Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (6 page)

The Glass Menagerie
began with Amanda calling Tom to the dinner table. “We can’t say grace until you come back to the table,” she said to her dreamy son. As they intuited from Taylor’s weird radiance, Williams and the enthralled audience were in the presence of it. Taylor seemed to inhabit and to transform into light the punishing suffocation and loss of his “haunted household.”

Throughout his life, Williams, who was the most autobiographical of American playwrights, always approached his typewriter in the same way: “I begin with a character in a situation—a vague one. If I have a problem, I invent people in parallel circumstances, create parallel tensions. It is my way of working out problems.” Writing was good, he said, “in exact ratio to the degree of emotional tension which is released in it.” By the end of each writing day—he wrote for up to eight hours at a time—manuscript pages were scattered across his desk and at his feet. This disarray made a larger symbolic point: his mess was now outside him. For Williams, writing was a kind of cleansing. “There are only two times in this world when I am happy and selfless and pure,” he said. “One is when I jack off on paper and the other when I empty all the fretfulness of desire on a young male body.”

The pulse behind Williams’s unique voice—as he told Brooks Atkinson, the legendary drama critic at the
New York Times
—was desperation: “that thing that makes me write like a screaming banshee, when under this impulse to scream all the time is a deep, deep longing to call out softly with love.” On stage and off it, hysteria was Williams’s idiom. “I have a vast traumatic eye / set in my forehead center / that tortures to its own design / all images that enter,” Williams wrote. His plays put those images on stage and made a spectacle of his haunted interior—which he once characterized as “sixteen cylinders inside a jalopy.” Each play, he felt, registered “the climate of my interior world at the time in which [it was] written.” “I took to the theatre with the impetus of a compulsion,” Williams explained, describing the immediate charm of representation—re-presentation—of his dimly understood but persecuting internal world, a sump of confounding and conflicting projections (“the siege of all that is not I,” he called them).

“The turbulent business of my nerves demanded something more animate than written language could be,” he said. “It seemed to me that even the giants of literature, such as Chekhov, when writing narratives were only describing dramas. And they were altogether dependent on the sensitivity of their readers. Nothing lived of what they had created unless the reader had the stage inside him, or the screen, on which their images could be visibly projected. However with a play, a play on the stage—let any fool come to it! It is there, it is really and truly there—whether the audience understands it or not!” Williams had begun to feel, he said, “a frustrating lack of vitality in words alone. I wanted a plastic medium. I conceived things visually, in sound and color and movement.” He added, “Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me: actors appeared out of nowhere . . . and took the stage over.”

At the time of his conversion to drama, in his early twenties, Williams had never been backstage and, he said, “had not seen more than two or three professional productions: touring companies that passed through the South and Middle West. My conversion to theatre arrived as mysteriously as those impulses that enter the flesh at puberty.” For two decades, however, he’d had a ringside seat at some unforgettable and indigestible family scenes. Williams’s childhood was not happy, but it was noisy. He was born into a hate-filled parental drama—a theater of war in which the children were stunned witnesses. In “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” the short story that was the basis for
The Glass Menagerie
, the Narrator says, “In five years’ time I had nearly forgotten home. I had to forget it, I couldn’t carry it with me.”

For Williams, however, his family was never far from his mind. In a sort of séance with the ghosts of his past, their narratives and their voices were perpetually reworked into his cast of characters. His closest relatives—his benevolent grandparents, the Reverend Walter Dakin and Rosina Dakin, known as “Grand,” in whose various Southern Episcopal rectories Williams had spent his early life; his feared and frequently absent traveling-salesman father, Cornelius Coffin (“CC”) Williams; his prim and protective mother, “Miss Edwina”; his younger brother, Dakin; and his older blighted sister, Rose, who at the age of thirty-three was given one of the first prefrontal lobotomies in America—along with Williams himself, with his own “irreconcilably divided” nature, formed what the novelist and man of letters Gore Vidal astutely called “his basic repertory company.” Williams’s romance with the theater allowed him to get his insides out and to act out the warring fragments of family madness to which he had been an understudy all his life. To put feelings into the audience and to watch its startled response was also reassuring; it allowed Williams to reenter childhood innocence and to be known for himself as he never was in the family.

