Laureate of the Outcast - On Tennessee Williams

Imagine yourself in the year 1929, a young man barely seventeen, softer than most...the sensitive type. You are in the upstairs quarters of your childhood home and from where you are standing you can see the cherry tree in the back yard through the bedroom window. This is the same cherry tree your mother, Adwilla, posed beneath one overcast day in what became a strange and haunting snapshot. You are sweating through your crisp white cotton shirt, weak with impatience. Your father, who pelts you with relentless insults, is hitting your wilted and sterile mother as she is aiming to slip out of her summer dress. Next you hear him scream at your sister as he rampages down the stairs and tears out of your St. Louis home. He is going out into the night to gamble and drink before stumbling back once again to sleep it off. Now imagine this scene repeated over and over as though it were the heartbeat of your days and you get the picture of being a young Thomas Laniere Williams or Tennessee Williams, as he was called.

Born on March 26, 1912. Tennessee Williams was the first son to Cornelius and Adwilla Williams of Columbus, Mississippi. A child "shy to the point of pain," he kept to himself mostly and preferred reading to playing sports. At the age of four he came down with Diptheria, a contagious bacterial disease that would cause weakness in the lungs and body with a high fever. He was confined to the house for two years. His brother, Daikin, recalls his legs being so thin he could barely walk. During that time his mother read him Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and Tennessee fell deeply in love with the great authors. 

His father supported the family monetarily as a traveling salesman. He'd be gone for lengths of time much to the peace of the home. Tom and his younger sister Rose, were soulmates. Close in age, they took care of each other, went everywhere and did everything together, yet, Rose had by her late teens exhibited violent fits of instability, rage and hysterical crying. She seemed to be emotionally debilitated and was viewed as an enigma and labeled 'crazy' for her failure to exhibit an acceptable disposition. Tom's younger brother, Daikin, remembers a moment when his sister Rose was questioning her sanity and truly teetering on the edge. Tom, in a stupid argument, lashed out at his sister, unfairly, saying "He never wanted to see her ugly face again". The result pushed his delicate sister too far and the next day, she pulled a knife on her father. This resulted in Rose's parents committing her to a mental institution. Tom would never forgive himself for lashing out at Rose and Rose succumbing to experimental solutions became one of the first recipients of a new procedure at that time known as Frontal Labotomy. Tom had forever been reading and writing, but after Rose was 'gone' he wrote with all his might.  The artist that he was had to create, he thought, or he might also, "...end up like Rose." This young poet had a will for poetry. Poetry explained the agony that filled him, somehow quieted his pain and served as the replacement for the confidant that Rose had once been. 

Tom would attend three colleges. The first, the University of Mississippi was where his father pulled him out after he flunked ROTC training. He was put to use at his father's shoe factory stacking boxes and later fired for writing a poem on the inside of a shoebox cover. in 1936 he entered the University of St. Louis, where he submitted a poem in a poetry contest and won first place. Later, however, he stormed out after screaming at his professor for placing the play he had written in only 4th place. Changing schools for the last time, he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1937. By this time, Tom had changed his name to Tennessee was drinking with frequency and writing non-stop.  "His drive was remarkable," his brother Daikin recounted. "He would pound and pound on his typewriter sometimes for eight hours straight without a break. And he was meticulous about ripping out page after page until he had it just right."

It's obviously why Tennessee had a deep well of emotion from which he cultivated his enormous characters. His young life had been tumultuous and void of acceptance making painful memories that were irreversible. Did this cause madness in him? Was he like his sister Rose, experiencing mental illness? Or was Rose's behavior merely the natural outcome from an abused childhood? Had Rose, not been given a lobotomy, at such an early age of twenty, would she have gone on to create works of art as potent as her brother's? How is it determined whether the abused child will succumb to the effects of cruelty or manage to overcome them? It is impossible to know whether cruel and unjust adversity will also serve an individual and provide them with useful material and insight, later in life. While the question regarding the usefulness of suffering remains rhetorical, I believe the difference lies in who the hindered person meets along the way. It matters greatly who influences them, who champions them and who takes them seriously. For Tennessee, the hardships, the violence, the ever present doppelgänger within, served him in the act of creating enormous characters and stories with which the public praised him. This praise, is what kept Tennessee from madness. The wounds Willimas had the courage to depict were aphrodisia to an unsuspecting audience. His courage to disrobe and lay bare before the public was met with passionate admiration, at first.  Being wounded and accepted versus being wounded and rejected defined the future of the tender playwright. Tennessee had made friends with suffering, and masterfully focused his memories through a playwrights lens, using skill to shape them into stories. He spent a lifetime noticing people from the outside -in- and articulating with justness what he had found. This measurement of his work spoke to audiences who returned his effort at reaching them with resounding applause. The difference between he and Rose was, where Rose had been silenced for histrionic episodes, Tom had been awarded for operatic genius. Making it seem as though, how and where we show our unlabeled emotions is an important part of deciphering their true value. Had Rose been encouraged to write and met with understanding instead of scrutiny and her agonizing self doubt, intercepted, instead of medically silenced, we may be celebrating her plays today, as well. 

Glass Menagerie originally named The Gentleman Caller, was William's most notably autobiographical work. Although it's safe to say all of his plays had the playwright himself deeply enmeshed. Glass Menagerie, a play about a domineering mother who wants to marry off her "crippled" daughter after the father abandons the family, won its creator the Pulitzer. The following passage from Act 1 Scene 7 between Jim (the gentleman caller) and Laura (the daughter) illustrates something about the author most touching. 

JIM:  (to Laura) I wish that you were my sister. I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one time's one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're as common as -weeds, but-you-well, you're- blue roses!"

