Biographies, when they matter, can act as a kind of corrective to the subject’s boorishness. All that the star could not achieve in life—tenderness, care, responsibility toward others—doesn’t get vanquished in great studies so much as explained and folded into the grand story of the complicated, arresting self. The British biographer Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey, for instance, is a major work about a minor Bloomsbury figure that is fascinating to read because Holroyd recognizes, without admonishing, Strachey’s spectacular selfishness. It’s Holroyd’s witty view of it all that lifts the narrative up and propels the reader forward. John Lahr’s distinctly American sense of humor—it never comes at his subject’s expense—informs “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” his authoritative and felt new biography of the playwright (1911-1983). A great deal that made Williams appear out of order and out of touch during the latter part of his life and career—he called the nineteen-sixties his “stoned age”—grew out of forces that Lahr not only describes but explicates, illuminates, and makes resonate.
Lahr begins his life of the playwright with Williams’s first hit—1945’s “The Glass Menagerie.” (Williams’s first thirty-four years were chronicled in Lyle Leverich’s excellent, if a trifle standard, 1995 biography, “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.”) Shifting effortlessly between that historic play’s record-making opening night, a critical assessment of its importance, and Williams’s personal history—the playwright’s backstage dramas with his lovers, agent, family, and so on, always equalled what was on stage; indeed, there was not much of a difference to Williams—Lahr’s study is a masterpiece of the form because he has invented his own. Instead of merely chronicling Williams’s rise as an author on the world stage and his death nearly forty years later, Lahr has made a critical and biographical mosaic. To his historian’s love of chronology, he has applied a critical acumen (he was the lead theatre critic at this magazine for over two decades, and was twice the winner of the George Jean Nathan award for Dramatic Criticism) and a great reporter’s acuity when it comes to unearthing the facts of Williams’s background and his various psychological difficulties.
Born in Mississippi, Thomas Lanier Williams III—he would not change his name to Tennessee until 1938—was the first son of the Southern-born, Victorian-era raised Edwina and Cornelius Williams. Along with his older sister Rose and his younger brother Dakin, Williams was raised in an atmosphere defined by rupture and discord. Cornelius, who supported his family by working as a salesman, was a drinker and a womanizer. (His gay son would follow suit, but with boys.) Edwina was the only child of a probably gay pastor. Williams’s rambunctious father loathed his wife’s prim, smug attitude toward the world, her hatred of sex, not to mention what black elders might call her “sanctified” background. (According to Williams’s unreliable but entertaining 1975 “Memoirs,” Cornelius had a great deal of respect for his wife’s mother, who was emotionally loving in a way that her daughter was not. It was her softness and compassion that drew her grandchildren to her as well. Williams always called her Grand, and wrote one of his finest short stories, “Oriflamme,” about her—to him—anarchic spirit.) The repression, fear, and hysteria that shaped Edwina no doubt fed into Rose’s madness. (During the Depression, Rose was diagnosed as schizophrenic; in 1943, she was lobotomized.) As a young patient, Rose often said that Cornelius had molested her. Williams’s younger brother, Dakin, had no sexual experience until he was married, at the age of thirty-seven, while the homosexual Williams did not masturbate until he was in his mid-twenties.
Not one of the Williams children could ever effectively marry their bodies to the concept of freedom or joy. Constantly split between good and evil, guilt and pleasure, life and death, the Williams children heard one aria growing up: Edwina’s torrent of words describing pain, betrayal, sin, and wrong doing. (Williams’s first great female character, Amanda Wingfield, in “The Glass Menagerie,” was pure Edwina.) Their mother was like an actress who can’t leave the stage; her feelings were less real to her without an audience. Lahr argues that, like her imaginative son, a productive hysteric, Edwina wanted you to feel what she felt. But this is, of course, a physical and metaphysical impossibility: we are not each other but ourselves. Still, this particular tension drives much of Williams’s best work, which often describes the difference between you and me even as his characters long not only to transmute their feelings but to make other bodies feel differently.
