Richard Gray
Little Blue Devils
Notebooks
By Tennessee Williams, Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton
Yale University Press 775pp £27.50
In 1936, just before his twenty-fifth birthday, Tennessee Williams began keeping a journal. ‘Saw first robin today – two in fact,’ reads the first entry, ‘pain in chest all morning but okay tonite.’ ‘Felt rather stupid all day,’ it concludes, ‘but will write tomorrow – .’ Williams then continued the journal intermittently until two years before his death in 1983. It has now been published for the first time.
The notebooks in which Williams kept his journal are unremarkable in appearance, the kind that can still be bought at any American drugstore. And the journal entries, as that first one shows, are often written in a kind of shorthand and are always unpremeditated, like random snapshots of the day. But it is this very lack of premeditation that makes them valuable. This is a record of thoughts and feelings jotted down almost as they happened, offering glancing insights into one of the most remarkable talents the American theatre has ever known.
‘This is where I record my less exuberant moments,’ Williams confesses in an entry for 1936. Six years later, he sounds a similar note: ‘I use this journal mostly for distress signals and do not often bother to note the little and decently impersonal things which sometimes have my attention.’
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm