Memoirs

  Later in 1946, Margo Jones and her friend Joanna Albus arrived in New Orleans, where Grandfather and I were living, and I read them the first draft of Streetcar, aloud. I think they were shocked by it. And so was I. Blanche seemed too far out. You might say out of sight. But when Margo and Joanna left, I decided to drive down to Key West with Grandfather. It was a lovely drive, the Pontiac behaving well. We crossed the Suwannee River and we cut across from the west coast of Florida to the east. Grandfather was a wonderful traveling companion. Everything pleased him. He pretended to see clearly despite his cataracts and in those days you could shout to him and he’d hear you. All his life he had been in love with life, and just being with him revived my own pleasure in the fact of existence.

  We arrived in Key West and occupied a two-room suite on the top of the Hotel La Concha and it was there that I really began to get Streetcar into shape. It went like a house on fire, due to my happiness with Grandfather.

  Every afternoon when I was through work we would drive out to South Beach. It was still nice in those days, before the advent of the motels and the parking lots. I would swim and swim and Grandfather would sit at the edge of the water and let the waves wash over him.

  Several hospitable and interesting people were there. Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway was occupying the Spanish colonial home where Ernest had left her when he split to Cuba and Pauline entertained Grandfather and me. Then Miriam Hopkins arrived on the scene and enlivened it still more with her extravagant wit and charm.

  I finished Streetcar and mailed it to Audrey Wood and this time I received from that little lady a much more positive and encouraging reaction.

  Then I first encountered Irene Selznick. My meeting with her was arranged by Audrey with the atmosphere of high-level espionage. I was wired to come directly to Charleston, South Carolina, to the best hotel there, where I was to have a rendezvous with Irene and Audrey. I went there posthaste. Irene flung open the door of her suite with her eyes ablaze and it was settled that very evening that she would produce Streetcar. The atmosphere of mystery continued. Irene wired the office she had set up in New York: it was a coded message to her assistant and the message read: “Blanche is coming to stay with us.” This was all very exciting for me. I left Charleston to rejoin Grandfather in Key West, where Mrs. Hemingway and other friends had been looking out for him.

  Mardi Gras was now approaching in New Orleans and Grandfather was determined not to miss it, so he went ahead by plane while I drove the snow-white secondhand Pontiac convertible up the east coast of Florida. All went well until I came near the town of Jacksonville. I had picked up a redheaded youth, hitchhiking, and we were beginning to discuss the matter of checking into a roadside motel for the rest of the night, when suddenly a highway patrol car came screaming up to us and ordered us onto the shoulder of the road. The highway patrolman said I had no taillights on my car and then he demanded to see my registration papers and my driver’s license, of which I had neither. I was not at all bright about the exigencies of driving, or was I merely indifferent to them? Anyway the fiendish highway patrolman handcuffed my right wrist to my left ankle and told me to get out of the car. I asked him how it was possible for me to get out of the car with my right wrist handcuffed to my left ankle and he yanked me out and told me to crawl to his patrol car. Well, I managed to do it while he marched the redheaded hitchhiker to the car behind me. We were driven to the jailhouse in Jacksonville. It was about midnight. We were thrown into the bull-pen, a small barred enclosure containing drunks and addicts and homos. I had always suffered from claustrophobia and I had a hard time controlling my nerves. That night the police had raided some black whorehouses and their brutality to the poor girls was hardly to be believed. They kicked them up and down stairs and they hit them over the head with their billy-sticks. About daybreak a bondsman came to see me. He said he would represent my case, when it came up, for three hundred dollars. I happened to have some traveler’s checks with me which covered that extraordinary demand.

  About noon the next day I was let out of the bull-pen and told that before my car would be released to me and before I would be permitted to continue my journey to New Orleans, I would have to pass a driver’s license test. I was given a bunch of test papers to study and I don’t think I’ve ever studied anything so hard. Miraculously, I managed to pass the test and was released by the law.

  For some reason they wouldn’t allow me to pay the bond for the young hitchhiker. I had to leave him in that Jacksonville bull-pen and heaven knows what he endured there.

  With a driver’s license and taillights working, I resumed my journey to New Orleans, where Grandfather was enjoying Mardi Gras, a celebration that has never appealed to me but that was great fun for Grandfather since the floats passed directly by our corner and he was thrilled by the spectacle, which he managed to see despite his growing blindness.

  How much trivia there is to be set down in the record of one’s life: There must be much between the lines that is more deserving of recollection but somehow that remains in a nebulous state while the mere surface history comes back clearly to mind. I mean relatively clearly …

  7

  Tonight I have been announced as appearing in Small Craft Warnings with the replacement for Helena Carroll a very gifted actress named Peg Murray, whom Bill Hickey calls one of the best in the business, despite the fact that she is not well known outside the profession.

  It will be exciting to see a gifted actress, after such short preparation, take over the demanding role of Leona and to see us all up there giving her our support, covering the almost inevitable “fluffs” as best we can, and loving her as actors must love each other on such critical occasions, if there is love in this world, and I think there is. I think there is love in this world and even in the profession of acting, love that may expire backstage but that I think, in the form of co-operation, is nearly always present on-stage when the play is imperiled by the performance, the opening one, of a new star who has not been allowed enough time and rehearsals to undertake her part.

  It will be exciting and it may be beautiful, too.

  I recall a letter from Brooks Atkinson when he retired as drama critic for the New York Times.

  I was on the Coast and I wrote him: “I think it is time for me to retire, not you, Brooks.”

  He wrote me back: “You must go on with your allusive work.” I am not sure that my work was, at that time, still allusive but there is no question that it should be and that the advice was warmly given and well intended.

  Yesterday two events of importance: one personal, the other political and very, very public.

  The personal event was dinner with Miss Rose and her increasingly irritable and irritating companion. To complete the party, I brought along a young friend, a gifted painter, model, and sometime actor.

  Miss Nameless had decided to book us a table at Lüchow’s, the beautiful Bavarian-looking restaurant, half as old as time, and we were very nicely placed just under the bandstand. The band, in Bavarian or Tyrolean costume and not a one in the bunch that the costume was becoming to, started to play at 7 P.M., just fifteen minutes after our arrival.

  What charmed me most was a skylight close to our table, through which I saw first dark going into a deep dusk as the dinner progressed—well, disintegrated is a better word for it, since Nameless had her Irish up and immediately started to put down my poor young friend—and how he controlled his temper with that Irish biddy, deep in her cups and mean as a rattler, I cannot comprehend. He must be at least half an angel.

  Miss Nameless began to take on the “young” in general as a bunch of social parasites and leeches and degenerates.

  She declared that the good old days had gone completely and there was no dignity or integrity left in the world.

  My friend and I had agreed in advance that when this lady started to show her bitch-colors, we’d say, one of us to the other, that we had seen a robin today in Central Park, and wasn’t that strange for a robin to be a
round so late in summer.

  Well, I can’t tell you how many times we had to make references to the late summer appearance of this robin and to other valentine aspects of Central Park in order to keep things bearably cool at the table.

  But I’m afraid I lost my cool and I turned on Nameless and said, “Let’s face it, you have turned into a reactionary and I am a revolutionary.”

  She then started talking about mongrels, meaning the young man and I. You see, she is completely Irish and she regards all persons not completely Irish as mongrels. And, alas, she has no Irish humor on this subject.

  Of course, when the evening was over, I began to feel a bit sorry for Nameless. She is so tough in her loneliness, her spinsterhood, and her archaic “principles,” which are as hypocritical as “principles” of her vintage could possibly be.

  The story of my sister Rose’s tragedy begins a few years before I commenced my three-year break from college to work for the Continental Shoemakers branch of the International Shoe Company.

