by John Lahr
80 “discovered a certain flexibility”: Leverich, Tom, p. 278.
80 “Rather horrible night”: N, June 11, 1939, p. 153.
80 “I had the experience Sat. night”: Ibid., June 14, 1939, p. 153.
80 “I seem to be my normal self again”: Ibid., June 25, 1939, p. 153.
80 “It is good for me to have somebody”: Ibid., May 25, 1939, p. 149.
80 “I felt like I was going to cry”: Ibid., Mar. 7, 1939, p. 141.
80 “appalling loneliness”: Ibid., Mar. 8, 1939, p. 143.
80 “If only tomorrow”: Ibid.
80 “a delightful personality”: Ibid., July 6, 1939, p. 155.
81 “I want something straight”: Ibid.
81 “I demand so much”: N, July 30, 1939, p. 161.
81 “enduring for the sake of endurance”: LOA1, p. 587.
81 “Now I must make a positive religion”: N, July 30, 1939, p. 161.
81 “an expert at graceful retreat”: Ibid., Aug. 11, 1936, p. 49.
81 complaints that signaled his quiet desperation: Ibid., Oct. 16, 1938, p. 125. “The fear is so much worse than the thing feared—the heart defect, however actual, would cause me little discomfort, no actual pain—if I were not afraid of it—it is the fear that makes all the concomitant distresses, the dreadful tension, the agora and claustro-phobia, the nervous indigestion, the hot gassy stomach.”
81 “a strange trance-like existence”: Ibid., July 30, 1939, p. 161.
81 “The dreadful heavy slipping”: Ibid.
82 “was caging in something”: CWTW, p. 83.
82 “I need somebody to envelop me”: N, Oct. 3, 1939, p. 166.
82 “What taunts me most”: Ibid., Aug. 23, 1942, p. 325.
82 “I am so used to being”: Ibid., May 27, 1937, p. 87.
82 “I’ve never had any feeling”: CWTW, pp. 229–30.
82 “It is so easy to ignore”: N, Oct. 6, 1943, p. 391.
82 “to know me is not to love me”: M, p. 131.
82 “I am a problem”: N, July 1, 1942, p. 297.
83 “I am as pure as I ever was”: Ibid., Jan. 28, 1940, p. 185.
83 “Thank god I’ve gotten bitch-proof”: N, Dec. 15, 1939, p. 179.
83 “My first real encounter”: CWTW, p. 231.
83 “Ashes hauled”: N, Jan. 12, 1940, p. 183.
83 “Oh, Lord, I don’t know”: Ibid., Jan. 26, 1940, p. 183.
83 “the restless beast in the jungle”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Sept. 1940, L1, p. 276.
83 “I ache with desires”: N, Feb. 7, 1940, p. 187.
83 “The big emotional business”: Ibid., Mar. 11, 1940, p. 191.
83 “this awful searching-business”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Aug. 18, 1940, L1, p. 262.
83 “My emotional life has been a series”: N, May 26, 1940, p. 195.
84 “His practice in a room”: Donald Windham, As If: A Personal View of Tennessee Williams (Verona, N.Y.: Privately published, 1985), pp. 17–18.
84 “He would dispatch me”: M, p. 53.
85 “quotidian goal”: Windham, As If, p. 17.
85 from prude to lewd: Anna Freud, The Writings of Anna Freud, vol. 2: Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1936), pp. 153–54: “Young people who pass through the kind of ascetic phase which I have in mind seem to fear the quantity rather than the quality of their instincts. They mistrust enjoyment in general and so their safest policy appears to be simply to counter more urgent desires with more stringent prohibitions. Every time the instinct says ‘I will’, the ego retorts, ‘Thou shall not’ much after the manner of strict parents in the early training of little children. . . . But in the repudiation of instinct characteristic of adolescence no loophole is left such substitute gratification . . . turning against the self we find a swing-over from asceticism to instinctual excess, the adolescent suddenly indulging in everything which he had previously held to be prohibited and disregarding any sort of external restrictions.”
85 “I was just terribly over sexed”: CWTW, p. 231.
85 “I’m getting horny as a jack-rabbit”: Williams to Donald Windham, Oct. 11, 1940, TWLDW, p. 17.
85 “the most uncompromising of southern Puritans”: Williams to Theresa Helburn, Oct. 11, 1940, L1, p. 290.
85 “So line up some”: Williams to Donald Windham, Oct. 11, 1940, TWLDW, p. 17.
