by John Lahr
Williams re-created himself on the grandiose plan of Artist, a “Homo Emancipatus—the Completely Free Man.” “The poet, the dreamer . . . fights a solitary battle against the world’s dullness—the others, conscious of no such enemy in the field think him a mad man who is struggling with phantoms,” Williams wrote inside his volume of Hart Crane. But there was a price to be paid along the way to his hard-won freedom, a price in torment and loneliness. “When will the cool white time of healing arrive?” he prayed in his 1940s diary. “When will the fingers of peace be laid on my forehead? Oh, days ahead—give me a sign! Give me a candle to walk by! Oh it’s so bewildering, uncertain where I stand. Courage, my lad—en avant.” The heaven he sought was his own individuality. “Am I still looking for God? No, just for my self,” he said.
In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s first full sentence is about grace. “We can’t say grace until you come to the table,” she calls to Tom. Grace is again invoked as the Gentleman Caller sits down to break bread with Laura and the rest of the family. “I think we may—have grace—now,” Amanda says. But grace is granted at the finale only to the Narrator, Tom Wingfield. Haunted, restless, guilt-ridden, searching for a truth that keeps him in perpetual motion, he is released by the luck of talent into the world, no longer earthbound but airborne by his imagination. Through his literary ability—as the interior pantomime of Amanda and Laura at the finale demonstrates—Williams’s storytelling is the act of grace, redeeming his life and the lives of others with a meaning and a beauty that feels like blessing.
With the success of The Glass Menagerie, that long-delayed something that Williams lived for—“the time when I would first catch and hold an audience’s attention”—had arrived. He recognized it now for what it was: a simulacrum of the child’s longing to be held. “We come to each other, gradually, but with love,” Williams wrote in the play’s introduction. “It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.”
The hubbub of Williams’s new life began almost immediately. He was photographed by Vogue in broody profile with a raincoat over his shoulder; he was interviewed in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section; within a week—with his royalties estimated at a thousand dollars a week—he was complaining to the Times about the burdens of the American tax system. “I guess I’m getting spoiled,” he told the reporter. “That’s the second time in my life I’ve ordered room service.” Embossed invitations went out, inviting Williams’s newfound society to meet “Mrs. Edwina Williams, Miss Laurette Taylor, and The Reverend Walter Dakin” over “tea and cocktails” at Sherry’s. “This is the twilight of an era in the theatre,” Williams had written a friend in 1943. “God knows what’s coming next.” The answer, as it turned out, was him.
CHAPTER 2
The Heart Can’t Wait
What do I want? I want love and creative power!—Eh bien!
Get it!
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Notebooks, 1938
“May God be merciful to me and open some door, some avenue of escape,” Williams had prayed in an early diary; now, with the success of The Glass Menagerie, mercy rained down on him. The play won every major theatrical prize except the Pulitzer. In September 1945, Williams’s romantic comedy You Touched Me!—“a last, desperate throw of the literary dice in the direction of Broadway” is how he described it in 1942—opened at the Booth Theatre, with Montgomery Clift in the lead. Williams’s “drizzle puss self” seemed to evaporate. Although subsequent editions of The Glass Menagerie appended his famous 1947 essay, “The Catastrophe of Success,” which made a legend of the “spiritual dislocation” that accompanied his sudden good fortune, in the early months of his renown Williams was caught up in the rollicking velocity of his fame.
The playwright, who only a “few years earlier had confessed to his diary that he didn’t have enough money to eat, now dined cavalierly from room service. “Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak,” he recalled. He also bought himself $125 suit to match the deluxe company he was keeping: Eugene O’Neill; the actress Katharine Cornell, who wanted him to write a play for her; and the director and producer Guthrie McClintic, who promised to give him the names of well-connected people to look up on his spring trip to Mexico. The last time he was there, Williams told McClintic, “I nearly went crazy the first few days—from loneliness—and . . . got embroiled in situations from which I barely escaped with my life. So it would be lucky to have a few of the non-throat-cutting variety.” He got his introductions, and along with them the discovery that in the aristocracy of success there are no strangers. “I have met the following here,” he wrote to Audrey Wood from Mexico City, “Leonard Bernstein, Dolores Del Rio, Rosa Covarrubias, Norman Foster (now directing Mexican films), Romney Brent’s sister, Balanchine, Chavez and many lesser notables of the International Set (!) all of whom have invited me places.”
