A Dark, Wide World You Can Breathe In Thomas Lanier Williams III, destined to be known to the world as "Tennessee," was born on 26 March, 1911, in Columbus, a town in the hills of northeast Mississippi not far from the Alabama line. It was Palm Sunday, and the Reverend Walter Dakin, grandfather of the new baby, was conducting services at St. Paul's Episcopal Church when his daughter went into labor. Edwina Dakin was rushed to a clinic, arriving only minutes before her son was born. A few days later he was christened at St. Paul's and named for his paternal grandfather, Thomas Lanier Williams II, who had died in 1908. Originally called Possum Town by the local Indians, Columbus was incorporated in 1821 and immediately began to grow. It had become by the mid-nineteenth century a beautiful town, sprawled across the rolling hills between the Tombigbee and the Luxapalila Rivers. Even today, despite the strip malls that spread out like some ugly infection from the center of town, the Columbus of old is still there, seemingly barely touched by time. Along its tree-lined streets are more than two hundred antebellum mansions, set deep in large lots amid oaks, magnolias, and cedars, and every spring the yards and gardens are magically transformed by an astounding abundance of flowers-azaleas, camellias, gardenias, Confederate jasmine, and bridal wreath-and blooming trees-dogwood, redbud, plum, and pear-into a riot of fragrance and color. Tom was the second child of his parents; his sister Rose had been born in 1909. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, had herself been born in Ohio, an ironic detail, considering the fact that by her teen years she had become in her language and lifestyle the quintessential southern belle. She did, however, spend several of her formative years in Tennessee, when her father was studying for the ministry at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Like most other graduates of that institution-one famous alumnus, William Alexander Percy, referred to them as "the Arcadians" -Reverend Dakin would forever hold his alma mater dear to his heart, and the grandfather's devotion would decades later be rewarded by the largess of his playwright-grandson's will. Even though the family returned to Ohio after the time in Sewanee, when Edwina was in her teens, her father subsequently accepted a series of pulpits in the South, first in Cleveland, Tennessee, then at the lovely antebellum chapel at Church Hill, near Natchez, Mississippi, then in the town of Port Gibson, where the "southernization" of the young woman seems to have been completed. It was in Port Gibson that the playwright's mother insisted that she had spent the happiest of her youthful years, and in Tennessee's drama The Eccentricities of a Nightingale when Alma Winemiller speaks of the Episcopal Church in Glorious Hill, with its unusual steeple, she is actually describing the Port Gibson Presbyterian Church. It was in 1905 that the Dakins and their daughter moved to Columbus, Mississippi, where they would re main until 1 December 1913. It was in Columbus that Edwina Dakin met Cornelius Williams in 1905 and two years later, 3 June 1907, married him. Cornelius Coffin Williams was the true southerner of the family, born and re a red in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Thomas Lanier Williams II, for whom Cornelius's son would be named, and Isabel Coffin Williams. Cornelius was a descendant of several pioneer families of that state and the region-Seviers, Laniers, Calhouns, and Williamses. This lineage seems to have played no small part in Edwina's decision to accept Cornelius's proposal. One of his ancestors was General James White, the founder of Knoxville, whose granddaughter, Polly McClung, was by marriage a great-great-great aunt of Tennessee's. She was "the first American coed," the playwright wrote Donald Windham, when Tennessee was invited to the University of Tennessee in 1945 to unveil a portrait of her on the occasion of the school's naming a hall for her. Two other distinguished members of his family tree were poets Tristram Coffin and Sidney Lanier, a major Confederate author, who wrote not only verse but also a novel, Tiger Lilies , based on his experiences as a federal prisoner of war. Through the Williams line Cornelius could claim as ancestors an early senator from the state which in the late 1930s would provide his play w right-son with his famous nom de plume . Through the Seviers, who were Huguenots, Cornelius was related to John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, and another illustrious ancestor from that branch was a brother of St. Francis Xavier, Valentine Xavier, whose American descendants changed the spelling of the name to "Sevier." Cornelius's family came from Knoxville, and many of the Williamses, including Cornelius himself, are buried in the old Gray Cemetery there. The genealogy of the playwright's family is intriguing for a number of reasons. Among the strongest