New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;

  Invisible valves of the sea, – locks, tendons

  Crested and creeping, troughing corridors

  That fall back yawning to another plunge.

  Slowly the sun’s red caravel drops light

  Once more behind us … It is morning there –

  O where our Indian emperies lie revealed,

  Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!

  He worked on some of the earlier as well as the later sections, including ‘Atlantis’. He wrote to a friend in New York: ‘I’ve been having a great time reading Atlantis in America, the last book out on the subject, and full of exciting suggestions. Putting it back for 40 or 50 thousand years, it’s easy to believe that a continent existed in mid-Atlantic waters and that the Antilles and West Indies are but salient peaks of its surface.’

  In August 1926 he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘I have never been able to live completely in my work before. Now it is to learn a great deal. To handle the beautiful skeins of this myth of America – to realize suddenly, as I seem to, how much of the past is living under only slightly altered forms, even in machinery and such-like, is extremely exciting.’

  He sent the sections of The Bridge as he finished them to editors and friends. On 22 July he sent Marianne Moore his poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ for The Dial (which she accepted); it would be the prologue for his long poem. Two days later he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘That little prelude, by the way, I think to be almost the best thing I’ve ever written, something steady and uncompromising about it.’ Its last two stanzas read:

  Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

  Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

  The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

  Already snow submerges an iron year …

  O Sleepless as the river under thee,

  Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

  Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

  And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

  Crane was well aware that an epic poem could not be written in America in the 1920s. Such a poem would, he knew, because of its very ambition, be doomed to failure or something close to failure. This idea seemed, most of the time, to excite him. He was, it is important to remember, a poet in his twenties. At times he saw that the symbols would not carry the weight he gave them. ‘The bridge,’ he wrote to Waldo Frank in June 1926, ‘as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks.’

  But in other letters, including ones to Frank, and especially one written fifteen months later to his patron Otto Kahn that set out the grand design of the poem, he seemed to feel no doubt about the importance of his project. ‘The Aeneid was not written in two years,’ he wrote to Kahn, ‘nor in four, and in more than one sense I feel justified in comparing the historic and cultural scope of The Bridge to that great work. It is at least a symphony with an epic theme, and a work of considerable profundity and inspiration.’

  Like many young poets, he wrote home once his first book had appeared wondering what they would make of it. He wrote to his mother: ‘I’m very much amused at what you say about the interest in my book out there in Cleveland. Wait until they see it, and try to read it! I may be wrong, but I think they will eventually express considerable consternation.’

  His father was not impressed. As late as 1928, when The Bridge was almost finished, he suggested that his son learn a trade. But Crane was still adding to his store, discovering, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins early in 1928. ‘It is a revelation to me – of unrealized possibilities,’ he wrote to Yvor Winters, who seemed to admire his work, and with whom he had a fascinating correspondence until Winters reviewed The Bridge harshly, thus ending what had been a close literary friendship.

  Crane seemed to derive energy and immense pleasure from travel. His letters from France and Mexico are filled with delight, even though it is clear that he was drinking a great deal in Mexico. It was there in 1932 that he broke rank, as he put it, with the ‘brotherhood’, and began an affair with Peggy Cowley, who was in the midst of a divorce from Malcolm Cowley. ‘I think it has done me considerable good,’ he wrote. ‘The old beauty still claims me, however, and my eyes roam as much as ever. I doubt if I’ll ever change very fundamentally.’

  Once The Bridge was finished and published, Crane continued working on a number of shorter poems, including ‘The Broken Tower’:

  The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

  Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell

  Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn

  From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

  In Mexico he had been on a Guggenheim fellowship that ended on 31 March 1932, when he said to a friend, ‘I’m just plain Hart Crane again.’ He was unsure whether he wanted to remain in Mexico or return to the United States. The problem, as before, was money, and this problem now became more severe when he learned that his inheritance from his father’s estate would be much less than he had expected, not enough to live on. His stepmother wrote to him on 12 April:

  Nothing can be paid from the estate account to you in the way of your bequest … and there isn’t any income from stocks to speak of. We are not making any money from our different businesses. The only thing we can do is to give you an allowance from my salary each month, and that I have made arrangements to do.

  Crane was drinking wildly and behaving erratically but still spoke of plans for future work. It was clear because of the freedom he had won during his travels and his high ambition as a poet and also because of his constant drinking that he was in no state to go back to New York and work again in advertising, or make his living in any way. He spoke of suicide and, it was reported, made a number of wills. Eventually, it was decided that he and Peggy Cowley would sail back to the United States on the Orizaba from Veracruz. After a stop in Havana, it seems that Crane was badly beaten up on the ship in the early hours of 27 April. One of his fellow passengers, Gertrude Berg, saw that ‘he had a black eye and looked generally battered’.

  Close to noon that day he appeared on deck. ‘He walked to the railing,’ Berg remembered,

  took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and then dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea … Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again.

