TENNESSEE WILLIAMS WAS AN AVID LETTER WRITER, AND MANY OF HIS epistles are as culturally significant as his essays, notebooks, and memoirs. In putting together their exquisite two volumes of <i>The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams</i>, Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler had to make numerous difficult decisions. They obviously could not include every letter Williams wrote and so selected only those that contributed a key anecdote, a historical reference, or a personal recollection that helped reconstruct the playwright's life not found in the fiction and nonfiction he left behind. Few of the letters they selected, however, were destined for Williams's father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, or C. C. for short, a man Williams openly reviled throughout his adult life but whom he came to understand--and ultimately to forgive--years later following his father's death in 1959. Only six letters to his father appear in the first volume edited by Devlin and Tischler, and, tellingly, none in the second. To be sure, the published letters to C. C. are never as candid as the ones Williams wrote to the novelist and memoirist Donald Windham, his close friend; rarely as touching as those he penned to his sister Rose; and scarcely as long as those he occasionally mailed to his mother Edwina, his grandparents, or his brother Dakin. And yet, it is precisely in their brevity, in their detached coolness, in their matter-of-factness that Williams's relationship with his father can be gleaned. In the sum of his life, his father haunted Williams less than did his mother, or even his sister. One obvious reason for this is that C. C. did not live as long as they did. But another possibility is that Williams came to admire the man's no-nonsense frankness to life's complexities, a credo that Williams tried to follow, though he rarely succeeded.

A folder at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library contains several letters by Williams to his estranged father, such as the one below, that did not find their way into the published <i>Selected Letters</i>. Their absence is regrettable, since their mere existence speaks volumes about a troubled father-son relationship. Williams had written many letters collectively to his family, but few were penned singularly to his father. While the early letters to C. C. were often about thanking him for new shoes he had sent or job opportunities he had found for Williams in California, his later ones, after he had officially left home and began earning far more than his father ever had, portray a different Williams <i>viz</i>. his father. In one letter, dated February 28, 1941, he asks his father for advice about filing his income tax return, uncertain if the Rockefeller fellowship that he received the previous year was tax exempt. He describes his sojourns in Florida, his daily rewrites on <i>Battle of Angels</i>, and his having met several girls at Cora Black's Trade Winds boardinghouse in Key West--an anecdote that probably brought a wry smile to the man who knew early on that his son was no ladies' man.

In another letter at Columbia, written months later on May 12 (and sent not to the family's Clayton address but rather to C. C.'s Friedman Shelby Shoe Co. office, as Williams did not want his mother to know he was writing his father), Williams describes the loss--or theft--of his trunk containing clothes and manuscripts. He asks his father to contact the Pennsylvania Railroad from the St. Louis end of the route to see if it could be traced; a Western Union telegram sent to his father's office later that same evening announced: "DISREGARD LETTER TRUNK RECOVERED. OFF PITTSBURGH BY MISTAKE. TOM." (1)

The following handwritten letter, accompanied by an envelope bearing the same Hotel Sherman stationery, was addressed to "Mr. C. C. Williams, 53 Arundel Place, Clayton, 5, MO." Given its contents and its postmark on January 14, 1945, the letter was likely written just a few days or even one day prior to its mailing from Chicago, where Williams was on the eve of becoming America's most celebrated playwright. That fact alone adds to the letter's greater significance, despite its bromidic content.

<b><i>To Cornelius Coffin Williams</i></b>

                                                     SH: Hotel Sherman
                                                     Chicago, Illinois
                                                [ca. January 14, 1945]
                         [ALS, 1 p., recto verso, Columbia University]

Dear Dad--

   Glad you may get up. Our business is still improving and the plans
are now To keep the show here till sometime in February. However they
have now taken me off the expense account and I have no more work to
do so I will probably return to New York--I have some people to see
there in connection with "You Touched Me" which is now attracting new
interest because of the present success in Chicago. Please let me know
if you are coming--I will try to stay over till then.

   Margo is now off the payroll and returning to N.Y. early this week.
Neither of us spend much time in the bar.

   Will be getting a good-sized check from Audrey pretty soon now and
will take care of my phone bill in Saint Louis--if I can get home for
a few days before going East, will do it.

                        Love to you and Mother

                                 Tom.

Many thanks for the cig-case!

<b>Commentary</b>

The letter was handwritten on both sides of a sheet of stationery from the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, where the entire theatre company was quartered during the duration of the Chicago tryouts of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>. Williams was expecting his father's trip north from St. Louis to see the play that was now, by early January, improving its box office receipts. Edwina had already been up to Chicago to see its premiere on December 26. According to Edwina, Cornelius went up to Chicago alone and, since the performance at the Civic Repertory Theatre had already been sold out, he was given a folding chair in the aisle (Williams and Freeman 151). He stayed only one night, and Williams, who had prearranged a date with a college student at the University of Chicago, left him with Laurette Taylor, who later scolded Williams for having abandoned her with such a "DULLOLDMAN?!" (Windham 160). <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> eventually closed not on February 10, as Eddie Dowling had wanted, but rather in March, before moving onto Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre by the end of that month.

