The Sewanee Review December

With a flood threatening Collinsville, Illinois, in July 2014, Francesca Williams scrambled to transport her father Dakin’s legal correspondence upstairs from her basement. As she deposited box after box in her living room, a handwritten note caught her eye. Francesca immediately recognized the stationery of New York’s legendary Hotel Elysée, and the penmanship of her uncle Tennessee Williams. Seeing the note triggered a memory—more like a fragment, really, from when Francesca was seven—of one of Williams’s rare visits to St. Louis. Dressed in a crisp linen summer suit, the man she’d known as Tom was kneeling to embrace her.

Francesca began exploring the correspondence. The letters in the boxes depicted the mundane rhythms of Williams family life, but also described hospital stays and nervous breakdowns, the decision to have their sister Rose lobotomized, the years of struggling in anonymity, the intoxication of success and fame, the despair of a career in decline, the drug-fueled paranoia and recurring depression, and the family members’ abiding love and respect for one another. These personal dramas were the raw material that Williams would ultimately transform and recast in the characters of Amanda, Laura, and Blanche.

Francesca, who is herself a playwright, brought the letters to me. I was a friend of her father’s as well as a screenwriter and faculty member of the Film and Media Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis, which both Dakin and Tennessee attended, and I had already written a screenplay based on Dakin’s book My Brother’s Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams. Francesca and I subsequently edited the correspondence and turned it into a play, ensemble, which has been produced in New York and St. Louis. Francesca’s real goal in sharing these letters with the public, however, was to provide a new look at her family’s legacy, one too-often considered merely dysfunctional and tragic. The Williamses were finally a modern family, one that faced the challenges and tumult of life with the same courage, passion, and hope we all aspire to.

—Richard Chapman

And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other.

—“Person-to-Person,” Tennessee Williams, the New York Times,

March 20, 1955

 

When I was in junior high, I was assigned to sit in chapel next to a girl who spent each service picking scabs off her elbows and knees. She methodically harvested the dried blood of each wound and gazed at it, oblivious to the world around her. I thought, Gross, why does she do that in public? But I couldn’t take my eyes off her. When I watch Tennessee Williams’s plays or read his letters, I think of him picking at his wounds in public. They’re our wounds, too.

Williams wanted to be known and loved through his plays, but he left us so much more of himself, maybe more than he intended, in the “somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls” of his loneliness: scraps written on stationery of the Hotel Elysée or the Plaza; fragments of lines on the backs of restaurant bills; postcards from his endless travels; notes on airline stationery of Alitalia or the Concorde; letters, so many letters, scribbled or typed on anything he could find. Each one was like a dry flake of skin, a scab, detritus falling from his body every time he scratched an itch, each one containing some essential bit of his DNA. Writing was the way he scratched that nagging itch, and for a moment the words gave him respite, some peace, though never for long.

A few of Williams’s notebooks are housed in the Archives of the University of the South. Just holding them and reading his handwriting is so private, so personal; it is like looking over his shoulder in St. Louis while he writes. Some of his manuscripts are there, too—The Red Devil Battery Sign, Moise and the World of Reason—strewn with insertions and revisions written on napkins stained with coffee and wine or on the backs of menus from ocean-liner crossings. He wrote a poem on a half-melted lava lamp. Everything he left behind, from his toaster to his ashtray, seems like a message of some kind. Even his small black phone book, with its cramped, handwritten entries for Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, and Truman Capote, is fascinating.

Then there are the letters. They’re as carefully crafted and ironic as his characters’ dialogue. Williams’s letters, I’d argue, are the dress rehearsals for his theatre. Each one has an audience, familial and familiar—grandparents, cousin, brother, mother—that responds to his provocations and pleas. Those responses become the dialogue of the drama of his life, by turns condescending and manipulative, comic and tragic.

The letters below are part of a recently discovered cache, only two of which have been published before in excerpts. The Sewanee Review approached me before I began teaching my Tennessee Williams course this fall to ask if I would respond to them, not as a scholar, but as someone who loves Williams’s works and words and who knows his ties to Sewanee. Seeing his handwriting and the font of his typewriter, being able to eavesdrop on the intimate conversations between Williams, his brother Dakin, and his mother Edwina, brings him to life, sheds light on his significance, reminds us of his humanity and his tragedy. The letters remind me why I started teaching Williams in the first place, and why he will continue to “break through walls” and speak to anyone who knows his plays.

