>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]   >> Hi everybody.
Thanks for coming out on a beautiful but blustery March evening
in Washington, D.C. My name is Rob Casper.
I am the Head of the Poetry and Literature Center here
at the Library of Congress.
And I want to welcome you to tonight's event.
Last fall, the Poetry and Literature Center launched a new series,
Literary Birthday Celebrations to honor some
of our country's greatest writers.
We have already held four events in the series and are thrilled
to count this as our fifth.
And we are very excited, tonight's event features one
of our former consultants in poetry, William Jay Smith to read
from his new book, My Friend Tom:
The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams,
on Williams' 101st birthday.
I would like to offer a special thanks to the University Press
of Mississippi and to its Assistant Director, Marketing Director,
Steven B. Yates without whom this event would not be possible.
I would also like to let you know that My Friend Tom will be
for sale along with two of William Jay Smith's poetry collection.
And Mr. Smith will be happy to sign books after the event.
Let me ask you now to check your cellphones
and electronic devices and turn them off.
They do interfere with the mic so good
to have those-- good to have those off.
And let me also take this opportunity to tell you a little bit
about the Poetry and Literature Center.
For the past 75 years, we have been to the home to the consultant
in poetry and that called the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
We also put on literary readings, lectures and panels
of all sorts throughout the year.
If you would like to find out about more events like this
and I believe we have Literary of Birthday Celebrations
for Walt Whitman and Gwendolyn Brooks coming up later
on in the spring in summer.
You can pick up one of our spring events fliers which are outside
where the books will be, and sign our sign-up sheet.
We have a sign-up sheet by the signing table
and there's one outside there too.
And you can also visit us at our website which is www.loc.gov/poetry.
You can read about both Tennessee Williams and William Jay Smith
in your program which you should have one in your chair.
It is always a cause for celebration when one our consultants
or poets laureate returns to the center.
We are honored to have William Jay Smith back to the Library
that was his home from 1968 through 1970.
And we celebrate his long standing contribution to American letters.
The latest of which is this account of Smith's old friend and one
of the America's great literary luminaries.
Please join me in welcoming William Jay Smith.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> I was planning to stand at the podium but I'm afraid
that I would begin to fall in while on face.
So I'm going to sit, and I hope you'll all be able to see me
and my voice will carry I think
because I have, I'm all digitalized now.
[Laughter] I mean I have something
in my pocket that's I guess takes me around the world.
So any ways, it's very great honor to be here after so many years.
I had-- I wanted to come for the celebration
of the anthology recently published of the poets laureate
but I wasn't able to make it.
I wasn't able to make it here or nor to the event in New York.
But I've signed copies of that, but until--
if I had been here that night, I would have had
to sign some 40 copies for the library in addition to anybody else
that was, wanted anything to sign.
So that was a kind of signing of the evening
that I'm not accustomed to these days.
But I want to-- I brought my little sweater along
because I usually get a cold neck.
And this morning, it was with the wind, it was rather cold.
So, I-- you know, it seems strange tonight, very peculiar to be here.
Because-- and I see so many familiar faces.
In fact the good part of, my family is here.
I think that whenever-- if I start to count them, I mean they may take
up perhaps too much of the audience out of that,
it's a little embarrassing from my statutes shall we say.
But it's great to see them there with wonderful faces.
In fact, a good many of them are thanked
that the acknowledgment's here in this book.
I think I thank everybody who's ever come near my house
and near my library because I've worked and this work for so long.
Because I, one of the few people who now is alive I think,
who knew Tennessee Williams before he was Tennessee Williams.
Tom-- Thomas Lanier Williams and I were students together
at Washington University in St. Louis and I met him in 1935.
And we were constantly together between 1935 and 1940.
After that, I went off to the war and I was-- I came back.
When I came back, their great play and the-- The Glass Menagerie,
had just opened in New York.
And there was one of the first things that I'm getting back
from my long years of service in the navy.
The first thing I did was take the train in New York and I went
to see The Glass Menagerie.
And of course it was a strange feeling because I had spent
so many years in the house that he depicts so beautifully in his play.
I knew them all.
And they were so incredibly presented by the greatest actors,
of course I've ever seen, Laurette Taylor.
And then I was so moved about the whole performance.
That I walked out of the theater and I was just sort of ready
to fall you know just to fall in my face.
I looked across over in the corner, over in the edge
of the street, there was Tom Williams.
And so, it was just as if we had gone
on during those whole war years.
But of course I wondered, is this guy going to be the same to me now
that he is famous, now that he's made so much money?
And of course he was exactly the same, and with me
and he was the rest of his life.
When he came to see me and my first wife in Florence,
he was absolutely warm and greeting
and then we met each other many of over the years.
Sometimes, when he gave a reading publically or when he was
in the academy who got some letters to which I was elected after he was.
And I said to him, I greeted him,
so I think you had something to do with this.
He said, well I voted for you.   [Laughter] And that so he did.
Anyway, I thought that I would begin
by reading what is called the preface here.
You know the publishers always wanted have writers do all their
work for them by just telling what the book is all about.
