The Books: Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, by Lyle Leverich

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, by Lyle Leverich

Tried writing yesterday. Did some work on Stairs to the Roof. Not much energy but accomplished something. Even coffee doesn’t wake up my torpid brain cells. Such heaviness, such dullness, appalling. Well, it is bound to get better. It couldn’t get worse.

— Tennessee Williams, journal entry, Sept. 7 or 8, 1940

The main thing to say about this magnificent biography is that it was Volume 1. It takes Tennessee Williams up to the opening of Glass Menagerie in 1945. So there was so much life after that to be told. 40 years of life. Unfortunately, tragically, for all of us, the author – Lyle Leverich – died before Volume 2 was complete. In the obituary for Mr. Leverich, the second volume was said to be a “quarter to a third complete”, and I keep hoping that that draft will be foisted upon the public, incomplete or no, because Volume 1 is in my top 5 biographies of all time. It’s definitive.

The book is so vast, so important, so wonderful, that I remember talking with my friend Ted about it (he had read it too), and he said something like, “When the hell will Volume 2 come out??” and I had to break it to him gently. “Ted, Lyle Leverich died.” Ted gasped, as though he knew him personally. “Oh, no!”

Mr. Leverich was an old man when he died. His life’s work was near complete. Despite the fact that Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams will now have to stand alone, unfinished, and that is a great loss, the book itself is a sweeping examination of all of Tennessee Williams’ influences. His literary inspirations, his family (Leverich has done his research, the family tree in the opening pages was very helpful), his lovers, his burgeoning sexuality, his ambition. Because Williams was gay, writers often focus on that aspect of him as the key to his work, his career, his life. I understand why. He is a hero in his openness about being gay at a time when that meant you were beaten up on a regular basis (as happened to Tennessee), and were forced to live in the closet if you wanted to be safe. Williams did not live in the closet. Brave. However, that is just one element of Williams’ landscape. You can look at all of his plays as a metaphor for being gay, and the plays certainly hold up, but I think you’ll miss a lot if you do so. Leverich’s deep deep delving into the Williams family tree, and Williams’ parents and grandparents – especially Williams’ beloved grandfather – is indispensable work. The discussion of Tom’s sister Rose’s mental breakdown is harrowing. This is a biography so authoritative that generations to come who want to write about Williams will have to reference it.

Leverich is an elegant and beautiful writer who is smart enough to let Tennessee speak for himself as much as possible, the book peppered with fascinating excerpts from Williams’ voluminous correspondence and open-to-the-point-of-heartbreaking journal entries.

The buildup to Glass Menagerie, the casting of Laurette Taylor, the opening in Chicago in the middle of a frigid winter, the slow burn of its success before it finally exploded in New York, making Williams’ name forever: Leverich’s description of these famous events are beyond compare. There were anecdotes I had never heard before (Laurette Taylor dyeing her own dress before the opening), and it gave me such a better understanding of what a momentous occasion that play (and that performance) really were. I mean, we all know Laurette Taylor gave the greatest performance of the 20th century (and if we don’t know it, we SHOULD), even though there is no record of it. But to read Leverich’s lovingly detailed description of how all that came about, and how she worked … exquisite.

Rose, Edwina, and Tom Williams

Here is a section from 1938, when Tennessee (or Tom) is living and working in St. Louis. His sister has been institutionalized. You’ll see Leverich’s mastery here. This is not just biography. It is emotional analysis. This can be tricky territory but Leverich knows his subject well. A lot of times, emotional analysis comes off as far too pat, a desire on the part of a biographer to “make everything make sense”, when often life itself is more chaotic than that. (You know: “His mama didn’t love him enough, and THAT’S why Shakespeare wrote like he did.” Yawn.) Leverich doesn’t do that. Tennessee Williams had many inspirations and driving forces. Overbearing mother, mad sister, aloof father, being gay, an almost panicked desire to escape, his loving grandfather, his religious background, his Midwesternness – all of these things poured out of Williams in different forms in play after play (not to mention his bounding imagination). Leverich is not interested in reducing Williams. Williams was a genius. In many ways, he cannot be sufficiently explained. Leverich keeps his options open. He delves into Williams in a completely three-dimensional way.

This book is a must-read.

For now, I can only dream of Volume 2. Volume 1 will have to be enough. In many ways, it is more than enough.

Excerpt from Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, by Lyle Leverich

Now that the Mummers held no promise, Tom turned his attention to the St. Louis Poets’ Workshop, which he had formed with William Jay Smith. As Smith recalled, they met regularly at the Williams home: “We were soon joined by Louise Krause, who had attended Mills College in California and had come back to St. Louis to take a master’s degree in English.” Another recruit was Elizabeth Fenwick Phillips, “who later married Clark Mills and as Elizabeth Fenwick wrote several fine mystery novels.” They had some stationery printed and “sent poems to all the leading magazines with a covering letter signed by a fictitious secretary of the workshop. In a few carefully chosen words the letter described the great poetic flowering then taking place in St. Louis. The poems enclosed, the secretary stated, were representative samples of this remarkable Midwestern Renaissance. The editors addressed were less impressed by our flowering than we were: the poems all came back.”

In mid-November, Tom drove his mother, Grand, and Jiggs to see Rose at Farmington. He wrote, “She is like a person half-asleep now – quiet, gentle and thank God – not in any way revolting like so many of the others. She sat with us in a bright sunny room full of flowers – said ‘yes’ to all our questions – looked puzzled, searching for something – some times her eyes filled with tears – (so did mine). Only the little dog stirred her – she was delighted with him – held him and gave him water. She said once ‘I can’t believe he is!’ – meaning ‘alive’ I suppose, as she always feared so much for his health. Strange, sad – It rains tonight, lightning, low thunder -”

The means needed for Rose to achieve a full recovery now seemed to be beyond medical capability. Edwina and Grand had not lost hope, Grandfather prayed, Cornelius remained stoically aloof, and Tom wondered if perhaps he might have “a touch of my sister’s disease?!” Looking back over his journal, Tom commented, “I notice that in Sept. of last year – before leaving for Iowa – I remarked that I felt I was leaving the paternal roof for good – Well, here I am back under it. Yes, my life is a series of returns.” Once again, he was enduring in his attic room a terror he had not known in the year he had been away: the terror of being trapped and imprisoned, with the accompanying painful swings from one emotional extreme to the other. “Swam 20 lengths – felt swell afterwards – then the renewed illness began – Oh, I hope I can throw it off soon – I want to live, live live!!”

A while later, Tom alluded to a scene with his father at which apparently his mother and visiting grandmother were either present or within earshot.

Dad started griping about my lack of job, Etc. – Surely I won’t stay on here when I’m regarded as such a parasite. Now is the time to make a break – get away – away. I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen – Significant – I’m desperately anxious to escape. But where and how? – No money – Grand & Mother the only possible source. What a terrible trap to be caught in! – But there must be some way out and I shall find it.

Nov. 16 or 17 – (I’m a bit vague about the calendar these days) I wish to report one happy circumstance – am almost definitely decided [on] departure for New York. Seems almost too fabulous, doesn’t it? But no serious obstacles apparent now. My miraculous grandmother is going to finance the trip. Will it happen? Can it happen? I hope so!

The one really gnawing question that he kept turning over and over was why his father held him in such open contempt. Why wasn’t he the one to encourage him and support his aspirations? And why wouldn’t he pay for his trip to New York, which he could well afford? Tom could only reason that, after all, he had written an impressive body of work and two of his plays had been produced. But in the six years since he had been removed from the University of Missouri, all his father had done was to provide him with room and board. Inevitably, Edwina’s reaction was that of the protective mother who chooses to move closer to her son, thus making him his father’s competition.

Having long given up any hope of winning Edwina as an affectionate wife, C.C. had increasingly taken refuge to drink and in the company of his poker-playing buddies Pat Shackelford and “Hatch” Hatcher. More than that, he had forfeited any future at the shoe company. He could go neither back on the road nor forward in management. What Tom presently saw was a man defeated, retreating and imprisoned by his own hand. He realized that this, too, would be his own fate unless he could escape. He also knew the only way he could win his father’s affection would be to succumb to the same imprisonment C.C. was suffering at the shoe company.

He now saw his father as a failure, and so, too, his father’s father. Failure was begetting failure. And instinctively he knew it was only his ungovernable desire to write that could save him. Tom had the inherent strength of his forebears: the Williams clan, Tennessee pioneers. But his frontier was the theatre – that was what held out the promise of setting him free – and by now he was fast building up an arsenal of one-act and four full-length plays.

As a result, what had been developing in Tom all these years, above all other traits, was a passion to write. And that passion emanated from a curious source: a fierce reaction to the repressed love of his father, while in Rose this same love for her father was suppressed, ultimately crushing her sanity. Although Tom’s mother and grandmother were giving him the concrete support he needed, paradoxically it was not so much their inspiration as his rage against his father that inflamed his burning desire to write. Tennessee Williams’s career could be called an act of revenge, until at length he entered analysis, understood his sublimated love for his deceased father, and turned his anger on his mother, thus changing the character of his plays.

Tennessee was to say that his failure to stand up to his father and his overt fear of him were interpreted by the old man as weakness and cowardice and that he loathed his son for it. But now, in December of 1938, the tables were turning. During all the years of his youth, Tom had looked upon C.C. as an overpowering figure of strength. But once the son had become a young man, he began to perceive in his father the same weakness and cowardice that the old man had attributed to him. This knowledge was enough to give Tom the courage he needed to leave and to say, once again, good-bye to St. Louis.