by John Lahr
19 “an enemy of light”: Ibid., p. 270.
19 “You heard me cussing”: Ibid., p. 211.
19 “new patterns”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Sept. 3, 1940, L1, pp. 274–75.
19 “I have spent so many years”: Williams to Donald Windham, June 19, 1945, TWLDW, p. 174.
19 “a shameless, flaunting symbol”: LOA1, p. 273.
20 Conjure Man: “The Conjure Man, if you are looking for a symbol, represents the dark, inscrutable face of things as they are, the essential mystery of life—‘the one who knows but is not telling’—omniscience, fate, or what have you, of which death, life and everything else are so many curious tokens sewn about his dark garments.” (Williams to Lawrence Langner, July 3, 1941, L1, p. 320.)
20 “seems to make a slight obeisance”: LOA1, p. 274.
20 “BETTER RETURN AT ONCE”: Tennessee Williams, “Better Return at Once” (unpublished), HRC.
20 “I am becoming more and more”: Williams to Donald Windham, May 1, 1941, TWLDW, p. 22.
20 “twenty-six years of living”: He was actually twenty-nine. Tennessee Williams, undated Ms., HRC.
20 “I remembered particularly”: Williams, “Better Return at Once,” HRC.
21 “Old,” Williams said: Ibid.
22 sent Odets into semipermanent theatrical retirement: Between 1935 and 1940, Odets wrote seven plays; from 1940 until his death in 1963, at the age of fifty-seven, he wrote only three more.
22 “What can we produce”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Oct. 23, 1941, L1, p. 352.
22 “We were deceived by the maturity”: DPYD, p. 69.
22 “Probably no man has ever written”: LOA1, p. 275.
22 no experience with casting: Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn, the Guild’s co-directors, were described by Margaret Webster as “masters of miscasting.” (DPYD, p. 68.)
22 “before I knew”: LOA1, p. 275.
22 “low and common”: Leverich, Tom, p. 363.
22 “It’s impossible, darling”: Ibid., p. 364.
23 “a deep collective death wish”: RBAW, p. 136.
23 “a bunch of prissy old maids”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, L1, Jan. 2, 1941, p. 297.
23 “raised the roof”: Williams to the Williams Family, Nov. 18, 1940, ibid., p. 293.
23 “seem much interested”: DPYD, p. 69.
23 “I am old, I am tired”: Williams to the Williams Family, Nov. 18, 1940, L1, p. 293.
23 “For heaven’s sake, do something”: LOA1, p. 283.
24 “a not very satisfactory cast”: DPYD, p. 71.
25 “Up and down the aisles”: LOA1, p. 285.
25 “To an already antagonistic audience”: Ibid., p. 285.
25 “The bright angels”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Jan. 2, 1941, L1, p. 297.
25 “He appeared so suicidal”: William Jay Smith, My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), p. 54.
26 “The play gives the audience the sensation”: Leverich, Tom, p. 393.
26 “which seemed to us the roar of a cannon”: RBAW, p. 136.
26 “I will crawl on my belly”: Ibid., p. 137.
26 Lawrence Langner: In subsequent correspondence with Audrey Wood, Williams referred to Langner as “Lawrence Stanislavsky Langner, the one who operates that famous Art Theatre on E. 56th St.” (Williams to Audrey Wood, June 20, 1945, L1, p. 565.)
26 “At that moment”: Audrey Wood to Williams, undated, HRC.
26 “putrid”: Gilbert Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends: An Informal Biography (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965), p. 51.
26 “improper and indecent”: Ibid.
26 “too many of the lines”: Leverich, Tom, p. 394.
27 “DIRT”: L1, p. 298.
27 “Tennessee was completely taken by surprise”: DPYD, p. 72.
27 “censors sat out front”: LOA1, p. 286.
27 “an insult to the fine young man”: Leverich, Tom, p. 394.
27 “MIRIAM HOPKINS SAYS”: DPYD, p. 72.
27 “You don’t seem to see”: Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends, p. 50.
27 “You must not wear your heart”: Leverich, Tom, p. 395.
27 “I don’t think I had an answer”: Ibid.
27 “for recasting, re-writing, re-everything”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Jan. 2, 1941, L1, p. 297.
27 “What a failure!”: Williams to James Laughlin, Apr. 2, 1944, ibid., p. 521.
27 “Nothing whatever in this whole experience”: DPYD, p. 72.
27 “the play was more a disappointment”: Leverich, Tom, p. 395.
