night in a bar called Rounds, which ‘boasts a somewhat piss-elegant decor and a clientele consisting largely of male hustlers and those who employ them’. Gallant, yes: but also not an entirely reliable witness to the traffic of his own life.
The Elysée was not the kind of place I could afford but a friend at Condé Nast had wangled me a room. There was a chandelier in the lobby and someone had painted a trompe l’oeil garden on the far wall. It looked vaguely Italian: lemon trees, black and white tiles and a box-lined path that narrowed bluely towards some wooded hills. As I checked in I asked which floor Tennessee’s old suite was on. I’d planned to pop up in the morning and see if a chambermaid would let me peek inside. But the Sunset Suite no longer existed. The boy at the front desk, who looked like he might play field hockey, added surprisingly: ‘We divided it up to get rid of bad spirits.’
People believe strange things. Rose Williams, Tennessee’s adored sister, who had a pre-frontal lobotomy at the age of twenty-eight and still outlived all her immediate family, refused to acknowledge death when it occurred. But once, or so her brother recorded in Memoirs, she said: ‘It rained last night. The dead came down with the rain.’ He asked, in the gentle tone he almost always used with her, if she meant their voices and she replied, ‘Yes, of course, their voices.’
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in absences, and the fact that the room had ceased to exist pleased me. I was beginning to think that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world, or at least of slipping one’s appointed place within it, though if you’d seen Tennessee blundering through the hallway, pie-eyed and legless, you might think conversely it made one all too painfully impossible to miss. It seemed appropriate, anyhow, that this place where I thought I’d start my journey should turn out to be a non-place, a gap in the map. I looked at the trompe l’oeil garden again. That was the path to follow, into the vanishing point, past the wavering blue brushstrokes with which the artist had indicated the threshold of his knowledge.
Time, Tennessee Williams wrote in The Glass Menagerie, is the longest distance between two places. I’d been trying to work out when he first came to New York. I figured from his letters that it must have been in the summer of 1928, when he was a shy, sheltered boy of seventeen – the same trip, as it happens, in which he tried alcohol for the first time. Back then he was still called Tom; still lived with his family in hateful St. Louis.
He’d been invited by his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, to join a touring party made up of various adventuresome parishioners. The group would travel by way of a White Star liner from New York to Southampton, and then go on to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy: a democratic, twentieth-century version of the aristocratic Grand Tour.
The trip began with a four-day blowout at the Biltmore, the hotel by Grand Central Terminal where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald had spent their honeymoon eight years before. ‘We have just concluded dinner with a multi-millionaire . . . in his seven room suite at the end of the hall,’ the would-be sophisticate wrote home in ecstasy. ‘I was sitting at the same table, in his private suite, where the Prince of Wales had sat during his stay at the Biltmore in 1921! Did that kill me!!’
Life aboard ship was even more riotous. They set sail at midnight on the ss Homeric, in what he recalled much later as a gala departure, with brass bands and a great deal of coloured paper ribbons tossed back and forth between the vessel and the well-wishers on Pier 54. The next day he drank his first alcoholic beverage, a green crème-dementhe, and afterwards was violently seasick.
Not wholly convinced by this newly adult pleasure, he reported to his mother: ‘Grandfather . . . keeps his tongue pretty slick with Manhattin Coctails and Rye-Ginger Ales. I have tried them all but prefer none to plain ginger-ale and Coca Cola. So I’m afraid I’m not getting all the kick out of this boat that the others are getting.’ Six days on, in the Hotel Rochambeau, he changed his tune, opening a letter home with the exultant declaration:
I have just imbibed a whole glass of french champagne and am feeling consequently very elated. It is our last evening in Paris which excuses the unusual indulgence. French champagne is the only drink I like here. But it is really delicious.
He didn’t add what he would later dwell on in his memoir, that in the boulevards of Paris he began abruptly to feel afraid of what he called the process of thought, and that over the weeks of travel this phobia grew so intense he came within ‘a hairsbreadth of going quite mad’. Later, he described this experience as ‘the most dreadful, the most nearly psychotic, crisis that occurred in my early life’.
It wasn’t the first time Tom had suffered from anxiety, though it was the most serious attack he’d had so far. He’d always been an acutely sensitive boy, a condition not helped by the disruptions of his household. His parents had met in 1906 and married the next year. Edwina Williams was a pretty, popular, talkative girl who had in her youth nurtured a fantasy of going on the stage. Her husband, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a travelling salesman who sold men’s clothes and later shoes. In addition he played poker, drank heavily and generally conveyed in all his habits his congenital unsuitability to domestic life.
After their marriage the couple lived together, but when she fell pregnant with her first child in 1909 Edwina returned to her parents, moving with them through a succession of rectories in Mississippi and Tennessee. Tom came along two years later, on Palm Sunday, 26 March 1911: a concentrated, watchful baby. The south suited him. He had his sister Rose for company, and would remember this period much later as ‘joyfully innocent’, though his father was rarely present. As a very little boy he was active and robust, but in first grade he caught diphtheria, and was taken out of school. He spent most of the next year on his own in bed, acting out invented scenes with a pack of cards for players. By the time he returned to his classmates, he’d changed dramatically, becoming delicate and frail.
In 1918, the southern idyll came abruptly to an end. Cornelius had been promoted to a management position at the International Shoe Company and wanted to set up home in St. Louis. Living with his children for the first time, he regarded the older two with contempt, though he liked Dakin, the son born a few months after their arrival in the city. The pattern of geographic instability established in the south didn’t stop once the Williamses were reunited, either. By the time Tom was fifteen, he’d lived in sixteen different houses, though it wasn’t until the family’s arrival in St. Louis that he realised how poor they were. The apartments they rented were tiny; the colour, he recalled later, of mustard and dried blood. In these nasty confined spaces, his parents’ incompatibility was ruthlessly exposed, while Rose began her precipitous descent towards a mental breakdown.
‘Life at home was terrible, just terrible,’ Dakin wrote decades later in a letter to Williams’s biographer Donald Spoto. ‘By the late 1920s, mother and father were in open warfare, and both were good combatants. He came home drunk . . . and he’d fly into a rage . . . there’d be a vicious row and finally mother would do her famous fainting act.’ The dainty, troubled Rose found these fights increasingly petrifying, while Tom harboured bitter memories of being called Miss Nancy for his cissyish interest in books and movies, recording as an adult that his father ‘was a terrifying man’.
In his teens Williams was pathologically shy, blushing whenever another pair of eyes met his. Not surprising then that on his first trip abroad he might experience an attack of paralysing anxiety. But something else had happened on the ss Homeric itself, a disturbing encounter that may also have played a role. Tom spent a good deal of his time aboard ship waltzing with a dance instructor, a young woman of twenty-seven. ‘I was in those days an excellent dancer and we “just swept around the floor: and swept and swept” as Zelda would put it.’ Later, he overheard her
