“Make voyages! — Attempt them! — there’s nothing else …” Happy Birthday, Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams) was born on this day in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911.

I love this early note from Tennessee Williams because it already incorporates his most famous line, from Streetcar Named Desire.

Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?

Thank you!

Thomas Lanier Williams

— Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933

In his memoirs, published in 1975, Williams wrote:

Work!! – the loveliest of all four-letter words, surpassing even the importance of love, most times.

Editor John Rood wrote the following advice to Tennessee Williams (then Tom) on March 22, 1935:

Just keep on writing. It is remarkable how one begins to know what is right.

An interviewer asked Williams once: “What is your definition of happiness?”

He replied, “Insensitivity, I guess.”

When I first heard that anecdote, I felt like my entire sense of life was validated.

Tennessee Williams also said:

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

More – a lot more – after the jump.

 
 

The spectacular unedited edition of Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks, the journal he kept for his entire life (except for a 20-year gap), is indispensable. His spelling mistakes are not corrected. His underlines are duplicated. When words are struck out that seem important (evidence of his editing thought-process), the struck-out words are duplicated. Margaret Bradham Thornton, who also edited the two volumes (thus far) of Tennessee Williams’ letters, is responsible for the editing of the Notebooks, and she has done a superb job.

Williams grew up in a claustrophobic household in St. Louis, with an overbearing and loving mother, and two siblings, Dakin and Rose. Rose was a bit of a problem. The brutality of psychiatric treatment at the time, and how randomly it was used on this poor girl (insulin treatments, shock treatments, and finally a prefrontal lobotomy) is enough to make even the coldest person tremble. The Williams family did the best they could by Rose, in some lights … they were terrified of what was happening to her and tried to deal with it, and the results were catastrophic. Now? She’d be on meds and she’d be fine. She had a family who loved her and did not abandon their responsibilities to her. Her “debut” into society was a failure, the story still isn’t clear, but she was not a “success” and the tailspin began. Delusions set in. She was obsessed with sex. One of her psychiatrists told her her problem was that she should “try to get married”. Grrrr. She eventually was diagnosed with “dementia praecox”, an early term for schizophrenia.

Meanwhile, Tom (Tennessee) and Dakin tried resist the pull of the tragedy.

Mrs. Edwina Williams reading to her children, Rose and Tom (Tennessee)

Tom went to a local college in St. Louis and lived at home, feeling trapped. In 1937, he was accepted into the University of Iowa. Rose had been institutionalized in January of 1937 (she would never, after that point, live on her own). Tom’s college attendance feels like a getaway. The guilt he experienced at his ability to leave must have been excruciating and factors into The Glass Menagerie, especially Tom’s last monologue in that play:

…It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass. Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. 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! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura – and so goodbye …

Rose Isabel Williams

After he graduated, he went to New Orleans, accepting he was gay (or a “sissy”, as he called himself). I wonder if living at home, and his constant nervous-ness (which plagued him throughout his life, he called his nerves “blue devils”), had to do not only with Rose having a mental breakdown , but also his sexuality. He was destined to be an outlaw his whole life. He was not hostile towards religion. He speaks to God often in his journals. He speaks of needing to receive Communion after going to visit Rose in the sanitarium. His beloved grandfather, who was Tennessee’s traveling companion and sometimes roommate for years, was a minister. I’m sure Grandpa saw some shit.

Once Tennessee finally left the family home and started to find his own tribe of like-minded artists, he could accept who he was. He only slept with one woman in his whole life, a girl he met at the University of Iowa (he wrote a lot of love poetry for her), and when she threw him over for another guy, he was very hurt. He considered it a turning point in his life (he mentions it often in later essays, when he was a much older man).

Here is a journal entry from the fall of 1937, as he departed from St. Louis to start college in Iowa. I am struck by it because here he was, in his mid-20s, and you can feel Glass Menagerie in him already. It is already full and complete. It would just take the courage to write it out.

Thurs. Sept. 16 [1937] Tonight is pleasant – A crisp chilly autumn night that elates the spirit and makes life seem a more definite, positive quantity.
…You see, I feel in my heart that I will never really return to this place. Whatever happens good or ill, this next year I think it will surely divorce me at last from the paternal roof – wish-fulfillment! –
…No, I haven’t forgotten poor Rose – I beg whatever power there is to save her and spare her from suffering.
…My play is all but finished and I feel pretty well satisfied with it. Now I yearn for work on a new one – will not be content till I have made a good start on it. The next play is always the important play. The past, however satisfactory, is only a challenge to the future.

