by John Lahr
In You Touched Me!—a sort of prolegomenon to passion—a pious forty-year-old English spinster, Emmie, who is “the proud proprietress of a virgin mind,” rules a household that includes Emmie’s brother Cornelius, the bibulous and long-suffering former sea captain, and his daughter, the timid Matilda, who is in her early twenties. Cornelius has also adopted Hadrian, “a youth of twenty-one,” who returns to this landlocked household in rural England after spending years in the Air Force and brings a sense of the world into an airtight environment whose grace and beauty, the stage directions point out, “nevertheless are not in vital contact with the world.” As the acting edition explains, the story is about overcoming “the fears and reticences that have been instilled in the boy and girl” by Emmie, who represents “not predatory maternity but aggressive sterility.”
The play’s claustrophobic, twilight environment—“like being under water,” Matilda says—mirrors Williams’s own toxic family milieu. “The Victorian actually prevailed until the beginning of the 20’s and is still prevailing in large middle and upper middle class sections of the South at least,” Williams wrote to Wood in 1942. “I grew up, for instance, among just such characters as Emmie and Matilda. In fact Mother and her friends around Columbus, Port Gibson and Natchez would probably consider Emmie a little ‘advanced.’ You all forget how old-fashioned the provinces remain. . . . the fear of the world, the fight to face it and not run away, is the realest thing in all experience to me, and when I use it in my work, I am always surprised that it does not communicate clearly to others.”
You Touched Me! dramatizes both the violent innocence of virginity—a state in which people make themselves strangers to the world and to their own desires—and, in the character of Hadrian, the liberation of those desires through knowledge of the flesh. “Virginity is mostly the consequence of bad environment and unfavorable social conditions,” Cornelius says. He goes on, “Emmie’s is congenital. . . . Matilda’s case is acquired. Exposed to a virulent case of it like Emmie’s, the healthiest constitution would be infected.”
In his letter to Wood, Williams explained Matilda this way: “Without intervention, she would drift into that complete split with reality which is schizophrenic.” Williams saw in Matilda’s confusion a parallel to Rose, “who found it too much and escaped as Matilda is in danger of escaping.” (Rose’s lobotomy erased all memory of desire and inhibition.) Williams, like Hadrian, was saved by his willingness to give in to his own sexuality. “I doubt that anything ever did me more good as a writer than the many years of loneliness, of ‘cruising around,’ making sudden and deep acquaintances one after another, each one leaving a new and fresh print on me,” he wrote in 1950.
You Touched Me! first voiced Williams’s revelation. As Hadrian “catches her fingers and holds her from flight,” he spells out to Matilda his carnal discoveries. “New wonders, new thrills, new excitements!” He continues, “I whisper to you because it is—still a secret.” Hadrian, whom the script describes as “the opposite of the closed house,” is an embodiment of the sensual. He is also emblematic of sexuality’s role in tearing apart the parent-child relationship. At the finale, as he carries Matilda out of the house in his arms, Emmie says, “Where are you going?” “Forward!” Hadrian calls back over his shoulder. “Forward’s the way—for an old man’s daughter to go,” the Captain concludes.
Rehearsing You Touched Me!, 1945
FOR WILLIAMS, THIS embrace of the sensual world was hard won and relatively recent. His evolution into genital sexuality—the transformation essential for male adulthood—had been woefully postponed. He described his youthful self as “the little puritan.” He didn’t masturbate until he was twenty-six. “I didn’t know what such a thing was. Well, I’d heard of it, but it never occurred to me to practice it,” Williams said. Except for his one hapless heterosexual coupling at the University of Iowa, he remained celibate until the age of twenty-seven. In the most prescient autobiographical passage of You Touched Me! the orphan Hadrian links sexual appetite with a child’s need to be fed, and connects his own physical obsession to the absence of a mother’s touch:
HADRIAN: . . . I grew up reaching for something that wasn’t there any more—maybe the breast of my mother.
EMMIE: (Disgustedly) Uhhhhh!
