Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  My condition as I attempted to resume work on my story “Sabbatha and Solitude” was next of kin to comatose, so I gave it up after the slight accomplishment of getting the pages into some kind of order.

  About that story: it is a satire of sorts but I’m afraid it doesn’t come off.

  As a matter of fact, it is almost incoherent at points. Something is happening to me that’s not very propitious and at a most inconvenient time, since I am very close, now, to the production of my last major work for the theatre. It may be that the imminence of this event has unnerved me. But haven’t I always been unnerved?—So that excuse doesn’t hold much water or even—what’s less than water?—precipitation or dew?

  Still, the story will someday come together. Given time enough, a piece of work does. And what’s the hurry?

  I look back on the months during which I have kept this chronicle of time present and past. I realize that it puts me in a less than flattering light but that doesn’t violate the premise—can a premise be violated?

  I need somebody to laugh with.

  Since my release from Friggins Division in the holiday season at the end of ’69 I have almost constantly needed someone to laugh with, and I realize, now, that this has been somewhat to the detriment of my work. Too much of it has been in the form of hysterical laughter, as humorless, at heart, as it was loud in volume.

  It wasn’t easy to live as a writer with a brain damaged by three convulsions in one morning and a heart so damaged by coronaries that going to sleep each night is always attended by the uneasy and sometimes fearful suspicion that you may not wake up in the morning.

  Mornings, I love them so much!—Their triumph over night.

  It sometimes appears to me that I have lived a life of morning after morning, since it is and has nearly always been the mornings in which I’ve worked.

  A friend tells me that she has phoned a friend who works for the New York Times, to ask for a copy of the obituary which that éminence grise of American newspapers has undoubtedly already placed in its files, since she has survived to a certain age, and obituaries must be produced with expedition when a “celebrity” dies.

  There is something macabre about this journalistic practice.

  I say this not because I doubt that the death of American artists should be reported quickly after their demise but because I feel that the chief endowment of any true artist is the honesty of his intention, and that this cannot be explored in a bit of copy listing his dates and honors, and mention of his principal works, but that he is entitled to a reflective study of both his life and his “ouevre.”

  The word “ouevre” is pretentious. Why not just his work?

  Work!!—the loveliest of all four-letter words, surpassing even the importance of love, most times.

  What most alarms me is my progressive difficulty in sleeping: it has never been this difficult before.

  It is as if I were unconsciously haunted by something that prevents me from sleeping more than the minimal time that the sedation is active.

  The impending productions?

  All possible misadventures can be survived with a little old-cat licking of wounds, especially since I will be free to immigrate permanently to that “little farm in Sicily” to “raise goats and geese.”

  I suspect what I am haunted by is something that I am concealing from myself, unconsciously but wisely.

  Perhaps the desperate condition of my mother, which does continually prey upon my “mind” but to which I have hardly given adequate attention. I might attempt to justify myself by my dread of returning to St. Louis, so great that I feel not physically able to undertake it.

  The illness of my sister? That seems closer to being a plausible cause. And yet even that does not seem to suffice …

  Someone interviewing me asked me why writers are so preoccupied with disease and death.

  “Any artist dies two deaths,” I told him, “not only his own as a physical being but that of his creative power, it dies with him.”

  A play is submitted to so many people and to so many conditions, alterable or not, and to such bafflingly varied interpretations by those to whom it’s submitted that it’s a wonder the author isn’t stricken with incurable vertigo and plummeted irretrievably into a pit of snakes and madness.

  And yet, today, as I complete my revisions for the published version of Out Cry, I don’t feel any disequilibrium at all. The weather is fair; I’m surrounded by close friends; and tonight I will see a preview of A Streetcar Named Desire, the leading parts performed by actors who understand and love it, and the revival staged by the gifted young director James Bridges.

  If there are stop signs ahead, they are not yet visible enough for me to stop going on …

  A man must live through his life’s duration with his own little set of fears and angers, suspicions and vanities, and his appetites, spiritual and carnal.

  Life is built of them and he is built of life.

  The umbilical cord is a long, long rope of blood that has swung him as an aerialist on an all but endless Trapeze, oh, such a long, long way, from the first living organism that gave birth to another.

  Define it as the passion to create which is all that we know of God.

  Is that an agnostic thing to say? I think not.

  Perhaps you will accede to my claim of exceptional honesty, both as writer and man. And if you knew me outside of this book, you would find me a man who values kindness and patience with others.

  Most of my life has been spent with intimate companions of a complex and difficult nature. It is only recently that I have learned how to accept the bargain, by which I mean to treasure the lovely aspects of their natures, which all have possessed, and to stoically live through their abrasive humors. After all, none of them have found me exactly easy to exist, and travel about, with.

  For two and a half years I have been companioned by a stormy young man, given to verbal abuse in the lingo that he acquired during his military service in Southeast Asia. He says that he loves me. I ask myself, “How could he?”

  If he should leave me today, I would have the deep satisfaction of knowing that while he lived with me he had completed two of the most distinguished modern novels that I have read.