The letters and their bits of truth, their various voices and attitudes, allow us to assemble a creaturely version of Williams the way he assembled his own characters out of real life. We read the letters; we watch him picking at his wounds. We can’t turn away.

—Virginia Ottley Craighill

August 30, 1936

Dear Grand and Grandfather:

Dakin and I have just returned from a delightful two weeks at camp in the Ozarks. It was nicer this year than I have ever known it. We had everything, even a mild tornado, by way of diversion and escaped some of the worst heat, according to reports at home. Dakin gained some weight and we are both feeling fine. We produced three plays, which I wrote and Dakin acted in. The last one was an old-fashioned melodrama and for the heroine we had a little Ozark girl that waited on the tables whose accent and manners were just perfect for the part. She pronounced villain as “vill-yun” and was so dumb she didn’t realize the play was supposed to be funny, which made it all the funnier.

It rained just the day before we returned and has been pretty cool here since then. I hope the heat has broken in Memphis also. It must have been awful to have to conduct services in such weather.

While I was away I got a letter from Simon & Schuster publishing company that published Josephine Johnson’s “Now in November.” They said my short story in “Manuscript” was excellent and wanted to know if I were working on a novel and said if so they would like to see it. So I think that I will try to write one during my spare time—just a short one. It is easier to sell a good novel than a good short story. I’ve also had a story tentatively accepted by “American Prefaces,” which O’Brien the short-story critic considers the most promising new literary magazine.

It is certainly lovely of you to offer to send me to Washington. But I don’t want you to do it if it would mean sacrificing things that you need. I think I could complete my work in another year and of course I could get out of the physical education on account of my irritable heart. At camp I met a Washington U. junior who said he wanted me to write for the school magazine and join the Poetry Club. He’s an editor of the magazine. I think my contacts at the University would be extremely helpful. I’m going to get in touch with some newspaper editors pretty soon and perhaps in another year they will have a place for me or something else will open up.

Jiggs and the others are all quite well.

With much love, Tom

 

At twenty-five, Williams’s insatiable desire for success is already evident, along with the exaggeration of triumphs to loved ones—“They said my short story in ‘Manuscript’ was excellent and wanted to know if I were working on a novel and said if so they would like to see it”—and the cruelty, side by side with the insight into character and dialect: “a little Ozark girl . . . pronounced villain as ‘vill-yun’ and was so dumb she didn’t realize the play was supposed to be funny.” Williams might have learned to pick up on rhythms of speech and dialect by listening to stories told by his black nurse Ozzie or to sermons given by his grandfather Walter Dakin, but where did he get the meanness? Maybe from his father, Cornelius, the hard-drinking, abusive shoe salesman, who called Williams “Miss Nancy.” Or maybe it was always there in his “irritable heart.”

April 25, 1945

Dear T. W.—

I do appreciate your invitation for the 27th. I can’t come, but I appreciate your asking me. The reason I can’t come is that I hate to find myself in crushes of people, just as you probably do. If you ever find time and want to, come and see me at home or call me for lunch at the office.

I’m very glad about the acclaim given your beautiful Glass Menagerie; and while you may not be enjoying it to the hilt—for as an artist you don’t have to give a damn what the public thinks, and may not want to—certainly your mother is now happy in the glow of satisfaction over what she has achieved, in proxy, through you. That is maybe God’s greatest reward to good mothers—when they are fortunate.

Not that I mean you had a wise mother, as distinguished from one of goodness. I wouldn’t know; but few Dakins I’ve heard about or known seemed particularly wise. And in the Dakin heritage you and I have both had much to bear in common. Both of us had father trouble. Both of us grew up in what seemed tawdriness. Both had to escape and then go it alone, as sensitive pieces of machinery that nobody could help because nobody knew anything about the job those machines had to do. So both had to work out any answers they found all by themselves.

The best thing about the Glass Menagerie is its inner evidence of the answers you’ve found for yourself and are still finding. It’s this, more than the people who are galloping to see it, that can make you glow way down inside yourself. I hope it does, and I’m glad for this opportunity to tell you so. In a time full of the terrible failures of men, you have a right to your deep pride.

Most sincerely,

Edwin F. Dakin

 

Apparently the Dakin family liked to recycle names, making Edwin F. difficult to trace. He may have been Williams’s second cousin once removed—Edwin’s grandfather was brother to Tennessee’s grandfather, Walter Dakin—but he is never mentioned in any Williams biographies, and this is perhaps the only correspondence. While working for the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, Dakin convinced the tobacco industry to stop using doctors to advertise the benefits of smoking, but otherwise he managed to live privately, unlike his cousin.

