The sweet youth of `Bird'

Duncan Fallowell

TOM: THE UNKNOWN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS by Lyle Leverich Hodder, £25, pp. 644 Tennessee Williams became successful at the age of 34 with the triumph of The Glass Menagerie, first in Chicago, then on Broadway, in 1945. It is at this point that Lyle Leverich's 644-page biography stops. Which means that there's an awful lot of book before things start to get interesting. Williams himself isn't born until page 36. Leverich imparts a sense of significance to the early years by appealing to world histo- ry.

1914: `. . . a war to ignite all wars was about to send forth reverberating shock waves of death and violence, of human mis- ery on a scale that. . . '

1929: `. . . a trading slump gave clear indication that the stock market, which could survive only by constant rises. . . '

1939: 'On September 1, Hitler's Wehrmacht would invade Poland, and on the third, a shaken British Prime Minister would announce that his country. .. '

Between these rather absurd stentorian milestones is strung a mass of detail about Williams's family and friends, school teach- ers, uncompleted courses at various minor universities, numerous part- and full-time jobs, juvenile short stories, poems, drafts and half-drafts of plays. `On his second- hand bicycle, Tom peddled back and forth between the ranch and the shoe-store'. And Lyle peddles with him. Hundreds of pages of this is terribly off-putting.

But buried within it is a truly fascinating tale: the birth against all the odds of a tor- tured and entertaining homosexual writer of great distinction. Key elements in the tale have been there all along — the clinical insanity of his sister, the bad relationship between the two parents, the seeding of his neuroses — but well nigh lost to view. It is not until page 356 that the core story lifts itself out of the circumambi- ent mush and starts to drive the biography.

For on page 356 Tennessee Williams achieves his first contract for a professional production of one of his plays. On page 357 Williams writes, 'Haggard, tired, jittery, fretful, bored — that is what lack of a reciprocal love object does to a man'. Soon after, at the age of 26, his sex life begins. It is as though a switch had been thrown, and for the next 300 pages we have a real book on our hands.

Unquestionably Leverich has done an enormous job of conscientious research and this, the first of a two-volume autho- rised biography, is the inevitable amplifica- tion of Spoto's The Kindness of Strangers, now out of print, and an essential correc- tive to Williams's own delicious but fanciful Memoirs.

Except when he is reminding the reader in churchy tones that we are in the pres- ence of genius, Leverich is a sympathetic biographer, abreast of his subject, and he is often shrewd in his judgments:

Exacerbated by his aloneness and his fear of enclosure, there sprang a desperate desire for an itinerant way of life, an escape from the spectres of madness . .

This combines four Williams characteristics very succinctly.

The best writing however comes in the form of extracts from Williams's journal I'm sick of writing 'Williams' and `Williams's' and shall use TW from now on — and again it is around page 350 that these journals click suddenly into gear as TW becomes the possessor not only of a career and a love-life but also of a voice, that characteristic tone which was fluent, endearing and ruthless. At the same time he changed his name from Tom to Ten- nessee, his first and most brazen stroke of self-promotion. The very name became a conundrum one wanted to solve.

TW's great theme was the terrors of loneliness, because it was the awful theme of his own existence. 'To be passionate and to be lonely aren't the easiest of things in the world,' he wrote. No kidding. Here is the meticulous and courageous record of a life-long battle with 'the blue devils': extreme restlessness, anxiety, depression, palpitations, nausea, chills, fatigue, dizzi- ness, insomnia, claustrophobia, and the recourse to booze and pills and sex, all of which makes him a vivid and accessible exemplar of the writer's difficulties in the 20th century. take a sleeping pill so that my exhaustion can prevail over my tension'.

Few writers are as candid as he on the subject of their weaknesses. Perhaps they feel it might undermine their authority. Or perhaps I am thinking only of male heterosexual writers who have this chappish Maileresque façade to maintain. But like all writers TW also suffered from what is absolutely the worst curse of writ- ing: 'mental double exposure — the intru- sion of self-consciousness into experience'. Nor were these neurotic problems relieved by success. He wrote:

With money rolling in at the rate of a thousand a week, all impulse toward action has been short-circuited in me . . and given life an air of extreme unreality.

Certainly his homosexuality generated a powerful charge to his constitutional dis- comfort. 'All homosexuals have to live with a deep wound that never heals', he wrote. He never became reconciled to being homosexual, though he was very far from prim about it. And in many ways it suited him.

Leverich writes:

Homosexuality, despite its being fraught with the dangers of police entrapment and public revelation, nevertheless offered Tom the deepening appeal of nonconformist exploration and the illusion of escape from the imprisonment of family.

Which brings us to the link between homosexuality and literature which in the 20th century has been profound. It is a major subject and yet there is still no major book on it. Such a book would probably have to be written by a scholar from main- land Europe where most of the cultures seem able to take such things in their stride. English and Americans are too unnerved by sex, so that they would rather tighten up or overcompensate with special pleading. Leverich inclines towards the lat- ter but on the whole is surprisingly relaxed about the gay extravaganza aspects of TW's life. Whether he can steer such a level course during the wallowings of fun, unhappiness and excess which must come in volume two (after half a dozen superb works, TW's many later plays eluded criti- cal respect, to his great distress) remains to be seen; however I do find myself eagerly looking forward to it.