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

lady,” the answer to her toddler’s question was an unequivocal yes. Edwina was all lungs. “She was always talking,” Dakin said. “There was never any silence. You would step in the room, and she immediately started.” He went on, “She liked to focus the attention on herself by talking. She wouldn’t pay any attention to anyone but herself. It was like water dripping—tip, tip, tip.”
    Edwina wasn’t just a talker: she was a narrative event, a torrent of vivid, cadenced, florid, and confounding speech that could not be denied. Eloquence was a show of power amid her powerlessness. As a child, she had dreamed of being an opera singer; in adulthood her operatics were exhibited through bouts of feinting, rowing, and talking—performances that made a manipulative spectacle of her un-boundaried feeling. With the fine filigree of her language, as Dakin pointed out, “she was trying to gain the stage.” (“Miss Edwina will still be talking for at least an hour after she’s laid to rest,” Williams wrote in his essay “Let It All Hang Out.”) In her verbal fights with CC, according to Williams, Edwina was “rarely if ever bested.”
    A large word horde was part of a Southern belle’s arsenal of seduction, the sugar to swat the fly. “It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure,” Amanda tells Tom in
The Glass Menagerie
, as she launches into a story about her legendary gentleman callers. “She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions. . . . Never anything coarse or common or vulgar.” As Amanda preached it and Edwina lived it, talk was a tool, an exhibition, and an assertion. In Edwina’s case, speech renovated reality; it imposed a sense of coherence on the emotional chaos of her life, diverting her hostility away from herself and making her unknowable. “I always like to forget the unpleasant,” Edwina wrote, adding, “I often pretended to feel gay when I was in anguish. I did not think it fair of parents to take out their feelings on children. . . . I believe it would have been far more grim had I not pretended things weren’t as bad as they seemed. All of us are actors to the degree that we must be to survive.” For Edwina’s children to survive her and to get the emotional support they needed, they had both to indulge and to join her narrative. At the beginning of
The Glass Menagerie
, as Amanda is about to launch into a reverie about her past, Williams demonstrated this complicity:
    TOM: I know what’s coming!
    LAURA: Yes. But let her tell it.
    TOM: Again?
    LAURA: She loves to tell it.
    (
    Amanda returns with bowl of dessert
    .)
    AMANDA: One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!—gentleman callers! . . .
    TOM: I bet you could talk.
    AMANDA: Girls in those days knew how to talk, I can tell you.
    Edwina’s wall of words was designed to keep the world at attention and at bay. Speech was a sort of confidence trick: that is, her words were intended to give confidence both to others and to herself. “You couldn’t sit with Edwina without wanting to imitate her,” Gore Vidal said. “She had this rather grim face, a very long upper lip. I used to call her the good Gray Goose. Tennessee thought that terribly funny.” Williams, whom Edwina claimed “was exceptionally observant as a child,” was a good audience for his mother, a fact to which
The Glass Menagerie
bears witness—a retelling of the saga of her upbringing as a Southern belle, her suitors, her God-fearing piety, her husband’s abandonment, and her gallant support of her fragile brood. All Edwina’s homilies, aphorisms, and idioms, with their particular quality of denial, were absorbed by Williams and reenacted by Amanda. When Edwina first saw herself re-created on stage, as she sat with her son at the Chicago opening, Williams recalled, she “looked like a horse eating briars. She was touching her throat and clasping her