Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  In a real sense, Williams the writer was dreamed up by the disappointed Edwina. Writing strengthened his bond with his mother at the same time that it provided Edwina with yet another soldier in her battle against the disdained and disdainful CC, who, as Dakin said, “thought writers were complete zeroes who would never amount to anything, i.e. make money.” “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad, when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Williams wrote. As Cornelius spurned Tom’s efforts, Edwina “doubled her support,” Lyle Leverich writes in Tom. “Whether intentionally or not, she had fashioned a vengeful weapon that served as a permanent wedge between father and son.” For Williams, storytelling became a kind of collusion, an attempt to live up to his mother’s vivacity, her way of imagining, and her sense of him. The burden of the roles the children inhabited finally became insupportable.

  Unacknowledged by CC and reconstituted by Edwina—the unspoken family message was “you cannot have the feelings you have”—the children struggled to make a place in their lives for their own emotional reality. The combination of CC’s violence and Edwina’s repression was at the root of Williams’s various physical complaints, and of his breakdown at the International Shoe Company in 1935. “I was a sweet child. Child murdered,” he wrote in his journals. The horrible family atmosphere was also a recipe for madness. According to Williams, Rose had “the same precarious balance of nerves that I have to live with” but no outlet for them; gradually, and inexorably, she descended into her own unreachable world. One of her reported “delusions,” she told one of her doctors, was that “all of the family were mentally deranged.” After Rose’s first breakdown, Williams recalled her walking into his tiny room “like a somnambulist” and announcing “we must all die together.” A psychiatrist told CC, “Rose is liable to go down and get a butcher knife one night and cut your throat.” “Tragedy. I write that word knowing the full meaning of it,” Williams wrote in his journal on January 25, 1937. “We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death.”

  With father and mother

  When the disoriented and delusional Rose was first admitted to the Farmington State Hospital, at the age of twenty-eight, the psychiatrist who debriefed her observed, “Insight was entirely absent although she at times states that she is mentally ill as a result of her family’s troubles.” In Williams’s eyes, Rose’s lobotomy was, to some degree, a result of Edwina’s sexual hysteria, an enforcement of radical innocence through the surgical removal of the part of the brain that remembers. “Mother chose to have Rose’s lobotomy done. My father didn’t want it. In fact he cried. It’s the only time I saw him cry,” Williams said. “Why was the operation performed? Well, Miss Rose expressed herself with great eloquence, but she said things that shocked Mother. Rose loved to shock Mother.” He went on, “Rose said, ‘Mother, you know we girls at All Saints College, we used to abuse ourselves with altar candles we stole from the Chapel.’ And Mother screamed like a peacock! She rushed to the head doctor, and she said, ‘Do anything, anything to shut her up.’ ” The lobotomy was a family tragedy; it finally and forever fit Rose into Edwina’s version of life. Rose, as Edwina wrote, “now lived in a world where she remembers only the good things.”

  Where Rose was forced to comply, Williams escaped, mostly into his writing, in which he was able to turn himself and the torture of his family into an event of a different kind. In playwriting, he found a strategy both to hide himself away and to vent his murderous feelings. On the stage, he could exorcise his anger. Writing, he said, was an act of “outer oblivion and inner violence.” He likened his lyrical impulses—what he called his “sidewalk histrionics”—to the performance of a little Southern girl he once saw, decked out in “cast-off finery,” who screamed to her indifferent friends, “Look at me, look at me, look at me!” until she fell over in “a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net. And still nobody looked at her.” (Williams’s first story, “Isolated”—published in Junior Life at five cents a copy—was a three-paragraph fantasy about a flood that leaves him marooned and invisible until he is saved by a search party that is “reclaiming dead bodies.”) Rose, who had no symbolic release for her rage, took it out on herself and her family. The lobotomy was the reverse of her brother’s solution: outer violence and inner oblivion. According to her psychiatric report prior to the lobotomy, Rose suffered from “somatic delusions: felt her heart was as big as her chest; thought that her body had disappeared from her bed.” The lobotomy transformed her literally into a ghost of her former self.

  That ghostliness is built into The Glass Menagerie, in which shards of memory play out the Narrator’s internal drama. By standing outside the scene, the Narrator suggests both his and Williams’s detachment, which verges on the spectral. Absence dominates the play. A specially lit photograph of the Wingfields’ missing father in his First World War uniform stands on the Wingfield mantelpiece, serving as a reminder—as if one were needed—of the omnipresent weight of CC’s abandonment: the grief that punished and unhinged the Williams family. Tom Wingfield—like the young Williams, whose depressions he described as “interior storms that show remarkably little from the outside” and which created “a deep chasm between myself and all other people”—feels himself to be, if not a ghost, then not exactly alive. “You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin,” he says. Tom’s habitual moviegoing, which so mystifies Amanda, is no mystery to him. “People go to the movies instead of moving!” he explains. Psychic survival is linked to make-believe.

  At the finale, the Narrator stands before the audience as a haunted man, hounded by figments of his internal world. “I traveled around a great deal,” he says. “The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something[. . . .] Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes . . . Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” The Narrator stands in a spotlight, bathed in white light—the light of the imagination.

