First published in Experiment (Fall 1946), then reprinted in Mademoiselle (July 1950), then IWC, and included on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952). Drafts at HRHRC are dated New Orleans, Nov. 1941, and City Park, New Orleans. On one draft, Tennessee pencilled a note: “Part of a Play: End of an act”.
[Dedication]: Carson McCullers (1917–1967), American author, a friend of Williams since 1946.
Jean qui pleure ou Jean qui rit?: “John who weeps or John who laughs?” (French).
Naishapur: Birthplace of the Persian poet and scholar, Omar Khayyam (in Khorasan province).
First published in New Directions 9 (1946), pp. 82–83, as the last in a sequence of three poems, followed by the date Lake Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico, July 1945 (see note to “The Jockeys at Hialeah” above). A variant draft in the collection of Fred Todd, titled “IDILLIO,” is dated Provincetown, June, 1944. (This month and year are corroborated by drafts at HRHRC with the title “Idillio” dated June, 1944 and simply 1944. For the meaning of the working title “Idillio,” see note to “Recuerdo” below.)
First published as the first of four lyrics, each issued separately, in the series Blue Mountain Ballads with music by Paul Bowles (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1946). Before being collected in IWC, the poem was also included as one of six unpublished lyrics in the sequence “Some Poems Meant For Music” on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952). A draft at HRHRC is dated Key West, 1941. The character Val, in Orpheus Descending, twice “sings and plays ’Heavenly Grass’” according to stage directions in the 1957 published text (Theatre 3, pp. 246, 292), but the lyric itself is not printed there. Willams had included the poem in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May, 1942, which collected 12 of his lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” along with the note: “This collection is written primarily as lyrics for blues music or a folk opera but no music has been composed for them yet.” Versions of the lyric are sung or recited recurrently in drafts of an unpublished play at HRHRC, entitled “HEAVENLY GRASS” (with various subtitles); an account of this work, and of the poem’s role in one version of the script, appears in Gilbert Debusscher, “Tennessee Williams’s Black Nativity: An Unpublished Libretto,” Costerus New Series 66: American Literature in Belgium, ed. Gilbert Debusscher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 127–33. In draft materials for Camino Real (at HRHRC), Williams incorporated this poem in several different ways, none of which survive in the published text; in one version, the character Kilroy sings at least the first two lines of the poem, at a point which corresponds to the end of the published play (as several characters “PASS UNDER THE ARCH”); in another, at the same point in the action, all of the Pilgrims sing the poem; finally, in yet another version (dated by Brian Parker to September–October 1952), the poem appears earlier in the play, where Kilroy alone sings its first four lines to Esmeralda to the tune of a mandolin. In a scenario for an unpublished “dance play” entitled “THE PAPER LANTERN” (at HRHRC), Williams planned for the character of Luke Sturdevant to sing and play the song. Bowles’s setting of the first line is sung at the end of Act One of Kingdom of Earth (1968/75) by Myrtle, who introduces it as a “church song.”
First published as the second of four lyrics, each issued separately, in the series Blue Mountain Ballads with music by Paul Bowles (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1946; republished in Bowles, Selected Songs [Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984]). The text was originally included in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May 1942, which collected 12 of Williams’s lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” (see note to “Heavenly Grass” above).
First published as the third of four lyrics, each issued separately, in the series Blue Mountain Ballads with music by Paul Bowles (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1946). The text was originally included in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May 1942, which collected 12 of Williams’s lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” (see note to “Heavenly Grass” above).
First published as the third of four lyrics, each issued separately, in the series Blue Mountain Ballads with music by Paul Bowles (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1946; republished in Selected Songs [Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984]). The text was originally included in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May 1942, which collected 12 of Williams’s lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” (see note to “Heavenly Grass” above).
First published in Maryland Quarterly [later volumes titled Briarcliff Quarterly] 1:2 (1944), p. 58, as “The Kitchen Door Blues.” Before being collected in IWC, this poem was also included as one of six unpublished lyrics in the sequence “Some Poems Meant For Music” on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952).
Before its first publication in IWC, this poem was included as one of six unpublished lyrics in the sequence “Some Poems Meant For Music” on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952).
First published in New Directions 12 (1950), p. 395, with the notation “Set to music by Paul Bowles” (score published in Bowles, Selected Songs [Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984]). The poem was at one point incorporated into draft materials for Camino Real (at HRHRC), where it was to be sung by Jacques Casanova “to music from some mysterious source,” or alternatively to the accompaniment of the harp.
First published in Voices 149 (Sept.–Dec. 1952), p. 7, with one different stanza (see Textual Variants).
Before its first publication in IWC, this poem was included as one of six unpublished lyrics in the sequence “Some Poems Meant For Music” on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952).
First published in New Directions 12 (1950), p. 393, with dedication “For F. M.” (i.e., Frank Merlo—see note to “Little Horse” below), and dated Key West, 1950. An undated early draft at HRHRC contains a variant stanza suggesting a connection to the composition of Williams 1950 play, The Rose Tattoo:
A woman has on her breast a rose tattoo to match the one of her lover.
They call her a savage. She knows.
She swears like a man and she spits at the women’s black skirts.
In a later draft, much closer to the published text and dated Key West, January 1950, Williams omitted this image, replacing it with another: “The boy with the rose tattoo/ will float in our blood!” These lines were in turn to be excised from the published play (Theatre 2).
First published in New Directions 12 (1950), pp. 396–97. A musical setting by Paul Bowles has been published in Bowles, Selected Songs (Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984). Among drafts at HRHRC are several dated Key West, Florida, 1949, and Rome, May 1949 (one handwritten on the back of an Italian bill made out to Williams and Frank Merlo, and dated May 6, 1949). Cf. Williams’s anecdote in a letter written from Rome at this time: “Cheryl Crawford was in town this week, looking very feminine and bursting into tears over Keats’ grave . . . . She was looking at some of Gabe Kohn’s sculptures and she said to him, Gabe, this is a very unartistic comment, but the sexual parts on your (statue of) St. Sebastian have such a weak look about them!” (Letters to Donald Windham, pp. 238–39, letter dated April 8, 1949, Rome). For an account of the poem’s subject, and of Williams’s discarded intention to incorporate it into Suddenly Last Summer (evident in typescript drafts of that play at HRHRC), see Brian Parker, “Tennessee Williams and the Legends of St Sebastian,” University of Toronto Quarterly 69:3 (Summer 2000), pp. 634–59.
[Title]: Saint Sebastian, a third-century martyr according to Roman Catholic tradition, was the subject of frequently eroticized representations during the Renaissance, and in particular of one painting by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477–1549) which now resides in the Pitti Palace in Florence. Another depiction by Guido Reni was, and remains, well-known, yet it was Bazzi who was “nicknamed ‘Sodoma,’ according to Vasari’s malicious account, because of his over-fondness for ’beardless youths’” (Brian Parker, op. cit., p. 639). The death of the homosexual poet Sebastian Venable, as recounted in Williams’s play Suddenly Last Summer (Theatre 3), alludes to Saint Sebastian’s homoerotic associations, as well as to the physical sufferings that he endures in the legends (and in the paintings) at his persecutors’ hands.
First published in Partisan Review 16:4 (1949), p. 367. Drafts at HRHRC include the date Paris, July 1948.
First published in FYAP, pp. 142–43, and dated April 1941, Vero Beach, Florida (date and place of composition corroborated on a draft at HRHRC). Williams incorporated this poem, in at least one variant and one substantively identical text, into two versions of a speech assigned to the Dreamer in draft materials for Camino Real (at HRHRC); the speech is absent from the published play, where the Dreamer briefly appears as an alternate name for the Survivor (Theatre 2, p. 450).
First published in FYAP (pp. 131–32) and dated July, 1943, Santa Monica (date and place of composition corroborated in drafts at HRHRC).
[Title]: Bourbon Street, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, was “vulgarity’s epitome, the sacred province of . . . pimps, prostitutes, and male hustlers,” in the words of Leverich (p. 285).
the tall iron horseman before the Cabildo: I.e., in Jackson Square, New Orleans. In an unpublished story at HRHRC entitled “AMOR PERDIDA” (sic), Williams recollected “[t]he fog coming up from the river, swallowing Andrew Jackson on his big iron horse.”
