Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  and quick to speak and move—

  I think that she would say goodbye

  can be no less a lyric word

  than any song, than any cry

  of greeting we have heard!

  Edwina’s consent to a lobotomy, in 1943, was brought on by Rose’s failure to improve during her hospitalization, and especially by her persistent graphic sexual outbursts—one of which Williams witnessed in 1939. “Horrible, Horrible!” he wrote in his diary. “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 stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards—a cold, unsympathetic young man—he said her condition was hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration. It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.” Still, Williams came to believe that the lobotomy had been “tragically mistaken.” “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 institutional existence,” he said. Moreover, Williams thought that Edwina, who later in life signed herself “Edwin” and thought a horse was living in her room, “was essentially more psychotic than my sister Rose,” he told the Paris Review in 1981. He went on:

  Mother chose to have Rose’s lobotomy done. My father didn’t want it. In fact, he cried. It’s the only time I saw him cry. He was in a state of sorrow when he learned that the operation had been performed. . . . It didn’t embitter me against Miss Edwina. No, I just thought she was an almost criminally foolish woman. Why was the operation performed? Well, Miss Rose expressed herself with great eloquence, but she said things that shocked Mother. I remember when I went to visit her at Farmington, where the state hospital was, Rose loved to shock Mother. She had great inner resentment towards her, because Mother had imposed this monolithic Puritanism on her during adolescence. Rose said, “Mother, you know we girls at All Saints College, we used to abuse ourselves with altar candles we stole from the chapel.” And mother screamed like a peacock! She rushed to the head doctor, and she said, “Do anything, anything to shut her up!” Just like Mrs. Venable, you know, except Mother wasn’t as cruel as Mrs. Venable, poor bitch.

  Six months after the lobotomy, in a letter to “dearest brother,” in a script no longer well formed, Rose wrote, “You made a bad appearance the last time you called on me. You looked murderous. I’m trying not to die, making every effort possible not to do so. . . . The memory of your gentle, sleepy sick body and face are such a comfort to me.” She added, “I feel sure that you would love me if I murdered some one. You would know that I didn’t mean to. . . . If I die you will know that I miss you 24 hours a day.”

  In addition to the lobotomy, in the nineteen years that she was in residence at Farmington, Rose underwent more than sixty-five electroconvulsive shock treatments. On December 31, 1956, Rose was discharged from Farmington. After a few botched attempts at residential care, Williams finally had her transferred to the deluxe Stony Lodge in Ossining, New York, high on a bluff overlooking the river. “Probably the best thing I’ve done with my life, besides a few bits of work,” Williams said of this move.

  During Williams’s absences, his loyal coterie—the producer Charles Bowden and his actress wife, Paula Laurence, the actress Jane Lawrence Smith, and Maria St. Just—saw to it that Rose’s rooms were well appointed (new flower arrangements arrived every week) and that she had frequent visitors. Her bedroom had a white canopy bed and white wicker furniture. In her wallpapered sitting room, a framed photograph of the actor Tristan Rogers, who played Robert Scorpio in General Hospital, her favorite program, sat atop the television set. Rose’s walls were decorated with a framed poster of her famous brother, as well as with portraits of fictitious English nobles, who constituted part of the patrician family that Rose invented for herself.

  Rose had her pleasures. She loved clothes. She loved churchgoing and the very loud and slow singing of hymns. She loved Christmas. Once, with some help from the Bowdens and Maureen Stapleton, Williams gave Rose a Christmas celebration in the middle of summer. “She and Tennessee sang carols and danced,” Paula Laurence recalled. Rose also liked to be driven to the Highland Diner, in Ossining, where she would order a grilled-cheese sandwich and “a non-alcoholic” Coke. “She moved among her subjects” is how Bowden described Rose’s air of noblesse oblige. “I do not desire it” was her ornate way of saying “no.” She liked to go for drives, and over the years she acquired the habit of gesturing from the limousine, a semaphore that Williams dubbed “the Windsor Wave.” He offered to take her to England to meet the Queen. “I am the Queen,” Rose replied.

