“Why Do They Strike Us? What Is Our Offense?”

Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks are incredible on multiple layers. It has a lot of information not before published, the footnotes are as extensive as the text itself – beautifully connected to the text, adding depth and shadings to what Williams shares in his journal (postcards to his mother, for example – so we can see the whitewashed version of events he tells his mother, as compared to what was REALLY going on – something I am sure we all can relate to) – and also things like drafts of poems that he mentions working on in the journal. Then in the footnote, we’ll see said draft and be able to read it. It is an exquisitely put together book. It is a snapshot of personality, its many different layers, and how we are different to different people – over many many years. I am still in 1943, a big year for Williams professionally, although he doesn’t know it yet. 1943 was also the year his sister Rose was lobotomized, which his mother informs him of in a letter. She refers to it as a “head operation” and that it was “successful”. Williams writes back in a letter I find chilling:

I did not at all understand the news about Rose. What kind of operation was it and what for?

That was in January, 1943. It would be a couple of months before this news would make it into his journal. Too painful and awful to even contemplate. At times, Williams referred to his sister only as “R”. Her name became too painful to even write out.

On March 24, 1943, he wrote this in his journal (“Grand” refers to his beloved Grandmother, who was ill at the time):

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.

It’s horrifying. Williams had been toiling over a short play called “The Gentleman Caller” for quite some time (an early version of, of course, The Glass Menagerie – my excerpt here) writing it out as a short story, futzing with it, worrying over it. He had an agent. He had already had a play flop in Boston (Battle of Angels – my excerpt here), and he was at loose ends. The Notebooks at times read like a litany of money woes (he is always being evicted from somewhere, and then, at the very last moment, like the cavalry, a check comes in) and a compulsive listing of sexual partners.

You can feel the emptiness behind most of his conquests. He had fallen in love with a dancer named Kip Kiernan, his first love, who broke his heart. Williams took about a year to recover (and, I would surmise, never really fully recovered. His last play Something Cloudy, Something Clear is an autobiographical work – my excerpt here – about the summer in Provincetown when he met Kip Kiernan) – and his big loves – Pancho (the volatile drunk Mexican) and Frank Merlo, his partner for many years – are still in the future. Williams talks a lot about yearning for love, a real partner – Loneliness is his companion, and he is disgusted with himself when he views sex as nothing more than physical exercise. And yet, loneliness is nothing to sneeze at. Even if the companionship is momentary and brief, it’s better than coming back to his little room alone. Meanwhile, he keeps working, working, working. Without any knowledge of what was to come for him in the next couple of years – fame, fortune, his name in the books forever.

One of the really haunting things about the Notebooks is its open depiction of being a gay man before the days of sexual liberation (and we ain’t there yet, especially not now, with the vicious bigotry and prejudice surrounding the topic of equality for gays/lesbians/transgenders). There are those who say, “It’s fine what you do in your own private bedroom, I just don’t want to hear about it.” That statement is a red flag for me. Often, with good reason, because it’s a so-called nice polite way to say, “Keep your gayness private, please.” What does “don’t want to hear about it” mean? Does that mean you don’t want to see a picture of someone’s boyfriend on his desk at work? Quite often, yes, that is what it means. If a gay man tells you, “I had an awesome date last night …” and you feel threatened, that you “don’t want to hear about it”, but you would have no problem hearing your female coworker tell about HER date with a great guy – then you are a bigot, and you ARE the problem. It is trying to keep someone silent, BEGGING someone to just be QUIET. About who they ARE. Nope. Life don’t work that way.

