Tennessee Williams: Influences

Tennesse Williams

Background Information
• Thomas Lanier Williams
• Born on the 26 March 1911, Columbus Mississippi
• His father descended from “pioneer Tennessee Stock,” hence Williams’ adopted first name.
• Diagnosed with Diphtheria aged 5 and nearly died.
• It also caused his legs to be paralysed for 2 years so was encouraged to write by his mother.
• Had one sister, Rose, who he was very close to. Rose was institutionalised and eventually incapacitated due to a lobotomy.
• Wrote his first play “Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!” as a teenager
• Met his long term partner Frank Merlo in 1948 who passed away with lung cancer in 1963
• Suffered from depression, alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs later in his life
• Was briefly institutionalised in 1969
• Died on 25th February 1986 after he choked on the lid of an eye drop bottle in his hotel room.
• Due to his illness he was not as strong as his father (Cornelius Coffin) would have liked.
• His mother Edwina was trapped in the unhappy marriage and focused and was thus over protective of Williams’ as she focused all her attention on him
• Father was a violent man who suffered from alcohol issues and was a strong gambler
• Williams’ was seen as weak and disdained by his father

Early Life
• Attended the University of Missouri
• His father didn’t approve of him wanting to be an author and made him leave after his 1st year and become a shoe maker
• The only thing he wanted to do was to be a writer as it offered and escape from the real world and thus became sleep deprived leading to him having a nervous breakdown and a heart condition
• His father eventually agreed to let him go to the University of Washington were he got some of his papers published but didn’t win the writing contest so decided to quit
• He then went to the University of Iowa were his nickname was ‘Tennessee’ which he decided to keep
• Due to their Southern speech and manners and also background of poverty Williams’ and his older sister Rose were teased by their class mates

Career
• In the late 1930s as a young playwright Williams struggled to have his work accepted.
• In 1939 he was awarded the Rockefeller Prize and received a $1000 grant
• During the winter of 1944-45 his ‘memory play’ The Glass Menagerie told the story of a young man, Tom, his disabled sister, Laura and their controlling mother Amanda.
• It is said that Williams’ used his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play thus being his inspiration for the play
• The director of many of Williams’ plays stated of Williams that: ‘Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.’
• In the 1960/70s, although Williams’ continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his high levels of alcohol and drug consumption as well as many poor choices of collaborators

Personal Life
• Williams’ sister, Rose, was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult and later institutionalised following a lobotomy
• Williams’ continued to visit her in the facilities where she spent most of her adult life
• The effects of Rose’s illness contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various prescription drugs
• After various attempts at heterosexual relationships, by the late 1930s Williams had finally accepted his homosexuality and was the first openly gay playwright of his time
• In the summer of 1940 Williams entered an affair with Kip Kiernan, a Canadian dancer
• When Kiernan left him for a woman and marriage
• Williams was distraught and Kiernan’s death later at 26 was another blow
• In a visit to New Mexico in 1945, Williams met Rodriguez y Gonzales
• Rodriguez was loving and loyal but also prone to jealous rages and excessive rages, so the relationship was emotionally turbulent
• The pair travelled and lived together until 1947 when Williams ended the affair, the two remained friends
• Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome with a teenage Italian boy to whom he provided financial assistance for several years
• On returning to New York that year, he met and fell in love with Frank Phillip Merlo, an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in WWII
• The relationship ended 14 years later from various infidelities and drug abused from both sides
• Merlo became Williams’ personal secretary and provided happiness and stability and also balance to Williams’ frequent bouts with depression and the fear that like his sister he would succumb to insanity
• Shortly after their breakup Merlo was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and Williams’ cared for him until his death in September 1963
• Following Merlo’s death Williams’ was plunged into a period of severe depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalisations and commitments to mental health facilities

Death
• Williams died on February 25, 1983 aged 71
• He died due to choking on the lid of the cap from an eye drops bottle
• This indicated that his use of drugs and alcohol may have contributed to his death by suppressing his gag reflex

Influences
• His sister’s illness had a huge contribution to his work, which can be seen by Blanch Du’Bois in a Street Car Named Desire
• Williams’ father violence and alcoholism also was a major influence
• His summer with the teenage Italian boy provided him with the inspiration for his first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs.Stone
• In reference to the quote mentioned in the section on Williams’ career anything and everything important in his life was seemingly transferred into Williams’ plays