Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Initially, Williams struck a cavalier pose about the analytic endeavor. “I’ve been wanting to try it for a long time, and this seems a good time to do it, now that it seems advisable to stay at a safe distance from Broadway till the critics have a chance to forget my recent transgressions,” he wrote to his mother. But he was serious about the process; he found it painful. “With Kubie I have worked mostly on negative points: my suspicions, fears, jealousies. I have deliberately painted a black picture of myself, a sort of ‘mea culpa,’ ” he explained to Kazan. “If only we could turn up something nice,” he complained to St. Just in October. “But so far nothing of that sort even worth mentioning, just envy, hate, anger, and so forth. Of course he is attacking my sex life and has succeeded in destroying my interest in all except the Horse, and perhaps the Horse will go next and I will start getting my kicks out of dirty pictures.”

  THE PROCESS OF analysis may not have been pleasant, but it did change at least one aspect of Williams’s narrative: his story of his hated and hateful father. “Kubie would imitate my father and scream at me—to break the doors down, you know,” Williams explained to Playboy in 1973. “What he gave me was not forgettable. I actually learned to respect my father, and now that he’s dead, I love the old son of a bitch.” Williams even took issue with a twelve-part New York Post profile in which Cornelius, who he now claimed “wasn’t really that bad,” was cast in a “terrible light.” “My father was a totally honest man,” Williams wrote in a protesting letter, which was published in full in the newspaper. “He was never known to tell a lie in his life or to take an unfair advantage of anybody in business.” He continued:

  He had a strong character and a sense of honor. He lived on his own terms which were hard terms for his family but he should not be judged as long as he remains a mystery that he is to us who lived in his shadow. Maybe I hated him, once, but I certainly don’t anymore. He gave me some valuable things: he gave me fighting blood, which I needed, and now he has given me, through the revelations of my psychoanalysis, a sense of the necessity to forgive your father in order to forgive the world that he brought you into: in my opinion, an important lesson which I hope I have really learned. Forgiving, of course, does not mean accepting and condoning, it does not even mean an end to the battle. As for his being devoted to money, as my younger brother is quoted as having said of him, all American businessmen seem to have that devotion, more or less, mostly more, and I think it a sort of reverse sublimation. Disappointed in their longing for other things, such as tenderness, they turn to the pursuit of wealth because that is more easily obtainable in the world. My father got little of either.

  Behind the tyranny of CC’s anger, Williams came to see a punishing sense of resignation, a man exiled from those he ought to love and who ought to love him. In the poem “Iron Man,” he imagined his father’s “strangulated love”:

  I.

  We cringed at his anger,

  sudden as steel,

  rapier-like,

  but did not feel

  his wounds that could not

  utter their need

  but bled in silence

  as martyrs bleed!

  II.

  His rage over trifles,

  his bitter smile

  were the things that we noticed,

  and yet all the while

  a frustrated heart

  was beating there

  that wanted to love us

  but did not dare!

  In his essay “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” Williams wrote, “A psychiatrist once said to me, You will begin to forgive the world when you’ve forgiven your father. I’m afraid it is true that my father taught me to hate, but I know that he didn’t plan to, and, terrible as it is to know how to hate, and to hate, I have forgiven him for it and for a great deal else.” He added, “Now I feel a very deep kinship to him.” Through psychoanalysis, Williams achieved a less judgmental view of CC’s boozing. “I think it was the constraint of working in an office after the free life on the road, and his unexpressed but deep feeling of guilt over his failure ‘to be a good husband and father,’ ” he wrote in 1962 to Lucy Freeman, who helped Edwina to write her autobiography. “His nature was not to comply with accepted social modes and patterns without a restlessness that would have driven him mad without the release of liquor and poker and wild weekends.” Williams recalled, “My mother would scream, ‘I know where his liquor is. He’s hidden it behind the bathtub.’ If only she’d’ve sat down and had a sherry with him.” In his son’s eyes, CC had lived “a rather pathetically regular life.” CC had played it safe; in the compromise, he lost everything. His sorry example inspired his son to take a more uncompromising approach to his own heart’s desires, to gamble everything on his writing. “Oh, no, I can’t make peace,” he wrote in his diary. “I can’t accept a little or nothing.”

  Williams’s recognition through analysis of his underlying love for his long-absent, frustrated father was by itself a major accomplishment, but it was overlooked by friends in their posthumous accounts of Williams. “Happily, the Bird’s anarchy triumphed over the analyst,” Gore Vidal wrote, for instance. “After a troubling session on the couch, he would appear on television and tell Mike Wallace all about the problems of his analysis with one Dr. Kubie, who not long after took down his shingle and retired from shrinkage.” This entirely misrepresented both Williams’s hard-won emotional education and the analyst’s role in it. Kubie did indeed retire, but to become director of training at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital outside Baltimore; Williams did indeed talk to Mike Wallace, but with a new inward-looking tone, which demonstrated his serious attempt to reconsider his upbringing and to explore its effect on his character:

  WALLACE: Richard Watts, whom I know you admire, has described your characteristic mood as “steeped in passion, hatred, frustration, bitterness and violence.”

