Who Were the Other Twelve?: Tennessee Williams's Lowly Beginnings

If you saw all the books that pile up in my cubicle week after week, you'd realize why my wife was ecstatic to have found a book for me for Hanukkah that I neither had already nor really knew about, but was thrilled to get: Tennessee Williams's Notebooks, the gigantic and complete edition that came out a couple of years ago. I'm not sure there's any kind of book I like to get more than diaries or journals, especially a writer's: in part because I love to see the daily lives behind creative work, but in part because a diary, like a good reference book, can be squeezed into my already-fully-booked reading life in tiny, random bits. And so the Notebooks have taken a prominent place on the short stack of books in one of the rooms in my house where, ahem, a get a fair amount of short-term reading done, along with longterm favorites that I've been poking in and out of for years, like Cheever's Journals and Brian Eno's Year with Swollen Appendices.

I mention the Notebooks this evening because I just came across a note that still has me shaking my head. One of the beauties of this edition is that Margaret Bradham Thornton, the editor, has added voluminous, wonderfully informative notes (as well as photographs and facsimiles of letters, manuscripts, and diary pages) that appear on facing pages to the notebook entries and, far from overwhelming the main content, flesh it out in fascinating ways. I must say I hardly know anything about Williams, beyond what almost everybody does, and I've done my first poking around at the beginning, in 1936, when he was a college student in St. Louis. He was in his mid-20s, his education having been delayed for a few years after his father stopped paying his tuition and made him take a job as clerk at a shoe company, but he wrote indefatigably throughout--writing and rewriting stories, poems, and plays--despite only the most moderate of successes. Here's his short entry from March 20, 1936:

Friday Morning -- Better -- much better -- a bright cool windy day -- slept soundly -- feel like a patient old cow -- will finish dressing now and later try to finish my play --

And here's the beginning of the much longer note that links from the word "play":

Most likely, "Moony's Kid Don't Cry," an expanded version of "Hot Milk at Three in the Morning," which had received thirteenth place in the University of Missouri's 1932 Dramatic Prize Contest.

Thirteenth place? I'm not even sure where to begin with that. First of all--what contests even go all the way down to thirteenth? Not even Miss America goes past fourth-runner-up. And who would expect someone who finished #13 in an undergraduate play competition to end up becoming maybe the greatest American playwright? Probably nobody besides #13 himself. Certainly one proof of that writing-workshop truism that there's usually no way to tell who in a class, if anyone, is going to end up making a career out of their writing--it's often not the apparent talent on the page that gets you there, but the drive to stick with it.

I wonder how many people were even in that contest. Fourteen? Maybe more people were writing plays in 1932, but I remember when a friend in college won our drama prize one year I thought--okay, enviously perhaps--"That's pretty cool--but how many people wrote a whole play and entered that contest?" I have no idea, but it's worth noting that the runner-up in that year's competition is now writing the book for U2's Spider-Man musical. So the lesson is, I guess: stick with it, even if you don't finish first. Or even twelfth. --Tom