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Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 © John S. Bak 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27352–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xiii List of Abbreviations xiv 1 Columbus to Columbia (via St Louis): Separating Fact from Fiction 1 2 University City to Clayton (via Memphis): Looking for a Publisher in Spring 25 3 University City to New Orleans (via Iowa City): Academic Blues versus ‘American Blues’ 42 4 New Orleans to Hollywood (via Acapulco): Mañana Es Otro Día 69 5 Hollywood to Rome (via Chicago): The ‘Catastrophe’ of his Success 102 6 Rome to Rome (via Nearly Everywhere Else): ‘Comfortable Little Mercies’ 130 7 New York to New York (via Miami): A Battle of Angles 158 8 Tokyo to St Louis (via Spoleto): The Stoned(wall) Age 180 9 Key West to New York (via Bangkok): In Search of Androgyny 209 10 Chicago to St Louis (via Vancouver): ‘Right (Write) On!’ 245 11 Epilogue 259 Notes 264 Bibliography 302 Index 314 vii Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 1 Columbus to Columbia (via St Louis): Separating Fact from Fiction It is unorthodox, and perhaps even unethical, to begin a biography of a writer’s life in medias res. Where are the early years that formed him? Where are the faces and places of his childhood? Surely, a his- torical biography on Tennessee Williams should begin in Columbus, Mississippi, and not in Columbia, Missouri. Such a biography, like Lyle Leverich’s classic Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995), would cover Williams’s childhood from his birth in Columbus on 26 March 1911 (and not 1914, as he would later tell the Group Theatre and early interviewers) to the months he lived with his grandfather, Walter Edwin Dakin, and his beloved grandmother, Rosina Otte ‘Grand’ Dakin, in their rectory in Clarksdale, Mississippi, or in Memphis. As Leverich notes, Tommy Williams, during these early years, was ‘growing up more a minister’s son than the son of a traveling salesman, whom he scarcely recognized as a father’.1 Then, the biography would follow the Dakin/ Williams family north (briefly) to Nashville, then back south to Canton and then Clarksdale, all the while in the company of the playwright’s mother, sister, and grandparents, since his father, Cornelius Coffin, or C.C. for short, had spent his time on the road drumming first men’s clothing and then men’s shoes. The biography’s introductory chapters would eventually terminate with his mother Edwina and his sister Rose following his father north again, this time to St Louis, where C.C. accepted a promotion to assistant sales manager at the International Shoe Company. Such would be the opening chapters of that historical biography, similar to those chapters we can already find in Leverich’s Tom, as well as in the biographies written by his mother Edwina and his brother Dakin, just to name a few. This is not that biography. 1 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 2 Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life Instead, it begins in St Louis in the summer of 1918, when Williams was already seven years old, for that is arguably when and where Williams’s ‘literary life’ began. One could argue the case, as indeed many have, that Williams’s youth in the South formed him much more as a writer than St Louis ever did. Surely his serious illnesses at age five – diphtheria and then Bright’s disease – had a significant impact on his literary affections; first bedridden then confined to the house for nearly two years, Tommy had turned from ‘a little boy with a robust, aggressive bullying nature’ into a ‘decided hybrid’, whose imaginative games and stories and aes- thetic sentiments were honed during a time of relative isolation.2 After all, he considered himself to be a southern writer, and the South is his locale of choice in his plays and in many of his stories. I do not wish to debate that point. Arguably, though, St Louis and the Midwest had shaped Williams, too, more than he had himself consid- ered or at least had imagined, in particular his early political and artistic credos. It is my contention in the opening of this literary biography to confirm that St Pollution – as Williams would later refer to St Louis – had at least as strong, if not a stronger than previously considered, role in transforming Thomas Lanier Williams III, the distant cousin of Civil War poet Sidney Lanier, into Tennessee Williams, the poet–playwright who championed the lowly, disenfranchised flotsam of American society.3 Because of that childhood illness and those frequent uprootings that ultimately landed his family in the industrial city of St Louis and its many (first unfashionable, then later highly bourgeois) suburbs, Tom Williams was a shy, unassuming boy who would sooner take to his books than to his fellow classmates. His world in the South, inhabited by his sister Rose, their black nurse Ozzie, and all of the characters in his grandfather’s library, was one built on stories and playacting. His world in St Louis for the next ten years – one dominated by nearly a dozen social-climbing removals from boarding houses to apartments to rented then purchased houses in increasingly upscale districts of St Louis and stymied by the conservative ideals and gaping divides between the city’s haves and have-nots – was built instead on escapism and on social activ- ism. This chapter will explore these two themes in the early writings of Tom Williams. Finding it difficult at first to make friends with local boys his own age at the Eugene Field Public School, or Stix School later (returning to St Louis after a brief respite in Clarksdale in 1920), Williams sought companionship in the escapist protagonists of his writings. Williams would later fantasize about fleeing to exotic climes aboard a Merchant Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Copyrighted material – 978–0–230–27352–8 Columbus to Columbia (via St Louis) 3 steamer; he would actualize certain escapes to summer camp in the Ozarks and, eventually, to college in Columbia, Missouri. This need to escape – be it the oppressive conservatism of St Louis, the volatile reproaches of a drunken and disillusioned father, or the choking repres- sion of a puritanical mother – stayed with Williams throughout his life. Even before he had the financial freedom to drift between cities and over continents, Williams was the perennial vagabond, the arche- typal poet-gypsy. And when he finally left St Louis for New Orleans in December 1938, he fled more than his father’s suffocating house to which he would make brief returns always on the way to somewhere else. Williams, it would seem, was ultimately fleeing from himself. But that Jamesian doppelganger he left behind in his parents’ attic, where cigarettes and black coffee fuelled his nightly production of poems and stories – duly submitted and duly rejected – pursued him throughout the remainder of his life. Though Tommy Williams, then Thomas Lanier III or simply Tom, became Tennessee Williams en route to New Orleans, he had begun the transformation much earlier. Having escaped one past, he never really stopped looking for a future and sought it out in nearly every corner of the world. One of those corners, which he would later celebrate in The Glass Menagerie, was wherever Rose happened to be at the time, be it in their bedroom in Nashville (to where the Williams family had moved when Walter Dakin accepted the ministry of the Church of the Advent in December 19134) or in Clarksdale (after his childhood illness in the summer of 1916) or in Rose’s white room in their ‘dismal over-crowded flat’5 on 6554 Enright Avenue in University City (a middle-class suburb in western St Louis that, with its ‘vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular-living units’, was more the setting for The Glass Menagerie than was the fashionable Westminster Place address where they had first lived on arriving in the city).