Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (97 page)

, p. 91.

59

“You know it don’t take much”: LOA1, p. 417.

59

“I traveled around a great deal”: Ibid., p. 465.

60

“almost dancelike”: Ibid., p. 425.

60

“my doomed family”: Williams to Donald Windham, Apr. 1943,

, p. 56.

60

“interior pantomime”: LOA1, p. 465.

60

“Never before in my experience”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 820.

60

“holding out the ruffles”:

, p. 413.

60

“All the people backstage”: JLI with Betsy Blair, 2002, JLC.

60

“Author, Author!”:

, Apr. 30, 1945.

61

blushing: Irving Hoffman,

.

61

“Eddie, I can’t remember anything”: Dowling, Nov. 21, 1964, CUCOHC, p. 820.

61

“It was like after a World Series game”: Ibid., pp. 821–22.

61

“the real and first talent of them all”: Stark Young, as quoted in

, p. 408.

62

“pretty run-of-the-mill”:

, p. 239.

62

“Her talent was luminous”: Williams, “On Laurette Taylor,” HRC.

62

“I don’t remember feeling”: Leverich,

, p. 585.

62

“providential”:

, p. 330.

62

“a planetary tie-up”: Scrapbook, HRC. The chart goes on: “Around this chart are most of the significant contacts-by-conjunction made to the players and author’s planets by the planets on that exciting opening night. (And note first that the only planet uncontacted is Saturn, the planet generally debited with obstruction and failure, nothing of that kind about this opening—and Saturn has no contact, on the negative side of analysis).”

62

“a revolution”: Arthur Miller, “Tennessee Williams’ Legacy: An Eloquence and Amplitude of Feeling,” in Arthur Miller,

(New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 204.

62

“It seems to me that your glass menagerie”: Carson McCullers to Williams, Feb. 10, 1949, Duke.

63

“I was happy to have my freedom”:

, p. 200.

63

“The postman can ring twice”: As quoted in the

, Apr. 22, 1945.

63

“there was a feeling of release”:

, Apr. 1, 1945.

63

“

REVIEWS ALL RAVE

”:

, p. 126.

64

“snatches of talk about the war”: Lewis Nichols, “The Glass Menagerie,”

Apr. 2, 1945.

64

“Such a response and attitude”: Stark Young,

, Apr. 15, 1945.

64

“in playing Amanda”:

, p. 415.

64

“The whole week has been fantastic”: Laurette Taylor to Dwight Taylor, Apr. 8, 1945, HRC.

64

“the greatest moment of collective inebriation”: Philip Roth,

(New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 40.

64

American per-capita income would triple: Harold Evans,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 435.

64

“Everything was up for grabs”: JLI with Arthur Miller, 2004, JLC.

65

: John Lahr,

(Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000), p. 94.

65

“There is no dynamic in life or art”: Odets,

, p. 344.

65

“Overcome selfishness!”: LOA1, p. 422.

65

“the destiny of me”: Walt Whitman, “Out of the Endless Rocking.”

65

“I build a tottering pillar of my blood”:

, “The Siege,” p. 9.

65

“that long upward haul”:

, “Grand,” p. 383.

65

“I am thy frail ghost-brother”:

, Aug. 23, 1942, p. 325.

65

“Breathe into me a little of thy life!”: Ibid., Sept. 17, 1941, p. 239.

65

“I will burn one for you”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Oct. 10, 1941,

, p. 348.

66

“Homo Emancipatus—the Completely Free Man”: Williams, “Stairs to the Roof,” HRC. “Freedom for him wore the bright face of danger and he was willing to contemplate it only from a safe distance,” Williams wrote in an early short-story version of the expressionistic

, subtitled

. The play made its unremarkable debut a week before the opening of

at the little Pasadena Playbox. In Williams’s mind, freedom had a spiritual dimension. In his stage directions to

, he left no doubt as to what the roof represented: “Below this region the world may be grooved repetition, but here it is the transcendental—light, light, light! The last high reach of the spirit, matter’s rejection, the abstract core of religion which is purity, wonder and love.” (“Stairs to the Roof,” HRC, p. 90.) Before he disappears in a cloud of smoke into a new orbit, the hero, Ben Murphy, tells the girl who goes with him, “The roof is only the jumping-off place to a man with my ambitions.” His last words, shouted “from a long way off” to the hordes of workers who scream his name and “cast their ledgers, their papers, and pencils away with joyful cries for freedom” are “Hello—goodbye.” (Ibid., p. 98.)

66

“The poet, the dreamer”: The endpapers of Williams’s copy of the

, which he carried with him. Columbia.

66

“When will the cool white time”:

, Aug. 14, 1942, p. 321.

66

“Am I still looking”: Ibid., June 27, 1941, p. 229.

66

“We can’t say grace”: LOA1, p. 401.

66

“the time when I would first catch”:

, pp. 77–78.

66

“We come to each other”: Ibid., p. 78.