Just before the New Year, Williams moved back to the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he’d begun his artistic adventure in December 1938. Then, Tom Williams had signed himself into a rooming house on Rue Toulouse as “Tennessee Williams, Writer.” Now, his name needed no explanation. “About an hour after my arrival,” he wrote to Wood, “the hotel owner rushed out of his office and seized my hand and exclaimed: ‘Mr. Williams, this is indeed an honor! We saw your play in New York.’ ” Although he met with three reporters and gave a radio interview soon after his arrival, Williams promised Wood that in New Orleans he was going to have “no telephone and if necessary an assumed name.” He added, “I’m going to be a very serious, hard-working boy again—all else is vanity.” A month later, he wrote to Wood again: “I am switching back and forth between two long plays, the one about the sisters started in Chicago and one about a Spinster begun in New York. Right now I am doing more with the sisters, it is now set in New Orleans and is called ‘A Street-car Named Desire’—there is one by that title that runs close by my apartment, and proceeding in the other direction down the next street is one called ‘Cemeteries.’ In spite of this I am not really in a very morbid state of mind, as this might suggest.” Williams had surrendered to the flesh; his new plays dramatized this capitulation. The ensuing twenty-four-month period would be the most fecund of his writing life.
The year 1946, in particular, would be a watershed—one in which Williams first glimpsed both his greatness and his downfall. For most of the year, he had two productions on Broadway. A road company of The Glass Menagerie was crisscrossing America. His first book of short plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton: And Other One-Act Plays, was in bookstores. He seemed finally to have achieved his heart’s desire. A certain confidence and expansiveness had seeped into his manner and his metabolism. “I was not a young man who would turn many heads on the street,” he said. But fame had invested him with a glamour that gave his small torso fresh allure; he was experiencing the refreshing rush of visibility. “I never put on a shirt, just a leather jacket,” he told Wood. “I go unshaven for days and nobody says, Look at that bum, they say, That is the fellow who wrote ‘The Glass Menagerie’! Droit de Seigneur, Noblesse Oblige and Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, all rolled into one!”
Williams grew a mustache, and he began to go out into New Orleans society. But success also meant that Williams didn’t need to go out to the world; the world came to him. Women began to set their hats at the famous author. “I am going through quite an experience with this young lady,” he wrote to James Laughlin, unnerved by the tenacity of a woman called Sylvia who had “more or less forcibly” got him on a train to Washington, D.C., for a command performance of The Glass Menagerie on January 27, 1946, which was part of FDR’s sixty-third birthday celebration. “She is one of these people with a passion for lost causes, is beautiful enough to have anybody she wanted but is apparently attracted only by the
line of most resistance. So she came down here from New York and so far the most complete and graphic candor on my part has not convinced her that propinquity will not conquer all. I have always been more or less overlooked by good-looking women and once upon a time I sometimes suffered acutely from the fact, so the novelty of the situation makes it all the more impossible to cope with.”
To Laughlin, Williams added, “No, I don’t want to be ‘saved.’ I don’t think anyone has ever been happier with his external circumstances.” The louche byways of New Orleans were, he said, his “particular milieu.” He found the hedonistic city “more restful” than Manhattan. “If you can imagine how a cat would feel in a cream-puff factory you can imagine my joy at being back in the Quarter,” he wrote to Wood. Williams spelled out the delights of New Orleans in more specific camp detail to his friend and erstwhile cruising companion Oliver Evans, whom he addressed as “my dear Daughter.” “The streets are teeming with ambulatory vistas,” he wrote in a letter urging Evans to visit. “The small dark kind that are barely contained by their buttons and while I know you will grieve for the Sisters left behind you, I have no doubt that certain errands of piety and mercy may draw you occasionally out upon the streets.” Evans wasn’t tempted. Writing to “my sainted Mother,” he replied, “Your prolonged absence from this and other places of worship (Gregory’s Bar, Pink Elephant, 1-2-3 Club and Times Square Baths, to mention only a few) has aroused considerable comment among the more pious elite, who are beginning to fear you may have been taken in by one of those strange Southern cults.” Evans preferred, he said, to “linger yet awhile in the Holy innocence of my present chaste existence, surrounded by the pious Sisters of our beloved Order of St. Vaseline.”