According to Vidal, who on occasion wrote in the same room as Williams, the playwright entered entirely into his imaginary world while working; he was “so absorbed that, as he was typing, he was acting out what his characters were doing.” The pinched world of
The Glass Menagerie
, with its alley and fire escape, its secondhand furniture, is a poetic, if not literal, representation of the Williams family’s existence in St. Louis—where the family moved in 1918 when Williams was seven so that CC could accept a management position with the International Shoe Company, then the biggest shoe company in the world, after working four years as a traveling salesman for them. In 1943, while he was staying at his parents’ house and working on
The Glass Menagerie
, Williams wrote “Cortege,” a poem that evoked the suffocating trauma his displaced family had experienced in St. Louis: “Nowhere was ease / You lost belief in everything but loss.”

In fact, although Williams claimed that his life before St. Louis “was completely unshadowed by fear,” he was already no stranger to loss. Between the ages of four and six, he had lost the use of his legs (probably a case of diphtheria, which kept him an invalid for two years); his beloved black nanny, Ozzie, who disappeared without explanation; and, to all extents and purposes, his father, who, like the absent patriarch in
Menagerie
, “had fallen in love with long distances” and returned only occasionally to the rectory for fractious reunions with the family.

In St. Louis, Williams hung onto his mother’s skirts and her every word. He also absorbed Edwina’s voluble displeasure about her husband and her home. “His winter breath / made tears impossible for her,” he wrote in “Cortege.” Soon after the move, Williams’s depressions—“the blue devils” that would plague him for the rest of his life—began. In his mind, the title
The Glass Menagerie
summoned up the idea of the family’s fragility in the face of a new urban brutality:

When my family first moved to St. Louis from the South, we were forced to live in a congested apartment neighborhood. It was a shocking change for my sister and myself accustomed to spacious yards, porches, and big shade trees. The apartment we lived in was about as cheerful as an Arctic winter. There were outside windows only in the front room and kitchen. The rooms had windows that opened upon a narrow alley way that was virtually sunless and which we grimly named “Death Alley” for a reason which is amusing only in retrospect. There were a great many alley cats in the neighborhood which were constantly fighting the dogs. Every now and then some unwary young cat would allow itself to be pursued into this alley way which had only one opening. The end of the cul-de-sac was directly beneath my sister’s bedroom window and it was here that the cats would have to turn around to face their pursuers in mortal combat. My sister would be awakened in the night by the struggle and in the morning the hideously mangled victim would be lying by her window. The side of the alley way had become so odious to her, for this reason that she kept the shade constantly drawn so that the interior of her bedroom had a perpetual twilight atmosphere. Something had to be done to relieve the gloom. So my sister and I painted all her furniture white; she put white curtains at the window and on the shelves around the room she collected a large assortment of little glass articles of which she was particularly fond. Eventually the room took on a light and delicate appearance, in spite of the lack of outside illumination. When I left home a number of years later, it was this room that I recalled most vividly and poignantly when looking back on our home life. They were mostly little glass animals. By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the Sensitive. The alley way where the cats were torn to pieces was one thing—my sister’s white curtains and tiny menageries were another. Somewhere between them was the world that we lived in.

With father, Cornelius (“CC”)

The Williams family’s impoverishment was as much emotional as material. As Edwina pointed out in her memoir
Remember Me to Tom
, their first apartment “was no tenement.” “We could not afford to buy a house in an exclusive neighborhood so we kept trying to find roomier apartments, and houses for rent,” she wrote. Over the subsequent decade, the family moved nine times, shifting the façade of bourgeois comfort with them—a piano in the parlor, a record player, a car, a membership to the local country club, and, latterly, a cook. In the rural calm of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Williamses had been part of a minister’s household, a patrician bulwark of the local community. St. Louis dislocated them not just from place but also from prestige. The abrasions of anonymity in middle-class city dwelling were unsettling for everyone, but especially unconscionable for a snob like Edwina, who was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (she was born in Ohio but adopted the style and manners of a Southern belle) and whose head had been turned by the raffish CC Williams partly because he came from one of the first families of Tennessee. CC’s mother, Isabel Coffin, had a pedigree that stretched back to the Virginia settlers; his father, Thomas Lanier Williams II—for whom Tennessee was named—was a well-known politician with an illustrious family tree. But, with CC, a pedestrian salesman, the heroic lineage of the clan seemed to have come to a halt.

Williams saw his literary endeavor both as revenge against his father’s stalled life and as rebirth of his ancestors’ legacy of daring. “The Williamses had fought the Indians for Tennessee,” he wrote. “And I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages.” In an early stab at the material of
The Glass Menagerie
—a verse drama entitled “The Wingfields of America”—Williams invoked the still water on which the family destiny seemed to have floundered. “In the beginning there was high adventure for the Wingfields, and they were equal to it,” the Narrator of “The Wingfields” begins. He goes on: