by Colm Toibin
In the middle of all of this Williams was capable of what one presumes – it is hard to know – was irony, even self-mockery, when in April 1940 in New York he noticed the war: ‘Tonight Germany seized Denmark and war was declared by Norway – but infinitely more important is the fact that my play will be discussed and perhaps a decision rendered by the Theatre Guild.’
As he moved away from home, Williams fell in love a number of times, first with a Canadian, Kip Kiernan, then with Pancho Rodriguez, and then Frank Merlo, with whom he lived for many years, but this did not prevent him from having many casual lovers, often one or two a day wherever he went. On 27 June 1941, he wrote: ‘I am fatigued, I am dull, I am bitter at heart. But I do not suffer much. I have diverted myself with the most extraordinary amount of sexual license I have ever indulged in.’
This sexual licence, however, was accompanied by strange moments of unease about his sexuality and about homosexuality in general. When in 1941 a friend suggested that homosexuals should be exterminated at twenty-five ‘for the good of society’, Williams wondered:
How many of us feel that way, I wonder? Bear this intolerable burden of guilt? To feel some humiliation and a great deal of sorrow at times is inevitable. But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my deviation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance. Some day society will take perhaps the suitable action – but I do not believe that it will or should be extermination.
And sex itself much of the time, despite the energy he put into it, disappointed him. On 16 September 1941, he wrote, for example: ‘The cold and beautiful bodies of the young! They spread themselves out like a banquet table, you dine voraciously and afterwards it is like you had eaten nothing but air.’
As he got older and began to travel, especially in Italy and Spain where he went every summer, he paid for sex, but this did not seem to make him happy either, especially afterwards. In Rome in July 1955 he wrote:
The most embarrassing of all relations is with a whore. At least, after the act, when you suffer the post-orgasmic withdrawal anyway, a good whore, in the sense of a really wise one, knows how to create an atmosphere that obviates this hazard but the one this afternoon, though divinely gifted in the practise of bed, made me feel very sheepish afterwards. I didn’t know how to offer the money or how to say goodbye. It is because of my Puritanical feeling that it is wrong, wrong! – to use another being’s body like this because of having need, on one hand, and cash on the other – Still – I owe more pleasure to this circumstance in life than anything else, I guess. Can I complain? Breast beating is twice as false as the love of any whore.
Because of his bad eyesight, Williams did not serve in the Second World War and it is an aspect of his honesty as well as his self-obsession that the war engaged him very little. In January 1942 he wrote:
I am frightened thinking of the changes or rather the increased vicissitudes the war may create in my life. I suppose if it did not affect me personally my feelings about it would be only abstractly regretful. Things have to impinge on my own life to matter to me very much. Is it that way with most people? Yes, I am sure that it is.
He had, as he said, a way of reducing or indeed elevating everything to the personal. In a letter to Elia Kazan about Nixon in August 1952, for example: ‘He looks like the gradeschool bully that used to wait for me behind a broken fence and twist my ear to make me say obscene things.’
What impinged on Williams’s life as much as his work, as is clear from these pages, was his family. His father appeared in the early entries as a threat and a nuisance, ‘a dormant volcano’; his younger brother Dakin hardly at all; his mother Edwina surprisingly little. But his maternal grandparents, whom he loved, were invoked regularly. His grandmother, also called Rose, was, he wrote in 1941, ‘a miracle of gentleness. A faded golden rose in fading sunlight. The finest thing in my life.’ And the fate of his sister Rose troubled him year after year, flitting through his waking life and his dreams. As he worked with fierce determination on his plays, as he travelled the world like a maniac, as he sought new sexual partners, as he drank and took pills and went to parties, there was always the sense, made clear in many notebook entries, that he was in flight from what was done to his sister. He lived in the shadow of her suffering and there were times when he seemed to seek pleasure and experience enough for two of them.
Rose was sixteen months older than Williams; as children, they were very close. She saw her first psychiatrist when she was twenty-one. In 1937 she was diagnosed with dementia praecox, an early term for schizophrenia. In 1943 she underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy. In notes made in 1979 Williams wrote that his mother ‘approved for my sister to have one of the first pre-frontal lobotomies performed in the States because she was shocked by Rose’s tastefully phrased but explicit disclosures of masturbation practised with Candles stolen from the Chapel, at All Saints in Vicksburg’. Rose lived in institutions from 1943 for the rest of her life.
As Margaret Bradham Thornton makes clear in her copious annotations to these diaries – each right-hand page of Williams’s entries is faced by a left-hand page of informative notes – Rose appeared in various guises in many of Williams’s plays, poems and stories. Her life as it made its way into his imagination is central to his work.