Another entry from this time:

My virtues – I am kind, friendly, modest, sympathetic, tolerant and sensitive –
Faults – I am ego-centric, 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!

After winning a play contest sponsored by the famous Group Theatre, Tom wrote in his journal:

My next play will be simple, direct and terrible – a picture of my own heart – there will be no artifice in it – I will speak truth as I see it – distort as I see distortion – be wild as I am wild – tender as I am tender – mad as I am mad – passionate as I am passionate – It will be myself without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life that will leave no room for trepidation. I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do – then go ahead and do it with ease. Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan – till the first draft is finished. Then Calvary – but not till then. Doubt – and be lost – until the first draft is finished.

Williams wrote in a college paper:

Aristotle says that plot is the most important factor of a play but I’d rather have a bad plot with interesting characters than a good one with a bunch of stooges.

Listen to that.

In a letter to fellow playwright and friend Horton Foote, on April 24, 1943, Tennessee wrote:

We must remember that a new theatre is coming after the war with a completely new criticism, thank God. The singular figures always stand a good chance when there are sweeping changes. Keep your ear to the ground and concentrate on honesty till you know what else is coming!

He sensed his time had come.

His sister Rose was lobotomized in 1943. This was the defining event of Williams’ life, the event from which he (and of course poor Rose) never recovered. It was the wellspring of much of his art. If one is an artist, one must be tough as hell to use such material.

On March 24, 1943, Tom wrote in his journal (“Grand” refers to his Grandmother, who was ill at the time, and also 27 Wagons of Cotton, the famous one-act which would be adapted into the film Baby Doll 13 years later):

I wrote alone at Donnie’s office till two a.m. – from 7 – a 7 hour stretch – longest at one stretch in a long time. On a short play. 27 Wagons. Not worth much – amusing but a little nasty perhaps.
Grand. God be with you.
A cord breaking.
1000 miles away.
Rose. Her head cut open.
A knife thrust in her brain.
Me. Here. Smoking.
My father, mean as a devil, snoring. 1000 miles away.

The guilt of leaving Rose behind never left him. If one was “happy”, if one was able to maneuver through a world that lobotomized its most sensitive members, then “happiness” required a hard outer shell, a shell Tennessee himself lacked, that other “sensitives” (his word) lacked. He did not begrudge people their happiness. He just didn’t understand it.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

— TW

He WAS Blanche. He WAS Miss Alma. He WAS Flora Goforth.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

— TW

Dakin Williams (Williams’ brother) said:

Blanche is Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn’t be necessarily true. And Blanche says in Streetcar, ‘I don’t tell what’s true, I tell what ought to be true.’ And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee.

In his journal in 1941, he describes a violent sexual encounter with a sailor.

Tuesday – Jan 5, 1943

This is the first time that anybody ever knocked me down and so I suppose it ought to be recorded. Unhappily I can’t go into details. It was a case of guilt and shame in which I was relatively the innocent party, since I merely offered entertainment which was accepted with apparent gratitude until the untimely entrance of other parties. Feel a little sorrowful about it. So unnecessary. The sort of behavior pattern imposed by the conventional falsehoods.

Donnie comforted me when he arrived on the scene. Now he is upstairs with another party procured in the bar. Why do they strike us? What is our offense? We offer them a truth which they cannot bear to confess except in privacy and the dark – a truth which is inherently as bright as the morning sun. He struck me because he did what I did and his friends discovered it. Yes, it hurt – inside. I do not know if I will be able to sleep. But tomorrow I suppose the swollen face will be normal again and I will pick up the usual thread of life.

Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in “Glass Menagerie”

Laurette Taylor’s performance as the faded Southern-belle Amanda Winfield in the Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie launched Williams into stardom, and launched the play itself into the firmament of our culture. Amanda revitalized Taylor’s career (thought long over) just before she died. And now, her performance in Glass Menagerie is legendary. But the play didn’t depend on Laurette Taylor’s genius, although thank God she found the vehicle. The star of the play was the writing. Taylor knew that, and constantly shifted the focus of the spotlight back onto the young writer beside her.

Williams wrote in his memoirs about Taylor:

In Chicago the first night, no one knew how to take [Glass] Menagerie, it was something of an innovation in the theatre and even though Laurette [Taylor] gave an incredibly luminous, electrifying performance [as Amanda Wingfield], and people observed it. But people are people, and most of them went home afterward to take at least equal pleasure in their usual entertainments. It took that lovely lady, Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, a lot of time to sell it to them to tell them it was special.