He signs the letter formally, but appears to understand Williams’s family troubles and knew Williams grew up in “tawdriness.” The letter conveys a deep sense of who Williams was, a “[sensitive piece] of machinery that nobody could help.” His cousin, his soulmate, this man who empathized with Williams’s “irritable heart,” didn’t show up on the 27th and never shows up again, which is too bad.

Taipei, Formosa

April 23, 1956

Dear Tom—

Have just returned from visit to Philippine Islands where I had to prosecute a sergeant for stealing $460 from an enlisted man. The Sergeant was convicted and sentenced to two years. While in Manila I attended a performance by the Manila Theater Guild of your Rose Tattoo. The play was a big success in Manila—seats all sold out—and I was lucky to get in.

Next Monday I’m invited to a reception given by the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the Madam. In case they haven’t read your plays, this situation will be remedied as I am giving them copies of The Rose Tattoo and Streetcar, as well as my own Nails of Protest! My purpose in giving them the latter book, is, of course, to convert them to the Church!

Never did hear your opinion of Nails of Protest. Did you read it? I thought so—you gave it to Frank or tossed it in a waste can?

I still haven’t been able to see your Rose Tattoo movie. It’s now in Japan—and I’m enclosing a very favorable review from the Tokyo newspaper we get here.

Joyce sent me a clipping about St. Thomas Island which I’m also sending you; we thought you were going there on a visit. Sure sounds like an interesting place. We are trying to save all we can to open up a law practice again as soon as possible and have over two thousand in cash set aside—half of which was received from you for which we are most grateful. I also have a little over four thousand in bonds and hopes (very small) of getting royalties from Nails of Protest. Aunty says that Ed and Jenny Ashe (our Catholic relatives in Knoxville) bought several copies!

Aunty, too, is very appreciative of the help you are giving her. She is quite a gallant person and I am most happy that you are keeping her from being dependent on Dad, who is very rude to her—she says Dad “has it in for me,” and wouldn’t even have dinner with her on his last visit to Knoxville.

Hope you got the small gift I sent for your birthday. There isn’t much available here, but if there is anything you would like in Hong Kong or Japan—I can get it there for you—as I visit there occasionally.

Mother is well and says Rose enjoyed being home for Easter and looked very well in the new blond beaver coat you gave her.

I certainly do appreciate your continuing to keep me on your “payroll”, but if you find it is too much when added to all the other responsibilities you have, Joyce and I can always make ends meet. The Air Force is not very generous with their pay, but at least it is regular.

Hope Kazan did a good job with your new movie and the two plays 27 Wagons and Unsatisfactory Supper were successfully blended. I should think it quite a job—but both are excellent.

The overseas tour has been cut to fifteen months so I may be home for Christmas and am counting on taking Joyce to the next “opening night.”

Lots of love—

Dakin

 

Always little brother to the superstar playwright, Dakin’s letter oozes with desire to level the playing fields. How is it fair, the letter fairly screams, for Dakin, the “good son,” who did everything by the book—graduated from college and law school, went to Harvard for an MBA, married, joined the armed forces, was a devout Catholic, wrote his own book—to be forever eclipsed by Tom, the dropout, hypochondriac, homosexual momma’s boy whom Dad never liked? We cringe when Dakin notes that he’ll provide the Kai-sheks with copies of The Rose Tattoo and A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as his own Nails of Protest, as if putting the title of his book in close proximity to his brother’s plays makes them equal.

You can almost hear Dakin’s teeth gritting when he writes that he and Joyce “are most grateful” for the gift of a thousand dollars, and feel his clenched jaw as he describes his “appreciat[ion]” to Tom for “continuing to keep me on your ‘payroll.’” Dakin acknowledged in a letter to Williams from 1977, “It may well be that the only lasting memorial to having lived my life, will be that I was instrumental in enabling you to continue your writing career.” Somehow, it doesn’t seem like enough.

July 20, 1962

Dear Dakin:

Sorry to have been so long in answering your letter about “Mother’s book.” If Mother and you are pleased with it, I am sure I will be, but I do think you had better have Putnam’s send me a copy of the manuscript, for Mother’s sake more than my own. You never can be sure how books of this sort may be slanted. They could be embarrassing to all of us, and I certainly don’t want Mother to be embarrassed.

Of course I am very dubious about having poems I wrote at junior high school published, just as I am dubious about the advisability of ever publishing any of that awful “juvenilia” that Mr. Andreas Brown has gotten together in the basement.

