Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Read online

  Edwina liked to say that CC loved only “two breathing things: Dakin and the dog in the house.” (Edwina’s nickname for CC was “Neal,” which was also the name of one of their dogs.) CC took Dakin with him to Cardinals baseball games and to Ruggeri’s steak house for a seventy-five-cent T-bone. To Rose, however, he could be withering. Once, after she danced for him, CC remarked, “Just like a moo-cow.” And to his un-athletic, morbidly shy, and effeminate first son—the first male to replace him in Edwina’s affections—CC could be annihilating. He ridiculed him as “Miss Nancy”; when Williams flunked ROTC, in his third year at the University of Missouri—an insult to the military heritage of the Williams family—CC took the draconian measure of withdrawing him from the university and putting him to work at the International Shoe Company—a job that Williams characterized as “designed for insanity . . . a living death.” Despite his son’s complaints and subsequent breakdown, the hard-nosed CC contended that Tom’s sixty-five dollars a month was “a whole lot more than he was worth.” “Dad resented any money Mother spent on Tom, and violent arguments were precipitated by bills Mother incurred at Famous-Barr for clothes for Tom,” Dakin recalled.

  Rose Williams as a teenager

  Williams never sought or got much approval from CC. “Off and on he would make abortive efforts to show affection, would ask me to go downtown to the movies with him,” he wrote to the critic Kenneth Tynan of their childhood relationship. “I would go but would be frozen stiff with fear of him and, being defeated repeatedly, he gave up.” “I think he loved me,” Williams said of his father, but he was never quite sure. His reaction to CC’s fiats was not titanic fury but “desolation,” he recalled. “[Tom] did not defy his father. I can only guess what this must have cost him psychically,” Edwina said. “I had begun to regard Dad’s edicts as being—as far as I was concerned—too incomprehensibly and incontestably Jovian to feel about them anything but what a dead-tired animal feels when it’s whipped on further,” Williams said. “Of course, under this hopeless non-resistance there must have been an unconscious rage, not just at Dad but my own cowardice and impotent submission. This I realize because as I have grown older I have discovered a big underground rebellion that was there all along, just waiting for a way out.”

  Well into his adulthood, Williams continued to see his combustible father through the lens of his mother’s disillusionment. “It was like walking on eggs every minute of the day and night,” Edwina said of her marriage. “Cold, cold, cold / was the merciless blood of your father,” Williams’s poem “Cortege” begins. It continues, “She passed him and crept sidewise / down the stairs, / loathing the touch / of the doorknob he had clasped, / hating the napkin / he had used at the table.” While working on The Glass Menagerie in St. Louis in 1943, Williams wrote to Windham, “The old man has just now left the house on his long anticipated trip to the West Coast. We hope he never comes back, but nothing returns more certainly than evil.” The “evil” and the “we” announced both Williams’s bias and his collusion in his mother’s version of events. (Another sign of his internal alliance was Williams’s distinctive drawl; CC had no Southern accent, his mother did.) For most of his adult life, Williams dreaded his visits home. “My father—how to meet him again—will I be able to do it?” he wrote in his 1942 journal. “Or will I run away again?—And cheat my poor Mother who goes without a servant to keep me going?” In 1943, he wrote, “We made talk alone for the first time in probably ten or fifteen years. A pathetic old man but capable of being a devil.” He went on: “It’s like a Chekhov play, only much wilder and sadder.” By this time, the fractious family was so polarized that CC ate alone at a first sitting, and Edwina and her parents ate second.

  “What a dark and bewildering thing it is, this family group,” Williams wrote to Windham. “I can only feel one thing, the necessity for strength and the pettiness of all other considerations. I guess that is what I came home for. Because I can’t give them any help.” “Does nothing but stay home and drink,” Williams wrote to Wood about his father. “When sufficiently drunk I think he is dangerous. Mother says that he talks threateningly and abusively to my grandfather.” By the time of his last visit home, in early March 1945, before the opening of The Glass Menagerie, Williams could no longer spend time in the house. For the entire week he felt compelled to stay away from five in the afternoon until two in the morning—“Any excuse just to get away and escape talk and questioning!” he confided to Laughlin. He continued, “Tonight I came in at ten—the earliest—and was greeted by a flood of tears and reproaches—and how could I explain or excuse myself except by saying—Yes, it’s true, I can’t stand it here, not even one night out of one week out of one year!”

