If you ever have to lie about your age, try to do it with as much creativity and conviction as Tennessee Williams. When he was nearly twenty-eight, the playwright submitted a handful of one-act plays to a contest for writers under twenty-five. Worried that his deception would be discovered, he changed his name and mailed the submission not from St. Louis, where he lived, but from Memphis, using his grandparents’ home there as the return address. Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Mississippi, he first considered calling himself Valentine Sevier, after an ancestor on his father’s side whose brother was the first governor of Tennessee. But he decided to instead keep his last name and change only his first.
“Mr. ‘Tennessee’ Williams got a telegram last night,” he wrote to his mother a few months later, in March, 1939, letting her know that he’d won the contest, receiving a hundred-dollar prize from the Group Theatre, in New York City. “Do not spread this around till the checque has arrived, as some of my ‘friends’ . . . might feel morally obliged to inform the Group that I am over 25.”
If Williams had any scruples of his own, he shed them with an elegant explanation. After dropping out of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he’d spent the fall of 1932 through the spring of 1935 as a clerk at the International Shoe Company, in St. Louis. His father, a sales manager there, got him the position, which Williams described as “hard labor,” though it mostly involved dusting sample shoes in the morning and typing factory orders for the rest of the day. He took a smoke break every half hour and got paid sixty-five dollars a month. “The job was designed for insanity,” he later remembered. “It was a living death.” He therefore felt entitled to excise that period from his personal history. That’s why Tennessee was three years younger than Tom, and eligible to enter the playwriting contest that brought him to the attention of East Coast agents and West Coast directors.
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But all that is only a technical explanation of how Tom became Tennessee. The deeper questions about Williams’s transformation are the stuff of endless debates and dissertations, fuelled by interviews, letters, memoirs, biographies, and Williams’s own writing, including posthumous publications. Most of us don’t mind literary grave robbing, especially when it comes to authors we love, in which case we don’t mind cradle robbing, either: the boyhood diary of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the miniature books of the young Brontë sisters, the childhood newspaper of Virginia Woolf. In this spirit, New Directions is publishing a volume of the early work of Tennessee Williams, who died forty years ago. Slightly less jejune than the abovementioned efforts, this set of short stories is more like the university-era poetry written by T. S. Eliot in the notebook he titled “Inventions of the March Hare,” or Vladimir Nabokov’s blank-verse play “The Tragedy of Mister Morn,” which he wrote as a twentysomething.
“The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories” includes seven works of short fiction by Williams, culled from the seventy-six boxes of his archival materials at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. They are introduced by Tom Mitchell, an emeritus theatre professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who previously adapted several of Williams’s stories for the stage. Written during the Great Depression, the stories are mostly from the era of Tom’s life that Tennessee erased, when he was living in what he called the City of St. Pollution, writing in the evenings after work, hopped up on black coffee and cigarettes, struggling to find a form and an audience for his art.
Like the early sketches of a great portraitist, these stories feature the outlines of the characters—spinsters, sirens, hotheads, and ministers—whom Williams later made famous in plays like “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The promise of juvenilia is that it will reveal how the person became the artist, exposing the sometimes awkward process by which he fashioned himself through apprenticeship and experimentation. “The Caterpillar Dogs” fulfills that promise, but its real appeal is something else entirely: not a revelation but an affirmation, the chance to be reminded of what we loved about Williams in the first place.
The Williams family moved to Missouri in 1918, when its patriarch, Cornelius Coffin Williams, known as C. C., was offered a stay-put position with the International Shoe Company. Before that, he’d worked as a travelling salesman, leaving his wife, Edwina Dakin Williams, and their children behind with her parents, generally in the parsonage of whatever Episcopal parish her father happened to be serving. The Reverend Walter Dakin and his wife, Rose, were lodestars of a sort, providing stability and a semblance of prosperity, if not financially then at least socially, given their prominence in every community they called home. Their grandson later compared them to Baucis and Philemon, the humble couple in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who unknowingly host Zeus and Hermes.
