I hope to die in my sleep, when the time comes, and I hope it will be in the beautiful big brass bed in my New Orleans apartment, the bed which is associated with so much love and Merlo in our New York apartments on East Fifty-eighth and East Sixty-fifth streets.
I have read that as brilliant a man and artist as Yukio Mishima had faith in reincarnation. If he did, he never discussed it with me.
I am unable to believe that there is anything but permanent oblivion after death. It is a dreadful apostasy with which to live a human life. I’ve been told that all straight lines in the universe are eventually curved and a curving line may eventually curve back to its beginning, which might be something in the nature of rebirth. But what a long time to wait, and if the thought of its remote possibility is a comfort, what a cold comfort it is, for you would be born again upon a planet turned to a slag-heap, if it existed at all. And among what other conditions I dread to imagine.
I am not sure, even, that it has been incontestably proven that space and the universe are curved in our sense of what is curved.
So, finally, we are left with either the simple faiths of our childhood, unacceptable to a mature person, or to—what?
What, indeed! The trivial distractions of daily and nightly existence with which we obscure the hushed but giant footsteps of our approaching end? The practice of meditation in solitude and, through it, the slow, the marvelously stoical transcendence of bodily self and its concerns?
I am certainly aware of the attractions in this Far Eastern way of reconciling one’s self to the end of being one’s self, but I am too Occidental a creature to follow it through without an opium pipe.
For me, what is there but to feel beneath me the steadily rising current of mortality and to summon from my blood whatever courage is native to it, and once there was a great deal.
Not long ago we dined with a very talented young black who was writing a history of jazz and popular music in Harlem. During the course of the meal he made such a wise and amusingly “black” remark, that I wrote it down on a paper napkin.
“God don’t come when you want Him but He’s right on time.”
While waiting, what? Of course I will continue to work, but not to trick myself into supposing that what I now accomplish still has the vitality of my work at full tide, when it sprang like the torrents of spring.
How perilously do these fountains leap
Whose reckless voyager along am I.
(Lines from an early poem when I was bursting with images but had not yet broken the confines of iambic pentameter.)
What else while waiting?
Being a sensual creature—and why do I keep saying creature instead of man?—I will go on doing what I am doing while waiting. I will comfort myself with good wine and food but not to drunkenness and satiety and grossness of the flesh. I will try to hang onto those friends who have remained friends despite my difficult, angry years which I think are now past. And I will have, I still hope to have, both spiritual and carnal knowledge of a desirable young companion: not as frequently, now, but at prudently spaced intervals.
I shall not indulge in vanity but I shall cling to pride, two very different things, one being weak and indulgent, the second being strong and a necessity of survival with honor.
Do you think that I have told you my life story?
I have told you the events of my life, and described as best I could, without legal repercussions, the dramatis personae of it.
But life is made up of moment-to-moment occurrences in the nerves and the perceptions, and try as you may, you can’t commit them to the actualities of your own history.
The work of a fine painter, committed only to vision, abstract and allusive as he pleases, is better able to create for you his moments of intensely perceptive being. Jackson Pollock could paint ecstasy as it could not be written. Van Gogh could capture for you moments of beauty, indescribable as descent into madness.
And those who painted and sculpted the sensuous and the sensual of naked life in its moments of glory made them palpable to you as we can never feel with our fingertips and the erogenous parts of our flesh.
A poet such as the young Rimbaud is the only writer of whom I can think, at this moment, who could escape from words into the sensations of being, through his youth, turbulent with revolution, permitted articulation by nights of absinthe. And of course there is Hart Crane. Both of these poets touched fire that burned them alive. And perhaps it is only through self-immolation of such a nature that we living beings can offer to you the entire truth of ourselves within the reasonable boundaries of a book.
If that’s the case, well, the inadequacies of this attempt to tell my life story, and believe me, I’ve tried to tell it, may be, surely must be, to my advantage, and I trust no serious disappointment to you.
This year Rose’s Christmas was celebrated on New Year’s Day (1975) since I had spent Christmas traveling “up country” and Rose received in advance only the token gift of a pair of pearl earrings. They match the pearl necklace that I had purchased at Saks with her dinner-gown, a lovely silvery dress called “pistachio green.” I had visited Saks again the day before New Year’s to get her important presents for the delayed Christmas: a beautiful silvery fur jacket and two silk blouses patterned with spring flowers. (Rose has by no means lost her frustrated passion for clothes, which caused her to devote so many pleasant hours in her girlhood to window-shopping in St. Louis’s county stores. The problem now is finding closet space for her wardrobe at Stoney Lodge—most of her clothes have to be stored outside her room.)