27 “I am right smack behind the eight-ball”: Williams to Lawrence Langner, Feb. 26, 1941, L1, pp. 305–6. When the rewrite was rejected by the Theatre Guild, Williams wrote to Audrey Wood, “Spit in Langner’s face for me.” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 2, 1941, ibid., p. 318.) On June 27, 1941, Williams’s revised script of Battle of Angels was rejected by the Theatre Guild. He was philosophical about it. “It is apparent that no definitive script has yet emerged, though . . . one eventually will—and ‘Battle of Angels’ can afford to wait, perhaps more than such plays as ‘Watch on the Rhine,’ ‘There Shall Be No Night,’ Etc.,” he told Langner, adding, “I have made this play out of such enduring stuff as passion, death, and the spiritual quest for the infinite, which are elements that time can only improve.” (Williams to Lawrence Langer, July 3, 1941, ibid., p. 317.)
29 “O lonely man”: “Speech from the Stairs,” CUCOHC, p. 819.
29 “That is the one ineluctable gift”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Sept. 3, 1940, L1, p. 275.
29 “the days AB—After Boston”: N, Feb. 16, 1941, p. 221.
29 “This is a one-way street”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Feb. 27, 1941, L1, p. 308.
30 “I have diverted myself”: N, June 27, 1941, p. 227.
30 “a rich and exciting period sexually”: Ibid.
30 “a celluloid brassiere”: Williams to James Laughlin, May 29, 1943, L1, p. 455.
30 “Dear Child of God”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 20, 1945, ibid., p. 564.
30 “I want an audience”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 1, 1942, ibid., p. 402.
30 “I cannot see ahead nor can anyone”: N, July 9, 1942, pp. 301–3.
30 “The things that I have to sell”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Sept. 24, 1940, L1, p. 285. The undertow of war also seemed to drown the highfalutin poetic drama of Maxwell Anderson as well as the work of George Kelly, Robert Sherwood, Paul Green, and Philip Barry, who had dominated Broadway theater in the thirties.
31 “I must be able to be a post-war artist”: N, Feb. 25, 1942, p. 281.
31 “a new form, non-realistic”: Williams, undated, HRC.
31 “I think there is going to be”: Williams to William Saroyan, Nov. 29, 1941, L1, p. 359.
31 “We must remember that a new theatre”: Williams to Horton Foote, Apr. 24, 1943, ibid., p. 443.
31 “It is appalling”: N, Oct. 26, 1943, p. 401.
31 “no overwhelming interest”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 28, 1943, TWLDW, p. 94.
31 “I have been horribly worried”: Williams to Margo Jones, Aug. 27, 1943, HRC.
32 “Have finished ‘The Caller,’ ”: Williams to Donald Windham, Aug. 1944, TWLDW, p. 148.
32 “I said, ‘Ma, c’mon, now,’ ”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 819.
32 “The few minutes she had”: LIB, p. 412.
32 “She played almost through a fog”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 820.
32 “There was nothing left inside of her”: LIB, p. 412.
32 “supernatural quality on stage”: Williams, “On Laurette Taylor,” HRC.
32 “Laurette’s basic tragedy”: Ibid.
32 “There is an inexplicable rightness”: Stark Young, New Republic, Apr. 16, 1945.
33 “Stop all this hand clasping”: RBAW, p. 143.
33 “haunted household”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1943, TWLDW, p. 57.
33 “I begin with a character”: LIB, p. 412.
33 “in exact ratio to the degree”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 306.
33 “There are only two times”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 28, 1943, ibid., p. 91.
33 “that thing that makes me write”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Sept. 2, 1959, BRTC.
34 “I have a vast traumatic eye”: CP, [“I Have a Vast Traumatic Eye”], p. 173.
34 “sixteen cylinders inside a jalopy”: Williams to Lawrence Langner, Aug. 22, 1940, L1, p. 267.
34 “the climate of my interior world”: Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
34 “The turbulent business of my nerves”: LOA1, p. 276.
34 “It seemed to me that even the giants”: Ibid.
34 “a frustrating lack of vitality”: Ibid., p. 275.
34 “had not seen more than two or three”: Ibid.
34 “In five years’ time”: CS, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” p. 119.
35 “irreconcilably divided”: Williams to Jessica Tandy, as quoted in Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Williams (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), p. 181.
35 “his basic repertory company”: Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in Gore Vidal, Armageddon? Essays 1983–1987 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), p. 53.