HADRIAN: Something warm and able to give me comfort—I guess that’s what I’m still reaching for. To be warmed—touched—loved! . . . After I left here I learned the ways that you get along in the world—working hard and facing things straight—but still I had that longing, not satisfied yet. To be touched. Now I feel that need more than ever. That’s why I came back here for a second try.
Edwina’s children inevitably inherited her fear of the flesh. Her puritan hectoring echoes through Williams’s plays: “Don’t hang back with the beasts.” “To me—well, that is the secret, the principle of existence—the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed within our reach.” “Don’t quote instinct to me! Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to the animals. Christian adults don’t want it!” For a long time, Williams allowed his instinctual life to be ruled by his mother’s dicta. By refusing to acknowledge his own sexuality, he elected to remain a child well into his twenties. He had no clear sexual identity, no sexual body, and, by virtue of the fact that he had no meaningful connection to CC, he did not disengage from his father. Living with his embattled parents and his grandparents, he also had no model of couples nourishing each other sexually.
Rose had been driven mad by the taboo around sex and by its disruptive power; Edwina had become a frigid virago; CC, a drunken, furious absence, forced to carouse with whores; and even the Reverend Dakin was made a stranger to himself. When Williams was a young adult, the mere touch of another’s flesh on his own eroticized body—the “body electric,” as he sometimes called it, invoking Whitman—could give him a spontaneous orgasm, itself a defense against the forbidden sexual act. Recalling his first female love, Hazel Kramer, Williams said, “She was frigid. She’d make me count to ten before she’d let me kiss her; we were both 11 when we met and we were sweethearts until she was in college. She said, ‘Tom, we’re much too young to think about these things.’ But I constantly thought about sex. In fact, the first time I had a spontaneous ejaculation was when I put my arm around Hazel on a river boat in St. Louis. She had on a sleeveless dress and I put my arm about her and stroked her bare shoulder and I had on white flannel pants and I came, and we couldn’t go on dancing.” Later, in college at the University of Iowa, Williams recalled being “deeply in love with my roommate ‘Green Eyes’ but neither of us knew what to do about it.” He continued, “If he came to my bed, I’d say, ‘What do you want?’ I was so puritanical I wouldn’t permit him to kiss me. But he could just touch my arm and I’d come. Nothing planned, just spontaneous orgasms.”
During those university years, Williams’s self-assessments still echoed the annihilating judgment of his father. “Faults—I am egocentric, introspective, morbid, sensual, irreligious, lazy, timid, cowardly—But if I were God I would feel a little bit sorry for Tom 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!” he wrote in his diary in 1937. Williams felt “stunted”; he complained of his puerile nature: “Only my longings and my critical faculty, my sense of my own unfitness, has any dignity.” In social spheres, Williams frequently felt hapless, unable to make himself either felt or seen. “Why do women ignore me so consistently these days,” he wrote. “Sometimes they look at me as though I weren’t there—I believe it’s mostly because I’m so damned short—and then I’m too lazy to be interesting when I’m out among people I don’t know well.”
When Williams was finally initiated into heterosexual sex by a big-chested University of Iowa student, Bette Reitz—a “genuine nympho,” according to Williams, who took pity on his timorous longing, which touched “a maternal chord”—he vomited a
nd failed the challenge. The following night, however, he was successful. “I was . . . terribly impressed with myself,” he said. Returning to his fraternity house after midnight and standing at the latrine beside an Alpha Tau Omega brother, he recalled saying, “ ‘I fucked a girl tonight.’ ‘Yea, yea, how was it?’ ‘Oh, it was like fucking the Suez Canal,’ I said and felt like a man full grown.” By the next summer, according to his memoir, he was “finally fully persuaded that I was ‘queer’ but had no idea what to do about it.”