85 “deviant Satyriasis”: M, p. 53.
85 “Sexuality is an emanation”: Ibid.
85 “I went out cruising last night”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Sept. 27, 1941, L1, p. 333.
85 “I am always alarming bed partners”: N, Jan. 15, 1943, p. 409.
85 “As the world grows worse”: Williams to Donald Windham, May 1, 1941, TWLDW, p. 22.
86 “I’d like to live a simple life”: N, July 12, 1942, p. 303.
86 “I think for a good summer fuck”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 23, 1942, TWLDW, p. 37.
86 “I cruised with 3 flaming belles”: N, Oct. 4, 1941, p. 243.
86 “Tonight ran into some ‘dirt’”: Ibid., Oct. 29, 1941, p. 255.
86 “unspent tenderness”: Williams and Windham, You Touched Me!, p. 65.
86 “When I now appear in public”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, July 25, 1941, L1, pp. 325–26.
87 “Sometimes I feel the island”: CP, “The Siege,” p. 910.
87 “I always want my member”: CWTW, p. 229.
87 “In his room, amid the disordered contents”: Windham, As If, pp. 16–17. See also “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (CS, p. 119, originally published 1943): “In five years’ time I had nearly forgotten home. I had to forget it, I couldn’t carry it with me.”
87 “I think I have gone”: N, Oct. 28, 1946, p. 447.
87 feeling like a ghost: “I felt like a ghost.” Williams to Donald Windham, Nov. 23, 1943, TWLDW, p. 121.
88 “Evening is the normal adult’s time”: N, Feb. 25, 1942, p. 281.
88 “to find in motion”: LOA1, p. 465.
88 “spiritual champagne”: N, Mar. 29, 1940, p. 191.
88 “the asking look in his eyes”: CS, “The Malediction,” p. 147.
88 “You coming toward me”: N, May 26, 1940, p. 195.
88 “rebellious hell”: M, p. 53.
88 “I know myself to be a dog”: N, May 30, 1940, p. 195.
88 “I wonder, sometimes, how much”: M, p. 53.
88 “at the nadir of my resources”: Williams to Luise Sillcox, July 8, 1940, L1, p. 257.
88 “mad pilgrimage of the flesh”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Aug. 18, 1940, ibid., p. 262.
88 “beautiful and serene”: Williams to Donald Windham, Aug. 1940, TWLDW, p. 11.
89 pictures he would carry in his wallet: LLI with Joseph Hazan, 1985, LLC.
89 “Neither of us had any talent”: LLI with Joseph Hazan, 1985, LLC.
89 “My good eye was hooked like a fish”: M, p. 54.
89 cataract in one eye: Ibid.
89 “I will never forget the first look”: Ibid.
89 “slightly slanted lettuce-green eyes”: Ibid.
89 “When he turned from the stove”: Ibid.
89 “with Narcissan pride”: M, p. 54.
89 “He had Southern charms”: LLI with Joseph Hazan, LLC.
90 “crazed eloquence”: M, p. 54.
90 “Tom, let’s go up to my bedroom”: Ibid., p. 55.
90 unique account of his ravished surrender: Hazan insists that between Kip and Williams there was only one sexual encounter and that Williams embellished his sexual life with Kip. (See N, p. 202.) In Memoirs (p. 55), Williams implies that their affair was more than one night. “After that, we slept together each night on the double bed up there, and so incontinent was my desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during the night for more love-making . . . ,” Williams wrote. In any case, the entire relationship lasted no more than six weeks.
90 “We wake up two or three times”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 29–30, 1
940, TWLDW, pp. 9–10.
90 “little boy’s face”: Ibid.
91 “Last night you made me know”: M, p. 55.
92 “I know Kip loved me”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 237; in the published book, he adds: “after his bewildered fashion” (M, p. 55). The last two sentences were cut from the published version.
92 “ecstasy one moment”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 1940, TWLDW, p. 8.
92 “Kip turned oddly moody”: M, p. 55.
92 “Moves me to find someone afflicted”: N, July 29, 1940, p. 201.
92 “Will it be all gone”: Ibid., July 19, 1940, p. 199.
92 “I am being courted by a musician”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 1940, TWLDW, p. 8.
92 “a girl”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 56. In an edited passage, “The girl was the sister of Kenneth Tynan’s wife, Elaine.”
93 “Tenn, I have to talk to you”: M, p. 56.