  In the first moment of the play, the Narrator announces the “tricks up his sleeve”; in the last beats, he shows how, through the act of storytelling and artifice, he has taken command of himself. The stage becomes “almost dancelike,” a hallucinatory tableau vivant in which Williams transforms what he called “my doomed family” into a form of glory. The panoply of his recollected misery becomes a dumb show—an “interior pantomime,” the stage directions call it: “The interior scene is played as though viewed through soundproof glass. Amanda appears to be making a comforting speech to Laura who is huddled upon the sofa. Now that we cannot hear the mother’s speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty. Laura’s dark hair hides her face until at the end of the speech she lifts it to smile at her mother. . . . Amanda’s gestures are slow and graceful . . . as she comforts the daughter.” Instead of being overwhelmed by the memories of family madness, the Narrator is now in control of his own internal turmoil. “Blow out your candles, Laura—and so good-bye,” he says, in the last line of the play. Laura does as she’s told. The silent final gesture demonstrates the Narrator’s dramatic prowess; it also broadcasts Williams’s dramatic goal—to redeem life, through beauty, from the humiliation of grief.

  When the final curtain came down on the Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie, the audience knew that some kind of theater history had been made. “Never before in my experience or never since and perhaps never again in my life will there be anything like it,” Eddie Dowling said. “It was really a thunderous, thunderous thing.” The cast took twenty-four curtain calls. Laurette Taylor, “holding out the ruffles of the ancient blue taffeta as though she might break again into the waltz of her girlhood,” was crying. “All the people backstage were crying,” recalled the actress Betsy Blair, who was Julie Haydon’s understu
dy. For the first time that year, a Broadway audience rose to its feet shouting, “Author, Author!” The calls persisted until Williams was coaxed out of his seat. With a helping hand from Dowling, he climbed up onto the stage. The audience experienced Williams’s childhood just as he had—startled, bewildered, terrified, and excited. Now, as he stood before the boisterous crowd, he even seemed jejune. Slight, his hair closely cropped, his jacket button missing, the blushing author bowed awkwardly to the actors; in so doing, he showed his backside to the audience.

  After the curtain came down for the last time, Taylor threw her arms around Dowling. “Eddie, I can’t remember anything,” she said. “Does it look like a success?”

  I said, “Well, Laurette, you must have left your hearing aids home because there’s never been such . . . ”

  She said, “Well, I never pay attention to applause. But the quiet during the performance, Eddie. What is the quiet?”

  “We learned from thirteen or fourteen weeks in Chicago, Laurette, about the quiet.”

  “But,” she said, “New York isn’t Chicago. They’re intelligent in New York.”

  I said, “Laurette, this isn’t a matter of intelligence. These are basic emotions, my dear girl, and haven’t you caught on yet to the kind of play we’re doing?”

  She said, “Oh, don’t give me all that nonsense.” She said, “Why wasn’t there some reaction to my funny lines? I didn’t get one so-and-so.”

  I said, “Well, you’ll find out very soon.”

  The number of people who came backstage to see the actors was so large that the Playhouse’s safety curtain had to be lifted to allow the euphoric spillover crowd to loiter onstage. “It was like after a World Series game when they come down out of the stands. That’s what it was,” Dowling said. He continued, “We went on for a long time after. . . . I don’t suppose there’s been a hit since like it. Certainly no actress before or since has ever made the impression this woman made. She’s a legend along with Bernhardt and Duse, and all out of that little play.”

  To the sharp eye of the New Republic’s Stark Young, who wrote the most evocative and informed response to the play, Taylor was “the real and first talent of them all.” “Here is naturalistic acting of the most profound, spontaneous, unbroken continuity and moving life,” he wrote. In later years, Williams would recall the rest of the cast as “pretty run-of-the-mill,” but his memory of Taylor’s peerless performance never lost its luster. “Her talent was luminous in a way that exceeded the natural. There was a rightness about her that you could not see beyond,” he wrote after she died in 1946. “Once in a while, only once in a while and not long, the confusion and dimness about us so thickly is penetrated by a clarity, an illumination of this kind, which makes it still possible to believe that the tunnel in which we move is not closed at both ends.”

  Afterward, the first-nighters filed off to a party in Williams’s honor that Wood was hosting at the Royalton. Williams was too stunned to socialize. He and Windham disappeared into the balmy night. They walked the city for hours and forgot about the party. “I don’t remember feeling a great sense of triumph,” Williams said. “In fact, I don’t remember it very well at all. It should have been one of the happiest nights of my life. . . . I’d spent so much of my energy on the climb to success that when I’d made it and my play was the hottest ticket in town, I felt almost no satisfaction.” Williams’s word for this moment in his life was “providential”—“suddenly, providentially, ‘The Glass Menagerie’ made it when I was thirty-four.” As if to underscore the inexplicable nature of the play’s good fortune, he kept in his scrapbook a published astrological chart showing “a planetary tie-up” the night of the premiere “that is amazing.”

