the

  caterpillar dogs

  and

  other early stories

  The West End Lyric Theater on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis

  was near the Williams family home and may be the model for

  the movie theater in “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite.”

  Photo by George Dorrill, 1937.

  Copyright © 2023 by The University of the South

  Copyright © 2023 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  Introduction copyright © 2023 by Tom Mitchell

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories is published by special arrangement

  with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 1556 in 2023

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Williams, Tennessee, 1911–1983, author. | Mitchell, Tom (Stage director), editor.

  Title: The caterpillar dogs : and other early stories / Tennessee Williams ;

  edited, with an introduction by Tom Mitchell.

  Description: First edition. | New York : New Directions Publishing, 2023.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022050575 | ISBN 9780811232326 (paperback) |

  ISBN 9780811232333 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3545.I5365 C38 2023 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20221020

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050575

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: Episodes from the Life of a Clerk

  The Caterpillar Dogs

  Season of Grapes

  Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite

  Ironweed

  They Go Like a Thistle, He Said

  Till One or the Other Gits Back

  Stair to the Roof

  Editor’s Note

  Landmarks

  Cover

  * * *

  Introduction:

  EPISODES FROM

  THE LIFE OF A CLERK

  In 1932, after three years and no degree from the University of Missouri, Thomas Lanier Williams began laboring as an anonymous clerk for the next three years, typing orders, checking inventory, and secretly scribbling poems on shoebox lids in the St. Louis headquarters of the International Shoe Company. Never supportive of his son’s academic ambitions, Cornelius Williams finally lost patience with Tom, as he was then known, when he flunked ROTC. He insisted that the young man withdraw from the university to take a job at the shoe company where Cornelius was a sales manager. Leaving college on the verge of his senior year was humiliating; Tom gave up friendships and the first independence he had known, transitioning from the free-wheeling campus atmosphere to a dysfunctional household and a complex, polluted city. Toiling at home in the evenings, Tom composed poems, one-act plays, and short stories that he submitted to magazines and contests. Writing was his means of escape.

  The Williams household was filled with turmoil, a family situation that had been rocky since his early childhood. The Williamses had moved from the small Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi to St. Louis in 1918, when Tom was seven years old. Though he spent his next school year and many summers with his grandparents in Clarksdale, the family’s relocation to St. Louis permanently changed the trajectory of Tom’s life. His mother, Edwina, a pampered, sexually repressed minister’s daughter prone to hysteria and paranoia, was ill-equipped to cope with raising a family, let alone doing so in the crowded city of St. Louis. Fueled by Cornelius’s gambling and heavy drinking, the two fought constantly as they moved the family from one rented flat to another in search of comfort and status. Throughout their school years, Tom and his older sister Rose found themselves outsiders among their classmates in one school after another. Tom grew to rely on his sister for stability, but during their adolescence Rose began to show signs of a mental break, her outbursts and preoccupations eventually becoming more intense and often of a sexual nature.

  Rose and Tom were teenagers during the liberated Roaring Twenties, but in their home Edwina would shut-down any mention of sex or intimacy. Nevertheless, when Tom went to college, he provided his sister with tantalizing gossip about fraternity life on campus. Rose, in turn, sent her brother the racy Ballyhoo magazine full of naughty comics and suggestive parodies, and referred to herself as “a smoking, dancing, card-playing Sunday School teacher.” Despite her expression of boldness, Rose’s mental state precluded any serious love affairs, and although he was drawn to the scandalous novels of D.H. Lawrence, Tom’s social life in St. Louis was limited, his romantic life was non-existent, and his sexual orientation unclear.

  Outside the Williams home, St. Louis was in the grip of the Great Depression. A riot outside City Hall led to the death of a Black man shot by police while protesting the city government’s lack of compassion for the poor. Labor strikes shut down major companies. Unemployed youth hopped aboard freight cars that crisscrossed the city. A “Hooverville” of makeshift shelters stretched along the Mississippi River, where the Gateway Arch now stands. Racial and ethnic neighborhoods shifted as the economy displaced residents. Williams befriended leaders in the Communist Party-allied Union of St. Louis Artists and Writers. Joe Jones, from the organization, taught art classes for unemployed African American men until police locked them out of their studio for creating a mural critical of civic and religious leaders. Another associate of Tom Williams, the author Jack Conroy, published fiery proletarian novels, and local author Josephine Johnson received the Pulitzer Prize for Now in November, a novel about the crushing economic burden felt by Missouri farmers. In Tom Williams’s neighborhood, radical students from Washington University marched in the streets, and progressive theatre groups produced anti-war and pro-labor plays—he found himself amidst the swirling political and artistic energy of the city, which influenced his early writing.

