Writer's Notebook: A Streetcar Named Tennessee

Williams’ mother, to whom industry was a prized virtue, prompted him to keep busy and always use his imagination. Williams began by writing impromptu letters to family members when he was only eight years old. In some of these letters, he describes the flavorful events at his grandfather’s rectory: “tell Rose the fussy big old Plymouth Rock (chicken) turned out to be a rooster, so Grand killed and ate him…all the chickens are going in danger of lossing their heads if they don’t lay any eggs.” He later sent Rose a drawing of herself with the note, “widow with a tenth husband. All the rest commided suicide because she was so strict.” Although often brazenly dark-humored when young, it was a character trait that drained out of him as he grew older, disappearing entirely by the time he was a teenager.

In 1918,when the young Thomas was only seven, Cornelius suddenly moved the family from rural Clarksdale to the urban caldron of St. Louis, Missouri, where he took a job with the International Shoe Company. In St. Louis, the Williams’ lived in a cramped, noisy apartment far removed from the pastoral and socially prominent lifestyle with the Dakins’. The years in St. Louis were remembered by Tennessee Williams as his unhappiest, “because I found life was unsatisfactory.” It was here he began to look inward for his own consolation—and he began to write more seriously. But when he was diagnosed with diphtheria, he spent several years recovering and unable to accomplish anything at all.

When he was thirteen, his mother presented him with a typewriter and encouraged him to use it and make something of himself. It was a singular event that was as significant as any other he would experience in his life. His first brush with the literary fame came at age 16, when he won third prize and received $5 for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” in Smart Set Magazine. The following year he was published in Weird Tales. Finally, in 1929, he entered the University of Missouri, where he became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. It was his playful fraternity brothers dubbed him “Tennessee,” because of his thick southern accent and his father’s Tennessee background.

The name stuck.