  Williams’s eloquence, like his neurotic nature, was part of his family inheritance. While the family’s violence shaped his personality, its fluency shaped his prose. The Dakins, Ottes, and Williamses, who comprised his family tree, were well educated and well spoken. Williams grew up saturated in the rich linguistic brew of biblical imperative, Puritan platitude, classical allusion, patrician punctilio, and Negro homily. His beloved grandfather, the Reverend Dakin, who was the formative male figure of his early years, had a mellifluous voice and enjoyed reading aloud. (“He could recite poetry by the yard,” Edwina said. “I’m sure Tom got some of his love of books from Father.”) The Reverend was also something of a ham in the pulpit. Delivering his sermons, which were written out in a hand as limpid and florid as his speech, he spoke with particular dramatic flair. “Pitch now your tents toward Heaven and the Sure Rising,” he intoned, in a sermon first given in 1901, a decade before Williams was born, and last delivered in 1920, by which time Williams was in the habit of clinging to his grandfather’s every metaphor-laden word. “As the storm of sin rages fiercely about you and within you, as the horizon of the world grows darker with new and ever new forms of evil, learn to shelter yourself more and more closely in the Rock of Ages till the storm shall cease and the blackened sky pierced by radiant rays of glory from the Son of Righteousness who will come to you with healings in his Wings.”

  With grandmother and grandfather, Rosina Dakin (“Grand”) and the Reverend Dakin

  Edwina was as wordy as her father, though her proselytizing was of a different kind. “Is my mother a lung lady?” Williams asked, in one of his earliest recorded childhood sentences. Although Edwina chose to construe this as a comical malaprop for “young lady,” the answer to her toddler’s question was an unequivocal yes. Edwina was all lungs. “She was always talking,” Dakin said. “There was never any silence. You would step in the room, and she immediately started.” He went on, “She liked to focus the attention on herself by talking. She wouldn’t pay any attention to anyone but herself. It was like water dripping—tip, tip, tip.”

  Edwina wasn’t just a talker: she was a narrative event, a torrent of vivid, cadenced, florid, and confounding speech that could not be denied. Eloquence was a show of power amid her powerlessness. As a child, she had dreamed of being an opera singer; in adulthood her operatics were exhibited through bouts of feinting, rowing, and talking—performances that made a manipulative spectacle of her un-boundaried feeling. With the fine filigree of her language, as Dakin pointed out, “she was trying to gain the stage.” (“Miss Edwina will still be talking for at least an hour after she’s laid to rest,” Williams wrote in his essay “Let It All Hang Out.”) In her verbal fights with CC, according to Williams, Edwina was “rarely if ever bested.”

  A large word horde was part of a Southern belle’s arsenal of seduction, the sugar to swat the fly. “It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure,” Amanda tells Tom in The Glass Menagerie, as she launches into a story about her legendary gentleman callers. “She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions. . . . Never anything coarse or common or vulgar.” As Amanda preached it and Edwina lived it, talk was a tool, an exhibition, and an assertion. In Edwina’s case, speech renovated
reality; it imposed a sense of coherence on the emotional chaos of her life, diverting her hostility away from herself and making her unknowable. “I always like to forget the unpleasant,” Edwina wrote, adding, “I often pretended to feel gay when I was in anguish. I did not think it fair of parents to take out their feelings on children. . . . I believe it would have been far more grim had I not pretended things weren’t as bad as they seemed. All of us are actors to the degree that we must be to survive.” For Edwina’s children to survive her and to get the emotional support they needed, they had both to indulge and to join her narrative. At the beginning of The Glass Menagerie, as Amanda is about to launch into a reverie about her past, Williams demonstrated this complicity:

  TOM: I know what’s coming!

  LAURA: Yes. But let her tell it.

