Tennessee Williams: 1911-1983
A great artist is reborn at the hour of his death. His works cast a larger and more durable shadow than the man who wrote them. So it will prove with Thomas Lanier Williams, a.k.a. Tennessee, who choked to death in Manhattan last week (after swallowing the cap of a medicine bottle). With the debatable exception of Eugene O'Neill, he was the greatest playwright in U.S. dramatic history.
O'Neill gave the American theater a new birth of seriousness. Williams annexed for it a new terrain of freedom. In his plays, the previously unmentionable was said; the formerly unavowed, acknowledged. He once defined the motivation at the core of his writing: "I was brought up puritanically. I try to outrage that Puritanism."
Outrage it he did, to the point of being regarded by some as a kind of Southern gothic erotomaniac. Williams dealt in taboos, yet the taboo is often the touchstone of drama: in the profoundest Greek play, a man murders his father and marries his mother. Williams mesmerized as well as outraged playgoers with Orpheus Descending (murder by blowtorch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality) Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, fetishism, coprophagy).
Yet the shocking surface was never the substance in Williams. He was and will remain the laureate of the outcast, what he called "the fugitive kind"—the odd, the lonely, the emotionally violated. The sense of loss and vulnerability that one finds in his characters was imprinted on the playwright at an early age. Williams was born in his Episcopalian clergyman grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. His forebears included a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier (1842-81), some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier's. When Tennessee was seven, the sunlit backyards of his boyhood were exchanged for rows of St. Louis brick flats the color of "dried blood and mustard." The change was shattering for Williams, and he was to make of the South a mythic past, an expulsion from Eden.
His mother, whom Tennessee always called "Miss Edwina," nourished the myth with illusory memories of a grand and gracious heritage. His father was a gruff and aggressive traveling shoe salesman, who, on rare home stays, taunted his son as a sissy and called him "Miss Nancy." His older sister Rose, an imaginative muse to Williams, tragically retreated into schizophrenia until a prefrontal lobotomy in 1937 immured her in a perpetual mental twilight.
In his highly autobiographical The Glass Menagerie, Williams tenderly exorcised the painful burden of his family history. When the play opened on Broadway in 1945, it galvanized a theater that had exhausted its creative momentum. Onto this becalmed stage, Williams brought a kind of drama that reflected an entire generation's failure of nerve, and touched the exposed nerve ends.