Letters, 1936–1977

With a flood threatening Collinsville, Illinois, in July 2014, Francesca Williams scrambled to transport her father Dakin's legal correspondence upstairs from her basement. As she deposited box after box in her living room, a handwritten note caught her eye. Francesca immediately recognized the stationery of New York's legendary Hotel Elysée, and the penmanship of her uncle Tennessee Williams. Seeing the note triggered a memory—more like a fragment, really, from when Francesca was seven—of one of Williams's rare visits to St. Louis. Dressed in a crisp linen summer suit, the man she'd known as Tom was kneeling to embrace her.

Francesca began exploring the correspondence. The letters in the boxes depicted the mundane rhythms of Williams family life, but also described hospital stays and nervous breakdowns, the decision to have their sister Rose lobotomized, the years of struggling in anonymity, the intoxication of success and fame, the despair of a career in decline, the drug-fueled paranoia and recurring depression, and the family members' abiding love and respect for one another. These personal dramas were the raw material that Williams would ultimately transform and recast in the characters of Amanda, Laura, and Blanche.

Francesca, who is herself a playwright, brought the letters to me. I was a friend of her father's as well as a screenwriter and faculty member of the Film and Media Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis, which both Dakin and Tennessee attended, and I had already written a screenplay based on Dakin's book My Brother's Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams. Francesca and I subsequently edited the correspondence and turned it into a play, which has been produced in New York and St. Louis. Francesca's real goal in sharing these letters with the public, however, was to provide a new look at her family's legacy, one too-often considered merely dysfunctional and tragic. The Williamses were finally a modern family, one that faced the challenges and tumult of life with the same courage, passion, and hope we all aspire to.

—Richard Chapman

________

And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other.

—"Person-to-Person," Tennessee Williams, the New York Times, March 20, 1955

When I was in junior high, I was assigned to sit in chapel next to a girl who spent each service picking scabs off her elbows and knees. She methodically harvested the dried blood of each wound and gazed at it, oblivious to the world around her. I thought, Gross, why does she do that in public? But I couldn't take my eyes off her. When I watch Tennessee Williams's plays or read his letters, I think of him picking at his wounds in public. They're our wounds, too.

Williams wanted to be known and loved through his plays, but he left us so much more of himself, maybe more than he intended, in the "somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls" of his loneliness: scraps written on stationery of the Hotel Elysée or the Plaza; fragments of lines on the backs of restaurant bills; postcards from his endless travels; notes on airline stationery of Alitalia or the Concorde; letters, so many letters, scribbled or typed on anything he could find. Each one was like a dry flake of skin, a scab, detritus falling from his body every time he scratched an itch, each one containing some essential bit of his DNA. Writing was the way he scratched that nagging itch, and for a moment the words gave him respite, some peace, though never for long.

A few of Williams's notebooks are housed in the Archives of the University of the South. Just holding them and reading his handwriting is so private, so personal; it is like looking over his shoulder in St. Louis...