The Life of a Writer – with Help from Tennessee Williams
Historic New Orleans Collection, the Fred W. Todd Tennessee Williams Collection, 2003.0228.1.12
September 2024En Avant! Before he became a national celebrity, Tennessee Williams struggled with hardships, rejection and disappointment, yet this personal mantra kept him moving “onward” - with an exclamation point!
– by Richard Goodman
This column underwritten in part by Karen Hinton and Howard Glaser
Difficulties—financial….I am flat broke—stony—literally not one cent. Bummed a couple of cigarettes off a queen at Jean’s [a bar in the Quarter]. Guess I’ll have to sell a suit tomorrow. Hate to. But I do love to eat….Rent over due 3 or 4 days….Well—let’s hope a gift arrives in the mail. En Avant!
That is the thirty-year-old Tennessee Williams writing in the French Quarter in his notebook on October 17, 1941.
The next day:
I wake up with no money for breakfast and the landlady right outside my door.
A few days later:
Owe three dollars on rent and five dollars to Bill. Even if I sell my clothes—unless check comes I’ll still be broke. Christ. It’s all a little too much, too much….Drank half a pitcher of water to relieve my hunger. Found a few grapes left in the bottom of sack—two were eatable.
On October 21, 1941, he writes his agent, Audrey Wood, “I do hope you have already gotten my last appeal for money.…I have had to borrow on my nice tan gabardine suit. When I leave New Orleans I shall write a song called ‘The Rampart Street Blues.’ Some day I expect to pass along there and see myself hanging in one of the windows – ‘Greatly reduced’.”
Doesn’t sound too romantic, the life of a writer, does it? Mind you, this is the 30-year-old Tennessee, not the 20-year-old. He’d been writing seriously for years. The Glass Menagerie, his first major success and the play that changed his life, wouldn’t see the light of day for another three years.
The typewriter of Tennessee Williams, which he would sometime pawn to buy food. Historic New Orleans Collection, 2018.0393
Tennessee Williams arrived in the French Quarter in late December 1938. He was twenty-seven. He was completely unknown. He knew no one in the Quarter. He’d not written the plays that made him famous. But he instantly felt at home in the Quarter: “Here surely,” he wrote in his Notebooks on the day he arrived, “is the place I was made for…” In early January 1939, he writes a rhapsodic letter to his mother about how taken he is with New Orleans. “I’m crazy about the city,” he writes her. “I walk continually, there is so much to see.”
He rented a room. He began to write. He got menial jobs. Then came the struggle. Or the continuing struggle, since, as was noted, it began before he moved to New Orleans. He was often broke or nearly broke. He got behind in his rent. His work was rejected. He was, in short, like many writers who might read this who have embarked on this life who are facing discouragement, an incessant lack of money and what they view as a bleak future.
His motto, that he declared again and again in his letters and notebooks, was En Avant! Forward!
He lived the life of a writer bravely and steadfastly. It’s really something to see, this resolve. You can follow his years in the French Quarter, where he lived on and off his entire life, and elsewhere, through his letters, his notebooks, memoirs and the prose pieces he published. You can come to him for encouragement. (Note that the word “courage” is at the heart of encouragement.) His strong example is there for anyone, especially writers, to draw from.
The plaque on 722 Toulouse, where the playwright lived in 1939 and again in 1941. To read about all the places he lived, see "Tennessee Williams and the French Quarter," also by Richard Goodman.
The plaque on 722 Toulouse, where the playwright lived in 1939 and again in 1941. To read about all the places he lived, see "Tennessee Williams and the French Quarter," also by Richard Goodman.
Not all his struggles were about money. He struggled to get the plays he wrote produced. His first efforts were not well received. Here’s another, early entry from his Notebooks:
The future is still a bit unimaginable, since I haven’t even heard anything encouraging from the theater.
