Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Read online

  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:

  With mother, Edwina

  The contents of the Americas were baptized in their blood.

  They were the pioneers. . . .

  They were the ones

  That took the trail westward again,

  for the lands that were known

  were not large enough to contain them

  The introduction to the poem concludes:

  Dimly and under the surface of their lives, the Wingfields

  wondered where the excitement had gone, what had become of the first wonderful something

  With which they had come

  Through the mists of morning and through the

  mountain pines with horses and barges and guns—

  To make a new world!

  What had they made? A world!

  But was it actually new?

  That is what the Wingfields dimly wondered.

  Williams, who called CC “the saddest man I ever knew,” wrote, “He was not a man capable of examining his behavior toward his family, or capable of changing it.” When CC was five, his mother died of tuberculosis. Her early death, as Williams wrote in his memoir, left CC without “the emollient influence of a mother,” or, as it happened, without the containing influence of a father. In four unsuccessful bids to become the governor of Tennessee, Thomas Lanier Williams II had squandered much of the family fortune. CC was shunted off to a series of oppressive and inferior boarding schools, where he quickly acquired a reputation for hell-raising. Finally, he was sent to military school, where his “fierce blood” inevitably played itself out in a series of disciplinary misadventures. He was rebellious and restless. He flirted with the notion of becoming a lawyer, and even studied for two years at the College of Law at the University of Tennessee before volunteering to fight in the Spanish-American War. But both the law and the military were too authoritarian for CC’s bumptious, wayward spirit. For a time CC worked as the regional manager of a telephone company before becoming a drummer for a Knoxville men’s clothing firm. As a traveling salesman he could live by his own rules and by the laws of motion. In Williams’s early play The Spinning Song, the father admits a need for “continual excitement”; if CC didn’t have a destiny or a solid emotional core, the road, at least, provided a kind of direction. For CC movement was an antidote to anxiety; over time, his peripatetic writer-son—known to his friends as “Bird”—would adopt the same defensive strategy. “I have an instinct for self-destruction,” Williams has a character say in Battle of Angels. “I’m running away from it all the time.”

  CC and Edwina were victims of their hidebound times. In both their lives something remained hidden. CC drew an iron curtain around his feelings, refusing ever to discuss his own parents or his childhood, which made his volatility all the more arbitrary and bewildering. Likewise, Edwina never acknowledged or understood the secret in her own family between her convent-educated mother—“the least demonstrative person I’ve known,” she said—and her doting father, who was “not the most masculine of men,” as Williams described him. Despite his lifelong show of rectitude, according to Gore Vidal, who knew him, the civilized Reverend Dakin had an interest in the “Grecian vice.” Although Williams alluded to a certain caprice in Reverend Dakin’s nature—“he is humble and affectionate but incurably set upon satisfying his own impulses whatever they may be”—he left it for others to read the sexual implications in the ferocity of Reverend Dakin’s denial during one crucial incident of his old age.

  One d
ay in 1934, in Memphis, when the Reverend was living on a retirement pension of eighty-five dollars a month, two men came to the door. The Reverend handed over most of his wife’s savings—cashing in five thousand out of seventy-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds. “She said ‘Why, Walter?’ Again and again, till finally he said, ‘Rose, don’t question me any more because if you do, I will go away by myself and you’ll never hear from me again!’ ” Williams wrote. “At that point she moved from the wicker chair to the porch swing. . . . As my grandmother swung gently back and forth and evening closed about them in their spent silence . . . I felt without quite understanding, something that all their lives had been approaching, even half knowingly, a slow and terrible facing of something between them. ‘Why, Walter?’ The following morning my grandfather was very busy and my grandmother was totally silent. He went into the tiny attic of the bungalow and took out of a metal filing case a great, great, great pile of cardboard folders containing all his old sermons. He went into the back yard of the bungalow with this load, taking several trips . . . and then he started a fire and fifty-five years of hand-written sermons went up in smoke. . . . What I most remember more than that blaze, was the silent white blaze of my grandmother’s face as she stood over the washtub . . . not once even glancing out of the window where the old gentleman, past eighty, was performing this auto-da-fé as an act of purification. ‘Why, Walter?’ Nobody knows! Nobody but my grandfather who has kept the secret into this his ninety-sixth spring.”