Her most important gift of all, however, was conferred by the medical staff at Stoney Lodge. They consented to her spending three days in New York City with me and her companion whom I mentioned earlier, Tatiana, a white Russian refugee from “St. Petersburg.” Tatiana is a charming lady in her seventies who is working “on call” as a practical nurse in New York. It is necessary for Rose to be attended by a nurse because she is subject to occasional attacks of petit mal, a result of the scar tissue that remains as a memento of the lobotomy performed at Missouri State Sanitarium. I regard that as a tragically mistaken procedure, as I believe that without it Rose could have made a recovery and returned to what is called “normal life,” which, despite its many assaults upon the vulnerable nature, is still preferable to an institution existence.
And so on New Year’s afternoon, Tatiana and I went to Ossining in a hired limousine to pick up the soi-disant Queen of England. It was to be Rose’s first real holiday in more years than I can easily remember, at least twenty-five, and both Tatiana and I were somewhat worried about how it would go.
Rose received us cordially and invited us into her new room, which was rather small but pleasant. She had no traveling bag but Tatiana had brought one along and Rose packed all that she could into it with amazing alacrity. She knew precisely where everything was and as she packed she announced that she was intending to stay with me for good. We thought it better not to advise her that the stay was limited to three days. While the nurses were providing Tatiana with Rose’s medications, Rose and I waited in the reception room. On the floor was a girl stretched out on the carpet and going through grotesque contortions and facial grimaces. Miss Rose was not impressed. She stepped right over this prostrate figure, saying politely, “Excuse me,” and sat on a sofa to light up a cigarette.
At Stoney Lodge, Rose is limited to three or four cigarettes a day but when she comes into town she is a chain-smoker. I showed her the Surgeon General’s warning, on a pack of cigarettes, that they were dangerous to health. Rose pretended to be unable to read it, although, later, she could read a French menu in a restaurant with ease.
Aside from her snatching, at every opportunity, for cigarettes, the visit went off with great success. The second night Billy Barnes entertained us for dinner in his penthouse apartment, the delicious meal prepared by his sixty-eight-year-old black gentleman’s gentleman whose name is Ernest Williams. Sometime before, when Rose firs
t met Ernest, he told her that his name was Williams, too, and Rose smiled and said to him, “Just say that you are Welsh.”
Rose is fond of the blacks, as I am, perhaps because of our devotion to our beautiful black nurse Ozzie when we were children in Mississippi. She always used to conclude her letters to me with, “Love to my children, white or black.” I noticed that in New York, on the streets and in stores, Rose was continually waving to children of both races.
I feel a great affection for Tatiana. She is valiant and so warmhearted. Afflicted badly with arthritis, she now has alarming dizzy spells when she moves suddenly. She makes light of it, but I am troubled, especially since she must continue to earn her living.
On the afternoon of the third day we went to the Fellini film Amarcord. Rose watched it delightedly. There were some scenes of far-out comic erotica which I thought would shock her. Not at all! When the visit was over, and Rose had reluctantly accepted the news that she couldn’t stay permanently with us, Tatiana asked her what she’d enjoyed most. “That wonderful movie,” Rose said. The film does not need more “quotes” but Fellini is welcome to that one from the self-proclaimed ruler of the British Isles.
The success of this little vacation has revived my old hope that Rose, with a nurse-companion, may be permitted to occupy the Coconut Grove, Florida, property which Marion Vaccaro and I selected for her so many years ago and which has increased in value from its purchase price of $40,000 to $150,000 and will probably still increase. She and Tatiana could, perhaps, both retire there with a nice housekeeper, or they could occupy an apartment in my New Orleans rental property.
Of course the realization of this dream is contingent upon a reversal of the downward trend in my own health.
In any case, you couldn’t ask for a sweeter or more benign monarch than Rose, or, in my opinion, one that’s more of a lady. After all, high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
AFTERWORD
A Few Notes and Corrections
BY ALLEAN HALE
THIRTY YEARS AGO when this book first came out, I wrote a review with this dreadful beginning: “Now comes Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs, and if he has not exactly opened his heart, he has opened his fly.” This judgment reflected many of the reviews of the day that concentrated on the book’s shock value. In free-from-shock 2006 the non-stop sexual cruising sounds almost like wholesome exercise.
