Tennessee Williams (1911-198З). Biography and Creativity

At the height of his powers, the American playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer Tennessee Williams enjoyed fame and fortune usually reserved for Hollywood actors and directors. Born in rural Mississippi, Williams is known for the “southern gothic” style of his works and their emotional range, which often break with conventional modes of expression and tap into deeply felt human desires and needs, creating an often-grotesque portrait of 20th-century life.

In his dramas, for which he is best known, Williams drew upon his own family background, especially in his depiction of women driven or destroyed by frustrated sexuality or mental instability. Replete with southern charm, broken relationships, substance abuse, and sexual frustration, Williams’s life was as dramatic as any of his plays. As do his best stage productions, his personal story weaves fact with fiction and imagination with reality.

Christened Thomas Lanier Williams III upon his March 26, 1911, birth in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams was the second of three children born to Cornelius Coffin (C. C.) Williams, a traveling salesman, and Edwina Dakin Williams, a housewife. Until 1918, he, Edwina, and his older sister, Rose, lived with Edwina’s parents, Walter and Rosina Dakin, while C. C. spent nearly all his time on the road. They moved frequently in Williams’s early years, following his grandfather Dakin’s career in the Episcopal clergy and occupying rectories in Nashville, Tennessee, and three small Mississippi towns (Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale).

In 1916, as Williams approached school age, he contracted a near-fatal case of diphtheria that, coupled with a kidney infection, kept him housebound for 18 months. As a result of his poor health, both the schoolchildren and his father, who nicknamed Williams “Miss Nancy,” ridiculed his masculinity. This emotional form of abuse only grew worse after Williams’s brother, Dakin, eight years his junior, proved to be an extrovert who outshone Williams athletically and socially. By the time C. C. became branch manager with the International Shoe Company in 1918 and moved his family into a small St. Louis, Missouri, apartment, Williams had developed an introspective and sensitive personality.

The move to St. Louis proved traumatic not only for Williams—derided for his southern drawl and “sissy” mannerisms—but also for his mother, Edwina, who identified as a southern matriarch and never found her bearings in the Midwest. Edwina and C. C.’s already strained relationship grew increasingly contentious, and the cramped St. Louis apartment only magnified the tension. In addition to the familial alienation it caused, the “tragic” move, as Williams later called it, taught the young boy about class difference. Realizing for the first time he was poor, Williams reacted to the way the wealthy treat the impoverished with “shock and rebellion” (Where I Live 59). The shock remained with him for the rest of his life; many of his important plays focus on social inequality.

Williams developed a literary disposition early in life. His mother read to him frequently and bought him a typewriter when he was 12. As a student at Ben Blewett Junior High, he published a short story in the school newspaper and a poem in the class yearbook. During his secondary school years, first at Soldan High and later at University City High, he won a cash prize in an essay contest and published a short story in Weird Tales.

Meanwhile, his father’s habitual drinking became chronic. Edwina’s resentment, both of C. C.’s angry outbursts and of the family’s social standing, intensified. Rose’s behavior turned erratic and rebellious, prompting C. C. and Edwina to send her in 1925 to All Saints College, a private boarding school in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The change of scenery failed to improve her condition, and after two years, she returned to St. Louis. Unable to cope with a stressful home life, Rose suffered a mental breakdown. In 1937 her parents committed her to St. Vincent’s, a sanitarium near St. Louis.

There, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with schizophrenia. Six years later, after electroshock therapy and insulin treatment, which induced convulsions, her condition remained unchanged. Edwina then authorized a lobotomy, a surgical operation that involved severing the brain’s prefrontal cortex. During this time such operations were commonplace, although today such a procedure is considered to be a drastic treatment reserved for only the most severe psychiatric disorders. Although the operation rendered her more sedate, it did not cure Williams’s sister. She remained institutionalized until her death in 1996.