  TOM: Again?

  LAURA: She loves to tell it.

  (Amanda returns with bowl of dessert.)

  AMANDA: One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!—gentleman callers! . . .

  TOM: I bet you could talk.

  AMANDA: Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you.

  Edwina’s wall of words was designed to keep the world at attention and at bay. Speech was a sort of confidence trick: that is, her words were intended to give confidence both to others and to herself. “You couldn’t sit with Edwina without wanting to imitate her,” Gore Vidal said. “She had this rather grim face, a very long upper lip. I used to call her the good Gray Goose. Tennessee thought that terribly funny.” Williams, whom Edwina claimed “was exceptionally observant as a child,” was a good audience for his mother, a fact to which The Glass Menagerie bears witness—a retelling of the saga of her upbringing as a Southern belle, her suitors, her God-fearing piety, her husband’s abandonment, and her gallant support of her fragile brood. All Edwina’s homilies, aphorisms, and idioms, with their particular quality of denial, were absorbed by Williams and reenacted by Amanda. When Edwina first saw herself re-created on stage, as she sat with her son at the Chicago opening, Williams recalled, she “looked like a horse eating briars. She was touching her throat and clasping her hands and quite unable to look at me.” Later, backstage, Laurette Taylor asked her, “Well, Mrs. Williams, how did you like yourself?” “Myself?” Edwina said grandly, rising above what she saw as Taylor’s impertinence.

  Edwina was, as Williams politely characterized her in his memoir, “a moderately controlled hysteric.” And, like many hysterics, she had trouble with her body; she was frigid. “She used to scream every time she had sex with my father,” Williams said. “And we children were terrified. We’d run out in the streets and the neighbors would take us in.” Dakin, who joked about his mother being “president of the anti-sex league,” said, “She didn’t believe in sex, she avoided it completely.” Edwina described her love to her children, rather than demonstrating it. Kissing and hugging—the ordinary tactile expressions of maternal affection—were not in her repertoire. “She just didn’t touch you,” Dakin said. “She didn’t react well to anything physical. We never had it, and didn’t expect it.”

  Amanda, like Edwina, avoids the physical. In the course of the play, the stage directions indicate, she touches her son only three times. “Don’t quote instinct to me!” she snaps at Tom, upbraiding him for his defense of human passion. “Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals! Christian adults don’t want it!” For Edwina, spiritual self-sacrifice took the place of passion, a substitution that made her, in Williams’s eyes, “an almost criminally foolish woman.” With her “monolithic Puritanism,” as Williams called it, Edwina embodied “all the errors and mistakes and misunderstandings that her time and background could produce. She is so full of them that she is virtually a monument of them, nor has she outgrown a single one of them,” he wrote in 1946. He added, “Society should be scourged for producing such ‘Christian martyrs’!—such monuments of misapprehension!” In the hope that her hapless daughter, who had never graduated from high school or held a job, might become a secretary, Edwina had Rose practice typing such self-improving homilies as:

  Achievement, of whatever kind, is the crown of effort, the diadem of thought. By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness and well-directed thought a man ascends; by the aid of animality, indolence, impurity, corruption, and confusion of thought a man descends.

  Like all hysterics, Edwina was adept at transmitting her inner state to others. Her martyred look, which is preserved in The Glass Menagerie’s second scene, could pierce even CC’s bow-wow façade. Recalling an evening when his father came late and drunk to the dinner table, Williams wrote, “She fixes on him her look of silent suffering like a bird dog drawing a bead on a covey of quail in the bushes.” Edwina’s performance could draw out of CC an almost “maniacal fury.” In the case of her children, who most needed her emotional support, that fury turned inward.

  Thanks to the dread of the physical that Edwina “imposed,” Tennessee, Rose, and Dakin were strangers to their own bodies. Dakin remained sexually inexperienced until his marriage at the age of thirty-seven; Rose, whose first signs of madness, according to a 1937 Farmington State Hospital report, were a “reaction to delusions of sexual immorality of family,” died a virgin; and, by his own admission, Williams didn’t masturbate until he was twenty-six, “and then not with my hands but by rubbing my groin against my bed-sheets while recalling the incredible grace and beauty of a boy-diver plunging naked from the high board in the swimming-pool of Washington U. in St. Louis.”