We shall see—We shall be patient as an old cow—we shall endure—But also we shall try very hard to work out some permanent design for living that will hereafter sustain us in things like this. We must have a backbone, a central thing—in life, aside from work—which is impossible at times.
Bye bye, baby—be brave!
It should be noted in all fairness that not all was desperate, all the time, financially speaking. He did have a brief stint as a scriptwriter in Hollywood in 1943 where he was paid the royal sum of $250 a week. There he faced a different sort of struggle. Among other projects, he was asked to rewrite a script for a Lana Turner movie that, he writes to his agent, “contains every cliché situation you’ve ever seen in a Grade B picture. They want me to give it ‘freshness and vitality’ but at the same time keep it ‘a Lana Turner sort of thing’. I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver.”
He still managed to keep writing his own work, though. He never faltered doing that.
He did, in fact, have a play, Battle of Angels, his first produced, mounted in Boston in 1940. It was poorly received. Another testament to Williams’ indefatigableness: he did not abandon that play. He reworked it some years later. It became Orpheus Descending and premiered on Broadway on March 17, 1957.
It should also be said that he had, in Audrey Wood, an agent who believed in him unreservedly and who supported him, starting in 1939, for thirty years, through thick and thin, with advice, loans and love until he summarily dismissed her. She was loyal and helpful, resolutely there for him. And he did have his champions. But despite these intermittent bursts of sunshine, Williams toiled in obscurity.
Three years after moving to the French Quarter, in November 1944, he finds himself back home in St. Louis,
Home appears to have been a bad strategy….I have made two feeble efforts to write—Either the material didn’t really excite me or I just couldn’t get off….The confidence quite knocked out of the old boy—One cannot give in so one has to go on—this is not a battle in which one dares to let go….Anyway you look at it, I’m in a tight spot—but I am the new Houdini! En Avant!
Just under two months later, on December 26, 1944, six years almost to the day that Williams arrived as an unknown writer in the French Quarter, The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago. After a slow start, and with strong support from two major theater critics, it propelled forward. The play opened on Broadway at the end of March 1945, ran for over a year, and won, among others, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It’s become a classic.
Thereafter, though he had frequent bouts with depression and sometimes had difficulty with his writing, Tennessee Williams’ struggle was not with lack of money but with contending with success—that “bitch-goddess,” as William James called it. Another struggle altogether and a difficult one in its own right. He managed that well enough, creating A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana, among other celebrated plays that are, forty years after his death, still being performed and likely will be as long as there is theater.
Tennessee Williams inside his old apartment at 722 Toulouse Street, 1976. Historic New Orleans Collection, ©Christopher Harris, 1994.143.3
How do you tell a young writer anything about their future? Give them advice that has any impact? Words that they’ll even listen to? I’m not sure you can. I know I wasn’t a good listener when I was a young writer. You couldn’t tell me much of anything.
What you can do, though, is to point them to a writer like Tennessee Williams. Who, by his example, can provide inspiration, guidance and solace. So when these writers do stumble and fall, or even think about throwing in the towel, they can turn to him for a lifeline. To show them how to keep putting one foot in front of another. Because, at a certain point as a writer, that’s the best you can do. Just to put one foot in front of another.
You cannot do better than turning to Tennessee Williams for help. Especially the Tennessee Williams who, as a young writer living and working in the French Quarter of New Orleans, was unknown and often penniless, writing his heart out, struggling.
These few quotes I’ve provided represent a compressed view of his struggles as a writer. There are many more. I recommend you read the Notebooks and Letters in their entirety to give yourself a true idea of the extent of those struggles, the full story, which lasted years before he became the famous playwright we all know. Only when you witness Williams’ journey over an extensive period of time can you get the full appreciation and benefit of his persistence.
Years later, after the success of The Glass Menagerie and on the eve of A Streetcar Named Desire’s Broadway premiere, Williams published a piece in the New York Times about the artist’s life in which he wrote, “once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.”
You can look at it that way.
He did, and it’s all there for everyone to see.
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