Irene whose body was offered at night: One of Williams’s most oft-remembered acquaintances from new Orleans; cf. the mention in “Preface to My Poems—Serious Version” (FYAP, p. 125; Where I Live, p. 5), and the fictionalized account in “In Memory of an Aristocrat” (Stories, pp. 79–92). Leverich (p. 376) writes that Irene inspired the character of Edith Jelkes in the story “The Night of the Iguana” (later made into Hannah Jelkes in the play of that name), and that she “would ultimately materialize as Blanche DuBois.” Cf. also Williams’s idea for a “full-length play” about “an extraordinarily gifted young woman artist who is forced into prostitution . . .” (Selected Letters I, pp. 220–21; letter dated December 1939 by the editors).
the merchant sailor who wrote of the sea: identified as “Joe Turner” in “Preface to My Poems—Serious Version” (FYAP, p. 125; Where I Live, p. 5). In “AMOR PERDIDA” (see note above), Williams remembered “the jobless merchant seaman, Joe, who wrote sea-stories more exciting than Conrad’s which were destroyed when the house he lived in burned.”
First published in FYAP (p. 143) and dated 1940, Memphis (date and place of composition corroborated on a draft at HRHRC).
First published in FYAP (pp. 135–36), with no date given. Among drafts at HRHRC, one is dated August 1938, Chicago, and subscribed “Thomas Lanier Williams,” suggesting that this was an early version; on other drafts, the name appears as “Tennessee.” For an account of the brief period, early in Williams’s childhood, during which his father was employed as a travelling shoe salesman, see Leverich (pp. 34–35, 40). Cf. Memoirs (p. 13): “He was such a good salesman that he was taken off the road to become sales manager of a branch of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis—a promotion which . . . removed my father from the freedom and wildness on which his happiness depended.”
Joplin: A town in the southwest corner of Missouri, on the Kansas border.
Washington Boulevard: A street in St. Louis, Missouri, which passes near some of the Williams family’s various places of residence in that city.
Hotel Statler: See note to “The Jockeys at Hialeah” above.
Art Hill: Museum area in St. Louis, with a statue of Louis IX (after whom the city is named); in Williams’s A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, it is mentioned as a place for love in parked cars (Theatre 8, p. 174).
Before its first publication in IWC, this poem was included as one of six unpublished lyrics in the sequence “Some Poems Meant For Music” on the sound recording, Tennessee Williams: Selections From His Writings, Read by the Author (Caedmon LP TC 1005, 1952). (On a draft at HRHRC, Williams had pencilled a note headed “Light verse for music”: “1. Which is my little boy?/ 2. Heavenly Gr [i.e., “Heavenly Grass” above]/ . . . If this is used, several other light poems can go with it.”)
[Title]: Frank Merlo (d. 1963), who first met Williams in Provincetown in 1947, became in 1948 his long-term lover. He travelled and lived with him in many places, including Key West (where they had a house).
Mignon . . . mignonette: “sweet, cute;” mon mignon = “my sweetheart” (French; -ette, feminine diminutive).
avec les yeux plus grands que lui: “with eyes bigger than he is” (French).
parapluie: “umbrella” (French).
Petit cheval: “Little horse” (French).
First published in New Directions 12 (1950), p. 397. A musical setting by Paul Bowles has been published in Bowles, Selected Songs (Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984). A draft at HRHRC is dated Key West, Spring 1950.
Not in the first edition of IWC (1956); first published in the New Directions Paperbook edition (1964).
Not in the first edition of IWC (1956); first published in the New Directions Paperbook edition (1964). A draft in the collection of Fred Todd (now in the Historic New Orleans Collection) is dated Havana, 1957.
Not in the first edition of IWC (1956); first published in the New Directions Paperbook edition (1964). The identical text was republished in Nobody Swings on Sunday: The Many Lives and Films of Harry Rasky (Collier MacMillan Canada Ltd., 1980), p. 200, where Tennessee is quoted as saying that the poem was “written for a play called The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.” The poem does not appear in the published version of that play, but it was incorporated into a draft at HRHRC, containing a scene in which Mrs. Goforth begins to read from the book of poems Chris has written.
CHRIS: Please, Mrs. Goforth! Not that way: let me!
MRS. GOFORTH: OK, you read it to me.
[Chris reads the text of “Shadow Wood.”]
MRS. GOFORTH: Title?
CHRIS: Oh—it’s called Shadow Wood.
MRS. GOFORTH: Do you want my opinion?
CHRIS: No.
MRS. GOFORTH: You’re afraid to hear it?
CHRIS: No, but I know that—No, I—
MRS. GOFORTH: It’s a piece of facile sentiment. A poem isn’t as simple and easy as that if it’s any good. I like a thing to have guts. That poem doesn’t have any.
Not in the first edition of IWC (1956); first published in the New Directions Paperbook edition (1964). The text evidently assumed its published form in Spring 1962, which is the date Williams wrote on a heavily revised draft now filed at New Directions; this particular draft had, in its original state, borne the title “A BIT OF WHITE CLOTH TO CONTINUE.” (On it, however, is also the following note, apparently written by Robert MacGregor: “Brought by TW to RMM 1/3/64”—a date corroborated by another note “Rec from TW. 1/3/64” on a draft in the collection of Fred Todd, now in the Historic New Orleans Collection.) In Memoirs (p. 155) Williams asserted that this poem described his reacquaintance with Frank Merlo in 1948, an event which led to their extended relationship (see note to “Little Horse” above).
the temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok: The most famous statue of the Buddha in Thailand, housed in the Wat Phra Kaeu (built 1782) and fashioned from a single jadeite.
First published in New Directions 27 (1973), pp. 16–17. A draft in the collection of Fred Todd is dated Feb. 17, 1972. In an internal New Directions office memo of Oct. 8, 1975, it was suggested to J. Laughlin that the “new collection of T.W.’s poems” should be titled after this poem. In the last decade of his life Williams was especially preoccupied with its premise, and Spoto reports (p. 364) that he opened his readings with it.
“Winter Smoke Is Blue And Bitter”
A copy of a typescript in the files at New Directions, with variant lines 4–7, bears two annotations: “Rec’d 2/1/76” and "superceded by new version recieved 10/4/76."
fox-teeth: Cf. Hart Crane’s poem, “Lachrymae Christi.” See also Williams’s poem, “Androgyne, Mon Amour,” and Selected Letters I, p. 229 and n.
Dark Arm, Hanging Over The Edge Of Infinity
First published in FYAP (pp. 133–35) and dated April 1941, Darien, Georgia. Leverich (p. 409) deduces that the subject was inspired by TW’s “stay in Darien at the Vaccaros’ home, Marsh Haven” for a few days during that month. In FYAP the poem contained three sections, the second of which was dropped in its entirety in the AMA version (see Textual Variants).
On a list of poems in the files at New Directions, the title appears accompanied by the date Aug. 28, 1963.
In Florence Visconti is producing: Luchino Visconti (1906–1976) was an Italian director for stage and screen. Williams admired his work, and in Sicily had witnessed the making of one of his films—an account of which he wrote in February 1948, and published as “A Movie Named La Terra Trema,” ’48 Magazine [New York] 2:6 (June, 1948), pp. 102–104, 111–113. In a letter of Feb. 11, 1948, to Oliver Evans (now at HRHRC), Williams described Visconti as “a very handsome and elegant man of our tastes.”
Lead Wood, Missouri.: A town in St. Francois County, northwest of Farmington, where Williams’s sister Rose had been hospitalized for years (cf. notes to "The Beanstalk Country" above).
First published in Ambit (London) 69 (1977), pp. 2–3, and dated San Francisco, 1976; Williams made reference to it in a letter dated Sept. 29, 1976 (filed at New Directions), as a poem then at least old enough to have become lost.
Chekhov’s Mashas: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was the Russian author whose plays and stories Williams most admired (see Allean Hale’s “Introduction” to the New Directions edition of The Notebook of Trigorin, Williams’s late adaptation of Chekhov’s play The Sea Gull). Masha, Shamrayev’s daughter in The Sea Gull, expresses her unrequited love for Constantine by wearing black; another character named Masha appears in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
brochette de coeur: “skewered heart” (French).
encore saignante et palpitante: “still bleeding and beating” (French).
fox-teeth: See note to “Winter Smoke is Blue and Bitter” above.
sous l’ombre d’une jeunesse perdue: “in the shadow of a lost youth” (French).
First published in FYAP (p. 151) and dated Boston, 1941 (date and place corroborated in drafts at HRHRC). According to Leverich (p. 397), Williams left Boston before the end of January that year, in the wake of the failure of his play Battle of Angels.
First published in Evergreen Review 50 (Dec., 1967), p. 29, with some differences in stanza breaks. A reference to this poem in the files at New Directions is accompanied by the date March 29, 1967.
A reference to this poem in the files at New Directions is accompanied by the date March 1968.
First published in New Directions 11 (1949), pp. 472–78, and dated Paris, May 1949.
terra incognita: “unknown land” (Latin). Cf. the “archway that leads out into ‘Terra Incognita,’” a crucial element in the setting and dramatic conception of Camino Real (Theatre 2, p. 431).
Mais soyez tranquille!: “But set your mind at ease!” (French).
lithograph/ of Hope blindfolded with hands on a/ broken-stringed lyre: In lines which Williams marked to be cut from a typescript draft of Camino Real (at HRHRC), the identical picture is described as typifying private “nights in hotel bedrooms,” where it is “Presiding above – what sighs! What tender admissions!”
First published in FYAP (pp. 169–70) and dated Dec. 1942, Manhattan.
Impressions Through A Pennsy Window
A reference to this poem in an internal memo from the New Directions files is accompanied by the date August 1970.
Messrs. Cronkite-and-Sevareid’s: Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, television news anchors.
Spoto (p. 172) asserts, without documentation, that this poem was written “long before” 1950. However, an internal memo from the files at New Directions refers to the poem, in a list of “poems received from TW 7/19/76,” as one that “seems to be new” (though perhaps caution should be exercised, since at least one other note to the same effect in the New Directions files is demonstrably in error).
Lyons: Williams evidently means the town of Lyon, Mississippi, a few miles north of Clarksdale (see note to “Sunflower River,” in notes to “In Jack-O’-Lantern’s Weather” above).
pellagra: A nutritional disease characterized by “dermatitis, diarrhea and dementia;” the cause, discovered in 1937, is niacin deficiency due to poor diet and/or alcoholism. Pellagra was endemic to the southern U.S.
Flynn’s Emporium: unidentified.
the Delta Brilliant: Cf. Battle of Angels (Theatre 1, p. 79), and also Alma’s speech in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (Theatre 2, p. 105): “What a strange way we’ve spent New Year’s Eve! Going to a Mary Pickford picture at the Delta Brilliant, . . . ” It is not known whether Williams actually knew of a movie theater with this name, in Mississippi or elsewhere.
Sunflower River: See note to “In Jack-O’-Lantern’s Weather” above.
the Press-Scimitar: A Memphis newspaper (actually entitled the News-Scimitar during the years of Williams’s residence in Clarksdale).
A reference to this poem in the files at New Directions is accompanied by the date May 1974.
poppy kimono: Cf. Explanatory Note to “The Jockeys at Hialeah” above.
Les points de suspension: the ellipsis (. . .), as Williams wrote elsewhere: “fuck les points de suspension too, those triple dots that betray an unwillingness to call it quits or truly completed” (Moise and the World of Reason, p. 63).
Rilke’s stone angels: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the German-language poet from Austria, was admired by Williams. His poem “L’Ange du Méridien,” included among the Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907, features an angel sculpted on the front of Chartres Cathedral (one which the poet also described in a letter to Clara Rilke on January 26, 1906). Angels were important to Rilke generally; cf. the epigraph to Summer and Smoke, which Williams took from the first poem in Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” (Theatre 2, p. 112). In various drafts of verse and drama at HRHRC, the image of “Rilke’s stone angels” appears (with a portrait of Nijinsky) on a “bedside table.”
aerial leap and outcry of Crane: Hart Crane, American poet (1899–1932); see Introduction.
A typescript of this poem in the files at New Directions is dated Rome, 1948. Among drafts at HRHRC, one is dated “Formio,” April 1949 (evidently Williams’s error for Forio [d’Ischia]—the resort off the coast of Naples, Italy which he visited in the spring of 1939, according to Spoto, p. 157).
the ritual hanging up by the heels/of . . . Mussolini: Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was shot on April 28, 1945, as he tried to flee Italy before the approach of Allied troops moving north; most Italians did not mourn him.
The crossbow at Agincourt: Williams’s mistake, evidently; it was not the crossbow, but the longbow that famously helped the English to win the battle of Agincourt against France in 1415.
First published in The New Yorker (July 5, 1969), p. 28, as “CREPE DE CHINE,” and reprinted in The New Yorker Book of Poems (New York: The Viking Press, 1969). An unpublished one-act play at HRHRC, entitled “Thank You, Kind Spirit,” concerns the practice of a New Orleans medium (cf. letter of Oct. 21, 1941 to Audrey Wood in Selected Letters I).
Metaxas: Metaxa, a Greek maker of brandy and other liquors, including ouzo.
Among several drafts at HRHRC of material that would eventually be incorporated in this poem, one is dated Rome, August 1949; another gives Williams’s location as Key West. One of the HRHRC drafts bears a dedication to Maria Britneva (see note to “A Wreath for Alexandra Molostvova” above), and one bears a note: “for recitation the poem should be read with a very thick southern drawl, with a touch of ’camp’ in it.” In the New Directions files, a reference to the poem’s title as published is accompanied by the date Feb. 21, 1968.
[Title]: “The Stars of a Circus” (French).
[Dedication]: Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918), the Swedish director for stage and screen.
the fiery city of Karl: unidentified, presumably imaginary.
Craag: unidentified, presumably imaginary.
Raak: unidentified, presumably imaginary.
First published in FYAP (p. 146) and dated Dec., 1941, New Orleans (date and place corroborated on drafts at HRHRC). IWC notably omits the FYAP text’s explicit reference to “genitals” (see Textual Variants).
porte cochère: Properly, a gateway for carriages (from the French); used in the U.S. for a porch that shelters passengers as they enter and exit from carriages.
A typescript in the files at New Directions bears the annotation “FROM TW 11/11/76.”
[Title]: Maria Britneva (the Lady St. Just; see note to “A Wreath for Alexandra Molostvova” above).
First published in Chicago Review 1:3 (Summer 1946), pp. 163–66, in a considerably different version (see Textual Variants). Some of the poem’s “rose” passages correspond closely to parts of draft materials at HRRHRC for what Williams called a “dance-play for Martha Graham,” entitled “THE PAPER LANTERN”; Williams had chosen “Belle Reve” as the setting for this “story of the disintegration of a land-owning Southern family,” and, in a note at HRHRC dated Sept. 1943, he represented it as “a tragedy purified by poetry and music of modern feeling, a vividly pictorial presentation that would offer the utmost visual excitement and be informed by the rich and disturbing beauty of surrealist painting.” Closer to the text of the published poem are a prose draft at HRHRC dated New York, 1945—to which Williams referred, in an undated note to J. Laughlin, as “a wild experiment in verbal abstraction, rather Stein-like”—and a variant verse draft dated Rome, 1948.
First published in Antaeus 11 (Autumn 1973), p. 23.
á la Sebastian: Cf. Catharine Venable’s account of how “Sebastian . . . talked about people . . . as if they were—items on a menu” in Suddenly Last Summer (Theatre 3, p. 375), and her description of Sebastian’s death (p. 422). Also cf. note to “San Sebastiano de Sodoma” above.
A variant version in the files at New Directions, only 16 lines long, is stamped with the date Jan. 20, 1964.
Some drafts at HRHRC are dated New Orleans, 1941, and Fire Island, May 1944. A New Orleans draft bears a dedication to Audrey Wood—Williams’s New York agent, his constant correspondent, and the organizer of many of his life’s practicalities between 1939 and 1971—to whom he had also sent the poem in a letter, with a note: “I enclose a little ballad, primarily for your amusement. Do you suppose ‘Esquire’ would like it? Or is it too risqué” (Selected Letters I, p. 346, dated “ca. October 7, 1941” by the editors).
First published in New Directions 20 (1968), p. 96. In drafts at HRHRC, the character “I” is described “with a forked tail and other properties of devils/ A monster and an angel.”
A variant typescript draft in the files at New Directions bears the annotation “dated by correspondence 7/10/70”, but also notes “see 1976 revised version.”
First published in Prairie Schooner 23:4 (Winter 1949), p. 330, with one additional stanza that was omitted in AMA (see Textual Variants). A draft at HRHRC, slightly variant from the AMA version, is dated Martha’s Vineyard, [Massachusetts,] Sept. 1945. In the files at New Directions is a draft dated Bethal, Connecticut, August 1945, with a note appended: “Quite drunk when wrote this – (later revised but excluded by publishers from volume)[.] Memorable chiefly by concurrent event involving a one-legged youth beside pool at night[.]” In another attached note (evidently much later and arising from the process of selecting poems for inclusion in AMA), Williams commented further: “Perhaps N.D. could follow it with a photostat of hand-written original with amusing note on occasion. This ‘one-legged youth’ drove sports-car 90 miles an hour through rain-storm – passengers too scared to speak!” In a note dated September 9, 1970, at UCLA, Williams indicated that any selection from The Drunken Fiddler which Oliver Evans saw fit to publish (see Introduction, note to “The Eyes” above) “should include a poem known to Dr. Evans called ‘The Wild Harp of Wales’, and that this poem should be the title poem of the book.”
[Title]: The harp is a traditional instrument in Celtic cultures; among the Welsh the tradition is supposed to have been unbroken since medieval times. It is not known whether Williams’s allusion is more specific.
Among variant drafts at HRHRC, two are dated February 1945 and “The Atlantic, December 1948.”
First published in New Directions 29 (1974), pp. 77–79.
Trigorin . . . Nina: Characters in Chekhov’s play, The Sea Gull (see note to “Androgyne, Mon Amour” above).
the Jane Bowles summerhouse.: Williams in fact had a gazebo built at his home in Key West which he called by this name, and where he dedicated plaques to his favorite people (Spoto, pp. 160–61). Jane Bowles (1917–1973), American author, wrote a two-act play entitled In the Summer House (1954); she and her husband Paul Bowles (1910–1986) had known Williams since meeting him in Acapulco in 1940. Writing to another friend, Paul Bigelow, Williams once mentioned the “summer-houses” of the Pacific Palisades in Santa Monica, California, as part of a campy account of the cruising that transpired there (Selected Letters I, p. 459, letter dated June 9, 1943).
First published in New Directions 29 (1974), pp. 79–81.
First published in FYAP (pp. 141–42), with no date given. A draft version at HRHRC concludes with the additional word “curtain,” appended as though it were a stage direction.
Two Poems From The Two-Character Play [“FEAR IS A MONSTER VAST AS NIGHT;” “OLD BEAUX AND FADED LADIES PLAY”]
The first poem was in fact included in The Two-Character Play (1975; Theatre 5, p. 311), where Felice utters the first line, Clare the second, and so forth. This stichomythic exchange takes place to the sound of “a taped recording of a guitar,” which Felice starts at the beginning of the recital and then cuts off at the end. Lines 7-12 of the second “Two Poems” appeared (trivially altered) as a song in Now the Cats With Jewelled Claws (Theatre 7, p. 329). A version of the first poem from the Thomas Lanier Williams period exists at HRHRC, entitled “FEAR” and dated Jan. 24, 1936; among versions of the second from the same period, entitled “AUGUST EVENING,” one is dated St. Louis, 1935.
Cypress Boulevard: The early drafts at HRHRC read “Lindell Boulevard” (a street in St. Louis, Missouri, which passes near some of the Williams family’s various places of residence in that city; cf. note to “Washington Boulevard” in “The Road” above).
A typescript in the files at New Directions is dated Vienna, 1975.
First published in New Directions 30 (1975), p. 161. A draft in the collection of Fred Todd, much yellowed, bears autograph revisions and (in the same pen as the revisions) is dated 1976. The ND 30 version was very different (see Textual Variants).
[Title]: An allusion to Swedish lore. According to a text projected at the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Hour of the Wolf, “[t]he hour of the wolf is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their greatest dread, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born” (quoted in Robert Emmet Long, Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage [NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994], p. 116). Williams visited Sweden in the summer of 1955 (Spoto, pp. 201–202); cf. Williams’s dedication of his poem “Les Etoiles d’Un Cirque” to Bergman (above).
a damaged heart-valve: Williams’s heart failed repeatedly after he was taken suddenly off prescription drugs during his stay at Barnes Hospital in 1969; see note to “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?” below.
First published in FYAP (pp. 158–59), in a very different version (see Textual Variants) and dated Summer 1942, St. Augustine. Among drafts at HRHRC, one corroborates this date and location; another is dated Provincetown, July 1941. Leverich (p. 417) writes that Williams “gave Paul [Bigelow]” a draft of the poem in August 1941. Williams read this poem and “Turning Out the Bedside Lamp” (below) in an interview with Andy Warhol that was taped during the spring of 1976. The representation of music in association with the color blue and with the theme of art may be indebted to Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar;” at the end of Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (American Blues, p. 77), “music rises tenderly and richly as the PLAYER OF THE BLUE GUITAR steps into the moonlight plaza. A WOMAN sings at a distance. He looks about him. Then stretches his arms in a gesture of wonder and finality.”
Turning Out The Bedside LampAn internal memo in the files at New Directions dates this poem to April 1976. Williams read this poem and “The Ice-Blue Wind” (above) in an interview with Andy Warhol that was taped during the spring of 1976.
Tangier: The Speechless Summer
First published in Antaeus No. 1 (Summer 1970), pp. 43–45. In Memoirs (p. 187), Williams asserted that this poem recounted “a curiously difficult summer” spent with a “young poet” in “’61 or ’62,” “after Night of the Iguana”—information which, if true, points to the summer of 1962.
[Title]: Tangier, Morocco, where Williams repeatedly visited his friends Paul and Jane Bowles (see note to “His Manner of Returning” above). Paul Bowles was a contributing editor at Antaeus.
“The Poet”: According to Spoto (p. 251), Frederick Nicklaus was the poet with whom Williams was involved in 1962, yet with whom he “could barely communicate except in bed” (Memoirs, p. 187).
the Zoco Chico: the “Little Market” (Socco Chico, Petit Socco) in Tangier, location of hotels and cafés; the alleys behind it housed bordellos for all inclinations. Cf. Abdullah’s reference to the “P’tit Zoco . . . The Souks!” in Camino Real (Theatre 2, pp. 490–91), and also Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams in Tangier, tr. Paul Bowles (Santa Barbara: Cadmus Editions, 1979), pp. 40–41, 84 (re. Williams’s 1973 visit).
Gibraltar: “England’s Rock” (see section III of the poem), across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco.
First published in FYAP (pp. 136–37) and dated Summer 1941, Washington (date and place corroborated on drafts at HRHRC). This is the only one of Williams’s poems published in FYAP which was never republished during his lifetime. (A 1952 typescript in HRC, however, lists it among those that were once intended—by Williams or by Laughlin—for a Williams poetry volume. We know of no special reason for its subsequent omission from both IWC and AMA.)
Published separately in the Contemporary Music Series (New York: Hargail Music Press, 1947), with musical score by Paul Bowles (music republished in Bowles, Selected Songs [Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984]). The text was originally included in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May 1942, which collected 12 of Williams’s lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” (see note to “Heavenly Grass” above).
Botteghe Oscure 4 (1949), pp. 337–339. Drafts at HRHRC are dated New Orleans, Oct. 1941 and New Orleans, Nov. 1941 (the latter with a pencilled comment from J. Laughlin, rejecting the poem: “Tennessee I dislike this – reminds me of Masefield, but I’m sure you could sell it for a fat sum to some slick paper ladies’ magazine and it would become an anthology favorite”).
New Directions 12 (1950), p. 396. A musical setting by Paul Bowles has been published in Bowles, Selected Songs (Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1984). Among drafts at HRHRC, some are dated Rome, June 1949 and Key West, Florida (where Williams went to live, for the third time, from Nov. 1949 to May 1950).
[Title:] The Sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth, in 410 CE (AD), was an event which came to symbolize the historic decline of the Roman Empire in the West.
Two Early Poems
[“I Confess I Cannot Guess,” “I Am An Exile Here”]
Voices, September-December 1952. The poem seems originally to have evolved in draft materials for Camino Real (at HRHRC), where variant versions appear in several typescripts (some with lines struck through, and revised, until the poem had acquired the form that would ultimately be printed in V). In these Camino Real drafts the poem is presented as a composition of Lord Byron, who recites it or sings it to a musical accompaniment when he first appears on stage; in one version the poem is interrupted repeatedly by the critical remarks of Mr. Big, after which Lord Byron, having finished his recitation, “CRUMPLES PAPER AND THROWS IT INTO THE PIT,” complaining, “It’s too soft, too soft, you’ve taken the iron point out of my pen, Mr. Big, and left me only the feather.” Williams did not, in any case, include the poem in the published play (Theatre 2).
First published in Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work (New York: Oblensky, 1961), pp. 46–47. Much of the published poem seems to have originated during the spring of 1939. At that time it existed as a complete draft under nearly the same title (“Tenor Sax Takes the Breaks”), according to a typescript in HRHRC dated Laguna Beach, [California,] May 1939—on which the author’s name still appears as Thomas Lanier Williams. During the following year (now calling himself Tennessee), Williams was incorporating elements of the text, in particular the first two stanzas and the calls for a meeting at “Mona’s tomorrow,” into a piece now headed “A CHANT FOR MY FORMER COMPANIONS/ (from a long poem, Dos Ranchos)” and dated Provincetown, Mass., August 1940. Although this material was not ultimately destined to be part of the final version of the verse play Dos Ranchos, or The Purification, it appears to have been submitted separately to J. Laughlin at New Directions in a quite different, undated version entitled “A CHANT FOR MY FORMER COMPANIONS,” with the handwritten stipulation “(To be read by 3 Voices)”—the submission then having been rejected or (possibly) intended for publication in an issue of New Directions (according to conflicting pencil annotations in Laughlin’s customary style). Yet another, fragmentary and undated adaptation of this material exists in HRHRC under the title “THE VOCAL DEAD/ (An Act in Verse).”
Evidently Williams took an interest in jazz as a form of expression, one reflecting youth’s libidinal energies in the shadow of both economic depression and impending war (another early draft title was “The Latest Jazz Tunes”). Nelson (op. cit., p. 47) compares Tom’s recollections of the “hot swing music” of the era in The Glass Menagerie (Theatre 1, p. 179). Williams’s explicit comments on jazz, as on other topics, could vary with his audience; during his first stay in Southern California in March-August 1939, he wrote to his grandparents: “These Westerners are friendly but utterly and hopelessly uncultured. They hate good music, good literature – everything – jazz and hamburgers and the movies are their spiritual fare” (Selected Letters I, p. 160, letter dated March 20, 1939 by the editors). To his literary friend Clark Mills, who followed the poetry of high modernism, he wrote from Laguna Beach: “My social milieu is amazing – a bunch of jitterbugs and beach-combers and frantic week-enders! There is a famine of intellectual contacts out here” (Selected Letters I, p. 160, letter dated “ca. mid-July 1939” by the editors). The multiple drafts of the poem suggest how “Tenor Sax,” like other works by Williams, evolved with his changes of location. On August 8, 1940, around the time he returned to this poem, Williams wrote from Provincetown that “I do some writing here every morning, go out to the beach in the afternoons, very much like the life in California, only I think the country is more picturesque” (Selected Letters I, p. 261).
[Title]: Cf. Williams’s comment about Camino Real, in an essay published in The New York Times (Sunday, March 15, 1953) and republished as the “Foreword” to the play (Theatre 2, p. 419): “To me the appeal of this work is its unusual degree of freedom. When it began to get under way I felt a new sensation of release, as if I could ’ride out’ like a tenor sax taking the breaks in a Dixieland combo or a piano in a bop session.”
Meet you at Mona’s!: Cf. Williams’s recollection of an episode from his life in and around Laguna Beach, California during 1939, which he described in his autobiographical story “In Memory of an Aristocrat:” “One Saturday night late that spring I dropped in Mona’s for a glass of beer . . . ” (Stories, p. [95]). Mona’s was presumably the “coast-town bar-room” that Williams mentioned to Audrey Wood in a letter dated July 16, 1939 (Selected Letters I, p. 179), and which later became a model for “Monk’s place” in the play Confessional and its successor, Small Craft Warnings.
[“I Think The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer”]
Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work (New York: Oblensky, 1961), pp. 196–197. Also published in Leverich (p. 419), with the identical text and the information that the poem was titled “Poem for Paul” and was enclosed in a letter of August 27, 1941 from Williams to Paul Bigelow (seemingly the copy now at Columbia, cited by Thomas Adler, “Tennessee Williams’s Poetry: Intertext and Metatext,” in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 1 [1998], pp. 63–72). A draft at HRHRC is likewise dated Manhattan, August, 1941. Williams adapted the poem many years later for use in his one-act play, The Mutilated (Theatre 7; see Textual Variants). He also used the poem in the short play entitled And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens. . . , published in Mister Paradise & Other One-Act Plays (New York, New Directions, 2005): “I think in places known as gay,/ In special little clubs and bars,/ Pierrot will serenade pierrot/ with frantic drums and sad guitars.” In the play, the poem has been written “about queers” by a gay man living in New Orleans, and is called “lovely, not great, no, but lovely” by the man who reads it aloud on stage—the poet’s landlord, an interior decorator and transvestite.
What’s Next On The Agenda, Mr. Williams?
A first, much abbreviated and variant version (see Textual Variants) was transcribed and excerpted for publication in an article by Tom Buckley, “Tennessee Williams Survives,” The Atlantic (Nov. 1970), pp. 98–108. Our copy-text, however, is Mediterranean Review, 1.2 (1971), pp. 15–19, the second published (but the first complete published) version of the poem. This MR version also corresponds to a typescript draft deposited at UCLA together with a note from Williams dated Sept. 9, 1970, stipulating that “I would like to ask you to restrict the Ms. to the extent that it should not be copied or removed from the library collection during my life-time.” Buckley, who had recorded Williams reading the earlier version in his Key West living room, supplemented the published excerpt in A with an account of what had followed it on the tape: “There were two more long parts, and when he finished reading them, Tennessee put the manuscript aside with a sigh. ‘It’s a bitch of a poem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, y’know. It’s just a venting of venom, I suppose. Justified venom. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I may have it published in a little magazine in Tangier. It won’t attract any attention there, y’know, but I just want to get all of it on the record” (p. 108). In a letter written shortly after the appearance of Buckley’s article, Williams called it “the worst piece of character assassination that’s ever been tried on me for size” and vituperated against it at some length (Five O’Clock Angel, p. 217, letter dated Nov. 9, 1970, Bangkok). Cf. Memoirs, pp. 218–26.
Friggins Division of Barnacle Hospital in the city of Saint Pollution: Williams entered the Renard Division of Barnes Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri, in September, 1969.
that Key to which you now hold a key: Key West, where Williams owned a residence.
friend called Little Horse: Frank Merlo (see note to “Little Horse” above).
token act of contrition, . . . benediction.: Williams’s rebaptism as a Roman Catholic in January, 1969 may be relevant; it was an irregular act in itself, while the sincerity of his conversion has often been cast in doubt.
the director Elia Kazan . . . Gadg?”: Elia Kazan (b. 1909) directed several of Williams’s works, both for the stage and in screen adaptations.
Mazda-bedazzled: See note to “The Jockeys at Hialeah” above.
party-boss Daley: Richard J. Daley (1902–1976), Democratic Mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death.
the Jane Bowles Summer House: See note to “His Manner of Returning” above.
Ginsberg: Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), American poet.
Siddhartha,: Fictional account of the youth of the Buddha, by German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962).
old friend Gore . . . Myra Breckinridge,: Gore Vidal (b. 1925), American author, acquainted with Williams since 1948 (when both were in Rome); his novel Myra Breckinridge was published in 1968. Vidal had a strong impression of Williams as a habitual non-reader – reporting, for instance, in Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), that the playwright was ignorant of current events, and that he “traveled with but one book,” that of Hart Crane’s poetry (pp. 43–44).
Christopher Street, 4:4 (Dec. 1979), pp. 26–27.
Stephen!: unidentified.
The Blond Mediterraneans A Litany
Christopher Street 6:1 (Feb. 1982), pp. 14–15.
Sonno straniero qui./ Lo so. Lei sei solo?/ Si./ Peccado.: “I am a foreigner here./ I know. Are you alone?/ Yes./ A shame” (Italian, with misspellings).
No, no, per carita: “No, no, if you please” (Italian).
molto discreto, siempre, e siempre meglior cosi: “very discreet, always; it is always better that way” (Italian, with misspellings).
Buona sera Salvatore: “Good evening, Salvatore” (Italian).
New Directions 46 (1983), pp. 1–2. A typescript in the files at New Directions is dated August 1982.
Leverich (p. 121), with no citation given.
[Title:] I.e., Anna Jean O’Donnell (see note to “[’Can I Forget’]” above).
Leverich (p. 131), citing a letter in the collection of Ms. Jerry Miller.
[Dedication:] I.e., Anna Jean O’Donnell (see note to “[’Can I Forget’]” above).
[“Tonight I Stay At The Summit Temple”]
Leverich (p. 164), citing an undated, unposted letter at HRHRC from Williams to John Rood of the literary magazine Manuscript. Leverich quotes the poem in his chapter on the period from Sept. 1935 through Aug., 1936.
Poetry 157 (Feb. 1991). There are undated drafts of this poem at HRHRC, subscribed “Tennessee Williams.”
Richard Freeman Leavitt (ed.), AVE ATQUE VALE! Memorial pages preserving the final notices and other memorabilia connected with the death and burial of America’s greatest playwright/poet: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (Miami, 1983), p. 6. The poem is followed by a parenthetical note: “The poem was presented to Gary Tucker, the director with whom he was working at the time” (i.e., on A House Not Meant to Stand).
No. 1202: [AAV footnoted this with an asterisk: “The number of the Sunset Suite in the Hotel Elyseé where he ultimately died.”]
[“How Grimly Do Petunias Look”]
(From The Case Of The Crushed Petunias: A Lyrical Fantasy)
American Blues (p. 25). The spirited “YOUNG MAN” in this 1941 play recites the lyric to “MISS DOROTHY SIMPLE, a New England maiden of twenty-six, who is physically very attractive but has barricaded her house and her heart behind a double row of petunias” (p. 22); he introduces it as “a poem I once composed on the subject of petunias—and similar flora” (p. 25). A stage direction indicates its accompaniment by “LIGHT MUSIC”. A version with variant verses exists in an undated typescript draft at HRHRC, entitled “IN PRAISE OF ZINNIAS/ (And Similar Flora),” on which Williams uses the name “Tennessee” (dating the version to no earlier than 1938):
Behold how grimly zinnias look
on things not listed in the book,
for these dear creatures never move
outside the academic groove.
They mark with sharp and moral eye
phenomena that passes [sic] by
and classify as good or evil
mammoth whale or tiny weevil.
They note with consummate disdain
all that is frivolous or vain,
with virulent displeasure stare
at every style of underwear
Except the kind that makes you squirm
in anguish like a furry worm . . . .
Of course they say that good clean fun’s
permissible for every one
But find that even Blindman’s Buff
is noisy and extremely rough
AND! –
not quite innocent enough.*
* in very small type: spoken in a confidential whisper.
In this HRHRC draft there is no indication that the poem was originally conceived for inclusion in a play.
[“Youth Must Be Wanton, Youth Must Be Quick”]
(From The Night Of The Iguana, Act Two)
Theatre 4 (pp. 310–11). In the play, Nonno recites this poem falteringly, in fragments, prompted by Hannah each time his memory lapses; the last three lines are spoken by both in unison.
[The Drunken Fiddler]
(From The Night Of The Iguana, Act Two)
Fragmentary version in Theatre 4 (p. 321). In the play, after “declaiming” five and a half lines, Nonno is interrupted by “HANNAH: Nonno, not now, Nonno! He thought someone asked for a poem.” There are at least two drafts of the poem in its complete state, as a finished work of the “Thomas Lanier Williams” period. One is at HRHRC, entitled “The Drunken Fiddler” and dated Memphis, 1935; the other is at UCLA, where it appears as “L’Envoi” concluding The Drunken Fiddler, a unique bound collection of Williams’s early poetry in typescript (see Introduction). We print the text through the middle of line 6 as it appears in The Night of the Iguana, since these lines in the published play do not vary substantively from the corresponding lines in the typescript drafts. The remainder of the poem (enclosed in square brackets) is published from the UCLA text, which seems likely to be the later of the two typescript versions. The draft at HRHRC conforms to our text except in its third stanza, which there reads:
Harlots sometimes give him silver
when they wish a certain tune
but the prudent wives draw curtains
to exclude him as the moon
We give the poem’s title as on the HRHRC draft (since “L’Envoi” is fitting only in its material context).
[“How Calmly Does The Orange Branch”]
(From The Night Of The Iguana, Act Three)
Theatre 4 (pp. 371–72). The verses are heard in fragmentary form throughout the play, and then at last dictated in toto, as the play nears its conclusion, by “NONNO [in a loud, exalted voice].” (An earlier, variant text beginning “How still the lemon on the branch” has been published, evidently from a typescript in HRHRC to which it corresponds in all save a few accidentals, in Leverich, pp. 379–80. The HRHRC typescript is dated Acapulco, Mexico, August 1940. Interestingly, this version contains one variant—“expression” replacing “betrayal” in line 4—which Williams transferred into Nonno’s own compositional process as well, inserting it into his partial recitation of lines 1–4 at the end of Act One [Theatre 4, p. 288].)
[Not A Soul; Blanket Roll Blues]
(From The Film The Fugitive Kind)
Our text (copyright United Artists, 1960) is the version performed in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (the film adaptation of Orpheus Descending). Valentine Xavier sings the lyric while driving back from the juke joint where he has gambled with Lady’s money and won. The second stanza is largely identical to the first stanza of the twelve-line lyric which Williams envisioned in his screenplay One Arm, as the words to an imaginery recorded country song; see Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays, (New York, New Directions, 1984), p. 250. A longer version of the lyric, entitled “Blanket Roll Blues,” exists in a draft at HRHRC:
I took what I was given
and I took what I had stole,
but I took nobody with me,
not a soul, not a soul.
I took nobody with me,
not a soul.
I took some things for hunger
and I took some things for cold,
but I took nobody with me,
not a soul, not a soul.
I took nobody with me,
not a soul
I took all my longings with me,
all the dreams that I could hold,
but I took nobody with me,
not a soul, not a soul.
I took nobody with me,
not a soul.
I took my heart and body
in a dirty blanket roll,
but I took nobody with me,
not a soul, not a soul.
I took nobody with me,
not a soul.
[“They That Come Late To The Dance”]
(From Now The Cats With Jewelled Claws)
Theatre 7 (p. 308). The poem, sung by the Manager, is introduced at Madge’s suggestion that she and Bea dance: “ . . . Restlessness assuaged by Terpsichore? [They perform a dance to which the manager sings.]” When his song is finished, the Manager continues commenting: “—Worthy of Saint Oscar! Sentimentality is not crossing the Channel to escape Reading Gaol . . . Sentiment is a bird without nest in my heart. I dream of perverse seduction, passionately. –I wear a white carnation . . . Ladies, resume your seats. Discuss the banalities of your future plans.” There is a variant draft at HRHRC, entitled “SHE THAT COMES LATE TO THE DANCE”:
She that comes late to the dance
more wildly must dance than the rest
though the strings of the violins
are a thousand knives at her breast.
She that comes late to the dance
must dance till her shoes are thin
and the breath of the boy in the flute
is lost in the suck of the wind.
She that comes late must dance
till the lanterns smoke and expire
and the heart she uncovered too late
is broken before it could tire.
Filed with this version are several fragmentary drafts of an unfinished story, also titled “SHE THAT COMES LATE TO THE DANCE,” in which a poetically inclined but inexperienced twenty-nine-year-old, Anna Kimball, prepares herself for a spring “rendezvous with life” in the person of an Italian youth whom she encounters in a park (suggesting at least a distant relationship between the poem and the concept for Williams’ 1948 play, Summer and Smoke). In at least two of these fragments, a few lines from the poem, with variations, are presented as verses of Anna’s own composition. Anna’s purchase of a red dress for her “rendezvous,” suggests a connection with a 1937 unpublished Williams story, “The Red Part of a Flag” (and to its successor of 1944, republished in Stories as “Oriflamme”). Finally, a 12-line version of the poem (much like the variant text reproduced here) appears in draft materials for Camino Real (at HRHRC), where it is recited antiphonally by Marguerite Gautier (lines 1–4, 6–7, 9–10, and 12) and Jacques Casanova (lines 5, 8, and 11) as they follow Mr. Big’s direction to “turn with the carousel.” Compare with “Carrousel Tune” and the Explanatory Note to that poem.
[“I Have A Vast Traumatic Eye”]
(From The Novella Moise And The World Of Reason)
Williams described of one of his cataract operations in Memoirs, pp. 73–75.
[“Many White Gents Respected High“]
(From Tiger Tail, Act Two)
Published in Baby Doll & Tiger Tail (New York: New Directions, 1991) p. 220. Ruby Lightfoot, a moonshiner and “good-time house” proprietor (see pp. 120, 123) is heard singing these lyrics offstage at the beginning of Act Two, Scene Two (p. 189).
Neophyte: A Journal of Poetry (St. Louis), 1:3 (Christmas-New Year, 1932–1933), p. 36. Williams was to adapt this sonnet, with some revisions, for his 1941 one-act play Lord Byron’s Love Letter (Theatre 6, pp. 165–66). There retitled “Enchantment,” its recitation is begun by a Spinster whose grandmother wrote it “to the memory of Lord Byron,” (p. 165) and is then completed by the Old Woman—who herself is shortly to be revealed as the grandmother in question. (On textual differences between the version in the play and that of our copy-text, see Textual Variants.)
Un saison enchanté!: “An enchanted season!” (French).
Inspiration: A Journal for Aspiring Poets, and Poetry Lovers [St. Louis], 2:2 (Spring, 1933), p. 9.
[Dedication]: Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), American poet, admired by the young Williams.
Counterpoint [St. Louis], 1:1 (July 1933), p. 11.
L’Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, 4:6 (October 1933), p. 1.
Voices 77 (Aug.–Sept. 1934), p. 40.
Voices 77 (Aug.–Sept. 1934), p. 40. A draft at HRHRC is dated Taos, 1938.
The Versemaker [Lawrenceville, Illinois], 4.1 (Spring, 1935), p. 11.
fleurs de mal: “flowers of evil” (French); the seminal volume of verse by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was entitled Les Fleurs du Mal.
Rupert Brooke: Brooke (1887–1915) was a celebrated English author and soldier-traveller. By 1948, Williams would describe a project for which he had little enthusiasm as “more like a sonnet by Rupert Brooke than a painting by Gauguin. It is a dry fuck, really!” (Letters to Donald Windham, p. 177, letter dated July 28, 1949).
Sonnets For The Spring (A Sequence)
[I. SINGER OF DARKNESS; II. THE RADIANT GUEST;
III. A BRANCH FOR BIRDS]
Wednesday Club Verse, March, 1936; the poems won the Wednesday Club’s $25.00 prize. On March 25, 1936, following the announcement of the award, all three sonnets were printed in The St. Louis Star Times (p. 12); “The Singer of Darkness” appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (p. 8c); and “The Radiant Guest” appeared in the St. Louis [Daily] Globe-Democrat (p. 6A). Leverich (p. 164) describes the attention that the prize and the award ceremony brought to Williams, remarking that the award was announced to him on March 25th, the day before his 25th birthday. (Our copy-text is Wednesday Club Verse.)
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:2 (November 1936), p. 2. A draft at HRHRC is dated Washington University, Spring 1936.
[Title]: Pygmalion, mythical sculptor of the supremely beautiful woman, was granted his desire that she should come to life (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:2 (November 1936), p. 2 (appeared below “Sonnet for Pygmalion”). There are several variant drafts of this lyric, all unfortunately undated, at HRHRC and at UCLA (where Williams included a version of it in the section of The Drunken Fiddler entitled “To Kip”—see Introduction). The interesting feature of these alternate versions is their use of different pronouns and, in the UCLA draft, different genders for the characters depicted in the poem. The HRHRC version thus begins with the line “This is at once my pride and my disgrace,” and reads at ll. 5–8 (emphases added):
Last night you thought me as innocent and mild:
You loved me gently as you would a child . . . .
This morning you beheld a satyr’s face
Caught sleeping in your innocent embrace [ . . . ]
This HRHRC draft also substitutes “every living one of you” for “every mother’s son of you” in line 4, and concludes: “ . . . she, awaking, who had thought me wild/ And arrogant, shall find a sleeping child!” (emphasis added). The UCLA draft, on the other hand, starts “This is at once his pride and his disgrace,” while at the same time conforming to the published text’s “every mother’s son” at line 4; at ll. 5–8, it reads:
Last night you thought him virtuous and mild
and loved him gently as you would a child
This morning you beheld a satyr’s face
caught sleeping in your innocent embrace [ . . . ]
(emphases again added). Although the sequence of these versions is not known, it appears that Williams in 1936 published the poem in an explicitly ’heterosexual’ version (in which “every mother’s son of you” encounters a “sibyl”), whereas at some point he produced both a less definite version (where “every living one of you” encounters “me,” a “satyr”) and also an unambiguously homosexual version (in which “every mother’s son” meets the “satyr;” that this is the text he collected in the “For Kip” section is suggestive).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:3 (December 1936), p. 19. A draft at HRHRC is dated Memphis, 1935.
II. [Title and epigraph]: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), French author, wrote in his Pensées that “Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point”—“The heart has its own reasons that reason does not know at all.” Williams quoted the same aphorism in the short story, “Two On A Party” (Stories, p. 299).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:3 (December 1936), p. 21.
Southern Cross: Constellation of stars visible from the southern hemisphere.
Argus Keel: Williams presumably means to allude to the Argo of Greek legend (the ship in which Jason and the Argonauts go in quest of the golden fleece). Argus is a mythological monster with many eyes.
Lyric [“HER FOOTSTEPS WERE A SEASON’S COMING”]
College Verse, 6:3 (January 1937), pp. 59–60. A draft at HRHRC is dated St. Louis, 1937.
College Verse, 6:3 (January 1937), p. 60 (appeared below “Lyric [’Her Footsteps Were . . . ’]”).
College Verse, 6:3 (January 1937), pp. 60–61 (appeared below “Clover”).
College Verse, 6:5 (March 1937), pp. 100–101.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:5 (March 1937), p. 1.
[Title]: Possibly alluding to the Mummers of St. Louis, the theatrical troupe whose director, Willard Holland, had selected Williams’s long play Candles to the Sun for production; it opened on March 19, 1937. In the 1945 essay “Something Wild . . . ”, Williams remembered the Mummers as “sort of a long-haired outfit” whose work was “run by a kind of beautiful witchcraft” (Where I Live, pp. 8, 11).
American Prefaces [Iowa City], 2:7 (April 1937), p. 105. A draft at HRHRC is dated Sewanee [Tennessee], Summer, 1937 (thus postdating the poem’s publication).
College Verse, 6:6 (April 1937), pp. 126–130. Drafts at HRHRC are dated October, 1936 and Oct. 28, 1936. Williams wrote to his family during World War II that “I have been asked to contribute some patriotic verse to a NBC radio program selling war-bonds – comes on for fifteen minutes once a week and they have top-flight artists and writers. The only patriotic poem I can think of that I have written is the one called ‘Inheritors’, the only copy of which is in one of those little college verse magazines in the attic” (Selected Letters I, p. 378, letter dated “ca. late-May 1942” by the editors). Williams began calling himself “Tennessee” in 1939; in Memoirs (p. 12), he summarized the importance of his paternal line in the history of “the Western Territory (as Tennessee was called before it became a state),” and added: “So that’s the justification for my professional monicker—and I’ve also just indulged myself in the Southern weakness for climbing my family tree.” Cf. Leverich (p. 29). According to the editors of the Selected Letters, Williams “drew on” this poem in an unpublished verse draft at HRHRC entitled “Prologue: the Wingfields of America,” which “was intended to give epic background” to the semi-autobiographical material for The Glass Menagerie (Selected Letters I, p. 527 n.).
