Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (75 page)

In Williams’s account of his futile dash for freedom, he was intercepted “by a wheel-chair with straps and by a goon squad of interns. . . . Clutching the flight bag that contained my booze, my pills, my vial of speed . . . I was strapped into the chair and rocketed out of Queen’s Division to Friggins Violent Ward”—Williams’s mocking epithet for the Renard Division. “There the flight bag was snatched from me, and at this point I blacked out.” Williams’s story omits Edwina’s “fainting as Tennessee was being wheeled to the elevator,” according to Dakin. Dakin, who was then running for the U.S. Senate, had come with Bob Arteaga, a photographer friend, who attempted to calm Williams by placing his arm around him. “Who are you?” Williams asked Arteaga. “I’m a friend of Dakin’s.” “I wouldn’t brag about that,” Williams said. As he was wheeled into the elevator, an intern “got behind him and injected him with something in his arm that put him to sleep,” Dakin said.

Technically, according to Williams, he was considered a voluntary admission. “It wasn’t voluntary at all. It was forced. I was given a paper to sign and told that if I didn’t sign it I would be legally committed,” he explained. “I thought it better to sign it, as, technically again, you are in a position to sign yourself out. But how can you do that without your doctors’ and relatives’ permission? I mean approval?” Dakin’s decision, which would cost him his inheritance, kept Williams in the hospital for three months. It also saved his life. The tests revealed that Williams was dying of acute drug poisoning. To get him off the drugs would require a prolonged stay. For Williams, whose life had been ruled by a rebellion against any proposition of control, the idea of such a confinement was repellent and terrifying, “a 2 by 4 situation.”

When he woke up, according to Dakin, Williams’s first words were, “Where am I? At the Plaza?” In the Renard Division, a lock-down ward where he was kept for the best part of a month, his cell was checked “every half hour by an intern—the door would open noisily and a flashlight would be turned on you.” Williams dubbed the place “Spooksville” and “nightmare alley.” He claimed to have been driven crazy by days of sleeplessness. In addition to the intrusive interns, he had been given a whitewashed room (No. 512) beside the incinerator, whose rumblings were another barrier to his getting any sleep on his steel cot. The demented haunted the hallways. For nearly two months of his stay, Williams was not allowed to write letters, to make phone calls, or to receive unopened mail. When a package of books from Elia Kazan was inspected by an orderly before it was handed over—“Hospital policy,” the orderly said—Williams flew into a rage. “Upset the card table and started screaming at the orderly and screaming at me. I didn’t do anything except walk out,” Dakin said, adding, “I was the only one allowed to see him besides the doctors.”

“I am a completely disenfranchised citizen,” Williams wrote to Glavin, when he could. He later claimed to have had three “convulsive seizures” during his withdrawal from Doriden and Mellaril. Over time and retellings, those seizures escalated to “heart attacks.” Williams’s medical files have been destroyed, so the facts of his condition cannot be corroborated, but the emotional thrust of his account, however melodramatically embellished, never varied. “The circumstances under which I was treated were totally unsuitable and demoralizing and would most certainly have destroyed me had I not been so fiercely resolved to complete my life, what was left of it after those convulsions and heart attacks—which Dr. von Stein has told me were altogether unnecessary—in a state of freedom, not behind the bars of a violent ward in a snake pit, in filthy clothes because neither the hospital nor my brother were willing to have my clothes laundered till toward the very end when it became apparent that something in me would prevail,” Williams later wrote to MacGregor. When he was finally allowed to write letters, he titled one of his first, to Wood, “De Profundis 200,000,” drawing an invidious comparison between his own confinement and Oscar Wilde’s ruinous imprisonment. In Williams’s mind, the hospital was a jail, a kind of sadistic internment camp, from which there was no escape and where his literary fame and his celebrated eloquence had no purchase.

In Williams’s accounts of the hospital’s abusive treatment, there is no mention of the cruel abuse that he dished out—the overturned tables, thrown cups, scurrilous graffiti, snarling insults. Nor, in any written account, is there an acknowledgment of the indisputable, not incidental fact that the medical team he vilified gave him back his life and another decade of writing.