In Summer and Smoke, in front of an anatomy chart, Alma Winemiller and John Buchanan debate inhibition and transgression. “This part down here is the sex,” Buchanan points out to Alma. “I’ve fed . . . as much as I wanted—You’ve fed none—nothing.” The battle between these forces was one that Williams fought in the presence of his own anatomy. “I must get my mind off my body and onto other things,” he wrote in his diary in 1937. Two years later, after a New Year’s Eve spree had introduced him “to the artistic and Bohemian life of the Quarter with a bang,” Williams was still hard at work scourging himself of desire. “Am I all animal, all willful, blind, stupid beast?” he wrote (echoing one of his grandfather’s sermons)—“How much better is man with all his advantages than the beast? . . . What does he do to cultivate the spiritual, to feed the spiritual? Is there another part that is not an accomplice in this mad pilgrimage of the flesh?” Williams asked himself.
In New Orleans, Williams said, he first “discovered a certain flexibility in my nature.” However, it remained to be seen just how flexible Williams was. When he finally had his first homosexual experience—or, at least, the one first mentioned explicitly in his diary—on June 11, 1939, Williams reacted as he had to his first heterosexual intercourse: he vomited. “Rather horrible night with a picked up acquaintance Doug whose amorous advances made me sick at the stomach,” he wrote. “Purity!—Oh God—it is dangerous to have ideals.”
A few days later, in his next notebook entry, he continued in the same vein: “I had the experience Sat. night which confused and upset me and left me with a feeling of spiritual nausea,” he wrote. “I don’t fit in with the careless young extroverts of the world—people of my own kind are so difficult to find and one is always being disillusioned & disappointed—Oh, Hell!—I must learn to be lonely and like it—at least there is something clean about being lonely—not cluttered up and smeared over with cheap, filthy personalities who take everything out of you that is decent and give you nothing but self-disgust! But oh, God, it’s so hard.” On June 25, he wrote in his notebook, “I seem to be my normal self again—full of neurotic fears, a sense of doom, a dreadful lifeless weight on my heart and body. Oh, of course, that isn’t quite my normal condition.”
Williams had traveled West for the first time in February 1939, with a young heterosexual teacher-turned-clarinet-player named James Parrott, who wanted to try his luck in Hollywood as an actor and a musician. “It is good for me to have somebody around that I can feel an unselfish affection for,” Williams wrote. Nonetheless when Parrott dropped Williams off at the Los Angeles Y on March 6, Williams noted an explosion of sudden feeling: “I felt like I was going to cry—could scarcely control my voice. . . . I was completely lost.” Not for the first time, he was unmanned by what he called “appalling loneliness.” “If only tomorrow I’ll meet somebody who’ll help me somehow!—at least be kind to me and relieve my loneliness.”
On July 6, Williams described meeting “a delightful personality,” a salesman who drove him from Santa Monica to Berkeley. The salesman, he said, “had an extraordinarily sensitive and philosophical mind—we talked quite beautifully for hours and it left a very nice taste in my mouth after the many hurts and loneliness of the recent period. Strange experience to delve so deep into another lonely human heart just in the course of a few hours.” Williams was struck by the nonphysical charm of the encounter, which he found “perfect and complete.” “I might have looked him up afterwards,” he wrote, but he decided against it, because continuance “might have detracted from that perfection.” Platonic friendships kept carnality out of the equation; they kept life from being, as he wrote, “Chaotic! (Messy).” “I want something straight and clean and perfect,” he wrote. “Why can’t I make it with my art?”
When Williams met up with Parrott again later that summer, though, things were far from perfect. Despite Parrott’s generosity and patience with Williams, the two friends were not happy together. Williams put the tension between them down to his off-putting emotional neediness. “I demand so much, I give so much in a relationship—So there is a desert between us,” he wrote. “My loneliness makes me grow like a vine about people who are kind to me—then it is hard to loosen the vine when the time has come for separation.” He went on, “All my deep loves & friendships have hurt me finally. I mean have caused me pain, because I have felt so much more than the other person could feel. Then I am so pursued by blue devils—No wonder I cling for salvation to whomsoever passes by.”
