Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
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54 “almost entirely impossible”: M, p. 23.
54 “Almost without remission”: Ibid., p. 17.
55 “What taunts me worst”: N, Sept. 23, 1942, p. 325.
55 “the only psychiatrist in whom I believe”: RMTT, p. 244.
55 “essentially more psychotic”: CWTW, p. 327. Edwina herself was committed for a time; at the end of her life, she dropped the “a” from her name and signed herself “Edwin Williams.”
55 “Like a force of nature”: Williams to Elia Kazan, July 5, 1980, Harvard.
55 “You’re my right-hand bower!”: LOA1, p. 419.
55 “Resume your seat, little sister”: Ibid., p. 402.
55 “Nonsense! Laura”: Ibid., p. 410.
55 “AMANDA: It’s almost time”: Ibid., p. 404.
56 “My mother was extremely”: LLI with Dakin Williams, Apr. 15, 1985, LLC.
56 “Her husband had deserted her”: Tennessee Williams, “Stairs to the Roof” (unpublished story), HRC.
56 “mah writin’ son”: Leverich, Tom, p. 65.
56 “Within a few months”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
56 “thought writers were complete zeroes”: Dakin Williams to Lyle Leverich, Aug. 16, 1984, LLC.
56 “I feel uncomfortable”: N, Oct. 7, 1938, p. 125.
56 “doubled her support”: Leverich, Tom, p. 65.
56 storytelling became a kind of collusion: M, p. 15.
57 “I was a sweet child”: N, Oct. 10, 1943, p. 395.
57 “the same precarious balance of nerves”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 4, 1942, HRC.
58 “all of the family were mentally deranged”: Leverich, Tom, p. 247.
58 “like a somnambulist””: M, p. 119.
58 “Rose is liable to go down”: RMTT, p. 85.
58 “Tragedy. I write that word”: N, Jan. 25, 1937, p. 73.
58 “Insight was entirely absent”: “Psychiatric Summary.”
58 “Mother chose to have Rose’s lobotomy done”: CWTW, p. 327.
58 “now lived in a world”: RMTT, p. 14.
58 “outer oblivion and inner violence”: NSE, p. 76.
59 “reclaiming dead bodies”: Leverich, Tom, p. 65.
59 “somatic delusions”: “Psychiatric Summary.”
59 That ghostliness: To Williams, playwriting was a sort of haunting. “A play just seems to materialize, like an apparition it gets clearer and clearer and clearer,” he said. (CWTW, p. 330.) He would later write to Elia Kazan about “the detached eye of art” and its ability to see human character in all its contradictoriness, “as if a ghost sat over the affairs of men and made a true recording of them.” (Williams to Elia Kazan Apr. 19, 1947, WUCA.)
59 CC’s abandonment: On seeing The Glass Menagerie for the first time, CC’s only comment was, “Well, I never deserted the family.”
59 “interior storms”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 28, 1943, TWLDW, p. 91.
59 “You know it don’t take much”: LOA1, p. 417.
59 “I traveled around a great deal”: Ibid., p. 465.
60 “almost dancelike”: Ibid., p. 425.
60 “my doomed family”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1943, TWLDW, p. 56.
60 “interior pantomime”: LOA1, p. 465.
60 “Never before in my experience”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 820.
60 “holding out the ruffles”: LIB, p. 413.
60 “All the people backstage”: JLI with Betsy Blair, 2002, JLC.
60 “Author, Author!”: Life, Apr. 30, 1945.
61 blushing: Irving Hoffman, Hollywood Report.
61 “Eddie, I can’t remember anything”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 820.
61 “It was like after a World Series game”: Ibid., pp. 821–22.
61 “the real and first talent of them all”: Stark Young, as quoted in LIB, p. 408.
62 “pretty run-of-the-mill”: CWTW, p. 239.
62 “Her talent was luminous”: Williams, “On Laurette Taylor,” HRC.
62 “I don’t remember feeling”: Leverich, Tom, p. 585.
62 “providential”: CWTW, p. 330.
62 “a planetary tie-up”: Scrapbook, HRC. The chart goes on: “Around this chart are most of the significant contacts-by-conjunction made to the players and author’s planets by the planets on that exciting opening night. (And note first that the only planet uncontacted is Saturn, the planet generally debited with obstruction and failure, nothing of that kind about this opening—and Saturn has no contact, on the negative side of analysis).”
