June 1946, Nantucket, Massachusetts

Tennessee Williams is dying. He’s standing on a pier on Nantucket Island, eyeing the overcast sky, exhausted and beset with anxieties. The past few weeks have taken their toll on him. He’s never had ‘such a freakish run of bad luck’ in his life. His initial summer plans – a vacation in Taos, New Mexico, with his boyfriend Pancho – had to be abandoned. He’d started driving there, in a second- or third-hand Packard convertible roadster. But the car broke down, its bearings burnt out, in Alvo, Oklahoma, of all places. At the very same time, his body broke down, too. There was an emergency operation on his appendix, conducted by a group of amateur doctors, fresh out of the army. Then, barely recovered, a fiery incident with Pancho. This young, rakish Mexican American is an angel of goodness, Tennessee thinks, except when he’s drinking. The problem is, he’s always drinking. One evening, apropos of nothing, Pancho tore up all Tennessee’s clothes and smashed his typewriter. Though, strangely, he left his manuscripts intact. Perhaps he sensed that to destroy them might destroy the man.

Against his better judgement, and from a de sperate need to avoid loneliness, Tennessee has ‘permitted’ Pancho to join him on this vacation in Nantucket. The two men have rented accommodation for the summer: 31 Pine Street, a grey, lopsided frame house, equidistant from the cemetery and the shore. But the run of bad luck has followed Tennessee here. The elements are conspiring against him. Two days ago, a storm rolled in, bringing violent winds that shattered all the glass windows. The weather’s been dismal since. Nothing but cold rain and cold air. To make matters worse, a stray, pregnant cat crawled through one of the broken windows and gave birth to a litter of kittens in the downstairs guest bedroom.

Nantucket’s not an entirely arbitrary choice of location. Tennessee has a connection to the island. His father’s side of the family, which carries the name Coffin, ‘flourished’ here a couple of generations ago. There’s a neat irony in the idea of a family of flourishing Coffins; and the notion that Tennessee should return to such a place while convinced of his imminent death makes a twisted, Southern kind of sense. He’s been experiencing severe heart pain, palpitations and cold sweats for weeks now. ‘The physical machine,’ Tennessee writes to a friend, is ‘in a state of collapse, and what may politely be called the spiritual element is crouching in the corner with both hands clasped to its eyes’. The palpitations themselves are nothing new. The strong black coffee he drinks every morning before turning like a ‘blast furnace’ to his typewriter, a necessary antecedent to ‘getting the creative juices flowing’, certainly doesn’t help. But this time his heart feels different. This time it feels serious. It keeps him up at night. It surely signals some terminal condition, the approach of the end of his life.

Now, he and Pancho wait on the pier, bracing themselves for yet another roadblock to their restorative summer getaway. But this one is self-inflicted. Tennessee has invited a guest to join them for a few days. Someone, he believes, to be the greatest living writer in America, if not the world: the young Southern novelist, Carson McCullers. A few weeks ago, in the midst of that run of bad luck, he’d been kept awake all night, chain-smoking cigarettes and wiping away tears. This insomniac turn wasn’t caused by his heart pains, but by Carson’s new novel, The Member of the Wedding. He’d first read her debut, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, some years before, writing to a friend that it is ‘so extraordinary it makes me ashamed of anything I might do [. . .] What a play she could write!’ Disturbed and touched by Member, he hastily penned a fan letter – the first he’d ever written – sending the adulatory missive off to Carson the following morning. On discovering that they had friends in common, he felt inspired to invite her to join him and Pancho in Nantucket. He should like to spend some time with the world’s greatest living writer, he said, before he gave up the ghost. Flattered, McCullers accepted.

The two men scrutinise the ferry’s departing passengers. They don’t know who, exactly, they’re looking for, but expect to spot an austere, sophisticated literary type, a glamorous young woman, standing out in the crowd. But she’s not there. It appears everyone has left. Did she even board the ferry? Just as they head up to see if anyone remains, a tall, tall girl comes down the gangplank, carrying two worse-for-wear suitcases, clad in a man’s shirt, a baseball cap and slacks, and wearing a radiant, crooked grin.