  In 1988, five years after his death, Rose was moved again across town to the Bethel Methodist Home, a beautiful red-brick building with pillars and an American flag at the center of its circular driveway. There she lived out the rest of her long life (she died in 1996, at age eighty-six) in her own two-room suite—the only one at the home—at the cost of about $300,000 a year.

  DURING THE AUTUMN of 1957, between undergoing analysis and writing Suddenly Last Summer, Williams visited Rose with unusual frequency, which even the Stony Lodge administrators remarked upon. “I’ve seen Rose four times since we went out together and you’ll be happy to know that she is remarkably better,” he wrote to his mother on November 19, 1957. He went on:

  We have been going each Sunday to the lovely Tappan Hill Restaurant, near Sleepy Hollow famous for Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Rose is taking more interest in things and more pleasure, eating much better, putting on some becoming weight again, and has even started smoking. The last few Sundays she has asked for cigarettes, but she says she doesn’t smoke except on these outings. She says that you wouldn’t approve! She still complains that her parakeet [a gift from Williams] won’t take a bath, but that’s about her only complaint, and when I took her to the drugstore yesterday, she only bought candy and a toothbrush, not the usual ten or twelve bars of soap. For her birthday my old friend Jo Healy and I are taking her into New York for some shopping. She wants a winter coat so I think I’ll give her one for a birthday present, and take her afterwards to a good restaurant and maybe let her spend the night here with Jo, at a nice hotel.

  Rose Williams wearing her brother’s Medal of Freedom, 1980

  In adulthood, Williams exhibited deep compassionate feelings for his sister. When, in passing conversation, Cheryl Crawford referred to Rose as “just a body,” he took angry issue. “She isn’t any more just a body than you and I are,” he wrote to Crawford. “And if you looked at her, at her tortured face and observed her desperate effort to meet the terrible moment of facing the person she loved most as a girl, and to whom she was closest, and knew that she was a lunatic being visited by him in a bug-house, a plush-lined snake-pit, I don’t see how you could call her just a body.” He continued, “Madness doesn’t mean the cease of personality, it simply means that the personality has lost touch with what we call reality, and I think, myself, that their mental and emotional world is much more vivid than ours is.”

  As a younger man, however, Williams had not been so attentive. The Glass Menagerie had appropriated Rose into his romantic myth, his legend of loss. “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” Tom says. But in October 1936, when she was in the process of losing her mind at home, to his abiding shame, Williams showed her no generosity and no compassion. “Rose in one of her neurotic sprees,” he wrote in his diary on October 7. “Fancies herself an invalid—talks in a silly dying-off way—trails around the house in negligees. Disgusting.” (Three years later, re-reading his journal, he wrote above this entry, “God forgive me for this!”) The iconic scene of his never-to-be-forgiven callousness was a confrontation in the same year, after Rose had tattled to their parents about a boozy party he had thrown while they were on holiday in the Ozarks; Williams’s newfound literary friends had been
banned forthwith from the house. “We passed each other on the landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. “I hissed at her: ‘I hate the sight of your ugly old face!’ Wordless, stricken and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.” He added, “This is the cruellest thing I have done in my life, I suspect, and one for which I can never properly atone.”

  By 1937, as Williams settled into life at the University of Iowa, the drama of his own survival prevented him from keeping Rose properly in mind. “I think of Rose and wonder and pity—but it is such a faraway feeling—how bound up we are in our own selves—our own miseries. Why can’t we forget and think of others?” he noted. The day after her sexual outburst in 1939—“poor mad creature,” he wrote in his diary—Williams was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which would get him out of St. Louis and on his way. Rose was the dark cloud on his brightening horizon. “Rose, my dear little sister—I think of you, dear, and wish, oh, so much that I could help!” he wrote in July 1939. “Why should you be there, little Rose? And me, here? No reason—no reason—anywhere—why?—why?” Above these lines, two months later, he noted, “I seldom think of Rose anymore.”

