Word: sisterly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Life in a Play. The play that best proves it is The Glass Menagerie. In it Williams held a mirror up to memory and caught upon it the breath of three lives: his mother's, his sister's and his own. In a lower-middle-class apartment in a Mid western city, Amanda Wingfield ("an exact portrait of my mother," says Williams) tries to cope with a peevish present by chattering of a fancied past. The son Tom (Williams) suffocates in a shoe factory and goes to movies to daydream of escape. The daughter Laura (Williams' sister...
...forever on the road with his shoe line, and Edwina Williams lived with her father, a patrician Episcopal preacher who restlessly changed parishes about every two years. Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. He and his older sister Rose absorbed their mother's lofty sense of status as the daughter of a clergyman in Delta country. Tom loved to tag along after the Rev. Mr. Dakin on parish calls and listen to the conversations. "Tom always was a little pitcher with big ears, and I think he still...
...posted to St. Louis as a branch sales manager, and Tom and his sister were uprooted once again. Gone were the sunlit spacious backyards of Mississippi, replaced by rows of brick flats the color of "dried blood and mustard." The children sang in the Episcopal choir, but were made to feel like social untouchables. At home, the parents often "quarreled horribly,'' and C.C. grew more and more dissatisfied with his son. He felt the boy was "sissified," wanted him to play baseball, took a bitter delight in calling him "Miss Nancy...
Into Print. With characteristic self-dramatization, Williams dates his urge to write from his sister Rose's arrival at puberty, leaving him behind in "the country of childhood." (It happens that his mother bought him a $10 typewriter around the same time.) His first writing coup was of a sort to make his father apoplectic. Pen-named as a woman, the 14-year-old Tom won a $25 Smart Set contest on the subject "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" He went on to be published in a magazine called Weird Tales, with a story titled...
...shelf of influences: Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Chekhov, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, who became Williams' poetic idol. Tom introduced Mills to Rose. As Mills recalls it, Mrs. Williams "commanded Tom to bring home 'gentleman callers,' " as Tom Wingfield does in Menagerie; "Williams' poor sister was dressed in old-fashioned Southern costumes. She was very lovely. She never talked at all. Mrs. Williams never stopped talking-empty verbiage about their status in the South. The mother didn't give her a chance...