In his Memoirs, Tennessee was experimenting with a “stream of consciousness” style which seldom allowed pause to check facts. Perhaps now we should do that. He opens with indignation about an “inaccuracy” he had just read in Who’s Who: that in the early forties he received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In fact, there was no inaccuracy; he apparently ignores their thousand dollar grant of 1944 when he was a starving artist. He misdates the year of the nervous breakdown that released him from the shoe factory and led to his first produced play, Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! as 1934 (it was 1935) although its reception inspired him to become a playwright. He dates his sister’s lobotomy to 1938 when in 1943 it was one of the first such operations, and he says that Orpheus Descending failed on Broadway in 1959—it was actually 1957. He recalls his acting debut at the University of Iowa in Richard of Bordeaux when he was in fact one of Falstaff’s soldiers in Henry IV, Part 1. (An interesting slip, since Richard of Bordeaux—by Elizabeth Mackintosh, not Shakespeare, was the 1933 play that first brought John Gielgud fame.) Misremberings of this sort dot the pages of the Memoirs and have often been repeated as if they were facts. Perhaps taking revenge on Saint Louis, Williams spells the name of its founder “Choteau” instead of “Chouteau” and describes its vast Union Station as demolished, although it survives as a shopping mall. And, having his moment of fun, he gives a Greek statue in the St. Louis art museum a detachable figleaf.
In the “Now it can be told” department, it seems valid to identify some of the companions Williams disguised in 1972. Although two from his early college days can be left undisclosed. Biographer Lyle Leverich flew from New York to California to interview “Smitty”—the object of Williams’s first lust at Missouri U—and found a grandfather who denied any such relationship. The University of Iowa female student with whom Tom had his sole man-woman affair had best be left as “Sally”: his description of their union is a hilarious masterpiece. He does name Kip Kiernan, his first love, and Frank Merlo, his faithful longtime companion, and it is scarcely a secret that the stormy “Santo” of his early days in New Orleans was Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez, a local clothing salesman. The composer who took Tennessee in during the early forties in New York was Carley Mills, who wrote a song that reflected their time together: “If I Cared a Little Bit Less and You Cared a Little Bit More.” The Harvard student Williams admired who was beheaded by a subway train was Bill Cannastra. Kip’s friend Joe is the dancer Joe Hazan. “Angel,” the young poet who lived with Williams in Key West when Merlo was dying, was Frederick Nicklaus. “Dr. Feelgood” whose magic shots sent Williams on the path to addiction after Merlo’s death was the infamous Dr. Max Jacobson, whose license was later revoked. “Ryan,” the handsome companion who managed Williams’s life for five of his drugged-out late years was Bill Glavin, and the stormy love of his old age was Robert Carroll, a twenty-five-year-old Vietnam veteran who moved in with Williams in 1973. He dedicated his 1975 novel Moise to Carroll and in 1978 painted his portrait, Esprit de Robert.
Of the two-dozen original reviews of Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs, the most frequent criticism was that the playwright failed to discuss his plays. “Shall I attempt to entertain you … with my theatre or my life … ?” he asks the reader at the beginning of his Memoirs. Those who opt for his life will not be disappointed.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
(Chapter Three, Group One)
1. Mother, at 9 years old, studying the violin. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
2. Father as a little boy. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
3. Dad at Bellbuckle Military Academy. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
4. Mother. (From the author’s personal collection)
5. The Rectory in Columbus, Mississippi. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
6. Mother as a young woman. (From the author’s personal collection)
7. Mother, Grandmother and Rose. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
8. Mother as Regent. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
9. Grandfather Dakin. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
10. Grandfather in Key West. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
11. Grandfather posing with a pelican. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
12. Grandfather and me. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
13. Mother and Grandmother in Clayton, Missouri. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
14. Paternal Grandfather Thomas Lanier Williams II. (Ray Kutos)
15. Isabel Coffin Williams. (From the author’s personal collection)
16. My favorite picture of Grandfather. (From the author’s personal collection)
17. Cornelius (“C.C.”) Williams. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
18. Mother and Dad in the Ozarks. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
19. A formal portrait of Mother. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
20. Mother and me in Key West. (From the author’s personal collection)
21. Rose Isabel Williams. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
22. Rose on Westminster Place in St. Louis. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
; 23. My sister. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
24. Rose on the beach in Florida. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
25. Rose and a friend. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
26. My sister Rose as a young woman. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
27. Rose in a Catholic sanitarium in St. Louis. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
(Chapter Three, Group Two)
28. Dakin and Mother outside one of our apartments in St. Louis. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
29. Dakin and me. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
30. Home on Aberdeen Street in St. Louis. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
31. Dakin planning a political future. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
32. Grandfather at our house on Arundel Place. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
33. The group Grandfather took to Europe. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
34. On the deck of the S.S. Homeric, bound for Europe. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
35. A sweet picture of Rose. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
36. Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
37. Grandfather and Grand. (The Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)
Memoirs Page 33