Collected Stories Read online

  It would be false to say that he was ever outwardly kind to his fantastic older son, myself. But I suspect, now, that he knew that I was more of a Williams than a Dakin, and that I would be more and more like him as I grew older, and that he pitied me for it.

  I often wonder many things about my father now, and understand things about him, such as his anger at life, so much like my own, now that I’m old as he was.

  I wonder for instance, if he didn’t hate and despise “The World’s Largest Shoe Company” as much as I did. I wonder if he wouldn’t have liked, as much as I did, to climb the stairs to the roof.

  I understand that he knew that my mother had made me a sissy, but that I had a chance, bred in his blood and bone, to some day rise above it, as I had to and did.

  His branch of “The World’s Largest” was three floors down from the branch I worked for, and sometimes an errand would take me down to his branch.

  He was always dictating letters in a voice you could hear from the elevator before the door of it opened.

  It was a booming voice, delivered on his feet as he paced about his stenographer at the desk. Occupants of the elevator, hearing his voice, would smile at each other as they heard it booming out so fiercely.

  Usually he would be dictating a letter to one of his salesmen, and not the kind of letter that would flatter or please them.

  Somehow he dominated the office with his loud dictation. The letters would not be indulgent.

  “Maybe you’re eating fried chicken now,” he’d boom out, “but I reckon you remember the days when we’d go around the corner for a cigarette for breakfast. Don’t forget it. I don’t. Those days can come back again…

  His boss, Mr. J., approved of C.C.’s letters, but had a soundproof glass enclosure built about his corner in “The World’s Largest”…

  A psychiatrist once said to me. You will begin to forgive the world when you’ve forgiven your father.

  I’m afraid it is true that my father taught me to hate, but I know that he didn’t plan to, and, terrible as it is to know how to hate, and to hate, I have forgiven him for it and for a great deal else.

  Sometimes I wonder if I have forgiven my mother for teaching me to expect more love from the world, more softness in it, than I could ever offer?

  The best of my work, as well as the impulse to work, was a gift from the man in the overstuffed chair, and now I feel a very deep kinship to him. I almost feel as if I am sitting in the overstuffed chair where he sat, exiled from those I should love and those that ought to love me. For love I make characters in plays. To the world I give suspicion and resentment, mostly. I am not cold. I am never deliberately cruel. But after my morning’s work, I have little to give but indifference to people. I try to excuse myself with the pretense that my work justifies this lack of caring much for almost everything else. Sometimes I crack through the emotional block. I touch, I embrace, I hold tight to a necessary companion. But the breakthrough is not long lasting. Morning returns, and only work matters again.

  Now a bit more about my father whom I have come to know and understand so much better.

  My mother couldn’t forgive him. A few years after the years that I have annotated a little in this piece of writing, my mother became financially able to cut him out of her life, and cut him out she did. He had been in a hospital for recovery from a drunken spree. When he returned to the house, she refused to see him. My brother had returned from the latest war, and he would go back and forth between them, arranging a legal separation. I suspect it was not at all a thing that my father wanted. But once more he exhibited a gallantry in his nature that I had not then expected. He gave my mother the house and half of his stock in the International Shoe Company, although she was already well set up by my gift to her of half of my earnings from The Glass Menagerie. He acquiesced without protest to the terms of the separation, and then he went back to his native town of Knoxville, Tennessee, to live with his spinster sister, our Aunt Ella. Aunt Ella wasn’t able to live with him, either, so after a while he moved into a hotel at a resort called Whittle Springs, close to Knoxville, and somehow or other he became involved with a widow from Toledo, Ohio, who became his late autumn love which lasted till the end of his life.

  I’ve never seen this lady but I am grateful to her because she stuck with Dad through those last years.

  Now and then, during those years, my brother would be called down to Knoxville to see Dad through an illness brought on by his drinking, and I think it was the Toledo Widow who would summon my brother.

  My brother, Dakin, is more of a Puritan than I am, and so I think the fact that he never spoke harshly of the Toledo Widow is a remarkable compliment to her. All I gathered from his guarded references to this attachment between Dad and the Toledo Widow was that she made him a faithful drinking companion. Now and then they would fly down to Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad and Mother had spent their honeymoon, and it was just after one of these returns to where he had been happy with Mother, and she with him that he had his final illness. I don’t know what caused his death, if anything caused it but one last spree. The Toledo Widow was with him at the end, in a Knoxville hospital. The situation was delicate for Aunt Ella. She didn’t approve of the widow and would only go to my father’s deathbed when assured there would be no encounter between the widow and herself in the hospital room. She did pass by her once in the hospital corridor, but she made no disparaging comment on her when I flew down to Knoxville for the funeral of my father.

  The funeral was an exceptionally beautiful service. My brother. Aunt Ella, and I sat in a small room set apart for the nearest of kin and listened and looked on while the service was performed.

  Then we went out to “Old Gray,” as they called the Knoxville Cemetery, and there we sat in a sort of tent with the front of it open, to witness the interment of the man of the overstuffed chair.