As Rose’s psychiatric problems emerged, Williams struggled with his own identity. Upon graduating high school in 1929, he enrolled at the University of Missouri at Columbia, planning to study journalism. After completing his third year, despite more success as a writer—he won honorable mention in the Dramatic Arts Club contest for his one-act play, Beauty Is the Word—poor grades, especially in then-required Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) military training classes, prompted C. C. to force Williams to quit school. By 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, the family had little money, so Williams took a job clerking for his father’s company. After long days working for the International Shoe Company, Williams would go home, “tanking up on black coffee,” and write most of the night, producing dozens of poems and short stories. In 1933 “Stella for Star” won first prize in the St. Louis Writers Guild’s annual Winifred Irwin short story contest.

By 1935 the regimen had exhausted him; he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Because William was medically unfit to return to his day job, his father allowed him to visit Memphis, Tennessee, where he lived for the summer with his grandparents. During this time he read the works of the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov. Delighted by Chekhov’s plays, Williams began writing his own. Later that summer, when the Memphis Garden Players produced his one-act Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, Williams saw his work staged for the first time.

On the heels of this success Williams returned to St. Louis and took courses at Washington University. In 1936 he began writing for the Mummers, an amateur troupe dedicated to producing cutting- edge drama. The Mummers performed Williams’s first full-length plays, Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind. The following year, distressed by his sister’s psychological deterioration, Williams left St. Louis for the University of Iowa, where he studied playwriting under E. C. Mabie and E. P. Conkle and wrote Spring Storm and Not about Nightingales. Williams graduated in 1938 with a B.A. in English and returned to St. Louis determined to make it as a writer.

Williams sent his works to publishers, production companies, and writing contests. While awaiting feedback, he traveled to New Orleans looking for work. Initially shocked by the seemingly amoral lifestyle and permissive atmosphere of the French Quarter, Williams quickly fell in love with the city. Vowing to return, he traveled with a friend to California, where he received good news: One of his contest submissions had paid off.

The Group Theater, a subsidiary of the Theater Guild, which sought work from young playwrights, awarded “Tennessee Williams” $100 for American Blues, a collection of one-act plays. Exceeding the contest’s age limitation by three years, Williams had invented a pen name to disguise his identity, choosing Tennessee because his ancestors had “fought the Indians for Tennessee and I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages” (Where I Live 59). Despite the relatively small sum of money, the award turned out to be Williams’s big break, calling him to the attention of Audrey Wood, one of New York’s most successful agents.

Between 1939 and 1944 Williams’s career underwent a series of ups and downs. A $1,000 Rockefeller Foundation Grant enabled him to move to New York, where he studied drama at the New School for Social Research and worked on Battle of Angels, a play about a woman who cares for her cancer-stricken husband while having an affair with a mysterious traveler. Battle of Angels, his first professionally produced play, premiered in Boston in December 1940. On its debut night most audience members left early when a smoke machine malfunctioned, and the Boston City Council censored the play for mixing religion with sexuality.

Despite the negative response the play foreshadowed Williams’s lifelong obsession with the clash between human sexuality and social mores. After the failure he collaborated with Donald Windham on a dramatic adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “You Touched Me,” which premiered in Cleveland to mixed reviews in 1943. During these years Williams lived in near-poverty, supporting his writing and vagabond lifestyle by working a series of part-time jobs. Yet, he traveled frequently, living in, among other places, New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, Miami, Key West, and Hollywood, where, in 1943, Audrey Wood secured him work as a contract writer for MGM.

Williams’s script The Gentleman Caller led to his first major theatrical success. After he reworked the script for the stage, The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago in December 1944 to rave reviews. The play performed well enough to secure a Broadway opening on March 31, 1945, at the Playhouse Theatre. That night, Williams received 24 curtain calls and became an overnight sensation. Two weeks later The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; shortly thereafter it won the Donaldson and the Sydney Howard Memorial Awards.

Set during the Great Depression in a cramped St. Louis apartment similar to the one Williams knew as a child, the play tells the story of Tom Wingfield, a young poet yearning for independence from his overbearing mother, Amanda, and his crippled sister, Laura. In Williams’s most autobiographical work Amanda and Laura were modeled on Edwina and Rose Williams. With its piercing psychological insights, complex characters, and emotional dialogue, the play was a revelation for American theatergoers, who had never experienced the unconventional techniques Williams used. As he explained in the play’s production notes:

Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. (xix-xxii)

The Glass Menagerie catapulted Williams into national fame and provided him financial security for the first time in his life. He went from renting spare bedrooms and worrying about how he would pay for food to living in a first-class Manhattan hotel, where he ordered room service for every meal.