  I have mentioned that Rose suffered for several years from mysterious stomach trouble. She was several times hospitalized for this digestive trouble but no ulcer, no physical cause for the illness, could be determined. At last it was recommended that she have “an exploratory operation.”

  Luckily our family doctor, a brilliant physician, intervened at this point and told my mother, much to her dismay, that it was his (quite accurate) opinion that Rose needed psychiatric attention, the mysterious digestive upset being due, he thought, to psychic or psychosomatic reasons that could be determined only through the course of analysis.

  You can imagine how this struck Miss Edwina. I am afraid that dear Mother has at times seemed to me to have been a moderately controlled hysteric all her life—and in her family tree (on both sides of it, Dakins and Ottes) have been alarming incidences of mental and nervous breakdowns.

  As a matter of fact, when Miss Edwina herself landed in the bin, sometime during the early fifties, and phoned me at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where I had gone for a brief much-needed vacation, she said, “Guess where I am?”

  “Why, Mother, aren’t you at home?”

  “No, son. A horrible mistake has been made. I have been put in a psychiatric ward. Please come at once and get me right out of here.”

  I did come at once. She had a female psychiatrist on her case and I had a private consultation with this lady and this lady said, “Mr. Williams, you probably know or have suspected that your mother has been paranoiac all her life.”

  She then told me that Mother was “thoroughly artificial and superficial.”

  Well, I was rightly indignant, despite some grain of truth that might be in this callously worded diagnosis.

  “Be that as it may, and I don’t think you’re a reliable authority on my mother’s character since you say she has refused to talk to you—I want her immediate release.”

  I sprung Mother right away.

  Well, now let’s get back to Miss Rose.

  In her early twenties Rose was sent to Knoxville with a few inexpensive party dresses to “make her debut.” A formal debutante party had been planned by Aunt Belle (Mrs. William G. Brownlow), but the death of her husband’s mother, the senior Mrs. Brownlow, intervened and the debut was “informal.” A party was given at the Knoxville Country Club, for Rose’s informal presentation to society. Aunt Belle had to buy Rose quite a few more dresses during this debut season: even so the debut was not exactly a howling success. I think Miss Rose fell in love with a young man who did not altogether respond in kind; and Rose was never quite the same. A shadow had fallen over her that was to deepen steadily through the next four or five years.

  When Rose returned from her Knoxville debut, I said, “How was your visit, Rose?”

  She said, “Aunt Ella and Aunt Belle only like charming people and I’m not charming.”

  An earlier summer, the summer of 1926, after we had all visited in Knoxville, we went on to the Appalachian Club, which Aunt Belle and Uncle Will belonged to. That summer I learned to swim in a clear mountain stream; it was Aunt Belle who taught me, in the pool of fabulously cool, clear water formed by the dam, which offered a sparkling waterfall over bone-white rocks. Aunt Belle tried to support me with a hand under my belly in the pool, and when I said to her, “Aunt Belle, I’d rather depend on myself,” she came out with this choice endorsement: “Oh, Tom, dear Tom, when you depend on yourself you’re depending on a broken reed.”

  Actually she was speaking of herself and of her dependence on God. She had an internal goiter which inclined her to extravagance of speech and of course to too much consideration of God.

  I am as much of an hysteric as Aunt Belle, you know, and as much as Blanche; a codicil to my will provides for the disposition of my body in this way. “Sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped over board, twelve hours north of Havana, so that my bones may rest not too far from those of Hart Crane …”

  The Appalachian Club was full that summer of boys that I couldn’t keep my eyes off, as they lay sunning themselves on the rocks in the stream. And my aunt Belle bought me my first long pants, a pair of flannels, and she bought Rose more charming frocks.

  We stayed in a little cottage. My brother Dakin had contracted a serious distemper on the way, probably from bad drinking water, and Grand, who was along, made him buttermilk in a churn since buttermilk was all that “Dinky” could eat.

  Rose had beaux, she was beautiful in her colorful summer frocks, and every night we danced. It was the Charleston era. There were two sisters at the club and one of them, I remember, killed herself the next year over a disappointment in love.