62 “a revolution”: Arthur Miller, “Tennessee Williams’ Legacy: An Eloquence and Amplitude of Feeling,” in Arthur Miller, Echoes down the Corridor: Collected Essays: 1944–2000 (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 204.
62 “It seems to me that your glass menagerie”: Carson McCullers to Williams, Feb. 10, 1949, Duke.
63 “I was happy to have my freedom”: RMTT, p. 200.
63 “The postman can ring twice”: As quoted in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Apr. 22, 1945.
63 “there was a feeling of release”: New York Times, Apr. 1, 1945.
63 “REVIEWS ALL RAVE”: TWIB, p. 126.
64 “snatches of talk about the war”: Lewis Nichols, “The Glass Menagerie,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1945.
64 “Such a response and attitude”: Stark Young, New Republic, Apr. 15, 1945.
64 “in playing Amanda”: LIB, p. 415.
64 “The whole week has been fantastic”: Laurette Taylor to Dwight Taylor, Apr. 8, 1945, HRC.
64 “the greatest moment of collective inebriation”: Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 40.
64 American per-capita income would triple: Harold Evans, The American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 435.
64 “Everything was up for grabs”: JLI with Arthur Miller, 2004, JLC.
65 The Inside of His Head: John Lahr, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000), p. 94.
65 “There is no dynamic in life or art”: Odets, Time Is Ripe, p. 344.
65 “Overcome selfishness!”: LOA1, p. 422.
65 “the destiny of me”: Walt Whitman, “Out of the Endless Rocking.”
65 “I build a tottering pillar of my blood”: CP, “The Siege,” p. 9.
65 “that long upward haul”: CS, “Grand,” p. 383.
65 “I am thy frail ghost-brother”: N, Aug. 23, 1942, p. 325.
65 “Breathe into me a little of thy life!”: Ibid., Sept. 17, 1941, p. 239.
65 “I will burn one for you”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Oct. 10, 1941, L1, p. 348.
66 “Homo Emancipatus—the Completely Free Man”: Williams, “Stairs to the Roof,” HRC. “Freedom for him wore the bright face of danger and he was willing to contemplate it only from a safe distance,” Williams wrote in an early short-story version of the expressionistic Stairs to the Roof, subtitled A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages. The play made its unremarkable debut a week before the opening of The Glass Menagerie at the little Pasadena Playbox. In Williams’s mind, freedom had a spiritual dimension. In his stage directions to Stairs to the Roof, he left no doubt as to what the roof represented: “Below this region the world may be grooved repetition, but here it is the transcendental—light, light, light! The last high reach of the spirit, matter’s rejection, the abstract core of religion which is purity, wonder and love.” (“Stairs to the Roof,” HRC, p. 90.) Before he disappears in a cloud of smoke into a new orbit, the hero, Ben Murphy, tells the girl who goes with him, “The roof is only the jumping-off place to a man with my ambitions.” His last words, shouted “from a long way off” to the hordes of workers who scream his name and “cast their ledgers, their papers, and pencils away with joyful cries for freedom” are “Hello—goodbye.” (Ibid., p. 98.)
66 “The poet, the dreamer”: The endpapers of Williams’s copy of the Collected Poems of Hart Crane, which he carried with him. Columbia.
66
“When will the cool white time”: N, Aug. 14, 1942, p. 321.
66 “Am I still looking”: Ibid., June 27, 1941, p. 229.
66 “We can’t say grace”: LOA1, p. 401.
66 “the time when I would first catch”: NSE, pp. 77–78.
66 “We come to each other”: Ibid., p. 78.
67 “I guess I’m getting spoiled”: New York Times, Apr. 4, 1945.
67 “This is the twilight of an era”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Apr. 10, 1943, L1, p. 438.
CHAPTER 2: THE HEART CAN’T WAIT
68 “What do I want?”: N, Apr. 29, 1938, p. 229.
68 “May God be merciful to me”: Ibid., Sept. 17, 1939, p. 165.
68 “a last, desperate throw of the literary dice”: Williams to Erwin Piscator, Aug. 13, 1942, L1, p. 393.
68 “drizzle puss self”: N, Oct. 6, 1943, p. 3.
68 “spiritual dislocation”: NSE, p. 33.
68 “Once I ordered a sirloin steak”: Ibid.
69 “I nearly went crazy”: Williams to Guthrie McClintic, May 23, 1945, L1, p. 560.
