Paul Ibell - Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.

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Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie

John Berger Andy Merrifield

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Constantin Brancusi Sanda Miller

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Charles Bukowski David Stephen Calonne

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Carl Jung Paul Bishop

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Gabriel Garca Mrquez Stephen M. Hart

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Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws

Edgar Allan Poe Kevin J. Hayes

Ezra Pound Alec Marsh

Marcel Proust Adam Watt

John Ruskin Andrew Ballantyne

Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak

Erik Satie Mary E. Davis

Arthur Schopenhauer Peter B. Lewis

Adam Smith Jonathan Conlin

Susan Sontag Jerome Boyd Maunsell

Gertrude Stein Lucy Daniel

Igor Stravinsky Jonathan Cross

Pyotr Tchaikovsky Philip Ross Bullock

Leon Trotsky Paul Le Blanc

Richard Wagner Raymond Furness

Simone Weil Palle Yourgrau

Tennessee Williams Paul Ibell

Ludwig Wittgenstein Edward Kanterian

Virginia Woolf Ira Nadel

Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter

Paul Ibell

REAKTION BOOKS

For Tom Erhardt

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
4448 Wharf Road
London N1 7UX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2016
Copyright Paul Ibell 2016

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements
match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780237107

Tennessee Williams at the 20th anniversary of The Glass Menagerie opening, 1965.

Thomas Lanier Williams III (19111983) is Americas greatest playwright, but his legacy of work belongs to the world. He is popular across the globe in Western Europe, Russia and the Far East, as well as the United States because his plays, though often set in the Deep South, have a European sensibility and a universal appeal.

This comes from the themes that are central to his most enduring works: sexual desire, nostalgia for lost youth and beauty, the importance of money, and the conflict between what we hope for in life and what it actually delivers. His ability to create memorable, impressive, yet sympathetically vulnerable female roles is a particular strength. He also overturns conventional concepts of masculinity by taking what have traditionally been thought of as female concerns the loss of youth and beauty referred to above and making them central to the personal tragedies of some of his leading male characters.

There have been a great many books and an avalanche of articles about Tennessee Williams, but, as with all great artists, the raw material of his life and the work through which he expressed himself repay any number of visits, whether by biographers or those primarily interested in his plays. These two inevitably overlap, as there can be no other playwright who so resolutely and imaginatively mined his family, his sex life and his neuroses for material. Though his work gathered many laurels, he was never content to rest upon them: he spent over forty years writing for the stage. Inevitably, during that period and in the decades since, theatrical tastes have changed, but he has never gone out of fashion. Even when his new works were being rubbished, his masterpieces were acknowledged and performed. Whether early (The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire) or late (Something Cloudy, Something Clear; Vieux Carr), his work compellingly portrays human frailties and our often doomed attempts to rise above them.

For someone so dedicated to art and so contemptuous of commerce, his writing displays an astute awareness of the importance of money. In his understanding of the world it formed part of a secular trinity, along with youth and good looks. Everyone eventually loses the last two, and many fail to hang on to their cash especially in the age in which he grew up, which saw the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression, when many lost the wealth that had once defined them. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who, with his wife Zelda, is at the heart of Williamss play Clothes for a Summer Hotel) wrote about the young, talented and wealthy who, despite these advantages, had crises of their own. Williams, by contrast, showed us the no-longer young, those without money or a bankable talent in an American South whose obsession with social class mirrored the European societies that had, in colonial times, established its cities, its architecture and the origins of its social mores.

Like other great American authors between the wars specifically, Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway Williams was an American fascinated by Europe, but he was drawn to Italy and the myths of the classical world rather than to Fitzgeralds France or Hemingways Spain. Whereas previous Americans, headed by Henry James, had concentrated on the upper strata of a European society at its zenith, Tennessee Williams saw a continent shattered by two devastating wars and was in any case interested in the damaged but decorative rather than the confident and comfortably off. It is telling that the beautiful male prostitute, Paolo, in