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 friend, a man with the baroque name of Captain de Voe, making a crack about his sexuality, an incident he found singularly disturbing, though it was a good while before he figured out its meaning. What the man had said was: ‘You know his future, don’t you?’ to which the teacher replied: ‘I don’t think you can be sure about that at the age of seventeen.’
As the party travelled from Paris to Venice, Milan and Montreux, Tom kept up his cheerful letters home, describing mountains, castles and the places where he swam. He never mentioned his fears, though by the time the tour reached the Rhine he was certain he was going crazy. The phobia, as he explained it later, involved the sense that ‘the process of thought was a terrifyingly complex mystery of human life’. Things came to a head in a cathedral in Cologne. He knelt down and began to pray. The rest of the party left. Light was flooding in through the stained glass windows in coloured shafts. Then something miraculous occurred. He had the uncanny sense of being touched by a hand: ‘and at the instant of that touch the phobia was lifted away as lightly as a snowflake though it had weighed on my head like a skull-breaking block of iron’. A religious boy, he was certain he’d experienced the hand of Christ.
For a week he was very happy, and then in Amsterdam the phobia returned. This time, he chased it away almost immediately by composing a poem on the comforts of remembering one is only an individual in a crowd of equally complex beings. The poem itself is barely more than doggerel (‘I hear their laughter and their sighs, / I look into their myriad eyes’), but the experience was pivotal. In Memoirs, he reflected on how important this recognition of being part of a collective was, not just for his own but for any attempt to achieve balance of mind: ‘that recognition of being a member of multiple humanity with its multiple needs, problems and emotions, not a unique creature but one, only one among the multitude of its fellows’.
It was a useful insight. Tom Williams, soon to become Tennessee, would suffer lifelong from moods of terror. Many of the ways he found of medicating and soothing himself were toxic, among them his relationship with alcohol. But discovering that he could dissolve anxiety by looking outward didn’t just save his