And so I-- the library took this very seriously.
And so I wrote this preface in 19-- in 2010.
And I put it down and I thought well, they can just quote
from this and, I said no, no, no this has got
to be the beginning of the book.
And so now that I have had some friends around the country
who bought the book, they said well,
they read it to anybody who hasn't bought it.
They read this preface which, which gives them--
it's so exciting they said that they're sure that they just going
to send people right to the bookstore
if they aren't any bookstores left.
[Laughter] Anyway, anyway they'll get it on Amazon which,
it cost so much less anyway.
But anyway, this is what I thought would,
I would take the trouble to begin reading this.
And if I have difficulty, it's because I suffer from pollen.
And in fact, I don't know whether, whether I can, you know,
not be able be having a postnasal drip during the whole evening.
[Laughter] So forgive if that, if that happens.
But I, I can't really convince my life, my wife that there is
such a thing as suffering from pollen.
But when we went together to Rome where we spent four months there
in the spring, and I was a resident there.
Everybody had a wonderful time.
They gave us the biggest apartment in the place and it was--
we have the highest ceilings in the place
and beautiful look out over the garden.
Of course it turned out to be the coldest spring ever in Rome.
So we were freezing in that vast.
And the-- but the, it was then when it got warm
and everything blossomed out, I was like everybody
in Rome I was suffering from this, the pollen in the air.
And I went to a doctor to see, and he said go, go to the counter
and then buy this drug which is here,
you can't get that, get it over the counter.
These are drugs which I know with that, I don't take them any longer.
I try to just stick with Claritin.   But anyway, here we go.
[Laughter] And I'll begin by saying what I've been saying for a long,
long time and that this is not a long book.
But it has been long in the making.
When my friend Tom, Thomas Lanier Williams became immediately famous
in 1945 as Tennessee Williams with a phenomenal success
of The Glass Menagerie, he regularly gave my name to reporters, editors,
theater and film critics, biographers, teachers, to anyone,
anywhere who was he thought seriously interested in learning
about the beginning of his extraordinary career.
For more than half a century, I have been responding to questions
of every sort put to me by people of every sort from every corner
of the world concerning the early years
of the great American dramatist who was completely unknown
when we first met at Washington University
in St. Louis 75 years ago.
Tennessee Williams spent his first seven years in Mississippi.
But for the rest of his life, Missouri and the City
of St. Louis were-- it's so strange I have light
which is hitting me right in the wrong place.
But-- is there, I guess there's nothing that can be done about that.
I mean or you can you twist it away in anyway.
No, maybe it's--   [ Pause ]
Oh that's, oh that's marvelous.   [Laughter] That's wonderful.
Now I feel that I'm alive again.   I thought I was on television.
[Laughter] But now, so then, I'll go back now.
Tennessee Williams spent his first seven years in Mississippi,
but for the rest of his life, Missouri and the City of St. Louis
where he now lies buried where for the most part physically
or imaginatively his residence.
I was a close associate of his there from 1935 to 1940
when we were both students.
I, a freshmen and he is senior at Washington University
and where he produced his first two full length plays.
Poet Clark Mills, actually his full name was Clark Mills McBurney,
also a university senior and I,
met with the poet playwright Tom frequently often as,
as often as three times a week at his home
on Pershing Avenue a few blocks from the campus.
We read our poems to one another feeling as true poets do.
Poetry must be heard before it can be committed, committed to the page.
And of course before it can be recited on the stage.
And when not reading, in his living room, I looked and listened
and thus got to know Tom well and became familiar with all the sights
and sounds that he confronted every day and night
in that household he depicted so forcefully in The Glass Menagerie.
And to which in his imagination, he returned throughout his life
in other plays, poems and stories he wrote, he created.
I remember the-- his indomitable mother, Edwina,
ushering us like some contented commanding Confederate general
into an antebellum mansion with a honey-coated steady monotonous
and maddeningly unstoppable voice that Laureate Taylor,
in the character of Amanda Wingfield, caught perfectly.
The madness in her speech that extended
out over the entire household she dominated was echoed from time
to time in her talented son's dark, down-home Delta drawl when cut
by the cool blade of gallows humor,
it erupted in uncontrollable laughter that resounded slowly,
that resounded along the shelves on either side of the fire place
and shook dust from the books they contained.
I carry with me the vision of the lonely, lovely,
forever-lost sister Rose drifting in from the shadows,
her shrill persecuted voice ruffling the air
as she flees the determined drunken drumbeat
of the heavy stylishly footed hard-drinking salesman
father Cornelius.
Now I say that you and I, when I say the heavily stylishly footed,
he was of course a shoe salesman and he was a sales manager at the time
of one of the greatest shoe factories in the states.
It so happens that I'm wearing tonight my favorite shoes
which are Hush Puppies and maybe some of you know them.
I wore them years ago, it's the lightest shoe you can put
on your foot.   It's like lifting no shoe at all.
And so they're the ones that I wear.
And then shoes that-- at that time produced by the firm that was
where Tennessee Williams was made to work by his father after being sent
to University of Missouri for three years.
