Review by Choice Review
This new biography of playwright Tennessee Williams was conceived as a sequel to the late Lyle Leverich's Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (CH, Mar'96, 33-3772), which concludes with the staging of The Glass Menagerie (1944). However, longtime New Yorker theater critic John Lahr decided that "to reinterpret the plays and the life, [he] needed to revisit Williams's childhood and to take a different tack from Lyle's encyclopedic chronological approach." The result is indeed a "stand-alone biography," a masterful treatment of the often-tempestuous professional and personal relationships that shaped Williams's characteristically autobiographical dramas, from Battle of Angels through his last major play, A House Not Meant to Stand. Although Lahr makes limited reference to the extensive secondary scholarship on Williams's work, he cites interviews, memoirs, and manuscript collections in libraries from California to Massachusetts. Lahr's deep knowledge of the theater is evident in his attention to the impact of producers, directors, agents, actors, and reviewers on A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other gripping dramas of Williams's "mad pilgrimage of the flesh." Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Joan Wylie Hall, University of Mississippi
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS'S CAREER began and ended very badly. The boffo finish of his first Broadway-bound play, "Battle of Angels" (1940), was a big onstage fire - a special effect that generated so much smoke a number of theatergoers fainted while others bolted for the exits. "If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco," John Lahr writes in his new biography of Williams, piquantly subtitled "Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh," "history does not record it." Five years and a lot of crummy jobs later, Williams clawed his way back with a play that would make him famous, "The Glass Menagerie," whose premiere almost proved an even bigger disaster. Laurette Taylor, plucked from a long alcoholic oblivion to play Amanda Wingfield, was found an hour and a half before opening curtain in an alley outside the stage door, soaking wet in the rain and all but dead drunk. Occasionally pausing to vomit in a bucket offstage, she gave the performance of her life and thus saved our greatest postwar playwright from almost certain ruin. "Well, Mrs. Williams," the raffish actress remarked to the author's mother, Edwina, after the Chicago premiere, "how did you like yourself?" Whether Edwina had sufficient self-awareness to recognize her own maundering about (say) "seventeen! - gentleman callers!" is doubtful, but she was indeed Amanda in the flesh : a doughty chatterbox from Ohio who adopted the manner of a Southern belle and eschewed both drink and sex to the greatest extent possible. Her husband, Cornelius, was inordinately fond of both, and theirs was not a happy union. Drunk and embittered, Cornelius took to calling his effeminate older son Miss Nancy - until, many years later, as Tennessee Williams, this son would have the ineffable pleasure of sitting on the family tombstone while signing autographs at Cornelius's funeral. Williams might have used that image as an insignia on his letterhead, so aptly did it capture the triumph of art over life - the alchemy whereby a miserable childhood, and the enduring alienation that followed, were made into something sublime. For her part in this process, Edwina was rewarded with half the royalties from "The Glass Menagerie"; she had supplied not only the play's most memorable character, but also a theme that Williams would never quite exhaust: the ravages of repression. Edwina used to scream (in horror) during sex, and imposed on her children such a "dread of the physical" that Tennessee did not masturbate until the age of 26 - as Lahr informs us twice, lest we be skeptical in light of Williams's later exertions. As for the playwright's unfortunate sister, Rose, she was driven to such a pitch of hysteria that she taunted her mother with tales of abusing herself with altar candles at All Saints College, until Edwina demanded that her innocence be restored by way of a lobotomy. Or so Williams claimed, with a faintly humorous rue and no little sympathy, perhaps, for both parties. Often told that he dealt only with neurotic people, Williams replied that "when you penetrate into almost anybody you either find madness or dullness," and he was considerably less interested in dullness. One fascinating aspect of "Tennessee Williams," a finalist for the National Book Award, is its emphasis on the director Elia Kazan's role as midwife to Williams's better work. Called Gadg (for "Gadget") because he was compact, not to say handy at fixing every kind of theatrical problem, Kazan broke down the intricacies of a given character into easy-to-remember "Masks" and "Spines": Thus Williams's most memorable creation, Blanche DuBois of "A Streetcar Named Desire," fancies