  If he should leave me today—but I don’t think he will …

  We are both Southerners, we are both writers, and both of us are committed to honesty in our work and our lives.

  About honesty in work: There are two kinds: honesty with taste, and honesty without it.

  I started out on this book in 1972: it is now 1975. Consequently, the present passages skip back and forth in time.

  This is not a precedent in a book concerning the life of a man. The very clever, and often brilliant, Garson Kanin wrote a biography of Somerset Maugham with even more disregard for chronological order than I’ve attempted: and I liked it that way. Now time past and time present have come to a point of convergence in this thing.

  This evening Miss Rose came down from Stoney Lodge for dinner. Dear Tatiana, her companion, was not available so the young writer and I escorted her to the St. Regis for dinner.

  Did I mention that the last time she came into town, conversation among us turned to foreign travel and I asked her if she wouldn’t like to visit Engand? My friend Maria, the Lady St. Just, has offered her a standing invitation to be her guest at Wilbury, which I think would enchant Miss Rose. I mentioned this invitation, and added that I thought it could be arranged for her to meet the Queen of England. And without a moment’s hesitation or the least lack of conviction, she replied, “I am the Queen of England.”

  I suppose if you live in a dream world, it is nice to be a queen in it.

  Often she does have a regal air about her which seems completely natural. When entering a restaurant, she lifts her hand or nods to strangers.

  This evening her attention was particularly taken to children we passed in our short walk to the park. She waved at them delightedly and they all waved back.
/>   “Who was that child, Rose?”

  “My son,” she said.

  (Heir to the throne of England?)

  The last two times she’s come here she’s brought along her toothbrush and dental cream, apparently hoping to spend the night. It would obviously be nice for her to have a trip: and why not England?

  Maria still has her fantastic love of fun, and it would be fun to establish Rose at the lovely Palladian mansion, Wilbury, as a lady sovereign, with ladies curtsying to her and gentlemen bowing. And after her heroic endurance of the ordeal of madness, head unbowed, spirit never broken, why should she not be accorded such homage, as Queen of England or not?

  And have I mentioned that she now thinks that Mother (Dowager Queen?) is among the patients at Stoney Lodge? Tatiana says that she gives this surrogate parent a little pat on the shoulder and says, “Hello, Mother.” Receiving and expecting no response, she goes on by. Tonight I asked her, “How is Mother doing at the Lodge?”

  “Oh, she’s fine.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Sitting.”

  Carson McCullers was very fond of Rose and we often took her to visit Carson in Nyack. Always overflowing with tendresse, Carson once said, “Oh, Rose, come here and kiss me.”

  “No, thank you,” said Rose, “I have halitosis.”

  Another evening Carson had invited us to dinner which was intractably delayed, and Miss Rose, accustomed to eating early, became more and more restless. She always addressed Carson as “C” for some reason, and at last she insisted on going into the kitchen to see how dinner was progressing. Well, it was retrogressing, in fact the roast had burned.

  “C,” said Rose, “I’m afraid the roast has burned.”

  Carson was too dreamily involved in her Bourbon to be concerned about this report, but Miss Rose was not.

  “C, will you please get up and put on your clothes and my brother can afford to take us out to a restaurant.”

  It took Carson quite a while to get up, of course, and then she asked Rose to help her dress.

  Miss Rose was not so disposed.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to manage alone.”

  Carson and her husband Reeves have come into Paris from their “Ancien Presbytère” in the country. They are staying in the same hotel as Frank and I, the Pont Royal. It is the evening of the Paris premiere of a Magnani film, and, having received a summons to attend it, I’m getting into my tux when the phone rings. Carson is on the wire, greatly agitated.

  “Oh, Tenn, darling, we’ve had to move from the fifth floor to the second because Reeves is threatening to jump out the window. Please come at once and try to dissuade him.”

  This was a summons even more urgent than Anna’s, so I rushed to their room.

  “What’s this about suicide, Reeves? You can’t be serious about it!”

  “Yes, completely.”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve discovered that I am homosexual.”

  Not foreseeing, of course, that he was really going to kill himself a year or two later, I burst out laughing.

  “Reeves, the last thing I’d do is jump out a window because I’m homosexual, not unless I was forced to be otherwise.”

  Both the McCullerses were amused by this, and Reeves’s suicidal threat was put aside for a time.

  I arrived late for the Magnani premiere. Her eyes were daggers as I slunk into her box.

  At the Ancien Presbytère, to which the McCullerses returned, there was a cherry tree which Reeves kept suggesting to Carson that they should hang themselves from.

  He even had two ropes for the purpose. But Carson was not intrigued by this proposition.

  One of her relentless illnesses forced her to return to Paris for medical treatment.

  Reeves drove her in, but on the way he produced the two ropes and again exhorted her to hang herself with him.

  She pretended to acquiesce, but she persuaded him to stop at a roadside tavern and get them a bottle of wine to fortify themselves for the act.

  Soon as he entered the tavern, Carson clambered out of the car and hitchhiked a ride to the American Hospital in a suburb of Paris.

  She never saw poor Reeves alive again. He killed himself, some months later, with a bottle of barbiturates and booze.