And after having flunked ROTC, he was brought back and made
to work in the shoe factory.
And of course he's written about that and maybe some of you read
or [inaudible] were written about writing poems
on the back of a shoe box.
Anyway, everything in St. Louis seemed
to be connected at that time with shoes.
If not with shoes with beer because we had
of course the greatest brewery in the world and of course a lot
of that, beer was being made.
But most of the time, at the time I was there and grew up just south
of St. Louis, at Jefferson Barracks, 'cause my father was
in the regular army, I come up from Mississippi and Louisiana,
in Louisiana where I was born.
And I thought that I was just, a southerner now.
I lost my Louisiana speech because my mother was so very,
very keen person about getting me to do the right kind of thing.
And so she sent me to a coach who was--
had gone to the University of Chicago and wanted
to prepare me for the stage.   So I was-- I lost all my accent.
And since then, I've been to Columbia University in Oxford,
and everybody thinks that I'm English and of course,
I still talk in the way he's not.
I think I do speak English, a southerner who's as articulate
as it is when it's spoken
by our current president, but I'm not English.
But anyway, this man, Cornelius was a great-- well, he was a great,
very good person, but he was-- and I think that Tom realizes later
on because he was-- he was very abusive to him
and also quite a much of a drunk.
I mean, he drank constantly, and as my father did.
So I know something about that and about what happens when people,
they got a little bit too much to drink.
And of course in his case, it was a little bit--
when father, and then it did, and there were a case of my father
who was a corporal in the band and played the clarinet.
So when he wasn't playing the clarinet, he was gambling.
When he was not marching with the band, he was gambling or drinking.
And, he came home one night and had a lot to drink and he didn't use
to bring much money home and my mother who is very,
very beautiful also was a maker and designer of clothes.
And so she worked for the officer's wives, and made money
that kept the wolf from the door.
But, my father played and loved poker and I discovered
in writing this book actually that poker comes from a German word
"pochgen" which means something very savage
and that there is-- that involves violence.
And I suppose that does seems to happen with poker.
In the case of my father, he came home this one night
when he made some money, he made a lot of money,
and there were green bags, you know, out of his,
coming out of his pockets even.
And he had too much to drink, somebody had given him a lot
of a very hard liquor, you know, that then, so he had as all army
or people had that time, had his own pistol, and so he'd shot
up by a Porsche and then came in and fell on the floor,
and all of this money was out in front of him on the floor.
And I was four years old that time and I saw this so, I witnessed this.
And I then-- I though I'd carried this picture for my whole life
and finally, I wrote a poem of it.
And I'll say the poem, but I'll tell you first about what Tom did
with his father Cornelius.
He-- Cornelius was a-- used to be, well he likes selling shoes
and he was very pleasant as long as he went around the countryside
in the south, in Mississippi.
So, when he was made brought to St. Louis and put in front of a desk
where he had to just talk to salesman and tell him what to do,
Tom got the feeling afterwards
that he could understand why he hated the whole thing
and would've wanted to do, what Tom himself had wanted to do
to climb the roof and jump off.
And, but on the other hand, it would get his way of working
out the result was to get together with some
of the other people and play poker.
And, of course poker would sometimes lead to,
as the name indicates, to some violence.
In this case, one of the people at the table
that they were playing with, shoot off one of his ears.
So that, you know, this is not a little more
than you usually expect to have happened.
And so he was taken off to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis,
which is one of the greatest hospitals in the world.
And of course that he was-- his ear was remade.
And Tom of course was haunted by this scene as I was,
and I didn't know about-- I didn't know of the full--
I didn't know this in quite such detail as I do now at that time
because he didn't want to talk about it even with his close friends.
But I knew it would've happened more or less.
But I know afterwards where he went after The Glass Menagerie, he went--
and some of the actors in the play of The Glass Menagerie where asked
to come to his hotel room and to play poker.
And he would provide all the beer and all the wine
and whatever they wanted.
And also the cards, and then he would stay there,
and walk around the table, and learn how to play poker
because he didn't know anything about it.
And he learned very well, and he got to be himself.
By the end of his life, he was a very good poker player.
But what he did with it in his work was to write,
A Streetcar Named Desire.
And which is your-- the center is around the poker table
with the poker players, and that was his way of doing it.
Well, I don't want to-- I didn't write this book by the way
as I was afraid, some people thought that I--
that I wanted to make and to increase my reputation just on--
because I knew Tennessee Williams.
I do feel that our past crossed and I--
but I tried to leave out in any case at my references in the book
which were are in any two positive of way reflected on myself
because I wasn't writing about myself.
But, the past crossed and so, now I can tell you what I wrote
with my father's scene of violence.
And I think some of you who know my work, know the poem.
It's called American Primitive.
And as you will see, I took the scene that I carried
for so many years and put it about a 100 years earlier
in the south as it was actually.
And it goes like this, American Primitive.
Look at him there and his stovepipe hat.
His high-top shoes and his handsome collar,
only my Daddy could like that.
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.
The screen door bangs, and it sounds so funny.
