“Love the man,” she told me, “but study the work. Work cures everything, and work explains everything.” Had I met Hepburn in time to take a message to Tenn, she would have told him, “To work is all. You were put here to work.” “Tennessee only wanted to be loved,” she said, “and he was: He just looked toward the wrong places, at the wrong things.” She paused, smiled, then added, “He had terrific taste in friends.”
Several days later I received another letter from Hepburn. Enclosed in it, on a small card, was her recipe for brownies.
“I HAD WAYS of getting to my room,” Tenn told me. “I might become sick, or terribly tired, or consumed with the studies required of me the next day in school. I would banish myself to my room, and my mother, allied with my anxiety, might bring my dinner to me, a cool hand to the forehead, strength for the night.” Strength was needed, because Tenn’s father was addicted to the experience of criticizing his son. “He needed to diminish me so that his own stature would improve,” Tenn remembered. “His own silhouette had been diminished and distorted by so many humiliations and exertions that I was his only means of affirmation, the only human to whom he could submit himself for comparison and feel both superior and abusive.”
From the earliest age, the deepest memory, Tenn recalled that his father considered him a burden, a drain on the family’s emotions and finances, an embarrassment. His father hated his attempts at writing, his “gallivanting” in backyards with Rose, putting on plays or imitating neighbors or film stars; the images that Tenn painstakingly clipped and saved and pasted into notebooks or on cardboard would periodically disappear, thrown away by his disapproving father, who castigated the sissy for wasting his time and making a mess of things. Before he had entered grade school, Tenn knew, from his father’s insistence, that he must eventually obtain a good job with benefits and good people and the opportunity to “advance.”
A lover of words, Tenn looked up the word “advance” in the dictionary. He could recall snatches of what he had read: “to rise beyond the elementary or introductory.” Clearly, he recalled, this was the phase of development in which he was trapped with his family, a limbo not unlike that awaiting unsaved babies, an uncomfortable, unknowing state of being, devoid of sight and sound and touch. “That was home,” Tenn told me.
Another definition: “to be developed beyond the initial stage or process.” This was clearly the young Thomas Lanier Williams, born into a family of simpletons and savages, aware of things either beyond the imagination or beneath the contempt of his relations or peers, and hoping to escape.
Yet another definition: “to be much evolved from an early ancestral archetype.” This is what Tenn wanted to be more than anything else. It was what he felt his father could never be. “He arrived at his own home,” Tenn remembered, “and anywhere he went, I would imagine, intent on despoiling what was pleasant or calm or moving forward. He thrived on fear and power; he relished the barbaric. He enjoyed shouting at the radio when fights or other gladiatorial events were broadcast, praying for blood or injury or aborted careers. Limbs and lives destroyed. Adventure! Excitement! All at the expense of others. Drinking and demanding things of my mother and my sister. Judging the attempts—the pitiful but heartfelt attempts—my mother made around the house, to make it more appealing, as best she could on his niggardly contributions.”
There was a regular dance in the household, Edwina and Cornelius Williams circling each other warily, angrily, words and décor thrown at each other in some attempt at communication. At some point the energy would be directed at Tenn, who waited, poised over a pad of paper or a book, or clutching his radio. Depending on the anger his father possessed, the item to which Tenn devoted himself would be destroyed or criticized or hidden away from him until he “improved.”
“And here I am,” Tenn told me. “I am seventy-one years old, and I am still trying to understand what my father wanted me to improve, what he wanted me to become. I realize now that he simply didn’t understand me, couldn’t believe that I was his son, that I was somehow created to honor or care for him.” The earliest statement Tenn could remember coming to him from his father—and uttered to others in his presence—was that he was not right. There was something odd about the boy. Something off. Something within him needed to be slapped off or away, or the same unseemly something could be remedied by something better, more appropriate being pounded into him.