‘Are you Tennessee and Pancho?’ Carson asks.

Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers are both Southern writers. Tennessee hails from Columbus, Mississippi, Carson from Columbus, Georgia. In their work there is a shared tension between a nostalgic yearning for and fondness of the Southern landscape, its people and customs, and a frustration with its stifling social mores, political conservatism and racist heritage. But it isn’t their shared Southern roots alone that unites them. Their work also shares a unique, profound fluency in matters of the human heart, individual loneliness and desire, and the possibilities and failures of love.

Love and desire, for Tennessee and Carson, aren’t forces that can be neatly categorised. They do not fit into boxes. They are wild and fluid, encompassing everything from the spiritual to the base, the erotic to the platonic, the triumphant to the disastrous – and they are experienced by and between all of us, indiscriminate of sexual orientation, gender, class or race. For both writers, this is an essential truth in their work. It’s also an essential truth in their lives: they are both queer, and live openly as such. From his mid-twenties onwards, all Tennessee’s romantic relationships are with men, yet he will attest in interviews that his desires include both men and women; Carson, who married Reeves McCullers in 1937, divorced him in 1942, and remarried him several years later, also fell in love with and romantically pursued women. We might say that they both had a bisexual sensibility, and that they both vouched for and intended to make visible the double-direction, changeability and putative contradictions of love and desire. And both writers routinely, and self-consciously, synthesised real life into their art. To express this essential truth in their works – the fierce, untamed democracy of rangy desire – they critique the forces that seek to obscure it: compulsory heterosexuality and the incoherent, contradictory codes that give structure to gender, particularly masculinity. And they were doing this at a time of intense cultural and societal change, in which the very meanings of sexuality and masculinity were being warred over and newly defined, and an intense, state-sanctioned atmosphere of homophobia and misogyny deliberately implemented.

Carson, at twenty-nine, is six years younger than Tennessee. When she and the playwright first meet in Nantucket, she is in the middle of a tremendous decade of creative endeavour, during which she will write all her major works. Carson has been hailed a genius. A prodigy. An enfant terrible. Or, as one contemporary referred to her, sensing something doomed about her aura (or simply acknowledging her excessive alcohol consumption), a fleur du mal. Indeed, when it comes to her health, it has often seemed that Carson really is doomed. She is the ‘victim of a conspiracy of troubles’, susceptible to pneumonia, viruses and sheer bad luck besides (in 1942, a dentist accidentally broke her jaw bone during a routine molar extraction, which became infected). And this summer in Nantucket is the last she’ll enjoy of relatively fair health, before she is struck with a cerebral stroke in the winter of 1946. Her later years will be tragically beset with rheumatic heart disease, breast cancer and a broken hip, necessitating use of a wheelchair; the resulting nerve damage from these ailments will render her incapable of typing, except by using a single finger, hitting one key at a time.

The book that first earned Carson notoriety was her debut novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, written when she was twenty-two and published a year later, in 1940. It bestowed on her the kind of overnight literary fame that seems almost mythical. In many ways, the publication of Hunter did for Carson’s creative career what the staging of The Glass Menagerie did for Tennessee Williams’. When this play, his Broadway debut, appeared in 1944, it flung him to national and international fame. But Tennessee’s success wasn’t so sudden. Thirty-three years old at the time of Menagerie, Tennessee had spent years in obscurity, vagabonding around the urban wildernesses of America, penning poems, filling up diaries, doggedly pursuing his art but being met with failure after failure, wondering if he’d ever ‘make it’ at all.

Now, in Nantucket, these artists meet as creative equals. Carson has since published two more novels – Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Member of the Wedding – and has twice been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Tennessee, still radiant from the success of Menagerie, is working on several more scripts, sensing – correctly – that his best work lies ahead of him. One of these, currently a few sketchy ideas tentatively titled The Poker Night, will next year become his most famous stage play, A Streetcar Named Desire, and cement his reputation as America’s greatest living playwright.

A shame, then, that he should now be dying.