  “The Bird told me that he thought that his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy,” Gore Vidal wrote. The Reverend Dakin’s last words were “I want to go to Key West”—a homosexual watering hole he frequently visited with Williams, who bought a house there in 1950. “You’d think, being an Episcopal Minister, he’d have wanted to go to Heaven,” Dakin Williams told the press, missing the point that to a man of Reverend Dakin’s likely closeted inclinations, Key West was Heaven.

  Williams, who often complained of feeling “like a ghost,” grew up in not one but two haunted households where secrets and the unsayable suffused daily life with a sense of masquerade, creating an emptiness as palpable, elusive, and corrosive as it was to the Wingfields. The blown-up “ineluctably smiling” photo of Amanda’s decamped husband “facing the audience” on the living room wall allows a sense of the spectral to hover ironically at the edge of The Glass Menagerie’s theatrical experience, at once an immanence and homage to the presence of absence in the fabric of the Williams family life. To their children and to themselves, CC and Edwina were ghostly figures, both unknowable and unknowing. Never having experienced much love or ease, CC inevitably chose a partner who could provide him with neither. Edwina’s personality, according to Williams, was marked by a “gross lack of sensitivity.” CC was a dashing twenty-seven when he met Edwina, who thought herself over the hill at twenty-three. He knew—as salesmen must—how to persuade; he had liveliness, humor, and a gift of the gab. “One thing your father had plenty of—was charm!” Amanda says in The Glass Menagerie, echoing Edwina’s familiar mantra of disenchantment. “Before we arrived in St. Louis, I saw only the charming, gallant, cheerful side of Cornelius,” Edwina wrote (omitting to mention that, in those early days, CC had seen only the seductive, playful side of her). “I never could understand how Cornelius and Edwina ever got together,” Margaret Brownlow, a well-born Knoxville friend of the family, said. “To Edwina, there was no fun in life at all. To Cornelius, everything was fun. He drank. He danced. He smoked. He just did everything. Edwina just frowned on that. She just wasn’t raised that way and she didn’t like it.” She added, “She rather fancied herself.”

  When Edwina set up house in St. Louis, she was thirty-four. She had been married to CC for eleven years; it was the first time that the family lived under one roof away from her parents. It was also the first time that Edwina had to cook. When CC had asked for Edwina’s hand in marriage, the Reverend Dakin told him, “Edwina can’t sew. And she can’t cook. There’s nothing she can do but be a social butterfly.” CC replied, “Mr. Dakin, I am not looking for a cook.” By her own admission, Edwina was a spoiled only child; her domestic ignorance was a badge of aristocratic honor. But in St. Louis, deprived of her parents and her privilege, she was thrown back on herself and on the limitations of her and her husband’s Victorian rigidities. For different reasons, both members of the couple were soon disappointed and furious. CC took refuge from his hurt in excessive drink; Edwina, a teetotaler, showed her umbrage through excessive propriety. The result was war. Whereas Williams’s maternal grandparents were for him an inspirational model of intimacy—“Baucis and Philemon . . . that’s what they were like. . . . I thank God that I have seen exemplified in my grandmother and grandfather the possibility of two people being so lovingly close as they were that they were almost like a tree”—his parents were “split violently apart and tore the children apart through division and conflict.” Edwina claimed with much justification to be terrorized by her husband, who, Williams wrote, always entered “the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside.” CC, who made a good salary, withheld money; Edwina, who was some kind of emotional terrorist herself, withheld affection.