There he is in a shower of gold.
His pockets are stuffed with folding money.
His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.
He hangs in the hall like his black cravat.
The ladies faint, and the children holler.
Only my Daddy could look like that, and I love my Daddy
Well, it's with my-- I've got to say emphysema which I have as well.
I have a hard time breathing for-- but also anyway, this is--
this poem has been actually has been brilliantly painted
but I didn't know that people could--
would take a subject like this.
But it was done by a painter but-- and, I don't know [inaudible] now
because of this walking too far today I'm not even going
to forget his name, but he went something beautiful image there.
Well I'm going to go on with the whole thing
of this little introduction then I will go on to some poetry
because I want to talk to you about Tom as a poet.
And particularly, the poetry in his place.
[ Pause ]
Then I guess I just ended up with Cornelius.
And up behind Cornelius, marches the skinny,
uniformed little dizzy body brother Deacon back
from his ROTC training session in the field house of the university.
And actually, although Tom who was actually seven years older than I
because he had been three years at the University of Missouri,
and Clark Mills McBurney who was the other one of our little--
what Tom called our poetry club was five years older and I was a kid.
And as I'll tell you in a little minute, in a minute that way,
Tom refers to that, refers to me as a kid.
I want to record the continuing presence in my mind
of Tom's family members who appear in one form or another
in almost all his work and of his too early influential friends Clark
Mills, the poet and Willard Holland the actor and director
of the theatrical troupe that presented his plays
and the female members of our poetry club who turned up in them.
I wish to call back the Riverfront of St. Louis
as it then was during the Great Depression
with the Howardville shacks on the edge
of the Mississippi there below each bridge as important to Tom
as Brooklyn Bridge had been to Hart Crane.
And to provide some sense of the entire fog-bound polluted city
that he examine so carefully and to which he gave literally permanence.
And this fog-bound polluted city was absolutely polluted because at some
at times during the '30s when I was there, you would drive--
try to drive down through the city and you could not see anything.
It was that because it's in-- St.
Louis is in the sugar bowl and it's amazing what they've done
over the years that they've been able eliminate the smog
that once gathered in the bottom of this city and made absolutely,
this was what made it seem for us such a horrible place to be.
Actually, it was one of the most advanced cities where it had one
of the best public high school systems in the country.
And Tom came up with the age of seven from Mississippi.
And I had come up with the age of three from Louisiana,
but I went back from time to time as he did to Mississippi.
And I went with like cousins who are all also to on Mississippi.
But he-- we both went to the schools there and we had teachers
who encouraged us very much with our writing.
And so when I came-- when we started to meet
in St. Louis I had already sent poems to magazines
and I had some printed in magazines.
And then he had also been sending everything
out because he was determined from the very beginning
that he was going to write.
He had been-- when we met in 1935, well I tell you first of all,
I got ahead of myself but I wanted-- that this whole book is based on is
in fact that I knew him from the very beginning, but when he came
to St. Louis, he had not published anything
that was recognized anywhere except
in weird tales he published one story.
And that was all that was, but then he-- at the University of Missouri,
he had published, he had, had a one or two stories published
in the little magazine, the paper of the college.
And then, he had presented drafts of plays and those when some mentioned,
but he had never actually had a plate produced by of the college.
And when he came to St. Louis, one of his first plays
that he had ever produced was on the way there to St. Louis,
he stopped to Memphis with his grandparents the Reverend Deacon.
And there's a little group play,
and they made up with a friend of the family there.
He made up a little play and that was presented,
that was the first thing that he'd written before he got to St. Louis.
But, now, you see I rumble
on this way then I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
[Laughter] I mean I'm-- it's, I really don't know where I am
so forgive me if I ever jumped from place to place.
I do have something in mind.   And I am going from place to place.
What I mean to say is, I want you to know what happened so that I--
what I knew and where he was in various stages of his life.
And in this case, he had his first place were represented in St. Louis.
I was there in 1937 on the first evening
of Candles to the Sun it's called.
And we have been meeting at his house Clark Mills,
and that Clark Mills McBurney was of that time one of the leading poets
in the country and he had been published at that time wherever--
well he was somebody like Elizabeth Bishop who at that time wasn't quite
as well-known but she was-- they were all members of what was called,
though I'm talking of the poets throughout the country
who where members of the, what was called the College Poetry Society.
And this have been established by a woman named Winslow
and her real name was Grubbs.
If you have a name like Grubbs, I suppose you do want it,
you know make it do something with it.
So she was in Idaho which is also the last place, I think,
you've expect to have somebody establish a poetry as,
you know a group.
She wrote to every university in the country.
And she not only wrote to the university but she said,
do something, you have talented people there,
get them to write poetry and so forth.
So every major college established a College Poetry Society.
Then she not only did that but she had established poets
who would then agree to serve as judges on the contest.
And so we all-- this you know,
we all send our forms into the college verse.
And this was where Clark Mills was first published but then he went
on to publish in many other places like the, well then voices
and other things that were, and all the things
that were well better known.
And, then when it was actually this college poetry society
who brought the three of us together.
