and even studied for two years at the College of Law at the University of Tennessee before volunteering to fight in the Spanish-American War. But both the law and the military were too authoritarian for CC’s bumptious, wayward spirit. For a time CC worked as the regional manager of a telephone company before becoming a drummer for a Knoxville men’s clothing firm. As a traveling salesman he could live by his own rules and by the laws of motion. In Williams’s early play
The Spinning Song
, the father admits a need for “continual excitement”; if CC didn’t have a destiny or a solid emotional core, the road, at least, provided a kind of direction. For CC movement was an antidote to anxiety; over time, his peripatetic writer-son—known to his friends as “Bird”—would adopt the same defensive strategy. “I have an instinct for self-destruction,” Williams has a character say in
Battle of Angels
. “I’m running away from it all the time.”
CC and Edwina were victims of their hidebound times. In both their lives something remained hidden. CC drew an iron curtain around his feelings, refusing ever to discuss his own parents or his childhood, which made his volatility all the more arbitrary and bewildering. Likewise, Edwina never acknowledged or understood the secret in her own family between her convent-educated mother—“the least demonstrative person I’ve known,” she said—and her doting father, who was “not the most masculine of men,” as Williams described him. Despite his lifelong show of rectitude, according to Gore Vidal, who knew him, the civilized Reverend Dakin had an interest in the “Grecian vice.” Although Williams alluded to a certain caprice in Reverend Dakin’s nature—“he is humble and affectionate but incurably set upon satisfying his own impulses whatever they may be”—he left it for others to read the sexual implications in the ferocity of Reverend Dakin’s denial during one crucial incident of his old age.
One day in 1934, in Memphis, when the Reverend was living on a retirement pension of eighty-five dollars a month, two men came to the door. The Reverend handed over most of his wife’s savings—cashing in five thousand out of seventy-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds. “She said ‘Why, Walter?’ Again and again, till finally he said, ‘Rose, don’t question me any more because if you do, I will go away by myself and you’ll never hear from me again!’ ” Williams wrote. “At that point she moved from the wicker chair to the porch swing. . . . As my grandmother swung gently back and forth and evening closed about them in their spent silence . . . I felt without quite understanding, something that all their lives had been approaching, even half knowingly, a slow and terrible facing of something between them. ‘
Why
, Walter?’ The following morning my grandfather was very busy and my grandmother was totally silent. He went into the tiny attic of the bungalow and took out of a metal filing case a great, great, great pile of cardboard folders containing all his old sermons. He went into the back yard of the bungalow with this load, taking several trips . . . and then he started a fire and fifty-five years of hand-written sermons went up in smoke. . . . What I most remember more than that blaze, was the silent white blaze of my grandmother’s face as she stood over the washtub . . . not once even glancing out of the window where the old gentleman, past eighty, was performing this auto-da-fé as an act of purification. ‘
Why
,
Walter
?’ Nobody knows! Nobody but my grandfather who has kept the secret into this his ninety-sixth spring.”
“The Bird told me that he thought that his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy,” Gore Vidal wrote. The Reverend Dakin’s last words were “I want to go to Key West”—a homosexual watering hole he frequently visited with Williams, who bought a house there
The Spinning Song
, the father admits a need for “continual excitement”; if CC didn’t have a destiny or a solid emotional core, the road, at least, provided a kind of direction. For CC movement was an antidote to anxiety; over time, his peripatetic writer-son—known to his friends as “Bird”—would adopt the same defensive strategy. “I have an instinct for self-destruction,” Williams has a character say in
Battle of Angels
. “I’m running away from it all the time.”
CC and Edwina were victims of their hidebound times. In both their lives something remained hidden. CC drew an iron curtain around his feelings, refusing ever to discuss his own parents or his childhood, which made his volatility all the more arbitrary and bewildering. Likewise, Edwina never acknowledged or understood the secret in her own family between her convent-educated mother—“the least demonstrative person I’ve known,” she said—and her doting father, who was “not the most masculine of men,” as Williams described him. Despite his lifelong show of rectitude, according to Gore Vidal, who knew him, the civilized Reverend Dakin had an interest in the “Grecian vice.” Although Williams alluded to a certain caprice in Reverend Dakin’s nature—“he is humble and affectionate but incurably set upon satisfying his own impulses whatever they may be”—he left it for others to read the sexual implications in the ferocity of Reverend Dakin’s denial during one crucial incident of his old age.
One day in 1934, in Memphis, when the Reverend was living on a retirement pension of eighty-five dollars a month, two men came to the door. The Reverend handed over most of his wife’s savings—cashing in five thousand out of seventy-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds. “She said ‘Why, Walter?’ Again and again, till finally he said, ‘Rose, don’t question me any more because if you do, I will go away by myself and you’ll never hear from me again!’ ” Williams wrote. “At that point she moved from the wicker chair to the porch swing. . . . As my grandmother swung gently back and forth and evening closed about them in their spent silence . . . I felt without quite understanding, something that all their lives had been approaching, even half knowingly, a slow and terrible facing of something between them. ‘
Why
, Walter?’ The following morning my grandfather was very busy and my grandmother was totally silent. He went into the tiny attic of the bungalow and took out of a metal filing case a great, great, great pile of cardboard folders containing all his old sermons. He went into the back yard of the bungalow with this load, taking several trips . . . and then he started a fire and fifty-five years of hand-written sermons went up in smoke. . . . What I most remember more than that blaze, was the silent white blaze of my grandmother’s face as she stood over the washtub . . . not once even glancing out of the window where the old gentleman, past eighty, was performing this auto-da-fé as an act of purification. ‘
Why
,
Walter
?’ Nobody knows! Nobody but my grandfather who has kept the secret into this his ninety-sixth spring.”
“The Bird told me that he thought that his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy,” Gore Vidal wrote. The Reverend Dakin’s last words were “I want to go to Key West”—a homosexual watering hole he frequently visited with Williams, who bought a house there
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