93 “made a horrible ass of myself”: N, Aug. 15, 1940, p. 205.
93 “C’est fini”: Ibid.
93 “I can’t save myself”: Ibid., Aug. 12, 1940, p. 203.
93 “You whoever you are”: Ibid., Aug. 15, 1940, p. 205.
93 “Oh, K.—if only”: Ibid., Aug. 19, 1940, p. 207.
93 “I hereby formally bequeath you”: Williams to Kip Kiernan, Aug. 22, 1940, L1, p. 269.
93 “Do you think I am making too much”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 240.
93 “K., if you ever come back”: N, Aug. 19, 1940, p. 207.
93 died of a brain tumor: Williams visited Kip as he lay dying in a hospital bed at the Polyclinic Hospital near Times Square. By then, Kip had married; from his bed he had been asking for “Tenny.” Williams, who was afraid to visit him alone, brought Windham. “As I entered Kip’s room he was being spoon-fed by a nurse; a dessert of sugary apricots. He had never looked more beautiful,” Williams said in a 1981 Paris Review interview. “We spoke a while. Then I rose and reached for his hand and he couldn’t find mine, I had to find his.” Afterward, he sent Kip a cream-colored Shantung robe. He commemorated the encounter in “Death Is High”: “Return, you called while you slept. / And desperately back I crept / . . . my longing was great / to be comforted and warmed / once more by your sleeping form, / to be, for a while, no higher / than where you are, / little room, warm love, humble star!” Williams to Paul Bowles, Feb. 23, 1950, HRC. This early draft was later published in a much-revised version as “Death Is High,” without the dedication to Merlo.
94 “Tennessee could not possess his own life”: Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in Gore Vidal, Armageddon? Essays 1983–1987 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), p. 59.
94 “For love I make characters”: CS, “Preface,” p. xv.
94 Something Cloudy, Something Clear: This title refers to Williams’s eyes at the time he met Kip, and represented to Williams “the two sides of my nature. The side that was obsessively homosexual, compulsively interested in sexuality. And the side that in those days was gentle and understanding and contemplative.” (CWTW, p. 346.)
94 “has a fresh and primitive quality”: LOA1, p. 199.
94 “fresh and shining look”: Ibid., p. 575.
94 “is one of those Mediterranean types”: Ibid., p. 701.
94 “still slim and firm as a boy”: LOA1, p. 884.
94 “the body electric”: Williams to Donald Windham, Jan. 3, 1944, TWLDW, p. 126.
94 “I love you”: Williams to Kip Kiernan, Aug. 22, 1940, L1, p. 269.
94 “I screamed like a banshee”: CWTW, p. 229.
95 “I have just had an orgy”: Williams to Donald Windham, Sept. 20, 1943, TWLDW, p. 105.
95 “Why do they strike us?”: N, Jan. 5, 1943, p. 339.
95 “Not that I like being struck”: Ibid., Jan. 7, 1943, p. 339.
95 “What do you expect to get”: Tennessee Williams, “The Primary Colors” (unpublished), HRC.
95 Sexuality: In an early version of Streetcar, Blanche says to “George” (Mitch), “What people do with their bodies is not really what makes good or bad people of them!” Ibid.
95 “The truth of the matter”: N, Aug. 25, 1942, p. 327.
95 “tricks in my pocket”: LOA1, p. 400.
95 “charged with plenty”: Williams, “Primary Colors,” HRC.
95 “She tries to explain her life”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 23, 1945, L1, p. 557.
96 “We ought to be exterminated”: N, Sept. 14, 1941, pp. 232–33. Evans was also the model for Billy in Williams’s short story “Two on a Party.”
96 “sad but poignant”: Ibid., Sept. 14, 1941, p. 235.
96 “What are we doing”: Williams to Erwin Piscator, Aug. 13, 1942, L1, p. 393.
96 “Mr. Williams, you have written”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 29, 1942, ibid., p. 387.
96 “underground devils”: Williams to Mary Hunter, mid-April 1943, ibid., p. 438.
96 “naked and savage kinds of creation”: Ibid.
96 “vast hunger for life”: Williams to William Saroyan, Nov. 29, 1941, L1, p. 359.
96 “long fingers”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 18, 1943, TWLDW, p. 88: “We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.”
96 “too selfish for love”: LOA1, p. 265.
97 “Who, if I were to cry out”: Ibid., p. 565.