Because Clark, because Tom had been a member of the College
for Poetry Society at the University of Missouri.
And in fact there were not many-- he says it one time in his memoirs,
he says this, have I told you, Tennessee Williams ask
in his memoirs, that at Washington University,
we had a little poetry club.
It contained only three male members, the rest were girls,
pretty with families who owned elegant houses in the country.
The three male members were Clark Mills McBurney
who was Clark Mills was already nationally known as one
of the countries most prominent poets, Tom,
then Thomas Lanier Williams and I.
Well, as I said, Tom had been a member
of the College Poetry Society in Missouri.
And for some reason, this-- but nobody cannot quite understand
because this is the last person one would think would be made
treasurable of that organization.
[Laughter] He was made treasure of the Missouri chapter
and they brought a ledger for him to put on.
And of course he, then he was kicked out the following year
because his father wouldn't let him stay, you see.
So, he brought that with him and so he had the ledger that he bought.
And so he just then used the rest of that particular one
to begin his own diary which he kept.
He even kept from us, he never ever showed it to Clark or to me.
And it was fascinating some of you who followed his work know
that Yale University published the complete diaries
of Tennessee Williams which come to something like this.
And actually, it's all fascinating
because he tells exactly what he thought what's happening to him.
And most of time, nothing very good was happening.
And also, he tells all the truth about everybody else
because he was very truthful all the way through in all of his work.
And one thing he was-- his place where about,
was the fact that nobody was telling the truth.
And the case of a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I mean you remember
that when Big Daddy says, speaks out of to Sister Woman,
he talks about lying, about, what is the word I want--
>> Mendacity
>> Mendacity, yes, right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that I can't,
then that's-- then his mendacity and the Sister Woman, says mendacity,
Big Daddy, I don't think I knew what that means.
And then, he said, what it means is, it means that you're a liar.
And of course that is that he was talking
about people who lied the whole time.
And of course now, he-- it would be impossible for Tennessee Williams
to be writing his place because everybody
in public life is lying constantly, everyday,
every minute, every second.
[Laughter] So it was bad enough as it was then for all of us as artist.
But now it's pretty [inaudible].
Anyway to, to go on with that, I would just skip now to a little bit
of this where, when we met at his house, we also thought we knew
about his sister, Rose and we saw here occasionally
but it was just once in a while that she drifted in and wasn't,
we knew at the time that she was having some mental difficulty.
But of course, it was more became more profound
than we knew at the time.
But I want to give you a scene from the,
from my book which is also based on something
that he wrote in his own memoirs.
But I think we'll tell you something about him as a poet
and I'm not going to go on forever now.
Well, I haven't, I still have a few minutes to go I think.
And then I'll stop.
But we knew something about Tom's career and some, we knew something
about Tom's sister Rose, but we barely saw,
saw her when we came to the house.
We were aware that she was undergoing treatment
for her mental condition.
Although, we did not know as even Tom himself did not then know,
how very serious her condition was and how a few years later,
she would undergo a prefrontal lobotomy.
On one occasion, when his parents where away
on a holiday in the Ozarks.
Tom invited Clark and the, and another friend Willie Wharton
to share some whiskey with him.
Clark had known what and that the University and found him amusing.
I did not, he had little to say of any interest
but he never stopped talking.
[Laughter] At the time, he was married to Minerva Primm,
a former debutante who stayed at home with their little baby.
Wharton had, would take us up to their apartment and seem
to enjoy having us listen to their uninteresting
and interminable arguments.
[Laughter] I saw him years later much subdued and married to a nurse
who appeared to be able to manage him better than Minerva has.
The evening at Tom's after several drinks,
Willie began making obscene telephone calls
to people whose names he had picked at random from the phonebook.
I have a vision in my memory, Rose appearing suddenly on the stairs
in a fluffy white dress and outraged threatening to tell her parents
when they return about what was happening.
This she did to Tom's great distress.
After he had tattled on my wild party
as the playwright later recounted in his memoirs,
when I was told I could no longer entertain my first group of friends
in the house, I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up to them.
We passed each other, I'm on the landing and I turned upon her
like a wild cat and hissed at her.
"I hate the sight of your ugly old face."
Wordless, stricken and crouching, she stood there motionless
in the corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.
This was the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect.
And one for which I could never properly atone.
I think this is the one place in a,
in prose where he said what he said very often in his, in his plays.
He didn't know as I say the time how very serious this was.
Of course she did undergo a prefrontal lobotomy one
of the very first that was performed actually because this was-- St.
Louis is always been a great world renowned medical center,
and this was in 1943.
At this time, when this scene that I've just described,
wrote about here took place.
This was 1937, and when Rose had-- with just was schizophrenic
and she was put away in Farmington Center which is a kind
of hospital not but a clinic, you know.
And she was put up there and she wasn't at all happy there.
And actually, Tom went to see her when she was there.
And this was he wrote at the time about, about this,
this particular scene and this was one of the first poems that have,
I think of major poem that he first, that he first wrote,
and I'm going to read that.