The excitement quickly gave way to a feeling of spiritual dislocation, prompting him to move to Mexico, where he began drafting “The Poker Night,” the play that would become A Streetcar Named Desire. In August 1945 he returned to the United States for the Broadway premier of You Touched Me! That year New Directions published 27 Wagons of Cotton and Other One Act Plays, a collection that explores familiar Williams themes, such as the alienation of the individual from society and the conflict between spiritual fulfillment and the desires of the flesh. Over the next two years, while dividing his time between Nantucket, in Massachusetts, and New Orleans, Williams wrote Summer and Smoke, which premiered in Dallas on July 8, 1947. On December 3 of that year, A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway for the first of 855 performances. A runaway sensation, the play starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley, a role he reprised for the Academy Award-winning 1951 film version. In addition to its commercial success, the play won Williams his second Drama Critics’ Circle and Donaldson Awards as well as his first Pulitzer Prize.

Over the next decade and a half Williams composed several plays that have entered the permanent American theater repertoire: The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and Night of the Iguana (1961). Though not all were smash hits, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana each won a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Cat earned Williams a second Pulitzer. During this period he composed a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950); published a collection of poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956); wrote an original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956); and collaborated on film adaptations of Menagerie (1950), Streetcar (1951), Rose Tattoo (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and Orpheus Descending (renamed The Fugitive Kind, 1960).

Despite his fame, fortune, and elevated literary reputation, Williams failed to achieve lasting happiness. His relationship with Frank Merlo, his lover from 1948 until 1961, was often tempestuous and strained. He continued to blame himself for leaving Rose in St. Louis just as her psyche was fracturing. From 1947 onward he supported her financially, moving her to a private sanitarium in Connecticut in 1949. Yet, Williams never alleviated his guilty conscience, which can be seen in the unstable female characters and rose imagery to which he frequently returned in his works. Adding to his depression, his beloved grandfather, Walter Dakin, died in 1955.

Two years later Williams’s father, with whom he never developed an understanding, also died, leaving emotional scars that never fully healed. In the late 1950s his confidence began eroding, only temporarily buoyed by Night ofthe Iguana's success. To alleviate his misery, he turned to alcohol and prescription pills. When Merlo, with whom Williams remained friends, died of lung cancer in 1963, Williams became an alcoholic and drug addict. With his substance dependency supported by Dr. Max Jacobson, who gave Williams barbiturates and injected him with amphetamines, Williams entered a six-year period he would later call his “Stoned Age.”

Finally, in September 1969, Williams’s younger brother, Dakin, intervened and placed Williams in the mental ward at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. Forced by physicians to undergo immediate withdrawal, Williams suffered two heart attacks and several seizures during his three-month hospital stay. In December he returned to Key West, where he had owned a home since 1949. Within two years he began using drugs again, a habit that plagued him for the rest of his life.

Although he received several lifetime achievement awards and honorary degrees in his final 20 years, Williams spent the last half of his career in steady decline. Unfavorable reviews piled up. Some were vitriolic. Critics portrayed him as an eccentric washed-up old man compensating for deteriorating skill by reverting to abstraction and overwrought symbolism. In a 1970 television interview Williams further damaged his reputation by discussing his history of sexual promiscuity with men. In his last two decades he continued to write prolifically, publishing his memoirs, a poetry collection, two short story collections, and a novel. During this period he managed to produce a new play nearly every year. With the exception of Small Craft Warnings (1972), all were commercial failures.

On February 24, 1983, Williams died alone in a New York hotel room. He choked on a pharmaceutical bottle cap, apparently having used it to spoon two sleeping pills into his mouth. His brother, Dakin, had Williams interred at Mt. Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, against his stated wish to be cremated. Williams wanted his ashes scattered off the coast of Key West, where his favorite poet, Hart Crane, had committed suicide by leaping off a steamship. At the time of his death, his standing with audiences and critics alike was at a 40-year low. The strange circumstances surrounding his death echoed many of the grotesque situations of his dramas; Williams died a colorful yet tragic character.