  To the young playwright Arthur Miller, The Glass Menagerie augured what he called “a revolution” in New York theater. “In one stroke,” Miller wrote, “ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history. . . . In [Williams], American theatre found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and amplitude of feeling.” “It seems to me that your glass menagerie began a renaissance of our theatre . . . the climate of creation was invigorated,” his friend Carson McCullers wrote years later, assessing the seismic impact of the play.

  It was not only the American theater that was reborn. Edwina Williams, to whom her dutiful son gave half his royalties—The Glass Menagerie would run for 563 performances—was also reborn, liberated by her new wealth to leave her disastrous marriage. “I was happy to have my freedom,” she said. “The walls of the house had resounded with wrath for too many years and now there was peace at long last.” Laurette Taylor was reborn as a legend in her time. “The postman can ring twice,” she said. “From here on I’m just kicking the clouds around.” And overnight, in the public’s mind, Tom Williams was reborn as Tennessee Williams, playwright. The day after the opening, according to the front page of the New York Times, “there was a feeling of release—release from a hard winter and a promise of release, soon, from at least some of the cares of war.” The day was Easter Sunday, 1945.

  Telegram to parents about the Broadway opening night of The Glass Menagerie

  The news of Williams’s reversal of fortune arrived at his parents’ household by telegram a few days after the opening:

  REVIEWS ALL RAVE. INDICATE SMASH HIT. LINE BLOCK LONG AT BOX OFFICE. LOVE, TOM.

  Well, not quite all raves. The New York Times, not for the first time, missed the point, and the boat. Lewis Nichols, in his review, dismissed The Glass Menagerie as “snatches of talk about the war, bits of psychology, occasional moments of rather flowery writing.” Stark Young fired back in the New Republic: “Such a response and attitude as that Mr. Nichols expresses helps to tie our theatre down. What we need in the theatre is a sense of language, a sense of texture in speech, vibration and impulse in speech. Behind the Southern speech in the mother’s part is the echo of great literature, or at least a respect for it. There is the sense in it of her having been born out of a tradition, not out of a box.” Although, in public, Taylor was fond of telling the press that “in playing Amanda you’re riding on the audience’s shoulders,” in private, she knew it was the playwright’s shoulders the character rode on. “The whole week has been fantastic: such bravos! Such notices!! Such raves!!!” she wrote to her son on April 8. “The play and that remarkable fellow Tennessee Williams have (as you can see) come under the wire, and no matter how marvelous the actress—The Play’s the Thing.”

  WITHIN A MONTH of the play’s opening, V-E day brought an end to the war in Europe, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. Fueled by longing and by loss, the republic, which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of Depression and five years of war, assumed, seemingly overnight, a new momentum, a glorious and guilt-ridden race for its own survival. Recalling this time as “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history” in his novel American Pastoral, Philip Roth wrote, “Sacrifice and constraint were over. . . . The lid was off.” In the next decade, American per-capita income would triple, the greatest growth of wealth in the history of Western civilization. Inevitably, given such enormous social and economic change, the American consciousness also underwent a sort of mutation. “Everything was up for grabs,” Arthur Miller said. “They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self.” He added, “It was a difference in the idea of the individual.” Over the next decade, this cultural journey to the interior was manifested in the shift from social realism to Abstract Expressionism, from Marxism to Freudianism, from theatrical naturalism to Williams’s “personal lyricism.” It is not insignificant that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, one of the iconic expressions of postwar America, was originally titled The Inside of His Head.

  “There is no dynamic in life or art without form,” Clifford Odets wrote in his
journal in 1940. “So what is to be the new dynamic of democracy?” The Glass Menagerie answered that question. With its combination of exhaustion and exhilaration, the play looked both backward and forward in time, both outward and inward. Its romantic posture, its debate between self-sacrifice and self-interest perfectly captured the nation’s mood. The characters in The Glass Menagerie are born out of the scarcity and the stasis of the prewar thirties, not the buoyant postwar forties. But through its resilient Narrator, hell-bent on seizing his life and finding his personal fulfillment, the play pointed toward accidental but transcendent survival. “Overcome selfishness!” Amanda hectors Tom, who, in the end, embraces it. The garish sexual, emotional, and spiritual struggles of the individual, what Walt Whitman called “the destiny of me,” were the focus of Williams’s concern. The self-involvement that made Williams’s plays inaccessible to a wartime audience now in peacetime made them resonant.

  Out of the depredations of his childhood, Williams set about remodeling his own character. “I build a tottering pillar of my blood / . . . against the siege of all that is not I,” he wrote in “The Siege.” His early diaries and letters strained under the pressure of his self-invention; at times, in their urgency, they took on an almost religious tone. During his apprentice years—“that long upward haul as a professional writer, that desperate, stumbling climb”—he prayed to Hart Crane, whose poems he carried in his jacket pocket: “I am thy frail ghost-brother. Thy equal wanderer. Guide me,” he wrote in his diary. Sometimes, he beseeched Anton Chekhov too: “Breathe into me a little of thy life!” he pleaded. He lit votive candles for his own success and succor. “I will burn one for you and for me . . . a ten-cent one!” he wrote to a friend. “We will be purified and redeemed!—I work hard these days. For me there is either success or destruction sooner or not so sooner & so I work.”