  Behind us, on chairs in the open, was a very large congregation of more distant kinfolk and surviving friends of his youth, and somewhere among them was the Toledo Widow, I’ve heard.

  After the interment, the kinfolk all came up to our little tent to offer condolences that were unmistakably meant.

  The widow drove off in his car which he had bequeathed to her, her only bequest, and I’ve heard of her nothing more.

  He left his modest remainder of stock in the International Shoe Company in three parts to his sister, and to his daughter, and to my brother, a bequest which brought them each a monthly income of a hundred dollars. He left me nothing because, as he had told Aunt Ella, it didn’t seem likely that I would ever have need of inherited money.

  I wonder if he knew, and I suspect that he did, that he had left me something far more important, which was his blood in my veins? And of course I wonder, too, if there wasn’t more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.

  Aunt Ella is gone now, too, but while I was in Knoxville for Dad’s funeral, she showed me a newspaper photograph of him outside a movie house where a film of mine, Baby Doll, was being shown. Along with the photograph of my father was his comment on the picture.

  What he said was: “I think it’s a very fine picture and I’m proud of my son.”

  Tennessee Williams

  c. 1960 (Published 1980)

  Introduction

  I

  Thirty-seven years ago, to the day that I am writing this note, Tennessee Williams and I celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in Rome, except that he said that it was his thirty-fourth birthday. Years later, when confronted with the fact that he had been born in 1911 not 1914, he said, serenely, “I do not choose to count as part of my life the three years that I spent working for a shoe company.” Actually, he spent ten months not three years in the shoe company, and the reason that he had changed his birth date was to qualify for a play contest open to those twenty-five or under. No matter. I thought him very old in 1948. But I was twenty-two that spring of the annus mirabilis when my book The City and the Pillar was a bestsel
ler and his play A Streetcar Named Desire was taking the world by storm; as it still does.

  In 1973 Tennessee wrote a book called Memoirs (published 1975). He was not, as he was quick to warn us, at his best mentally or physically when he wrote the book, and though he purported to tell the story of his life, he chose, instead, to write about sexual adventures and glancing encounters with the great, ignoring entirely the art and inner life of one Tennessee (born Thomas Lanier) Williams. Fortunately, in “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair” (which I hope you have just read), he has given as dry and precise an account of his early life as we will ever have. Here he introduces most of the characters that he will continue to write about for the rest of his life. The introverted sister. Rose, on whom a lobotomy is performed, erasing her as a person. Whose fault? He blames their mother, Edwina, who gave the order for the lobotomy—on the best medical advice, or so she says. Then there is the hard-drinking, extroverted father, Cornelius, at odds with relentlessly genteel wife, sissy son, Tom, and daughter. Rose, who may or may not have accused him of making sexual advances to her, which he may or may not have made. There is the grandfather. Reverend Dakin, who gave to strangers all the money that he had put by for reasons not made clear (though Tennessee once told me that his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy); and, finally, the grandmother, yet another Rose, known as Grand, the survivor, the generous, the non-questioning. The son, Tom, is shadowy here: after all, he is creator. But, as he has just told us, over the years his sympathy shifted from mother to father while he was never to be out of love with Rose or Rose. As you are about to see, he will spend a lifetime playing with the same vivid, ambiguous cards that life dealt him.

  The stories are arranged in chronological order. The first was published (in Weird Tales, no less: a sister avenges her brother) when Tom was seventeen; the last was written when Tennessee was seventy-one. These stories are the true memoir of Tennessee Williams. Whatever happened to him, real or imagined, is here. Except for an occasional excursion into fantasy, he sticks close to life as he experienced or imagined it. No, he is not a great short story writer like Chekhov but he has something rather more rare than mere genius. He has a narrative tone of voice that is totally compelling. The only other American writer to have this gift was Mark Twain, a very different sort of writer (to overdo understatement); yet Hannibal, Missouri, is not all that far from Saint Louis, Missouri; and each was a comic genius. In any case, you cannot stop listening to either of these tellers no matter how tall or wild their tales.

  Over the decades I watched Tennessee at work in Rome, Paris, Key West, New Haven…. He worked every morning on whatever was at hand. If there was no play to be finished or new dialogue to be sent round to the theater, he would open a drawer and take out the draft of a story already written and begin to rewrite it. I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. “Why,” I asked, “rewrite what’s already in print?” He looked at me, vaguely; then said, “Well, obviously it’s not finished.” And went back to his typing.

  Many of these stories were rewritten a dozen or more times, often over as many years. The first story that he ever showed me was “Rubio y Morena.” I didn’t like it (and still don’t). So fix it, he said. He knew, of course, that there is no fixing someone else’s story or life but he was curious to see what I would do. So I reversed backward-running sentences, removed repetitions, simplified the often ponderous images. I was rather proud of the result. He was deeply irritated. “What you have done is remove my style, which is all that I have.” He was right.

