Tennessee
Williams, original name Thomas Lanier Williams, (born March 26, 1911, Columbus,
Mississippi, U.S.—died February 25, 1983, New York City), American dramatist
whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence
underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility.
Williams
became interested in playwriting while at the University of Missouri (Columbia)
and Washington University (St. Louis) and worked at it even during the Great
Depression while employed in a St. Louis shoe factory. Little theatre groups
produced some of his work, encouraging him to study dramatic writing at the
University of Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in 1938.
His
first recognition came when American Blues (1939), a group of one-act plays,
won a Group Theatre award. Williams, however, continued to work at jobs ranging
from theatre usher to Hollywood scriptwriter until success came with The Glass
Menagerie (1944). In it Williams portrayed a declassed Southern family living
in a tenement. The play is about the failure of a domineering mother, Amanda,
living upon her delusions of a romantic past, and her cynical son, Tom, to
secure a suitor for Tom’s shy and withdrawn sister, Laura, who lives in a
fantasy world with a collection of glass animals.
Williams’s
next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won a Pulitzer Prize. It is a
study of the mental and moral ruin of Blanche DuBois, another former Southern
belle, whose genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities
symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
In
1953 Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical, microcosmic town whose
inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a commercial failure, but
his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which exposes the emotional lies governing
relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize and was successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguana
(1961), the story of a defrocked minister turned sleazy tour guide, who finds
God in a cheap Mexican hotel. Suddenly Last Summer (1958) deals with lobotomy,
pederasty, and cannibalism, and in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) the gigolo hero
is castrated for having infected a Southern politician’s daughter with venereal
disease.
Williams
was in ill health frequently during the 1960s, compounded by years of addiction
to sleeping pills and liquor, problems that he struggled to overcome after a
severe mental and physical breakdown in 1969. His later plays were
unsuccessful, closing soon to poor reviews. They include Vieux Carré (1977),
about down-and-outs in New Orleans; A Lovely Sunday for Crève Coeur (1978–79),
about a fading belle in St. Louis during the Great Depression; and Clothes for
a Summer Hotel (1980), centring on Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and on the people they knew.
Williams
also wrote two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the
World of Reason (1975), essays, poetry, film scripts, short stories, and an
autobiography, Memoirs (1975). His works won four Drama Critics’ awards and
were widely translated and performed around the world.
The
production of his first two Broadway plays, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), secured his place, along with Eugene O’Neill and
Arthur Miller, as one of America’s major playwrights of the 20th century.
Critics, playgoers, and fellow dramatists recognized in Williams a poetic
innovator who, refusing to be confined in what Stark Young in the New Republic
called “the usual sterilities of our playwriting patterns,” pushed drama into
new fields, stretched the limits of the individual play and became one of the
founders of the so-called “New Drama.” Praising The Glass Menagerie “as a
revelation of what superb theater could be,” Brooks Atkinson in Broadway
asserted that “Williams’s remembrance of things past gave the theater
distinction as a literary medium.” 20 years later, Joanne Stang wrote in the
New York Times that “the American theater, indeed theater everywhere, has never
been the same” since the premier of The Glass Menagerie. Four decades after
that first play, C.W.E. Bigsby in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century
American Drama termed it “one of the best works to have come out of the
American theater.” A Streetcar Named Desire became only the second play in
history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle
Award. Eric Bentley, in What Is Theatre?, called it the “master-drama of the
generation.” “The inevitability of a great work of art,” T.E. Kalem stated in
Albert J. Devlin’s Conversations with Tennessee Williams, “is that you cannot
imagine the time when it didn’t exist. You can’t imagine a time when Streetcar
didn’t exist.”
More
clearly than with most authors, the facts of Williams’s life reveal the origins
of the material he crafted into his best works. The Mississippi in which Thomas
Lanier Williams was born was in many ways a world that no longer exists, “a
dark, wide, open world that you can breathe in,” as Williams nostalgically
described it in Harry Rasky’s Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and
Lamentation. The predominantly rural state was dotted with towns such as
Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale, in which he spent his first seven years with
his mother, his sister, Rose, and his maternal grandmother and grandfather, an
Episcopal rector. A sickly child, Tom was pampered by doting elders. In 1918,
his father, a traveling salesman who had often been absent—perhaps, like his
stage counterpart in The Glass Menagerie, “in love with long distances”—moved
the family to St. Louis. Something of the trauma they experienced is dramatized
in the 1945 play. The contrast between leisurely small-town past and northern
big-city present, between protective grandparents and the hard-drinking,
gambling father with little patience for the sensitive son he saw as a “sissy,”
seriously affected both children. While Rose retreated into her own mind until
finally beyond the reach even of her loving brother, Tom made use of that
adversity. St. Louis remained for him “a city I loathe,” but the South, despite
his portrayal of its grotesque aspects, proved a rich source to which he
returned literally and imaginatively for comfort and inspiration. That
background, his queerness, and his relationships—painful and joyous—with
members of his family, were the strongest personal factors shaping Williams’s
dramas.
During
the St. Louis years, Williams found an imaginative release from unpleasant
reality in writing essays, stories, poems, and plays. A recurrent motif in
Williams’s plays involves flight and the fugitive, who, Lord Byron insists in
Camino Real: A Play (1953) must keep moving, and his flight from St. Louis
initiated a nomadic life of brief stays in a variety of places. Williams fled
not only uncongenial atmospheres but a turbulent family situation that had
culminated in a decision for Rose to have a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to
alleviate her increasing psychological problems. (Williams’s works often
include absentee fathers, enduring—if aggravating—mothers, and dependent
relatives; and the memory of Rose appears in some character, situation, symbol
or motif in almost every work after 1938.) He fled as well some part of
himself, for he had created a new persona—Tennessee Williams the playwright—who
shared the same body as the proper young gentleman named Thomas with whom
Tennessee would always be to some degree at odds.
In
1940, Williams’s Battle of Angels (1940) was staged by the Theatre Guild in an
ill-fated production marred as much by faulty smudge pots in the lynching scene
as by Boston censorship. Despite the abrupt out-of-town closing of the play,
Williams was now known and admired by powerful theater people. During the next
two decades, his most productive period, one play succeeded another, each of
them permanent entries in the history of modern theater: The Glass Menagerie
(1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose
Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus
Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and
The Night of the Iguana (1961). Despite increasingly adverse criticism,
Williams continued his work for the theater for two more decades, during which
he wrote more than a dozen additional plays containing evidence of his virtues
as a poetic realist. In the course of his long career, he also produced three
volumes of short stories, many of them as studies for subsequent dramas; two
novels; two volumes of poetry; his memoirs; and essays on his life and craft.
His dramas made that rare transition from legitimate stage to movies and
television, from intellectual acceptance to popular acceptance. Before his
death in 1983, he had become the best-known living dramatist; his plays had
been translated and performed in many foreign countries, and his name and work
had become known even to people who had never seen a production of any of his
plays. The persona named Tennessee Williams had achieved the status of a myth.
Williams
drew from the experiences of his persona. He saw himself as a shy, sensitive,
gifted man trapped in a world where “mendacity” replaced communication, brute
violence replaced love, and loneliness was, all too often, the standard human
condition. These tensions “at the core of his creation” were identified by
Harold Clurman in his introduction to Tennessee Williams: Eight Plays as a
terror at what Williams saw in himself and in America, a terror that he must
“exorcise” with “his poetic vision.” In an interview collected in Conversations
with Tennessee Williams, Williams identified his main theme as a defense of the
Old South attitude—”elegance, a love of the beautiful, a romantic attitude
toward life”—and “a violent protest against those things that defeat it.” An
idealist aware of what he called in a Conversations interview “the merciless
harshness of America’s success-oriented society,” he was, ironically,
naturalistic as well, conscious of the inaccessibility of that for which he
yearned. Early on, he developed, according to John Gassner in Theatre at the
Crossroads: Plays and Playwrights of the Mid-Century American Stage, “a precise
naturalism” and continued to work toward a “fusion of naturalistic detail with
symbolism and poetic sensibility rare in American playwriting.” The result was
a unique romanticism, as Kenneth Tynan observed in Curtains, “which is not pale
or scented but earthy and robust, the product of a mind vitally infected with
the rhythms of human speech.”
