Introduction

INTRODUCTION "The Swan" was written when Thomas Lanier Williams, age twentyeight , had just reinvented himself as "Tennessee." Under this name in 1939 he had finally had a story accepted by Story magazine, a Holy Grail for young writers, and had sent to a Group Theatre contest four plays that would earn him his first playwriting award. The contest was limited to writers under twenty-five, so he subtracted from his age the three "wasted" years from 1933 to 1935, when his father, a sales manager for International Shoes, had made him quit college to work as a clerk in the company factory. It was the Great Depression, and jobs were hard to find, but to Tom, the aspiring writer just beginning to achieve recognition, typing shoe orders eight hours a day was his "season in Hell." It took a nervous breakdown and recuperation with his grandparents in Memphis to free him once more to write. He had been reared by his grandparents during the seven years of his childhood when his father was a traveling salesman. Tom's grandfather, an Episcopal clergyman, was his role model, and his grandmother was the angel who through his penniless years would stitch five-dollar bills into her letters to him. In addition to falsifying his age to enter the Group contest, Tom had adopted his grandfather's house number in Memphis as his mailing address. Although he typed "Tennessee Williams, Memphis, September 1939" at the end of this story, he was not in Memphis that September but in New York City to meet his newfound agent and to study the professional theater firsthand. Whether "The Swan" was written in the YMCA in New York or earlier , in the hot attic of his parents' home, it is a St. Louis story. Forest Park with its zoo, lagoon and pavilion is the setting for two strangers' adventure on a summer night. Williams builds up an atmosphere of stifling heat—a metaphor for his character's feeling of suffocation and his need to escape the domestic tyranny of lace curtains and the sleeping wife whose curled fingers make him think of "moist flowers of the insectivorous kind." Fleeing to the nearby park, he meets a girl equally desperate for relief. As they sit in darkness by the lagoon and the girl tells her story, their mutual understanding peaks in a violent moment The Missouri Review · 83 that is cooled by the passing whiteness of a swan. Any possible storybook finish is dispelled by irony, although each character is allowed a small revelation. "The Swan" is one of several stories the young Williams wrote that would feed into The Glass Menagerie, the work that made him famous overnight. The story anticipates the desperation of that play's Tom—the would-be writer confined to a boring job in "that celotex interior" and bound to a nagging mother and a sister who lives in a dream world of mental delusion. Laura in The Glass Menagerie, with her thwarted love, seems an extension of the girl in "The Swan." Both can be seen as portraits ofWilliams's own sister, Rose. The portrait ofhis mother, Amanda, in that play is a considerably softened version of the sickly, clinging wife in "The Swan." Both story and play address the themes of confinement and escape present in most of Williams's early work. Williams would remain the rare writer who produced poetry, fiction and drama all his life. "The Swan" displays characteristics of all three genres in its poetic descriptions, suspenseful narrative and dramatic climax. It is typical of Williams's work habits that two years later he expanded his short story into a full-length play, Stairs to the Roof; in Scene 10 of that play, the girl's confessional monologue from "The Swan" is reproduced word for word. Striving for the sort of commercial success he had seen on Broadway, Williams disposed of the clinging wife, developed the couple's chance meeting into a boy-girl romance and conceived what may have been the only happy ending he would ever write. The play never made it to Broadway, but since the year 2000 it has been produced successfully several times...