Candles to the Sun

by Dan Isaac

  I have a feeling, now that I have examined the play carefully and know much more about its author than I did then, that it may not have been that something had gone wrong in the production but that it was simply too painful for him to watch a play in which he had put so much of himself and his sister. Of The Glass Menagerie he said late in his life: “It is the saddest play I have ever written. It is full of pain. It is painful for me to see it.” To my mind Candles to the Sun is also one of Tom’s saddest plays, full of pain, but one of the most beautiful. It now deserves a place beside The Glass Menagerie.

  May 2004

  introduction

  by dan isaac

  By early 1936, Thomas Lanier Williams III (1911–1983) had become well known in a small circle of young St. Louis bohemian literati as an accomplished poet whose work was starting to gain wider attention. On March 26th, his twentieth-fifth birthday, his “Sonnets for the Spring” won a prestigious competition created by the late St. Louis poet Sara Teasdale. As though the fates had conspired to confirm Tom Williams in his calling as a poet, a letter arrived at just the same time from Harriet Monroe, famed editor of Poetry magazine, informing him that she would publish two of his poems during the coming year. In a letter dated March 27, 1936, Williams graciously declared that he was “surprised and delighted.”

  At that moment it seemed clear the young Tom Williams was destined to realize his dream of becoming a self-impoverished poet. But 1936 turned out to be the year Williams decided to write for the theater—though he continued to write poetry all his life. The result of this shift was a full-length play, Candles to the Sun, produced in 1937 by the Mummers of St. Louis (under the direction of Willard Holland) and published here for the first time. But how to account for his new interest in playwriting?

  Tom Williams had entered the University of Missouri in 1929 to attend the famed School of Journalism. In the spring of 1930, Professor Robert Ramsay sensed something special about the freshman who was auditing his course in modern drama, and urged him to write a play and enter it in the university-sponsored annual one-act play contest. Williams heeded this advice and wrote Beauty Is the Word. Despite the play’s rhetoric and didacticism, it was credited for its original plot (concerning a puritanical missionary on a South Sea Island and his visiting niece whose “God is beauty”), with the judges awarding it sixth place and honorable mention. The following year, 1931, Williams entered Hot Milk at Three in the Morning, a play about a man filled with wanderlust who feels trapped by his wife and their newborn baby. The play took 13th place and was not awarded honorable mention. Neither play received a production, which was one of the possible rewards of the contest. However, later on, Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, a rewritten and renamed version of Hot Milk, was submitted by Williams with four or five other one-act plays under the rubric title of American Blues to a Group Theatre play contest in 1938, and not only won a special monetary award, but gained the attention of Audrey Wood, who became his agent.

  ***

  In June 1932, Tom Williams’ often harsh father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, dealt his son’s hopes and plans a devastating blow. Tom Williams had wanted to become a journalist upon graduation, which would have permitted him to escape a home that his mother and father had turned into a hateful marital battleground. Even more important, as a working journalist he would have had the opportunity to sharpen his reporting skills, with time left over for his true love: writing poetry and short stories. But when C.C., as his father was known, raised in military schools and a proud veteran of the 1898 Spanish–American War, received his son’s report card and discovered that Tom had failed R.O.T.C., he informed his son that he would not permit him to return to the University of Missouri for his senior year.

  Edwina Dakin Williams later provided a first-hand account of the event that prematurely terminated the first part of Williams’ fractured college education:

  Tom’s failing R.O.T.C. was like a slap in the face to his father. “I told you he’s not doing any good in college,” Cornelius stormed at me. “I’m going to take him out and put him to work.” This was the third year of the Depression and Cornelius constantly felt the financial bottom dropping out of his world. . . . He insisted Tom not return to the university for his final year. Tom wanted with all his heart to get a degree, to keep learning, to be able to write more effectively. . . . But he did not defy his father. I can only guess what this must have cost him psychically.1

  Cornelius worked at the International Shoe Company where he got his son a job that paid $65 a month. Tom entered a world of dusting shoes, typing out factory orders, hauling packing cases stuffed with samples—the world of his father.

  There is a melancholy postscript to Williams’ aborted undergraduate career at the University of Missouri, and it came in the form of a deeply-felt letter from the Chairman of the English Department, Robert L. Ramsay, the same professor who had encouraged Tom to write his first play and enter it into a local competition. Dated December 10, 1932, the letter reads in part: “Your absence from the University this year has been a matter for real regret to all of us who knew the excellent work you did here the last few years, especially in the field of creative writing. I hope you will be able to return here and finish your course.”

  Williams worked at the International Shoe Company for nearly three years. After episodes of heart palpitations in early 1935—Williams always referred to them as heart attacks—he was finally able to quit the factory. The Williams family, rarely unified, met together to make the right decision for Tom’s immediate future: he would spend the coming summer in Memphis with his dearly loved maternal grandparents, Episcopalian minister Reverend Walter Edwin Dakin and his wife Rose Otto Dakin, who had retired to Memphis in 1931, after serving at the church of St. George in Clarksdale, Mississippi for fourteen years.

