I am spending more time thinking about what I could be saying rather than saying it. Around the time of my mother’s death on February 1, 2007, and for a couple of years after that, I seemed to have lots on my mind that I guess I just needed to get out of that crowded space. Although I know about as much about a digital camera as I can store on the head of a pin, sometimes the camera has been a good friend to me. I would hardly leave my home without the camera, just in case I saw something that seemed important to me at the time. For several years I took so many photos that they now number in the thousands and have made the migration across three different laptops. When I bought a new MacBook Pro last October, the Apple store in Albuquerque had a serious challenge in getting all of the photos onto the new laptop. Now it seems that I am not nearly so camera-driven.
So what’s going on? Not so much in the way of words, at least nothing much that sends me to the keyboard. A digital camera, the current one soon to be five years old, that more often than not remains somewhere in my house when I head out to my vehicle or onto to the street for a walk that is pretty much a daily part of my life in New Mexico. A friend in Santa Fe who has been one of the recipients of my blog at times told me before I left for my current sojourn in Texas that he enjoys receiving my blog from Texas. It has been a scant offering in this late winter/early spring of 2012. Is it possible that what I’ve needed to say in words and pictures has been said? I doubt that—seriously, I doubt that.
I’m realizing that I have felt much less driven for some time. Chalk it up to getting old, going inside with some resolve, being bored with too many people offering too many opinions. More and more I just think about things, and I wonder—I wonder a lot.
I’m mid-way through the authorized biography of Tennessee Williams that with sometimes tedious detail covers the first 34 years of his life, through the publication of “The Glass Menagerie”. I’ve long been a fan of Williams’s work, my introduction being my high school’s production of “The Glass Menagerie” for University Interscholastic League one-act play competition around 1960. I can see the faces of Amanda, Laura, and Tom, and I can even remember the first names of the young actors who played Amanda and Laura. “Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…” (Tom, Scene Seven) So Tom Wingfield implores, as he grapples to get released from the clutches of his family, one based closely on Tom (Tennessee) Williams's own family. I was touched, most likely to the point of being silent—because I likely didn’t know what to say. I just knew in my heart that I had witnessed something that mattered deeply in a life-affirming way—at least to me, if seemingly not to most of the other kids seated in that auditorium. Why do I remember snickers? No doubt, the story touched nerves that causes discomfort in lots of people, especially unsophisticated teenagers. We weren’t country folk—our family—but we did live in a rural area. It was the era of Eisenhower, even though my social conscience was very much attached to John F. Kennedy and the soon-to-come Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Most of my experience with Tennessee Williams has come through the films based on his stage works—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, and more—produced on film as I was graduating from high school and going through college in the 1960s. It was a great time in the history of film, and the time in my life that I realized my love for the written and spoken word. I had a lot of catching up to do—and in no way made a dent over the next 10-20 years. But I did make my way through much of the wealth of work produced by southern writers. To this day, my favorite stories are still rooted in the south of my heritage.
As I read Lyle Leverich’s biography of Tennessee Williams, I am often struck by the very ordinariness of the letters and journal entries quoted from Williams’s papers. Yet they tell so much about a young man who was in many ways at the mercy of his family— a controlling mother without whose financial and emotional support, along with his maternal grandparents, Williams simply wouldn’t have made it; a father from whom he was alienated, only to acknowledge later in his life how much he wanted an emotional relationship with his father; his inability, or perhaps unwillingness, well into his late 20s to acknowledge his homosexuality. A short story writer, a poet, a playwright— a playwright known for his poetic language, and characters in struggling circumstances elevated to some level of universality. Nothing ordinary about that. Tennessee Williams’s life was so totally about his choices, choices like for everyone that grow out of our family experience.
Each time I come back to Texas— when I spend a few weeks each fall and spring here in the 2-story barn that became my home now more than a decade ago, when I am in daily contact with family—I am caused to mull over these roots of mine. Even though it is not really a case of loving it or not, these roots are what they are. I’ve been all over the outside and inside of them, only to have the same questions, but fortunately, with more resignation, more acceptance, more peace. This time I have visited a long-lost family cemetery on my mother’s German side, and I’ve become a little connected to cousins who are third or fourth in the lineage of cousins, some of whom I’ve met only a time or two. I’ve had more contact with some of the stories about closer relatives from that family and their turmoil. I am thankful for all of it, thankful that I have the choice of not being embroiled in matters that I cannot impact. It’s one thing not to care, another thing entirely to be wary of tar babies and to distance oneself from them.
It is a rainy, spring Sunday morning in east Texas. For the last five weeks I’ve had the luxury of hearing rain on the metal roof of this barn. I’ve had the luxury of hearing and seeing the birds that populate the sanctuary surrounding this place and the luxury of seeing and smelling the fruits of spring, including 20-plus rose bushes that are seeing happier times for the first time in at least a couple of years. While I might not feel much of a need to put it all down in writing, or catch it all in digital format, I nonetheless appreciate it. And I give thanks that I don’t feel so driven to make sense of it all. Some things—maybe most things—are just what they are.
Some Thoughts on Tennessee Williams—Normangee, Texas (April 15, 2012)
R. Harold Hollis
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