  WILLIAMS: I’m having a big argument on this subject with my analyst, Mike. I tell him that I don’t feel that way and he—he wants to find out if I do or I don’t, and we’re still exploring it. I think I feel more affection and love. He thinks that certain early conditions and experiences in my life made—created a lot of anger and resentment in me, which I am taking out now through my writing. He may be right. I can’t say. . . . Have you ever heard of the term—he didn’t want me to use these analytic terms, he doesn’t approve of them, but I do a lot of reading and I use them to him, he doesn’t use them to me—a term that I’ve come across lately is “infantile omnipotence.”

  WALLACE: “Infantile omnipotence”?

  WILLIAMS: That is what we all have as babies. We scream in the cradle, the mother picks us up, she comforts us, she suckles us, she changes the diaper, whatever is giving us discomfort is tended to, and through this she rocks us to sleep and all that. And whatever gives us discomfort, we find, is—is relieved in response to an outraged cry. . . . This is the infant feeling omnipotent. All it has to do is cry out and it will be comforted, it will be attended to. All right. We grow up a little and we discover that the outcry doesn’t meet this tender response always. After a while the mother realizes that it’s no longer an infant, she gets impatient with its outcry or maybe the father gets impatient with it. Anyway, it meets the world which is less permissive, less tender and comforting, and it misses the maternal arms—the maternal comfort—and therefore, then, it becomes outraged, it becomes angry. And that’s where most of our neuroses spring from, from the time when we—. . . We meet a more indifferent world, and then we become angry. That is the root of most anger.

  The change in Williams’s story about his father inevitably led to a recalibration of his story about his mother, and her legend as the put-upon family saint. Prior to analysis, Williams’s narrative of his family was encapsulated in The Glass Menagerie, which (aside from its depiction of Amanda’s inability to touch or comfort her children) essentially presented his mother’s version of events. After analysis, Williams’s attitude toward his parents
(and himself) became more nuanced.

  This new version of his story was incorporated into Suddenly Last Summer, which was a direct product of Williams’s turmoil on the analyst’s couch. “I was bored not working,” Williams explained later. “I began to cheat. I’d get up at four, type a few hours, and then I felt fresh. The doctor finally surrendered.” Kubie’s diktats may not have broken Williams’s writing habit—trying to was possibly even a strategic analytic mistake, too challenging for someone like Williams, whose self-worth was bound up entirely in his work—but they did allow him to come to terms with Edwina and her punishing passive-aggression, in which there was as much unacknowledged hate as love, as much selfishness as selflessness. When Edwina died, at the age of ninety-five, in 1980, Williams wryly acknowledged the lethal, castrating dimension of her “extraordinary power.” “Only four feet eleven, she conquered my father who was six feet and drove him out of the house as soon as she received half of ‘Menagerie.’ Allowed the State hospital to perform one of the earliest lobotomies on Rose. Unconsciously managed to turn both her sons gay,” he told Elia Kazan.

  Suddenly Last Summer, which made a stylistic departure into the realm of the grotesque—a genre with “much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” as Edgar Allan Poe once described it—registered the roiling anger and the shock of disenchantment that his analysis had released. The play documents a furious struggle between Catharine Holly, a young woman who is driven mad by the gruesome death of her homosexual cousin, Sebastian Venable, and his mother, Mrs. Venable, who threatens to have her lobotomized for telling the truth about the circumstances of his demise. Set in a sort of festering and fantastical garden, “a well-groomed jungle,” full of thrashing sounds, “as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of a savage nature,” Suddenly Last Summer was, according to its author, an allegory. The “prehistoric” jungle-garden was as much a simulacrum of Williams’s unruly interior as it was a production of the decadent poet Sebastian Venable, who tended it. What has broken in Sebastian, in the play—“that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a—a sort of a—sort of—umbilical cord, long—after . . .”—was breaking in Williams too.

  For the first time in his dramatic oeuvre, Williams allowed himself to face overtly the madness of his mother. Mrs. Venable, who idealizes her late poet-son, refuses to accept the shocking and contradictory account of his behavior delivered by the institutionalized Catharine, who claims that Sebastian used her as bait to attract young male lovers. “I was PROCURING for him,” she tells her psychiatrist, Dr. Sugar. “She used to do it, too,” she says of Mrs. Venable. “Not consciously! She didn’t know that she was procuring for him in the smart, the fashionable places they used to go to before that summer! Sebastian was shy with people. She wasn’t. Neither was I.” Mrs. Venable, who gasps “like a great hooked fish,” clings to her delusions on the subject. “It wasn’t folie de grandeur. It was grandeur,” she tells Dr. Sugar of the halcyon days she spent traveling the watering holes of Europe with Sebastian. In Mrs. Venable’s mind, Catharine is a “vandal” bent on destroying the perfect image she has of her son and herself. “Really I was actually the only one in his life that satisfied the demands he made of people,” Mrs. Venable tells the doctor, contending that the forty-year-old Sebastian was “chaste,” “not c-h-a-s-e-d.” Mrs. Venable tries to use her wealth and her moral authority to bribe Catharine’s family into having the incriminating details of Sebastian’s sex life wiped out of her brain: the play is a negotiation for a lobotomy. “After the operation, who would believe her, Doctor?” Mrs. Venable says to Dr. Sugar, adding, from offstage, at the finale, “Cut this hideous story out of her brain!”

