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It combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion — any passion—just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable."
Passion is also the heart's blood of the theater, and Williams is to the stage what a lion is to the jungle. At its best, his dialogue sings with a tone-poem eloquence far from the drab disjunctive patterns of everyday talk. He is an electrifying scenewright simply because his people are the sort who are born to make scenes, explosively and woundingly. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Big Daddy jerks the crutch out from under his son Brick's arm and sends him sprawling in agony; a few minutes later Brick kicks the life out of Big Daddy by telling the old man that he is dying of cancer. Williams' vibrantly durable characters stalk the mind. Try to forget Maggie the Cat, or Blanche DuBois or Big Daddy or Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in a T shirt.
Williams was also a moral symbolist. His earthy characters journey over a landscape that pulses with the strife-torn dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal Abel. In the American tradition, this links Williams to three 19th century moral symbolists: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville.
As a playwright, Williams had the minor defects of his major virtues. He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have dammed. Occasionally, his characters were too busy striking attitudes to hit honest veins of emotion. His symbols sometimes multiplied like fruit flies and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger was the unhealthy narcissism of most modern art, whose tendency has been to gaze inward and contemplate the artist's ego, as well as his navel, to the point of myopia and hallucination. Almost inevitably, he suffered the attrition of dramatic power that afflicts most playwrights after the age of 50.
In the greatest drama, Greek and Shakespearean, there is a final reconciliatory acceptance of man's fate. Williams could not achieve that exalting serenity of vision. "Hell is yourself," he said more than once, and the only redemption he knew of was "when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person." In the finest moments of his finest plays, Williams achieves the lesser, but genuine, catharsis of self-transcendence. In breaking out of the imprisoning cycle of self-concern, the playwright and his characters evoke a line from Ecclesiastes: "To him that is joined to all the living there is hope. . ."
Tennessee Williams is no longer joined to the living. At one point in Street car, Blanche pleads with her sister not to "hang back with the brutes," saying, "Such kinds of new light have come into the world since then!" Williams was one of the bearers of that light. —By T.E. Kalem