Tennessee Williams
From Philosopedia
Williams, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) (26 March 1911 - 25 February 1983)
- Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Depending upon the kindness of strangers was the philosophy around which Williams, one of America’s foremost playwrights, lived. His entire life, it has been said, was one of religious confusion. Williams was born on Palm Sunday, “a kind of righteous pagan, who, like Shannon, the defrocked priest in The Night of the Iguana (1961), saw himself as ‘a man of God, on vacation,’ ” critic John Lahr has written.
Williams was raised by his beloved grandfather the Reverend Walter Dakin, of whom Williams wrote, “My grandfather was very, very High Church (Episcopal). He was Higher than the Pope.” At the age of sixteen, Williams had a religious brainstorm in which he thought “the grace of God touched me,” and his 1943 diary contains the prayer, “Help me, dear God, to find what I need.” An image of the Virgin Mary was by his bedside and Williams converted “only for one day” to Catholicism in 1969, a time when he was having severe personal problems. “I wanted to have my goodness back” was the reason Williams gave for converting, encouraged by his brother, a convert. But Christianity never really consoled Williams, although it tempted him with its ideas about salvation and the glory of self-sacrifice. Particularly in Sweet Bird of Youth, Lahr holds, Williams dreamed of salvation. His character, Chance, says, “Something’s got to mean something.” The story concerns an aging movie star whose kept young man is castrated by the father of the girl he deserted. The castration is a kind of leap of faith, Lahr writes, an explanation of Williams’s own longing to reclaim his belief.
Williams’s outlook is found in The Glass Menagerie (1945), a partly autobiographical work that immortalized his sister, Rose, who like its character Laura “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.” Rose (1919–1996) was a schizophrenic who underwent a prefrontal lobotomy and was institutionalized until her death. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947—winner of a Pulitzer Prize) further details his outlook and is known for the hypersensitive and lonely Blanche DuBois who exits saying, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” His outlook is further shown in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1955—winner of a Pulitzer Prize), in which characters live by a full emotional involvement in life rather than shrinking from or denying it, despite the terrible violence they encounter; and Memoirs (1975), in which he candidly discusses his career, his love affairs, his homosexual one-night stands, his thoughts.
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Merlo and Tallulah
When Williams moved from home, he started finding boyfriends and falling in love: Canadian Kip Kiernan was the first. Then Pancho Rodriguez, about whom Gregg Barrios has written:
- I met Pancho Rodriguez in the mid-1970s, when I was teaching summer classes at Loyola University in New Orleans. I knew that he had been a close friend of Williams, but Pancho and his brother Johnny were more interested in news of relatives in the Eagle Pass/Crystal City area, where I used to live.
- Years later, I was a neophyte playwright with a few credits to my name and a fellowship to write Tejano stories for the theater. While exploring the possibility that the Williams-Rodriguez affair had the stuff for good theater, I came upon My Life, Elia Kazan’s autobiography. Kazan, who directed both the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire, writes about his difficulty understanding the love-hate relationship between Stanley and Blanche in a play now considered among the best of the 20th century. But it all became clear when he witnessed an altercation between Williams and Rodriguez: “If Tennessee was Blanche, Pancho was Stanley.”
- That became my mantra as I traveled to interview those who had known the two during the years they lived together (1945-1947). Most roads led to New Orleans. Coincidentally, their relationship ended when Streetcar opened on Broadway. By then Williams had a new muse, Frank Merlo.
When Hollywood mogul Jack Warner at dinner one night asked Frank Merlo (1922–1963), “And what do you do, young man?” Merlo responded, “I sleep with Mr. Williams.” Williams made no secret of the fact, writing that when Merlo died, “I went to pieces. I retreated into a shell. For nine months, I wouldn’t speak to a living soul. I just clammed up. I wouldn’t answer the telephone and I wouldn’t leave the house.”
D. V. Jeste, N. D. Jeste, and B. W. Palmer, writing in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (July-August 2004, 12(4):370-5), have analyzed the relationship of Williams with Merlo, one that lated from 1947 until Merlo's death in 1963. Their finding was that Merlo was helpful when Williams had deep bouts of depression, that when he died from cancer Williams continued being depressed, fearful that Rose would go insane.
Tallulah Bankhead, over drinks, once told Williams, “You and I are the only constantly ‘high’ Episcopalians I know.” Lyle Leverich in Tom (1995) quotes a journalist to whom Williams said, “Of course, God exists. I don’t understand how. But He exists. How can there be a creation without a Creator? Still, I don’t think there is an afterlife. At least I’m afraid there isn’t.” He echoed that thought in his little-known 1980 work, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, in which a character representing him says, looking up at the sky, “Life is all—it’s just one time. It finally seems to all occur at one time.”
Plays, Novels, Short Stories, Poetry
Williams won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948 (A Streetcar Named Desire) and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1945 (The Glass Menagerie) and 1961 (The Night of the Iguana). He also won a Tony in 1952 (The Rose Tattoo).
In 2009, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamont, a screenplay he wrote in 1957, was turned into a movie.