35 “so absorbed”: JLI with Gore Vidal, 2000, JLC.
35 “Nowhere was ease”: CP, “Cortege,” p. 30.
35 “was completely unshadowed by fear”: RMTT, p. 19.
36 “had fallen in love with long distances”: LOA1, p. 401.
36 hung onto his mother’s skirts: Williams observes, “My mother’s overtly solicitous attention planted in me the makings of a sissy.” (M, pp. 11–12.)
36 “His winter breath”: CP, “Cortege,” p. 30.
36 “the blue devils”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 28, 1943, TWLDW, p. 91. “It’s like having wild cats under my skin.”
36 “When my family first moved”: Tennessee Williams, “Why the Title” (unpublished), HRC.
38 “was no tenement”: RMTT, p. 28.
38 “We could not afford”: Ibid., p. 32.
38 “The Williamses had fought the Indians”: NSE, p. 59.
39 “In the beginning there was high adventure”: “The Wingfields of America” (unpublished), HRC.
40 “the saddest man I ever knew”: N, “Mes Cahiers Noirs,” 1979, p. 751.
40 “the emollient influence of a mother”: M, p. 12.
40 “fierce blood”: Williams to Donald Windham, TWLDW, p. 298.
41 “continual excitement”: Leverich, Tom, p. 519.
41 “I have an instinct for self-destruction”: LOA2, p. 221.
41 “the least demonstrative person”: RMTT, p. 162.
41 “not the most masculine of men”: Time, Mar. 9, 1962.
41 “Grecian vice”: JLI with Gore Vidal, 2000, JLC.
41 “he is humble and affectionate”: CS, “Grand,” p. 379.
41 handed over most of his wife’s savings: Leverich, Tom, p. 152. See CS, “Grand.”
41 “She said ‘Why, Walter?’”: CS, “Grand,” p. 384.
42 “The Bird told me”: Vidal, “Tennessee Williams,” p. 52.
42 “I want to go to Key West”: Dennis Brown, “Miss Edwina under Glass,” St. Louisian, Mar. 1977, p. 62.
42 “You’d think”: Ibid.
42 “like a ghost”: Williams to Donald Windham, Nov. 23, 1943, TWLDW, p. 121. As Williams grew increasingly a stranger to himself, the notion of being a ghost increased. To his pen pal–turned–house sitter, the poet David Lobdell, Williams signed off in one letter, “I offer you a ghostly hand, David, on your hand, your face, your hair.” (Williams to David Lobdell, Sept. 14, 1968, LLC.)
42 “ineluctably smiling”: LOA1, p. 400.
43 “gross lack of sensitivity”: N, Nov. 20, 1941, p. 257.
43 when he met Edwina: “My mother’s marriage ceremony in Columbus, Miss. came as a complete surprise to nearly all her friends in the town,” Williams wrote to Audrey Wood. “It was performed in the church but privately and was a shocking surprise to the congregation as my father was considered ‘too fast’ for a minister’s daughter.” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 26, 1946, HRC.)
43 “One thing your father had plenty of”: LOA1, p. 410.
43 “Before we arrived in St. Louis”: RMTT, p. 34.
43 “I never could understand”: Leverich, Tom, p. 70.
43 “Edwina can’t sew”: RMTT, p. 186.
43 “Baucis and Philemon”: CWTW, p. 87.
44 “the house as though he were entering it”: CS, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” p. vii.
44 “It was as though a thunderclap”: Leverich, Tom, p. 34.
44 “We don’t think much of that new baby”: Ibid., p. 36.
44 “Then it isn’t mine”: Ibid., p. 48.
44 “was eager to get as much as he could”: Dakin Williams interview with Robert Bray, Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 48 (Fall 1995), p. 777.
44 “great but confused vitality”: LOA1, p. 394.
44 “turbulence”: Leverich, Tom, p. 520.
45 “Most of the time, life with him”: RMTT, p. 39.
45 “Come out of there”: Ibid., p. 63.
45 “You wanted to shrink”: Ibid., p. 26.
46 “I made the mistake of protesting”: Leverich, Tom, p. 138.
46 “And I—I had to endure him!”: LOA1, p. 266.
46 “two breathing things”: RMTT, p. 35.
46 “Just like a moo-cow”: Ibid., p. 56.
46 “designed for insanity”: Harold Bloom, ed., Tennessee Williams (Broomall, Penn.: Chelsea House, 2003), p. 24.