herself a "Damsel in Distress" (Mask) whose ultimate motivation is to "find protection" (Spine). Kazan was also adept at sifting the bric-a-brac of Williams's early drafts and finding the viable bits, the arc, whatever would keep viewers rooted to their chairs all the way to the final curtain. "please please stop and don't rush into production," Kazan wrote Williams of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." "You're letting yourself in for a lot of grief if you do." In Williams's original version, the flamboyant Big Daddy is shunted offstage for good after learning his cancer is terminal at the end of Act Two. Kazan insisted that Big Daddy return, and moreover that the troubled couple at the heart of the play, Brick and Maggie, evolve in a more sympathetic manner: a happier ending, in short. Williams acquiesced on almost every point and was rewarded with wealth and a Pulitzer, though he groused publicly about the compromise - "almost like a prostitution or a corruption," as he put it to Edward R. Murrow on national television, failing to mention that Kazan had offered to reinstate his original third act before the New York opening. Lahr's almost microscopic attention to the niceties of each play, from rough draft to final production, is more welcome in the early part of Williams's career, when his work was at its best and his collaborators included Kazan and some of the greatest actors of the postwar era. Thus the in medias res beginning of Lahr's book - that problematic Broadway premiere of "The Glass Menagerie" - seems a salutary jolt at first, a corrective (one supposes) to the "encyclopedic chronological approach," as Lahr notes in his preface, that Lyle Leverich took in his 1995 biography, "Tom." Lahr's book was initially conceived as the second volume that Leverich didn't live to complete. But somewhere along the way, Lahr (a theater critic for The New Yorker and the author of "Prick Up Your Ears," about the playwright Joe Orton) decided to expand his own work into "a stand-alone biography." He gives relatively little attention to Williams's early life, however, and after the structural ingenuity of that opening section - which jumps from a lengthy discussion of "Menagerie" to a lengthy discussion of "Battle of Angels" five years before, then perambulates a bit through Williams's early years before jumping forward to "Menagerie" again - Lahr's book is every bit as chronological and almost as encyclopedic as Leverich's "Tom." Which is to say: Give or take a few pages of childhood exposition, the book reads quite like the sequel it purports not to be. In any case, if Kazan had concerned himself with biographies instead of plays, I think he would have advised Lahr not to rush this one into production. A tactful egomaniac, Kazan might have pointed out the many felicities here, while warning Lahr that his exhaustive critiques of each and every play become less interesting once he, Kazan, is no longer in the picture. Hence: Winnow the plot summaries, the rambling quotations that serve no urgent purpose, and give the reader a fun interstitial anecdote, at least, between long discussions of one failed play and another. Better still: Skim altogether lightly over the wreckage of Williams's later career, and save your closest readings for maybe one or two of the more deserving oddities - "The Gnadiges Fraulein," for instance, a one-act "surrealist romp" from 1966. "In this off-kilter world," Lahr generously observes, "Williams's sense of persecution is reimagined as comic pandemonium; his public collapse is turned into the symbolic triumph of the pratfall." Above all, focus on strong, diverting characters and scenes: Bette Davis in "The Night of the Iguana" ("I'm sick of this Actors Studio [expletive]!"), yes; Williams's dreary late-life boyfriends, not so much. Speaking of Davis and her ilk: The kernel of Lahr's book was his brilliant 1994 New Yorker exposé of Williams's "soidisant literary executor," a minor actress named Maria St. Just (née Britneva), and Lahr's muse sings whenever he evokes this tiny virago with her "bluff, bowwow manner." "She scared people," said Gore Vidal, who didn't frighten easily, and Lahr fills many pages gleefully expatiating on this point. Williams's ghastly mother had left him with a weakness for strong, mentally unstable women, and his decision to name St. Just co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust - which owned the copyrights to his plays - put the kibosh on most Williams-related scholarship in the 11 years between his death and St. Just's. Her shenanigans are almost endearing in their childlike shamelessness. A few years before her death she published a collection of Williams's letters to her, "Five O'clock Angel," in which (among other malfeasances) she quotes the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson raving about her performance as Blanche in a revival of "Streetcar"; naturally Lahr tracked this (bad) review down and discovered the laudatory quotation was