who never lies—“I just gave her a push and she fell. She kept coming into my room at night and I couldn’t sleep.”

  I immediately told the administrator of this “Institute for Living” that Miss Rose was leaving.

  We drove for hours and hours to Stoney Lodge in Ossining, where she now stays, a lovely retreat where she has a pleasant room to herself, with flowered wallpaper. The Lodge is on a bluff looking over the upper Hudson, and the grounds are beautifully landscaped.

  This is probably the best thing I’ve done with my life, besides a few bits of work.

  I gave Rose a parakeet, remembering her devotion to the canary at the farmhouse. It became a dear pet. Whenever I took her back to the Lodge after an outing, she would say to me, as she got out of the car, “Tom, don’t you want to come up and see my parakeet?”

  It thrived for several years.

  And then, one outing, Miss Rose seemed unusually troubled and when I got out of the car with her at the Lodge, she did not invite me to visit the little bird.

  “Aren’t we going to see the parakeet, Rose?”

  “No, not this time,” she says. “It isn’t very well.”

  I insisted on going up to her room and the parakeet was lying dead in the bottom of the cage: the nurse in attendance at Rose’s Lodge said it had been dead for days but Miss Rose would not allow it to be removed.

  On several occasions after this tragic demise, I tried to persuade her to accept another parakeet and she has always refused.

  Rose has never and will never openly admit that a death has occurred. And yet she once said, “It rained last night. The dead came down with the rain.”

  “You mean their voices?”

  “Yes, of course, their voices.”

  Whenever my friend Maria mentions Miss Rose in her letters, she refers to her lovely, heartbreaking eyes.

  And yet, now, Maria refuses to accept my phone calls. The contradic
tions in one’s dearest friends appear to be quite limitless …

  Or nearly.

  I think the reason Maria is angry may be that my representative, Bill Barnes, rightly felt that we could no longer suspend a production of Out Cry until Paul Scofield found himself prepared to make a formal commitment and set a specific time for the production in England. With regret I acquiesced to this opinion, and in a short while the “property” was assigned to David Merrick. Peter Glenville was named as director.

  Maria, the Lady St. Just, is a woman of intense loyalties. She felt that our friend “Chuck” Bowden had been betrayed and, being a romanticist, she could not understand the exigencies of signed and sealed commitments in the theatre.

  No one has ever been more furious at my vacillations, timidity, and weakness than myself—with the exception of Maria. She has always felt that I betray myself with them, and so betray myself as an artist.

  She suddenly stopped answering my letters. Then she became “not at home” to my transatlantic phone calls to Gerald Road, London, and to Wilbury.

  I needn’t tell you how greatly distressed this makes me, since at this time Maria and my sister Rose and Billy are the only persons who are close and dear to my heart.

  I am staying on in New York two or three more days, and then, having seen Peg Murray’s opening in Small Craft Warnings, I will leave for the newly furnished apartment in New Orleans. That is, unless Mother’s doctor tells me that her condition is terminal or critical to the point that I really will have to go to that dreaded city of St. Louis.

  Whether or not I accompany Bill Barnes, at the end of August, to the Venice Film Festival depends on whether or not it will attract Maria as my guest on the Lido.

  Otherwise I’ll stay in New Orleans for the good, long rest so much needed before the next production, of Out Cry, which I must believe will start rehearsals late next month.