  It has been suggested that many of the stories are simply preliminary sketches for plays. The truth is more complicated. Like most natural writers, Tennessee could not possess his own life until he had written about it. This is common. But what is not common was the way that he went about not only recapturing lost time but then regaining it in a way that far surpassed the original experience. In the beginning, there would be, let us say, a sexual desire for someone. Consummated or not, the desire (“Something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being”) would produce reveries. In turn, the reveries would be written down as a story. But should the desire still remain unfulfilled, he would make a play of the story and then—and this is why he was so compulsive a working playwright—he would have the play produced so that he could, like God, rearrange his original experience into something that was no longer God’s and unpossessable but his. The frantic lifelong desire for play-productions was not just ambition or a need to be busy, it was the only way that he ever had of being entirely alive. The sandy encounters with the dancer Kip on the beach at Provincetown and the dancer’s later death (“an awful flower grew in his brain”) instead of being forever lost were forever his (and ours) once translated to the stage where living men and women could act out his text and with their immediate flesh close, with art, the circle of desire. “For love I make characters in plays,” he wrote; and did.

  I called him the Glorious Bird. I had long since forgotten why until I reread the stories. The image of the bird is everywhere. The bird is flight, poetry, life. The bird is time, death: “’Have you ever seen the skeleton of a bird? If you have you will know how completely they are still flying….’”

  There are some things of a biographical nature that the reader should know. Much has been made of Tennessee’s homosexual adventures (not least, alas, by himself); and, certainly, a sense of other-ness is crucial to his work. Whether a woman, Blanche, or a man. Brick, the characters that most intrigue him are outsiders, part of “that swarm of the fugitive kind.” Although there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person, there are, of course, homo-or heterosexual acts. Unhappily, it has suited the designers of the moral life of the American republic to pretend that there are indeed two teams, one evil and sick and dangerous, and one good and normal and—that word!— straight. This is further complicated by our society’s enduring hatred of women, a legacy from the Old Testament, enriched, in due course, by St. Paul. As a result, it is an article of faith among simple folk that any man who performs a sexual act with another man is behaving just like a woman—the fallen Eve—and so he is doubly evil. Tennessee was of a time and place and class (lower middle class WASP, Southern airs-and-graces division) that believed implicitly in this wacky division.

  Thirty years ago I tried to explain to him that the only way that a ruling class—any ruling class—can stay in power and get people to do work that they don’t want to do is to invent taboos, and then punish those who break them while, best of all, creating an ongoing highly exploitable sense of guilt in just about everyone. Sexual taboo has always been a favorite with our rulers though, today, drugs look to be even more promising, as alcohol was in 1919 when old-time religionists prohibited it to all Americans. But Tennessee had been too thoroughly damaged by the society that he was brought up in to ever suspect that he had been, like almost everyone else, had. He thought he was wrong; and they were right. He punished himself with hypochondria. Happily and naturally, he went right on having sex; he also went right on hating the “squares” or, as he puts it, in “Two On a Party,” where Billy (in life the poet Oliver Evans) and Cora (Marion Black Vacarro) cruise sailors together: “It was a rare sort of moral anarchy, doubtless, that held them together, a really fearful shared hatred of everything that was restrictive and which they felt to be false in the society they lived in and against the grain of which they continually operated. They did not dislike what they called ‘squares.’ They loathed and despised them, and for the best of reasons. Their existence was a never-ending contest with the squares of the world, the squares who have such a virulent rage at everything not in their book….”

  The squares had indeed victimized the Bird but by 1965, when he came to write “The Knightly Quest,” he had begun to see that the poor squares’ “virulent rage” is deliberately whipped up by the rulers in order to distract them from such real probl
ems as, in the sixties, the Vietnam war and Watergate and Operation Armageddon then—and now—underway. In this story, Tennessee moves Lyndon Johnson’s America into a near-future when it seems as if the world is about to vanish in a shining cloud. In the process, the Bird now sees the squares in a more compassionate light; he realizes that they have been equally damaged and manipulated; and he writes an elegy to the true American, Don Quixote, now an exile in his own country. “His castles are immaterial and his ways are endless and you do not have to look into many American eyes to suddenly meet somewhere the beautiful grave lunacy of his gaze….” Also, Tennessee seems to be bringing into focus at last the craziness of the society which had so wounded him. Was it possible that he was not the evil creature portrayed by the press? Was it possible that they are wrong about everything? A lightbulb switches on: “All of which makes me suspect that back of the sun and way deep under our feet, at the earth’s center, are not a couple of noble mysteries but a couple of joke books.” Right on. Bird! It was a nice coincidence that just as Tennessee was going around the bend (pills and booze and a trip to the bin in 1969), the United States was doing the same. Suddenly the Bird and Uncle Sam met face to face in “The Knightly Quest.” What a novel he might have made of this story! instead of that flawed play. The Red Devil Battery Sign. He was, finally, beginning to put the puzzle together.