But even all of this is a privileged conversation, showing how far we have come, when compared to what Williams went through. Williams and his friends are closer to the world of Oscar Wilde than the world of Neil Patrick Harris performing at the Oscars, an out gay man, successful and not in hiding. Some of the stories Williams tells are truly harrowing. The options are limited. You must always be on the lookout. He “cruises” for “trade”, and is more often than not successful. These are mainly one-night stands, which leave Williams satisfied sexually, but bereft emotionally. And sometimes, the night gets rough. Many of the men picked up are American servicemen – remember this is World War II – so soldiers are everywhere. It’s a subtle pick-up, a glance, a nod, sharing a cigarette, and then back to the room. But sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Williams is beaten up numerous times, as are his friends. Williams is punched in the face, his room ransacked. Then, in later years, on Key West, a hub of gay life, there are sudden round-ups of “degenerates” – the police suddenly making it impossible for gays to operate there, even take walks, nothing allowed – They are the “other”. Persecuted, hounded. Sometimes by the very men they had slept with the night before. It’s just awful to read about. And yet how much of this “outsider” status added to Williams’s work. (And to Wilde’s, and to all the gay men through history, who have managed to create some of the most long-lasting works of art known to man.) Homosexuality (and Williams talks about this a lot) is not just analogous to being an artist – it is one and the same thing, for him. One could not exist without the other.

And at that time in history, by making that choice (and he did see it as a choice, not as a natural tendency) he was choosing to be forever outside. He was choosing to not have such comforting things as a home life, a family, stability. He knew this intuitively. He was always on the run anyway, fleeing across the country to this or that haven, whenever things got too rough for him. But Tennessee Williams, unlike some of the people he had met in “the Quarter” in New Orleans, for example, was not a “queen”, he had not gone as far as camp, which was a great and strong survival skill for many homosexuals at that time (and still, at this time). Camp is like armor. Nothing can penetrate it. It stands, in its fabulousness, in its total disregard for social propriety, in its disinterest in being accepted (it doesn’t NEED to be accepted – it’s so awesome all on its own that “acceptance” is a given) – as a rock-hard shell, behind which the “sensitive” man underneath could operate. Could create a world of beauty and art and humor. Could survive the cruelty. Tennessee Williams did not have that option. He didn’t like “bitchy queens”, for the most part, although he found their presence strangely comforting – he could at least relax, and not “put on”, but Williams was, at times, morbidly shy. He was not an extrovert, in fact he was quite the opposite – despite his loud raucous laugh – and camp, to some degree, requires extroversion. It may be a defense against INTROversion, that is true, but Williams just didn’t operate in that way. He straddled the gay and straight world. He did not go completely underground, like many of the characters he had met along the way. He absorbed their spirit, however, and many of these characters show up, in disguise, in Williams’s later plays. Although they are not gay men in his plays. They are Williams’s female leads.

So not only, by living as a gay man, was he repeatedly taking his life in his own hands (and he knew this, he understood this completely) – but he was also committing himself to life as a gypsy (ie: artist). It was essential, although his loneliness never really left him. He yearned for comfort, ease and peace in his friendships and love affairs, and while he received some of that, temporarily, he never found that “one”. Or, he did, but Frank Merlo died of cancer, and Williams pretty much cracked up and never got his balance again (this was much much later – over a decade later than the early 40s section I am reading now in the book).

There is so much that is moving and amazing about this book (his comments on other writers, his comments on his own work, his frustrations, the sense that he is moving towards something HUGE – but he just can’t see it yet) – but there are a couple of entries having to do with what it is like to be a gay man at that time, and a certain KIND of gay man, an artist, (similar to his buddies Donald Windham and Christopher Isherwood) – someone with something to DO (besides living as an outlaw, I mean – which is really the case for gay men at that time). Men who had skills, gifts, talents … and who needed to corral their vast powers into whatever work it was they were put on this planet to do.)

My heart just cracks reading some of these entries, and I think of my dear gay friends, men and women, people who have immeasurably enhanced my life in ways I can’t even name … and I think of imprisoned ruined Oscar Wilde, and Williams crouching over his unfinished manuscript of Glass Menagerie as a sailor beats the shit out of him – AFTER having sex with him – and it’s just awful. The book puts you face to face with the realities of what it was like back then. And we should never forget that. It is good to have moved past a certain point – at least in enlightened areas where people are let alone to be whoever they want to be – but we’re not there yet. And we should never forget those who came before. Who didn’t have it so easy.

Two amazing entries from Williams along this score (and these are just two of MANY). One recounts a conversation had with good friend Oliver Evans during a period of living in New Orleans in 1941. Oliver Evans was a poet. He and Williams had met in Provincetown (the summer when Williams had his first love, with Kip Kiernan) – and they actually remained good friends up until the end of Williams’s life, which is rare – many of Williams’s friends abandoned him during the 60s, a really rough decade for Williams. But Oliver remained steady. Naturally, he was also gay.

