entirely into his imaginary world while working; he was “so absorbed that, as he was typing, he was acting out what his characters were doing.” The pinched world of
The Glass Menagerie
, with its alley and fire escape, its secondhand furniture, is a poetic, if not literal, representation of the Williams family’s existence in St. Louis—where the family moved in 1918 when Williams was seven so that CC could accept a management position with the International Shoe Company, then the biggest shoe company in the world, after working four years as a traveling salesman for them. In 1943, while he was staying at his parents’ house and working on
The Glass Menagerie
, Williams wrote “Cortege,” a poem that evoked the suffocating trauma his displaced family had experienced in St. Louis: “Nowhere was ease / You lost belief in everything but loss.”
In fact, although Williams claimed that his life before St. Louis “was completely unshadowed by fear,” he was already no stranger to loss. Between the ages of four and six, he had lost the use of his legs (probably a case of diphtheria, which kept him an invalid for two years); his beloved black nanny, Ozzie, who disappeared without explanation; and, to all extents and purposes, his father, who, like the absent patriarch in
Menagerie
, “had fallen in love with long distances” and returned only occasionally to the rectory for fractious reunions with the family.
In St. Louis, Williams hung onto his mother’s skirts and her every word. He also absorbed Edwina’s voluble displeasure about her husband and her home. “His winter breath / made tears impossible for her,” he wrote in “Cortege.” Soon after the move, Williams’s depressions—“the blue devils” that would plague him for the rest of his life—began. In his mind, the title
The Glass Menagerie
summoned up the idea of the family’s fragility in the face of a new urban brutality:
When my family first moved to St. Louis from the South, we were forced to live in a congested apartment neighborhood. It was a shocking change for my sister and myself accustomed to spacious yards, porches, and big shade trees. The apartment we lived in was about as cheerful as an Arctic winter. There were outside windows only in the front room and kitchen. The rooms had windows that opened upon a narrow alley way that was virtually sunless and which we grimly named “Death Alley” for a reason which is amusing only in retrospect. There were a great many alley cats in the neighborhood which were constantly fighting the dogs. Every now and then some unwary young cat would allow itself to be pursued into this alley way which had only one opening. The end of the cul-de-sac was directly beneath my sister’s bedroom window and it was here that the cats would have to turn around to face their pursuers in mortal combat. My sister would be awakened in the night by the struggle and in the morning the hideously mangled victim would be lying by her window. The side of the alley way had become so odious to her, for this reason that she kept the shade constantly drawn so that the interior of her bedroom had a perpetual twilight atmosphere. Something had to be done to relieve the gloom. So my sister and I painted all her furniture white; she put white curtains at the window and on the shelves around the room she collected a large assortment of little glass articles of which she was particularly fond. Eventually the room took on a light and delicate appearance, in spite of the lack of outside illumination. When I left home a number of years later, it was this room that I recalled most vividly and poignantly when looking back on our home life. They were mostly little glass animals. By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the Sensitive. The alley
The Glass Menagerie
, with its alley and fire escape, its secondhand furniture, is a poetic, if not literal, representation of the Williams family’s existence in St. Louis—where the family moved in 1918 when Williams was seven so that CC could accept a management position with the International Shoe Company, then the biggest shoe company in the world, after working four years as a traveling salesman for them. In 1943, while he was staying at his parents’ house and working on
The Glass Menagerie
, Williams wrote “Cortege,” a poem that evoked the suffocating trauma his displaced family had experienced in St. Louis: “Nowhere was ease / You lost belief in everything but loss.”
In fact, although Williams claimed that his life before St. Louis “was completely unshadowed by fear,” he was already no stranger to loss. Between the ages of four and six, he had lost the use of his legs (probably a case of diphtheria, which kept him an invalid for two years); his beloved black nanny, Ozzie, who disappeared without explanation; and, to all extents and purposes, his father, who, like the absent patriarch in
Menagerie
, “had fallen in love with long distances” and returned only occasionally to the rectory for fractious reunions with the family.
In St. Louis, Williams hung onto his mother’s skirts and her every word. He also absorbed Edwina’s voluble displeasure about her husband and her home. “His winter breath / made tears impossible for her,” he wrote in “Cortege.” Soon after the move, Williams’s depressions—“the blue devils” that would plague him for the rest of his life—began. In his mind, the title
The Glass Menagerie
summoned up the idea of the family’s fragility in the face of a new urban brutality:
When my family first moved to St. Louis from the South, we were forced to live in a congested apartment neighborhood. It was a shocking change for my sister and myself accustomed to spacious yards, porches, and big shade trees. The apartment we lived in was about as cheerful as an Arctic winter. There were outside windows only in the front room and kitchen. The rooms had windows that opened upon a narrow alley way that was virtually sunless and which we grimly named “Death Alley” for a reason which is amusing only in retrospect. There were a great many alley cats in the neighborhood which were constantly fighting the dogs. Every now and then some unwary young cat would allow itself to be pursued into this alley way which had only one opening. The end of the cul-de-sac was directly beneath my sister’s bedroom window and it was here that the cats would have to turn around to face their pursuers in mortal combat. My sister would be awakened in the night by the struggle and in the morning the hideously mangled victim would be lying by her window. The side of the alley way had become so odious to her, for this reason that she kept the shade constantly drawn so that the interior of her bedroom had a perpetual twilight atmosphere. Something had to be done to relieve the gloom. So my sister and I painted all her furniture white; she put white curtains at the window and on the shelves around the room she collected a large assortment of little glass articles of which she was particularly fond. Eventually the room took on a light and delicate appearance, in spite of the lack of outside illumination. When I left home a number of years later, it was this room that I recalled most vividly and poignantly when looking back on our home life. They were mostly little glass animals. By poetic association they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past. They stood for the small and tender things that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the Sensitive. The alley
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