69 “I have met the following here”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 20, 1945, L2, p. 7.
69 “Tennessee Williams, Writer”: Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 280.
69 “About an hour after my arrival”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Dec. 14, 1945, HRC.
69 “no telephone”: Ibid.
69 “I am switching back and forth”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946, L2, p. 36.
69 most fecund of his writing life: Between 1945 and 1947, after the success of The Glass Menagerie, Williams wrote Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, the first draft of Camino Real, two of his major short stories, “One Arm” and “Desire and the Black Masseur,” as well as The Night of the Iguana in story form.
69 road company of The Glass Menagerie: You Touched Me! closed after 109 performances; The Glass Menagerie closed on August 3, 1946, after 563 performances; the road company—according to Williams in a letter to Audrey Wood written in late March 1947, was “really a travesty of the play, mainly because of the glaring, stupefying incompetence of one member of the cast, Eddie Andrews.” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 1947, L2, p. 88.)
70 “I was not a young man”: M, p. 52.
70 “I never put on a shirt”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, L2, pp. 31–32.
70 “I am going through quite an experience”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 25, 1946, ibid., pp. 39–40: “I am so shy with this girl Sylvia that I suffer acutely when alone in a room with her. Have you ever felt that way with anyone? I have told her I feel that way—she makes it worse by enquiring every few minutes, ‘Am I making you uncomfortable?’ ‘Do you want me to go out now?’ ‘Is it all right if I sit here?’ ‘Don’t talk to me unless you want to? Etc.’ Then she sits there with her brilliant eyes taking in every embarrassed change of expression as if she were conducting some marvelous experiment in a lab so that I don’t know where to look, let alone what to say. Exactly like Lillian Gish or at best Harold Lloyd in an old silent film. What are women made of?!”
70 command performance of The Glass Menagerie: Williams failed to attend the performance; he fell asleep and also missed the White House reception.
70 “She is one of these people”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 25, 1946, L2, pp. 39–40.
70 “particular milieu”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, ibid., p. 31.
70 “more restful”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Dec. 14, 1945, HRC.
70 “If you can imagine how a cat”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, L2, p. 31.
70 “my dear Daughter”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Jan. 1946, ibid., p. 37.
71 “my sainted Mother”: Oliver Evans to Williams, undated, LLC.
71 “I am purring with gratitude”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 4, 1946, LLC.
71 “across the street from a Negro Convent”: Williams to “Rod” (letter signed by “John”), Oct. 19, 1945, HRC.
71 Amado “Pancho” Rodriguez y Gonzalez: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC. Both Donald Spoto, in The Kindness of Strangers, and the Library of America volumes on Tennessee Williams maintain incorrectly that Williams met Rodriguez in Mexico, who then followed Williams to New Orleans. “I met him here in New Orleans in the winter of ’45,” Rodriguez said. “He was coming back from Mexico. I didn’t realize who he was because I wasn’t too keen on theatre then.”
71 “dark of skin, dark of hair”: CS, “Rubio y Morena,” p. 261.
71 “I wish I had a lovely little clown”: N, Oct. 23, 1943, p. 401.
71 “rambunctious”: KAL, p. 334.
71 “Companionship was not a familiar”: CS, “Rubio y Morena,” pp. 259–61.
72 “took to be a man”: Ibid., p. 258.
72 “I have been having quite a hectic time”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Feb. 27, 1946, L2, pp. 43–44.
72 “his bedroom with the bottle”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946, ibid., p. 35.
72 “Conditions at home must be worse”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, HRC.
72 “In spite of basic damnation”: Williams to Donald Windham, Sept. 8, 1943, TWLDW, pp. 103–4.
73 “I am waking up”: LOA1, p. 440.
73 “It takes five or six years”: Time, Mar. 9, 1962, p. 55.
73 “a picture of my own heart”: N, Apr. 9, 1939, p. 147. On Easter Sunday, 1939, after the Group Theatre had acknowledged his work with a $100 prize, Williams rededicated himself to his vision of playwriting: “a picture of my own heart—there will be no artifice in it—I will speak truth as I see it—distort as I see distortion—be wild as I am wild—tender as I am tender—mad as I am mad—passionate as I am passionate—It will be myself without concealment.”
73 “ideal conditions”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, HRC.
73 “He had no idea”: CS, “Desire and the Black Masseur,” pp. 205–6.