Like many authors, Williams wasn’t adept at expressing himself outside of his work, but he sometimes evinced a startling degree of tough self-awareness. “The real fact is that no one means a great deal to me,” he said in a 1945 interview. “I’m gregarious and like to be around people, but almost anybody will do.” Lahr writes that Williams was at his “most alert, eloquent, humorous, vulnerable, and forthright when talking about the one pure thing in his life: his work.” But what was pure? His writing was the bridge he tried to build between his besmirched, original-sin self—the self that loved the temporary pleasures of sex, but no doubt considered it “dirty”—and the self that sought purification in a world other than this one. Indeed, the world he represents in his 1943 short play, “The Purification,” is a plea for that very thing—the expiation of guilt and sin. The pathos one finds in that piece, Williams’s only verse play, grows out of the fact that the protagonist has murdered his sister—his one true love. Amidst the poetry, blood stops blood. (Siblings as the source of life and death and the imagination is also the theme of Williams’s underrated 1973 play, “Outcry.”) There was no end to Williams’s guilt, remorse, and anger for having survived his sister, in particular, and his family as a whole. No survivor is ever free of his history of disaster.
From the first, Williams’s work ethic was extraordinary. By the time he won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for “The Glass Menagerie,” in 1945, he had written at least six full-length apprentice plays, innumerable one-acts, poems, and short stories. Writing was one way of being seen, and one way of hiding, too. For years, he was a furious blusher, particularly when in the company of someone for whom he felt more than a passing fancy. Still, he pushed past Edwina’s crippling influences to become a self that she could and could not recognize as her progeny: an ambitious star. He could not not speak; his curtain was the page, and once he tore that curtain open Williams the artist lived to reveal the constant high-stakes drama that was himself. Sex was a corollary to the language; he stained sheets and stained pages and, as the years wore on, the awards piled up, and his various addictions—to booze, barbiturates, and Broadway success—piled up, too, he’d often leave all that mess for someone to clean up. Lahr documents how Elia Kazan, Williams’s first great director, helped put certain pieces together, like the playwright’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning hit “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and the Williams-scripted 1956 movie “Baby Doll.” (In later years, Williams’s need to have someone wipe his ass grew more pronounced. Once, when he was meeting with the director John Hancock about a television script he’d written in the nineteen-seventies, he fell down drunk. Hancock did not pick him up. Some time later, Williams told the director that he was furious he hadn’t picked him up. Neither had Cornelius or Edwina.)
Williams’s hot view of a cold world found its most receptive audiences in the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, a period in American theatre that he dominated. The narrow, restrictive world that Truman and Eisenhower wrought was just a version of the kind of repression that Williams had grown up with; his work spoke to those who could not fit within the parameters of all those neat lawns and white picket fences and solid heterosexual values. In works ranging from 1947’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and 1951’s “The Rose Tattoo” to 1958’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” Williams created a collective portrait of difference that often raised the ire of moralists ranging from the gatekeepers at Time to Cardinal Spellman, who denounced “Baby Doll” from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The world was correct, pious, duplicitous Edwina, and Williams wanted to queer the world. Stars ranging from Marlon Brando and Maureen Stapleton to Geraldine Page made their names in works by Williams, because they were brilliant, but also because they transmitted their difference, as Method artists, through the twisted light of Williams’s characters, who are always set apart.
Lahr’s reporter’s eye—and his love of theatre—is not divisible from his skill at telling a good love story. Williams’s primary adult relationship was with the charming and honest Frank Merlo, who, like an earlier love, eventually died of cancer. Williams and Merlo met in 1947 and were together for fourteen years. During that time, Merlo tried to find his voice as a writer, too, but unlike Williams Merlo put the drama of their relationship first. After Merlo’s death in 1961, Williams began his long descent into commercial failure, that “dragon country” he feared most. (His last Broadway hit was 1961’s “Night of the Iguana.”) Despite the beauty of some of the poet’s later work—Lahr is especially fine on the underrated “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (1966) and “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” (1969)—he kept measuring himself against his former self, that man who queered Broadway. But the value of his late experimental work was distinctly anti-Broadway: it was about the theatricalization of certain lonely truths, like the desire to speak and the work that goes into making a true sentence.
