Between the lines: editing the notebooks of Tennessee Williams.(Essay)

In 1997, John Eastman, the executor of the Tennessee Williams Estate, asked me if I would be willing to look at the notebooks of Tennessee Williams and give him my thoughts as to whether or not they should be published. Two weeks later a box arrived containing photocopies of the twenty-three known notebooks (during the course of the project I discovered seven more). I was slightly surprised to see how ordinary the notebooks were--the vast majority being the inexpensive kind purchased at drugstores with names such as WriteRight Composition Book and Du-O-Ring with covers of unremarkable browns, blues, and blacks. The notebooks were handwritten, and many entries were either not dated or only partially dated. It took me some time to decipher and order what I had in front of me. I discovered that Williams would frequently write in a journal, misplace it, write in another, find the original journal, and then pick up where he left off. Before long, however, I realized that I had a moving emotional record of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights. A decade later, these entries, along with a selection of illuminating manuscripts, letters, photographs, and commentary, would emerge as Notebooks.

Williams began his first entry on March 6, 1936. Almost twenty-five years old, he was living at home and taking night classes to gain enough credits to begin his final year of college. His voice is innocent, earnest, and at times melodramatic. He wrote his last entry in the spring of 1981, almost two years before his death. There is a gap of twenty years from 1959 to 1979 when Williams, debilitated by an addiction to drugs and alcohol and discouraged by his inability to create with the perfection he had done in the past, stopped keeping a journal.

Because Williams wrote to himself about himself, the journals are an exceptionally personal chronicle, unique in the information they transmit, as they are a record of his voice and his thoughts without any compression or smoothing over of a memoir or interpretation by a biographer. Williams spoke to himself in a form of shorthand. He refers to people either by their first name or their initials, and he often does not identify manuscripts by name, especially in the early years. In order to give as much meaning as possible to the notebooks, I set about trying to situate and give clarity to Williams's comments. I began by trying to contact as many people as I could find who really knew Williams. Among others, Donald Windham, William Jay Smith, Gore Vidal, Joe Hazan, Paul Bowles, and the widow of Fritz Bultman were helpful in identifying people.

One issue that constantly pulled at me as I worked on this project was Williams's sanity. Too often I had read opinions that stated Williams, like his sister, Rose, teetered on the edge of insanity. When I traveled to Tangier to see Paul Bowles, in addition to asking him about people Williams mentioned when he was in Morocco, I asked about Williams's mental stability. He was one of the sanest people he knew, Bowles told me. Given his prolific body of work, he had to be.

On occasion the journey to find people ended in unexpected ways. I visited a friend of Williams's who was severely debilitated by Alzheimer's disease. The interview yielded nothing, and as I was leaving an assistant came running down the stairs and told me he had something I would be interested in--a notebook of Williams's. He instructed me to meet him on a street corner the next day with an envelope of cash. Twenty-four hours later, and not without reservation, I found myself waiting on a desolate street on the Lower East Side of New York City with an envelope full of cash. The assistant appeared carrying a manila envelope. The moment I pulled the small brown exercise book out of the envelope and opened the pages and read Williams's first journal entry, I knew it was authentic. It began with a description of Williams's first trip to Europe, in January 1948. He was alone on a train that was on its way from Nice to Rome. "Train now pulling out for the Italian border--I am on my way to Rome. The sun--glorious sun--is on my face, in my eyes, and I love it." There was no question that the handwriting and voice were his.

In a desperate effort to track down the only woman Williams had a love affair with, I contacted the head of a detective agency whose firm did routine background checks for a Wall Street bank for which I had once worked. I explained to him what searches I had done and asked his advice on what more I should do. He said he would get back to me. I assumed it was his polite way of getting rid of me. Within twenty-four hours I received a call from one of his colleagues, who told me that his mother had been enrolled in the theatre department with Williams at the University of Iowa and had been asked by Williams to deliver a poem, "Remember Me as One of Your Lovers." I found the unpublished poem in one of the university archives, and there is little doubt that the poem, with the refrain "Remember me as one of your lovers, / not the greatest of these, not the least, / but in some small way distinguished from all of the others," was not strong enough to win her back.

On another occasion I learned of the existence of Williams's death mask. A few years later, after a fair amount of persistence, I gained access to the death mask and found myself carrying a box down Fifth Avenue in New York City to the studio of a photographer whose specialty is photographing African masks. I distinctly remember unpacking the carefully wrapped cast and being struck by how absent Williams seemed to be from this artifact. We spent several hours photographing it from different angles. I was aware that a person's face in death fails to resemble who he or she was in life, but I hope that the image produced reveals Williams with a certain dignity and peace. I included this image at the end of Notebooks.