  In The Glass Menagerie, Laura’s desire—for her gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, on whom she had a secret high-school crush—paralyzes her; she literally can’t bring herself to stand and to answer the front door. In the Williams family, the fear of showing desire made the “highly sexed” Rose hunch her narrow shoulders in the presence of the opposite sex and “talk with an almost hysterical animation which few young men knew how to take.” “She made no positive motion toward the world but stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move,” Williams writes in “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” his first portrayal of Laura, whose gimp leg stands in for Rose’s psychological disability. Williams had his own form of morbid shyness. Having begun early on “to associate the sensual with the impure, an error that tortured me during and after pubescence,” he found it “almost entirely impossible . . . to speak aloud in class.” Anything that promised exposure both excited and confounded him. “Almost without remission for the next four or five years, I would blush whenever a pair of human eyes, male or female (but mostly female since my life was spent mostly among members of that gender) would meet mine,” he wrote in his memoir. It was a shyness that persisted for years. “What taunts me worst is my inability to make contact with the people, the world,” Williams wrote in a 1942 diary entry. “I remain one and separate among them. My tongue is locked. I float among them in a private dream and shyness forbids speech and union.”

  Edwina, who once boasted that “the only psychiatrist in whom I believe is our Lord,” was, according to Williams, “essentially more psychotic than my sister Rose.” “Like a force of nature, she seemed to be directed blindly,” Williams said. Her paranoia and her terror lodged in her children, modifying their behavior and keeping them at once overly suggestible and under wraps. Like Amanda, she used her children as vessels into which she emptied the desires and the fears of her frustrated heart. “You’re my right-hand bower! Don’t fall down, don’t fail!” Amanda exhorts her idealized son. For a long time, Williams and Rose struggled to maintain their image as dutiful, well-mannered representations of their mother’s hopes. Rose, in Edwina’s romantic fantasy, was a Southern belle and wife-to-be. Likewise, in the first beats of The Glass Menagerie, Amanda orders the crippled dateless Laura to sit: “Resume your seat, little sister—I want you to stay fresh and pretty—for gentleman callers!” “I’m not expecting any gentleman callers,” Laura say
s, who knows her disability debars her from a normal life. “But Mother—,” she says. “I’m—crippled!” Amanda refuses to acknowledge even the most glaring fact of Laura’s damage. “Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word. Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect—hardly noticeable, even!” she says. Before Laura’s eyes and ours, Amanda fictionalizes the world and insists that her children deny the truth of their very essence.

  AMANDA: It’s almost time for our gentleman callers to start arriving. (She flounces girlishly toward the kitchenette.) How many do you suppose we’re going to entertain this afternoon? . . .

  LAURA: (alone in the dining room) I don’t believe we’re going to receive any, Mother.

  AMANDA: (reappearing, airily) What? No one—not one? You must be joking!

  (LAURA nervously echoes her laugh. . . .)

  For her first-born son, Edwina’s desires were especially strong. “My mother was extremely, overly I would say, affectionate toward my brother,” Dakin Williams said. With CC permanently struck from her emotional map, Edwina formed a marriage of sorts with young Tom. “Her husband had deserted her shortly after S. was born,” Williams wrote in the short story that preceded the 1945 play Stairs to the Roof. “She was determined the boy should not escape from her too.” From the day she bought her chronically shy twelve-year-old son a ten-dollar typewriter, Williams was, in her mind, “mah writin’ son,” joined to her apron strings by a shared fantasy of self, a sort of grandiose co-production that became his destiny. “Within a few months,” Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, writing “became the center of my life . . . then all of a sudden one day when I sat down at the second-hand (maroon-colored) Underwood portable that I had received for Xmas . . . it suddenly occurred to me: this is my life, this is my love! What will I do if I LOSE it?—And the thought struck such terror in my heart, that for—I forget the exact intervals of time—days, weeks!—I was not able to write. I was a blocked artist!”