1. The financial woes of the fictional Wingfield family of The Glass Menagerie created the impression (not refuted by Tennessee) that the Williams family was downwardly mobile with an absentee father. During Tennessee’s adolescence, however, the family was financially secure if dysfunctional due to his father’s temper and drinking. His parents finally separated after Tennessee had left home, and, when he became successful, Tennessee provided support for his mother. Menagerie is an emotional rather than a situational autobiography.
2. The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, established in 1989 at The University of the South, provides some scholarship support for all aspiring writers who attend. In addition, the millions of dollars that the university has received from publication royalties and theatrical fees for Tennessee’s work have financed not only the Writers’ Conference but also other needs of the school.
3. Interview with James Laughlin (11/3/95), conducted by Peggy L. Fox at Laughlin’s home, Meadow House, Norfolk, Connecticut.
4. A contract between Williams and Laughlin for The Glass Menagerie exists, dated 2/5/45. However, because of the Random House imbroglio, it could not be acted upon at the time. An exchange of letters between James Laughlin and Donald Klopfer of Random House (11/29/48 and 12/16/48) confirms that Random House would sell New Directions the plates for Menagerie (for seventy-five dollars) but that Random House would retain the anthology rights to the play. In his letter of December 16, 1948, Laughlin mentioned that: “We have, of course, made a separate contract with Tennessee’s agent, for the basic royalty to be paid him on our edition.”
5. The single unattributed page found in Laughlin’s correspondence file (and reproduced in this volume on page 92) has been previously attributed to Tennessee himself, but the various publishing details, such as recommending the binding up of all the remaining five thousand sets of sheets, could not have come from Tennessee.
6. Alvin Lustig was an American artist and designer whose startling jacket designs—especially for the New Directions New Classics series—would become the iconic face of New Directions’ books for a generation. He died in 1955.
7. Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), p. 270.
8. Albert J. Devlin, ed., Conversations with Tennessee Williams (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), p. 343.
9. At this point, to maintain contact with J, I was sending a full packet of copies of correspondence and material to him each week and would receive in return an envelope of notes on quartered scrap paper, which were called, in the office, “Norfolk confetti.”
10. John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 588.
Notes on the Text
THE EXTANT CORRESPONDENCE between Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin, whether original documents, carbon copies, or photocopies, consists of at least 261 letters, short notes, telegrams, and postcards. We have included 170 of them in this volume, 73 by Laughlin and 97 by Williams. Because Williams’s relationship to his publisher, New Directions, is also part of the story of the friendship between Laughlin and Williams, we have included correspondence with Robert MacGregor from 1950 until his death in 1974. Editor, office manager, vice president when New Directions was incorporated, and from his arrival Laughlin’s right-hand man, MacGregor developed a strong friendship with Williams over that twenty-four-year period. In a similar spirit, there are also communications to and from MacGregor’s immediate successor, Frederick R. Martin, and Williams’s last editor, Peggy L. Fox.
We have gathered the correspondence for this collection from seven archives. The editorial files in the New York City offices of New Directions contain original letters from Williams as well as carbon copies of letters and memos from Laughlin, MacGregor, Martin, and Fox. Laughlin’s personal archive at his home in Norfolk, Connecticut, which held the majority of the original letters from Williams to Laughlin when we began this project, is now housed in the James Laughlin/New Directions Archive at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, which is also the repository of correspondence belonging to the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Letters by Williams to Laughlin are also located at the Performing Arts Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University, the Fred W. Todd Tennessee Williams Collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Manuscripts Division at the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections, and the Williams Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, which also holds letters by Laughlin.
In our selection of correspondence we have tried to maintain a balance of the personal and professional aspects of the primary correspondents’ relationship. Both men were staggeringly prolific, and their letters often extend to several pages. We have therefore edited or condensed many letters in this volume by the removal of day-to-day or pro forma business matters related to the publishing industry that do not illuminate the narrative. Deleted material is indicated by ellipses within square brackets. Any ellipses without brackets were put in by the author of the letter.
The formatting style follows closely the guidelines established by Hugh Witemeyer, editor of the first volume, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin (1989), in this eight-volume series from W. W. Norton. A headnote precedes every letter with the number of the entry in the volume, the form of communication, and the number of pages. The epistolary forms are designated with the following abbreviations: TLS (typed letter signed), TL (typed letter unsigned), ALS (autograph letter signed), AL (autograph letter unsigned), TNS (typed note signed, which applies to internal and external memos originating from New Directions), and TN (typed note unsigned). The author’s signatures are copied as written in each instance. For unsigned missives with typed names, which most often come from carbon copies of letters and memos by Laughlin, the author’s name appears in brackets. Typed names following autograph signatures are omitted.
All dates of composition are printed as written by the authors. When an author does not provide a date or year of composition, it is placed in brackets and is based on the best available evidence, internal or external. Because both men traveled around a great deal—though Williams far more frequently than Laughlin—after each date we have provided the location of composition in brackets. Determination of the latter is based on internal evidence, letterhead, and sources including journals, biographies, and other correspondence.