College Verse, 6:7 (May 1937), pp. 158–159. When originally published, each section appeared in two columns of equal height, side by side (presumably to save space).
[Title]: “Rite of Spring” (French “Sacre du printemps”); Le Sacre du Printemps was a seminal modernist ballet score by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) which received its premiere performance in 1913.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:7 (May 1937), p. 19. At least one draft at HRHRC is dated June, 1936.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:7 (May 1937), p. 19 (appeared below “Letter to an Old Love”). Drafts at HRHRC are dated April, 1937.
Ole ‘Sephus (Monologue To A Coon Dog)
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:8, June 1937, p. 7 (misnumbered volume 5). Originally included in a bound typescript in HRHRC, dated May, 1942, which collected 12 of Williams’s lyrics under the title “BLUE MOUNTAIN BLUES/ (A collection of folk-verse)” (see note to “Heavenly Grass” above).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:8 (June 1937), p. 7 (misnumbered volume 5); the poem appeared there below “Ole ’Sephus.” It was later republished in Eliot 8:8 (May 1941), p. 21, under the different title “In Memoriam to Jane Taussig.” Leverich writes that it was originally written “for Rose” (p. 225), “before TW left for summer camp” in July 1937.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:8 (June 1937), p. 19 (misnumbered volume 5).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:8 (June 1937), p. 19 (appeared below “The Shallow Pool”).
[Title]: Roman gods of the household.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 4:8 (June 1937), p. 19 (appeared below “Penates”). A draft at HRHRC is dated Jan. 24, 1936.
The Shuttle [THIS HOUR; MY LOVE WAS LIGHT]
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 50:3 (June 1937), pp. 142–143; the two lyrics appeared on facing pages. A copy at HRHRC bears the following stamp from the offices of Poetry: “acd [i.e., accepted] MAR 12 1936” (page reproduced from a University of Chicago Library microfilm). At least one draft of the second poem, at HRHRC, is dated St. Louis, 1936. In a letter at HRHRC from Williams to Harriet Monroe (the editor of Poetry) dated March 27, 1936, Williams showed his appreciation of these poems’ acceptance by ordering a subscription to Poetry (Selected Letters I, p. 83; quoted in Leverich, p. 165).
Lyric [“CAN IT BE AGAIN”]
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:2 (November 1937), p. 7.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:2 (November 1937), p. 7 (appeared below “Lyric [’Can it Be Again’]”).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:2 (November 1937), p. 11. A later draft of the piece, revised and retitled “The Gravedigger’s Speech” and dated Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, July 1939, is at HRHRC (cf. Leverich, p. 311). The poem is a spinoff of the Clown’s (Gravedigger’s) speech in Hamlet; in a letter from Saint Louis, Williams reported having listened to a national radio broadcast of the play on July 13, 1937 (Selected Letters I, p. 98).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:3 (December 1937), p. 21.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:3 (December 1937), p. 21 (but not directly below or alongside “Reveille”).
Song [“Girls That Have Loved Me”]
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:4 (February 1938), p. 4.
Lyric [“The Glad Morning, Coming”]
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:4 (February 1938), p. 4 (appeared alongside “Song [‘Girls That Have Loved Me’]”).
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 5:4 (February 1938), p. 21.
The Eliot [Washington University, St. Louis], 9:4 (January 1942), p. 20. Subscribed “By Tom Williams” (instead of “Thomas L.” or “Thomas Lanier”). A lyric by TW’s brother Dakin Williams, entitled “The Hour Glass,” appeared further down on the page. At HRHRC is a draft with the variant title “Housing Problem.”
Blewet Junior High The Junior Life, 16:5 (Nov. 25, 1925), p. 4.
Blewet Junior High The Junior Life, 16:9 (Jan. 22, 1926), p. 2.
Blewet Junior Life Yearbook (1925), p. 36. The subject was the problem of coal-processing fumes in St. Louis; see Leverich (pp. 67–68). A letter of May 5, 1928 (at HRHRC), from the “Consulting Engineer” of the “Citizens’ Smoke Abatement League, Incorporated March 22, 1927,” informed Williams of his being awarded a “check for $5.00 as one of the winners in the prize Essay Contest on Smoke Abatement.” Filed with this letter is a copy of an article dated “[St. Louis] Star [Times] 8/5/27,” headlined “St. Louis’ Anti-Smoke Campaign Called Most Distinctive in U.S.,” which reported the New York Sun’s positive coverage of the city’s fight against smoke. As quoted in this article, the Sun reporter had observed that: “ . . . there was a Smoke Abatement Week, and everybody who stopped could read the ‘Smoke Demon’ poster, with a dragon spouting smoke and bearing down upon a brave little group of St. Louisans who carried a banner bearing the legend, ‘Watch St. Louis grow/ When smoke is made to go.’”
[“Strangers Pass Me On The Street”]
Memoirs, p. 22; republished in Leverich (p. 96), and there dated Amsterdam, 1928. The draft in HRHRC, however, bears the date Amsterdam, Holland, 1930 (presumably Williams’s mistake since, as Leverich indicates, 1928 was the year in which he passed through Amsterdam). In the Memoirs account, Williams associates this poem with the end of a period of extreme mental anguish.
Edwina Dakin Williams (as told to Lucy Freeman), Remember Me to Tom (New York: Putnam, 1963), p. 40, no date given. Here included among the juvenilia on the basis of its placement early in RMTT.
Look Both Ways Crossing Streets
Edwina Dakin Williams (as told to Lucy Freeman), Remember Me to Tom (New York: Putnam, 1963), pp. 40–41; Williams’s mother introduces the poem with the remark that “ . . . I suspect his tone lies somewhere beneath amusement and fond exasperation” (p. 40). No date given. Here included among the juvenilia on the basis of its placement early in RMTT.
Babbitt: the eponymous protagonist of the 1922 novel by the American author, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951). In the essay “A Writer’s Quest for a Parnassus,” Williams distinguished his own preferred attitude of literary romanticism from a prosaic quality of mind which he associated with authors like Lewis, offering “the suggestion . . . that writers, all except, possibly, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, are essentially romantic spirits—or they would not be writing” (New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1950; republished in Where I Live, pp. 28–34, quoted at p. 29).
Edwina Dakin Williams (as told to Lucy Freeman), Remember Me to Tom (New York: Putnam, 1963), p. 251, preceded by the suggestion that the poem “refers . . . to Tom’s grandmother, rather than me” (p. 250). Here included among the juvenilia on the basis of its presentation in RMTT as “an early one” (p. 250).
Richard F. Leavitt (ed.), The World of Tennessee Williams (London: W. H. Allen, 1978), p. 21. No date indicated there.
The Savitar [University of Missouri], 38 (1932), p. 249. Subscribed “THOMAS LANIER WILLIAMS, Missouri Chapter of the College Poetry Society.”
sage Rodrigo: unidentified.
Memoirs (pp. 35–36). Williams wrote that the occasion was an episode during his “third year at the University of Missouri . . . in the spring,” when he “had a poignant and innocent little affair with a very charming girl named Anna Jean. My feeling for her was romantic. She was very pretty, she lived just across the street at the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and she had a delightful sense of humor. I wrote a little poem about her, well, I think several” (Memoirs, p. 35). Anna Jean’s surname was O’Donnell (Leverich, pp. 21–22).
[“I See Them Lying Sheeted In Their Graves”]
Last six lines first published in Williams’s essay from FYAP, “Preface to My Poems—Frivolous Version” (p. 122; now in Where I Live, p. 1). The entire poem was first published in Memoirs (pp. 37–38), introduced as “what is probably the most awful sonnet ever composed. It strikes me, now, as comical enough to be quoted in full” (p. 37). The listing of Elinor Wylie among the departed dates the sonnet’s composition to, at the earliest, the latter part of Williams’s seventeenth year (Wylie died Dec. 16, 1928); but we have no more precise evidence of the time of its composition, or of when it assumed the form in which it was first published.
Barrett: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), English poet.
Wylie: Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), American poet.
Millay: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), American poet (see Introduction).