Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs and biographies: Childhood onset of alternate personalities and memory gaps, symptoms of multiple personality

Childhood

“My first eight years of childhood in Mississippi were the most joyously innocent of my life…That world…ended…for me, by an illness diagnosed…as diphtheria with complications. It lasted a year, was nearly fatal, and changed my nature as drastically as it did my physical health. Prior to it, I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature. During the illness, I learned to play, alone, games of my own invention…

“During this period of illness and solitary games, my mother’s overly solicitous attention planted in me the makings of a sissy…I was becoming a decided hybrid…” (1, pp. 11-12).

“…it was in my sixteenth year that my deep nervous problems approached what might well have been a crisis…My adolescent problems took their most violent form in a shyness of pathological degree…for the next four or five years, I would blush whenever a pair of human eyes, male or female (but mostly female since my life was spent mostly among members of that gender) would meet mine…

“I don’t think I had effeminate mannerisms but somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden…Well, the school maiden imprisoned in my hidden self, I mean selves, did not need a frown to make her tremble, she needed only a glance” (1, pp. 16-17).

Switches Personalities like Charles Dickens

“According to [Gore] Vidal, who on occasion wrote in the same room as Williams, the playwright entered entirely into his imaginary world while working;  he was ‘so absorbed that, as he was typing, he was acting out what his characters were doing’ “ (2, p. 35).

Comment: Maybe he was just “acting out” what his characters were doing. But this sounds like how Charles Dickens’s daughter described her father at work. And Dickens was probably not just “acting out” his characters, but was probably switching personalities, from his regular personality to each character’s personality and back again. Search “Dickens” in this blog for my essay on Dickens, which discusses that whole scenario.

“Absentmindedness” (Memory Gaps)

“For those who were forever picking up after him, or, like his [college] roommates, organizing around him, his absentmindedness was hardly endearing. In fact, it could be damned exasperating. Tom’s [his real name] skipping classes or missing exams wasn’t so much deliberate as that he simply forgot them. If this neglect had been willful laziness, it would never have been tolerated. But he had an air of sheer helplessness, even desperation at times, that made all but the hardened want to help him. He was a dependent, and while he hated it, he also relied upon it—which is to say, discovering its power, he was not above using it. And in this, he would never change” (3, p. 110).

Comment: Search “absent-mindedness,” “memory gap(s),” and “paradoxical memory” in this blog, for relevant previous posts, to understand the significance of this.

Persecutor Alternate Personality (Since Childhood)

“…in his journal…he addressed the ‘enemy inside myself’—an essential division in his personality that would plague him and manifest itself in patterns of contradictory behavior throughout the years to come. It would divide him not only against himself but often against those closest to him, leading him to characterize himself as ‘half-mad’…

Journal Entry: “A little crazy blue devil has been with me all day. I wish I could shake him off and walk alone and free in the sunlight once more. There is one part of me that could always be very happy and brave and even good if the other part was not so damned ‘pixilated.’ ”

“…Not until he was thirty-two did he finally confide in a friend the torment of the blue devils and the fact that he had first become conscious of the specter when he was ten years old” (3, pp. 174-175).

Note: Search past post on "persecutor personalities" to understand what these are and the common part they play in multiple personality.

1. Tennessee Williams. Memoirs. Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1975.

2. John Lahr. Tennessee Williams. New York, W. W. Norton, 2014.

3. Lyle Leverich. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York, Crown, 1995.