fabricated. At one point, too, she went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, where Williams's papers are kept, and bullied librarians into leaving her alone with his letters in a private room; she then took a razor to all remarks that didn't please her - unaware that copies were preserved on microfiche. Williams, I think, would have laughed at that, and indeed it's the kind of thing that attracted him to St. Just in the first place. But then, too, he was notoriously careless about his social life; "Most of my friendships are accidental," he admitted, quantifying the matter with a pie chart that accorded 89 percent of his existence to "work and worry over work," 10 percent to his ongoing "struggle against lunacy," and 1 percent to friends and lovers and so forth. When the work began to fail, it's easy to guess which part of the pie chart expanded. His own mother advised him to "find another occupation" after she attended the premiere of "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel" in 1969 - this capping a decade that passed, for Williams, in a drug- and drink-addled blur - but he needed writing as much as breathing, and they stopped at roughly the same time. To the end, a part of the world kept applauding the hollow ghost (as Matthew Arnold would have it), and eight months before his death in 1983, Williams received an honorary degree from Harvard. Spotting Mother Teresa at a reception beforehand, he shambled over to where she sat on a couch saying her rosary, knelt down and put his head in her lap. Clearly the good woman had no idea who this paunchy, disheveled person was, but she knew a soul in pain when she saw it, and patted his head as she gave him her blessing. BLAKE BAILEY is the author of "Cheever: A Life." He is working on a biography of Philip Roth.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exhaustive biography of Tennessee Williams, Lahr presents the life of the legendary playwright, warts and all, in enthralling detail, tracing him from his early life in a troubled Mississippi family (which gave him plenty of fodder for his plays), to his almost overnight success with The Glass Menagerie, to his death in 1983. The book also paints a fascinating picture of the theater world during Williams's time, populated with such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, and others. Reader Ashley is a Tony Award-nominated actress who portrayed Maggie in the 1974 Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and was also a longtime friend of Williams. She reads Lahr's book in a southern accent, perfectly infused with bourbon and cigarettes, and though her rendering of the expository passages is perfunctory, she shines when quoting Williams and his friends, lovers, and colleagues. A Norton hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The tormented life of a celebrated American playwright.WhenThe Glass Menageriedebuted on Broadway in 1945, the opening-night audience erupted in thunderous applause. After 24 curtain calls, shouts of Author, Author! brought a startled, bewildered, terrified, and excited Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to the stage. At 34, after a decade of failed productions, he had achieved the success for which he had been desperately striving. Arthur Miller called the play a revolution in theater; Carson McCullers saw in it the beginning of a renaissance. But praise could never quash the demons that haunted Williams throughout his life. In this majestic biography, former longtimeNew Yorkerdrama critic Lahr (Honky-Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People,2005, etc.) delineates the fears, paranoia and wrenching self-doubt that Williams transformed into his art. I have lived intimately with the outcast and derelict and the desperate, Williams said. I have tried to make a record of their lives because my own has fitted me to do so. In stories, poems and such plays asA Streetcar Named DesireandCat on a Hot Tin Roof,Williams drew upon his stultifying childhood; his anguish over his sisters mental illness; and his promiscuity and failed love affairs. Addicted to alcohol and a pharmacopeia of narcotics, Williams at one point sought help from a psychoanalyst; however, when the treatment forbade him to write, he fled. His self-worth, Lahr concludes, was bound up entirely in his work and consequently in how directors, actors and especially critics responded to what he produced. Feeling bullied and intimidated by others expectations, he projected onto them (director Elia Kazan, most notably, or his long-suffering agent Audrey Wood) his own moral failure and turned it into a kind of legend of betrayal. Lahr knows his subject intimately and portrays him with cleareyed compassion. Drawing on vast archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, as well as interviews, memoirs and theater history, he fashions a sweeping, riveting narrative.There is only one word for this biography: superb. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