  On the day of Rose’s lobotomy—January 13, 1943—Williams was having “the most shocking experience I’ve ever had with another human being.” “My trade turned ‘dirt,’ ” he noted in his diary. “No physical violence resulted, but I was insulted, threatened, bullied and robbed. . . . All my papers were rooted through and the pitiless, horrifying intimidation was carried on for about an hour. I felt powerless.” Williams’s 1943 diary is filled with news of his plays, his pickups, his pain; not until late March, however, is there mention of Rose, when she is included as part of “my lack of feeling, the numbness I have developed for my family. . . . The love seems all there, but the capacity to feel about them seems nearly gone.” Two days later, he added a sort of haiku to his detachment: “Rose. Her head cut open. / A knife thrust in her brain. / Me. Here. Smoking.”

  In his work, Williams acted out his grief and his guilt over this youthful indifference. His plays were, in some sense, attempts at atonement, efforts to redeem Rose by elevating her to a literary motif, an invocation, an angelic immanence, an emblem of all the brave shadowy souls too delicate and too wounded to survive life’s hurly-burly. In Spring Storm, which Williams wrote between 1937 and ’38, the lovelorn Arthur makes a pass at Hertha Neilson—a librarian built along the same outlines as Rose: lean, with the same quick intelligence, the same need to “depend upon a feverish animation . . . to make her place among people.” After a drunken kiss, Hertha blurts out her love for Arthur. Appalled at the avowal, he pushes her away. “You—you disgust me. . . . !” he says. The words, which recall the rebuke that crushed Rose, send Hertha bolting from the library and ultimately to her death. (She throws herself in front of a train.) The moment is echoed in Streetcar, when Blanche attributes her husband’s suicide to her comment on discovering him in a homosexual embrace (“It was because—on the dance floor—unable to stop myself—I’d suddenly said—‘I saw! I know! You disgust me!’ ”).

  Catharine Holly, in Suddenly Last Summer, embodies both Rose’s predicament and her defining characteristics: defiance, truthfulness, a love of smoking and of fashion, and a sense of mischief. Catharine’s breakdown—a result of her having seen Sebastian eaten alive by “a band of frightfully thin and dark naked children that looked like a flock of plucked birds”—draws on a terrifying vision of devouring hordes that Rose confided to Williams during his first visit after the lobotomy. “The madness is still present—that is, certain of the delusions—but they have now become entirely consistent and coherent,” Williams wrote to Paul Bigelow in April 1943. He went on:

  She is full of vitality and her perceptions and responses seemed almost more than normally acute. All of her old wit and mischief was in evidence and she was having great fun at the expense of the nurses and inmates. . . . She showed me about her building and I noticed the other girls regarded her very nervously. She said she had “publicly denounced them” that morning. She had the impression that I had been in the penitentiary and was sorry I wasn’t, as she feels that an institution is “the only safe place to be nowadays, as hordes of hungry people are clamoring at the gates of the cities.”

  This image made a sharp impression on Williams, who repeated it in a 1943 letter that month to Donald Windham, as proof, if more were needed, of “what a dark and bewildering thing it is, this family group.”

  His writing hinted at even darker, more bewildering reasons for his guilt over Rose and his lifetime dedication to memorializing her. In his 1943 short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” Williams sketched out the characters and the central dramatic situation of The Glass Menagerie: Tom’s desperate mother sees marriage as the only hope of salvation for his chronically shy and wayward sister, Laura, and pressures him to bring home an eligible man from the shoe warehouse where he works. Tom enlists the “best-liked,” “warmly tolerant” Jim, whose “big square hands seemed to have a direct and very innocent hunger for touching his friends.” Jim counts Tom, whom he nicknames “Slim,” as a friend, and that endorsement has also greased the social tracks for Tom: “the others had now begun to smile when they saw me as people smile at an oddly fashioned dog who crosses their path at some distance.”

  The story contains the bare bones of the famous dinner scene and the postprandial flirtation of Jim and Laura: the mother’s background babble, the lemonade, the record player, Laura’s dissolving shyness, the dance, the rising hope, and then the devastating news that Jim has a steady girlfriend and is soon to marry. After Jim leaves, Tom’s mother blurts out her bewilderment at her son’s infuriating obtuseness:

  Laura was the first to speak.

  “Wasn’t he nice?” she asked. “And all those freckles!”

  “Yes,” said Mother. Then she turned to me.

  “You didn’t mention that he was engaged to be married!”

  “Well, how did I know that he was engaged to be married?”

