All budding authors with hopes of fame would do well to befriend someone like William Jay Smith—someone who goes on to write numerous books, becomes his country’s poet laureate, and is still writing strongly as he approaches age 93.
In My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, just out from the University Press of Mississippi, one of America’s greatest playwrights receives a fine testimonial from a fellow author who knew him in his years as an apprentice writer.
Their friendship began when the two young men were undergraduates at Washington University, and organized a writers’ coterie in St. Louis, surrounding themselves with others aspiring to their chosen trade. At that time, Williams’s primary objective was to excel in poetry, even more than in theater.
Smith had been born into a Southern family that had no intention of producing a writer son, even though both parents were accomplished storytellers in the Southern tradition. Smith’s father was a soldier whose job was to play the clarinet in the Sixth Infantry Band, stationed at Jefferson Barracks, just south of St. Louis. There, Smith senior had stalled in his career due to his addictions to alcohol and gambling.
Those maladies, it turned out, would help bring Smith and Tennessee Williams together. The latter’s father was similarly afflicted, living in St. Louis after the family had spent Williams’s first seven years in Mississippi.
Smith joined Williams at Washington University in 1935, and they, together with a poet, Clark Mills, became firm friends. The three met often at Williams’s family home, just off campus. Writes Smith: “We read our poems to one another, feeling as true poets do, that poetry must be heard before it can be committed to the page. And when not reading, in his living room, I looked and listened and thus got to know Tom well and became familiar with all the sights and sounds that he confronted every day and night in that household he depicted so forcefully in The Glass Menagerie,” which would win Williams great acclaim upon its first production in 1945.
At college, however, Williams was a self-consciously short young man struggling to come to terms with his homoerotic desires. His confusion was all the greater due to what Smith calls Williams’s “strong sensual response to girls, who were constantly in his company.” They were, Smith recalls, almost all “bright and pretty” and “spoke quickly and knowledgeably of many modern writers I had never heard of.”
At first, writes Smith, little pointed to Williams’s later emergence and mastery. He was a late bloomer,” Smith says by phone from his home in Cummington, Mass. “But he was always writing. He wrote from a very early age, as I did too.”
Williams was an anxious young man, on many accounts, says Smith: “He was very, very worried about the insanity in his family. He worried about that his entire life.” Much of the pleasure of Smith’s account is in his closely observed evocation of their early friendship. He writes, for example, that one of their circle, Frances Van Meter, was “a tall dark-haired willowy creature who looked, wherever she happened to be, as if she had just risen, naked and fine-boned, from a déjeuner sur l’herbe.”
Of Williams’s sister, later subjected to a lobotomy, Smith writes: “I carry with me the vision of the lonely lovely forever-lost sister Rose drifting in from the shadows, her shrill persecuted voice ruffling the air and rippling her beaded blouse, as she flees the determined drumbeat of the heavy stylishly footed hard-drinking salesman father, Cornelius.”
Thomas “Tom” Lanier Williams, as Smith knew the budding playwright, adopted his famous nom de plume only later, when he decided that since he was submitting some plays to a competition from his grandparents’ home in Memphis, he should sign himself “Tennessee Williams.” Smith writes: “Although Tom later was fond of ascribing the change to a Southern weakness for ‘climbing the family tree’ and to his heritage as a Tennessee pioneer, he really had no idea at the time where the name had come from and where it would take the person that it would come to represent.”
While Williams sought and found fame, Smith pursued his own vocation to write. Even before going on to Columbia University, and then Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, he was publishing poetry. Over the decades, he has published 13 volumes of it, including The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems (Curbstone Press, 2000), an epic sequence of poems describing the removal of Indian tribes East of the Mississippi. That book, which also explores Smith’s own Choctaw heritage, was praised by Harold Bloom who declared it Smith’s “master work: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable.” In Atlantic Monthly in 1998, Elizabeth Frank wrote of Smith’s formal mastery in verse “rooted in the concrete and the sensuous,” but elevated by a “verbal luxury and extravagance” most strongly exemplified in American verse by Wallace Stevens.
A light touch and wry sense of humor have marked his writing, too, particularly in his many poems for children, collected in Laughing Time: Collected Nonsense (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). He began writing such verse when he expanded on an utterance by one of his children, and won the child’s approval.
From 1968 to 1970, Smith was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate. He has published literary criticism and memoirs, edited several anthologies, and won awards for literary translation from the French Academy, the Swedish Academy, and the Hungarian government. He served as a poet in residence at Williams College from 1959 to 1967, and in a similar capacity at Columbia University from 1973 until 1975. He remains a professor emeritus of English at Hollins College.
Smith kept in close touch with Williams until the playwright died, in 1983. From the time of the success of The Glass Menagerie, he writes, Williams “regularly gave my name to reporters, editors, theater and film critics, biographers, teachers—to anyone anywhere who was, he thought, seriously interested in learning about the beginning of his extraordinary career.”
Biographers have made extensive use of Smith’s notes, including Williams’s official biographer, Lyle Leverich. But much is new in My Friend Tom, Smith says. In one endorsement of the book, W. Kenneth Holditch, an editor of Williams’s collected works for the Library of America, agrees, calling My Friend Tom the best book on Williams since Leverich’s.
Smith’s admiration for Williams as playwright is not unalloyed—he is, after all, a literary critic, among his many métiers—but he ends his book by writing: “To Tennessee Williams we owe a special debt. In a tragic age, he has transformed loneliness by naming it for us, suffered sordidness with beauty, graced poor hurt lives with love and pity.”
He says he brought his book to the Mississippi press in good part because he has long wanted to be published by a Southern press. “I have published so many books in so many years,” he says in the interview. “I can’t complain about any lack of attention. But I’ve never been placed as a Southern writer, which I really am. So I was happy finally to be published by someone in the South. I always had good recognition from the Southern writers, but the publishers never took any notice of that.” That stems in part from his growing up in St. Louis, but “I was actually born in Louisiana, and all my life and thoughts and everything else were in Louisiana.”
Age appears to have slowed Smith little, if at all, mentally. However, he says “I still use a typewriter from time to time, but because I can’t type as well as I used to, I really don’t use one very much.” He dictated much of this book from Paris, from his notes, via phone to a secretary in Massachusetts.
Stop and learn to use a computer? No. “Then I wouldn’t be able to get on with other things I want to finish,” he says.
He is preparing an autobiography, now, and says that he’s lining everything up, including several published essays that he’d like to expand and incorporate, so that “If I don’t live to see it through, it would be a fine arrangement for a biographer to go ahead with.”
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