constructive done so far except a brief meeting with Ashton, Director of the WPA Theater, who told me to see a young lady about submitting my scripts—think I'll do that tomorrow. I must do something. Somebody has just moved in the room next door—even a stranger across a wall is comforting to me in this state. “Wayfarer though he might be, Torn was discovering the brutal truth that escape from his father's jailhouse did not in and of itself set him free from the self-imprisonment of his anxieties. . . “Once Tom was living in the French Quarter, it didn't take him long to cast off the garb and other telltale aspects of a tourist: New Year's Day—1939—What a nite! I was introduced to the artistic and Bohemian life of the Quarter with a bang! All very interesting, some utterly appalling. New Orleans and Tennessee Williams had found each other.” . . . [Some years later Tennessee wrote a play titled Vieux Carré, describing the setting thusly:] "TIME: The period between winter 1938 and spring 1939. “PLACE: A rooming house, No. 722 Toulouse Street, in the French Quarter of. New Orleans.
No. 722 Toulouse Street
“THE SETTING OF THE PLAY: The stage seems bare. . . . In the barrenness there should be a poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world. This one is in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans, where it remains standing at 722 Toulouse Street, now converted to an art gallery. I will describe the building as it was when I rented an attic room in the late Thirties, not as it will be designed or realized for the stage. “It is a three-story building. There are a pair of alcoves facing Toulouse Street. These alcove cubicles are separated by plywood, which provides a minimal separation (spatially) between the writer (myself those many years ago) and an older painter, a terribly wasted man, dying of tuberculosis, but fiercely denying this circumstance to himself. “A curved staircase ascends from the rear of a dark narrow passageway from the street entrance to the kitchen area. From there it ascends to the third floor, or gabled attic with its mansard roof. . . . “In New Orleans, and most particularly in the Vieux Carré, the young Tennessee Williams first became aware of a dark side of life that seemed to drift timelessly, exhibiting a laissez-faire attitude that characterized the morés and amorality of the most colorful segment of humanity he had ever encountered. From the first, he became deeply attracted to the strangely sovereign life of the Old Quarter, existing apart from the rest of New Orleans: a cloistered heart of the city. . . 35