Memoirs, Tennessee Williams

Published in 1975, Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs created a bit of a scandal at the time, hard to imagine in this more liberated age. He spoke openly of his homosexuality, and the problems he encountered (crabs, for example), but not just this theme disturbed the literati. It’s a stream-of-conscious memoir, flowing from past to present with no warning (that shouldn’t be a surprise with the playwright of memory, as he is), and there was much criticism at the form the book took. I think Williams (as always) has had the last laugh. His Memoirs are (like so much of his work) ahead of their time – so ahead of their time that ultimately they seem timeless. The fragmented Proustian nature of the narrative is par for the course in memoirs today, as is the blatant honesty about perhaps the more unsavory elements in his life. His drug addiction, the lost decade of the 60s (he refers to it as “The Stoned Age”), and his romantic problems … all are treated with an unashamed veracity that jarred at the time (this is the author of Streetcar? Glass Menagerie?), but seem rather tame today.

I wonder sometimes, how much of the cruising was for the pleasure of my cruising partner’s companionship and for the sport of pursuit and how much was actually for the pretty repetitive and superficial satisfactions of the act itself. I know that I had yet to experience in the “gay world” the emotion of love, which transfigures the act into something beyond it. I have known many gays who live just for the act, that “rebellious hell” persisting into middle life and later, and it is graven in their faces and even refracted from their wolfish eyes. I think what saved me from that was my first commitment being always to work. Yes, even when love did come, work was still the primary concern.

Now I think that’s kind of lovely. Really well put, with, as per usual with Williams, a really disturbing sense of alone-ness and isolation on the outskirts of his lyricism (“wolfish eyes”, “graven in their faces”). The book is full of such passages, and I suppose if you have no desire to hear about the sex life of a famous person – let alone the gay sex life of a famous person – then the book may be rather tiresome. I don’t feel that way. You can write a book that is one gay orgy after another, and if you write it well I’m in. It’s not the experience that is important and unique – because it’s not – but how someone puts it into words. As Fran Leibowitz so potently said once, “Being unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.” True, true. Williams, even when just dashing things down off the cuff in his journal, is strikingly eloquent, and poetic. He can’t help himself. His writing is never twee, it has muscle behind it, real heart, real power.

Williams is honest in how difficult he finds it to talk about his work. He believed that the work speaks for itself (as indeed it does), but the brief snippets and glimpses he gives are vastly illuminating. His journals are filled with mini pep-talks he gives to himself. The main refrain is to “endure”. Endurance, endurance. Williams battled nerves his entire life, and also believed, from a very early age, that something was wrong with his heart. It has never been determined that Williams had a cardiac condition, but he lived under the spectre of sudden heart failure from the time he was a college student (and maybe younger). He put it up to too much coffee. He would wake up in the middle of the night with his heart racing a mile a minute. The cards were stacked against this man. The key, for him, was endurance.

Williams wrote his memoirs knowing that he had long lost his “critical darling” status. He hadn’t had a hit since the 1950s. Critics became increasingly savage towards his work. He couldn’t do anything right. They wanted him to be the same playwright who had written Glass Menagerie, etc., but that discounts the fact that an artist, if he’s lucky enough to live long, will grow and change. Williams gradually began to move away from realistic plays (although his first hit, Glass Mengaerie, with its narration and other elements, was far from “realistic”), and these plays (Camino Real and others) hold up VERY well. They seem contemporary and relevant today. But in the 50s, people were baffled. He would not be “allowed” to experiment. Williams wasn’t experimenting for the hell of it. He had great integrity as an artist. Art saved his life. He took it very seriously. Art, for him, was worthless unless it was an attempt to describe how he experienced reality, and that, necessarily, changed, as he grew and changed. The pain of being rejected by the critical establishment who had once so embraced him vibrates through the pages of Memoirs. Williams has enough of an ego, however, to be angry at the rejection as well. And stubbornness. No matter what, he would never ever write “for” them. He hadn’t written Glass Menagerie FOR them, and he wouldn’t write anything else with the sole purpose of getting back into their good graces.

