Recently, foolish and fashionable comments have reduced Williams to a playwright with a brain the size of a pea who milked Broadway from 1945 to 1958 with a series of squeegee dramas about distressed gentle heroines. This approach to the plays has been reinforced by evidence that the stuff of his last twenty years tumbled into gothic and grotesque nonsense.

Other ingredients have emerged. The playwright’s preoccupation with homosexuality was never openly debated on his stages, he made too much money out of the theatre but gave too little back to it, ultimately his own influences are only too apparent (DH Lawrence, Rilke, Hart Craine etc) and too skimpily absorbed. Murmurs of a hot sticky sensationalist, and we are left with little more than Thomas Lanier Williams, born 1911, Mississippi, into a rather drunken Episcopalian family, who changed his name and as an artist gained astonishing public acclaim, only to die in his sleep at the New York Hotel Elysée, 1983, from a fit of asphyxiation brought on by the savagery of his OD.

Tennessee Williams, according to the pathologist, had taken a variety of tranquillisers, and other ill-assorted items, including a megadose of Ritalin, Nembutal, Miltown, cocaine and a bottle of wine. In the process of spooning out a couple of Seconals he swallowed the plastic bottle cap. It lodged in his throat. He was unable to call for help. Williams is now perhaps on the road to posthumous extinction and knives must surely be out to dissect the artistic corpse: perhaps not an unusual pattern of events. In the light of Williams’ popular success during this post-war quarter century, the lack of serious assessment of the plays has been noticeable. The esteemed voices of Eric Bentley, George Jean Nathan, John Gassner have been duly raised to direct our attention to the value of the best work. We are still left with a pile of campus bread-and-butter dissertations barely a sticky finger remove from the playwright’s hot-house emotional felicities, on the one hand, and the bleakly informative tombstone of his entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Into this unnerving arena has stepped Donald Spoto, known hitherto for his biographical studies of Hitchcock and Stanley Kramer. Spoto has attempted what the publishers call a complete critical biography’, written in a self-effacing style of unadorned journalese, and it is an informative book. On looking through the author’s acknowledgements and preface it becomes clear, however, that there are names missing from the witnesses of this hagiography. And it is a pity Spoto is not willing to admit to these lapses and omissions. It would certainly help us to anticipate future studies. Alas, I believe it is another example of short term biographical work – claiming too much for what there is on display, and conveniently saying too little about the demands of ‘a complete critical biography’. For example, the playwright’s relationship and letters with key people in his life, some of them quite free from the insatiable sexual cruiser he became, are virtually ignored: his intense and frantic concern over his elder. sister Rose Williams, the long term devotion to Donald Windham as friend and muse, the extraordinary years he shared with his agent, the redoubtable Audrey Wood, plus the social parallel of Williams’ career with Carsons McCullers’, (barely a mention of their correspondence), or a proper indication of the depth and chicanery of his long distance lover Frank Merlo.

Merlo was a wonderful man for Tennessee … Tennessee was really being loved and taken care of by Frank, and he needed that a great deal.

A quote from the director Jose Quintero. It is this scissor-and-paste style which so often reminds the reader that this is by the same writer of The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.

But Donald Spoto does indicate – no matter the demand of this type of biographical entertainment – two very distinct and new approaches to Tennessee Williams. If we cannot observe the social animal from the hot-house antics of his plays, we can at least take a cursory glance at the playwright in his landscape through the years beside his contemporaries. And Spoto provides the reader who is foreign to the States with a view of the humbling size of the country beside the ambition of young Williams. There is a triangular cross-country link which takes one’s breath away. The early plays were tried out in Boston and Chicago, the playwright hid out in New Orleans with a Mexique boy, his mother and father shared brutal and alcoholic vengeance in St Louis, and the real moneymaking was north-east one thousand miles away on the Great White Way boulevard.

The playwright’s elder sister Rose and her tragic life marked his work. And this has been recalled by Williams and his friends. Rose suffered from hysteria, unbalanced behaviour and often resorted to fantasies which were reduced to the wide-ranging diagnosis of dementia praecox. At times she was given insulin and EST therapy. She complained that her father, a shoe salesman, was regularly drunk, that he beat her up, and made sexual advances to her. All of this was the true grist for prognoses such as dementia praecox. And years after the private tragedy was complete, it may not come as a surprise to learn that her father indeed was a family brute, an alcoholic and a sexual lunatic. None of this aided Rose. She was placed in a state asylum. Her mother was given an ultimatum. There was a new therapy much favoured at the time, leucotomy. And leucotomy is what Rose Williams received at the Farmington Asylum. She was given a pre-frontal lobotomy. The nerve fibres connecting the thalamus to the frontal lobes were severed. In exchange for relief from anxiety the patient suffered loss of judgement, absolute failure of retentive skills, and self-awareness she became chronically labile… It was 1937. Rose Williams was thirty. She never regained any form of normal health. She lived out her years in asylums. Her younger brother adored her, and all his life maintained concern and provided financial aid. He was not consulted on the lobotomy, he was shattered by the results. Donald Spoto makes a valiant but shallow effort to illustrate Rose Williams’ character in all Tennessee Williams’ heroines, from Laura Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) to Serafina Delle Rose (The Rose Tattoo). And the sister’s memory does tend to stain the fictional characters, perhaps never more so than in Laura Wingfield whose nature implicitly echoes Rose Williams’ fastidious charm for ‘gentlemen callers’ and ‘the love of company of strangers’.