  Suddenly liberated from both the crushing boredom of the International Shoe Company warehouse and the tyranny and pathology of his parents, Tom started the summer in Memphis early. In a letter from Memphis dated May 18, 1935, to Josephine Winslow Johnson, a woman he knew from the Writers Guild in St. Louis who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Now in November, Williams describes his health and the new surroundings: “Now that I feel more settled inside, I’ll probably start writing my head off again. There’re so many fascinating things to write about down here. You should visit these plantations! Everyone down here seems to have a history that you could write volumes about.”

  The first of two fortuitous Memphis meetings that summer was with Bernice Dorothy Shapiro, a young, unmarried schoolteacher who was an active member of a local amateur theater group called alternately the Garden Players and the Rose Arbor Players. In the middle of a June 25, 1935, letter to his brother Dakin, Williams made it clear that he had made a connection with Dorothy Shapiro and that they were rehearsing for a production of “their” play. With the phrase, “As you know . . . ,” the letter is apparently a continuation of an ongoing progress report concerning the Shapiro/Williams play. Recalling the play forty years later in his Memoirs, Williams feels more at ease and refers to “Miss Shapiro” as Bernice Dorothy—though he misremembers the year of his 1935 stay in Memphis:

  In that summer of 1934, when I first became a playwright, there lived next door to my grandparents in Memphis, a family of Jews with a very warmhearted and actively disposed daughter named Bernice Dorothy Shapiro. She was a member of a little dramatic club in Memphis. Their productions took place on the great sloping lawn of a lady named Mrs. Roseborough, which accounts for the “Rose Arbor” name of that cry of players. Dorothy wanted me to collaborate with her on a play for the group—she knew that I was a writer and she wasn’t. I wrote a play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!—a farcical but rather touching little comedy about two sailors on a date with a couple of “light ladies.” Bernice Dorothy Shapiro wrote a quite unnecessary and, I must confess, undistinguished prologue to the play. Thank God the prologue was short: that’s all I can remember in its favor.


  The play was produced late that summer. It was not long, either, but it was a great success for the group. On the program I was identified as the collaborator and was given second billing to Dorothy.2

  And even though the play might be a somewhat confused hybrid, Williams would also record in his Memoirs his awareness of what that first production had meant to him: “Still, the laughter, genuine and loud, at the comedy I had written enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better or for worse. I know it’s the only thing that saved my life.”

  ***

  The second major event of that Memphis summer was when Tom Williams began writing his first full-length play, Candles to the Sun, which was also to be his first produced full-length play. One of the unusual things about Candles to the Sun is that it was possibly co-authored. Another would-be playwright handed his play over to Williams, telling him that he was tired of working on it, and—in effect—saying, “Do what you want with it!” Williams did and eventually turned it into Candles to the Sun.

  The would-be playwright in question was Joseph Phelan Hollifield, and he is first identified in an August 17, 1935, letter in which Williams describes to his mother all his recent doings in Memphis. Somewhere in the middle, as though the name were already known and required no introduction, Tom abruptly states: “Last two week-ends Mr. Hollifield has taken grandfather and myself to Maywood Mississippi where there is a fine artesian pool. The sun and fresh air have helped me tremendously.”3

  There is but one known letter that Hollifield wrote to Tom Williams: and it is invaluable for what it tells us. It is reproduced here in its entirety:

  1159 North Parkway, November 7th.

  Dear Tom,

  I was very glad to get your letter because I had been wanting to hear from you. The play contest sounds very interesting, I just hope you will be able to do something with The Lamp. It is the only thing I have ever done that I feel is worth anything at all. Whatever you do with it will be all right, I am sure.

  Your letter happened to catch me at a very busy time, so I am not going to try to write a letter now, but I am going to write you later. I will send you some material on mining people in Alabama if I can find any. If there is anything that you would like to know before then that I can tell you, please let me know.

  Congratulations on getting a story accepted. You see, this is a good place to write. You must come back for some more successful work. I would like to read that story.

  Good luck to you with the play.

  Your friend,

  (autograph signature)

  J.P. Hollifield4

  In the largest sense, this letter—failing any document to the contrary—might serve as a deed of gift, Hollifield’s written testimony that he had, willingly and happily, given Tom Williams his play about the coal fields of Alabama, “The Lamp,” to do with it whatever Mr. Williams saw fit. “Whatever you do with it will be all right, I’m sure.” Hollifield makes it very clear that he is presently busy with other matters. He remains a man of some mystery, a courtly benevolent Gatsby, the subject of a search just begun.5 No other direct communication between the two is known.

  Yet there remain two other items—one is tempted to call them exhibits—that must be considered, one of them invaluable to this inquiry into the question of co-authorship: What precisely did each party contribute? The first item is a letter from Williams to his grandfather, worth noting if only because references to Hollifield are so rare. This letter is dated, but the fourth digit of the year date is smudged over and unreadable: Sept. 15, 193?.” However, internal evidence proves that 1936 is the year.6

  The mention of Hollifield comes just before Williams signs off: “If you see Hollifield tell him I am still working on the coal miner play and expect to submit it in the Little Theater Contest this year. I want to visit some real coal mines in Illinois before I do.” This confirms that his grandfather was the connection to Hollifield, and further suggests that Williams had not been in touch with Hollifield since the latter’s November 7 letter cited above. It seems that Williams never realized his intention to visit coal mines in Illinois.