Williams’s
characters endeavor to embrace the ideal, to advance and not “hold back with
the brutes,” a struggle no less valiant for being vain. In A Streetcar Named
Desire, Blanche’s idealization of life at Belle Reve, the DuBois plantation,
cannot protect her once, in the words of the brutish Stanley Kowalski, she has
come “down off them columns” into the “broken world,” the world of sexual
desire. Since every human, as Val Xavier observes in Orpheus Descending, is
sentenced “to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as
we live on earth,” the only hope is to try to communicate, to love, and to
live—even beyond despair, as The Night of the Iguana teaches. The attempt to
communicate often takes the form of sex (and Williams has been accused of
obsession with that aspect of human existence), but at other times it becomes a
willingness to show compassion, as when in The Night of the Iguana Hannah
Jelkes accepts the neuroses of her fellow creatures and when in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof, Big Daddy understands, as his son Brick cannot, the attachment between
Brick and Skipper. In his preface to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams might have
been describing his characters’ condition when he spoke of “the outcry of
prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the
duration of his life.” “The marvel is,” as Tynan stated, that Williams’s
“abnormal” view of life, “heightened and spotlighted and slashed with bogey
shadows,” can be made to touch his audience’s more normal views, thus achieving
that “miracle of communication” Williams believed to be almost impossible.
Some
of his contemporaries—Arthur Miller, notably—responded to the modern condition
with social protest, but Williams, after a few early attempts at that genre,
chose another approach. Williams insisted in a Conversations interview that he
wrote about the South not as a sociologist: “What I am writing about is human
nature. ... Human relations are terrifyingly ambiguous.” Williams chose to
present characters full of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Yet Arthur
Miller himself wrote in The Theatre Essays of Tennessee Williams that although
Williams might not portray social reality, “the intensity with which he feels
whatever he does feel is so deep, is so great” that his audiences glimpse
another kind of reality, “the reality in the spirit.” Clurman likewise argued
that though Williams was no “propagandist,” social commentary is “inherent in
his portraiture.” The inner torment and disintegration of a character like
Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire thus symbolize the lost South from which
she comes and with which she is inseparably entwined. It was to that lost world
and the unpleasant one that succeeded it that Williams turned for the majority
of his settings and material.
Like
that of most Southern writers, Williams’s work exhibits an abiding concern with
time and place and how they affect men and women. “The play is memory,” Tom
proclaims in The Glass Menagerie; and Williams’s characters are haunted by a
past that they have difficulty accepting or that they valiantly endeavor to transform
into myth. Interested in yesterday or tomorrow rather than in today, painfully
conscious of the physical and emotional scars the years inflict, they have a
static, dreamlike quality, and the result, Tynan observed, is “the drama of
mood.” The Mississippi towns of his childhood continued to haunt Williams’s
imagination throughout his career, but New Orleans offered him, he told Robert
Rice in the 1958 New York Post interviews, a new freedom: “The shock of it
against the Puritanism of my nature has given me a subject, a theme, which I
have never ceased exploiting.” (That shabby but charming city became the
setting for several stories and one-act plays, and A Streetcar Named Desire
derives much of its distinction from French Quarter ambience and attitudes; as
Stella informs Blanche, “New Orleans isn’t like other cities,” a view
reinforced by Williams’s 1977 portrait of the place in Vieux Carre.) Atkinson
observed, “Only a writer who had survived in the lower depths of a sultry
Southern city could know the characters as intimately as Williams did and be so
thoroughly steeped in the aimless sprawl of the neighborhood life.”
Williams’s
South provided not only settings but other characteristics of his
work—romanticism; a myth of an Arcadian existence now disappeared; a
distinctive way of looking at life, including both an inbred Calvinistic belief
in the reality of evil eternally at war with good, and what Bentley called a
“peculiar combination of the comic and the pathetic.” The South also inspired
Williams’s fascination with violence, his drawing upon regional character
types, and his skill in recording Southern language—eloquent, flowery,
sometimes bombastic. Moreover, Southern history, particularly the US Civil War
and the devastating Reconstruction period, imprinted on Williams, as on such
major Southern fiction writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and
Walker Percy, a profound sense of separation and alienation. Williams, as
Thomas E. Porter declared in Myth and Modern American Drama, explored “the mind
of the Southerner caught between an idyllic past and an undesirable present,”
commemorating the death of a myth even as he continued to examine it. “His
broken figures appeal,” Bigsby asserted, “because they are victims of
history—the lies of the old South no longer being able to sustain the
individual in a world whose pragmatics have no place for the fragile spirit.”