I have written a few good things, just a few, and the rest is better forgotten. I think Mr. Brown means very well indeed. But it would be awful to suspect that, after my death, some book would come out containing all the discards of a life of writing. It might destroy whatever reputation I have made as a writer.

Please get Putnam’s to send me the manuscript right away. We may all need money, but we don’t want it at the price of being made to look foolish in print, publicly, do we?

If the book is friendly, sympathetic, not supercilious or slyly mocking, you know I will be very happy about it and cable an immediate endorsement.

I have been ill and exhausted and depressed or I would have written much sooner. Now I’m back on the beach and beginning to feel a bit better.

Hermione Baddeley was terrific in the Spoleto tryout, and if my continued work on the play goes well, we may try it out in England in a couple of months, touring the provinces first.

Period of Adjustment has scored a hit in London and has been transferred to a bigger theatre, in the “West End.” I will see it soon. The star, Collin Wilcox, is a girl from Knoxville who knew Aunt Ella.

Love to you all,

Tom

 

If your mother were about to publish an unauthorized biography of your life, you might, like Williams, feel some trepidation, even if you didn’t have a literary reputation at stake. Williams’s claim that he “certainly [doesn’t] want Mother to be embarrassed” rings false, as it seems Edwina was not the type who was easily shamed. She apparently never recognized, or never acknowledged, that she was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and anyone that deep in denial is not likely to be embarrassed by her own musings on the past.

 Williams gets to the heart of the matter, condescendingly using the royal we: “We may all need money, but we don’t want it at the price of being made to look foolish in print, publicly, do we?” It’s an interesting comment coming from the son who used his mother as the model for Amanda, and for Violet Venable. Edwina’s book, Remember Me to Tom, did get published in 1963, and the “awful ‘juvenilia’ that Mr. Andreas Brown” of the Gotham Book Store had gotten “together in the basement” ended up as the invaluable Tennessee Williams Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Williams wanted control of his life and work, but he left too much of a paper trail to be successful at it, and we, the voyeurs and scavengers, are the beneficiaries.

June 22,1968

Dear Dakin,

If anything of a violent nature happens to me, it will ending my life abruptly, it will not be a case of suicide, as it would be made to appear.

I am not happy, it is true, in a net of con-men, but I am hard at work, which is my love, you know.

Devotedly,

Tom

 

The letter has been partially quoted before, in an article in the June 28, 1968 New York Times entitled “Tennessee Williams Expresses Fear for Life in Note to Brother” and picked up by John Lahr in his 2014 biography, but looking at the uneven penmanship, one wonders how many manhattans Williams had at L’Escargot before he wrote it, and whether he woke up the next morning and chuckled before sending it, given the penciled note at the top: “melodramatic but true!” Was Williams aware that he was giving his brother a kind of gift, a theory that Dakin could work with and live on long after Williams’s death in 1983?

There’s evident editing: the first “it will” is scratched out and the cramped addition of “as it would be made to appear” heightens the drama, which Williams knew well how to do. Even the exclamation mark in the penciled claim seems more like an ironic wink than an interjection of fear. Maybe Williams knew where this would lead, not to a crime scene or to a murderer, but to a distracting postmortem for conspiracy theorists (not just Dakin), and a morbid fascination with the nature of his death rather than the character of his work.

December 19, 1975

Dearest Mother:

I am somehow managing to keep up with the heaviest schedule of my career, with the aid of various jet planes. Last week I was in Los Angeles to see a preview of Night of the Iguana. Then flew to San Francisco to attend rehearsals and make revisions on a new play called This Is (An Entertainment), which is being done brilliantly by ACT (American Conservatory of Theatre) in San Francisco. Yesterday flew back to New York for the opening, last night, of The Glass Menagerie revival with Maureen Stapleton.

Rose and her delightful new companion went with me, and I am writing with pen so my typewriter won’t disturb them—in the adjoining suite. There has also been a very successful revival of Sweet Bird of Youth. (Dakin saw it with me in Chicago)—it opens soon in New York with the great English actress Irené Worth.

Tonight we celebrate Christmas early—a home dinner for Rose and her (practical nurse companion) Tatiana, who is a titled white Russian lady with whom Rose is very pleased. Then this coming Monday I must fly to Europe for the world premiere of the new Red Devil Battery Sign at Vienna’s English Theatre. It will be brought to the States later. Several producers are eager to do it here. My dear friend Maria is appearing in an important supporting role. I will be there for Christmas. Then I must fly back for the final rehearsals and previews of the play in San Francisco.