elements of the southern psyche are the familial attachment and pride of ancestry, and the close family ties that exist in the South were even stronger when Thomas Lanier Williams was a child. Despite what skeletons may hang in the family closet, there is a sense of security and pride in belonging , in being a part of that unit identified by blood ties. Even now in small towns in the South the appearance of a stranger on the scene is likely to evoke from elders the age-old, ubiquitous question, "Who are his people?" Those who have moved to a town within living memory are likely to be referred to as "come-heres." By 1900 most members of the old "aristocracy" of the South could best be described as "decayed gentry," having lost what ever fortunes they may ever have possessed in a series of regional disasters: the Civil War, Reconstruction, and several devastating depressions. These reverses, however, seem to have intensified in many southerners a love for, even obsession with, the past and their antecedents. Even though he often disavowed and made fun of ancestor worship, Tennessee, like many, certainly including his mother, took a distinct pride in the history of his family. He considered using the name Valentine Xavier as a nom de plume before settling on "Tennessee" and did employ that ancestral name for the male protagonist of Orpheus Descending . His use of the name Jonathan Coffin for the ancient poet in The Night of the Iguana is an allusion to his New England ancestors. Given the importance of women as companions and influences in Tennessee's later life and as characters in his plays, it is interesting to note the predominance of female relatives on the playwright's paternal side. His grandmother, Isabel Coffin Williams, was a descendant of an important New England family. One of his father's sisters, Ella, was a nurse in World War I, and the other, another Isabel and Tennessee's favorite, was so strong that he could describe her as the only woman who could intimidate his mother, the indomitable Edwina. So forceful was the character of "Aunt Belle" that Tennessee on several occasions attributed the origin of some qualities of Blanche DuBois to her. From his mother and her parents Tennessee inherited yet another southern trait, a deeply ingrained religious, Puritanical consciousness, later reflected in play after play. One facet of that conviction was the comfort derived from faith, but another darker aspect was the strong Calvinistic bent that has long marked the southern psyche and southern literature. Writers from the region, even those who have abandoned organized religion, more often than not retain their "Christ-haunted" mentality, to which the Calvinistic Catholic author Flannery O'Connor refers. Tennessee frequently commented on that quality in his character, to the amazement of some of his friends, but much of the tension in his works derive s from the struggle between his two natures: romantic and Puritan. During the early years of Tom's life his father was on the road as a traveling salesman, paying only periodic visits to his wife and children as they continued to live with the Dakins in a variety of Episcopal rectories in southern towns. The house in Columbus in which Tom spent his first two years is a two-story Victorian cottage with Gothic trimmings. As the rectory it was located next to the Episcopal church, but in recent years it has been relocated a block away from the church and converted into the Columbus Visitors Center. When Tom was two, Reverend Dakin moved his wife, daughter, and grandchildren to Nashville, where he had accepted a two-year appointment as rector at the Church of the Advent. It is interesting to speculate what use the future dramatist might have made, had the family remained in Columbus, of the town's magnificent Federalist, Greek Revival, Italianate, Gothic, and Victorian mansions. Indeed, any one of a number of them might well be Belle Reve, the "beautiful dream," lost to Blanche DuBois. Surely it was inevitable that he soaked up some of that atmosphere, and his grandfather, who was apparently something of a gossip, must have relayed tales to young Tom not only about the people of the Delta but also about those in Columbus. One story in the town concerned a woman who had in her possession a letter of Lord Byron's. This became the inspiration for the one-act play "Lord Byron's Love Letter," set in New Orleans, in which an elderly woman has a letter the poet wrote to her after they met on the steps of the Acropolis. The actual document was owned by a Columbus native, Julia Meek Geherty, who died in 1953, leaving a large collection of books and other memorabilia. The real letter, however, was, rather than a profession of love, a denial by Byron that he had written a poem entitled "The Vampire," but the story became the seed that blossomed in the dramatist's imagination into a Gothic tale of thwarted romance. The first seven years of Tom's life were spent in several