Tennessee Williams and the Plastic Medium

Abstract

Tennessee Williams and the Plastic Medium A. Banerjee John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. Norton, 2015. Illustrated. 784 pages. $19.95 pb. Lyle Leverich started his authorized biography of Tennessee Williams soon after the dramatist’s death in 1983. But the project was initially scuppered by Maria St. Just, a lifelong friend of Williams and an executor of his estate. It was only when she died in 1994 that Leverich was able to publish the first part of his biography, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, in 1995. Leverich was already seventy-five years old then. He told John Lahr, the acclaimed theater critic, that “should something happen” to him, he should complete the work. When Leverich himself died in 1999, Lahr decided to take on the project, but it took him about twelve years to complete. Considering the huge amount of research and labor that was obviously put into this book of over 700 pages, this time-frame seems justified. In his excellent biography Lahr follows the long writing career of Tennessee Williams, including the less important plays, which, despite their lack of success, he continued to write until he died. Over six decades, Williams wrote “over thirty plays and seventy one-acts,” and Lahr comments on most of them. Williams’s critical reception ranged “from good reviews to bad reviews to no reviews.” Lahr follows the meandering track of Williams’s life [End Page 519] and career and also gives copious details about the writing, staging, and filming of the plays. He seems almost to have lived with Williams, and he takes his reader along with him. It is the great merit of the book that the author charts Williams’s journey without indulging in speculation, and authenticates his narrative with citations which he annotates conscientiously. Williams writes in his Memoirs that a writer “is entitled to a reflective study of his life and work.” Several people have tried to write about his life, but Lahr rightly dismisses them as gossipy or not fully informed. Lahr himself authentically covers the full life of the dramatist, tracing his early years of astonishing success to his inevitable decline. Taking the clue from Elia Kazan’s remark that Williams’s plays “might be read as a massive biography,” Lahr tries to “interpret the plays and the life” of Tennessee Williams. Lahr takes on Williams’s family too because, as Gore Vidal has said, Williams’s family provided him with his basic “repertory company.” Williams was not satisfied with mere words on the page. Lahr reminds us that Williams was haunted by the terrors of living—by what he called his “blue devils.” He turned to drama because he believed that “the turbulent business of my nerves demanded something more animate than language could be.” He felt “a frustrating lack of vitality in words alone. . . . I wanted a plastic medium. I conceived things visually, in sound and color and movement.” He added, “suddenly, I found that I had a stage inside me: actors appeared out of nowhere . . . and took the stage over.” This stage offered him the ideal vehicle. Gore Vidal astutely points out that in the play and on the stage Williams “could, like God, rearrange his experience into something that was no longer God’s and unpossessable but his.” Though Leverich had discussed The Glass Menagerie, Lahr starts by devoting sixty pages to the play, showing the close connection between Williams’s play and his own life and family. He has unearthed significant details of Williams’s early life and experiences and demonstrates how Williams memorably transforms them here. When his family first moved to a small and inhospitable apartment in St. Louis, he and his sister decorated their rooms in such a way as to keep out the chill and brutality of the outer world. In order to relieve the gloom, his sister had “collected a large assortment of little glass articles of which she was particularly fond.” Williams goes on to say that when he left home later, he “recalled them most vividly and poignantly when looking back on our home life.” For him, the glass animals stood for the “small tender things that relieve the...