In order to function at all, Tenn believed, all people, not merely those who wished to write or act or paint or sing, must develop for themselves a support system comprised of myths tested by them and found to be effective. Most find comfort and a sense of purpose and a level of care under the supervision of a God or gods who have inspired or personally delivered to the mere mortals below a plan of action, a means of advancement, via canonical texts or visions or through the agency of fellow humans who are imbued with the spirit or propelled by the example of their chosen leader. As a child Tenn had roamed the halls of rectories and had overheard the means of atonement and acceptance and advancement and had found them lacking. “I turned to clipped photographs and radio dramas,” he told me. “I preferred the morals and the lineaments of whatever story I could project into that imagined situation, those rooms of my dreaming. I know that I lifted characters and dialogue and contours from my ‘real’ life, and then placed them within what became my actual and my preferred life, and it was here.” With the final statement, Tenn again poked a finger into my forehead.
“There is no salvation,” he said. “There is no being saved. There is no ‘Eureka!’ moment. There is no Cassandra in the closet who will appear and ask the probing questions. There is within your mind all that you will ever be and all that you will ever need. I always felt this way, but I was never brave enough to face this fact and live entirely by my own counsel. I needed and I sought out the myths of my choosing.”
Tenn had also come to believe that all of us are caught on that train he had mentioned to me, the train mistakenly jumped upon in haste, with badly marked directions, and we looked out the windows and realized we were headed in the wrong direction, or that people we would rather emulate or love or study were on the opposite track, better appointed, prepared, armed with itineraries that had a stated destination and the accommodations that would provide comfort and safe delivery. “I felt that way as I pursued my life in the theater,” Tenn told me, “but my mother felt the same way, ironing doilies or cutting crusts off sandwiches or entertaining her friends in the front room. There was a present person; there was conversation. Deep in her mind, however, she was young and pretty and destined for a good and envied life, a life of purpose and demands that her creativity and humor could fill. She dreamed her way through her life. I am dreaming my way through my own. I talk to you now, but I keep seeing pages filling up with my handwriting or the words I’ve typed, in pica. Plays, essays, descriptions. On one track I’m dreaming of working again and being happy and being productive, and on another I’m at the task of writing, and I can make myself believe that I’m working. My mother did this: washing dishes but also dancing at the beautiful lake, with lights sparkling on the dappled water. Warding off the blows of my father, but actually taking on the final scenes of Medea and waiting for the applause. Living alone with her three wayward, badly wired, and confused children, stretching every nerve and every penny, but actually awaiting the attentions of the best men in town, who would deliver her from her penury and her pinched heart.”
Two trains. Juggling of the gods.
“I left the God of my childhood,” Tenn continued, “and I offered my soul and my allegiance to a variety of gods. There was the god of beauty and order, which I found in photographs of interiors designed by Dorothy Draper and Cedric Gibbons. There was no oilcloth or soiled damask or venetian blinds in those settings, and I believed that there was peace there. I would only later learn that the bright sheen of lacquer and marble could also house hatred and anger and abuse. I did not know that then, so I transported myse
lf to those places and saw my mother and my sister in those chairs and in those doors and looking out those windows, happy and advancing in the right direction.
“That god fell by the wayside when I began to love the sound and the shape of words and sentences. I heard words first, over the radio and from the movie screen, and I always wondered where they came from and how they looked. After I learned to read, I imagined them, black on a white background, sometimes in the typefaces of the screen credits, bold and orderly, offering shape and style to every situation. Even in situations with those people who populated my life, I listened to what they said and could see the words, which I then paginated and indented to my satisfaction. When I began to write, I liked the length and the weight of sentences, the way a word looked or sounded or felt to me in particular placement. Then words went above and within the pictures I’d clipped. I had demoted my earlier god, who was now, with me, in service to the word.
