Chapter 1The Rectory and the Diphtheria Year

Foreword

The women I have spent my working life among wrote themselves down. Whatever else they withheld, they left sentences behind, and the record I worked from was in the end a record they had authored. That is the biographer's ordinary luxury, and after two books I had grown used to it — the subject who has already begun the argument, so that you are only ever finishing her thought.

Tennessee Williams is the man who wrote the women. Blanche DuBois at the last stop on the streetcar line. Amanda Wingfield at the telephone, selling magazine subscriptions into the dark. Laura at her shelf of glass animals. Maggie on the hot tin roof, talking to keep from disappearing. These are the most exposed and the most frightened and, in the plain arithmetic of fame, the most famous Southern women of the American century, and not one of them ever drew a breath. A soft-spoken, half-lame boy baptized in a Mississippi rectory made them. He put into each of them a fragility I had spent years tracing in women who had actually lived, and he made his invention more permanent than any fact.

That was the inversion I could not walk away from. I had built a shelf out of women who reckoned in public with what celebrity does to a self, and here was the man who had given the American theatre its women — and who staged that same reckoning, in a male body, more nakedly than any of them. I did not come to him across my own beat. I came at him from the far side of it.

I expected a ruin. The received image of the late Williams is the one the obituaries reached for: the drink, the pills, the clownish decline, the six and a half years in a hotel suite off Fifty-fourth Street that gives this book its name. What I found instead was a man who typed. Who typed on the last morning of his life, a half-finished page still in the carriage of the Smith Corona when the Medical Examiner's investigator pronounced him dead. The wreckage was real. So was the discipline underneath it, and the discipline is the part the obituaries missed.

I worked, as a biographer of the recent dead must, from the public record: the produced plays and their revivals, the letters and journals that have found print, his own gorgeous and unreliable Memoirs, the press coverage that tracked him from the Glass Menagerie opening to the Elysée, the court and probate filings that settle in the end what a man's wishes were worth. I have invented nothing and reported nothing at first hand. I have only tried to read what was already there more slowly than the obituaries did.

What makes him worth a book is that he understood exposure before it was done to him. He wrote women who stand under a bare bulb and beg not to be seen, and then he lived out their fear in his own late celebrity — watched, quoted, humiliated, unable to stop performing the self the culture had bought. The wish he stated for forty years, to be given to the sea, was not honoured. He lies in St Louis clay, four feet from the sister he could not save. That distance — between the exit a man writes for himself and the one he is given — is the subject of this book.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · The Rectory and the Diphtheria Year

The house was a rectory and the rectory was the house. On the afternoon of Sunday 26 March 1911 the Reverend Walter Edwin Dakin, fifty-three years old, rector of St Paul's Episcopal Church in Columbus, Mississippi, lifted his hours-old grandson from a basket on the kitchen table, carried him through the narrow interior corridor that connected the rectory to the church, and at the marble font set into the south wall of the chancel poured tepid water from a brass pitcher over the boy's head and pronounced him Thomas Lanier Williams III, after a dead Tennessee great-grandfather.

The boy did not cry. The font was cold. Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams, twenty-six, in the front pew, watched her father baptise her son in the church where her father preached, in the parsonage where she had given birth, in a town she had not chosen. Her husband was not present. Cornelius Coffin Williams was on the road for the Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph Company, somewhere between Memphis and Nashville, and would not return for a week.

The rectory adjoined the church at the south corner — a wooden two-storey clapboard structure painted white, with a wraparound porch and four bedrooms upstairs. The garden in the back held cape jessamine and crape myrtle and a single magnolia tree old enough to remember the Civil War. The afternoon of the baptism the air through the kitchen door smelled of magnolia.

Edwina took the boy back into the kitchen after the rite. Rosina Otte Dakin, fifty, the rector's wife and the boy's grandmother, was at the stove. Rose Isabel Williams, sixteen months old, was on the kitchen floor holding a cloth doll. The two children. The mother. The grandmother. The grandfather coming through the corridor in his vestments. The father somewhere in central Tennessee.