In a Conversations interview the playwright commented that “the South once had
a way of life that I am just old enough to remember—a culture that had grace,
elegance. ... I write out of regret for that.”
Williams’s
plays are peopled with a large cast that J.L. Styan termed, in Modern Drama in
Theory and Practice, “Garrulous Grotesques”; these figures include
“untouchables whom he touches with frankness and mercy,” according to Tynan.
They bear the stamp of their place of origin and speak a “humorous, colorful,
graphic” language, which Williams in a Conversations interview called the “mad
music of my characters.” “Have you ever known a Southerner who wasn’t
long-winded?” he asked; “I mean, a Southerner not afflicted with terminal
asthma.” Among that cast are the romantics who, however suspect their own
virtues may be, act out of belief in and commitment to what Faulkner called the
“old verities and truths of the heart.” They include fallen aristocrats
hounded, Gerald Weales observed in American Drama since World War II, “by
poverty, by age, by frustration,” or, as Bigsby called them in his 1985 study,
“martyrs for a world which has already slipped away unmourned”; fading Southern
belles such as Amanda Wingate and Blanche DuBois; slightly deranged women, such
as Aunt Rose Comfort in an early one-act play and in the film “Baby Doll”;
dictatorial patriarchs such as Big Daddy; and the outcasts (or “fugitive kind,”
the playwright’s term later employed as the title of a 1960 motion picture).
Many of these characters tend to recreate the scene in which they find
themselves—Laura with her glass animals shutting out the alley where cats are
brutalized, Blanche trying to subdue the ugliness of the Kowalski apartment
with a paper lantern; in their dialogue they frequently poeticize and
melodramatize their situations, thereby surrounding themselves with protective
illusion, which in later plays becomes “mendacity.” For also inhabiting that
dramatic world are more powerful individuals, amoral representatives of the new
Southern order, Jabe Torrance in Battle of Angels, Gooper and Mae in Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof, Boss Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, enemies of the romantic
impulse and as destructive and virtueless as Faulkner’s Snopes clan. Southern
though all these characters are, they are not mere regional portraits, for
through Williams’s dramatization of them and their dilemmas and through the
audience’s empathy, the characters become everyman and everywoman.
Although
traumatic experiences plagued his life, Williams was able to press “the nettle
of neurosis” to his heart and produce art, as Gassner observed. Williams’s
family problems, his alienation from the social norm resulting from his
queerness, his sense of being a romantic in an unromantic, postwar world, and
his sensitive reaction when a production proved less than successful all
contributed significantly to his work. Through the years he suffered from a
variety of ailments, some serious, some surely imaginary, and at certain
periods he overindulged in alcohol and prescription drugs. Despite these
circumstances, he continued to write with a determination that verged at times
almost on desperation, even as his new plays elicited progressively more
hostile reviews from critics.
An
outgrowth of this suffering is the character type “the fugitive kind,” the
wanderer who lives outside the pale of society, excluded by his sensitivity,
artistic bent, or sexual proclivity from the world of “normal” human beings.