Tennessee Williams is certainly not the first American writer to be overcome with remorse over the fate of a female member of the family. But perhaps it ought to be said that Donald Spoto has missed an opportunity to place Rose’s neurosurgical fate in a proper context. 1937 was ten years or so before Harold Truman signed the National Mental Health Act. In those days asylums had a bonanza. Each year over 100,000 women were placed in mental homes. A profitable decade. And this awesome business of brain surgery had its gurus. There was Egar Moniz from Portugal, Walter Freeman in Washington, and Ugo Cerletti from Turin. They were the fathers of the transorbital lobotomy. An unpalatable number of highly intelligent to vegetables. Walter Freeman once boasted of thirty-five female lobotomies in the space of an afternoon in Seattle. Egar Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949. The sheer quantity of victims obliges one, no matter how shocking the implication, to compare aspects of uncontrolled lobotomy of women with some acts of ‘medical inquiry’ which were conducted at Auschwitz. All of this may be a far step away from the haunted mind of the playwright. But it is an unusual area of Tennessee Williams study, by no means properly explored. Admittedly, the women in the plays must also be shadows of his own sexuality.

In 1940, Tennessee Williams was twenty-nine. He’d had four plays produced on amateur campus. The film star Miriam Hopkins agreed to play in Battle of Angels. It was premiered in Boston. The turgid plot perhaps blinded the audience. The detailed characterisation was appreciated. In this early piece, delicate Myra hates husband Jabe, but Jabe has cancer. Myra falls for a poet Val Xavier and becomes pregnant. Bitter and brutal Jabe shoots Myra. The sheriffs posse hang and burn the poet Val. Play ends with a conflagration on stage. Heavy stuff. The show lasted two weeks before the Boston City Council sent for the police commissioner. One Council member called the play ‘putrid … this show is a crime to be permitted to run in the city of Boston’.

In retrospect it sounds like good clean healthy fare. But Broadway did not beck-on. On Broadway that season were Paul Osborn’s charming Morning’s at Seven, Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story, and Clifford Odets’ Night Music (for 22 performances only). And yet here was a play which possessed on the surface every kind of melodramatic and apolitical grab-yer-by-the-throat material which carriage trade New Yorkers scramble for. Quite a good moment, 1940, one would have thought, midway between the Nazi-Soviet pact (August 1939) and the invasion of Russia June 1941). For apolitical drama the playwright hadn’t got it right.

Five years later, he had a try out in Chicago for his next full length play, The Glass Menagerie. He had a great actress in her sixties, Laurette Taylor (Outward Bound, 1938), an alcoholic dying of cancer. The play had a dismal start, and closing notices were put up backstage. The play itself appears to be his most autobiographical. The character Tom and his sister Laura lead a fragile life in the harsh Wingfield family. Laura is dependent on handsome young strangers. Tom is forced to flee home to write poems. A delicate twilight world, with a cruel absent father, filled with remembered time and ‘truth in the pleasant disguise of an illusion’. The Chicago Mayor came to the aid of the play. All municipal workers got a fifty percent ticket subsidy. In due course it was a sell-out. And on Broadway, Laurette Taylor’s heart-breaking performance made the play a palpable hit. With war over, and soldiers returned, it is just almost possible this delicate piece with its portrait of impoverished Southerners in a depressed time touched a nerve in the carriage trade audience. The lyric writing and the fragrant Marie Laurencin picture of Laura Wingfield could fiercely burn. It was the beginning of sensational fame. Arthur Miller called the play ‘an eloquence and an amplitude of feeling … emotional heroism’.

It is this sensational aspect which now becomes a worrying matter. Only in the States ‘where a playwright can make a killing but not a living’ does his success leave a sad reminder. But the sensational career and fame served a similar purpose to that plastic bottle cap he swallowed in the Hotel Elysée. Something stopped. He could not cry out. He was much more than the gothic rubbish of the later years. There was a pure, vulnerable autobiographic artist in the creation of brutal Jabe (Battle of Angels) and melancholic Laura (The Glass Menagerie). After this came the melodramatic thrashings of A Streetcar Named Desire onto the emotional incontinence of A Lovely Sunday for creve Coeur. Yes, but also minor gems like the death of DH Lawrence in the short play of 1952 I Rise in Flames, Cried the Phoenix. Those who wish to bury Thomas Lanier Williams in haste may find the digging difficult if the emotional truth of his sister Rose’s shadow can still haunt the early plays. And that voice of Tom Wingfield, the narrator from The Glass Menagerie, how it lingers, musk and smother, sunset and fireflies, cyclamate and scythe:

– Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes… Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out!

(Laura bends over the candles)

– for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura – and so goodbye…

(She blows the candles out)

THE SCENE DISSOLVES.