This was the first photograph the boy was inside of. He would not remember it. He would, for the rest of his life, place its emotional contents at the centre of every play he wrote.

The Williamses were a Tennessee family. Cornelius's father, Thomas Lanier Williams II, had been an attorney who ran for state office; the family's Tennessee eminence belonged to an earlier Thomas Lanier Williams — the first of the name — who had been a state representative, a state senator, and, from 1836, Chancellor of Tennessee, remembered afterward as the state's father of equity law. The name was dynastic. Cornelius, born 1879 in Knoxville, was the family disappointment — a sales clerk, a heavy drinker, a poker player.

He had met Edwina Dakin in summer 1906 at a tennis party in Columbus. Edwina was twenty-one, the minister's only daughter, with a soprano voice and the manners of a Southern woman of her class. Cornelius was twenty-six, in a brown suit, with the half-charming half-coarse manner of a man whose education had not stuck. They married on 3 June 1907 in St Paul's Episcopal Church, Columbus, the Reverend officiating. By autumn 1907 it was evident that Cornelius's drinking was not the social drinking his father-in-law had hoped for.

The Reverend Walter Edwin Dakin had studied for the priesthood at the School of Theology of the University of the South at Sewanee in Tennessee in the mid-1890s, taking his theology degree in 1897. His education there had given him a respect for literature that he carried into every parish he served. He owned a small but careful library of nineteenth-century novels — Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës — and read them as a second devotional practice alongside the Bible. It was the Reverend who first put books into Tom's hands as objects of pleasure rather than instruction. The distinction mattered. Cornelius's household was not a house of books; Edwina read poetry and the social pages of the Columbus Commercial Dispatch, but the Reverend was the reader, the one who treated the evening chapter of Nicholas Nickleby as a domestic sacrament. Tom absorbed this habit from his grandfather's lap before he was old enough to read the words himself. The habit would never leave him. The photograph over his writing desk for fifty-one years was Hart Crane's; but the original furniture of that desk space — the sense that serious life included serious reading as a moral requirement — was the Reverend's.

The Dakin connection to Sewanee also carried an institutional significance Tom would honour decades later. When he drafted his will in 1972, he designated the University of the South at Sewanee as the ultimate beneficiary of his estate after Rose's death and the dissolution of the Rose Williams Trust — partly in tribute to his grandfather's alma mater, partly because the University had treated his family with the serious-minded Episcopal gravity that was the faith of the Dakin branch of his life. Sewanee received the royalties beginning in 1996 and used them to fund the Sewanee Writers' Conference and its Tennessee Williams playwriting fellowship, which continue to bring young writers to the Cumberland plateau each year. That, too, was the Reverend's gift, carried forward sixty years.

Rose Isabel Williams was born on 19 November 1909 in the Columbus rectory. She was healthy, dark-haired, with the Dakin features. Cornelius was on the road through most of Rose's first eighteen months. The Williamses lived in the rectory because Cornelius had not set Edwina up in a house of her own. The arrangement was understood as temporary. It would last seven years.

Thomas Lanier Williams III was born on Sunday 26 March 1911 after a nine-hour labour. He weighed six pounds, eleven ounces. Edwina insisted the Reverend perform the baptism that same afternoon rather than wait the conventional fortnight. She had been raised, she would say, to believe an unbaptised child was a child the angels had not yet noticed.

For the family's first years the rectory was in Columbus. Cornelius was on the road three weeks of every four. The Reverend, who had attended the University of the South at Sewanee, read aloud to his grandchildren each evening from the King James Bible and from a modest library of nineteenth-century novels. Tom listened. Rose, who could read by four, sat at her grandfather's knee with her cloth doll and the porcelain dog Edwina had given her for Christmas 1912.