She said Laurette ranked with [Eleonora] Duse.

Eventually, though, Menagerie was a startling success, which success I attribute in large part to Laurette. She was, as I have said many times, a gallant performer; I still consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known. I wrote a tribute to her, on her death, in which I said that it is our immeasurable loss that Laurette’s performances were not preserved on the modern screen. The same is true of Duse and [Sarah] Bernhardt, with whom Laurette’s name belongs.

I also wrote that there are sometimes hints, during our lives, of something that lies outside the flesh and its mortality. I suppose these intuitions come to many people in their religious vocations, but I have sensed them equally clearly in the work of artists and most clearly of all in the art of Laurette. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us.

Again, from his Memoirs:

Williams balked when reviewers characterized his female characters as “frustrated” (see excerpt below). He said he had never written a victim.

Cousin Kerry and I saw a phenomenal production of Streetcar at Williamstown, with Sam Rockwell as Stanley and Jessica Hecht as Blanche. I am proud of this review: it was an excellent production, one I still think about.

Here’s part of an essay Williams wrote for The New York Times in 1948 where he addresses the misunderstanding of his female characters:

Don’t misunderstand me. I am thankful for these highly condensed and stimulating analyses, but it would never have occurred to me that that was the story I was trying to tell. Usually when asked about a theme I look vague and say, “It is a play about life.” What could be simpler, and yet more pretentious? You can easily extend that a little and say it is a tragedy of incomprehension. That also means life. Or you can say it is a tragedy of Puritanism. That is life in America. Or you can say that it is a play that considers the “problem of evil”. But why not just say “life”?

To return to the women in the alcove. On this particular occasion the question that floored me was, “Why do you always write about frustrated women?”

To say that floored me is to put it mildly, because I would say that frustrated is almost exactly what the women I write about are not. What was frustrated about Amanda Wingfield? Circumstances, yes! But spirit? See Helen Hayes in London’s “Glass Menagerie” if you still think Amanda was a frustrated spirit! No, there is nothing interesting about frustration, per se. I could not write a line about it for the simple reason that I can’t write a line about anything that bores me.

Was Blanche of “A Streetcar Named Desire” frustrated? About as frustrated as a beast of the jungle! And Alma Winemiller? What is frustrated about loving with such white hot intensity that it alters the whole direction of your life, and removes you from the parlor of the Episcopal rectory to a secret room above Moon Lake Casino?

For actresses taking on these roles: Do not play the frustration. Play the objective, play the character’s desire, play what the character wants, NOT the character’s sadness at NOT getting what they want. The tragedies of these plays lie in the characters’ hopes for themselves and how strongly they believe in love and mercy and compassion, despite the evidence around them. Despite the fact that the world will not, refuses, to play along, with the delusion that people are actually kind.

“Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a tin roof – is there? Is there, baby?”

— from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

When Camino Real (one of my favorite Willimas plays) opened, directed by Kazan, starring Eli Wallach, it was not embraced by the critics. In that radical play, Williams prophesied where theatre was going to go in the following decade. The experimental theatre of the 1960s, of which people like Lanford Wilson and John Guare were at the vanguard, is all there in Camino Real. No one congratulates you for being right about things 10 years before everyone else gets the memo. People were baffled by Camino. And because they were baffled, they rejected it, as opposed to trying to examine what this important playwright was attempting to do. Williams always had an open relationship with certain critics, and here, he writes a letter to Walter Kerr.

Dear Mr. Kerr,
I’m feeling a little punch drunk from the feared, but not fully anticipated attack at your hands and a quorum of your colleagues. But I would like to attempt to get a few things off my chest in reply. What I would like to know is, don’t you see that “Camino” is a concentrate, a distillation of the world and the time we live in?

Mr. Kerr, I believe in your honesty. I believe you said what you honestly think and feel about this play. And I wouldn’t have the nerve to question your verdict. But silence is only golden when you have nothing to say. And I still think I have a great deal to say.
Cordially,
Tennessee Williams

Eli Wallach wrote in his autobiography:

I don’t believe Kerr ever answered Tennessee’s letter. But there’s one line in the play that affected Anne and myself so greatly that we decided to adopt it as our motto. “Lately,” Lord Byron says, “I’ve been listening to hired musicians behind a row of artificial palm trees instead of the single pure stringed instrument of my heart. For what is the heart, but a sort of instrument that translates noise into music, chaos into order. Make voyages, attempt them, there’s nothing else.” Anne and I decided that we would always make voyages and attempt them.