There was another pleasurable difference between Williams’s life in New York and his new life in New Orleans: he had money. “I am purring with gratitude,” he wrote to Laughlin. He could afford a high-ceilinged apartment at 710 Orleans Street, with twelve-foot shuttered windows and a balcony that looked out at the back of the St. Louis Cathedral. The apartment stood, Williams said, “across the street from a Negro Convent that has the funniest cornerstone. . . . It reads ‘Convent of the Sisters of St Joseph . . . Sisters of the Holy Family Laid October 13, 1885, by Archbishop Pontiface.’ What a boy Archbishop Pontiface must have been!”
Even Williams’s hectic sexual wayfaring seemed to have reached some new and happy resolution. For the first time in his life, he found himself settled down with someone: the muscular, volatile Amado “Pancho” Rodriguez y Gonzalez whose tall Mexican good looks—“dark of skin, dark of hair, dark of eyes”—gave Williams the mistaken first impression that Pancho was a bullfighter rather than a receptionist at the Pontchartrain Apartment Hotel in New Orleans. (Pancho called Williams “Torito.”) “I wish I had a lovely little clown for a friend,” Williams had confided to his diary in 1943. “One that had sorrows but made me sunny. I want to be friends with some wild thing.” In the shape of the hard-drinking and combustible Pancho—“rambunctious” was Elia Kazan’s word for him—even this wish was granted.
“Companionship was not a familiar or easy thing,” Williams wrote of the “unprecedented duration” of their relationship, when he came to recollect it in the autobiographical story “Rubio y Morena,” whose narrator “had lately become what is called a Name.” The narrator’s lover is Amada, a woman whom the narrator at first “took to be a man”; in fact, Amada was a man, transposed from Pancho whose first name was Amado. “I have been having quite a hectic time of it—living with a little Mexican full of tricks, for about two months,” Williams wrote to Paul Bigelow on February 27. “I didn’t mind her bringing in trade as long as she saved a little of her energy for my own entertainment but recently she started falling asleep as soon as her trade departed. So I kicked her out of bed and sent her out on the streets. She is a pretty thing—She took refuge with a Creole belle who had wanted her badly while she was staying with me but was considerably disconcerted to have her altogether on his hands.” Williams went on, “I wrote her a mildly affectionate note of farewell which she mistakenly interpreted as a plea to return. So back she came tonight with her 2 shirts, alarm clock and perfume. . . . These Mexicans are charming little things—if you can live through them!”
As Williams was surviving so sensationally, his family’s fate, by comparison, seemed ever more parlous. His father had retired from the shoe company and retreated to “his bedroom with the bottle,” as Williams told Wood. He “does nothing but stay home and drink,” he wrote. After Williams’s beloved “Grand” suffered a lung hemorrhage while playing the piano and died two years earlier, the Reverend Dakin had taken up residence in his daughter’s home—in what proved to be a sort of grace-and-disfavor arrangement. “Conditions at home must be worse than terrible,” Williams wrote to Wood on January 3, 1946. “My father . . . is at home all the time so poor grandfather has to stay in his room. . . . They can’t stand the sight of each other!” Rose, who had been lobotomized in 1943, was beyond memory or desire. As for Edwina, she bustled dutifully between the enemy camps of her fractious family, alone with the story of her grievances and her God.