46 “a whole lot more than he was worth”: Durant Da Ponte, “Tennessee’s Tennessee Williams,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, University of Tennessee Studies in the Humanities, 1956, p. 14.
46 “Dad resented any money”: Dakin Williams to Lyle Leverich, Aug. 16, 1984, LLC.
48 “Off and on he would make abortive efforts”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 302.
48 “I think he loved me”: CWTW, p. 258.
48 “[Tom] did not defy his father”: RMTT, p. 62.
48 “I had begun to regard Dad’s edicts”: Ibid., p. 69.
48 “It was like walking on eggs”: Ibid., p. 35.
48 “Cold, cold, cold”: CP, “Cortege,” p. 30.
48 “The old man has just now”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1943, TWLDW, p. 58.
48 Another sign of his internal alliance: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
48 “My father—how to meet him again”: N, Aug. 23, 1942, p. 323.
48 “We made talk alone”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1943, TWLDW, p. 56.
49 “What a dark and bewildering thing”: Ibid., p. 57.
49 “Does nothing but stay home and drink”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946, HRC.
49 “Any excuse just to get away”: Williams to James Laughlin, Mar. 11, 1945, L1, p. 554.
49 “He could recite poetry by the yard”: RMTT, p. 167.
49 “Pitch now your tents toward Heaven”: Papers of the Rev. Walter Dakin, Sewanee.
51 “Is my mother a lung lady?”: RMTT, p. 15.
51 “She was always talking”: JLI with Dakin Williams, 2001, JLC.
51 “she was trying to gain the stage”: JLI with Dakin Williams, 2004, JLC.
51 “Miss Edwina will still be talking”: Tennessee Williams, “Let It All Hang Out,” NSE, p. 174.
51 “rarely if ever bested”: RMTT, p. 202.
51 “It wasn’t enough for a girl”: LOA1, p. 403.
51 “I always like to forget”: RMTT, p. 14.
51 “I often pretended to feel gay”: Ibid., pp. 254–55.
52 “TOM: I know what’s coming!”: LOA1, p. 403.
52 “You couldn’t sit with Edwina”: JLI with Gore Vidal, 2000, JLC.
52 “was exceptionally observant as a child”: RMTT, p. 15.
52 reenacted by Amanda: “Dakin said that the characterization was so accurate, Edwina could have sued Tom. ‘Her fainting act and her “suffering Jesus” facial expressions were the most lethal (and unendurable) bits of her repertoire.’ ” (Leverich, Tom, p. 567.)
52 “looked like a horse eating briars”: Leverich, Tom, p. 560.
53 “Well, Mrs. Williams”: Ibid.
53 “a moderately controlled hysteric”: M, p. 116.
53 trouble with her body: In 1920, Edwina miscarried; in 1922, her persistent illness was diagnosed as incipient tuberculosis; in 1926 she had a hysterectomy from which she nearly died.
53 “She used to scream every time”: CWTW, p. 327.
53 “president of the anti-sex league”: Leverich, Tom, p. 61.
53 “She didn’t believe in sex”: JLI with Dakin Williams, 2001, JLC.
53 “She just didn’t touch you”: JLI with Dakin Williams, 2004, JLC. Edwina claimed that her own mother, Williams’s beloved “Grand,” was “never very demonstrative, the least demonstrative person I’ve known, but she felt things deeply.” (RMTT, p. 162.)
53 “Don’t quote instinct to me!”: LOA1, p. 421.
53 “an almost criminally foolish woman”: CWTW, pp. 326–27.
53 “monolithic Puritanism”: M, p. 119.
53 “all the errors and mistakes”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946, HRC.
53 “Achievement, of whatever kind”: The typing exercise is filed in the Rose Williams folder at HRC.
54 martyred look: Leverich, Tom, p. 567.
54 “She fixes on him her look”: CS, “Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” p. x.
54 “maniacal fury”: Ibid.
54 “imposed”: N, p. 751.
54 Dakin remained sexually inexperienced: “I knew next to nothing about sex and was a ‘virgin’ when I married Joyce in 1955 at the age of thirty-seven.” (Dakin Williams to Lyle Leverich, July 15, 1987, LLC.)
54 “reaction to delusions”: “Psychiatric Summary”: Farmington State Hospital, Dr. CC Ault, Dec. 16, 1937, LLC.
54 “and then not with my hands”: N, pp. 751–53.
54 “highly sexed”: M, p. 119.
54 “She made no positive motion”: CS, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” p. 110.
54 “to associate the sensual”: Leverich, Tom, p. 63.