  I remember Rose and the two sisters and me walking along a narrow mountain road and some mountain boys went past us, chanting out, “F U C K.”

  None of us commented on the occurrence. We continued our way without a sign of hearing the obscenity.

  And I remember the afternoon when we walked from the Appalachian Club to Gatlinburg, which is now the annual meeting place of the Seviers. We were with two adolescent youths, devoted to each other but attentive to us. On the way there was a great thundershower and it drenched us.

  The girls retired to change in one place and I went to change with the boys. And the boys stripped naked in front of me and I stayed in my wet clothes until they undressed me. Nothing happened of a scandalous nature, but their beauty is indelible in my prurient mind, and also their kindness to me.

  One final recollection. One evening that summer, that wild jazz-age summer, we young people gathered in the cabin of a middle-aged lady who was afflicted with some terminal disease. She retired early but remained awake. And we young people began to talk about sex, the great big mystery that we were beginning to explore.

  Our hostess, from her bedroom, called out to us. “You are all just children …”

  And she said it so sweetly and lovingly that we shut up and soon dispersed and the great new mystery of love in our lives, I mean of adolescent sex in our lives, went with us.

  It accompanied us away from the afflicted lady.

  Rose was a popular girl in high school but only for a brief while. Her beauty was mainly in her expressive green-gray eyes and in her curly auburn hair. She was too narrow-shouldered and her state of anxiety when in male company inclined her to hunch them so they looked even narrower; this made her strong-featured, very Williams head seem too large for her thin, small-breasted body. She also, when she was on a date, would talk with an almost hysterical animation which few young men knew how to take.

  The first real breakdown occurred shortly after I had suffered the heart attack that ended my career as a clerk-errand boy at the shoe company.

  My first night back from St. Vincent’s, as I mentioned, Rose came walking like a somnambulist into my tiny bedroom and said, “We must all die together.”

  I can assure you that the idea did not offer to me an irresistible appeal. Being now released at last from my three years as a clerk-typist at Conti
nental, God damn it I was in no mood to consider group suicide with the family, not even at Rose’s suggestion—however appropriate the suggestion may have been.

  For several days Rose was demented. One afternoon she put a kitchen knife in her purse and started to leave for her psychiatrist’s office with apparent intent of murder.

  The knife was noticed by Mother and snatched away.

  Then a day or so later this first onset of dementia praecox passed off and Rose was, at least on the surface, her usual (now very quiet) self again.

  A few days later I departed for Memphis to recuperate at my grandparents’ little house on Snowden Avenue near Southwestern University in Memphis.

  I think it was about this time that our wise old family doctor told Mother that Rose’s physical and mental health depended upon what struck Miss Edwina as a monstrous thing—an arranged, a sort of “therapeutic” marriage. Obviously old Doc Alexander had hit upon the true seat of Rose’s afflictions. She was a very normal—but highly sexed—girl who was tearing herself apart mentally and physically by those repressions imposed upon her by Miss Edwina’s monolithic Puritanism.

  I may have inadvertently omitted a good deal of material about the unusually close relations between Rose and me. Some perceptive critic of the theatre made the observation that the true theme of my work is “incest.” My sister and I had a close relationship, quite unsullied by any carnal knowledge. As a matter of fact, we were rather shy of each other, physically, there was no casual physical intimacy of the sort that one observes among the Mediterranean people in their family relations. And yet our love was, and is, the deepest in our lives and was, perhaps, very pertinent to our withdrawal from extrafamilial attachments.

  There were years when I was in the shoe company and summers when I was a student at the State University of Missouri when my sister and I spent nearly all our evenings together aside from those which I spent with Hazel.

  What did we do those evenings, Rose and I? Well, we strolled about the business streets of University City. It was a sort of ritual with a pathos that I assure you was never caught in Menagerie nor in my story “Portrait of Girl in Glass,” on which Menagerie was based.