“I talk to you about all of these women because they are like ambulatory, fleshly emblems of my beliefs. Think of them, if it helps, as if they were a human gallery of examples of a truly catholic—use the small c—Stations of the Cross. I gain nothing at all by focusing on the pains and betrayals of Jesus Christ, a fiction comprised of any number of myths that man, from the first and darkest of caves, fashioned for himself, a savior, a father, a buddy out there in the wild maneuverings of life, smoothing the rough edges, looking out for his well-being, furnishing a place in some Edenic hostel, comfortable and safe and eternal. However, I can imagine myself walking through a cathedral, designed by my desire and my imagination and my memory, and on the walls I might find Lillian Gish or Marian Seldes or Katharine Cornell. Ruth Chatterton or Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson. Ida Lupino or Barbara Stanwyck or Laurette Taylor. Examples. The sweetness and the devotion—the dogged persistence, cloaked in kindness—that Lillian and Marian and Katharine exhibited to me. The toughness and the carnal gaits of Stanwyck and Lupino. The scrubbed and sparse aestheticism of Katharine Hepburn and Frances Sternhagen. The brutal intelligence and fiery will of Estelle Parsons and Madeleine Sherwood. The flamboyant denial of fact and colorful poses of Elaine Stritch and Ruth Gordon. The earthly worthlessness but artistic supremacy of ethereal monsters like Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley. The judicious and frighteningly bright allegiance and intelligence of Maria Tucci, perpetually supplicating so that others might shine around her, so that life can flourish, even if her art suffers. Bring me saints who can compare with these lives! Bring me examples that would better suit my life, or any life!”
Tenn asked me if I had the rosary. I handed it to him.
“This thing, this series of beads,” he said, holding it above his head, “has no meaning for me, serves as no sacrament, until I invest these beads with those women and men and events that give some foundation, some bones, to the fleshly man that I am. The bones and the beads prop me up, keep me upright and ambulatory, and give me some sense of what I’m doing. What I should be doing.”
To one of the beads he added two names: Frank Merlo and Yasujiro Ozu.
TENN TOLD ME that in that “awful year of 1963,” as Frank Merlo died of lung cancer in the apartment they shared, which now smelled of sour spit and sweat and the bursts of Mitsouko that a well-meaning maid insisted on spraying over the rooms, he was notified of the death of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu. Dead at the age of sixty, dead in fact on his birthday, from cancer, Tenn found himself thinking of the man, whom he did not know, but whose films he had loved, and about whom he had argued with the writer Yukio Mishima, who had deplored Ozu’s films and who had forced Tenn to defend them. Mishima did not care for the severity and the simplicity of the films: he wanted color and boldness in his art and in his life, and he found the films of Ozu to be tight and dry and airless. Tenn agreed with Mishima that life is colorful and bold and messy, and art should express that; but life is also almost always impossible to handle, and those simple tasks in the films of Ozu—tea, an orderly home, silent moments on a hill with a child—are the moments we all need to apply contours to the events the day presents to us. From the films of Ozu Tenn learned that everything, every solitary thing that comes into our life and our consciousness, is all that we will ever have, and it is the only inventory in which we can search for supplies. Our memories can only be built from the things and the people and the places that we see and hear and smell and love and discard or save, and in this ceaseless rush of stimulus we often need the vase of flowers to arrange, the pet to stroke, the tea to boil, the scented bath, as well as time to stop and think and attach to that memory whatever we might need to hold it and use it and share it.
Mishima agreed, and said he would reconsider the man who was Yasujiro Ozu. It was Mishima who contacted Tenn to let him know that Ozu’s grave bore the inscription mu, a Japanese word meaning nothingness. This disturbed Tenn until Mishima explained that in the many obituaries and tributes that had been written for Ozu, it was revealed that the director believed, most strongly, in mono no aware, or an awareness of the impermanence of things. Life, Mishima told Tenn, truly is swift and unforgiving, and beauty and meaning are ours only if we can recognize them and snatch them and pass them along to others.