Sunday, 14, September 1941

Later – Sunday A.M.

Oliver Evans – a sad but poignant episode. Mack’s and the St. James bar.

“We ought to be exterminated” said Oliver. “for the good of society.” I argued that if we were society would lose some of its most sensitive, humanitarian members. A healthy society does not need artists, said Oliver. What is healthy about a society with no spiritual values? – Then you think spiritual values are identical with us? said Oliver. No, I admitted sadly, but we have made some unique contributions because of our unique position and I do not believe that we are detrimental to anyone but ourselves. “We are the rotten apple in the barrel,” said Oliver. “We ought to be exterminated at the age of 25.” “But Shakespeare had written no great plays at that age.” — “He had written Romeo and Juliet,” said Oliver. — “Yes, but he had not written Hamlet.” And so on — “If you think we are dangerous, why do you act as you do? Why do you not isolate yourself?” “Because I am rotten.” — How many of us feel that way, I wonder? Bear this intolerable burden of guilt? To feel some humiliation and a great deal of sorrow at times is inevitable. But feeling guilty is foolish. I am a deeper and warmer and kinder man for my devigation. More conscious of need in others, and what power I have to express the human heart must be in large part due to this circumstance. Some day society will take perhaps the suitable action – but I do not believe that it will be or should be extermination.

There is so much pain in that, so much acceptance of the situation. He could not live any other way. Many men couldn’t hack it (and women too) and married, just to at least have a suitable “cover” under which they could operate. Take the damn edge off. I don’t fault those people at all. Many of them were very good companions (Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for example), and helped and supported one another in their various pursuits, and marriage gave them some protection. Williams did not go that route. He had consigned himself to criminal status, basically. As Oscar Wilde (although married) did. But his understanding there – of the “contributions” they have made … It’s quite a sensitive reading of the situation, quite amazing really, when you think that this is a man getting beaten up every other night for basically providing another human being what that person asked for. Amazing.

The following entry brought me to tears. Williams has moved back up to New York from an aimless and strange summer spent in Macon, Georgia, with his friend Paul Bigelow. It is January, 1943, right around the time that his sister Rose was being lobotomized, although he doesn’t know it yet. It is THE defining event of his life. And strangely, you can see, in the Notebooks, how it galvanized him. The awfulness of it. He had been working on his “gentleman caller” play, and had been thinking of it as a comedy, something light, and in one draft Laura and the gentleman caller hit it off, and they make another date – so maybe there’s some hope there – and in the end, as Tom goes off, his mother Amanda tells him that whereever he goes, he will always have a home to come to. Well, that’s ONE way you could tell that story. But after the horrible news of his sister Rose, it becomes imperative that he be truthful in his art, that his art reflect life – as he experiences it – It was a real catapulting force. It had to be. Otherwise, Rose’s sacrifice would be for naught. Although he never said it that way. He could barely speak of his sister.

But here is the entry in question, which is a rallying cry for gay men everywhere, a piercingly insightful observation about what is really going on:

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.

Courage.

“He struck me because he did what I did and his friends discovered it.” Self-hatred, self-loathing, a fearsome enemy when cornered. We can see a lot of that going on today, with the politicians running on ferocious anti-gay platforms suddenly found sporting a wide stance in some airport bathroom or driving drunk after bumping and grinding at some gay bar. Or vicious pastors who focus only on homosexuality, suddenly discovered to be hanging out with a gay massuer for years. It’s almost become a cliche. It is the real definition of “phobic”. Anyone who displays that level of phobia is really operating from a fearful position of recognition and identification, and that has been borne out time and time again. And Williams, in that brief sentence, written 60 plus years in the past, nails why. “He struck me because he did what I did and his friends discovered it.”

Selfishly, I am so glad that Tennessee Williams found his tribe – not just of gay men, but of committed artists (poets, dancers, painters, writers). Art saved his life, as it could not save his sister’s.

Tennessee Williams and friends, in Provincetown. Tennessee is in the front, shirtless