Instead, Williams adopted the posture of shanghaied victim, dragooned into a hell of his brother’s making. “I’m afraid I bear him malice, permanently, after those months in the St. Louis snake pit he put me into,” Williams wrote to Paul Bowles after his release in late December 1969. “I suspect he’d love to do it again. Given the slightest excuse. I think the sight of him would freeze my blood.” Two years earlier, Williams had spoken lovingly of Dakin as “sort of a Quixote—my favorite character in life and fiction. . . . Honesty and humor are a rare combo, but Dakin has both.” Now, Dakin was “Brother Cain.” Williams’s hospitalization, he concluded, was “legalized fratricide.” Where Williams saw betrayal, Dakin saw love. He insisted he’d saved his big brother’s life. Many of Williams’s closest acquaintances—Laughlin, Wood, Vaccaro, Stapleton, and Brown, among them—agreed. “I know that you never intended (consciously) to do wrong,” Williams wrote to Dakin in 1970. “And yet how can I forget the day you picked up a post-card photo of Edwin Booth in my Cell at Renard and said, ‘This man’s brother shot Lincoln. I guess he felt his brother had up-staged him.’ ” Williams continued, “It is hardly accurate to say that you ‘saved me’ by putting me in the violent ward of a psychiatric hospital where I had three convulsions in a single morning because of cold-turkey withdrawal under the care of a sadist resident-physician and three pompous neurologists, two of which were indifferent at best, and one of them unmistakably hostile.”

While on the psychiatric ward, Williams had a dream so vivid and extraordinary that years later he included it in his memoir. He saw himself moving slowly down a corridor with a drag queen’s mincing, exaggerated gait and chanting a poem. The recurrent line of each verse was “Redemption, Redemption.” “Redemption from what?” he wondered. Was it about his brother, his homosexuality, his waste of life and talent? “How terribly I’ve abused myself and my talent in the years since . . . I suppose since Frankie’s death,” Williams wrote to his New Directions editors from the hospital. But to pour scorn on his brother and the doctors was easier than to face the losses he’d brought about himself. In his excoriating (and hilarious) prose-poem account of his hospitalization, “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?” (1970), Williams loudly proclaimed his innocence—a riff that demonstrated, among many things, that anger was a great antidepressant. (The two neurologists attending Williams, Dr. Berg and Dr. Levy, were rechristened here “Ice Berg” and “Leviathan.”)

“You say you do not sleep well.” . . .

“No, I do not sleep well,” I said to this mammoth neurologist, the one of the three that came on with an air of tired but benign intentions, unlike Dr. Ice Berg whose questions I rarely answered. . . . “No, Dr. Leviathan,” I said to this doctor whom I could talk to, “your sleeping medications give me palpitations like the hoof-beats on a fast-track at the derby, and also, every half hour during the night, an orderly bangs my cell door open and flashes his goddamn flash-light directly into my eyes, for what reason I no more know than why they’re giving electric shock therapy to that sweet old lady, seventy-five years old, worn thin as a finger by life but not the least bit senile, who nearly shakes to pieces with terror when she is informed, which is every night, that she’ll be subjected to shock again the next morning.

“She’s not one of our patients,” the doctor said blandly, “so let’s stick to you, Mr. Williams. Now couldn’t it be that you don’t fall asleep because you associate falling asleep with dying?”

“No, Sir, I don’t think so.”

“Perhaps, you don’t think so but you unconsciously feel so.”

“No, I still know what I unconsciously feel which makes it a conscious feeling, if not at night, at least by this hour the next day.”

“What patients think they feel isn’t always reliable here. You know, I think that your brother told you, that you have suffered what’s called a silent coronary which showed up on the electro-cardiogram taken of you before you were admitted to Friggins Division.”

“Oh, yes, he did give me that bit of false information with quite an interesting smile the first time he called on me here; yes, false it was as his smile was shockingly true. Now, doctor, I know and you know, we both know, that I did not have a coronary, not a silent nor a loud one, before I had three convulsions in one morning while under the skilled, conscientious care of the resident physician here at Friggins; but during and since those three cold-turkey convulsions, I have had and survived two of them, I mean coronaries, the first one during those spasms of my brain-waves, the stabbing pain of it is all that I remember about that first coronary, and I know that I suffered another, a second one, since, when I was pursued by a bitch of a night-nurse into this cubicle where I’m afraid you must be very uncomfortably seated.” . . .

And while I said this to myself, confronting the fact that I was being a son of a bitch, he thanked me for being concerned concerning his comfort.

