complain? Breast beating is twice as false as the love of any whore.
Because of his bad eyesight, Williams did not serve in the Second World War and it is an aspect of his honesty as well as his self-obsession that the war engaged him very little. In January 1942 he wrote:
I am frightened thinking of the changes or rather the increased vicissitudes the war may create in my life. I suppose if it did not affect me personally my feelings about it would be only abstractly regretful. Things have to impinge on my own life to matter to me very much. Is it that way with most people? Yes, I am sure that it is.
He had, as he said, a way of reducing or indeed elevating everything to the personal. In a letter to Elia Kazan about Nixon in August 1952, for example: ‘He looks like the gradeschool bully that used to wait for me behind a broken fence and twist my ear to make me say obscene things.’
What impinged on Williams’s life as much as his work, as is clear from these pages, was his family. His father appeared in the early entries as a threat and a nuisance, ‘a dormant volcano’; his younger brother Dakin hardly at all; his mother Edwina surprisingly little. But his maternal grandparents, whom he loved, were invoked regularly. His grandmother, also called Rose, was, he wrote in 1941, ‘a miracle of gentleness. A faded golden rose in fading sunlight. The finest thing in my life.’ And the fate of his sister Rose troubled him year after year, flitting through his waking life and his dreams. As he worked with fierce determination on his plays, as he travelled the world like a maniac, as he sought new sexual partners, as he drank and took pills and went to parties, there was always the sense, made clear in many notebook entries, that he was in flight from what was done to his sister. He lived in the shadow of her suffering and there were times when he seemed to seek pleasure and experience enough for two of them.
Rose was sixteen months older than Williams; as children, they were very close. She saw her first psychiatrist when she was twenty-one. In 1937 she was diagnosed with dementia praecox, an early term for schizophrenia. In 1943 she underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy. In notes made in 1979 Williams wrote that his mother ‘approved for my sister to have one of the first pre-frontal lobotomies performed in the States because she was shocked by Rose’s tastefully phrased but explicit disclosures of masturbation practised with Candles stolen from the Chapel, at All Saints in Vicksburg’. Rose lived in institutions from 1943 for the rest of her life.
As Margaret Bradham Thornton makes clear in her copious annotations to these diaries — each right-hand page of Williams’s entries is faced by a left-hand page of informative notes — Rose appeared in various guises in many of Williams’s plays, poems and stories. Her life as it made its way into his imagination is central to his work.
In October 1936 Williams first noted a problem with Rose: ‘The house is wretched. Rose is on one of her neurotic sprees — fancies herself an invalid — talks in a silly dying-off way — trails around the house in negligees. Disgusting.’ Three years later, when the seriousness of her condition was fully clear, Williams wrote an emendation to this: ‘God forgive me for this!’ In January 1937 Williams’s mother wrote to her parents about Rose’s breakdown and her ‘raving on the subject of “sex”… and I was ashamed for Dakin and Tom to hear her the other night’. The same day Williams wrote in his notebook: ‘Tragedy. I write that word knowing the full meaning of it. We have had no deaths in our family but slowly by degrees something was happening much uglier and more terrible than death. Now we are forced to see it, know it. The thought is an aching numbness — a horror!’
By May, when Rose had been moved to an institution, Williams’s mother wrote to her parents once more: ‘Tom and I went out to see Rose Sunday… The visit made Tom ill so I can’t take him to see her again. I can’t have two of them there!’ In September that year, having seen Rose, Williams wrote: ‘No, I haven’t forgotten poor Rose — I beg whatever power there is to save her and spare her from suffering.’ The following year, he saw her again: ‘She is like a person half-asleep now — quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others — She sat with us in a bright sunny room full of flowers — said “yes” to all our questions — looked puzzled, searching for something — sometimes her eyes filled with tears — (So did mine).’
In August 1939 Rose’s medical report read: ‘Does no work. Manifests delusion of persecution. Smiles and laughs when telling of person plotting to kill her. Talk free and irrelevant. Admits auditory hallucinations. Quiet on the ward. Masturbates frequently. Also expresses various somatic delusions, all of which she explains on a sexual basis. Memory for remote past is nil. Appetite good. Well nourished.’
Four months later when Williams had made another visit, he wrote: ‘Visited Rose at sanitarium — horrible, horrible! Her talk was so obscene — she laughed and spoke continual obscenities — Mother insisted I go in, though I dreaded it and wanted to go out and stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards — a cold, unsympathetic young man — he said her condition was so hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration.’
In March 1943, when Rose had a lobotomy, Williams wrote: ‘A cord breaking. 1000 miles away. Rose. Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain. Me. Here. Smoking. My father, mean as a devil, snoring 1000 miles away.’
Rose came to him in dreams in which his identity and hers seemed confused. In December 1948, while crossing the Atlantic, he noted:
Later I dreamed of my sister. Woke up. Then went to sleep and dreamed of her again. At one point I was lying in her bed, the ivory-colored bed: but it was not a dream of incest, although I am at a loss to explain it. I was standing naked in a room. Heard footsteps. Jumped in the bed to cover myself. Discovered it was my sister’s bed. She entered the room. Spoke to me angrily and pulled back the covers. I struggled not to expose my nakedness. She turned away crossly while I got hastily up from the bed. There I woke up.
Four years later in Spain he noted another dream: ‘I’ve dreamed of my sister, seeing her in a cream colored lace dress which I had forgotten. In the dream a lady who looked like my sister wore it — then I had it on and then I was struggling to sit down between two tables and was wedged so tightly between them I couldn’t breathe.’
In later years he saw more of his sister, writing in 1979 in Key West:
My sister Rose, the living presence of truth and faith in my life. If I go abroad to die, I must not leave her, afterwards, in the custody of her present companion, a tasteless woman whose idea of giving Rose a good time is to take her to the Masonic Lodge… Tonight she had dressed Rose for a party at Kate’s in a livid green dress from Woolco’s, as tasteless as possible and as unbecoming. I had said that Rose should have a green dress but I meant to buy it for her myself, in a pastel shade, such as lettuce.
Part of the reason for Williams’s obsession with his sister was his feeling that he, too, could easily have followed her into a mental institution. ‘The shadow of what happened to Rose’ haunted him in the years of his success and in subsequent years when the plays he wrote did not find large audiences or win much praise and he was addicted to various drugs and to alcohol. As early as his visit to her in 1939 he saw the danger for himself, as his mother had two years earlier. He wrote: ‘It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.’ The artist Vassilis Voglis, a friend of Williams’s, told his biographer Donald Spoto: ‘He was devoted to Rose, but in a way she was an extension of himself. He could have had the lobotomy. He felt the outsider, marred in some way. He really cared for her, and perhaps he never really cared for anyone else in his life, ever. And I think he knew it.’
In 1973, speaking of his play
I’ve had a great deal of experience with madness; I have been locked up. My sister was institutionalized for most of her adult life. Both my sister and I need a lot of taking care of… I’m a lonely person, lonelier than most people. I have a touch of schizophrenia in me and in order to avoid madness I have to work.
In his notebooks for 1957, Williams noted that he was ‘stealing a week between New York and the “retreat”… at Stockbridge, assuming I do go there’. He wrote to his mother:
I stayed only five minutes in the Institute. I took one look at the other patients and told Frank to carry my bags right back out to the car. I checked into the local hotel and stayed there over the weekend to make sure that this was not the place for me, then drove back to New York. I think the psychiatrist Dr Kubie who is head of the