“In spite of basic damnation, I am incorrigibly lucky,” Williams wrote. “I feel that God should walk into this mellow kitchen of mine with drawn sword and just wordlessly chop my head off because I have been too fortunate compared with the female members of my doomed house.” For the moment, Williams had achieved a sort of equipoise in his life and in his work, a seismic internal shift that had been foreshadowed in The Glass Menagerie. “I am waking up,” Tom says, broadcasting vague intimations of transformation. Jim, the gentleman caller, sees no signs of the awakening and says so. “The signs are interior,” Tom replies. “I’m planning to change.”
“IT TAKES FIVE or six years to use something out of life,” Williams once told Time. “It’s lurking in the unconscious—it finds its meaning there.” In 1939, Williams had vowed to make his plays “a picture of my own heart . . . myself without concealment.” Now, six or seven years later, working in New Orleans under “ideal conditions” and with prodigious energy, he looked back on the landscape of abdications that had forestalled his coming of age and kept him from knowing his own heart for so long. His writing became both a conscious and an unconscious attempt to chart the unlearning of repression.
“He had no idea of what his real desires were,” Williams wrote of Anthony Burns, the timid thirty-year-old hero of “Desire and the Black Masseur,” his short story that was completed in April 1946. Burns, like Williams at that age, “by virtue of so much protection . . . still had in his face and body the unformed look of a child and he moved like a child in the presence of critical elders. In every move of his body and every inflection of speech and cast of expression there was a timid apology going out to the world for the little space that he had been somehow elected to occupy in it.” “His desires, or rather his basic desire,” Williams wrote of Burns, “was so much too big for him that it swallowed him up as a coat that should have been cut into ten smaller sizes, or rather there should have been that much more of Burns to make it fit him.”
But, whereas Burns’s unexamined desires lead him to annihilation—he is ultimately, and literally, devoured by sexuality, embodied by the black masseur—Williams’s own exploration of the sensual led to a sort of liberation. In “Chart of Anatomy”—the second play he’d mentioned to Wood, the one about the spinster (later retitled Summer and Smoke), about a prim, dutiful, Southern virgin called Alma Winemiller—Williams replayed his own shift from the spiritual to the carnal. “Miss Alma grew up in the shadow of the rectory, and so did I,” Williams said. She “is my favorite because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle.” The play is both a dissection of his suffocating family and homage to the climate of fretful desire out of which he had finally emerged.
WILLIAMS’S OWN TRANSITION from timid virgin to florid gay man was his defining struggle. He had grown up in a hothouse of thwart
ed desire. Edwina’s hysteria had infected everything and everyone around her. “Please be sure that no single copy of anything falls into [my parents’] hands,” Williams instructed Wood in 1941. “My mother wrote me the other day that the plays in ‘American Scenes’ were ‘ugly details about indecent people’ and a disgrace to the kinfolk mentioned in the preface. I am afraid she would burn them in order to save my reputation.” Edwina’s perfervid vigilance reflected an asceticism that was based on her father’s preaching. “By the flesh is meant that corrupt nature which we inherit from our first parents; and ‘to live after the flesh’ is to follow the devices and desires of our own hearts without any restraint on Christian principle,” the Reverend Dakin said, in a sermon first preached on the eighth Sunday after Trinity in 1896. He went on, “People are apt to plead the weakness of the ‘flesh’ as an excuse for yielding to temptation. They forget that to yield is a sin; that every victory over self aids in another conflict, that we are placed here to conquer ourselves, ‘to fight the good fight.’ ”
Edwina, like her father, became expert at replacing carnal arousal with spiritual arousal—a sort of psychic jujitsu in which sacrifice became passion. Through his mother’s exhortations and the books that his grandfather pressed on him—The Ascent of the Soul was one—the righteous message was brought home to Williams. “Character is the man—the whole man—the seen, the unseen, the known, and the unknown—the whole including all the hurts,” the Reverend Dakin preached. “Character is the product of daily, hourly actions and words and thoughts . . . struggles against temptation, submissiveness under trial.” Williams’s sense of character was forged along these hair-shirted lines. “I had begun to associate the sensual with the impure, an error that tortured me during and after pubescence,” he wrote. “Or did I, and this seems most likely now, say to myself, Yes, Tom, you’re a monster!”