“Thank

,” I said, “for caring how I don’t sleep.”

Still, Dr. Levy, who “was fully aware of who Tennessee was,” according to Dakin, gradually broke down Williams’s bumptiousness. “He was very clever at motivating him,” Dakin recalled. “He said, ‘Tennessee, if you co-operate with us, you’ll write better when you come out than you did before.’ It was then that he began to cooperate a little bit.” As Williams dried out and slowly returned to his senses, by degrees his privileges were reinstated. In late October, the writing ban was lifted; he was allowed envelopes and a rental typewriter, which had to rest on his bed because the table was too high for it. “The worst may be over,” Williams wrote to Glavin, who was housesitting in Key West. “It was the withdrawal from Doriden. It was a cold-turkey withdrawal.” The letter contained the first signs of Williams’s chastened recovery:

I’m having dinner with Dake tonight—I now have the privilege of dining in a very attractive top-floor restaurant in another (non-psychiatric) part of the hospital, on the condition that I don’t order a drink. It’s hardly credible but I’ve not had a drink for over a month—I believe that’s about how long I’ve been confined. Some nights I can’t sleep at all and I sure miss the presence of a Scotch on the bed-side table. However it’s just as well that I don’t attempt to go into the matter of things that I miss. Well, perhaps I might mention you and Gigi and the little house and—nope, I’d better not remind myself of other remembrances.

. . . The present circumstances are relatively agreeable. Most of the patients appear to be reasonably normal, at least by my standards which are not the strictest. A certain number are taking electric shock treatments. You can tell which ones they are by their dazed expressions. I’ve not been given that kind of shock, probably because my electro-cardiogram shows that I’ve had a serious heart attack, “some time in the last few years.”

I registered here as Tom Williams but Dakin gave a press-release so it’s now widely known that Tennessee is here, too.

I walk quite steadily now and I notice nothing particularly eccentric about my behavior—but when the doctors will release me is something I’ve yet to learn. “We don’t expect to keep you here forever” is the closet approximation I can get out of them. They say they can’t yet trust me to stay off Doriden and liquor, the combination of which was responsible for my general disequilibrium. You know, I really didn’t drink so very much. I rarely finished a Scotch and only had two or three a day. Of course there were the martinis and wine at meals. But the doctors have an exaggerated idea of my drinking habit and seem very skeptical when I tell them I was a minor-league drinker. . . .

I’ll seem quite well when you see me and I’ll be careful thereafter. . . . Take care. I’ve learned it’s necessary.

Around the same time, in the last days of October, Williams made contact with Wood. The gloom seemed to be lifting. He was full of ideas for rewrites of a new short play,
Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis?
, and a reworking of
Tokyo Hotel
(“I was obviously quite ill when I wrote that play but stripped to its essence, it could have an original quality and a degree of poetic power”). Williams was coming back to life.

Today, for the first time, the neurologist, Dr. Levy, spoke of my going home (Key West) as something not months away. Perhaps in three weeks I’ll be ready. Just imagine, for a month and a half now, I have existed without a drop of liquor!—I am given countless un-named pills, mostly anti-depressants. Levy says that I have been living in a “fog” of depression for “several years” but that I am lucid now.—The agony has been the sleepless nights. Two or three in a row without sleeping a moment. Withdrawal from Doriden is harder, he says, than withdrawal from heroin. . . . Did you know that Dakin is running for nomination to the Senate? That he has five television sets in his house, two of them in color? What an eccentric family Rose belongs to!

On November 7, almost two months after his committal, Williams stepped out of the hospital and into the light of a lovely Indian summer morning for a sanctioned excursion. He had lost weight in the hospital; his clothes no longer fit. Dakin drove him to a men’s store in the suburbs of St. Louis to replenish his wardrobe. Williams wrote to Lobdell:

I’d planned to get a couple of suits but I felt too nervous, too tense, to spend that much time in the store. So I settled for two pairs of slacks and a red sweater-shirt. Dakin disappeared. I got panicky and shouted for him. He was trying on a suit. I insisted that we leave at once. How selfish sickness makes you! He really needed a suit. He is running on a peace and Civil Rights platform, I’m happy to say. He is on the side of the young. Our country seems to be divided between young and old. It’s a tremendously dramatic confrontation. . . . I hope that some entirely new idea of government will evolve, perhaps it could happen within the framework of democracy that is