Because we discovered that we knew Clark first as a poet,
and I knew that he was going to make a name for himself,
but I didn't realized that it, that he would be as a playwright because,
one, he didn't read some, some of his plays to us.
And one of them was called Ishtar and this was a Babylonian fantasy.
And it was the most, this was an attempt at writing in verse
and a love story in, a Persian love story and--
the, I quote in the book I wrote.
But you maybe interested to see that there were,
some of lines quoted were simply ghastly, unbelievably awful.
So Clark and I burst out laughing and then you know Tom,
really expected to have this read and understood as a beautiful play,
but he realized, how impossible the language was.
And he said, well go and tear it all up 'cause he never tore it up.
He has never tore anything up because he thought, well somebody,
you know, maybe there's something here I can save.
And then of course his mother picked everything up
and that's why they have so much
of the William's materials still available in all the Texas
and at the University of Columbia and various other places
because the she had saved them.
And many of it, many of the things that he would,
would've wanted to throw out.
But actually, well, what we discovered was that, when,
when we saw his plays, Clark and I saw his plays, the first one,
the first full length play was at about coal miners in Alabama.
Well this, you know was, he knew the language they spoke
because he was a-- he had a great year and he knew how people
in Alabama out in the coal mines would speak.
And they spoke just as they would and it's very, it's very,
it's you know it's, there was, it's a perfectly correct and--
but it also has that rhythm which is what he got in all
of his plays which is really poetry.
Because, and some of them, they had the speeches are actually,
well they would be printed as prose poems.
I mean in any other case.
And, and very often, he took actual, he was a lyric poet and he took some
of his lyrics and put him into the plays.
But I'm going to read this one that he wrote then about Rose
when she was in the, at the pharmacy and at the, the Missouri,
Farmington as that called, yes.   It's called the beanstalk country.
You know how the mad come into a room is too boldly.
Their eyes exploding on the air like roses.
Their entrances from space we never entered.
They're always attended by someone small and friendly who goes
between their awful world and ours
as though explaining but really only smiling.
A snowy gull that dips above a wreck.
They see not us, nor any Sunday caller among the geraniums
and wicker chairs, for they are Jacks
who climb the beanstalk country composed of hammers
and tremendous beams, compared to which the glassed solarium
in which we rise greet them has no light.
The news we bring them, common, reassuring,
drenched with the cheerful idiocy of noon, cannot compete
with what they have to tell, they have, that they saw through cracks
and what they saw through cracks the ogre's oven.
And we draw back.   The snowy someone says.
Don't mind their talk, they are disturbed today.
That's a really frightening poem I'm sorry I read it so badly
but I printed, I copied it from the book.
But I made some typewritten mistakes, I tried to redo them,
you know, when they're copied, it didn't come through correctly.
And so I can't even read, of course I reached that point in life,
and none of you who got there yet where I can't read my own writing.
And I used to write long letters by hand and I still do,
but no body can read them at all, so.
[Laughter] I give them to a typist.
And but some, anyway, it's frightening very frightening poem
and then of course like all of his work, it does have its absolute base
in what this has happened.   And that is, that the actual one
who is becomes a snowy gull that dips above a wreck.
This are the little friendly smiling creature who introduces you
to those people who are ill.
These actually was said by his sister when she saw--
when was pointing to one of the patients who was in a,
and under that table is something in a catatonic state.
And then she said to Tom, "Don't bother, and be annoyed about this,
this is just one of her bad days."
So, actually it's an incredible what he did to his tape, this would,
so that the actual person presenting the mad creature is actually
mad himself.
So, it's a kind of wonderful change that he makes.
Now, I'm going end with one little very short poem,
a very different type of poem.
But it shows some of many aspects of his writing.
And then I'll be happy to answer any questions.
I think we may still have a little time to do that
and I've been very interested since I've had this book came
out just about, well since the first of February,
I have spoken several times New England, I know,
very often had some wonderful questions.
I mean people I think bring their--
when they want to they can ask very sensible questions I found
when I was teaching that most of time they didn't.
[Laughter] But anyway, now they seem to.
Anyway in this case I'm going to read this.
This poem which is called Kitchen Door Blues.
And this is one of the little, once that he wrote for music
and he'd wrote a number of pieces.
Any southerner as you know, are likely, either country musicians,
and everybody's writing music in the south, one way or another.
And some was good and some was awful,
and but everybody sings as everybody else.
And of course this is what he did and he put down some
and he actually had recorded and many
of you know perhaps know those things that they're very,
very well done and he does them beautifully.
Well this is one that he wrote and then with some time--
would done perhaps as a projected blues,
series of blue song Libby Holman.
But when late in life when I asked him if I could have permission
to use it in an anthology, he said, well of course.
But he said, you know, that that poem was my father's favorite work
of all the works I had done.
And I think when you hear it, you'll understand why and here it is.
My old lady died of a common cold.
She smoked cigars and was ninety years old.
She was thin as paper with the ribs of a kite,
and she flew out the kitchen door one night.
Now I'm no younger 'n the old lady was,
when she lost gravitation, and I smoke cigars.
