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Williams: ‘Keeping a journal is a lonely man’s habit’ |
In search of kind strangers
Tennessee Williams’s personal notebooks, published for the first time, reveal the workings of a brilliant but troubled mind, writes Piers Plowright
Tennessee Williams: Notebooks Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton. Yale University Press £27.50. order this book
THE novelist Evelyn Waugh once created a fictional young woman prone to travel, who would send back cryptic postcards from exotic places. “This is the Sphinx. Goodness how sad!” was one I particularly remember.
There are times in this minutely annotated, 700- page journey through the ups and downs of the inner Tennessee Williams when the reader may have a similar sense of being told both more and less than he or she wants to know.
“Nothing happens,” he writes on Sunday July 5, 1936: “I seem unable to take any action – just drift along haphazardly from day to day, wondering what will turn up.”
Three months later: “It is raining and I am lonely. Oh, God, help me to do what I should do – be brave and live a free life.”
But 16 years later, he’s still at it: On August 17, 1952, he writes: “Quelle misère! This place [Munich] no good. Not even worth talking about… Retreat is limitless this side of death. That doesn’t make much sense – days go by so fast. Fading, fading. Leave no mark but fatigue.”
Luckily, for Williams and for us, there are other and richer things to be found between March 1936, when the notebooks start, and the last entry in spring 1981 (there was a pause between 1958 and 1979), two years before his accidental death in a New York hotel bedroom.
Williams was 24 when he began the notebooks. Then still Thomas Lanier Williams (he changed his name for literary reasons in 1938), he was the son of a travelling shoe salesman with whom he never got on and a powerful mother whom he both loved and hated. There was also an older sister, Rose, whose tragic life later fuelled so much of his fiction.
The journals show the first signs of a remarkable talent that would blow apart the conventions of 20th-century American drama. The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Baby Doll and half a dozen other masterpieces were to follow as in these ordinary looking, lined notebooks (there are 30 of them) Williams began to jot down his daily thoughts and emotions.
“Keeping a journal is a lonely man’s habit,” Williams wrote elsewhere. Journal keeping is a secretive habit too. The director Elia Kazan called him one of the most secretive people he had ever known.
But these notebooks, at their best, let us in to some of those secrets and allow the reader to trace the connections between Williams’s manic-depressive, sex, booze and drug-drenched life and his extraordinary fiction.
For example, on Monday October 27, 1947, Williams writes: “The long table under the skylight and the miserable labor on ‘Summer and Smoke’ and the panicky times when you thought you would not survive the coming winter… Then you bought the car and began spending the nice afternoons out – things picked up a little, gradually. But not till Grandfather came and you escaped with him to Florida did you really seem to catch hold of life again – and wrote Streetcar. All in about six weeks, that is, the final draft of it. You recovered your lost manhood!”
This is revealing: about Williams, about the writing of Streetcar and Summer in New Orleans the year before, and about his grandfather (Williams adored his maternal grandparents).
And when he turns the screws on himself, scribbling comments on what he has written in the notebook margins, Williams transcends self-pity: “Sunday September 26, 1943. I have accepted sex as a way of life and found it empty, empty, knuckles on a hollow drum.”
Then, scribbled alongside: “Not true, I usually enjoy it. What I mean is it doesn’t answer all.”
Here the real, complex, and very sympathetic Williams takes over and this is what makes the book worth reading. Pain and pleasure, crisis and creativity intimately linked.
Margaret Bradham Thornton’s notes and comments are impeccably researched and include photos, reproductions of the original notebook pages, drawings and paintings by Williams and detailed detective work that follows up every reference.
For Tennessee Williams aficionados, this work will be a source of great enrichment; for the casual reader, it’s a book to dip into and flip through.
There will be moments when you’ll want to shake him. But just as many moments that will move and delight you. In the end these pages are about the search for that famous “kindness of strangers” and the longing for a serenity impossible in so complicated a man.
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