Like Faulkner, Williams was troubled by the exclusivity of any society that
shuts out certain segments because they are different. First manifested in Val
of Battle of Angels (later rewritten as Orpheus Descending) and then in the
character of Tom, the struggling poet of The Glass Menagerie and his shy,
withdrawn sister, the fugitive kind appears in varying guises in subsequent
plays, including Blanche DuBois, Alma Winemiller (Summer and Smoke), Kilroy (Camino
Real), and Hannah and Shannon (The Night of the Iguana). Each is unique but
they share common characteristics, which Weales summed up as physical or mental
illness, a preoccupation with sex, and a “combination of sensitivity and
imagination with corruption.” Their abnormality suggests, the critic argued,
that the dramatist views the norm of society as being faulty itself. Even
characters within the “norm” (Stanley Kowalski, for example) are often
identified with strong sexual drives. Like D.H. Lawrence, Williams indulged in
a kind of phallic romanticism, attributing sexual potency to members of the
unintelligent lower classes and sterility to aristocrats. Despite his
romanticism, however, Williams’s view of humanity was too realistic for him to
accept such pat categories. “If you write a character that isn’t ambiguous,”
Williams said in a Conversations interview, “you are writing a false character,
not a true one.” Though he shared Lawrence’s view that one should not suppress
sexual impulses, Williams recognized that such impulses are at odds with the
romantic desire to transcend and that they often lead to suffering like that
endured by Blanche DuBois. Those fugitive characters who are destroyed, Bigsby
remarked, often perish “because they offer love in a world characterized by
impotence and sterility.” Thus phallic potency may represent a positive force
in a character such as Val or a destructive force in one like Stanley Kowalski;
but even in A Streetcar Named Desire Williams acknowledges that the life force,
represented by Stella’s baby, is positive. There are, as Weales pointed out,
two divisions in the sexual activity Williams dramatizes: “desperation sex,” in
which characters such as Val and Blanche “make contact with another only
tentatively, momentarily” in order to communicate; and the “consolation and
comfort” sex that briefly fulfills Lady in Orpheus Descending and saves
Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. There is, surely, a third kind, sex as a weapon,
wielded by those like Stanley; this kind of sex is to be feared, for it is
often associated with the violence prevalent in Williams’s dramas.
Beginning
with Battle of Angels, two opposing camps have existed among Williams’s
critics, and his detractors sometimes have objected most strenuously to the innovations
his supporters deemed virtues. His strongest advocates among established drama
critics, notably Stark Young, Brooks Atkinson, John Gassner, and Walter Kerr,
praised him for realistic clarity; compassion and a strong moral sense;
unforgettable characters, especially women, based on his keen perception of
human nature; dialogue at once credible and poetic; and a pervasive sense of
humor that distinguished him from O’Neill and Miller.
Not
surprisingly, it was from the conservative establishment that most of the
adverse criticism came. Obviously appalled by this “upstart crow,” George Jean
Nathan, dean of theater commentators when Williams made his revolutionary
entrance onto the scene, sounded notes often to be repeated. In The Theatre
Book of the Year, 1947-1948, he faulted Williams’s early triumphs for
“mistiness of ideology ... questionable symbolism ... debatable character
drawing ... adolescent point of view ... theatrical fabrication,” obsession
with sex, fallen women, and “the deranged Dixie damsel.” Nathan saw Williams as
a melodramatist whose attempts at tragedy were as ludicrous as “a threnody on a
zither.” Subsequent detractors—notably Richard Gilman, Robert Brustein, Clive
Barnes, and John Simon—taxed the playwright for theatricality, repetition, lack
of judgment and control, excessive moralizing and philosophizing, and
conformity to the demands of the ticket-buying public. His plays, they
variously argued, lacked unity of effect, clarity of intention, social content,
and variety; these critics saw the plays as burdened with excessive symbolism,
violence, sexuality, and attention to the sordid, grotesque elements of life.
Additionally, certain commentators charged that Elia Kazan, the director of the
early masterpieces, virtually rewrote A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof. A particular kind of negative criticism, often intensely emotional,
seemed to dominate evaluations of the plays produced in the last 20 years of
Williams’s life.
Most
critics, even his detractors, have praised the dramatist’s skillful creation of
dialogue. Bentley asserted that “no one in the English-speaking theater”
created better dialogue, that Williams’s plays were really “written—that is to
say, set down in living language.” Ruby Cohn stated in Dialogue in American
Drama that Williams gave to American theater “a new vocabulary and rhythm,” and
Clurman concluded, “No one in the theater has written more melodiously. Without
the least artificial flourish, his writing takes flight from the naturalistic
to the poetic.” Even Mary McCarthy, no ardent fan, stated in Theatre
Chronicles: 1937-1962 that Williams was the only American realist other than
Paddy Chayevsky with an ear for dialogue, knew speech patterns, and really
heard his characters. There were, of course, objections to Williams’s lyrical
dialogue, different as it is from the dialogue of O’Neill, Miller, or any other
major American playwright. Bentley admitted to finding his “fake poeticizing”
troublesome at times, while Bigsby insisted that Williams was at his best only
when he restrained “over-poetic language” and symbolism with “an imagination
which if melodramatic is also capable of fine control.” However, those long
poetic speeches or “arias” in plays of the first 25 years of his career became
a hallmark of the dramatist’s work.