Editorial insertions within the correspondence are indicated by square brackets and are so placed for ease of reading. These are most often the completion of someone’s name, the title of work referred to but not identified in the text, or a missing word. Angle brackets surround an author’s handwritten insertion in an otherwise typed letter: < >. Typographical errors and misspellings, including proper names, have been silently corrected unless they appear to be a deliberate stylistic choice. Titles have been adjusted to standard formatting: The titles of books, full-length and one-act plays, magazines, paintings, and record albums appear in italics, while quotation marks surround the titles of poems, short stories, essays, and songs. We have standardized Williams’s frequent use of short and long dashes as em dashes and maintained his style of using all capital letters for emphasis. For all correspondence we have removed line spaces between paragraphs and indented every paragraph.
The following abbreviations are used in the notes: JL for James Laughlin, TW for Tennessee Williams, ND for New Directions Publishing Corporation, RM for Robert MacGregor, FM for Frederick Martin, PF for Peggy L. Fox, NDPP (along with the number of the issue: NDPP 7, for example) for New Directions in Prose and Poetry, and FYAP (1944) for Five Young American Poets (1944) Third Series. ND, when followed by a year date, both enclosed in parentheses, indicates a New Directions title and its year of publication. The year set in parentheses following Williams play titles is most often the year of a play’s official opening, including on Broadway but not out-of
-town tryouts. The year in parentheses may also be the year of first publication, if there was no prior production at the time of publication, or for a collection of full-length or one-act plays. The year of composition or completion of a Williams play is identified as such within a note. In the case of his stories, poems, and novels, year dates are the date of trade publication.
Thomas Keith
Acknowledgments
BECAUSE I HAD BEEN EDITING the Tennessee Williams titles published by New Directions since the late 1970s, in 1994 James Laughlin asked me if I would undertake the Laughlin/Tennessee Williams volume of the ongoing series of his correspondence with the most famous of the authors he published at New Directions. I was honored, flattered, and, while feeling challenged, confident of being able to complete the task in a few years. But only months after I had accepted the commission, I was named vice president of New Directions and took charge of the day-to-day running of the corporation. While I was able to conduct and transcribe an extensive interview with Laughlin at his home in Norfolk, Connecticut, in 1995, it eventually became apparent that I would need help to complete the correspondence project, and I turned to Thomas Keith. As a young actor (who had come to New York to work at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club), Thomas had a deep love for the works of Tennessee Williams. When he started doing part-time work at New Directions in 1987, it was natural that I should enlist his help in preparing Williams manuscripts for publication as part of the ambitious program of publishing Williams’s previously unpublished work. In 1997, with Laughlin’s approval that Thomas work as my coeditor on the letters project, we were able to make a preliminary selection and he began the job of entering all of the letters into the computer. However, Laughlin died later that year and my duties at New Directions took precedence over the work on this volume. From 2001 to 2009 Thomas worked full-time at New Directions where, after I turned the editing of Williams titles over to him in 2002, he was responsible for reissues of the most famous Williams titles and for editing much of Williams’s unpublished work, including four volumes of previously unpublished or uncollected one-act plays. It was only after I retired in 2011 that we took up this project again.
By the time we recommitted ourselves, Thomas had become a well-known expert on all matters Tennessee, was a sought-after speaker and adviser for Tennessee Williams conferences and stage productions, and, as a consulting editor, was superintending all of Williams publications at New Directions. And as Laughlin’s literary coexecutor and a trustee of both the New Directions Ownership Trust and the Private Literary Projects Trust under the will of James Laughlin, I had become much more familiar with Laughlin’s life and the history of the corporation. Full disclosure: In 2004 I married Ian MacNiven, who had been chosen by the Laughlin trustees (Daniel Javitch, Laughlin’s son-in-law and my literary coexecutor; Donald Lamm, former president and chairman of the board of W. W. Norton; and myself ) to write the authorized biography of James Laughlin. Needless to say, my access to all the material needed for the commentary on the Laughlin letters was now unparalleled.
So it is with profound gratitude that I acknowledge and applaud the full partnership that developed between myself and Thomas Keith as this project evolved over the years—without his intervention and singular contributions, the book simply would not be. And I would also like to thank my husband, Ian MacNiven, who not only generously shared the fruits of his research for his much praised biography of Laughlin (“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Biography of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 2014) but also contributed his editorial expertise and experience in editing volumes of letters to make this a better book all around (love, support, and gourmet meals also much appreciated). My co-trustee Donald Lamm graciously read and offered very helpful suggestions on the Introduction. And I am grateful to Leila Laughlin Javitch and co-trustee Daniel Javitch for their support for this project over the years. Thanks also to dear friends Jan Fergus, Melinda Barnhardt Jud, Trudy Katzer, and Jane Keller, who have been my sounding boards for years.