The particular barrenness of Williams’s life in this period—a spectacular deprivation that is mirrored in Summer and Smoke by Alma’s housebound social and emotional imprisonment—led him to a kind of living death of resignation, “enduring for the sake of endurance,” as Alma puts it. Faced with his own solitude and his sexual starvation, in a direct echo of Alma’s words, Williams vowed, “Now I must make a positive religion of the simple act of endurance—I must endure & endure & still endure.” Williams, by his own admission, was “an expert at graceful retreat but at vigorous assault I’m rather pathetically unskilled.”
Like Alma, who suffers from all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms—heart trouble, insomnia, nervousness, ennui—Williams was plagued by a series of complaints that signaled his quiet desperation. The aridity of life reduced him to “a strange trance-like existence” and pushed him to a numbed point where, as he wrote, “the heart forgets to feel even sorrow after a while.” “The dreadful heavy slipping by of the days like oxen on a hot dusty road toward some possible spring—dreadfully athirst but not knowing where the water is hidden,” he wrote. “Oh strange and dreadful caravan of tired cattle—Quo Vadis?—Where? Why?—What!!” Alma “was caging in something that was really quite different from her spinsterish, puritanical nature,” Williams said in 1961; so was he. His 1939 notebook is full of longing but no courage to act on it. “I need somebody to envelop me, embrace me, pull me by sheer force out of this neurotic shell of fear I’ve built around myself lately,” he wrote. “I feel all but annihilated. Yes, something does have to break and damn soon or I will.”
Williams had to unlearn repression; this meant doing battle with the congenital shyness that prevented him from showing or knowing his feelings. “What taunts me most is my inability to make contact with the people, the world,” he wrote in his diary. “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. This is not always so. A sudden touch will release me. Once out, I am free and approachable. I need the solvent.” Williams had grown up on a confounding diet of rejection and idealization, which had left him unconfident about the allure of his essential nature. “I am so used to being a worm,” he wrote in 1937. Later, he explained, “I’ve never had any feeling of sexual security.” “I’m only attracted to androgynous males. . . . I find women much more interesting than men, but I’m afraid to try to fuck women now. . . . Because women aren’t as likely as the androgynous male to give you sexual reassurance. With a boy who has the androgynous quality in spirit, like a poet, the thing is more spiritual. I need that.” (As late as 1943, despite the fact that he was a produced playwright and a contract writer for MGM, he still wondered to his diary why someone like the publisher of New Directions, Jay Laughlin, would seek him out and want to be friends. “It is so easy to ignore a squirt like me.”) Experience had taught him, he said, that “to know me is not to love me.” “I am a problem to anybody who cares anything about me—Most of all to mys
elf who am, of course, my only ardent lover (though a spiteful and a cruel one!)”
Eventually, Williams, like Alma, found release in male pickups and a life of profligacy. At first, however, Williams struggled in vain against his homosexual nature. “I am as pure as I ever was—in fact purer—essentially—Ah, well . . . ” At the end of 1939, he noted, “Thank god I’ve gotten bitch-proof.”
By February 1940, alternately thrilled and appalled, Williams had joined the sexual merry-go-round. “My first real encounter was in New Orleans at a New Year’s Eve party during World War Two,” Williams recalled. “A very handsome paratrooper climbed up to my grilled veranda and said, ‘Come down to my place’ and I did, and he said, Would you like a sunlamp treatment? And I said, Fine, and I got under one and he proceeded to do me. That was my coming out and I enjoyed it.” He had said good-bye to the ascetic aspect of his prolonged adolescence, but the hello to his adult sexual instincts took some adjustment. “Ashes hauled,” he wrote in his diary. “Somehow pretty sick of it.” Two weeks later, noticing in the mirror that his boy self was evaporating, he wrote, “Oh, Lord, I don’t know what to make of this life I’m living. Things happen but they don’t add up to much. . . . I’m getting ugly though. My face looks so heavy and coarse these days. I feel that my youth is nearly gone. Now when I need it most!” With sex, Williams noted, “the restless beast in the jungle under the skin, comes out for a little air.”
