That Sweet Bird

Walter Dakin Williams, 41, is a captain in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Scott A.F.B. near St. Louis. He is an enthusiastic bridge player, an amateur actor and an occasional writer. In the Roman Catholic magazine Information last week, Captain Williams (a Catholic convert since 1944) discussed his older brother Tom. When he was just a tot back home in Columbus, Miss., Tom had once dug a huge hole in the yard, explaining: "I'm diggin' to de debbil." Today he is digging still, and getting closer--or so it seems to millions who know Tom as Tennessee Williams.

The gist of Dakin's argument is that Tom "is not a 'dirty' writer," that he is really turning out "morality plays." Exposure of Sin. Head on, Walter meets skeptics who find mostly corruption in his brother's work (see above).

The Glass Menagerie is both "positive and healthy," he says, "eulogizes the heroic qualities of human nature in adversity." Admitting the "negative charge" in Tennessee's other plays--he calls Cat on a Hot Tin Roof "a symphony of evil"-Dakin nonetheless finds an implied positive in each. Rape of a sister-in-law (A Streetcar Named Desire), homosexuality (Cat, etc.), cannibalism (Suddenly, Last Summer), garden-variety adultery (Orpheus Descending) and castration (Sweet Bird of Youth} may not be radiant with uplift, but "there can be no valid moral objection to the exposure of this sort of sin in human nature." The only Tennessee Williams product ever condemned by the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, Williams' brother points out, was the film Baby Doll, and the problem there lay more in Hollywood than in Tennessee: the long, "morally offensive" seduction scene between Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach was played without dialogue, and the playwright, therefore, "was not in the least responsible." With Douay-eyed insistence, Dakin reports: "Tennessee is really looking for God ... He is searching for pardon for the sinner in the mercy of an all-loving God ... He believes in God ... He is also aware of his blood relationship to St. Francis Xavier."*

Brotherly Shove. Basically, concludes Dakin Williams, his brother is like one of his own characters: Chance Wayne, who "seeks to recapture his 'sweet bird of youth'--his lost innocence." Adds Dakin: "In a recent conversation, Tennessee confided to me that although he was not certain that any Christian church had as yet discovered God, if it were now necessary for him to make a choice between the various churches, he would choose the Catholic Church."

Captain Williams' article closes with a brotherly shove, as he remembers a day long years ago when little Tom was playing with his toys in the yard and the heavens lowered with thunderheads.

"Please God, don't let it rain until I get my things in," cried the future Tennessee Williams. Warns Brother Dakin: "The clock is ticking loudly"; Tennessee had better find his religious shelter "before the coming rain."

*Williams traces his descent across four centuries to St. Francis' brother Valentine.

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