breakfast for the children when CC arrived home after an all-night bender. “I made the mistake of protesting, not realizing how much under the influence of liquor he was,” she wrote in her diary. “He flew into a rage and threatened me. I locked my door and tried to reason with him through the closed door. ‘Open that door or I’ll bust it in!’ Before I could obey the command he had suited the action to the word, the lock broke, the door flew open striking me in the nose and knocking me to the floor where I lay dazed. Meanwhile Rose wakens, hears the commotion, sees me lying on the floor with nose bleeding and rushes into the hall screaming, ‘Help, he is killing her!’ ” In
Battle of Angels
, Williams captured something of the toxic marriage. “And I—I had to endure him!” Myra tells Val about her husband. “Ahh, my flesh always crawled when he touched me.”
Edwina liked to say that CC loved only “two breathing things: Dakin and the dog in the house.” (Edwina’s nickname for CC was “Neal,” which was also the name of one of their dogs.) CC took Dakin with him to Cardinals baseball games and to Ruggeri’s steak house for a seventy-five-cent T-bone. To Rose, however, he could be withering. Once, after she danced for him, CC remarked, “Just like a moo-cow.” And to his un-athletic, morbidly shy, and effeminate first son—the first male to replace him in Edwina’s affections—CC could be annihilating. He ridiculed him as “Miss Nancy”; when Williams flunked ROTC, in his third year at the University of Missouri—an insult to the military heritage of the Williams family—CC took the draconian measure of withdrawing him from the university and putting him to work at the International Shoe Company—a job that Williams characterized as “designed for insanity . . . a living death.” Despite his son’s complaints and subsequent breakdown, the hard-nosed CC contended that Tom’s sixty-five dollars a month was “a whole lot more than he was worth.” “Dad resented any money Mother spent on Tom, and violent arguments were precipitated by bills Mother incurred at Famous-Barr for clothes for Tom,” Dakin recalled.
Rose Williams as a teenager
Williams never sought or got much approval from CC. “Off and on he would make abortive efforts to show affection, would ask me to go downtown to the movies with him,” he wrote to the critic Kenneth Tynan of their childhood relationship. “I would go but would be frozen stiff with fear of him and, being defeated repeatedly, he gave up.” “I think he loved me,” Williams said of his father, but he was never quite sure. His reaction to CC’s fiats was not titanic fury but “desolation,” he recalled. “[Tom] did not defy his father. I can only guess what this must have cost him psychically,” Edwina said. “I had begun to regard Dad’s edicts as being—as far as I was concerned—too incomprehensibly and incontestably Jovian to feel about them anything but what a dead-tired animal feels when it’s whipped on further,” Williams said. “Of course, under this hopeless non-resistance there must have been an unconscious rage, not just at Dad but my own cowardice and impotent submission. This I realize because as I have grown older I have discovered a big underground rebellion that was there all along, just waiting for a way out.”
Well into his adulthood, Williams continued to see his combustible father through the lens of his mother’s disillusionment. “It was like walking on eggs every minute of the day and night,” Edwina said of her marriage. “Cold, cold, cold / was the merciless blood of your father,” Williams’s poem “Cortege” begins. It continues, “She passed him and crept sidewise / down the stairs, / loathing the touch / of the doorknob he had clasped, / hating the napkin / he had used at the table.” While working on
The Glass Menagerie
in St. Louis in 1943, Williams wrote to Windham, “The old man has just
Battle of Angels
, Williams captured something of the toxic marriage. “And I—I had to endure him!” Myra tells Val about her husband. “Ahh, my flesh always crawled when he touched me.”
Edwina liked to say that CC loved only “two breathing things: Dakin and the dog in the house.” (Edwina’s nickname for CC was “Neal,” which was also the name of one of their dogs.) CC took Dakin with him to Cardinals baseball games and to Ruggeri’s steak house for a seventy-five-cent T-bone. To Rose, however, he could be withering. Once, after she danced for him, CC remarked, “Just like a moo-cow.” And to his un-athletic, morbidly shy, and effeminate first son—the first male to replace him in Edwina’s affections—CC could be annihilating. He ridiculed him as “Miss Nancy”; when Williams flunked ROTC, in his third year at the University of Missouri—an insult to the military heritage of the Williams family—CC took the draconian measure of withdrawing him from the university and putting him to work at the International Shoe Company—a job that Williams characterized as “designed for insanity . . . a living death.” Despite his son’s complaints and subsequent breakdown, the hard-nosed CC contended that Tom’s sixty-five dollars a month was “a whole lot more than he was worth.” “Dad resented any money Mother spent on Tom, and violent arguments were precipitated by bills Mother incurred at Famous-Barr for clothes for Tom,” Dakin recalled.
Rose Williams as a teenager
Williams never sought or got much approval from CC. “Off and on he would make abortive efforts to show affection, would ask me to go downtown to the movies with him,” he wrote to the critic Kenneth Tynan of their childhood relationship. “I would go but would be frozen stiff with fear of him and, being defeated repeatedly, he gave up.” “I think he loved me,” Williams said of his father, but he was never quite sure. His reaction to CC’s fiats was not titanic fury but “desolation,” he recalled. “[Tom] did not defy his father. I can only guess what this must have cost him psychically,” Edwina said. “I had begun to regard Dad’s edicts as being—as far as I was concerned—too incomprehensibly and incontestably Jovian to feel about them anything but what a dead-tired animal feels when it’s whipped on further,” Williams said. “Of course, under this hopeless non-resistance there must have been an unconscious rage, not just at Dad but my own cowardice and impotent submission. This I realize because as I have grown older I have discovered a big underground rebellion that was there all along, just waiting for a way out.”
Well into his adulthood, Williams continued to see his combustible father through the lens of his mother’s disillusionment. “It was like walking on eggs every minute of the day and night,” Edwina said of her marriage. “Cold, cold, cold / was the merciless blood of your father,” Williams’s poem “Cortege” begins. It continues, “She passed him and crept sidewise / down the stairs, / loathing the touch / of the doorknob he had clasped, / hating the napkin / he had used at the table.” While working on
The Glass Menagerie
in St. Louis in 1943, Williams wrote to Windham, “The old man has just
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