  Although lifeboats were lowered, there were no further sightings of the poet. One of the most brilliant first acts in American literature had come to an end.

  Tennessee Williams and the Ghost of Rose

  Although Henry James’s sister, Alice, was five years his junior, they were the closest among the five James siblings. In her biography of Alice James, Jean Strouse has written:

  Alice and Henry shared throughout their lives a deeper intellectual and spiritual kinship than either felt with any other member of the family. Within the family group the second son and only daughter were more isolated than any of the others … What bound Henry and Alice together was a … profound mutual understanding. Henry had withdrawn early from the competitive masculine fray to a safe inner world.

  As a way of escape Henry James found his ‘safe inner world’ through reading and writing; this was not available in the same way to Alice. Henry created a vast imaginative terrain that he inhabited with considerable determination, independence and strength of will; his only sister, on the other hand, became a reverse image of him – she was a weak patient, dependent on others, suffering from ailments not easy to name and impossible to cure. Henry James did not keep a personal diary and nowhere set down his dreams and fears, but it is clear from his letters about her, especially when she arrived in England in 1884 and after her death eight years later, that Alice’s fate and her su
ffering preoccupied him a great deal while he also worked hard and managed a varied and busy social life.

  Just as it is possible to read the character of Rosie Muniment, the witty invalid, in The Princess Casamassima as a version of Alice James, we can also read the children Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw, written three years after Alice’s death, as versions of the two James siblings, Henry and Alice, who both lived unmarried and in exile in England, oddly abandoned and orphaned and, in certain ways, emotionally unprotected. In February 1895 James wrote in his notebook the idea of a

  possible little drama residing in the existence of a peculiar intense and interesting affection between a brother and a sister … I fancy the pair understanding each other too well – fatally well … [They] abound in the same sense, see with the same sensibilities and the same imagination, vibrate with the same nerves … Two lives, two beings, and one experience.

  Although he never wrote this story, the notebook entry is fascinating for anyone interested in James’s nonchalant masculinity and Alice’s neurotic inertia, as it is for anyone looking at the richly complex emotional and creative life of Henry James and the diaries and letters of his sister Alice.

  In his Memoirs, Tennessee Williams, a writer both homosexual and hypochondriac who also devoted fierce energy to his work while his only sister suffered from a mysterious mental illness, wrote about his relationship to his sister Rose:

  I may have inadvertently omitted a good deal of material about the unusually close relations between Rose and me. Some perceptive critic of the theatre made the observation that the true theme of my work is ‘incest’. My sister and I had a close relationship, quite unsullied by any carnal knowledge … And yet our love was, and is, the deepest in our lives and was, perhaps, very pertinent to our withdrawal from extrafamilial attachments.

  Henry James and Tennessee Williams each marvelled at his sister’s own prose style in diaries and letters. Alice’s diary, James wrote, ‘is heroic in its individuality … and the beauty and eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute … a new claim for the family renown. This last element – her style, her power to write – are indeed to me a delight.’

  Williams in his Memoirs quoted from Rose’s letters: ‘I remember one that began with this phrase: “Today the sun came up like a five-dollar gold piece!” Or another in which she wrote: “Today we drove in town and I purchased Palmolive shampoo for my crowning glory.” ’

  In his two best early plays, Williams dramatized relations between siblings, one of them watchful, the other damaged and insecure; each contains a key moment in which the weaker sibling loses her moorings. In The Glass Menagerie (1944) Laura’s brother writes poems, admires the work of D. H. Lawrence and works in a shoe warehouse, as Williams did, while Laura herself is, like Rose and indeed like Williams himself, immensely fragile and sexually insecure. (The mother in the play was, according to Williams’s younger brother, so accurately based on their mother that she could have sued.) In the play, Laura is psychologically broken by the visit of one gentleman caller; in life, Rose’s troubles began when she was abandoned by her ambitious boyfriend after her father had lost part of his ear in a fight at an all-night poker game, thus ruining his chance of further professional advancement. ‘Her heart broke, then,’ Williams wrote, ‘and it was after that that the mysterious stomach trouble began.’

  As he worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, which was produced in 1947, Williams was living in New Orleans with his boyfriend Pancho Rodriguez. In his notebook he wrote about the difference between them: ‘He is incapable of reason. Violence belongs to his nature as completely as it is abhorrent to mine.’ According to a friend, ‘Tennessee behaved very badly toward Pancho, and he did so by using Pancho for real-life scenes which he created – and then transformed them into moments of A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Thus Pancho, rough, less educated than Williams, became Stanley to Williams’s Stella. The drama begins when Stella’s unstable sister comes to New Orleans and has, eventually, to be taken away. Some of the most fruitful moments in Williams’s work came when he found metaphors in drama for what had really happened to him and his sister Rose.