I feel, I look sort of peaked, and I feel kind of pore.
So for God's sake, lock that kitchen door.
[Laughter] Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]
I won't try to stand but thank you, thank you very much indeed.
>> Thanks so much, thanks so much.
Thanks Mr. William Jay Smith for that a great talked.
I wonder if there are just a couple of sensible questions out there.
[Laughter] And just for the purposes of the taping,
I'll have to repeat your questions so, go ahead.
[Inaudible Remark]   >> Yeah, right.
>> And if you alluded to the fact
that Tennessee Williams called you a nice kid and he did ask you
to do something, he would hope that you do something upon his
of this-- [Inaudible Remark]
>> Oh well, and yes, I think that was one finale I was going
to read and perhaps I will.   Just, let's see I can do that.
It won't take long, I'll find it.
Yes, this was in 1939 when I was just, I was just an assistant
at the university then in French, the French Department.
And this is where I had moved in, it was really near that university.
Went over to Bill's room at WU 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 this 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 was very nice kid and I hope will make some kind
[Laughter] So I discovered that after
in his journal after this year.
And so that's the, the one of the reasons I wrote this book actually.
And so I've tried to give a very sympathetic picture of him and not
of the kind of monster that this-- that you get from Hollywood and they
and the drug scene and I think he was,
there was more to him than that.   So any, anything else?
>> Any other questions?   >> Their must be something else.
>> Well, just-- hold on for a second.
I'll bring this back.
>> Where do you think he got the sense of humor he had,
was it the father, the mother or?
Anybody in the family have that particular sense of humor?
As in the poem you read about the kitchen door,
and so many other things you were--   >> Yeah right.
Well I think, where does one get the sense of--
well I think I don't know-- well I think their father probably had it,
but certainly not, no, no I wouldn't say.
He said some funny things
but I don't think he realized how funny they were.
[Laughter] But, and certainly the mother didn't.
Their mother wanted to be--
she'd always dreamt of being a singer, you know.
I mean actually that I think.
And she had a-- she did, well, it's only fair to say
that she'd read him all the songs, and so what when he was little boy.
And so he was, he really was exposed to all the great poetry.
But, I think-- I don't know, I find it--
well I've just notice actually when I arrived,
I arrived in Washington today and that--
well, one of the engineers came to the room because we couldn't figure
out that there was-- that was what happening in the room.
There was, it was just too cold and he came and he is a sudden of about,
the man of collar and he-- we became great friends all of a sudden
and he started to talk and he had tremendous sense of humor.
And I think that that's, that's just there, I mean, it seems to me
that it didn't come from anybody in the family particularly.
I mean and not actually in his family, I mean the great
and descendants of Tennessee that Cornelius was so proud of.
So we're not great humorous, you know, I mean but of course
in modern writers, and one of the other characters
in this book is Eudora Welty, who happened to be one
of my other mentors in life and who has the most marvelous sense
of humor anywhere in the world I think, so that's a what, anyway yes?
>> Did you know back in the 30's that you're going
to write about this man one day?   Did you keep a diary?
Is your recollection of it vivid because you've just file that--
>> Well, I've tell you I've never done what he did
and kept a journal, a diary day by day.
What I've done is fill up notebooks with just whatever comes in my head
and I have a very good visual memory.
And so, what I did-- well I think you've read the Army Brat
which is based on many, many sayings from my child hood.
I did in that case, if there was his--
I was thinking of the historical things I went back
and got the notes and everything else.
But, I didn't think of this, but I've-- I have done so much.
I have so many notes just sometimes just on pieces of paper that,
and as you've been in our house, so you know that nothing is thrown out
and that my dear wonderful French wife gets it all packed up
and put it away out of everybody's sight.
But still, when I'm working it's all here and I think that I did feel,
I wanted to say something about him before I knew
that what was written here but I--
that was when I spoke in New Orleans once, I had a sort of festival.
The-- my friend Thomas Keith
from New Directions Publishing house heard me speak and he said,
you know, you self speak so well about this play,
once you write the introduction to written, so they published
that Candles to the Sun, he never had a,
he never appeared anywhere before and I wrote about it because I knew,
I remember the whole-- I have a very good memory of, a visual memory,
I mean I want to be a painter.
And so I knew-- I remember the evening,
I remember whatever they look like and of course I think part of the--
part of that being having so many relatives in the south
and then listening to them, my ear was strained to, I mean, I did--
I was a listener as Eudora says and he was a listener.
And well I think every good writers are listener.
[ Pause ]
>> Thank you, I note tonight's about the Tennessee Williams,
but I just want to say, he's a teacher.
For 30 years, I've been teaching American Primitive
and I think it's one of the most powerful poems ever written
for young people.   It just mean so much.
So, I want to let you know that.
But the other thing would be, when you and Tom,
and we all did this kind of in college, you know,
you're sitting there and you've had a whiskey
or seven or nine or whatever.
And you start talking about where you're going to go
and what you're going to do.   >> Yeah.
>> I'm sure you didn't think you would be sitting here tonight
necessarily addressing us.