Another
major area of contention among commentators has been Williams’s use of symbols,
which he called in a Conversations interview “the natural language of drama.”
Laura’s glass animals, the paper lantern and cathedral bells in A Streetcar
Named Desire, the legless birds of Orpheus Descending, and the iguana in The
Night of the Iguana, to name only a few, are integral to the plays in which
they appear. Cohn commented on Williams’s extensive use of animal images in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof to symbolize the fact that all the Pollitts, “grasping,
screeching, devouring,” are “greedily alive.” In that play, Big Daddy’s
malignancy effectively represents the corruption in the family and in the
larger society to which the characters belong. However, Weales objected that
Williams, like The Glass Menagerie’s Tom, had “a poet’s weakness for symbols,”
which can get out of hand; he argued that in Suddenly Last Summer, Violet
Venable’s garden does not grow out of the situation and enrich the play.
Sometimes, Cohn observed, a certain weakness of symbolism “is built into the
fabric of the drama.”
Critics
favorable to Williams have agreed that one of his virtues lay in his
characterization. Those “superbly actable parts,” Atkinson stated, derived from
his ability to find “extraordinary spiritual significance in ordinary people.”
Cohn admired Williams’s “Southern grotesques” and his knack for giving them
“dignity,” although some critics have been put off by the excessive number of
such grotesques, which contributed, they argued, to a distorted view of
reality. Commentators have generally concurred in their praise of Williams’s
talent in creating credible female roles. “No one in American drama has written
more intuitively of women,” Clurman asserted; Gassner spoke of Williams’s
“uncanny familiarity with the flutterings of the female heart.” Kerr in The
Theatre in Spite of Itself expressed wonder at such roles as that of Hannah in
The Night of the Iguana, “a portrait which owes nothing to calipers, or to any
kind of tooling; it is all surprise and presence, anticipated intimacy. It is
found gold, not a borrowing against known reserves.” Surveying the “steamy zoo”
of Williams’s characters with their violence, despair, and aberrations, Stang
commended the author for the “poetry and compassion that comprise his great
gift.” Compassion is the key word in all tributes to Williams’s
characterization. It is an acknowledgment of the playwright’s uncanny talent
for making audiences and readers empathize with his people, however grotesque,
bizarre, or even sordid they may seem on the surface.
Although
they have granted him compassion, some of his detractors maintain that Williams
does not exhibit a clear philosophy of life, and they have found unacceptable
the ambiguity in judging human flaws and frailties that is one of his most
distinctive qualities. For them, one difficulty stems from the playwright’s
recognition of and insistence on portraying the ambiguity of human activities
and relationships. Moral, even puritanical, though he might be, Williams never
seems ready to condemn any action other than “deliberate cruelty,” and even
that is sometimes portrayed as resulting from extenuating circumstances.
In
terms of dramatic technique, those who acknowledge his genius disagree as to
where it has been best expressed. For Jerold Phillips, writing in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Williams’s major
contribution lay in turning from the Ibsenesque social problem plays to
“Strindberg-like explorations of what goes on underneath the skin,” thereby
freeing American theater from “the hold of the so-called well-made play.” For
Allan Lewis in American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre, he
was a “brilliant inventor of emotionally intense scenes” whose “greatest gift
[lay] in suggesting ideas through emotional relations.” His preeminence among
dramatists in the United States, Jean Gould wrote in Modern American
Playwrights, resulted from a combination of poetic sensitivity, theatricality,
and “the dedication of the artist.” If, from the beginning of his career, there
were detractors who charged Williams with overuse of melodramatic, grotesque,
and violent elements that produced a distorted view of reality, Kerr, in The
Theatre in Spite of Itself, termed him “a man unafraid of melodrama, and a man
who handles it with extraordinary candor and deftness.”
Other
commentators have been offended by what Bentley termed Williams’s “exploitation
of the obscene”: his choice of characters—outcasts, alcoholics, the violent and
deranged and sexually abnormal—and of subject matter—incest, castration, and
cannibalism. Williams justified the “sordid” elements of his work in a
Conversations interview when he asserted that “we must depict the awfulness of
the world we live in, but we must do it with a kind of aesthetic” to avoid
producing mere horror.
