Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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table and chair. Primed with coffee and cigarettes, he would type out poems till 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. When his mother opened his door in the morning, calling out "Rise and shine, rise and shine," as Amanda does in Menagerie, stale smoke billowed out, and she would some times find Tom sprawled across his bed still clothed.

After three years, says Williams, "I guess I willed myself into a nervous breakdown." Recuperating with his grandparents in Memphis that summer, he wrote his first play: Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!, about two sailors who pick up a couple of girls. He had never seen a sailor. In the next few years, returning to St. Louis, he churned out scripts about miners (unseen), munitions makers (unseen), prison convicts roasted alive (unseen) and a flophouse (visited). A quasi-bohemian theater group called the Mummers staged them.

He also belonged to the St. Louis Poets Workshop, a group of young poets who believed, even as young poets still do (see BOOKS), that they were part of a poetic revival. Williams' poetry, then and later, was lyrical, evocative and intensely personal.

Williams worked at that time in a kind of basement garret with Clark Mills, a fellow poet. Mills introduced him to a one-foot shelf of influences: Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Chekhov, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane, who became Williams' poetic idol. Tom introduced Mills to Rose. As Mills recalls it, Mrs. Williams "commanded Tom to bring home 'gentleman callers,' " as Tom Wingfield does in Menagerie; "Williams' poor sister was dressed in old-fashioned Southern costumes. She was very lovely. She never talked at all. Mrs. Williams never stopped talking—empty verbiage about their status in the South. The mother didn't give her a chance."

Rose, suffering from schizophrenia, became convinced that people were trying to poison her, that men were following her. Psychiatrists gave the Williamses two alternatives: commit Rose to an asylum or risk a prefrontal lobotomy, a much-questioned operation. Williams' parents signed the paper for the operation, which left Rose calmed, often lucid, but incapable of recovery. Guilt at his inability to help his sister engulfed Williams, and she still haunts his memory and imagination. Rose is now in a mental hospital in Westchester County, N.Y., and Williams pays upwards of $1,000 a month for her care. When in New York, he visits her every Sunday.

Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo. By 1938, Williams had managed to finish his schooling, at St. Louis' Washington University and at the University of Iowa, and he applied for a job with the WPA writers' project. He was rejected for lack of "social content," and settled for work as a waiter in a 25¢-a-meal restaurant in New Orleans. There he dived into a world of jazz, bars, pimps and sexual outcasts that populate his first short-story collection, called One Arm. He also officially adopted his nickname of Tennessee ("Tom Williams was rather dull").

From New Orleans, he submitted four full-length plays and a batch of one-acters to a New York contest being judged by Harold Clurman, Irwin Shaw and Molly Day Thatcher (Mrs. Elia Kazan). Then he headed for California in a 1934. Ford owned by a clarinet player named James Parrott. It was a Kerouwacky rhapsody of the road. They siphoned gas out of