97 “Probably the greatest difference”: Williams to Donald Windham, Sept. 20, 1943, TWLDW, p. 106.
97 little devil of the prologue: John: “They told me I was a devil. . . . I’d rather be a devil.” The script even has Buchanan driving like “a demon.” LOA1, p. 610.
97 “unmarked by the dissipations”: Ibid., p. 575.
97 “a Promethean figure”: Ibid.
97 “worn-out magic”: Ibid., p. 622.
97 “It’s yet to be proven”: Ibid., p. 611.
97 “the everlasting struggle and aspiration”: Ibid., p. 612.
97 “I should have been castrated”: Ibid., p. 624.
97 “I’m more afraid of your soul”: Ibid.
97 “I came here to tell you”: Ibid., p. 638.
99 “narcotized tranquility”: Ibid., p. 504.
99 “I cannot create”: N, June 27, 1941, p. 229.
99 “I pray for the strength”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Aug. 20, 1940, L1, p. 265.
99 “the cage of Puritanism”: CWTW, p. 83.
99 “The prescription number is 96814”: LOA1, p. 642.
99 “And still our blood is sacred”: CP, “Iron Is the Winter,” pp. 60–61.
99 “I need a soft climate”: N, Nov. 28, 1945, p. 437.
100 “N.Y. holds me only by the balls”: Williams to Donald Windham, Dec. 18, 1945, TWLDW, pp. 178–79.
100 “Our friendship was more spiritual”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
100 “the rare and beautiful stranger”: N, Aug. 18, 1940, p. 206.
100 “I don’t think he was disappointed”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
100 “Right in the thick of it”: Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 17, 1946, L2, p. 75.
100 “It was not until I met him”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
100 “the bright side of myself”: Williams to Joseph Hazan, Aug. 22, 1940, L1, p. 270.
101 “Tennessee: This is Vanilla Williams”: Tennessee Williams/Pancho Rodriguez record, BRTC.
101 “Well bred people find it difficult”: Miami Herald, Mar. 30, 1958.
101 “comes from deep underground”: LOA1, p. 640.
101 “was willing”: Williams to Studs Terkel, radio interview (Blackstone Hotel), Dec. 1961, LLC.
101 man-child of twenty-five: Pancho Rodriguez was born Dec. 1, 1920.
102 primitive: “He was a primitive,” the New Orleans artist Fritz Bultman said, as quoted in Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), p. 122.
102 “All of my nights with Pancho”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 24.
102
“sort of an off-beat saint”: M, p. 106.
102 “At first I entertained him”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 24.
103 “My deportment wasn’t too exemplary”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
103 “The scenes he created”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 24.
103 “He could not explain this thing”: CS, “Rubio y Morena,” p. 259.
103 “had never been able to believe”: Ibid., p. 257.
103 “restored his male dominance”: Ibid., p. 261.
103 “some loud tacky thing”: Ibid., p. 595.
103 “where anything goes”: Ibid., p. 610.
103 “gay, very gay”: Ibid., p. 642.
103 “Did anyone ever slide downhill”: Ibid., p. 618.
103 “widened the latitude”: CS, “Rubio y Morena,” p. 265.
103 “sentenced to solitary confinement”: LOA2, p. 875.
103 “Of all the people I have known”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Nov. 1947, L2, p. 130.
103 “had grown to love”: CS, “Rubio y Morena,” p. 260.
104 “to breathe the fine air”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 28.
104 “I have learned how to use”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 21, 1946, L2, p. 46.
104 “When I got home”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1946, TWLDW, p. 188.
104 “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Apr. 1946, L2, pp. 48–49.
105 “Jack in Black”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 29.
105 “The altitude affected my heart”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 27, 1946, HRC.
105 “Pancho sat in the hospital with me”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 32.
105 “He always had moments of great style”: M, p. 103.
105 “a sensation of death”: Ibid., p. 104.
105 “Claustrophobia, feeling of suffocation”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, p. 304.
105 “I’m dying! I’m dying!”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 32.
105 “I don’t know why I said it in Spanish”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 27, 1946, HRC.
105 “a rare intestinal problem”: Ibid.
105 “Well, you’re all right now”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, p. 304.
106 “One of the good sisters of the Holy Cross”: Williams to James Laughlin, July 1947, L2, p. 57.
106 “I don’t know what you got”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, July 26, 1955, TWLDW, pp. 305–6.
106 “Since then, and despite”: Williams to James Laughlin, July 1946, L2, p. 57.