  Tom’s workdays were filled typing forms, delivering boxes, and taking orders from impersonal bosses. His days ended writing in isolation, shut away in his small room to spite his father, avoid his mother, and hide from his sister. Already honing his skill as a keen observer of life, he wrote about the characters around him: in poetry and short plays, as well as stories, he imagined their inner lives, ambitions, and deceptions, and in this way, he also began to write about himself. Based on his success as a writer of short fiction in high school when his 1928 story “The Vengeance of Nitocris” was published in Weird Tales, he submitted stories to literary magazines identifying himself as an “undiscovered” talent. Following up on awards he’d received in collegiate writing competitions, he submitted work for contests to groups such as the St. Louis Writers’ Guild where his stories gained more recognition. He won their first prize for his story “Stella for Star,” and in a letter to novelist Josephine Johnson, he wrote, “As you are the only member of the Writers’ Guild with whom I have any personal acquaintance, I am addressing this note of thanks to you and hope you will extend it verbally to the rest of the Guild and the contest judges.” His letter continued with a self-assessment of his writing. “It is full of bombastic irrelevancies, the characters aren’t logically developed, and the romantic spirit . . . is almost unbearably sweet. But I was only trying to create a single, poetic effect and think I may have succeeded a little in doing that.”

  A month after receiving the St. Louis Writers’ Guild award in 1935, Tom Williams had a nervous breakdown, most likely brought on by his soul-crushing job and news of the engagement of his childhood friend, Hazel Kramer, whom he had long dreamed of marrying. To heal from this collapse, Tom was sent to Memphis for the summer with his grandparents, and while there, he began to write plays in earnest. When he returned to St. Louis, Williams joined a dynamic amateur theatre group, The Mummers, and forged a new identity as a playwright. Two years later, he left St. Louis for the playwriting program at the University of Iowa, after which he finally escaped his family and migrated to New Orleans in 1939. He changed his identity from Thomas Lanier Williams to Tennessee Williams. Most of the stories written during his youth in St. Louis were stored away in his mother’s basement while the author turned his attention primarily to the theater.

  The young Tennessee Williams found escape from his difficult family and meaningless job by writing. His experience of life in an industrial city undergoing dramatic social change permeated his writing in the 1930s. Although Tom Williams never hopped the trains, never took a role in local politics, or marched in the streets, as a young writer he was a romantic proletarian, or as scholar Christopher Bigsby has referred to him, “a radical of the heart.” The stories collected here are sketches of fellow citizens. They are “Episodes from the Life of a Clerk,” specifically from the life of the anonymous clerk, Tom Williams, working in the International Shoe Company’s downtown skyscraper. The characters, like their author, find themselves in a
society gripped by economic depression and undergoing enormous social change: a love-sick college student, a retired clergyman, a vacationing stenographer, shotgun-toting lovers, the son of Polish immigrants, ancestor of Spanish conquistadors, and a desperate clerk very much like Williams himself. In each episode, Williams revealed their truth, writing them with empathy, humor, and courage.

  Tom Mitchell

  * * *

  the

  caterpillar dogs

  and

  other early stories

  * * *

  The Caterpillar Dogs

  In the summer of her eighty-ninth year, Miss Angela De Menjos seemed for the first time rather close to refuting the ancient hypothesis that wealthy spinsters never die. In body she was as perniciously hale as ever. But her terrible old mind showed signs of a rapid deterioration. All of her life she had lived with a frustrated violence. Now a terrible calm was coming upon her. She kept moving constantly around her little flat in the fashionable West End; she nearly worked her middle-aged housekeeper to death by disarranging things as soon as they were put straight. She would yank the covers off of beds, rip curtains from their rods and pictures from the walls, overturn chairs, and scatter silver about the floor. But there was nothing tempestuous in her movements. They were all performed with a deadly, resolute calm. Her tongue, too, was singularly quiet. Sometimes it even seemed that she had lost the faculty of speech. Only her large black eyes still blazed under the huge, bluish-black wig that she wore.

  Angela De Menjos was the last of her line. It was a line of Castilian adventurers, conquistadors, and pirates. It is doubtful if, for hundreds of years, any of the De Menjoses had known two consecutive hours of real peace. One branch had sailed with Cortez and settled in Mexico, amassed huge lands, and lived in continual strife with their neighbors. The other branch had taken to buccaneering; sailed on the Spanish Main for several generations; finally settled in Georgia in time for the colonial rebellion. Through a strange series of events the last of the Georgia branch of the De Menjoses, a high-spirited young girl, had met and married the last of the Mexican branch, a fiery young Don. Their only child was Angela, who was unfortunately born a little more woman than man. In her blood was all the fury and courage of the conquistadors, and all the savagery and lawlessness of the buccaneers. But she was born too late for the Spanish Main. There were no more worlds to conquer. She was not even well-fitted for the minor warfare of love. Her nature was too masculine and her body too ugly to appeal to any but the most arrant fortune-hunters, and those she understood and despised. When she was nearly twenty her mother shot her father in a fit of unhappy passion, and then turned the pistol upon herself. From then on, Angela had roamed the world looking for trouble and found practically none. Thirty years ago, she had settled down in Saint Louis. Settled down geographically speaking. Even in this quiet, Middle-Western city she had lived with a frustrated fury. Belatedly passion had come into her life. She fell very much in love with a young coachman whom she employed her first winter in Saint Louis. She remained in the city for three years on his account; he was married and wouldn’t leave. After breaking with him in a scene of terrible violence (she hammered him over the head with a whip handle till he was insensible), she continued to live in the city because her wealth and eccentricity had made her a local celebrity, especially around the apartment-hotels among which she rotated. She went in for a long series of gigolo-chauffeurs. Their artificial passion gave her little satisfaction. She employed a different one every two or three months, often breaking into print, and having to pay heavy fines for inflicting violence upon them. At about seventy, sexual passion smoldered out of her nature. Then her life became indeed a torturing frustration. She traveled around a little more, spent two seasons in an Alpine sanitarium, visited many psychiatrists in London, Paris, and Vienna, tried all kinds of cures for all kinds of imaginary ailments. Thinking she had cancer, she returned to Saint Louis to die. But remained there in excellent health for fifteen years more . . . till the summer of her eighty-ninth year, when this terrific, silent calm began to settle over her mind, indicating that the end must be near.