  Williams in his art thus gave shape to his life, or to the parts of it that really interested him. The other sources for his life that he left have to be read judiciously. His impressionistic book Memoirs, for example, which he wrote in 1975 at the age of sixty-four, in the words of his biographer Donald Spoto, ‘conceals more than it shares, misrepresents more than it documents, omits major events, confuses dates and … tells virtually nothing about the playwright’s career’. Williams’s letters as source material are more useful, but they tended to be written to amuse and suit their recipients. Thus his notebooks, which he kept, mostly in diary form, between 1936 and 1958 and again briefly between 1979 and 1981, and which have been edited and annotated with fastidious care by Margaret Bradham Thornton, are the best guide we have to his life and his moods. About many aspects of him, this new volume is invaluable.

  The entries we have begin when Williams was twenty-five and living with his family, struggling under considerable pressures to find a voice as a poet, short story writer and playwright. These pressures might explain the tone of self-obsession, self-pity and despair. The entries seem to have been written at night and he himself became alert to their morbid self-indulgence, quoting Nietzsche: ‘Do not let the evening be judge of the day.’ While he was trying to impress everyone in his creative work, in these pages he wished to impress no one and thus could be brutally honest about his own failings. It is interesting that when he found success and fame the tone did not change much, even when he had many lovers, enough money to travel and lots of friends and admirers. He still, when he came to write in his notebooks, felt at times sorry for himself but at other times something more interesting and convincing, a huge unease about being in the world at all, which nothing, no matter how thrilling, could lift or cure.

  There is never a moment in his notebooks when he congratulates himself on mastering the structure of a new play or creating a new and memorable character or on that precise day writing a speech that worked wonders. Only a few times did he write about technical problems. (His observation that ‘the tragedy of a poet writing drama is that when he writes well – from the dramaturgic technical pt. of view he is often writing badly’ stands out in this book.) He did not jot down ideas as they came to him, as Henry James did, so we do not see in these pages the growth of his most important plays from a single entry. Instead, Williams noted what he was creating as a burden or a dull fact, including scenes he was rewriting or demands from directors and producers. Often, on rereading work in progress, he noted its badness. Precisely how his creative process operated he kept to himself. Instead, he wrote about who had irritated him or pleased him during the day, or how nervous he felt, how many pills he took or how much alcohol he consumed, or how many lengths of the pool he swam. He noted his fears and dreams.

  It is strange how out of all of this mostly inchoate and random writing, a sense of a personal vision emerges that would make its way into the very core of Williams’s main characters and scenes. These entries capture an authentic voice, an artist alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish. Many of his most whining entries were written on the very days when he was producing his most glittering work. His whining was not a game or done for effect; it seems, indeed, a rare example of whining both sincere and heartfelt. Even when he was at his most successful, he could, for example, write: ‘Today the dreaded occasion of reading over the work and the (almost but never quite) expected fit of revulsion.’ Tennessee Williams meant business when he whined. And thus somehow he managed to connect his own dark and obsessive complaints about his works and days, his own dread of life, to his characters and their fate. These notebooks, precisely because they were not intentionally created as raw material for work, now seem to be the rock on which his creations, sparkling and vivid versions of himself, were built.


  In the early years he was coy about sex. In a diary entry for 1979 he disclosed: ‘Such was the Puritanism imposed by Edwina [his mother] that I did not masturbate till the age of Twenty-Six, 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 swimmingpool of Washington U. in Saint Louis.’ The work he produced seemed almost part of a self-disgust, or a desperate need to overcome it, an aspect of pure frustration with himself and his circumstances. On 15 April 1936, for example, he wrote:

  It’s a horrible hot afternoon and I have that horrible oppressed feeling that hot weather gives me. This house frightens me again. I feel trapped – shut in. The radio is on – that awful ball-game – it will be going every afternoon now and hearing it makes me sick – I’m too tired to write – Can do nothing – I am disgusted with the story I wrote Saturday … It seems idiotic to me now … I wish I could write something decent – strong – but everything about me is weak – and silly – Terrible to feel like this.

  The feeling of uselessness arose sometimes from his fears about his masculinity, the sense that he was a sissy, a guy without guts, as much as from his judgements on the badness of his work. Two weeks after the entry quoted above, he wrote: ‘I must remember that my ancestors fought the Indians! No, I must remember that I am a man – when all is said and done – and not a snivelling baby.’ And then on 8 May: ‘If only I could realize I am not 2 persons. I am only one. There is no sense in this division. An enemy inside myself! How absurd!’ Later that year, it struck him about Shakespeare: ‘I bet he was a guy that had plenty of guts. No damn sissy.’ The following year, he wrote: ‘But if I were God I would feel a little bit sorry for Tom [Tennessee] Williams once in a while – he doesn’t have a very gay easy time of it and he does have guts of a sort even though he is a stinking sissy!’