locales-Columbus; Nashville, Tennessee; Canton, Mississippi; and finally Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Reverend and Mrs. Dakin settled with their expanded family in 1915 when the minister was appointed rector of St. George's, a position he would hold longer than any other of his ministerial career. During that period Cornelius Williams seems, like his counterpart in The Glass Menagerie , to have fallen in love with long distance, and his absence represented more of a blessing than a deprivation for Edwina and her two children. The marriage had certainly proven to be quite the opposite of what Edwina seems to have expected: her husband, despite his fine southern genealogy, turned out to be a heavy drinker, a gambler, and a womanizer. Both Rose and Tom were terrified of him, and later, after the birth of the third child, Dakin, Cornelius directed what ever love he had to share with his children toward Dakin and, in effect, spurned his first two offspring. One can only speculate as to Cornelius's feelings about his misalliance with Edwina, though it appears likely that in their own ways the two mismatched people loved each other. (Later, after the three children we re grown, the couple would separate and the husband would return to Tennessee.) Cornelius's career as a salesman-he sold Red Goose shoes-is reflected in his son's portrayal of Mr. Charlie Colton, "the last of the Delta drummers" in the short play "The Last of My Solid Gold Watches." The southern idyll ended for Rose and Tom when their father took a job in St. Louis and moved his family from Clarksdale to that "cold northern city" of The Glass Menagerie later referred to by Tennessee as "a city I dread." Tennessee described that uprooting to Harry Rasky as a move to the "heartland of America," which he and his sister, he added with characteristic humor, found "rather heartless, you might say." Rasky, who produced a film, Tennessee Williams's South , for Canadian television, later wrote a book about his friendship with the playwright, A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation , in which he noted that "for Tennessee, before bewilderment, the re was the South of ease and peace." In his Memoirs Tennessee wrote of those early years in Mississippi as "the most joyously innocent of my life, due to the beneficent homelife provided by my beloved Dakin grandparents...." Tennessee returned to Columbus only a couple of times, once in 1951, when he was interviewed by newspaperman Douglas Bat e ma n and accompanied the Reverend Dakin on visits to old friends. Their host during that visit was D. Douglas Patty, who entertained grand father and grandson lavishly and was apparently enraged when Tennessee did not bother to write a thank-you note for the hospitality. Many a seven-year-old, moved from one part of the country to another, would soon have adapted to his new home and felt as if he belonged there, but southerners, as noted above, have deep roots in their own native soil and do not tend to forget the land that gave them birth. There is an old saying in Mississippi that if two natives of the state, unknown to each other, are in a room filled with five hundred people anywhere in the world, they will find each other in fifteen minutes; give them half an hour and they will discover that they are cousins. In St. Louis, Edwina, Tom, and Rose, deprived of the comfort afforded by the Dakins in their southern haven, became to some degree a new family, isolated with the long-absent but suddenly very present Cornelius in an environment they found uncongenial. The result was an intensification of the problems that had always existed among the four of them. In the opening line of Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoi writes that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and the misery of the Williams family was in many ways unique. While growing up, Tom endured the quarrels that were an integral part of the disruptive misalliance of his parents, the disdain Cornelius Williams openly displayed for his creative son, and his own private guilt over the growing mental dysfunction of his beloved sister Rose, a condition which would finally result in her being subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy and later institutionalized in the 1940s. Rose, the prototype of Laura in The Glass Menagerie , died in 1996 at eighty-six, having dwelt for half a century in that twilight zone of artificially created innocence that sadly marks the lobotomized, the extended second childhood into which that radical operation had thrust her unawares. She was probably unable, alas, to appreciate the fact that in every one of her brother's plays, her name appears and that there are in all of them repeated references to her in symbolic terms. Continue... Excerpted from Tennessee Williams and the South by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt Copyright © 2002 by University Press of Mississippi Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