When Tom was about two, in 1913, the Reverend was transferred out of Columbus — first to a parish in Nashville, Tennessee, and then, within a couple of years, back to Mississippi, to Canton and finally to St George's Episcopal in Clarksdale, a hundred miles north-west of Columbus on the Delta. The Williamses moved with the Dakins at each appointment. The rectory at Clarksdale was smaller than the Columbus one but the parsonage garden, in the rich Delta soil, was more productive — figs, peach trees, a vegetable plot Edwina would tend each morning.

The Clarksdale years — from about 1915 to 1918 — were the green years of the boy's childhood. He ran in the parsonage garden with Rose. The Reverend read to them in the evenings. The Negro housekeeper Ozzie called them honey-boy and honey-girl in the back kitchen. The Mississippi bottom outside Clarksdale, with its cotton fields and moss-hung pecan trees and the brown river to the west, was the landscape that would shape every Southern setting Tom ever wrote. Belle Reve in Streetcar, the plantation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Mississippi fishing village in The Rose Tattoo — all Clarksdale.

He was four, then five, then six. When his father came home he hid in the upstairs hallway with Rose because Cornelius had been drinking and the laugh was the wrong kind.

Cornelius came home every few weeks from the road. He came with road-dust on his shoes and the smell of cheap hotel soap and something sharper underneath. He lifted Tom in the front hallway and held him for the thirty seconds before Tom went rigid with the effort of not crying and Cornelius put him down. The road was what Cornelius preferred. The rectory was what Cornelius tolerated. His wife was what he had chosen in a moment of warmth he could not sustain. His son was what the moment had produced.

In summer 1916 he caught diphtheria.

The illness arrived on a Wednesday in late June. The boy was five. He had been playing in the garden with Rose; he came in for lunch and was unable to swallow. By evening his temperature was a hundred and four. By the next morning he could not raise his head from the pillow. The family doctor examined him and said: Diphtheria.

The disease at the time killed perhaps one in five children who contracted it. The Clarksdale doctor sent for the antitoxin, administered the dose, and told Edwina the boy might still die. The Reverend came up the stairs in his black suit and sat at the bedside reading from the Psalms. The boy on the pillow was the colour of old wax. His throat was thick with the diphtheritic membrane. His breath came in shallow whistles.

He did not die. By the third day his temperature had dropped. By the end of the week he could swallow water. The doctor cautioned that the disease would leave aftereffects — the bacterial toxin attacks the nervous system; perhaps a third of survivors had residual paralysis. The boy's legs would not bear his weight by the second week.

The recovery took the better part of two years. From summer 1916 to summer 1918 he was in the upstairs bedroom or on a daybed Edwina had moved to the porch. Edwina did not let him out of her sight. She read to him. She bathed him. She did the muscle exercises the doctor had recommended. By spring 1917 he could stand with support. By autumn 1917 he walked with a careful, short-stepped gait. By summer 1918 he could run, but not as other boys ran.

The two years recast the family. Edwina became — by her own later admission and the unanimous testimony of her children — a mother whose protectiveness of her son was the operative emotional fact of the household. The boy who had nearly died was given the larger upstairs bedroom (Rose was moved to a smaller one) on the grounds that the room had better cross-ventilation.

The two years also recast the boy. He had been an active young child. He was now a quiet one who had been read to for two years and had begun to read himself. By eight he was reading on his own — David Copperfield, Little Women, Tom Sawyer. The pattern of his life as a reader, and behind that as a writer, was set in those rectory afternoons on the daybed with the wisteria in flower and Rose reading aloud from Little Women.

Cornelius came home perhaps every other weekend. He climbed the stairs. He looked at the boy on the bed. He left the room. He told Edwina, in a remark she would recall bitterly for the rest of her life, that the boy was too soft and that the long recovery had made him into a girl. Edwina did not answer. The Reverend told his wife that evening that he believed his son-in-law was a fool. Rosina agreed.

The name the family used for the boy was Tom. The name his father used was Miss Nancy.