Williams once said that the best of his work was thanks to his father, who taught him to hate, and not to his mother, who taught him to expect more love from the world than he would ever be able to give in return. Really, his writing emerged from the combustible combination of an emotionally manipulative and sexually inhibited minister’s daughter and an emotionally volatile and sexually insatiable alcoholic gambler, who once lost half his ear in a fight over a poker game. Models of addiction, madness, and sadomasochism were as available to the young Williams as the works of Milton, Dickens, and Shakespeare were. By the age of sixteen, he was so pickled in his parents’ sour exchanges that he was able to parrot their arguments in a prize-winning essay that responded to the prompt “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” “In recounting my own unhappy marital experiences,” the teen-ager wrote, “perhaps I can present convincing answers.”
Williams was born in 1911 and named for his father’s father, though he disappointed his paternal line by being shy and sickly, confined to bed for more than a year with diphtheria and nephritis. C. C. ridiculed his sensitive son by calling him Miss Nancy. Life wasn’t any easier on Williams’s older sister, Rose, who was born in 1909. She was a happy, mischievous child, but then she withdrew; she dropped out of high school and was eventually given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She received insulin shock treatments, which were pronounced unsuccessful, and underwent a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy. She never lived outside an institution again. Their younger sibling, Walter, was born in 1919, and went by his middle name, Dakin. He became a lawyer and dabbled in politics but called himself “a professional brother,” though he and Tennessee were estranged for the last decade of the playwright’s life, after Dakin had him committed for psychiatric evaluation and drug rehabilitation. “Everyone in the family is crazy, but Dakin’s the craziest,” Tennessee once insisted, according to an exchange recorded in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review. “Maybe so,” Dakin replied, “but I’m the one who got in the car and drove all of them to the mental institutions.”
In his early stories, Williams was already arranging and rearranging these family members on the page. Take “Every Friday Nite Is Kiddies Nite,” which features the Reverend Houston, a dead ringer for the Reverend Dakin, whose beloved silk handkerchiefs appear here as flamboyant pajamas, the only extravagance of a man who is leaving the ministry after almost fifty years of pastoring a rural church in Missouri. “What will poor old Reverend Houston do with himself now that he can’t preach the Gospel anymore,” his parishioners wonder. As we quickly learn, he’s planning to abandon the sticks for the city. “I’ve received a divine warning that the time has come for me to prepare myself for the World Beyond,” he tells his daughter. “In short, I’ve decided to move to Saint Louis!” Settling into a furnished apartment, he determines that it’s O.K. to leave a nudie painting on the wall, forgets to say grace before his first supper, and—although his parishioners couldn’t afford radios and waged a war against picture shows—delights in knowing that he can enjoy risqué comedians on his wireless and double features at the theatre across the street. (The story’s title comes from the theatre’s sign.) If those entertainments are a foretaste of some new life of debauchery, we never hear about it; all that happens is that the Reverend writes a slightly dishonest letter to his daughter. The story ends with a hollowed-out summoning of the last words of Christ: “ ‘Now it is all finished,’ he whispered softly, ‘and I can go to sleep!’ ”
It’s as if Williams gathered all the kindling he needed but forgot to bring a match. This is especially disappointing when you learn that, around the time he wrote this story, Williams, then living with his grandparents in Memphis after a nervous collapse, witnessed a curious incident involving his grandfather. One morning, the retired minister answered the door to find two men waiting for him; he disappeared for the rest of the day and returned that night to announce that he had given the pair nearly all the family’s savings, some five thousand dollars. The next morning, he made a handful of trips into the attic to fetch his old sermons, then threw them into an ashpit in the back yard and lit the whole pile on fire—his wife pointedly refused to watch. According to John Lahr’s magisterial biography, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” Williams told his friend Gore Vidal that he believed “his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy.”
