Alley Named Violence
Tennessee Williams. By Benjamin Nelson. (Peter Owen, 25s.)
BOOKS subtitled 'His Life and Work' have at least one reliable fascination—that of revealing the autobiography in an author's 'fiction.' It is intriguing to learn that Williams and his shy elder sister Rose did keep a collection of glass animals, their dream world and refuge from the violence inside their apartment, where their father raged and referred to the boy as 'Miss Nancy,' and from the violence in the alley out- side the apartment, where dogs cornered and devoured stray cats. The genteel Mrs. Williams went through the whole embarrassing process of trying to interest 'gentleman callers' in Rose. as depicted in The Glass Menagerie, and Rose eventually developed such acute schizophrenia that her parents authorised a prefontal lobotomy. She is living in a mental home still. Meanwhile, at the early age of nine, Tennessee Williams had chosen Titus Androtticus as his favourite play.
Benjamin Nelson is convincing in his analysis of Williams's motives for writing. He takes as his text a passage from the short story 'Desire and the Black Masseur,' which argues that 'the sins of the world arc really only its partialities, its incompletions,' and that men resort to imagination, to violence or to atonement by self- sacrifice in order to make up for their incom- pletion. Thus from childhood Tennessee Williams withdrew from the violence around him into a writer's world of imagination; and his imagina- tion then provided that very quality of violence which he, little Miss Nancy, so noticeably lacked. This is certainly more convincing than Williams's own remark: prefer tenderness, but brutality seems to make better copy.'
I agree rather less with Mr. Nelson's analysis of the individual plays. One's interpretation of Williams's basic attitude can hang. virtually, on where one believes his sympathies to lie in A Streetcar Named Desire. Benjamin Nelson be. lieves that they lie wholeheartedly with Blanche, that Williams is saying the faded Southern ideals of gentility and honour are what are needed once more in the brutal modern world I would agree that his pity is with Blanche; but his grudging and fascinated approval is for the downright and animal Stanley Kowalski Williams is saying throughout his plays that life must be fully lived, uncluttered by romantic memories or faded ideals. Blanche's patrician pretences are her downfall, and in The Glass Menagerie Amanda Wingfield's relentless gen- tility causes her daughter great suffering. Tom Wingfield is right, however harsh it may seem. to go off and live his own life.
This difference of opinion affects almost every play When at the end of Summer and Smoke the virginal Alma jettisons her plan of suicide in favour of a date with a young travelling sales- man, Mr. Nelson sees this as a defeat, the first step 'on the long road to destruction.' (How would he describe suicide?) Sensing Williams's strong sympathy for the vital Maggie, Mr. Nel- son has to say that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is separate from the body of Williams's work. He argues that Byron and Don Quixote triumph in Camino Real because they are romantic dreamers, whereas the real reason is surely that they forge on into the dangerous Terra Incog- nita while Casanova and Marguerite Gautier stay behind with their suitcases of romantic souvenirs.
For his thesis, Mr. Nelson has to deny the element of satire in Amanda Wingfield, in Blanche Dubois, and even in the ludicrous Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, a play on which he is particularly unconvincing. Too much reliance on imagistic analysis—a method more suited to poetry than drama—leads him to the amazing conclusion that this aborted short story is an 'artistic triumph.' But one is often more grateful to a critic who is stimulating than to one who is convincing. And Mr:.Nelson is cer- tainly stimulating.
BAMBER GASCOIGNE
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