Making Tenn out of Tom

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. By John Lahr. W.W. Norton; 765 pages; $39.95. Bloomsbury; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN Thomas Lanier Williams III decided, in his early 20s, to become a playwright, he had, by his own admission, “not seen more than two or three professional productions: touring companies that passed through the South and Middle West”. Of his first professionally produced play he wrote, “Probably no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknow-ledge of it.” But he had one thing going for him: he was raised in a supremely dysfunctional family anchored by two parents who loathed each other.

His father, Cornelius Coffin “CC” Williams, was a taciturn and loveless travelling salesman prone to fits of drunken rage (he hailed from one of the first families of Tennessee—whence his son’s pen-name). Edwina, Williams’s mother, was judgmental, frigid and pious, but also as loquacious as her husband was laconic. Williams’s sister Rose lived mostly in mental institutions, and underwent one of the first lobotomies performed in America (she was also the principal beneficiary of Williams’s considerable trust fund after his death).

This motley crew, explains his biographer John Lahr, “was never far from his mind. In a sort of séance with the ghosts of his past, their narratives and their voices were perpetually reworked into his cast of characters.” The neurotic, chatty belles of his plays (Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie”, Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”) trace back to his neurotic, chatty mother, just as the hard-drinking, dominating father-figures such as Big Daddy Pollitt in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” stem from CC. For good reason Mr Lahr calls Williams “the most autobiographical of American playwrights”.

This is neither the first biography of Williams nor the first critical analysis of his work, but it is the first to weave both strands together so well. Mr Lahr, an accomplished American theatre critic, proves both an astute and careful reader of Williams’s words and a dogged researcher; to his credit he avoids the biographer’s cardinal sin of letting the minutiae of his subject’s life overwhelm the broader story.

That story has two aspects, both stemming from Williams’s unshakable commitment to his art. One is the success that commitment brought: two Pulitzer prizes, at least six plays that reside permanently in the American theatrical canon, lasting fame and vast wealth. The other recounts the toll it took on Williams and everyone around him. Nearly all his personal and professional relationships shattered on the shoals of his titanic ego, and his need to be cared for and shown love while giving none away.

He came to treat his longest-lasting lover, Frank Merlo, as something between a housewife and a social secretary. Mr Lahr keenly notes that in the plays written during that relationship’s turbulent late period, “the idea of the couple was continuously subverted, dramatised as a travesty (“Baby Doll”), a tragedy (“Orpheus Descending”) or an impossibility (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”). Williams had a gift for using people up; as he explained in an interview, “I’m gregarious and like to be around people, but almost anybody will do…I prefer people who can help me in some way or another, and most of my friendships are accidental.” Williams himself, of course, was not immune from this destructive streak. He drank heavily, and eventually died alone on a hotel-room floor, next to an empty vial of pills and a couple of wine-bottle corks.

Contemporary, particularly young, theatregoers accustomed to both open acceptance of homosexuality and frank depictions of sex in all its permutations on stage and screen, may find Williams’s treatment of desire overwrought or archaic. But for his time he was radical. He moved the social realism of Eugene O’Neill and Anton Chekhov inward, to the human heart (and loins). If by the end of his life his work seemed rather old-fashioned, it was he who had made the fashion.