The Notebooks
Margaret Bradham Thornton's editing of Williams's Notebooks (Yale University Press, 2007 ISBN: 9780300116823) is an 828-page collection of his diary-like private thoughts from 1936 to 1981. The depression that he suffered in life showed up early and continued until his death. He describes the sex he had and with whom, the drugs he took, his fears, his obsessions, and the joys and sorrows he experienced in his dramatically chaotic life.
Thornton's editing is such that what Williams wrote into his notebook is on the right, complete with cross-outs and underlinings and editing, whereas on the left she supplies additional information ordinarily found in footnotes but now an integral part of the book. For example, here is his entry for Wednesday, 13 October 1937, written soon after he arrived to study at the University of Iowa:
- Wed. - oh, Lord, what misery! Same business! Terrific tension ever since my eleven o'clock class - Went swimming but scared to do more than one lap and all the way home - agony! Took mebral and sleeping pill soon as I reached this heavenly sanctuary - I need a friendly shoulder to cry on tonight - Johnnie (197) who rooms next door is nice. I now feel amazingly relieved in body - but dread tomorrow - and all the other tomorrows - how can I ever find my way out of all this?
- Je ne sais rien!
On the opposite page, to explain footnote 197, Thornton explains:
- When Williams first arrived in Iowa City, his lodging was at a boardinghouse located at 225 North Linn Street. Shortly afterward he moved into a boardinghouse at 325 South Dubuque Street where Johnnie was presumably also a boarder. A month later, at the end of October, Williams moved into the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house.
Thornton's notes describe such varied subjects as the following: his poor health; his loneliness; his concern about human brutality; his recognizing he is no longer a "fresh young thing"; his jitteriness from heavy drinking; why he converted to Catholicism at one point; his interest in Hart Crane; his dreaming about Bruno Hauptman's execution; his wrecking his Jaguar; his meeting and disliking Truman Capote and his lover, Jack Dumphy; his traveling with Merlo to see Morocco and Paul Bowles; his enjoying kids in their silks at the races; his observations about major authors and celebrities - the book is cram-packed with confessions and gossip.
For example, an entry in 1979:
- Such was the Puritanism imposed by Edwina [his mother] that I did not masturbate till the age of Twenty-Six, then not with my hands but by rubbing my groin against my bedsheets, while recalling the incredible grace and beauty of a boy-diver plunging naked from the high board in the swimming-pool of Washington U. in Saint Louis.
His Death
Four years before his death, he was gay-bashed by five teenage Key West boys, an incident that occurred after a local Baptist minister placed an anti-homosexual ad in the Florida newspaper. Williams was not badly hurt, but it was one of many such that he endured throughout his life.
While residing at the Hotel Elysee, 60 East 54th Street in New York City, he was found dead at the age of 71. Dakin, his brother, thought he had been murdered. A police report, however, stated many prescription drugs were in his room and it appeared that he had choked on a bottle cap, possibly because the drugs or alcohol he took made it difficult for him to gag and cough the bottle cap up out of his throat.
Williams did not wish to be cremated or buried in the family plot, writing in Memoirs that he wanted his body sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped as close as possible to the area at sea where Hart Crane committed suicide. He specifically did not want to be buried in the family plot in St. Louis, where he once had been locked up in a psychiatric ward.
As his biographer Lyle Leverich has pointed out, “Unfortunately, he failed to make this a provision in his will, or his attorney failed to include it.” Tennessee’s brother Dakin made the decision to have his brother buried in St. Louis, saying in a letter to Warren Allen Smith],
- When I arrived in New York on February 26th, my brother’s body was already placed in a very handsome "orthodox Jewish" casket. The decision to bury him had previously been made by trustees Maria St. Just and attorney John Eastman. The funeral director, Frank Campbell, took me aside and said, "We are planning to ship the remains to Waynesville, Ohio, to be buried alongside his grandparents." I then selected St. Louis, where visitors could come to pay their respects, rather than inaccessible Waynesville.
The open casket at the Campbell funeral parlor displayed a shaved face, but it was Tennessee and not Dakin who had shaved the beard shortly before he died. One viewer scarcely recognized the body lying with an object on the breast, an icon temporarily placed by Maria St. Just. Tennessee was said to have had suffered a lifelong dread of confinement, and to be enclosed in a coffin anywhere, not just St. Louis, was what he had never wanted. However, his remains were placed into a large “Orthodox Jewish” casket, the funeral was held in an ornate Byzantine cathedral, and over twelve hundred attended the final rites. “Lamentably,” says Leverich, “he left the final decision to others.”
Williams was interred in St. Louis, Missouri, at Calvary Cemetery.
From A Biographer
In Pique, a newsletter published in the 1990s by Warren Allen Smith, certain references were made to Williams that caught Leverich's eye]:
CE; John Lahr, “Fugitive Mind,” The New Yorker, 18 July 1994; GL; Lyle Leverich letter to WAS, 3 June 1991; OCAL; TRI; TYD}
