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

way where the cats were torn to pieces was one thing—my sister’s white curtains and tiny menageries were another. Somewhere between them was the world that we lived in.

    With father, Cornelius (“CC”)
    The Williams family’s impoverishment was as much emotional as material. As Edwina pointed out in her memoir
Remember Me to Tom
, their first apartment “was no tenement.” “We could not afford to buy a house in an exclusive neighborhood so we kept trying to find roomier apartments, and houses for rent,” she wrote. Over the subsequent decade, the family moved nine times, shifting the façade of bourgeois comfort with them—a piano in the parlor, a record player, a car, a membership to the local country club, and, latterly, a cook. In the rural calm of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Williamses had been part of a minister’s household, a patrician bulwark of the local community. St. Louis dislocated them not just from place but also from prestige. The abrasions of anonymity in middle-class city dwelling were unsettling for everyone, but especially unconscionable for a snob like Edwina, who was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (she was born in Ohio but adopted the style and manners of a Southern belle) and whose head had been turned by the raffish CC Williams partly because he came from one of the first families of Tennessee. CC’s mother, Isabel Coffin, had a pedigree that stretched back to the Virginia settlers; his father, Thomas Lanier Williams II—for whom Tennessee was named—was a well-known politician with an illustrious family tree. But, with CC, a pedestrian salesman, the heroic lineage of the clan seemed to have come to a halt.
    Williams saw his literary endeavor both as revenge against his father’s stalled life and as rebirth of his ancestors’ legacy of daring. “The Williamses had fought the Indians for Tennessee,” he wrote. “And I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages.” In an early stab at the material of
The Glass Menagerie
—a verse drama entitled “The Wingfields of America”—Williams invoked the still water on which the family destiny seemed to have floundered. “In the beginning there was high adventure for the Wingfields, and they were equal to it,” the Narrator of “The Wingfields” begins. He goes on:

    With mother, Edwina
     
    The contents of the Americas were baptized in their blood.
    They were the pioneers. . . .
    They were the ones
    That took the trail westward again,
    for the lands that were known
    were not large enough to contain them
    The introduction to the poem concludes:
    Dimly and under the surface of their lives, the Wingfields
    wondered where the excitement had gone, what had become of the first wonderful something
    With which they had come
    Through the mists of morning and through the
    mountain pines with horses and barges and guns—
    To make a new world!
    What had they made? A world!
    But was it actually new?
    That is what the Wingfields dimly wondered.
    Williams, who called CC “the saddest man I ever knew,” wrote, “He was not a man capable of examining his behavior toward his family, or capable of changing it.” When CC was five, his mother died of tuberculosis. Her early death, as Williams wrote in his memoir, left CC without “the emollient influence of a mother,” or, as it happened, without the containing influence of a father. In four unsuccessful bids to become the governor of Tennessee, Thomas Lanier Williams II had squandered much of the family fortune. CC was shunted off to a series of oppressive and inferior boarding schools, where he quickly acquired a reputation for hell-raising. Finally, he was sent to military school, where his “fierce blood” inevitably played itself out in a series of disciplinary misadventures. He was rebellious and restless. He flirted with the notion of becoming a lawyer,