  How lightly I write of these dreadful remembrances!

  How else could I present them to you, so few of whom have known Carson and Reeves?

  Yesterday evening I was interviewed, for the first time in my life, by a drama critic of New York, no less than Walter Kerr.

  I was scared. He declined to have lunch in La Veranda downstairs and wouldn’t share the bottle of Soave that I brought up to the suite—I think I drank it all since no remnant of it remains in the living room.

  But being with this reassuringly human man who fumbled quite a bit with his tape recorder and left one of the cassettes behind him—I didn’t babble nervously about irrelevant matters.

  Of course one never knows how an interview will come out any more than one knows how a review will. —Nor, indeed, how a play will.

  My New Orleans cardiologist advised me, four years ago, to return to Key West and live like a crocodile, a piece of advice that I have ignored, not knowing how crocodiles live except sluggishly in a swamp, and that sort of life attracting me about as strongly as death.

  “Walk softly and you’ll go far”—As far as what?—I shall certainly try, despite this continual itch for action and travel.

  Speaking of travel: This is the first summer since 1947 that I haven’t been abroad, at least to Italy. Suddenly, lunching at the Woman’s Exchange with my young friend, I dismissed the idea of Montreal, which isn’t really abroad, and all thought of retreating again to New Orleans or Key West. The Cocaloony Key has little appeal for me in the hurricane season. And I began to discuss enthusiastically the idea of flying to Italy for September. It’s probable I could take a pleasant little house for a month in Positano with most of the summer population gone, the water cool and clean, and I could do a few paintings and let some new writing project come to the surface, preferably not like a drowned cadaver but some living creature whose elements are water, air, and fire like Cleopatra’s.

  I could return stateside via London, spending a while with Maria; and the young writer, who dislikes her nearly as much as she does him, could fly back from Rome. In London I could try to interest the Royal Court or Hampstead Club Theatre in The Latter Days of a Celebrated Soubrette with Anne Meacham, with whom we dined this evening as her guests. She is still hopeful of getting a commitment from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to appear with her: I am less hopeful of it and less interested. I think all the project needs now is an off-West End house and a good director who digs its fantastic humor and—Anne would say “Terror” but I think that element is exorcised by the wild black comedy that envelops it.

  Quoting Camino’s Byron: “Make voyages, attempt them, there’s nothing else.”

  I think it is now time for me to consider the question of whether or not I am a lunatic or a relatively sane person. I suspect that most of you who have read through this thing have already come to your own conclusion on the point, and it is probably not in my favor. With those of you, the suspected plurality, I say non contendere. You have your own separate world and your own separate standards of sanity to go with it. Most of you belong to something that offers a stabilizing influence: a family unit, a defined social position, employment in an organization, a more secure habit of existence. I live like a gypsy, I am a fugitive. No place seems tenable to me for long anymore, not even my own skin.

  Sane and insane are legal terms, really, I don’t believe that Lieutenant Calley, now become a legend, a symbol of mindless brutalities as the young officer who turned that muddy ditch red with the blood of defenseless civilians, from grandparents to infants, has been declared legally insane.

  The question could be pursued with countless other examples of what passes for sanity in the world but it is a tedious q
uestion. And I turn back to its pertinence in regard to myself and I confess that I find myself exceedingly peculiar.

  I have made a covenant with myself to continue to write, since I have no choice, it is so deeply rooted as a way of existence and a form of flight—but I shall probably not involve myself in any further productions except as writer and as spectator. I shall not flay myself nor permit myself to be flayed by the anxieties, the tensions, of participating in the transmutation of a written script to a Broadway stage.

  Do I mean that? I must always wait and see, nowadays.

  Death is the unavoidable eventuality which in most cases we avoid as long as we can, but which, finally, when all the possible options have expired, we must attempt to accept with as much grace as there remains in our command. None of that is surprising except perhaps to some hard core Christian Scientists. The nicest thing about death that I’ve read lately was in Stewart Alsop’s book Stay of Execution. He wrote: “A dying man needs death like a very tired man needs sleep.”

  Of course needing a thing is not quite the same as wanting it.

  In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy remarks at one point in Act Two that a pig squeals but a man can keep a tight mouth about it. He says that the pig has an advantage. He has no idea of mortality. Animals go without knowing that they’re going but when they go, they howl or squeal about it. A man, though, he can know and keep a tight mouth about it.

  Ironically, in Act Three, Big Daddy howls vociferously with pain, and poor Big Mama, who did love him, rushes into the bedroom of Maggie and Brick for morphine to relieve his terminal anguish.

  A couple of summers ago, when I had an operation at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, I kept a tight mouth about my terror when they wheeled me into surgery and the anesthetist gave me the spinal injection from which I suspected I would not emerge. But when I did emerge in my hospital bed and they tore away the surgical gauze, I howled like an animal, or like Big Daddy in Act Three. Thank God they immediately gave me a strong Demerol tablet that put me out again. But soon the merciful sleep wore off, and the next day I described the night which had preceded it as “the night of the long knives.”