As a matter of fact, he states in Memoirs that the only thing he ever wrote for monetary reasons is the very memoir that he is in the process of writing. At the time of the writing, his play Small Craft Warnings (a play I love – excerpt here) had opened on Broadway and was not doing well. To boost ticket sales, he agreed to play “Doc” for five performances and give a series of QAs after the performances. His first time since college on the stage. A rather humiliating circumstance, especially in light of his reputation. One of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century having to do a “trick” to boost ticket sales. Interspersed with his memories, are present-tense sections where he discusses the progress of Small Craft Warnings, as well as the stop-start progress of his play Out-Cry, a truly genius piece of work, also known as The Two Character Play (excerpt here). Neither play is going well. Williams’s critics keep drumming it into his head: you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it … but that old refrain “endurance” still works for him. He can only write what he can write.

Yesterday I was alarmed by a state of confusion at the New Theatre. Honest to God, I couldn’t tell the interval from the end of the first show. I mean I came out of the men’s dressing room when I heard the applause for the first act curtain. My “fluffs” were alarming, too. And if the back of the house had been filled – it wasn’t for either performance – I doubt that I would have been audible much of the time.

The problem seems to be breath. I let the end of a sentence fall because the breath runs out.

And yet I got good hands. I guess there is something about me that is recognizable as something about “Doc” – regardless of whether all that I say is heard.

It is imperative that the show complete the summer. It must, it will. I think the production of Out Cry may hinge upon my demonstration to draw again and to keep a show that received “mixed reviews” running for five months, which is, I mean would be, quite a prestigious accomplishment and a help with the big one.

God, the pressure. “It must, it will.”

You’re never “done” in this life. You are never “all set”. Especially not if you are an artist committed to whatever project you are doing in that moment, and not just repeating past successes. Of course, the productions of Glass Menagerie and Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and all the others – round the world since the first productions – helped give Williams some financial stability. But financial stability isn’t everything. If the critics, and the audience, continue to reject your new work – it is shattering. Williams was not a blushing flower, when it came to his work. His correspondence is fascinating to read, because you can see how FIRM he was, how he was willing to compromise up to a certain point, but then there was a point where no, he had to have the final say. Because he wrote the damn thing. The whole thing about the revisions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the most notorious example, with a titanic fight between Kazan and Williams, and Kazan winning the battle (the production went with Kazan’s version) but Williams winning the war (the published version having both Kazan’s AND Williams’s versions, with a long explanatory essay from Williams about how he still preferred his own version).

There is something a bit dashed-off about the book. I wonder if it was even edited. Or if he even looked at the pages before sending them off. He is open about his drug use. His brother had committed him to a hospital in the late 60s, and Williams still seems shaky here. The 60s were his bad decade. Frank Merlo, his partner of 7 years died of cancer.

As long as Frank was well, I was happy. He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn’t create a life for myself.

Frank Merlo had been a patient and easy-going guy, who was a companion for Williams, a lover, all that, but he also helped organize Williams, something Williams desperately needed. Merlo could handle it. He did it with little to no ego. Williams is always leaving typewriters in hotels, losing manuscripts in taxis, forgetting where he put his stash of money – every day is a comedy of errors with Williams. An absentminded man. With a tendency towards agoraphobia. Merlo took the edge off. He loved him, stayed with him, and also booked his plane tickets, made sure he packed properly, kept the bad friends away, managed Williams’s sensitive personality. Williams’s description of Merlo’s last days are very upsetting. If you have watched someone die a slow death, then you know that restlessness that comes at the very end, so difficult to bear and witness. You want the loved one to have ease, comfort, peace, but the restlessness persists. The tide rolling in.

The morning after my return I visited Frankie at Memorial. He was now receiving oxygen from a bedside tank. I stayed on that day and it was a dreadful vigil for me to keep. He would not stay in his bed for more than a minute or two. He kept staggering out of it and sitting for a couple of minutes in the chair. Then staggering back to the bed.

“Frankie, try to lie still.”

“I feel too restless today. The visitors tired me out.”

“Frankie, do you want me to leave you now?”

“No, I’m used to you.”

He had, during my vigil that day, been transferred from the ward to a private room – which he doubtless recognized as a room to which he was removed to die.