Articles in this Notebook: Magazine: Go Down Faulkner The Agony and The Sweat Eudora Welty A Streetcar Named Tennessee Bard of the American Iliad The Existential Walker Percy Richard Wright (1908-1960) Margaret Walker Alexander Ellen Gilchrist Willie Morris Clifton Taulbert Essays: Oxford Wedding Recommended Reading: Soldier's Heart (Samet) Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce)	A STREET CAR NAMED TENNESSEE by Stephen Enzweiler
	He could have been a character out of one of his own plays. His life was a constant circle of triumph, disenchantment and depression. He was a chronic abuser of drugs and a profound alcoholic. Yet, he wrote prolifically, breathing life into such enduring characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire. He was Tennessee Williams, one the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911 to Cornelius and Edwina Dakin Williams. His father was a stern man who worked as a traveling shoe salesman; his mother, by contrast, was a prim, sophisticated, and sometimes neurotic daughter of an Episcopal minister, who doted over him and smothered him with attention. The family moved from Columbus to Clarksdale when Williams was three, and they lived there until he was seven. By all accounts, his Mississippi years were a pleasant and idyllic upbringing, which Williams later described in his memoir as carefree, happy, and filled with a sense of belonging and freedom. His mother was an intense and puritanical woman, the domineering force in the family who filled him with her conservative and moral teachings. He idolized his grandparents, especially his minister grandfather. But he was closest to his older sister Rose—a slim, frail girl diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose delicate and turbulent emotional state resulted in her to being institutionalized most of her life. He was emotionally distant with his younger brother Dakin, who became his father’s favorite, and to whom he was often unfavorably compared. It was an otherwise secure existence, punctuated only by those evenings when his father would come home after drinking too much at a local watering hole. As time went on, Cornelius became more and more abusive toward the family and more openly hostile toward his “sissy” son, a character trait that would be reflected in many of Williams’ writings.
	He was an emotionally turbulent man who wrestled constantly with chronic depression, and he was forever obsessed by the notion that he would go insane like his sister Rose.	Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
	Williams’ mother, to whom industry was a prized virtue, prompted him to keep busy and always use his imagination. Williams began by writing impromptu letters to family members when he was only eight years old. In some of these letters, he describes the flavorful events at his grandfather’s rectory: “tell Rose the fussy big old Plymouth Rock (chicken) turned out to be a rooster, so Grand killed and ate him…all the chickens are going in danger of lossing their heads if they don’t lay any eggs.” He later sent Rose a drawing of herself with the note, “widow with a tenth husband. All the rest commided suicide because she was so strict.” Although often brazenly dark-humored when young, it was a character trait that drained out of him as he grew older, disappearing entirely by the time he was a teenager. In 1918,when the young Thomas was only seven, Cornelius suddenly moved the family from rural Clarksdale to the urban caldron of St. Louis, Missouri, where he took a job with the International Shoe Company. In St. Louis, the Williams’ lived in a cramped, noisy apartment far removed from the pastoral and socially prominent lifestyle with the Dakins’. The years in St. Louis were remembered by Tennessee Williams as his unhappiest, “because I found life was unsatisfactory.” It was here he began to look inward for his own consolation—and he began to write more seriously. But when he was diagnosed with diphtheria, he spent several years recovering and unable to accomplish anything at all. When he was thirteen, his mother presented him with a typewriter and encouraged him to use it and make something of himself. It was a singular event that was as significant as any other he would experience in his life. His first brush with the literary fame came at age 16, when he won third prize and received $5 for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” in Smart Set Magazine. The following year he was published in Weird Tales. Finally, in 1929, he entered the University of Missouri, where he became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. It was his playful fraternity brothers dubbed him “Tennessee,” because of his thick southern accent and his father’s Tennessee background. The name stuck.
	Following the critical acclaim of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams continued to write some of America’s best-known dramas, among them: Night of the Iguana , Summer and Smoke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and Camino Real.
	His time at the University of Missouri was short-lived, however. The Great Depression had just hit the country, and he left that same year for financial reasons. Life for Williams quickly degenerated into a harsh life of clawing and scratching for his very existence. By 1931, he managed to land a job working at the same shoe company where his father worked. It afforded him an income and time to write. For the next several years, he developed new ideas about American theater and wrote with greater clarity and intensity. He left his job at the shoe company in 1933 and entered the University of Iowa, graduating in 1938 with a bachelor’s in English. During college, he studied other writers and formalized his own style. He discovered the authors that would mean the most to him throughout his life—the Russian playwright and writer Anton Checkov and poet Hart Crane. He found he felt more comfortable writing plays than fiction, and in 1935 his first publicly performed play, Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!, was produced in Memphis while still a student. It was the beginning of Tennessee Williams’ literary and stage career. With one production behind him, he continued writing, focusing on two more works, Candles In the Sun (1936) and The Fugitive Kind (1937). After graduation, he moved to New Orleans to write for the WPA, and took an apartment in the French Quarter. (He returned to New Orleans again in 1947, moving to 632 St. Peter Street, where he penned A Streetcar Named Desire.) By the time America entered World War 2, Tennessee Williams had written and produced 16 plays in only six years—an amazing feat considering how difficult it was for any unknown playwright in that era to get produced. But, the productions did nothing to bring him the kind of professional recognition he wanted or the financial security he needed. He continued to travel the country, living in virtual poverty and working odd jobs where he could find them. Eventually, this condition was relieved when he received an offer from MGM in Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. His Hollywood years were comprised of writing what he called “celluloid brassieres” for Lana Turner, but it finally gave him a marked degree of financial security and afforded him the time to work on his own projects. Since the mid-thirties, he had been working on