Peggy L. Fox
THE COMPLETION OF THIS VOLUME has been made possible by the trustees of the Private Literary Projects Trust under the will of James Laughlin, by the heirs to the estate of Tennessee Williams—The University of the South—specifically their representatives Donna L. Pierce and Linda B. Lankewicz, and by the current chairman of the board of W. W. Norton, Drake McFeely, to all of whom we are grateful for their generosity and goodwill.
Our editor at W. W. Norton, John Glusman, deserves our heartfelt thanks. John provided sensitive and smart editorial insights that greatly improved the quality of this collection while he cheerfully kept us on track and the publication process in motion.
Special thanks are due to Leslie Morris, curator of modern books and manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and in charge of the James Laughlin/New Directions Archive at the Houghton, where all of Laughlin’s voluminous correspondence was transferred after his death, for generously and promptly supplying enhanced copies of the correspondence whenever requested. Thanks are also due to Cathy Henderson and Richard Workman at the Harry Ransom Humanities and Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Jennifer B. Lee, curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University; Mark Cave, curator of manuscripts/oral historian, at the Historic New Orleans Collection; and Genie Guerard, head of the Manuscripts Division at the UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections. And a special note of thanks goes to Mary de Rachewiltz, who supplied copies of Maria Britneva’s letters to her, recording Britneva’s and Williams’s visit to de Rachewiltz’s father, Ezra Pound.
As Peggy has mentioned, we benefited enormously from the expertise and generosity of Ian MacNiven concerning any questions we had relating to James Laughlin and New Directions. We are also grateful to our friend, the author, editor, and former New Directions editor in chief, Peter Glassgold, the longtime editor of Laughlin’s poetry who recently completed the impressive The Collected Poems of James Laughlin 1935–1997 (2014).
To say that we stand on the shoulders of Albert J. Devlin, Jr., and Nancy M. Tischler is insufficient to convey how important their work on the Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I (2000) and Volume II (2003), is to the world of Tennessee Williams studies. Their meticulous research has informed every scholarly endeavor related to Tennessee Williams that has come since. Likewise, the significance of the two major biographies of Tennessee Williams, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) by Lyle Leverich and Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2014) by John Lahr, cannot be overstated—while distinct in style and content, each has been a landmark for the public understanding of Williams’s life and work.
Other essential reference works we relied upon include The Notebooks of Tennessee Williams (2006), edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton; New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), edited by John S. Bak; The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams (2002), edited by David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis; and George Crandell’s Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography (1995). Drewey Wayne Gunn’s Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography (2nd ed., 1991) is indispensable for accurately identifying and dating Williams productions as well as publications. For bibliographic information related to New Directions, A New Directions Reader (1964), edited by Hayden Carruth and J. Laughlin, and Published for James Laughlin: A New Directions List of Publications, 1936–1997 (2008) by John A. Harrison, Rebecca Newth, and Anne Marie Candido have proved invaluable.
We gladly acknowledge the editors of the previous volumes in this series whose work has offered us substantial guidance: Hugh Witemeyer, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1989); Lee Bartlett, Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1991); Robert Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1993); David M. Gordon, Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1994); George Wickes, Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Se
lected Letters (1996); David D. Cooper, Thomas Merton and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1997); and W. C. Bamberger, Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (2007).
Warm gratitude goes to our friends and colleagues at New Directions: Barbara Epler, Laurie Callahan, Declan Spring, Sylvia Frezzolini Severance, Erik Rieselbach, Christopher Wait, Mieke Chew, and the late Daniel Allman and Griselda Ohannessian.
Among the extensive and supportive community of Tennessee Williams scholars Peggy and I have come to know and cherish over the decades, for their help with this volume we would like to thank particularly Michael Paller, Felicia Hardison Londré, and the intrepid Karen Kohlhaas, who discovered the earliest extant letter from Laughlin to Williams that had somehow found its way into the Audrey Wood Archive at the Harry Ransom Center. To many others whom we have relied upon for matters large and small in relation to this volume, we offer our thanks: Helen Thomaides, Lydia Brents, Jeff Shreve, and Brendan Curry at W. W. Norton, Mitch Douglas, Andreas Brown, John Lahr, Eric Bentley, Gregory Mosher, John Guare, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Dick Cavett, Brendan Fay, John Uecker, Donald Windham, Erin DiIorio, Jane D. Young, Paul J. Willis, David Kaplan, Jeremy Lawrence, and William Jay Smith, as well as Georges Borchardt, literary agent for the Williams Estate, and Tom Erhardt (retired) and Mel Kenyon of Casarotto Ramsay Associates, London, theatrical agency for the Williams Estate.
I am indebted to my partner, Arturo Noguera, for his steadfast encouragement. His good humor respecting all the passions and hobbyhorses I pursue is constant. From the time we first met, Peggy L. Fox’s confidence in my abilities has led to much of the work that has brought joy into my life in the last thirty years. I thank her for that—if it’s at all possible—and for our work together on this project.
The Luck of Friendship Page 3