67

“I guess I’m getting spoiled”:

, Apr. 4, 1945.

67

“This is the twilight of an era”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Apr. 10, 1943,

, p. 438.

68

“What do I want?”:

, Apr. 29, 1938, p. 229.

68

“May God be merciful to me”: Ibid., Sept. 17, 1939, p. 165.

68

“a last, desperate throw of the literary dice”: Williams to Erwin Piscator, Aug. 13, 1942,

, p. 393.

68

“drizzle puss self”:

, Oct. 6, 1943, p. 3.

68

“spiritual dislocation”:

, p. 33.

68

“Once I ordered a sirloin steak”: Ibid.

69

“I nearly went crazy”: Williams to Guthrie McClintic, May 23, 1945,

, p. 560.

69

“I have met the following here”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 20, 1945,

, p. 7.

69

“Tennessee Williams, Writer”: Lyle Leverich,

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 280.

69

“About an hour after my arrival”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Dec. 14, 1945, HRC.

69

“no telephone”: Ibid.

69

“I am switching back and forth”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946,

, p. 36.

69

most fecund of his writing life: Between 1945 and 1947, after the success of

, Williams wrote

,

, the first draft of

, two of his major short stories, “One Arm” and “Desire and the Black Masseur,” as well as

in story form.

69

road company of

:

closed after 109 performances;

closed on August 3, 1946, after 563 performances; the road company—according to Williams in a letter to Audrey Wood written in late March 1947, was “really a travesty of the play, mainly because of the glaring, stupefying incompetence of one member of the cast, Eddie Andrews.” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 1947,

, p. 88.)

70

“I was not a young man”:

, p. 52.

70

“I never put on a shirt”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946,

, pp. 31–32.

70

“I am going through quite an experience”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 25, 1946, ibid., pp. 39–40: “I am so shy with this girl Sylvia that I suffer acutely when alone in a room with her. Have you ever felt that way with anyone? I have told her I feel that way—she makes it worse by enquiring every few minutes, ‘Am I making you uncomfortable?’ ‘Do you want me to go out now?’ ‘Is it all right if I sit here?’ ‘Don’t talk to me unless you want to? Etc.’ Then she sits there with her brilliant eyes taking in every embarrassed change of expression as if she were conducting some marvelous experiment in a lab so that I don’t know where to look, let alone what to say. Exactly like Lillian Gish or at best Harold Lloyd in an old silent film. What are women made of?!”

70

command performance of

: Williams failed to attend the performance; he fell asleep and also missed the White House reception.

70

“She is one of these people”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 25, 1946,

, pp. 39–40.

70

“particular milieu”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, ibid., p. 31.

70

“more restful”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Dec. 14, 1945, HRC.

70

“If you can imagine how a cat”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946,

, p. 31.

70

“my dear Daughter”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Jan. 1946, ibid., p. 37.

71

“my sainted Mother”: Oliver Evans to Williams, undated, LLC.

71

“I am purring with gratitude”: Williams to James Laughlin, Jan. 4, 1946, LLC.

71

“across the street from a Negro Convent”: Williams to “Rod” (letter signed by “John”), Oct. 19, 1945, HRC.

71

Amado “Pancho” Rodriguez y Gonzalez: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC. Both Donald Spoto, in

, and the Library of America volumes on Tennessee Williams maintain incorrectly that Williams met Rodriguez in Mexico, who then followed Williams to New Orleans. “I met him here in New Orleans in the winter of ’45,” Rodriguez said. “He was coming back from Mexico. I didn’t realize who he was because I wasn’t too keen on theatre then.”

71

“dark of skin, dark of hair”:

, “Rubio y Morena,” p. 261.

71

“I wish I had a lovely little clown”:

, Oct. 23, 1943, p. 401.

71

“rambunctious”:

, p. 334.

71

“Companionship was not a familiar”:

, “Rubio y Morena,” pp. 259–61.

72

“took to be a man”: Ibid., p. 258.

72

“I have been having quite a hectic time”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Feb. 27, 1946,

, pp. 43–44.

72

“his bedroom with the bottle”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 15, 1946, ibid., p. 35.

72

“Conditions at home must be worse”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Jan. 3, 1946, HRC.

72

“In spite of basic damnation”: Williams to Donald Windham, Sept. 8, 1943,

, pp. 103–4.

73

“I am waking up”: LOA1, p. 440.

73

“It takes five or six years”:

, Mar. 9, 1962, p. 55.

73

“a picture of my own heart”:

, Apr. 9, 1939, p. 147. On Easter Sunday, 1939, after the Group Theatre had acknowledged his work with a $100 prize, Williams rededicated himself to his vision of playwriting: “a picture of my own heart—there will be no artifice in it—I will speak truth as I see it—distort as I see distortion—be wild as I am wild—tender as I am tender—mad as I am mad—passionate as I am passionate—It will be myself without concealment.”