In October 1936 Williams first noted a problem with Rose: ‘The house is wretched. Rose is on one of her neurotic sprees – fancies herself an invalid – talks in a silly dying-off way – trails around the house in negligees. Disgusting.’ Three years later, when the seriousness of her condition was fully clear, Williams wrote an emendation to this: ‘God forgive me for this!’ In January 1937 Williams’s mother wrote to her parents about Rose’s breakdown and her ‘raving on the subject of “sex” … and I was ashamed for Dakin and Tom to hear her the other night’. The same day Williams wrote in his notebook: ‘Tragedy. I write that word knowing the full meaning of it. We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death. Now we are forced to see it, know it. The thought is an aching numbness – a horror!’
By May, when Rose had been moved to an institution, Williams’s mother wrote to her parents once more: ‘Tom and I went out to see Rose Sunday … The visit made Tom ill so I can’t take him to see her again. I can’t have two of them there!’ In September that year, having seen Rose, Williams wrote: ‘No, I haven’t forgotten poor Rose – I beg whatever power there is to save her and spare her from suffering.’ The following year, he saw her again: ‘She is like a person half-asleep now – quiet, gentle and thank God – not in any way revolting like so many of the others – She sat with us in a bright sunny room full of flowers – said “yes” to all our questions – looked puzzled, searching for something – sometimes her eyes filled with tears – (So did mine).’
In August 1939 Rose’s medical report read: ‘Does no work. Manifests delusion of persecution. Smiles and laughs when telling of person plotting to kill her. Talk free and irrelevant. Admits auditory hallucinations. Quiet on the ward. Masturbates frequently. Also expresses various somatic delusions, all of which she explains on a sexual basis. Memory for remote past is nil. Appetite good. Well nourished.’
Four months later when Williams had made another visit, he wrote: ‘Visited Rose at sanitarium – horrible, horrible! Her talk was so obscene – she laughed and spoke continual obscenities – Mother insisted I go in, though I dreaded it and wanted to go out and stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards – a cold, unsympathetic young man – he said her condition was so hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration.’
In March 1943, when Rose had a lobotomy, Williams wrote: ‘A cord breaking. 1000 miles away. Rose. Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain. Me. Here. Smoking. My father, mean as a devil, snoring 1000 miles away.’
Rose came to him in dreams in which his identity and hers s
eemed confused. In December 1948, while crossing the Atlantic, he noted:
Later I dreamed of my sister. Woke up. Then went to sleep and dreamed of her again. At one point I was lying in her bed, the ivory-colored bed: but it was not a dream of incest, although I am at a loss to explain it. I was standing naked in a room. Heard footsteps. Jumped in the bed to cover myself. Discovered it was my sister’s bed. She entered the room. Spoke to me angrily and pulled back the covers. I struggled not to expose my nakedness. She turned away crossly while I got hastily up from the bed. There I woke up.
Four years later in Spain he noted another dream: ‘I’ve dreamed of my sister, seeing her in a cream colored lace dress which I had forgotten. In the dream a lady who looked like my sister wore it – then I had it on and then I was struggling to sit down between two tables and was wedged so tightly between them I couldn’t breathe.’
In later years he saw more of his sister, writing in 1979 in Key West:
My sister Rose, the living presence of truth and faith in my life. If I go abroad to die, I must not leave her, afterwards, in the custody of her present companion, a tasteless woman whose idea of giving Rose a good time is to take her to the Masonic Lodge … Tonight she had dressed Rose for a party at Kate’s in a livid green dress from Woolco’s, as tasteless as possible and as unbecoming. I had said that Rose should have a green dress but I meant to buy it for her myself, in a pastel shade, such as lettuce.
Part of the reason for Williams’s obsession with his sister was his feeling that he, too, could easily have followed her into a mental institution. ‘The shadow of what happened to Rose’ haunted him in the years of his success and in subsequent years when the plays he wrote did not find large audiences or win much praise and he was addicted to various drugs and to alcohol. As early as his visit to her in 1939 he saw the danger for himself, as his mother had two years earlier. He wrote: ‘It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.’ The artist Vassilis Voglis, a friend of Williams’s, told his biographer Donald Spoto: ‘He was devoted to Rose, but in a way she was an extension of himself. He could have had the lobotomy. He felt the outsider, marred in some way. He really cared for her, and perhaps he never really cared for anyone else in his life, ever. And I think he knew it.’
In 1973, speaking of his play Out Cry, he said:
I’ve had a great deal of experience with madness; I have been locked up. My sister was institutionalized for most of her adult life. Both my sister and I need a lot of taking care of … I’m a lonely person, lonelier than most people. I have a touch of schizophrenia in me and in order to avoid madness I have to work.