Williams was disheartened by the slacking off of his critical acclaim. But he kept writing. Read his plays in chronological order. Watch how he constantly challenges himself.

Williams said in an interview:

You’re always having to compete with yourself. They always say, ‘It’s not as good as Streetcar or Cat‘. Of course it’s not. At 69, you don’t write the kind of play you write at 30. You haven’t got the kind of energy you used to have.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

— Tennessee Williams

Irene Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, consulting backstage at Streetcar

Here’s what Kazan wrote about the Streetcar process in his marvelous completely unreliable autobiography.

It is Tennessee Williams’ “advice” to Kazan at the end that reveals who Williams was, not just as an artist, but as a human:

But what had been intimated in our final rehearsals in New York was happening. The audiences adored Brando. When he derided Blanche, they responded with approving laughter. Was the play becoming the Marlon Brando Show? I didn’t bring up the problem, because I didn’t know the solution. I especially didn’t want the actors to know that I was concerned. What could I say to Brando? Be less good? Or to Jessie? Get better? …

Louis B. Mayer sought me out to congratulate me and assure me that we’d all make a fortune … He urged me to make the author do one critically important bit of rewriting to make sure that once that “awful woman” who’d come to break up that “fine young couple’s happy home” was packed off to an institution, the audience would believe that the young couple would live happily ever after. It never occurred to him that Tennessee’s primary sympathy was with Blanche, nor did I enlighten him …

His misguided reaction added to my concern. I had to ask myself: Was I satisfied to have the performance belong to Marlon Brando? Was that what I’d intended? What did I intend? I looked to the author. He seemed satisfied. Only I — and perhaps Hume [Cronyn, Tandy’s husband] — knew that something was going wrong …

What astonished me was that the author wasn’t concerned about the audience’s favoring Marlon. That puzzled me because Tennessee was my final authority, the person I had to please. I still hadn’t brought up the problem, I was waiting for him to do it. I got my answer … because of something that happened in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, across the hall from my suite, where Tennessee and Pancho were staying. [Pancho was Tennessee’s boyfriend. They had a volatile relationship.] One night I heard a fearsome commotion from across the hall, curses in Spanish, threats to kill, the sound of breaking china … and a crash … As I rushed out into the corridor, Tennessee burst through his door, looking terrified, and dashed into my room. Pancho followed, but when I blocked my door, he turned to the elevator still cursing, and was gone. Tennessee slept on the twin bed in my room that night. The next morning, Pancho had not returned.

I noticed that Wiilliams wasn’t angry at Pancho, not even disapproving — in fact, when he spoke about the incident, he admired Pancho for his outburst. At breakfast, I brought up my worry about Jessie and Marlon. “She’ll get better,” Tennessee said, and then we had our only discussion about the direction of his play. “Blanche is not an angel without a flaw,” he said, “and Stanley’s not evil. I know you’re used to clearly stated themes, but this play should not be loaded one way or the other. Don’t try to simplify things.” Then he added, “I was making fun of Pancho, and he blew up.” He laughed. I remembered the letter he’d written me before we started rehearsals, remembered how, in that letter, he’d cautioned me against tipping the moral scales against Stanley, that in the interests of fidelity I must not present Stanley as a “black-dyed villain”. “What should I do?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Don’t take sides or try to present a moral. When you begin to arrange the action to make a thematic point, the fidelity to life will suffer. Go on working as you are. Marlon is a genius, but she’s a worker and she will get better. And better.”

Tennessee Williams on the set of the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire

A humorous anecdote from Tennessee Williams from the New Haven opening of Streetcar:

Streetcar opened in New Haven in early November of 1947, and nobody seemed to know what the notices were or to be greatly concerned. After the New Haven opening night we were invited to the quarters of Mr. Thornton Wilder, who was in residence there. It was like having a papal audience. We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.

We sat there and listened to him politely. I thought, privately, This character has never had a good lay.

Tennessee Williams is one of my own personal artistic heroes, for more reasons than one, and I am aware (on practically a daily basis) of how grateful I am for his plays, in the same way I am nearly always conscious of being grateful that there was a Shakespeare, and that we have his works with us today.

We are lucky in this country to have produced such a playwright. We should be very very proud of that.

Tennessee Williams said the following, in a 1981 interview, only a couple of years before he died:

“I’m very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don’t permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O’Neill — he had to die to make ‘Moon’ successful. And to me it has been providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity — my sister Rose did not manage this. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do — for me, that’s enough.”