Tennessee Williams: An Appreciation

(PORTIONS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY 2008)

It would have been a damned shame if Tennessee Williams couldn't write, because I can't think of any man of letters whose family and friends provided so much rich material.

Williams, who along with Eugene O'Neill sits atop the pantheon of American playwrights, drew long and hard from the deep well of tormented souls who populated his life from childhood on and appear in various guises in the best known works, including The Glass Menagerie (1945), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and The Night of the Iguana (1961.) He also was a not bad short story writer.

Then there is A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was a Broadway hit with Marlon Brando, who played the immortal Stanley Kowalski, and Kim Hunter, Jessica Tandy and Karl Malden. Two years later, Streetcar was remade more or less intact for the big screen with Vivian Leigh replacing Tandy.

I don't think I ever was in the same place (which is to say probably a restaurant or bar) with Williams, although our paths might have crossed in Key West in the 1970s without me realizing it.

My appreciation for him was based solely on the movie versions of Cat, Iguana and Streetcar until I began working with scholars who visit the rare book and manuscript library where I work. They come in to study our fine collection of Williams typescripts, most of them heavily annotated by the man himself, who was notorious for repeatedly rewriting big chunks of his plays, in the case of Streetcar right up to the night of its Broadway opening.

These typescripts are extraordinary windows into an extraordinarily creative mind.

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Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in 1911 and died at the ripe old age of 71, an accomplishment considering that this hypochondriac suffered through many real illnesses, including depression, was an alcoholic and methamphetamine addict and like many of his characters feared death more than anything, including writing flops.

He acknowledged in Memoirs, his 1972 autobiography, that he was unable to write without artificial stimulants, and wrote in The Rose Tattoo (1951) that:

"Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation."

Williams was born and spent his early years in Mississippi and at age five was diagnosed with a disease that caused his legs to be paralyzed for nearly two years. His mother encouraged him to make up stories and read, and she gave him a typewriter when he was 13.

He acknowledged that he had "a particularly troubled childhood."

His mother suffered from a mood disorder, his father was abusive and his beloved sister Rose (on whom he based the mad heroine Blanche DuBois in Streetcar) was a schizophrenic who spent most of her life in mental institutions after being incapacitated by a prefrontal lobotomy.

In the early 1930s, Williams attended the University of Missouri, where his fraternity brothers nicknamed him "Tennessee" for his rich Southern drawl. By the time he finally earned a degree from the University of Iowa in 1938, he had written and staged his first play.

Williams spent the next several years in New Orleans and Key West, where he began and finished Streetcar, and his life was never more stable than when he had a committed companion, notably the mercurial sometimes actor Frank Merlo, at whose side he created his most enduring works during a 16-year homosexual relationship that ended with Merlo's death from cancer in 1963 and was followed by a severe mental breakdown.

Williams said in 1972 that:

"Most of my life has been spent with intimate companions of a complex and difficult nature. It is only recently that I have learned to accept the bargain, by which I mean to treasure the lovely aspects of their natures, which all have possessed, and to stoically live through their abrasive humors. After all, none of them have found me exactly easy to exist, and travel about, with."

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose works Williams idolized, famously said that there are no second acts in America, and although Williams wrote prolifically for most of the last 20 years of his life, the overall quality of his output suffered as he wandered from city to city and country to country, a self-described social and religious outcast.

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Williams wrote in Memoirs that his goal as a writer "is just somehow to capture the constantly evanescent quality of existence," something that he did very well.

In fact, although most of his plays were set in the South and some echo the Southern Gothic romanticism of Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, like those novelists' works his plays had universal themes. Williams dealt extensively with taboos. These included alcoholism, drug addiction, homosexuality, rape, nymphomania, frigidity, impotence, masturbation . . . oh, and death by blowtorch.

As he told Elia Kazan, who directed Streetcar and Cat for the big screen:

"There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature back into a last corner to make a last desperate stand -- but as a calculating bitch with 'round heels' . . . Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life."

Williams also was relentlessly self critical:

"When I capture that goal, then I have accomplished something, but I have done it, I think, relatively few times compared to the times I have attempted it. I don't have any sense of being a fulfilled artist. And when I was writing Menagerie, I did not know that I was capturing it . . . Maybe I am a machine, a typist. A compulsive typist and a compulsive writer. But that's my life."

From the beginning of Williams' career, every hit was followed by a great fall:

"After the success of Menagerie, as I've said before, I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance. Also, I had spent so much of my energy on the climb to success, that when I had made it and my play was the hottest ticket in town, I felt almost no satisfaction."

Filmmaker John Waters, writing in the forward of the 2006 reprint of Memoirs, astutely notes that when Williams acted level headed, it seemed to come as a surprise:

" 'I have never doubted the existence of God,' he writes soberly before later admitting a 'disbelief in an after-existence.' His guarded optimism always seemed to save the day. 'Mornings, I love you so much,' he enthuses, celebrating 'their triumph over night.' Self-pity? never. 'I've had such a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn't cry for myself: would you?' Hardly."

Tennessee Williams died alone on February 25, 1983 after a night of heavy drinking. Some friends believe that he was murdered, but it is more likely that his use of prescription drugs and alcohol contributed to his death from choking. His creative mind burned to the end, but he had lost his gag reflex.

IMAGES (From top):

March 1962 Times magazine portrait by Bernard Safran; With his long suffering mother and sister; Second from left with friends in Provincetown (1940); Celebrating the opening of Glass Menagerie (1944); With Frank Rodrigues in New Orleans (1946); Brando and Leigh in Streetcar (1948); Newman and Taylor in Cat (1958); With Frank Merlo (ca. 1960); A contemplative moment (1966); With Thomas McGuane and James Kirkwood in Key West (ca. 1975); At his ease (1977).