This passage, as in so many of William's passages, is one where you can imagine the author speaking about himself and his own sister. There is often a double entendre in Tennessee's work. His characters are the many facets of himself and his family reborn often enough as to give them all a second chance, with which they evidently most often always fail. 

Little Tom Williams had become a great success at the age of 34. He moved back to his beloved New Orleans where he had moved after finishing college and where he had always felt inspired to create. He was armed with a good literary agent, Audrey Wood, who had suggested he go to New Orleans in the first place. Now he could live where he felt most comfortable and where the lifestyle was most Dionysian and befitting to a homosexual artist. Williams was as passionate for younger men and liquor by this time as he was for writing. The previous being an attempt to escape his "inescapable loneliness,” and the latter being an attempt, perhaps, to heal it.

Tennessee knew that the resistances which he had grown up with in his family also had served to build his strength as an artist. Like the effort a butterfly makes to break from its cocoon so too had William's beat against his cage. He weathered the great irony of the poet; that the pain and degradation with which they initially suffer, does in the end become the earth they mine for their creations and prizes. 

A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947. The story of two sisters reunited when the elder has run out of her money and lost the family estate. The main characters, Stanley, Stella and Blanche are seen in the hot and sweaty New Orleans summer. Streetcar displayed "violence, sexuality, alcoholism and rape..." as never witnessed by audiences in the theatre before. Tennessee revealed a brutal, honest humanity that shocked people. A Williams' play was guaranteed to insult your polite side and invigorate your soul. It might even expose you to yourself in ways you hadn't expected. The famous novelist and friend to Tennessee, Thorton Wilder said, after seeing Streetcar, that he thought the character of Blanche was "too complicated for the theatre." Tennessee replied "But Thornton, people.....are complicated."

At the end of Streetcar, Stanley has raped his wife's sister Blanche while she, Stella, was away at the hospital giving birth. Upon Stella's return home we enter into a conversation regarding the fact that no one can believe what Blanche has announced (that Stanley raped her) really happened. In an effort to save everyone from one another Stella calls a doctor to come and take her sister away to a mental institution. Blanche believes, a former friend of hers is coming to take her on a cruise. Instead it is the Doctor who enters and after some commotion, Blanche realizes there is no escape. She says one of Tennessee's most famous lines of all time, holding tightly to the doctor's arm, "Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

The beauty of William's poetry combined of course with the raw talents of the original cast including Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Jessica Tandy and directed by Elia Kazan, was enough to bring home a second Pulitzer. 

This great success, however, would not prove medicinal to Williams writing for the New York Times, he said: "But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, the heart of man, his body his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daises, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to___why, then with this knowledge you are at least in position of knowing where danger lies. You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you "have a name" is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition___and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!

As much as Tennessee would have liked to have a different life, saying to his biographer when asked 'What would he change about his life if he could?" replied "I would have had a loving father...". Still he had an appreciation for the struggle that had made him. Steeped in feelings, both lyrical and diabolical this young Tom turned Tennessee would make do without his father's love. And yet, more than his father who "he only loved after he was dead," Tennessee felt that he had gotten much of his troubles from his sexually repressed and "psychotic" mother. He would later describe her as a "Little Prussian Officer in drag," and later "I must say, she contributed a lot to my writing, her forms of expression for example and that underlying hysteria gave her great eloquence. I still find her totally mystifying and frightening. It's best we stay away from our mothers."

With everything and everyone that had made him who he was, this prolific writer would publish over 40 full length and one act plays for stage and screen, along with novels and poems. The most famous of them including; Glass Menagerie, 1945, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton 1946, A Streetcar Named Desire 1947, The Rose Tattoo 1950, Camino Real 1951, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1954, Orpheus Descending 1958, The Fugitive Kind 1958, Suddenly Last Summer 1958, Sweet Bird of Youth 1959, and Eccentricities of a Nightengale 1976...to name a few.

The genius of Williams was in his elegant portrayal of the 'propinquity' between soul and angst. His illustrations of the outcasted and delicate people are irreplaceable in the world of American art and his original creations defined a period of history in American Theatre. Tragically, as much as the worlds praise had served to keep this timid flower in bloom, the criticism he would eventually receive for his 'failed' work, would be his demise. He holed up in the Hotel Elysee' (nicknamed Easylay) alone and in agony over headlines that condemned his production of Baby Doll as "pornographic." Francis Cardinal Spelmen from St. Patricks Cathedral in New York would publicly proclaim that the brilliant playwright's work was "morally repellant," though he never actually saw it for himself. Tennessee then developed what his brother called "full blown paranoia," and was convinced people were trying to murder him. Headlines that critics called Clothes for a Summer Hotel ,"Illiterate" broke his heart. The actress Jane Smith was quoted as saying that "The critics murdered him, literally, murdered him. Mercilessly." Williams died in 1983 a month before his 72nd birthday. The autopsy report said Williams had choked on a small cap from a barbiturate bottle.

Tennessee William's works are timeless, universal and legendary. They continue to inspire and educate. In response to being asked how Tennessee could have done what he did his brother replied, "You have to have that spark of genius which he has ---that's what a great artist is. You have those people doing it on canvas and you have them doing it with words. And my brother I think was the greatest...and always will be."

 

1.A&E, Videocassette. Wounded Genius. 1993.

2. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. Books on Tape. Crown Publishers, 1995.

3.Williams, Tennessee. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams Volume One, Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire. New Directions Publishing New York, NY.1990.

4. www.etsu.edu/haley/twbio.html, Biography: Tennessee Williams

5.www.booksfactory.com/writers/williams.htm, Biography and Complete Works.