But with Carson’s arrival, he soon begins to forget all about his heart palpitations. The first afternoon on Nantucket passes in a haze of easy intimacy and excitement. At the pier, the trio embrace. Within minutes of meeting, Tennessee and Carson discover a mutual love for the poetry of Hart Crane, something that helps Tennessee form an instant and instinctive attachment to Carson. Crane – a poet whose tragic fate was suicide by drowning, possibly instigated after he was assaulted in a homophobic attack – is one of Tennessee’s most beloved writers, in whose work he takes solace and inspiration. ‘My personal trinity let me think of them,’ he listed in an early poem, ‘Whitman the brawler, the cosmic-voyager Crane, / and soft-spoken Chekhov on evenings of wind and rain.’

When they return to 31 Pine Street, Carson adores the house. She isn’t bothered by the clutter and mess – the broken windows, the litter of newly born kittens curled up on her guest bed. Perhaps this atmosphere of ‘southern degeneracy’, as Tennessee described it, which he felt had ‘completely triumphed over the brisk New England climate’, made her feel more at home. With Carson’s presence, the house is transformed. She brings an atmosphere of warmth and light. In fact, she appears to have literally brought the sun with her. Almost from the moment of her arrival, the weather improves, and the seawater becomes warm and calm enough for swimming. The trio form a rough routine, heading out to the beach each afternoon, where Tennessee swims so far out that Carson thinks he might actually drown. Later, by candlelight, they fatten up on canned pea soup and diced weenies, or ‘Spuds Carson’, a culinary innovation of hers consisting of potatoes mashed with onions, butter and cheese. Role-playing as cook is a deviation for Carson. In her former home life, before her rise to fame, it would often be her husband, Reeves, who’d take care of the cooking and cleaning while she worked on her writing. After candlelit dinner, cocktails and conversation, Carson plays songs on the piano, or Tennessee reaches for a book of Hart Crane’s poetry – stolen from the St. Louis Library some time ago – and begins to orate, wise to the parallels between Crane’s suicide by drowning and his own reckless swimming escapades.

And then there’s the work. Tennessee has an evergreen, irresistible pull towards work. It’s like an internal motor that propels him through waking life, and he carries Carson into this restless slipstream. The two writers spend mornings sitting at opposite ends of the long dining-room table, working at typewriters, smoking and occasionally passing a bottle of bourbon back and forth. Tennessee encourages Carson to adapt The Member of the Wedding into a stage play, though he doesn’t see himself as her mentor, feeling that he has little by way of creative advice to offer the greatest writer in the world (‘Carson didn’t need me,’ he would later remark, ‘except as a catalyst for herself’). Meanwhile, he’s trying to work out the problems of his next play, Summer and Smoke. It is the only time that Tennessee has felt able to work in the presence of someone else. It is the first time that Carson writes for the stage.

Naturally, such a creative union excludes Pancho, who begins to feel that Carson is competing for Tennessee’s affections. At first, he even thinks that Carson is vying to marry him, though, as the summer progresses, this concern will show itself to be wildly unfounded. Carson is nursing a crush, but not for Tennessee. There’s a small social scene on the island, and the three attend parties together. At one, Carson meets a glamorous baroness, and quickly becomes infatuated. According to Tennessee, Carson would sit up half the night, slowly working her way through a bottle of Johnnie Walker and fantasising about the would-be romance. This particular infatuation occupied Carson’s mind until the baroness visited 31 Pine Street. She had brought her pet dogs with her, and one of the bloodthirsty mutts mauled and killed one of Carson’s adopted kittens. That was the end of that.

The days roll into weeks. Far from exhausting itself in a fire of mutual overzealousness, the relationship between these two writers blossoms. It begins to resemble what Carson, in The Member of the Wedding, might describe as a ‘We of Me’ relationship: a private club, a perfect intermingling of one self and another, an individual coddled into a collective, in a mutually sustaining communion. For Tennessee, the discovery of his and Carson’s friendship seems nothing short of miraculous. He feels that Carson possesses an immediate and intuitive ‘understanding of another vulnerable being’, which enables her to give ‘affectionate compassion’ more freely than almost anyone else he’s ever known. Their summer together forms the foundation of a deep and lasting relationship, one that the two writers seemed almost destined to make.

Image © Europeana

Ralf Webb is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 18th March, 2025.