Another
negative aspect of Williams’s art, some critics argued, was his theatricality.
Gassner asserted in Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama that Kazan, the
director, avoided flashy stage effects called for in Williams’s text of The
Glass Menagerie, but that in some plays Kazan collaborated with the playwright
to exaggerate these effects, especially in the expressionistic and allegorical
drama Camino Real. In a Conversations interview, Williams addressed this
charge, particularly as it involved Kazan, by asserting, “My cornpone melodrama
is all my own. I want excitement in the theater. ... I have a tendency toward
romanticism and a taste for the theatrical.”
Late
in his career, Williams faced increasingly harsh criticism. Beginning with
Period of Adjustment, a comedy generally disliked by critics, there were years
of rejection of play after play. By the late 1960s, even the longtime advocate
Atkinson observed that in “a melancholy resolution of an illustrious career”
the dramatist was producing plays “with a kind of desperation” in which he lost
control of content and style. Lewis, accusing Williams of repeating motifs,
themes, and characters in play after play, asserted that in failing “to expand
and enrich” his theme, he had “dissipated a rare talent.” Gilman, in a
particularly vituperative review titled “Mr. Williams, He Dead,” included in
his Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961-1970, charged that the
“moralist,” subtly present in earlier plays, was “increasingly on stage.” Even
if one granted a diminution of creative powers, however, the decline in
Williams’s popularity and position as major playwright in the 1960s and 1970s
can be attributed in large part to a marked change in the theater itself.
Audiences constantly demanded variety, and although the early creations of the
playwright remained popular, theatergoers wanted something different, strange,
exotic. One problem, Kerr pointed out, was that Williams was so good, people
expected him to continue to get better; judging each play against those which
had gone before denied a fair hearing to the new creations.
Williams
died due to a choking accident in 1983 in New York City. Following his
accidental death, some of those who had been during his last years his severest
critics acknowledged the greatness of his achievement. Bigsby, for example,
found in a reanalysis of the late plays more than mere vestiges of the
strengths of earlier years, especially in Out Cry, an experimental drama toward
which Williams felt a particular affection. Even Simon, who had dismissed play
after play, acknowledged in New York that he had underestimated the
playwright’s genius and significance. Williams was, finally, viewed by formerly
skeptical observers, as a rebel who broke with the rigid conventions of drama
that had preceded him, explored new territory in his quest for a distinctive
form and style, created characters as unforgettable as those of Charles
Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or William Faulkner, and lifted the language of
the modern stage to a poetic level unmatched in his time.
Posthumous
publications of Williams’s writings—correspondence and plays among them—show
the many sides of this complex literary legend. Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of
Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982 (1990) takes its title from the
name the author gave to Russian-born actress and socialite Maria Britneva,
later Maria St. Just, “the confidante Williams wrote to in the evening after
his day’s work—his ‘Five O’Clock Angel,’ as he called her in a typically
genteel, poetic periphrasis,” noted Edmund White in a piece for the New York
Times Book Review. These letters, White added, allow readers “to see the source
of everything in his work that was lyrical, innocent, loving, and filled with
laughter.” Among the other works published posthumously is Something Cloudy,
Something Clear. A play first produced in 1981 and published in 1995, Something
Cloudy, Something Clear recounts the author’s queer relationship with a dancer
in Provincetown. His queerness—this time in a violent context—also takes center
stage in Not about Nightingales, a tale of terror in a men’s prison. Actress
Vanessa Redgrave reportedly played a key role in bringing this early
play—written circa 1939—to the London stage in 1998.
Williams
is among the most quotable of American playwrights, and he remains widely
celebrated for the unique language he brought to modern theater. He introduced
to dramatic literature a cast of remarkable, memorable characters and turned
his attention and sympathy toward people and subjects that, before his time,
had been considered beneath the concern of serious authors. With “distinctive
dramatic feeling,” Gassner said in Theatre at the Crossroads, Williams “made
pulsating plays out of his visions of a world of terror, confusion, and
perverse beauty.” As a result, Gassner concluded, Williams “makes indifference
to the theater virtually impossible.”
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