  Suddenly Last Summer was a sort of autobiographical exorcism that worked through Williams’s grief and guilt over his sister, Rose, as well as his anger at Edwina for deciding to allow a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy to be performed on her without informing him in advance about the procedure—an omission for which Williams never forgave his mother. (“Do you want to bore a hole in my skull and turn a knife in my brain?” Catharine challenges Dr. Sugar, adding, “You’d have to have my mother’s permission for that.”) “Now that it’s over, I can tell you about Rose who has successfully come through a head operation,” Edwina wrote to Williams on January 20, 1943. “What kind of operation was it and what was it for?” he replied on January 25. “Please let me know exactly what was done with Rose.”

  Elizabeth Taylor as Catharine Holly in the film Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959

  In Miss Edwina’s memoir, the date of the lobotomy was strategically fudged. By implying that the operation took place when Rose was first committed, in 1937, rather than nearly six years later, Edwina shifted the blame for the decision onto CC, who “had given up on Rose” and on himself, as his increasingly chronic boozing indicated. “The psychiatrists convinced Cornelius the only answer was a lobotomy,” Edwina wrote, adding, “They tried to make me believe this was the only hope for Rose, that otherwise she would spend the rest of her days a raving maniac in a padded cell.” In fact, what doctors had told CC was that the “only hope” was insulin treatments, which began to be administered at Farmington State Hospital, in Missouri, about seventy miles from St. Louis, on August 23, 1937. The insulin did not work, however. By August 1939, Rose’s condition, if anything, had gotten worse: “Does no work. Manifests delusions of persecution. Smiles and laughs when telling of person plotting to kill her. . . . 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.”

  Some part of Rose’s unraveling could be blamed on CC, who, even the psychiatrist’s report acknowledged, “has been eccentric most of his life.” CC was always distant with Rose. “Any of the normal hugging or kissing between father and daughter would have embarrassed him, as it would have been discouraged by Edwina,” Lyle Leverich writes in Tom. Rose never held a job, which only compounded CC’s aloofness. In his mind, she was an economic burden who became an existential catastrophe. Over the years, his explosive scenes, his threats to leave the family, his drizzle of denigration unnerved and infuriated Rose, who began to show signs of erratic behavior at twenty-one. It was not uncommon for Rose, in front of guests, to accuse her parents of sexual immorality. She conceived the fantastical notion that Edwina was leading an immoral double life. “I remember her stalking into the front room one day, eyes ablaze, and shouting at Mother: ‘I know what you are doing and you are no better than a prostitute. You are keeping another apartment to have affairs with Dad’s salesmen and you have a complete wardrobe there, you are practically a streetwalker and I am going to tell Dad!’ ” Williams told Oliver Evans in 1971. He added, “I think Rose was getting back at Mother for all those repressions which Mother forced upon Rose and which resulted in her breakdown.”

  Rose’s scenes became increasingly sensational. On her way to a psychiatrist’s office, she put a knife in her handbag; once, shortly before she was hospitalized, she wandered into Williams’s room saying, “Let’s all die together.” In an attempt to stabilize her volatile and increasingly dissociated behavior, Rose’s parents sent her to stay with CC’s sisters in Knoxville over the Christmas holidays in 1936. The visit was not a particular success. Because of local flooding while she was traveling back to St. Louis a few weeks later, Rose was forced to sleep overnight at the Louisville train station “with refugees.” She became agitated and began to rave as soon as she got home. Edwina wrote to her parents, “Cornelius . . . lost his temper, told her she was crazy and that he was going to put her in the State Asylum. He will do this too, if I don’t do something else with her.”

  That March, Rose was committed to the psychiatric ward of Missouri Baptist Hospital and subsequently transferred on April 15 to St. Vincent’s, a Catholic convalescent home. Dakin recalled,
of her time there, “Rose was like a wild animal. Often I would hear her screaming long before the Catholic sisters would usher us into her presence. Our visits were almost always depressing disasters. Between screams and the most vile cursing, she would be chain-smoking and pacing up and down the corridor or visiting room. Finally the Mother Superior advised us there was no future for Rose at St. Vincent’s, which was primarily equipped for ‘custodial care.’ ” By the time Rose was admitted to Farmington, four months later, at the age of twenty-seven, her anger toward her parents, and CC in particular, was beginning to grow murderous. According to the Farmington report (Case No. 9014), she stated that “both of her parents had lost their minds.” The report went on, “Frequently she appears mildly euphoric, but for the most part is bizarre, indifferent and shows no normal concern about her family, usually condemning them.” To mark her tragic departure from home, Williams wrote the poem “Valediction”:

  She went with morning on her lips

  down an inscrutable dark way

  and we who witnessed her eclipse

  have found no word to say.

  I think our speechlessness is not

  a thing she would approve,

  she who was always light of wit