73 “His desires”: Ibid., p. 206.
73 “Miss Alma grew up”: CWTW, p. 228.
74 “Please be sure that no single copy”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 24, 1941, L1, p. 341.
74 “By the flesh is meant”: Papers of the Rev. Walter Dakin, Sewanee.
74 The Ascent of the Soul: Amory H. Bradford, The Ascent of the Soul. Williams’s volume is in the Washington University Library in St. Louis. The inscription reads, “For T. Lanier Williams from his Grandfather Walter Edwin Dakin, Christmas 1933. May he ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ the thoughts of this book.”
74 “Character is the man”: 4–5 Eastertide, Acts 24:14–16, Papers of the Rev. Walter Dakin, Sewanee.
74 “I had begun to associate”: CS, “The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin,” p. 277.
75 “the proud proprietress of a virgin mind”: Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham, You Touched Me! (New York: Samuel French, 2010), p. 115.
75 “a youth of twenty-one”: Ibid., p. 4.
75 “the fears and reticences”: Ibid., p. 116.
75 “not predatory maternity”: Ibid., p. 5.
75 “like being under water”: Ibid., p. 18.
75 “The Victorian actually prevailed”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 4, 1942, HRC.
75 “Virginity is mostly the consequence”: Williams and Windham, You Touched Me!, p. 84.
75 “Without intervention”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 4, 1942, HRC.
75 “who found it too much”: Ibid.
76 “I doubt that anything”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 18, 1950, WUCA.
77 “catches her fingers”: Williams and Windham, You Touched Me!, p. 115.
77 “Where are you going?”: Ibid., pp. 113–14.
77 “the little puritan”: CWTW, pp. 228–31.
77 “HADRIAN: . . . I grew up”: Williams and Windham, You Touched Me!, pp. 50–51.
77 “Don’t hang back with the beasts”: LOA1, p. 511.
77 “To me—well”: Ibid.,
p. 612.
78 “Don’t quote instinct to me!”: Ibid., p. 421.
78 “body electric”: Williams to Donald Windham, Jan. 3, 1944, TWLDW, p. 126.
78 Hazel Kramer: Williams met the redheaded, spirited Hazel Kramer (1912–1951) when he was eleven and she was nine. “Some young hoods were . . . throwing rocks at a plump little girl. I went to her defense . . . and thus began my closest childhood friendship which ripened into a romantic attachment,” Williams wrote in Memoirs (pp. 14–15). Around puberty, Williams recalled, “I had a sexual desire for Hazel and it was in The West End Lyric, a movie house on Demar Blvd. Sitting beside her before the movie began, I suddenly conscious of her bare shoulders and I wanted to touch them, and I felt a genital stirring.” (Leverich, Tom, p. 73.) CC, who didn’t think she was “good enough for Tom,” according to Edwina, opposed them attending the same university. She attended the University of Wisconsin.
78 “She was frigid”: M, p. 29.
78 “deeply in love with my roommate”: CWTW, pp. 230–31.
78 “Faults—I am egocentric”: N, Oct. 9, 1937, p. 109.
79 “stunted”: Ibid., Sept. 14, 1941, p. 235.
79 “Why do women ignore me”: Ibid., May 30, 1938, p. 119.
79 “genuine nympho”: M, p. 43. Regarding his vomiting: “All of a sudden I felt nauseated from the liquor consumed and from nervous strain and embarrassment. I rushed into the bathroom and puked, came out with a towel around me, hangdog with shame over my failed test of virility.”
79 “I was . . . terribly impressed”: Ibid.
79 “ ‘I fucked a girl tonight’ ”: Ibid. The affair lasted a few months before Williams was “thrown over by the beloved bitch—but the experience was valuable.” (N, Apr. 29, 1938, p. 115.)
79 “finally fully persuaded”: M, p. 49.
79 “This part down here is the sex”: LOA1, p. 624.
79 “I must get my mind”: N, Nov. 23, 1937, p. 69.
79 “to the artistic and Bohemian life”: Ibid., Jan. 1, 1939, p. 133. The phrase “mad pilgrimage of the flesh” was first mentioned in ibid., Jan. 14, 1939, p. 133: “Am I all animal, all willful, blind stupid beast? Is there another part that is not an accomplice in this mad pilgrimage of the flesh?” In the short story “The Malediction” (1945), the phrase appears for the first time in print.