Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams: The Fugitive Kind

In 1943 Rose Isabel Williams, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was given a lobotomy and institutionalised for the remainder of her life. Her brother was thirty-two and had written nothing anyone remembered. Two years later The Glass Menagerie opened with a fragile girl and her glass animals at its centre, and Tennessee Williams spent the next four decades and some two dozen plays failing to write his way out from under his sister.

Columbus, Mississippi

Thomas Lanier Williams III was born on 26 March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius Coffin Williams, a travelling shoe salesman prone to drink, and Edwina Dakin Williams. Rose (1909–1996) was the elder sister; Walter Dakin (1919–2008) the younger brother. Diphtheria in early childhood left the boy frail and housebound, and his father read the delicacy as effeminacy and treated him with contempt, while his mother, locked into an unhappy marriage, devoted herself almost entirely to him. In 1919 Cornelius was promoted to the International Shoe Company's St Louis office, and the family began the sequence of moves that his mother's dissatisfaction and his father's drinking kept in motion. Williams attended Soldan High School, which he later put on stage in The Glass Menagerie.

The Shoe Factory

He studied journalism at the University of Missouri from 1929 to 1931 and entered writing competitions; his first play, Beauty Is the Word (1930), made him the first freshman ever to take honourable mention in the contest. After he failed a military training course his father put him to work in the shoe factory, and the monotony drove him to write a story a week. By twenty-four he was exhausted, unpublished and suffering a nervous breakdown. He enrolled at Washington University in St Louis in 1936, transferred to the University of Iowa in the autumn of 1937 and took a BA in English in August 1938, then studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York. Around 1939 he became Tennessee Williams, in acknowledgement of his Southern accent and his roots.

New Orleans and the Breakthrough

His agent Audrey Wood secured him a $1,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1939 for Battle of Angels, produced in Boston in 1940 to poor notices. He used the money to move to New Orleans and write for the Works Progress Administration. The Poetry Foundation records that he felt at home in exactly two places, the South and New Orleans, the latter of which he described as a source of "new freedom."

The breakthrough came in the winter of 1944–45 with The Glass Menagerie, developed out of his 1943 story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass." Produced in Chicago, the memory play drew strong reviews, became an instant Broadway hit and took the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 settled the question of his stature; it is routinely listed among the finest American plays of the century beside O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Between 1948 and 1959 he had seven plays on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By the end of that run he held two Pulitzer Prizes — for Streetcar in 1948 and Cat in 1955 — three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards and a Tony. Elia Kazan and Richard Brooks brought the plays to the screen.

Frank Merlo

Frank Merlo (1921–1963), an occasional actor of Sicilian descent who had served in the Navy during the war, was the enduring romantic relationship of Williams's life. The fourteen years they travelled together were his most productive; Merlo became his personal secretary and the counterweight to his depressions. They separated in the late 1950s, and when Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer Williams returned and cared for him until his death on 20 September 1963.

The Long Decline

Through the 1960s and 1970s Williams wrote every day and failed commercially every time: Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980). Consumed by depression, he was treated in mental health facilities under his family's control, and took injections from Dr Max Jacobson — "Dr Feelgood" — who supplied escalating amphetamines alongside Seconal for insomnia. His last play, A House Not Meant to Stand (1982), earned largely positive reviews and ran forty performances.

He kept Rose close throughout. Once he could afford it he moved her to a private facility north of New York City and visited often, and he assigned her percentage interests in several successful plays so that the royalties would fund her care.

Why Tennessee Is Called a Genius

Gore Vidal used the word directly, writing that through his stories and plays "Tennessee validated with his genius our common ticket of transfer" — a figure borrowed from the New Orleans streetcars named Desire and Cemeteries. The faculty behind it is what the Poetry Foundation calls poetic realism: naturalistic detail fused with symbolism and a "poetic sensibility rare in American playwriting," carried on dialogue that one critic held nobody in the English-speaking theatre bettered. The material that faculty served never changed. Williams wrote about "the fugitive kind" — sensitive people excluded from the society around them — and about the discovery that human relations are terrifyingly ambiguous. Kazan's summary is the tightest anyone has managed: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."

The counter-case is documented as thoroughly as the case. Detractors charged melodrama, repetition and symbolism applied too heavily, and the last two decades of his working life supply the evidence — an unbroken run of commercial and critical failures produced through alcohol and barbiturates. He is ranked with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as one of the three foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century on the strength of perhaps five plays out of a lifetime of writing. After his death, critics who had been harshest conceded "the greatness of his achievement," and that late concession is the fairest verdict available: a genius who did his essential work inside fifteen years and then spent twenty more unable to stop working.

Legacy

He died on 25 February 1983, aged seventy-one, in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York. The death was first reported as choking on a plastic bottle cap; on 14 August 1983 the medical examiner corrected the record to a toxic level of secobarbital. His 1972 will had asked for burial at sea near the spot where the poet Hart Crane died, but his brother Dakin buried him at Calvary Cemetery in St Louis beside their mother. Most of the estate went to the University of the South at Sewanee, held in trust for Rose during her lifetime; after her death in 1996 the university received roughly $7 million, which endowed a creative writing programme. He entered the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979 and appeared on a US postage stamp in 1995.

Achievements

• Pulitzer Prize for Drama — 1955
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1980
• Notable work: The Glass Menagerie
• Notable work: A Streetcar Named Desire
• Notable work: The Rose Tattoo
• Notable work: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Genres: spoken drama