  The second item of paramount interest is the typed title page and text of a play that later would be retitled Candles to the Sun. The title page itself reads as follows: THE LAMP / (A Drama of the Southern Coal Fields) / by Joseph Phelan Hollifield / and / Thomas Lanier Williams. Here, the title of Hollifield’s one-act, “The Lamp,” has been retained by Williams after he has taken over, rewritten, and turned it into a full-length play.

  With regard to who wrote what in this full-length version, Williams scribbled a clarifying note with a thick dull pencil that spreads down the title page: “Hollifield finished the original one-act play from which the title and partly the idea for this play was derived. I am doing the writing on the present manuscript and he is contributing some material from Alabama. This is just the first draft in very sketchy form—the main theme—sacrifice of individual to social ends—is brought out in the final scene. I want to get your opinion before I give any more time to it this summer as I’m not sure it will ‘go.’” This note is at least confirmation that the idea for what was to become Candles to the Sun came from Joseph Hollifield. Whether or not any of Hollifield’s writing remained in the text as it was performed in 1936 has yet to be established though an examination of this and the various extant drafts suggests that Tom Williams wrote or rewrote all of the dialogue.

  Williams continued to work on “the coal miner play,” and turned out three early versions of Candles under different titles that are briefly described following the text of the play. Surely the winning of the play contest by Thomas Lanier Williams for The Magic Tower was announced in the local papers, even before its October, 1936, production. Willard Holland, a highly respected local director of a devoted company of spirited St. Louis amateur actors called the Mummers, contacted Williams, whom he had never met, in early September to ask him to write a few scenes, sketches really, to be produced as a curtain-raiser before an Armistice Day presentation of Irwin Shaw’s powerful and highly-praised anti-war one-act, Bury the Dead. By October of 1936, Tom reports in his journal that “Willard Holland just called up. Wants to see me tomorrow. He has read my long play. . . .” And even though Williams thought his prologue to Bury the Dead, titled Headlines and produced in November, was “rather botched,” his faith in Holland continued and by early 1937, Tom was doing rewrites at Holland’s house and confiding to his journal, “He is a master. Could get work out of an oyster.”

  ***

  Despite its uncertain beginnings, Candles to the Sun is an impressive piece of writing, which is all the more remarkable when it is recalled that for poet and short-story writer Thomas Lanier Williams, this was his first try at writing anything full-length for the theater. Colvin McPherson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (later a supportive friend of Williams’) described Candles (after its opening on Thursday, March 19, 1937) as one of the strongest plays the Mummers had ever attempted, lauded it as a drama of social content, and praised the writing of this theater novice: “His writing is rarely unsteady and his play has an emotional unity and robustness. It stands on its own feet. Its characters are genuine, its dialogue of a type that must have been uttered in the author’s presence, its appeal in the theater widespread.”7

  Set in the Red Hills coal fields of Alabama during the Thirties, Candles deals directly with the pathos of impoverishment due to exploitive working conditions. But it is not simply a period “Labor melodrama,” the generic label one reader used to describe it in a reader’s report for a Theatre Guild play contest. Candles to the Sun is in fact an engaging drama with tragic elements. And while the play is intensely concerned with labor problems and a miner’s strike (at one point miners rush out of a meeting and into the living room of a grieving family, crying “Strike! Strike! Strike!”), Candles is most concerned with how a set of desperate characters try to work out the problems of their lives. And when we learn in the last scene of
Candles that the strike has been settled, the playwright leaves us in the dark with regard to the exact terms of settlement, a matter that any true “labor play” would be quick not only to reveal, but also elaborate with instructive dialogue. Williams is more concerned with what will happen next to his major characters than the general issue of labor conditions.

  Part of the strength of this work is in the sense that the coal mine is always there as a brooding omnipresence undergirding this small world, dominating the lives of the families whose men work deep below the earth. Suffice it to say, Williams designed a play in which we see life in the mines through three generations of one family, the Pilchers, living in a “mining camp”—neither town nor village, but rather a place where there are virtually no other jobs, only the mine and a company store; where the microcosm of family represents the macrocosm of a suffering community of workers in a company town.

  As the action of Candles moves toward resolution Fern gives her blessing for the money she has saved for her son’s education—for his escape from the mines and their only hope to break the cycle of poverty—to go instead to the union organizer, Alabama Red, so that food can be purchased for the starving miners and their families during the continuing strike. Angry at her sister-in-law’s decision, Star asks Red sarcastically, “Oh, she saw the light, huh?”—Red latches on to this popular expression for revelation and spins it into a metaphor that uses the miner’s experience of going from the dark underground into the blinding brightness of the sunlit world; this becomes an epistemological metaphor for the problems of perception and cognition—and finally for profound understanding. The metaphor captured in the play’s title is also a perfect description of a mystical experience, and at the same time a recapitulation of the miner’s daily experience: from light to darkness and back again to light.