Books
Tennessee in pyjamas
Alan Brien
Memoirs Tennessee Williams (W. H. Allen £4.95)
Tennessee Williams's 'thing,' as he calls his memoirs, comes to those of us who read the Nev York Review of Books, and perhaps even more to those who only know someone else who reads the NYRB, almost as an appendix to Gore Vidal's now notorious essay on him in that magazine. Vidal seems to regard himself as Dorian Gray and Tennessee Williamsas t he ageing portrait a Portrait that has somehow escaped from its attic and is trotting around the streets g, iving gay authors a bad name. In his opening paragraphs, Vidal describes his first encounter with Tennessee in 1948, going out 't'his way to point out that he was then only tWenty-two while Tennessee was an antique lhirtY-seven 'but claimed to be thirty-three L°11 the sensible ground that the four years ne had spent working for a shoe company didn't count.• les true that reference works have tended differ on Tennessee Williams's birth date. 14Y old edition of The Reader's Encyclo1)Qedia (1965) has him born in 1914 while inY current International Who's Who (1976) ,I3,11shes him back to 1911: a difference of 'oree (not four) years. But it seems a piddling n 'gale with which to launch a long, long ,r.eview. As it happens, I remember dis',11.1ctly my own first encounter with the i'lLanhattan literary scene in 1956 when I was "41Y-one having been born in March 1925.1 observed to this tall, blond fellow, rather riesembling an ennobled Nigel on the knittng Pattern, how impressed I was by the 4ivchievements of Hal Prince, producer of P81 Side Story, who, I was surprised to ie,,acrn. was only twenty-eight. He bridled and s'ormed me somewhat sourly-1s that so shtIrPrising? I'm only twenty-nine.' I was N‘a;keri by this instant reference back to self, 41—nting out that there must always be anY people younger than many other coe°Ple but what counted, if anyone was tku.nting, was what they had done with "eirtime.
tas,' he said taking my point, as he has I 'en so many in others, in his stride, 'But paattl Gore Vidal.' Anagrams being the 'in' c,rtY game that season, and not having iutile across that collection of letters before, ,RthOught 'Large Void ?"Grave Idol?' to,eal God VI?' And I asked about, to be and that Gore Vidal was indeed a real name, k„ its owner a bright young man well or. wn for being a bright young man, author ileseveral novels now unmentioned through j0i2rIsPiracy of silence which he had not only hacillect but founded. More interestingly, he been born in October 1925 which meant
he was then pushing thirty-one.
Now that Tennessee and Gore are both over fifty, telescoped by the compression of decades into the same generation, it is about time for them to stop indulging in the grand old Irish sport of 1-knew-him-when. Not that Tennessee Williams in his leap-frogging autobiography, jumping barefoot, or at best carpet-slippered, from present to past and back again, is concerned to put down the famous figures who have crossed his path. This is a genuine attempt at autobiography, in which our hero more often plays a role anything but heroic, a kind of selfabuse almost, which (as his, and Gore Vidal's, third partner in the weird sisterhood, Truman Capote, once remarked about masturbation) has the great advantage that you do not have to dress up for it.
Tennessee Williams in Memoirs remains almost always, as he was the only time lever saw him alone, in his pyjamas, a furry, ruffled, mildly manic creature out of a children's comic, Tiger Tim perhaps. Then he spent most of the time I was hoping to learn something about the craft of drama watching Westerns on early-morning TV with the sound switched off. Vidal, while denying some of the remarks attributed to himself in the book, acutely observes that nevertheless 'when it comes to something unspoken' Tennessee has 'a sharp ear.'
What he does not add is that Tennessee needs one. What is striking, touching, and entirely convincing about his version of events is that he rarely listens to what is said, by Santayana for example or even Dylan Thomas, with his conscious mind. But what is said goes in one ear and does not come out of the other but, translated and transmuted, emerges from his mouth, or the mouths of his characters.
He is a great ventriloquist, in both the literal and the metaphoric meanings of the word. He speaks from the belly and also casts his voice onto those around him. especially those who shared his early years. The sections on his childhood and adolescence—a period not entirely over, as he is the first to suggest —confirm my long-held view as a critic of his work in performance that it is sometimes too personal, too intimate, too incestuous, to be acceptable to outsiders without embarrassment. In .a sense, we have already had his Memoirs in his work, especially in The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Root. This is not to say. on the evidence of his own report, that he is simply a transcriber from life. The skeletons in his cupboards are the real ones all right but he fleshes them with imaginary curves and muscles the way we all do with our past when we make the dead or dying dance to
entertain our coevals. But where our audience is numbered on one hand, his are numberless.
Though he appears in Memoirs to be saying only one thing at a time in a clumsily truthful way about his family and his friends, he is actually saying several things at once on different levels. For this reason, he is often, and this is the best definition know, writing poetry. Gore Vidal is a brilliant critic of prose, better even than he is a writer of it, but he misses this dimension of Tennessee Williams the memoirist. Take, for example, Tennessee's description of his mother—he loves her and pities her and finds her intolerable and supports her and so on along one wavy line. But he also loves and admires and criticises and fears the great actress Laurette Taylor who interprets her on stage, another wavy line. When the two intersect, Laurette grows testy because after the performance 'Miss Edwina,' Tennessee's mother, does not seem to recognise herself. And Laurette remarks: 'You notice these bangs I wear? I have to wear them playing this part because it is the part of a fool and I have a high, intellectual forehead.' Tennessee fudges this encounter on the page, dodging the clash, but we feel— and he has to feel—the shock waves that roll out from this eruption .
Gore Vidal in his review makes another picador jab at his old friend (and his piece would not have become a classic already if he had not drawn blood with such callous grace) when he observes—'Tennessee tells a great deal about his sex life which is one way of saying nothing about oneself.' But this is a general truth which happens, or so 1 think, to be faulty in this specific instance. Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether our memoirist is confessing or boasting when he tells us of the ravening frequency of his physical desire. But, at least to heterosexuals, it is extremely revealing. It confirms what I have often thought that, as far as instant, direct, nononsense consummation, the gays have it made. But it also confirms another intuition that sex is more than fucking. The very immediacy and efficiency and brusqueness and explicitness of such contact bends and distorts the act of love. We have seen the dilemma--never quite convincing between a man and a woman—in Tennessee Williams's plays. Now we see it in his life.
What Gore Vidal does not say about Tennessee Williams's honest and outspoken ('outspoken by whom?' as Dorothy Parker once asked about an endlessly garrulous host) autobiography is that it gives us a picture of a silly, talented, indestructible. generous, self-indulgent, lovable, infuriating human being, such as most of us are if we meet our own eyes long enough in the mirror, which is rarely found in literature and not easily forgotten. Who can resist an author who announces, 'I want to admit to you I undertook this for mercenary reasons. It is actually the first piece of work, in the line of writing, that I have undertaken for material profit'?
Previous page