But none of that intrigue or upset is captured in “Every Friday Nite Is Kiddies Nite.” Although Williams himself was gay, these early stories are excessively and unconvincingly heterosexual. In “Till One or the Other Gits Back,” a set of hillbilly twins fight over a woman, culminating in the attempted murder of one by the other on a state highway near the laughably named Dead Man’s Curve. Another story is titled “They Go Like a Thistle He Said”: “they” refers to young women; “go like a thistle” is a phrase Williams borrowed from D. H. Lawrence and repurposed as a euphemism for promiscuity; and “he” is a Catholic priest who breaks the bad news about promiscuous girls to a would-be artist whose heart has been broken by one of them.
Two stories, “Season of Grapes” and “Ironweed,” feature college-age stand-ins for Williams. One, enjoying a last summer in the Ozarks before his freshman year, is shaken by his sexual awakening with a vacationing stenographer. The other, home from the state university, is jilted by a neighbor before he can propose to her. Both have puzzled over Nietzsche and considered the meaningless meaningfulness of life. But these stories never sit with the ferocious emotions that fill Williams’s later works; even when their plots feature the same upheavals as those of the plays, they only gesture toward the explosions that Williams would bring to the stage.
“How absurdly inimical this whole world was to the dignity of lovers,” one of those undergraduates thinks, articulating what was already Williams’s credo. It would be years before the author fully realized that tragic theme, but he comes closest in “Stair to the Roof,” the last and most autobiographical of the stories in this collection. An alternative title for that story was “Episodes in the Life of a Clerk,” and Mitchell repurposes it for his introduction, which nicely traces the outlines of St. Louis during the Depression: “A riot outside City Hall led to the death of a Black man shot by police while protesting the city government’s lack of compassion for the poor. Labor strikes shut down major companies. Unemployed youth hopped aboard freight cars that crisscrossed the city. A ‘Hooverville’ of makeshift shelters stretched along the Mississippi River where the Gateway Arch now stands. Racial and ethnic neighborhoods shifted as the economy displaced residents.”
Williams was witness to all that poverty and strife without directly experiencing it. Mitchell calls him “a romantic proletarian,” and suggests that he was a man who befriended labor activists and Communists without becoming one, and who was surrounded by political radicals and progressive theatre types but never protested or marched. Instead, Williams wrote—poems he placed in obscure journals, stories he submitted to contests, plays he managed to get produced by the local Mummers theatre group—and found his way back to school, auditing classes and then enrolling at Washington University, in St. Louis, before transferring to the University of Iowa, where he finally earned a bachelor’s degree.
Although Williams didn’t count his wage-work years in the time line of his life, he did draw on them for his writing. In “Stair to the Roof,” his fictional avatar isn’t an aspirational student but a despondent shoe-factory clerk named Edward Schiller, who lives for his furtive attempts at poetry and his glimpses of the cityscape from the roof of his workplace, the Continental Shoe Company. The everywhere fog of Dickens’s London becomes the inescapable smoke of St. Louis, filling Washington Avenue and tickling the Eads Bridge as Edward sneaks his cigarette breaks upstairs, escaping the drudgery of his typing to “look out over the eastern horizon with its hazy intimation of lands stretching beyond the river and the city and perhaps continuing in beautiful, clean undulations until it reached the ocean.”
If elsewhere Williams struggled to light a fire, this story is all ashes. Immediately following an epigraph from Edna St. Vincent Millay, two nuns and a candy vender are nearly hit by Edward’s dismembered body parts after he jumps to his death from the roof of the twenty-five-story factory. The story’s macabre first lines read, “It made an oddly fluid, splattering sound as it struck the concrete. One limb, amputated by the cornice, slid several feet along the walk.” Top marks for the creative molding, but, as a beginning, it just doesn’t work. Before Williams introduces Edward by name, we get the newsboy version of what’s happened: “Somebody just done a Steve Brodie off the Continental roof!”