In his notebooks for 1957, Williams noted that he was ‘stealing a week between New York and the “retreat” … at Stockbridge, assuming I do go there’. He wrote to his mother:
I stayed only five minutes in the Institute. I took one look at the other patients and told Frank to carry my bags right back out to the car. I checked into the local hotel and stayed there over the weekend to make sure that this was not the place for me, then drove back to New York. I think the psychiatrist Dr Kubie who is head of the analytic institute in New York, is right in thinking I need some therapy of that kind to relieve the tensions that I have been living under, but I think it’s unnecessary for me to live in a house full of characters that appeared to be more disturbed than myself.
The following year, he wrote to Elia Kazan:
I had to defy my analyst to continue my work this past year. He said I was over-worked and must quit and ‘lie fallow’ as he put it, for a year or so, and then resume work in what he declared would be a great new tide of creative power, which he apparently thought would come out of my analysis with him. I wanted to accept this instruction but without my work, I was unbearably lonely, my life unbearably empty.
In 1969, a period not covered in the notebooks, Williams was confined to a mental hospital in Saint Louis by his brother where he stayed for three dreadful months.
Williams managed in his best work to harness that shadow of madness that lay over him and that fell on his sister. He made it appear almost normal, an unsettled striving within the soul, a brave dreaming up of the more wondrous parts of the self. He made its roots seem common to us all. But then, as he must have seen it develop in Rose, he dramatized its growth into a sort of poisonous power that slowly overcame and undid his characters.
It is remarkable in the notebooks how little credit he gave himself for his own genius at handling and shaping this material, his skills at catching patterns of speech and building dramatic structure, his astonishing sympathy for powerless dreamers especially when they came dressed up and ready to kill or were full of hidden erotic hope. As his own power waned, he did not, as other dramatists did, spend time overseeing new productions of old work. It was part of his unresolved innocence, his own nature as a dreamer, that he went on writing, despite the fact that most of his work after The Night of the Iguana in 1961 seemed to fail; it had been a great struggle to start, and now, as the last miserable pages of his notebooks make clear, it was too much of a struggle to stop. He knew that the creation of his characters was what had justified his life. As he came close to the end he wrote: ‘Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group? There is probably no clear cut answer … Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn’t, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence.’
John Cheever: New Ways to Make Your Family’s Life a Misery
One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way. In the pages that follow he is both a mythical hero of the suburbs and a holy fool; he is both a legend in his own dreams and a ridiculous figure, a character whose reality is evoked by the close detail with which his world is described, but who is also a victim of his own imaginings. There is a realism in the way the detail and the characters are evoked that forces the reader to believe that this is actually happening – that Neddy is really swimming home, pool by pool – but there is also something else going on that makes us wonder if the story is a metaphor for something, or a parable. It ends with Neddy’s arrival home to find his house dark and its doors locked. ‘He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.’
Cheever’s journals for the months before he wrote the story included an entry that dealt with his increasing ambition and fame: ‘I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote about something that might have prevented this actually happening: about a secret life that gave him creative energy and filled him with suburban shame. On the one hand, he wanted to be a happily married man and a devoted father, the man whom his friends and readers believed him to be. ‘It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself,’ he wrote. But, on the other hand, his thoughts had a habit of turning, as they did in that same diary entry, to his sexual interest in men, this time to a male figure he had seen by a swimming pool. ‘His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch.’ He thought about having sex in the shower with the young man; he contemplated ‘the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation’. But then he realized that he was, in fact, a respectable married man with three children who dreamed of having his face on a stamp. ‘But then there are the spiritual facts: my high esteem for the world, the knowledge that it is not in me to lead a double life, my love of perseverance, a passionate wish to honour the vows I’ve made to my wife and children.’ Nonetheless, he was intrigued by the urge, which his creation Neddy Merrill would soon also feel,
to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world … I have been in this country a hundred times before … Why should I be tempted to throw away the vast delights of love for a chance shot in a shower?
Thus ‘The Swimmer’, read in tandem with Cheever’s journals, becomes a version of the writer’s dream and then his nightmare. His dream was that he should have ‘breached this contract years ago and run off with some healthy-minded beauty’, his nightmare that he would come home to an empty house, that he would, because of instincts he barely understood and deeply despised, lose the domestic life he craved and the people he most loved. He wrote in his journals that he was locked into ‘the toleration of an intolerable marriage’. Soon after his account of the man he had seen by the pool, he wrote of being with his younger son, Federico: ‘I have no freedom from him. Never having known the love of a father has forced me into a love so engulfing and passionate that there is no margin of choice.’
He filled his journals with images of love for those around him and longing for domestic harmony, and then broke the harmony with images of despair, often caused by hangovers (he drank vast quantities, often starting in the morning), and of hate, usually for his wife (who for much of the time they were married did not speak to him, often with good reason). Few images of happiness or ease were allowed to stand. In 1963, for example, he registered a memory from childhood of being at the beach with his parents and his older brother, Fred, and then returning home.