  The beautiful, pious chatterbox who had sworn her devotion to CC was now devoted exclusively to her children. (CC never handled the news of his own paternity well. On hearing that his wife was pregnant with their first child, Rose, he was stunned. “It was as though a thunderclap had broken,” Edwina said. After Tom was born, CC remarked to Rose within earshot of Edwina, “We don’t think much of that new baby, do we?” And when Edwina informed him that she was pregnant with their third child, Dakin, CC responded, “Then it isn’t mine!”) CC felt increasingly unloved and unappreciated by his household; for her part, Edwina used her children as a kind of fortress against what she perceived as CC’s cruelty and betrayal. The children got the full measure of her concern and her intelligence; CC got the full measure of her prudery and her tongue. After Dakin’s birth in 1919, CC was banished from the marital bed. Edwina wanted nothing to do with sex; CC, as Dakin Williams recalled, “was eager to get as much as he could, wherever he could get it.”

  In The Spinning Song, Williams dramatized the double bind of his parents’ standoff—which The Glass Menagerie reimagines in rather more positive terms, turning his father into a poetic symbol of absence rather than acrimony, and his mother into a figure of “great but confused vitality” instead of a scold. In one scene of The Spinning Song, a small boy is crying at the foot of a Christmas tree as his father glowers over him; the mother takes the father to task for bringing his “turbulence” into their home and declares, “Our marriage was a mistake.” The father, in response, displaces his anger at his wife onto the child, whom he hectors about properly picking up his toy blocks—“Your mother’s made you a sissy!” The boy “stares at him with helpless fear,” then “runs to his mother for protection.” The scene continues:

  MOTHER: You’ve frightened him! . . .

  FATHER: That’s right. Turn the children against me.

  MOTHER: They don’t know you. You’re a stranger almost. And it would be better for you to stay one than come home on holidays to shock them. . . .

  (Ariadne enters clutching a doll. Stands frightened, staring . . .)

  FATHER: They’re my children.

  MOTHER: You’ve disowned them already.

  FATHER: I’ve been cut off.

  MOTHER: Yes, but you did the cutting!

  FATHER: Laura, let’s don’t quarrel, not today!

  MOTHER: (crying out) Look at poor Ariadne! Ariadne come here! You’ve terrified her with your drunken shouting. (The girl runs to her.) . . . See what you’ve done? You’ve spoiled their Christmas for them. They’re not like other children. They’re more easily bruised, they have to be sheltered more. . . .

  FATHER: I love the children.

  MOTHER: You show it very strangely.


  FATHER: I love you, Laura.

  MOTHER: You show that strangely, too.

  (He grasps her rigid figure in an embrace.)

  FATHER: Find some way to quiet me, keep me still!

  MOTHER: It’s too late!

  CC was blinkered and belligerent; as he aged, his body began to bear signs of these traits. He had sight in only one eye; part of one ear had been bitten off in a poker fight. (His ear was repaired by plastic surgery, but nothing could mend his reputation within the International Shoe Company.) Full of rages and resentments, he was aloof, dismissive, quick-tempered, and frequently terrifying. “Most of the time, life with him held either spoken or unspoken terror,” Edwina wrote. “In my mind, my husband became ‘the man of wrath.’ ” Williams, like Edwina, gave CC a wide berth. The home was a hothouse of violence. “Come out of there. I’m going to kill you,” CC shouted to Edwina when he was liquored up. According to her, he threatened abandonment on an almost monthly basis. “Take the children and go. Just get out,” CC brayed. Williams wrote of his father’s gruff booming voice, “You wanted to shrink away from it, to hide yourself.”

  At seven in the morning on New Year’s Day, 1933, for instance, Edwina was preparing breakfast for the children when CC arrived home after an all-night bender. “I made the mistake of protesting, not realizing how much under the influence of liquor he was,” she wrote in her diary. “He flew into a rage and threatened me. I locked my door and tried to reason with him through the closed door. ‘Open that door or I’ll bust it in!’ Before I could obey the command he had suited the action to the word, the lock broke, the door flew open striking me in the nose and knocking me to the floor where I lay dazed. Meanwhile Rose wakens, hears the commotion, sees me lying on the floor with nose bleeding and rushes into the hall screaming, ‘Help, he is killing her!’ ” In Battle of Angels, Williams captured something of the toxic marriage. “And I—I had to endure him!” Myra tells Val about her husband. “Ahh, my flesh always crawled when he touched me.”