Free Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

now left the house on his long anticipated trip to the West Coast. We hope he never comes back, but nothing returns more certainly than evil.” The “evil” and the “we” announced both Williams’s bias and his collusion in his mother’s version of events. (Another sign of his internal alliance was Williams’s distinctive drawl; CC had no Southern accent, his mother did.) For most of his adult life, Williams dreaded his visits home. “My father—how to meet him again—will I be able to do it?” he wrote in his 1942 journal. “Or will I run away again?—And cheat my poor Mother who goes without a servant to keep me going?” In 1943, he wrote, “We made talk alone for the first time in probably ten or fifteen years. A pathetic old man but capable of being a devil.” He went on: “It’s like a Chekhov play, only much wilder and sadder.” By this time, the fractious family was so polarized that CC ate alone at a first sitting, and Edwina and her parents ate second.
    “What a dark and bewildering thing it is, this family group,” Williams wrote to Windham. “I can only feel one thing, the necessity for strength and the pettiness of all other considerations. I guess that is what I came home for. Because I can’t give them any help.” “Does nothing but stay home and drink,” Williams wrote to Wood about his father. “When sufficiently drunk I think he is dangerous. Mother says that he talks threateningly and abusively to my grandfather.” By the time of his last visit home, in early March 1945, before the opening of
The Glass Menagerie
, Williams could no longer spend time in the house. For the entire week he felt compelled to stay away from five in the afternoon until two in the morning—“Any excuse just to get away and escape talk and questioning!” he confided to Laughlin. He continued, “Tonight I came in at ten—the earliest—and was greeted by a flood of tears and reproaches—and how could I explain or excuse myself except by saying—Yes, it’s true, I can’t stand it here, not even one night out of one week out of one year!”
     
    Williams’s eloquence, like his neurotic nature, was part of his family inheritance. While the family’s violence shaped his personality, its fluency shaped his prose. The Dakins, Ottes, and Williamses, who comprised his family tree, were well educated and well spoken. Williams grew up saturated in the rich linguistic brew of biblical imperative, Puritan platitude, classical allusion, patrician punctilio, and Negro homily. His beloved grandfather, the Reverend Dakin, who was the formative male figure of his early years, had a mellifluous voice and enjoyed reading aloud. (“He could recite poetry by the yard,” Edwina said. “I’m sure Tom got some of his love of books from Father.”) The Reverend was also something of a ham in the pulpit. Delivering his sermons, which were written out in a hand as limpid and florid as his speech, he spoke with particular dramatic flair. “Pitch now your tents toward Heaven and the Sure Rising,” he intoned, in a sermon first given in 1901, a decade before Williams was born, and last delivered in 1920, by which time Williams was in the habit of clinging to his grandfather’s every metaphor-laden word. “As the storm of sin rages fiercely about you and within you, as the horizon of the world grows darker with new and ever new forms of evil, learn to shelter yourself more and more closely in the Rock of Ages till the storm shall cease and the blackened sky pierced by radiant rays of glory from the Son of Righteousness who will come to you with healings in his Wings.”

    With grandmother and grandfather, Rosina Dakin (“Grand”) and the Reverend Dakin
    Edwina was as wordy as her father, though her proselytizing was of a different kind. “Is my mother a lung lady?” Williams asked, in one of his earliest recorded childhood sentences. Although Edwina chose to construe this as a comical malaprop for “young