But, what kinds of things did go through your mind?
Because I mean, you both were a very extremely successful
on so many levels.
So, you know, in some ways the dreams came true,
but take us back long before they happen.
Did you just sit in there in conversation, you're writing,
you're doing and then what else is going on?
>> Well, probably enough, I think it was-- that was the most,
and I think that one thing
that we felt then the most talented guy was Clark Mills.
And in fact it's so, in his memoirs, Tom says,
he says list the three members of this poetry society, and he says,
and in order of talent they were-- they went from Clark to me,
to him and you see he was the least talented.
Of course that's ridiculous because he probably was, you know,
somewhat the other way around.
Because actually they, Clarke may have shown us more talent than,
than he had, but he himself even realize
that he didn't have it in the end.   And so, he stop writing actually.
But, I resurrected one of his poems in this book as a matter fact.
But, thank you for the-- for my writing about of the prime,
of the American Primitive.
But, I'm told that, you know, that's been in textbooks and written,
well as you know with other poems, and students are asked to pick
out the worst poem of-- and they inevitably pick out mine.
>> Not in some New Jersey School.
[Laughter] And they do this, they do this to others, 49 states--
>> And now there are, right.   >> Not in major I'm sorry.
>> Okay, good.   All right.
I'm glad to hear that.
But, you know, because of-- some they say that well,
you know that you're-- this is no point to speak, I love my Daddy
like he loves his Dollar.   You can't talk like that.
And then of course, you realize that somebody who's objecting
to this does not realize that I'm written
about man who's hanged himself.
You know, which is-- and then of course--
well these has happened to me actually too.
And with the college students, and I was appalled.
And I said, but you know, you don't-- you're not looking at the--
you're not listening to what the poem says.
It says, he hanged in this hall,
he hangs in the hall by his black cravat.
You know, and that was a-- that line took me five years
to write and define.
But I think it comes off, I hope that it comes a justice if--
it was said in five minutes, you know.
But that's their-- and that's the [inaudible] that I know
that Tom wanted in his work too, to get a new field out on the stage.
That is if, this is not written.
This is what-- this is the way it was.
>> Okay, just one more question.   >> Yeah, all right.
>> And so I just want to ask, what all his old friends thought
when he changed his name to Tennessee Williams?
>> Well, I think they were mystified as many people have been since,
because he used to say at readings,
he said I'll answer any question except why I chose the name
Tennessee William.
I think it was when he sent all of his poems, which are were sent
from Memphis, as he was leaving to go for this, the first trip,
one of his first trips back.
And he had ended him them in a contest,
and this is where he also made his--
it was suppose to be four years shorter than it,
so he changed his birth date to enter the contest.
Anyway he got, he won that contest.
But he, he didn't stopped to see his parents and his grandparents,
and those people he really adored, especially his grandmother.
And he does write beautiful poems about her.
And they're some of the very best.
I think, I hope someday, somebody will print just the volume of poems,
of lyrics of his, you see.
Because there's so many that are lying around and in drawers.
And when I went to look in Texas where they are the, you know,
there's so many things that could be put together just to be read
for the value of the language, you know?
But now, I've got away from your question though.
>> What did you all think that when he changed his name?
>> Yes, well, of course, I think that really what was behind him.
He would never say what actually he'd been thinking about.
But I think that he really--
he wanted to remind himself of the best he came from.
And that was from the-- from his Tennessee family.
And this of course meant the poet that he, you know, that he's--
one of the poems of himself that he is, you know, he's,
that was a great influence on him.
The-- someday I've just lost the name, now again.
But-- I just talked too much and I've-- I've come on airplane today
and night, plus driving for hours at Rome.
Remember-- but he actually he was very proud
of his Tennessee for bears.
And he wrote even for a college verse.
He wrote a long poem which is all about them.
And they were very-- they were very courageous people
and also then they were very much in the government too.
And as well as a one or, you know, the famous writer whose name--
well, wait a minute let me-- Sidney Lanier that right Sidney Lanier.
He's called, you know, Thomas Lanier Williams.
Well, Sidney Lanier, he said he wasn't--
he didn't think that Tennessee that he didn't think
that Lanier was very much of a poet, but he was an interesting man
and interesting character.
The fact of the matter was that you know,
I don't know if you know the work of Sidney Lanier,
but he wrote The Marshes of Glynn, which is a marvelous poem.
And it's one of those, it's absolutely made up of sounds.
And Tom, he used to know by heart some
of the couple of stanzas of that poem.
But I think also he was, of course you remember that he was one--
well he was a rival of a great American Whitman, you know?
But he was-- because he'd had tuberculosis and because of the,
being in the war in the South.
He wrote about the south as opposed to the north.
And the south is always that south of beauty.
And the north is that more of, you know, of rigid intellect.
And the south is more of emotion and feeling.
And actually, that is what Tom really follows.
And although this is what so many of the modern, the other writers
in the south just dame, because they didn't want to have that picture.
But of course the way it's presented,
Tom was part of a humanity, not just the southern scene,
but that's really.
So I think that's-- anyway thank you all again.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.