Diphtheria was, in the summer of 1916, still a serious epidemic disease in the rural American South. The bacterial toxin produced by Corynebacterium diphtheriae does its principal damage in two places: the throat, where the diphtheritic membrane can block the airway, and the nervous system, where the toxin attacks the myelin sheaths of peripheral motor nerves. Partial paralysis of the legs, as Tom suffered, was not unusual in recovery; the nervous system in young children could repair itself over months, but the repair was never guaranteed to be complete. Tom's walk — the careful, slightly deliberate gait that classmates and colleagues would notice all his life — was the permanent record of the summer of 1916 in his body. He was aware of it by the time he was twelve and described himself in an unpublished notebook entry from 1924 as the boy with the walk of a small old man. The walk gave him the peripheral quality that would mark him socially for the next decade: the visible difference, the not-quite-normal boy's body, the soft-spoken manner of someone who had learned early that the body was unreliable and that the interior life was safer ground.

The two years of recovery also gave him the reading. Edwina at the Clarksdale Public Library checked out books in batches of six, returning and re-stocking each Saturday. The bedside reading during the illness ranged from David Copperfield (which Edwina read aloud in evening chapters until Tom could follow the text himself) to Little Women to the illustrated Morte d'Arthur the Reverend owned in a 1905 Dent edition. By age seven Tom could read a novel-length book alone. By age eight he was reading at what would later be assessed as an adult comprehension level. The sickness had made the reader; the reader would make the writer. The warehouse years and the Iowa workshop and the long apprenticeship were the mechanics of that making. The daybed on the Clarksdale porch, with the wisteria in flower and Rose reading Little Women aloud because she had finished the chapter before him, was the origin.

In the summer of 1918, Cornelius accepted a desk position with the International Shoe Company in St Louis. The International Shoe Company was at this time one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of shoes in the United States, headquartered in St Louis with warehouse operations throughout the Mid-South. The position paid $5,000 a year — more than Cornelius had earned as a travelling salesman — and required him to live in St Louis full-time. He told Edwina in late June that the family would move at the end of the summer. The Reverend — then sixty, and rector of St George's Episcopal in Clarksdale, where he would remain until his retirement about 1931 — could not follow them north; he and Rosina stayed on in the Delta, and Edwina went to a strange Northern city with only her children and a husband whose drinking the Dakins had been observing warily for eleven years.

The family took the Illinois Central north in the second week of July. Ozzie the housekeeper chose to remain in Clarksdale. The Williamses paid her two months' wages.

In the front parlour the upright piano had been pulled out from the wall and the piano-tuner from Greenville was tightening the strings for the long railway trip. The piano was Edwina's. It would sit in the parlour of every apartment they would live in for the next forty years. The piano Amanda Wingfield plays in The Glass Menagerie, the piano in Stella's apartment in Streetcar, the piano in the Pollitt parlour in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — all Edwina's piano.

The diphtheria had given the boy to his mother and given him books. The St Louis move would give him the city he would hate for the rest of his life. He would be returning to the rectory in his fiction again and again — to Clarksdale, the wraparound porch, the figs and the magnolia and Ozzie in the back kitchen — for the next sixty-five years.

He sat on his mother's lap on the porch reading The Wind in the Willows. The Reverend was packing crates upstairs. The piano was tuned. The first chapter of the boy's life was over.

The rectory childhood at Columbus and Clarksdale bequeathed Tom two things that no subsequent schooling or workshop or apprenticeship would alter: the sound of the Southern voice at its most formal and its most intimate, and the habit of treating the written word as the primary instrument through which human experience becomes permanent. The Reverend reading from the King James Bible each evening was giving Tom the rhythm of the English language in its most exalted form. Edwina reading David Copperfield aloud on the Clarksdale porch was giving Tom the rhythm of the English novel. The two rhythms would merge, over thirty years of practice, into the prose rhythm of the Williams dramatic text — the long Biblical cadences of Blanche DuBois's speeches, the compressed directness of Stanley's lines, the delicate Southern-belle diction of Amanda Wingfield. The rectory was the original classroom. The lesson was the sound of the language before it was the meaning of the words.