The itinerary makes me dizzy—but I have always preferred an active life, as you know.

In February I am invited to Australia for the Adelaide Festival where Kingdom of Earth will be done.

A reporter asked me how I explain all this resurgence of interest in my work and I said “Well, if you just hang on long enough, you are either forgotten or remembered too much.” I’ve been lucky—the plays receive better productions and attention than originally.

After Australia I have promised myself a season of rest—in Key West. And I will gladly visit Sewanee with you.

Rose seems well and happy. I’ll give her a lovely Christmas party tonight. She is the bravest and sweetest person I have known in my life. Nothing is sufficient to compensate for the ordeals she has endured so gallantly. I try to do what I can.

Please come South with me this spring and enjoy the fresh air and peace of Key West.

Everyone remembers you with love.

As I do—always.

Tom

 

If the other letters are comic or melodramatic, villainous or grandiose in their theatricality, this one is purely tragic. The loneliness of his travels echoes in the list of cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Vienna, back to San Francisco, Australia, Key West, the hope of visiting Sewanee with his mother (did he ever?).

Like the rondini, the birds in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone that have no legs and so can never land, Williams flew around the world looking for himself in his plays, to see if he was “either forgotten or remembered too much.” When he writes of “celebrat[ing] Christmas early” with “a home dinner,” the home is a hotel suite at the Hotel Elysée, where he would eventually die. Homeless himself, for Williams it was Rose, placid, empty, the unwitting recipient of all his fierce love and guilt, the sister for whom “nothing is sufficient to compensate for the ordeals she has endured”—ordeals of institutionalization followed by shock treatments followed, ultimately, by a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy in 1943—who was his home. Rose, the “lunatic with tranquil eyes,” was his resting place, his constant torment.

Aug 29, 1977

Dear Mother:

I just returned here (Key West) for what I hope may be a nice rest period after shuttling back and forth between the States and London since late spring. Of course it’s the rainy season, but everything looks fresh and green.

Among the mail that had come here while I was away was a letter from Dakin, enclosing a highly amusing article he has written for the Washington University magazine and an article about your birthday with a really nice picture of you.

You’ll be pleased to know that I found Rose looking well and in good spirits and health. She walks about ten paces ahead of me and Tatiana, a charming old Russian lady who visits her at Stoney Lodge regularly while I’m away from New York. She is eager to come back down to Key West for a visit as she did last Spring. The problem is that she smokes and drinks Coca-Cola almost continually here. At the Lodge she is limited to six cigarettes a day.

Aside from being tired, I am comparatively well. I do have some evidence of a cataract developing in my right eye, but it’s expected to mature slowly. With strong glasses, I have no difficulty in reading and writing.

The principal problem right now is that the housekeeper, Leoncia, has gone on vacation to New York, taking with her all the house keys. I was able to get in the house only through the assistance of a neighboring locksmith—won’t be able to use my studio till Leoncia’s return from Harlem.

This aging process is far from agreeable—but we’re all in the same boat and must be as philosophical about it as possible.

Please be more careful about avoiding falls. In the sixties I used to keep falling down—due to Dr. Feelgood’s shots—and I acquired an almost acrobatic skill at the practice. But now that some arthritis has set in, I am watching my steps.

There was also a lovely picture and article about you in the Key West newspaper in honor of your birthday. You and Grandfather are both remembered here by all who met you with great affection.

Love to all,

Tom

 

Williams writes to Edwina from a resting place, a house he owned in Key West, but emotional weariness, not just physical exhaustion, permeates the letter. He tries to be hopeful—“everything looks fresh and green,” and Rose is “well and in good spirits and health”—but he counteracts that hope at every turn: Rose can’t come back to Key West because she smokes and drinks too much Coca-Cola; he has another slowly developing cataract; “it’s the rainy season.”

Even at home he’s homeless: the housekeeper has locked him out. Williams eventually gets into the house, he tells his mother, but he “won’t be able to use [his] studio” until the housekeeper returns from her vacation. The studio is where he writes, and writing is how he re-creates home. Towards the end of the letter, Williams talks about “falling down,” but it’s not just a physical fear. Tennessee had been watching himself fall from grace, watching the critics mock his new plays like The Red Devil Battery Sign. In May of the same year, Williams called himself “‘the ghost of a writer’” in a letter to the New York Times. He is a homeless ghost who haunts us still.