The Glass Menagerie; by 1943, he had it finished. He wrote a screenplay version of it and offered it to MGM, calling it The Gentleman Callers. But MGM felt it was too experimental and they turned it down. What MGM called experimental was the new approach to dramatic storytelling Williams had developed. Drawing largely from the ideas of the Impressionist Movement, he innovated a style in which the emphasis on-stage was more on the representation of reality rather than the presentation of reality itself. He experimented with more fluid structures, productions devoid of large sets, stiff dialog, and complicated movements. Or as Williams put it: “I visualized reduced mobility on stage…something resembling a restrained type of dance, with motions honed down to only the essential or significant.” Tennessee Williams was changing the American theater. About the same time he worked at MGM, he received tragic news about his sister Rose. He had always been close to her emotionally, and after years of treatment in mental hospitals, she had become increasingly paranoid. Based on her doctor’s recommendations, her parents eventually consented to a prefrontal lobotomy operation in an attempt to cure her. The operation went badly, and Rose was incapacitated for the rest of her life. Williams never forgave his parents for allowing the operation, and he blamed himself the rest of his life for not doing more to protect her. The incident, and the guilt he felt, may have been one of the traumatic episodes of his life that eventually drove him down the road to drug abuse and alcoholism. Certainly, the character of Rose begins to appears more frequently in his plays after 1942. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is commonly understood to be modeled after Rose, as is the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. The themes of insanity and lobotomy appear in Suddenly, Last Summer , and Williams’ mother is recognizable in the character of Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie. As the nation tuned their radios to news of the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, The Glass Menagerie finally premiered at Chicago’s Civic Theater on December 26, 1944. It became the watershed of his career; it had a very successful run and won him wide critical acclaim. Overnight, Tennessee Williams was hot property. In an essay he wrote in the New York Times in 1947, he described the Chicago opening as “an event which terminated one part of my life and began another…I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence.” A year later, the play premiered at the Playouse Theater on Broadway to even greater success, winning him the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a lucrative film contract, and the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. Following the critical acclaim of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams continued to write some of America’s best-known dramas, among them: Night of the Iguana , Summer and Smoke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and Camino Real. His reputation continued to zenith, particularly after receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1950, only seven years after MGM flatly rejected his screenplay The Gentleman Callers, Hollywood scrambled frantically to buy the movie rights to The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar. Williams had finally achieved the level of success and fame few American playwrights had ever achieved before, and even fewer have achieved since.
		In 1994, the U.S. Postal Service honored Williams by issuing a commemorative stamp.
	But despite the critical successes and newfound financial prosperity, he continued to be dogged by crippling self-doubt and emotional conflicts, especially about his own sexuality. He was an emotionally turbulent man who wrestled constantly with chronic depression, and he was forever obsessed by the notion that he would go insane like his sister Rose. “My emotionalism is much too great for my intellectual capacity,' he wrote in a letter to friend Audrey Wood. “It is like having sixteen cylinders in a jalopy...I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.' In 1947, Williams met Frank Merlo, an Italian American who had served in the Navy in World War II. The two hit it off immediately. Merlo became Williams’ secretary, and later—his companion for life. Williams had needed a stabilizing influence in his life, just as the chaotic forces of his newfound fame and fortune were threatening to overwhelm his fragile emotional world. He found what he was looking for in Frank Merlo. A testament to their deep devotion to each other may be found in Williams’ 1948 play The Rose Tattoo—a romantic comedy he wrote for Merlo about love in the life of Italian immigrants: it is the only play Williams ever wrote that had a happy ending. Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963, sending Williams into an emotional breakdown he would never fully recover from. He spent the last 20 years of his life gripped by loss and playing out the painful public and personal spectacle of rejection and decline. To combat his “blue devils of depression”, he turned to ever increasing quantities of prescription drugs and alcohol, to which he became hopelessly addicted. Although he continued to write, his work suffered; he wrote less and the quality suffered. He found himself in a destructive downward spiral. His plays were met with increasing indifference or benign rejection. The same Broadway that had lionized him decades earlier were now hostile to him, giving him short runs and bad reviews, or attacking his sexual orientation in veiled language written in reviews of his plays. The fact that Tennessee Williams was homosexual had been a public secret for decades. No one seemed to care until the late 1960’s, when the issue began gaining national attention by special interest groups and the media. As a reslt, he was often the victim of gay-bashing by the newspapers and by the public. In 1969, he was beaten savagely by a gang of teenager thugs after a Baptist minister published a series of anti-gay articles in a local newspaper. Theater critics used their influence to ensure his plays weren’t produced. , and his last years were spent a disillusioned man, with only memories of better days, prescription drugs, and alcohol to keep him company. When the end came for Tennessee Williams on February 24, 1983, it was as bizarre as anything he could have written in any of his plays. While staying at the Hotel Elysee in New York City, amid a roomful of half-empty wine bottles and prescription pills, he accidentally swallowed the cap off a bottle of barbiturates and choked to death. He was one month short of his seventy-second birthday. Recently, Tennessee Williams’ later body of work is being re-evaluated more critically, with works previously considered inferior now undergoing critical review. He will forever be remembered for transforming the American theater and for his memorable characters that continue to draw us back time after time. His was a genius in its own right—a flame that burned twice as bright, and that gave us stories told in the kind of frankness and honesty that was uniquely Tennessee Williams.
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	Stephen Enzweiler is a journalist, author, and writer for Y'all Magazine. Contact: steve@yall.com.