  “I thought you called him your best friend down at the warehouse?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know he was going to be married!”

  “How peculiar!” said Mother. “How very peculiar!”

  At the beginning of the story, Tom speaks of Laura’s habit of dissociation—“I think the petals of her mind had simply closed through fear, and it’s no telling how much they had closed upon in the way of secret wisdom.” Jim’s heartbreaking departure allows for an illustration of Laura’s secret wisdom, her ability to “pop out with something that took you by surprise”:

  “No,” said Laura gently, getting up from the sofa. “There’s nothing peculiar about it.”

  She picked up one of the records and blew on its surface a little as if it were dusty, then set it softly back down.

  “People in love,” she said, “take everything for granted.”

  What did she mean by that? I never knew.

  She slipped quietly back into her room and closed the door.

  Laura understands what Tom won’t allow himself to know: he loves Jim. His flustered response registers both his denial and his shock at being, as Tony Kushner writes, “unceremoniously outed, by his mousey sister, with his mother present.” The awful implication of the innuendo, which never made it into the play, is that Tom has used his fragile but beautiful sister as bait to attract Jim to his home. In 1943, for an unknown playwright who had not found his audience, such an idea was inadmissible and un-stageable; by 1957, emboldened by craft, acclaim, and psychoanalysis, in Suddenly Last Summer, Williams was able to admit the idea of using a woman as sugar to swat the fly of male attraction and to make it the center of the scandal around Catharine Holly. Mrs. Venable wants the idea cut out of Catharine Holly’s brain just as Williams may well have cut it out of his own consciousness through his legendary devotion to Rose.

  At the beginning of his analysis, Williams worr
ied that if he got rid of his demons he’d also lose his angels. “I suppose this means the end of my career in theatre,” he told Paul Bowles in late December 1957. On the contrary, when it opened Off-Broadway on January 7, 1958, Suddenly Last Summer received generally excited critical response. “Apparently, judging from some of the reviews I have read on my hillside, a great light has broken through with ‘Suddenly Last Summer,’ ” Katherine Anne Porter noted in a letter to Williams. “An impressive and genuinely shocking play,” the usually un-biddable Wolcott Gibbs wrote in The New Yorker. “An exercise in the necromancy of writing . . . A superb achievement,” Brooks Atkinson called it in the New York Times. (“I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so grateful to you for a favorable notice,” Williams wrote to Atkinson.)

  The analytic process seemed to have opened Williams up to the deeper reverberations of his unconscious. The most shocking element in the play—and the most central to the shift in Williams—was Sebastian’s cannibalization. The gutted Sebastian, in Catharine’s horrified description, looks as if “a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses had been torn, thrown, crushed!—against that blazing white wall.” The play is at pains to emphasize that the devouring was willed by the erstwhile poet. “He!—accepted—all!—as—how!—things!—are!—And thought nobody had any right to complain or interfere in any way whatsoever,” Catharine explains to Dr. Sugar when he asks why Sebastian didn’t resist it. She goes on, “Even though he knew that what was awful was awful, that what was wrong was wrong, and my Cousin Sebastian was certainly never sure that anything was wrong!—He thought it unfitting to ever take any action about anything whatsoever!—except to go on doing as something in him directed.”

  Dr. Kubie, who saw the play in the first week of its run, said that he was “emotionally stirred” by it. Williams had even worked Kubie into his macabre gothic fantasy. “Doctor—Cu?—Cu?” Mrs. Venable stammers, struggling with the name of the “glacially brilliant” psychiatrist who may operate on Catharine’s brain. “Let’s make it simple and call me Dr. Sugar,” he replies. The line was a provocative wink at Dr. (Sugar) Kubie, who enjoyed the portrait. “Of all the many portrayals of the role of the psychiatrist that I have seen on stage and film, this rang truest,” he wrote to Williams. “It had a quality of thoughtful, unpretentious, competence of responsibility and humanity. . . . And he did not have bed-side manner oozing out of every pore.” Of all the reviews Williams got, Kubie’s was perhaps the most probing. In the same letter, Kubie wrote at length about being “intrigued by the particular use you make of the fantasy of eating and being eaten”: