My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams

© David Cronin

On the death of Tennessee Williams in 1983, James Laughlin, the publisher of his poems and plays throughout his life, said how much he valued what his friend had offered to the world. He recalled that Williams, first and foremost a poet himself, had carried with him wherever he went a copy of the poems of Hart Crane and that he had always been generous to his writer friends, "though you wouldn't hear that from him."

I had been one of his earliest writer friends at Washington University in St. Louis. I had been with him in 1935 when he first discovered the poems of Hart Crane, and he had always been extremely generous to me. After he died, I discovered in his Notebooks the following entry for December 11, 1939:

Went over to Bill's room at W.U. Dorm. We wrote, I on a new one act which is rather feverishly, desperately flashy. Bill prepared his group for the Poetry Club. Some of his stuff is surprisingly good—he gets nice musical effects and good images—but comes down frightfully in some lines without realizing it at all—still, Bill is a very nice kid and I hope will make some kind remarks over my grave.

The one-act play on which Tom was working was apparently "At Liberty," the story of Gloria La Greene, an unsuccessful actress who returns home to her mother in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. Gloria arrives, wanton and wasted by consumption but clinging to the illusion that her luck will change, and she will be cast for "a marvelous Broadway production." The group of poems that I was preparing no doubt included the short lyric "He Will Not Hear," which the poet Witter Bynner, pleased by my musical effects, awarded first place for an annual prize when it appeared later that year in College Verse.

Since Tom died, I have spent many happy hours preparing a long series of kind remarks, remarks I will be pleased to make over his grave in 2011 in celebration of the centenary of his birth. Before I begin to set them down in these pages, I should first give the reader some sense of where I came from and what I might have brought with me to St. Louis.

Like Tom, I was a displaced Southerner, born in 1918 in Winnfield, Louisiana, on my grandfather's farm. Of Scots-Irish and French descent, my grandfather had come by ox-cart from Georgia, had served in the Louisiana militia during the Civil War, and for that service was later made Postmaster of the Town of Winnfield. He also opened a general store and edited the only local newspaper. He died when I was three years old, but whatever talent I have as a writer, I believe I inherited from him. My father, unable to cope with farming, enlisted in the army in 1918 as a clarinet player in the band and was transferred three years later to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, just south of St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi. It was there, with my beautiful Southern part-Choctaw mother and my brother, a year and half younger than I and as different from me as Tom's young brother Dakin was from him, that I grew up between the two world wars, with only occasional visits back to Louisiana where I thought I belonged. This unusual boyhood I have recorded in detail in my autobiography Army Brat, published in 1980. My father, like Tom's, was an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler. As with Cornelius, Tom's father, alcohol and poker got my father into serious trouble. Because of drinking on duty, my father remained for years a Corporal, and my mother, as a seamstress who made clothes for the officers' wives, kept the wolf from the door. The children from the Barracks were transported by army trucks to St. Louis schools and because the city then had one of the finest school systems in the country, I benefitted...