Tenn took this conversation with Mishima and “subsumed it, held it deep within me,” and it would help him to write and think about Frank Merlo and what the man had meant to him and done for him. He remembered a day, during rehearsals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when tempers flared, scenes sagged, and actors failed to make eye contact with the playwright. Elia Kazan and Roger Stevens, one of the play’s producers, wanted substantial changes made to the text, and Tenn was unsure and unhappy about the direction the play was taking. Whenever Kazan brought up the deletions and the changes he had requested, Tenn would turn to Frank, who sat deep in the theater.
On this particular day that Tenn was remembering, voices were raised and an ultimatum was delivered: Tenn would make the changes to the play or the play would not open in New York. Angry and exhausted, he said nothing and looked out into the theater: Frank was not in his seat. Tenn calmly told Kazan and Stevens that he was leaving for the day, and with their voices yelling after him, he left, hailed a cab, and went to his apartment, where Frank sat.
“I yelled at him brutally,” Tenn remembered. “I told him that I needed him, and never more than at that time, in that theater. I went straight to his deeply Italian, deeply Catholic core and reminded him that Jesus Christ Himself, at his lowest moment, had chastised his disciples for leaving him, asking if they could not spare him one hour. Well, I needed Frank at that hour.”
Tenn told me that he needed me at this particular hour of his life, for a very particular purpose. He asked me to stay with him and be there for him and his dream, his “crazy dream”: to have one more hour with his father.
TENN’S FATHER BECAME a character that he imagined placing in rooms of his own invention, moving about in stories that were as manic and angry as the ones he could remember, but in others that were tinged with some of the memories of happier times in younger days that his mother shared with friends or at Tenn’s bedside when he was sick. The man in those stories was ambitious and romantic, and Tenn came to see that a life with Edwina and three decidedly odd and curious children had sapped him of anything but the incentive to perpetually provide and forbear. “All the sermons of my childhood,” Tenn told me, “all the pamphlets and all the books that told you how to buck up and get on and survive, talked of the need to bear and forbear. Acceptance, they insisted, led to advancement. But my father and my mother found themselves immobile and growing heavy and going nowhere, and that nest of anger must have been impossible to bear for him.” Tenn imagined that his father came into that house and was aware of the scattering of children who did not welcome him, did not want him, who resented the allocation of air and space given to him, and he could imagine his rage. Tenn’s father often complained of being a salesman on the road, going to cities so rustic and removed that the telephone poles
and the wires didn’t even reach them, back-country people with no interest in him or his wares; but he went on, coming home to rest and have his clothes laundered, the scents of liquor and sweat removed, and he faced only resentment from everyone around him.
“And one day he was gone,” Tenn said, “and I hated him for that, too. I hated him for hitting me and hating me and forcing me to become something other than what I was, but I came, in time, to see that he was absolutely my father, just as only Edwina could be my mother. I am their son in every way, and my father is the dreamer, the inconsistent, impossible, wandering poet that I have become. I dream as my mother did, but my mother had no movement in her. There was no advancement within her—her dreams were internal and suppressed by rage, fueled by denial. My father, however, took action, and his dreams were in his feet, and he moved away from a situation he could no longer handle. I took my thoughts and my dreams and put them into words that made their way to paper, and he took to the streets. He got away. He navigated in the truest sense of the word, and I came, in my way, to understand him and love him.”
Tenn did not study his own plays, although he confessed that every year or so, he tried to reread The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, the two plays that he felt came to him most clearly, and which are most clearly based on his parents and the “dance” they held with each other for so long. “I think that there may be elements of me in Tom and Blanche,” he told me, “but I look at those plays now and I see my mother as Amanda and my father as Tom. I look at Streetcar and I see my mother and my father, having their dance and simultaneously upholding and destroying illusions.”
Stella Adler fascinated Tennessee from the time he first saw her photograph in a magazine during her years with the Group Theatre. “Her intellect arose from the page,” he told me, and later in life her intellect helped him, somewhat, to gather strength and write again—“to keep at it,” he said. (illustration credit 18.4)
Follies of God Page 43