Williams finds his stride here only when he turns to autobiography, showing Edward to be made equally miserable by an overbearing mother and by modern office life. Mrs. Schiller, for whom Edward feels “a bitter hatred,” runs a boarding house in the town center; Mr. Schiller, for whom he feels “a vague pity,” is “a sallow, defeated specimen who some obscure malady had confined to the house as long as anyone could remember.” Edward tried to run away when he was ten, but a police officer dragged him home, and his mother gave the man permission to beat him, forever clipping the boy’s wings: “He was a rebellious spirit who lacked the courage to rebel.”
Edward’s only attempt at rebellion is his writing, and his suicide comes after colleagues discover it. He had been a scribbler since high school, and his poems and stories were so good that his teachers initially doubted he had written them, though one complained that he didn’t “write about things as they really are.” Her admonition became Williams’s mission: “You should try to write of things that actually happen in life, stories about real men and women. Otherwise your talent will be wasted.”
Williams often said that he feared being institutionalized like his sister, but “Stair to the Roof” reveals a different fear: unrealized talent. Edward’s family, teachers, and co-workers are all adversaries of his art, and the city itself is indifferent to both his potential and his plight. That wasn’t Williams’s fate, and it wasn’t even the final version of his fictional clerk’s life. A compulsive reviser, Williams later made the tragic “Stair to the Roof” into a surrealistic play called “Stairs to the Roof: A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That Are Kept in Cages.” In that version, the clerk doesn’t have to kill himself to escape a life sentence as a human calculator for the corporate executives of the Continental Branch of Consolidated Shirtmakers—Mr. P, Mr. D, Mr. Q, and Mr. T. All the hero has to do is follow his heart, undertaking a series of romantic adventures observed by a bizarre figure named Mr. E, who ultimately spirits the clerk and his new love to a faraway star.
That ending isn’t so unlike the ending of the play that would catapult Williams to a different kind of stardom: “The Glass Menagerie” concludes with the fragile, failing Amanda Wingfield telling her son, Tom, “Go, then! Then go to the moon—you selfish dreamer!” In his final monologue, Tom confides to the audience, “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further.” Fired for writing poetry, he flees St. Louis, becoming the artist who could tell this story, announcing haughtily and naughtily at the play’s beginning, “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve.”
That was Williams in 1944, only a few years after writing the stories in “The Caterpillar Dogs,” when he’d finally sloughed off the corporate responsibilities his father expected him to fulfill and escaped the domestic torments his mother heaped on him. “The Glass Menagerie” drew on several other early works, too, including, most notably, a short story called “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” in which Williams was sorting out his feelings about his sister—not only her mental health but also what role his father’s absences and his mother’s abuses had played in her breakdown.
Unlike some perfectionist writers, Williams was never embarrassed by his trail of false starts. He allowed his apprentice plays to be performed, and acknowledged the lesser tributaries of the great plays in prefaces and introductions throughout his career. “Writers usually speak deprecatingly of their ‘early works,’ for they like to feel that their talents have greatly expanded with maturity,” he wrote in the program for “Stairs to the Roof” when the Pasadena Playhouse staged it, in 1947. “It is certainly true that the continued exercise of a craft breeds competence in it, but in writing there are other things besides competence. There are certain organic values, such as intensity of feeling, freshness of perception, moral earnestness and conviction. These are virtues that may exist in beginning writers and unfortunately they may exist more in the beginning than in the later stages.”
If intensity appears at the beginning of an artist’s career and ability accrues over time, at least one thing endures throughout: the inner world from which all the work emerges. Williams was always Williams, and he was forever writing about the same themes. That’s why, if you love his late work, then you’ll love his early work also—not necessarily because it’s good, but because it’s him. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his sonnets, wrote, “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” That’s the pleasure of reading this little collection of juvenilia—to catch Tennessee in his early days, already selving. ♦