Frank Merlo

Along with these memories of his personal life, there are, of course, many anecdotes about the great actors and directors with whom he crossed paths. Williams’s writing, while poetic, is not ornate. He does not mince words.

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.

If there is a heaven, and if I can create my own heaven, then it will be a place where I can go back in time to that theatre in Chicago in the icy winter of 1944 and see that first production of Glass Menagerie.

Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield

My sense of him in his Memoirs is of a man who knows he doesn’t have much time left (he would be dead in 1983), and who is now desperate, desperate, to get back to his rightful position. But without having to compromise the type of writing he wants to do. His belief in his craft is stunning, when you think of the decade and a half of FLOPS he had been through. I don’t even know if I would call it “belief”, actually, which implies something intellectual. It’s not that he believed in his work (although that is true). It is that for him there was no other choice.

That is courage.

To keep putting pencil to paper … in the face of an overwhelming chorus of critical voices (and flagging box office sales) telling you, “No, no, no, we don’t want THAT from you … why don’t you write something like you USED to write?”

I continue to believe that Williams, ultimately, will have the last laugh. It is a mind-boggling body of work, when looked at it as a whole. It continues to grow in stature, making more successful commercial playwrights of the same era look flaccid, and trite. William Inge was more timely, in many ways, a true voice of the 1950s, but his plays have dated badly (as wonderful as the writing usually is). Similar to Clifford Odets who I believe is one of the best writers of dialogue this country has ever known, but his plays cannot be transported out of the 1930s. That decade is their anchor, their context. Williams’s plays are not as easily placed in a specific time, and therefore they don’t feel married to a certain era. Not in the slightest. And the later plays? The ones that were flop after flop after flop? Well, there is some amazing stuff there, and perhaps during Williams’s lifetime, with a success that playwrights can only dream of in the 40s and early 50s, such later plays, with a different voice and outlook – maybe they could never have survived. They suffered by comparison. But now, with the gift of perspective, and distance, they don’t suffer as much. They stand on their own as excellent plays, difficult, challenging, recognizably Williams (I could pick a sentence written by him out of a lineup in a dark alley) – and it doesn’t matter so much that they AREN’T Glass Menagerie, etc. Plays like The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (excerpt here), Kingdom of Earth (excerpt here), Small Craft Warnings, The Gnädiges Fräulein (excerpt here) … I wouldn’t call these “major” plays. They aren’t Menagerie, or Streetcar, or Cat, but even saying that to me feels ungenerous and ridiculous. If a playwright could write just ONE play as great as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams’s favorite of his plays, he considered it his best – Tommy Lee Jones, who played Brick, agrees with Williams) then that should be enough for one lifetime. But Williams just kept pumping them out, deep tormented funny plays with awesome characters that now live large in American culture forever. Stanley Kowalski. Big Daddy. Amanda Wingfield. Miss Alma. Blance Dubois. I mean, these were all in his head. So no, the later plays are not “major”, but they are certainly nothing to sneeze at, and again, I think with perspective they start to take on their own form and shape, they don’t cower so much in the shadow of those earlier masterpieces.

But at the time of the writing of the Memoirs, Williams could not know that. He could just continue to endure. And by “endure”, he meant “work”.

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

I am inclined to agree with him.

His memories of his tragic sister Rose are truly terrible, and I wince through the reading of them. You can feel his pain. It seems to me that Williams, naturally a very shy man, expressed what he needed to about his life in his plays. They are the true documents, the only real autobiography. Now, of course, we have the amazingly edited volumes of his letters, the diaries, all of this extemporaneous material, which adds depth, shading, understanding … but still: none of it EXPLAINS the work. The work stands alone. If you want to understand this man, you will not find the answers in his letters. You will find it when you read The Glass Menagerie. But what a gift it is, to also have his own words, in the same way that it would be such a gift to have, oh, Shakespeare’s diary, or letters, or something. Nothing on this earth (heaven or earth, Horatio) could ever explain Hamlet or Macbeth, but how awesome would it be to hear the MAN speaking? Williams obviously found his sister Rose to be an almost unbearably painful topic. It is a wound that never healed. It is the wound from which he wrote. All plays begin and end with Rose. But let me not take away from his extraordinary powers of creation and imagination. I do not mean to say that his plays are disguised autobiographies – no. But what happened to his sister Rose, her madness, her lobotomy, her tragedy, is what made HIM possible. What a terrible thought. Williams was haunted, literally haunted by this. That he got out and she didn’t. And not just that she didn’t get out, but that she would be so completely destroyed. He writes in his Memoirs about something that had happened back in the 30s, when he and Rose were kids, both still living at home. This story comes from 40 years in the past, but the pain in this passage, the pain that remains:

Then there was the wild weekend Mother and Dad had gone to the Ozarks, I believe, and Rose and I were alone in the house on Pershing. That weekend I entertained my new group of young friends. One of them got very drunk – maybe all of them did – but this particular one got drunker than all of us put together and he went up on the landing, where the phone was, and began to make obscene phone calls to strangers.

When our parents returned from the Ozarks, Miss Rose told them of the wild party and the obscene phone calls and the drinking.

I was informed by Miss Edwina [Williams’s mother] that no one of this group should ever again enter the house…

After she had tattled on my wild party … I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up them. We passed each other on the landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her:

“I hate the sight of your ugly old face!”

Wordless, stricken, and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.

This is the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect, and one for which I can never properly atone.

Memoirs is a jagged read, moving from far past tense to present-tense within paragraphs at times, and you can feel his decline in capability. Many paragraphs end with ellipses, as though you can feel him trailing off, unsure what the point of writing the memoir is … when his plays can’t even get off the ground. I remember when Jack Nicholson got his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars some years back and he joked at the beginning that there was something weird about the award, “because it has a feeling of the shroud about it.” Williams seems to have that sense here, too. Writing a memoir is meaningless to him without plays that can be put up, without an audience that will appreciate, without critics that try to understand.

Haphazard as a lot of it is, it stands as a monument to the sheer willpower and pigheadedness of this great playwright, a man who made his success early (although he wasn’t as young as Odets was, or Fitzgerald – he was in his 30s), and continued on … continued on with his work … even as his audience disappeared. Williams has almost no self-pity, it is one of his defining characteristics as a writer. He stated again and again that he had never written a “victim” in his life. He saw Blanche, Alma, as white-hot survivors, as characters who, through their sheer intensity of feeling, could teach the rest of us drabber souls a thing or two about living. He writes in Memoirs:

I realize how very old-fashioned I am as a dramatist to be so concerned with classic form but this does not embarrass me, since I feel that the absence of form is nearly always, if not always, as dissatisfying to an audience as it is to me. I persist in considering Cat my best work of the long plays because of its classic unities of time and placer and the kingly magnitude of Big Daddy. Yet I seem to contradict myself. I write so often of people with no magnitude, at least on the surface. I write of “little people”. But are there “little people”? I sometimes think there are only little conceptions of people. Whatever is living and feeling with intensity is not little and, examined in depth, it would seem to me that most “little people” are living with that intensity that I can use as a writer.

Was Blanche a “little person”? Certainly not. She was a demonic creature, the size of her feeling was too great for her to contain without the escape of madness. And what about Miss Alma? Was she a “little person”? Certainly not.

When Williams complains, it comes across as angry, and determined, and also, at times, confused, hurt. But not self-pitying. He is a good companion, even here, when you can feel how reduced he is, how fragilely he clings to his position.

Memoirs also contains what may very well be the saddest line Tennessee Williams ever wrote:

You see, I was still capable of falling in love in the sixties.

That is classic Williams. A clear open statement, with that friendly little “You see” at the beginning, disarming you for the hari-kiri move that is coming. You wonder how he could bear it. And then I wonder how I can bear it. All I know is, if he could bear it, then I certainly can, and spending time with him helps me see that, over and over again.

Not to mention getting a glimpse into how he worked, how he thought about his work, and the openness of his struggles with his process.

Tennessee Williams fans, I highly recommend the Memoirs, messy as they are. As with so much else of his work, it has great reverb beyond his time. Born in 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, his life almost spans the entire 20th century. It continues to reveal itself, unfold, it’s a never-ending encounter, for which I will always be grateful.