Williams was given a ten dollar per diem in Chicago during the tryouts (Windham 156), and when bad weather and half-filled theatre seats threatened to close the play in late December, glowing reviews from Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens, and a subsidy from the Mayor of Chicago, saw <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> through to January when advanced ticket sales improved. Sellout performances quickly lined Williams's pockets, and by February he was taking home a thousand dollars a week (Leverich 565). Once initial investments in the play had been recuperated, Williams's expense account was suspended.

Williams had met Margo Jones, the "Texas Tornado," at his agent Audrey Wood's Liebling-Wood agency office in late 1942. Jones soon became instrumental in getting several of Williams's plays performed, including <i>You Touched Me!</i>, which she directed in Cleveland in October 1943 and then again at the small Playbox of the Pasadena Playhouse in California a month later. C. C. had frequently seen her drunk in Pasadena and fretted about her influence over his son; apocryphally, C. C. had told him then: "Son, there are two things we've never had in our family--a sober man and a drunken woman" (Spoto 101-02). In an entry in his private journal, dated October 23, 1943, Williams wrote: "Tomorrow I have to see my father in his hotel in L.A. Thank God Margo will go with me" (<i>Notebooks</i> 401). Leverich describes how C. C. did not appreciate the encounter, since "Margo had more than a surfeit of drink and for the amusement of the salesmen did a wild dance. Cornelius, 'dreadfully shocked,' afterward sent Tom a wire asking to see him before he left the city," wanting to "urge him not to marry Margo" (Leverich 526). The reference later in the letter to Williams's not "spendfing] much time in the bar" with Jones thus alludes to a letter that C. C. had written to Williams, probably in early January 1945, about how he and Edwina had tried to reach their son "over the telephone one night last week" at the hotel but were informed that he was "down at the bar with Margo Jones." His father said he knew how expensive drinks were at the Hotel Sherman and did not want Jones spending all his son's money, when she was "making a good salary" (Windham 160). Williams convinced Jones in the fall of 1944 to put her Rockefeller fellowship on hold and come to New York to serve as Eddie Dowling's assistant. What began as assistant progressed to assistant director to finally co-director of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>. Jones was earning $150 weekly (Leverich 557) before being taken off the payroll for the same reason as Williams.

Though written and performed before <i>The Glass Menagerie, You Touched Me!</i> had never made it to Broadway, but now, with Williams being such a hot theatre property, more producers grew interested in bringing the play co-written by Williams and Windham to the Great White Way. By January 26, New York producer Mary Hunter, with whom Williams had been in contact for the past couple of years, finally agreed, after months of cat and mouse games with Williams, to buy the rights to <i>You Touched Me!</i> (Windham 158). Williams would eventually betray Hunter, and he and Windham signed with Guthrie McClintic instead (<i>SelectedLetters I</i> 550-51).

When it looked as if <i>You Touched Me!</i> would finally reach Broadway before <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> had completed its Chicago engagement, Williams became worried. Williams knew that <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> (still titled <i>The Gentleman Caller</i> or <i>The Caller</i>) was a better play, and he feared as early as October 1944 that "a production of that first would hurt the Caller ..." because of "similarities between Matilda & Laura" <i>(Selected Letters 1</i> 536). Intentionally or not, <i>You Touched Me!</i>--set in World War II and not during the Great War, as was the story upon which it was based--was delayed for over a year until after <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> opened in New York on March 31, 1945. By the following fall, though, <i>You Touched Me! seemed</i> passe; "the war had ended and so had the play's contrived relevancy" (Leverich 471).

As Williams's newfound riches grew, so did his paranoia. He confessed to Windham in a letter dated January 11 that he did not entirely trust his agent: "My royalties have started coming but so far haven't gotten past Audrey. She was here and happy as a lark--gave me ten dollars cash and took my 5% of the gross home with her" (Windham 158). The high phone bill was no doubt linked to Williams's many telephone calls during his October-November stay in Clayton (St. Louis) about the impending production of <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>, whose rights Dowling had purchased by mid-October. No other mention of C. C.'s gift of a cigarette case to his son could be located. (2)

                           Works Cited

Leverich, Lyle. <i>Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams</i>. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995.

Spoto, Donald. <i>The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams</i>. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

Williams, Edwina Dakin, and Lucy Freeman. <i>Remember Me to Tom</i>. St. Louis: Sunrise, 1963.

Williams, Tennessee. <i>Notebooks</i>. Ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.

--. <i>The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1:1920-1945</i>. Ed. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2000.

--. <i>The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. Vol. IL: 1945-1957</i>. Ed. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2004.

--. Unpublished letter to Cornelius Coffin Williams (ca. Jan. 14, 1945). Tennessee Williams Papers, box 1, folder 5. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library, n.d.

--. Unpublished telegram to Cornelius Coffin Williams (May 12, 1941). Tennessee Williams Papers, box 1, folder 5. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library, n.d. Copyright [C] 2018 The University of the South.

Windham, Donald, ed. <i>Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965</i>. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.

JOHN S. BAK

Universite de Lorraine

(1) This telegram, and the letters, are all reprinted by permission of the Curator of Manuscripts/University Archivist, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, and Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the University of the South, Estate of Tennessee Williams. All rights reserved.

(2) I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of my UE 75 graduate students, who contributed much to the research on this letter.