  For the last three years, Angela had kept a middle-aged housekeeper to look after her little flat. The woman was a fat widow, invested with such a cowish tranquility that even this ancient daughter of conquistadors and buccaneers could seldom ruffle her spirit. She had one consuming interest and that was dogs. To her distress, Miss De Menjos would not tolerate a dog around the place. She seemed, indeed, to have a special detestation for the animals. As her mistress’s mind began to fail, however, the housekeeper conceived a very cunning deceit. She bought a pair of beautiful, fluffy-brown Pekinese and kept them in the cellar of the apartment. When Miss De Menjos heard them barking or saw them scampering about the courtyard of the apartment and enquired furiously whence they had issued, the housekeeper said that they belonged to the young lady across the hall.

  For some peculiar reason, all of the old spinster’s ebbing fury concentrated itself that summer upon the twin Pekinese. Whenever she heard their small, shrill yapping in the courtyard she would fairly boil. Presumably because of their furry, horizontal appearance, she called them the caterpillar dogs. Leaning out of her window, she would try vainly to shoo them out of the courtyard, waving her stick and hissing, “Scat, scat, you caterpillar dogs! Scat!”

  But the dogs were peculiarly unperturbed by her enmity. Once in a while they would lift their black pug faces toward her window and stare coldly up at her with large, shining brown eyes. Then they would wag their fluffy brown plumes and scamper about the yard as peacefully as ever. If they had returned her fury, barking at her or showing any sign of resentment, she would have felt better. Their complete indifference to her existence drove her nearly mad.

  Finally she called up the young lady across the hall. She was so agitated that her voice was barely intelligible over the phone. She kept repeating, “I won’t have them snuffing about my garden, those nasty caterpillar dogs!”

  When eventually the young lady understood what she was talking about and had any chance of reciprocal speech, she angrily disclaimed any connection with the dogs, reminded Angela that the courtyard was not her exclusive property, and finally, and most infuriatingly, expressed a hearty approval of the twin Pekinese.

  One Saturday afternoon toward the end of July the occupants of the apartments were treated to an exciting spectacle in the courtyard. While the Pekinese were out for a little air, trotting and snuffing around the flower-bordered court, Miss De Menjos suddenly emerged from her wing of the building, flourishing a long and glittering cutlass. This was a relic that had been handed down to her from the buccaneering branch of the De Menjos family. With this well-preserved weapon, which had been steeped in the blood of countless sailors and sea-captains, red-coats, Mexicans, and Yankees (some De Menjos having wielded it in every American war since the Revolution), the last of the blood-lusting De Menjoses pursued the twin Pekinese round and round the courtyard. No one, not even the housekeeper, who loved the two dogs as her own soul, dared to intervene in this terrible chase. The janitor, who had been watering the lawn, turned his hose full upon Miss De Menjos, thinking that a cold shower might restore her senses. With a piratical yell and flourish of the cutlass, she put him headlong to rout, cutting a gash in the cuff of his pants as he leapt over the hedge. Then she resumed her chase of the dogs. Foolishly, they declined to seek shelter in the building, although the housekeeper held the door open and called them wildly. Indeed, they seemed not to appreciate the seriousness of their situation. Narrowly evading the cutlass time after time, they continued to scamper around Miss De Menjos’s maniacal figure. They barked joyously, apparently thinking that this was a little game. Whenever she turned to slash at one of them the other would jump behind her and snap at her skirts. For a woman of eighty-nine years she moved with an amazing energy. But the caterpillar dogs were too much for her. She tired quickly. Her breath came in long, horrible gasps, and her form tottered this way and that. But the cutlass never dropped; it never ceased wildly slashing the air! Her face glistened red with sweat and fury; her great eyes sparkled like black flames. Her wig slipped down on her forehead. Her voice cracked and quivered ecstatically as she shrieked invectives in English and Spanish at the gay Pekinese. For the first time in her life she was fully enjoying herself. The gigolo-chauffeurs had been passive beneath her blows. They had been too terrified to strike back. Here at last was something that would engage with her in physical combat. Here at last was something that snapped at her and barked and flew menacingly around her figure. Here was something of what she had been wanting all her life.