Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams. Edited by Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 251 pages. $39.95.

In these illuminating studies of the South’s greatest playwright, the “magical muse” takes many forms. For Michael Paller, who discusses Tennessee Williams’s career as “a long dialogue with his sister” (70), the muse is Rose—lifelong inspiration for the writer’s fragile and promiscuous female characters; his plots of desire, madness, and mutilation; and his increasingly grotesque, violent imagery. W. Kenneth Holditch’s focus is the “multiple, complicated, and symbiotic relationship” between Williams and his “spiritual home”: New Orleans, the city that “liberated him from the bonds that had constrained him and directed him down the path of a prodigious creativity” (204). Williams himself plays the muse for scholar and poet Philip C. Kolin, who introduces the essay collection with “A Party at Tennessee’s,” a versified tour de force about “forget-me-not-girls” who sip “Moon Lake water laced with absinthe” to the “liquored jazz” of “Val Xavier and his Delta Brilliants,” while “all the boys of desire” gather near their host, the “old white-plumed bird”(vii-ix). Throughout the volume, other muses emerge, from the artists Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock to Williams’s lover Frank Merlo, the director Elia Kazan, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and Zelda Fitzgerald as well.

Editor Ralph F. Voss concludes that “the magical muse of Tennessee Williams made him remarkably successful at what he called ‘the great magical trick of human existence’—which, again in his own words, is ‘snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting’” (7). Originating in
the 27th Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature, held in Tuscaloosa in 1999, the 12 “millennial essays” in this volume demonstrate a variety of thoughtful approaches to the lasting reality of Williams’s art. Voss groups the articles “roughly” into three categories: bibliographical/biographical, critical/theoretical, and “broadly cultural considerations” (3). Even the essays that make the most direct reference to contemporary theory and culture studies are highly readable, making Magical Muse of considerable interest to audiences beyond the academy. “Theater is not a theoretical thing; it’s a practical, real place where you solve problems” (223), observes Paller, who speaks from extensive experience as a dramaturge and literary manager.

George W. Crandell’s “Tennessee Williams Scholarship at the Turn of the Century” sets the stage for the rest of the collection by synthesizing a huge body of criticism; his “Works Cited” section fills eight pages, with all but a few entries published between 1990 and 2000. Among the most important works of this period, Crandell includes Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) and The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (2000), volume 1, edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. Leverich died before completing a second volume of the authorized biography; but Devlin and Tischler continue their meticulous labors among the prolific correspondence, and both draw upon the letters in their contributions to Magical Muse. Devlin’s “The Year 1939: Becoming Tennessee Williams” explores the major impact of two “roving artists” (38), the poet Vachel Lindsay and the travel writer Richard Halliburton, as literary models for Williams during the “extraordinary year of preparation” (35) for his success on Broadway. Tischler, in “‘Tiger—Tiger!’: Blanche’s Rape on Screen,” provides a fascinating look at Streetcar Named Desire’s transformation from play to film, under pressures as diverse as the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code and Lillian Hellman’s series of alternative, and occasionally bizarre, scenarios.

Jeffrey B. Loomis, too, considers the surprising directions a script can take in his “Four Characters in Search of a Company: Williams, Pirandello, and the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Manuscripts.” Working on the Pollitt family drama for 24 years, Williams wrote over 20 drafts; amid the varied treatments, Loomis finds a “constant Pirandellian sense of life’s inherent theatrics” (93). Robert Siegel’s “The Metaphysics of Tennessee Williams” traces a particularly dramatic conflict, the mind-body split, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and several other plays, culminating in The Night of the Iguana. A recurring character type is Kolin’s subject in “The Family of Mitch: (Un)suitable Suitors in Tennessee Williams,” an essay whose stylistic energy recalls Kolin’s exuberant poem in the opening pages of this volume. Of the Mae West statue in Streetcar, he remarks: “Williams could not have found a more salient reminder of Mitch’s sexual ineptitude than the shabby relic of the queen of burlesque, the boastful, domineering woman of hyperbolic assignations fueling male fantasies in the 1930s and 1940s” (137). The plaster sex-saint clutched by Blanche’s unsuitable suitor thus contributes (along with Blanche’s purse, Jim O’Connor’s gum-chewing, Alvaro Mangiacavallo’s dropped condom, and Chicken Ravenstock’s tight boots) to a corpus-wide “symbolism of disrupted sex and annihilated epiphanies that helped [Williams] to create the characters who sought but rarely captured love” (146).

In contrast to this imagery of disruption, the black-and-white yin-yang symbol reproduced in Allean Hale’s essay, “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel: Breaking the Code,” represents the vision of balanced wholeness to which Williams’s 1969 play aspired. Hale persuasively examines the maligned drama from the perspective of Taoist philosophy and Noh theater; moreover, she argues that Williams—like Jackson Pollock, the inspiration for his suffering artist figure—was actually “forging a new style of expression” (158), not (as confused reviewers claimed) losing control over his art. Like Hale, Jackson R. Bryer studies some of the least popular work with great sensitivity in “ ‘Entitled to Write about Her Life’: Tennessee Williams and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.” Clothes for a Summer Hotel, a “dream play” about Scott and Zelda, closed after just a few weeks on Broadway in spring of 1980—“a critical and commercial failure that devastated Williams” (163). The essayist believes that there is, in fact, “too much of the aroma of the library and not enough of that of the playhouse” (170) in this last of Williams’s major productions; but Bryer goes on to develop a series of intriguing parallels between The Great Gatsby and A Streetcar Named Desire, correspondences that strongly suggest the Fitzgeralds had been haunting the playwright for years before he placed them, ghostlike, in a summer hotel.

Barbara M. Harris shows how fully Williams himself has achieved the status of cultural icon in her playful “ ‘It’s Another Elvis Sighting, and . . . My God . . . He’s with Tennessee Williams!’” From The Worst of Mad in 1959 to recent satires, spoofs, and homages in film, television, theater, and news magazines, Tennessee Williams has become more than a mere celebrity. He has passed, says Harris, “the unassailable test of iconology”: mass advertising. Shades of Stanley Kowalski, a “macho male model, complete with torn undershirt” yells “Pella! Pella!,” pitching a stellar brand of windows in a 1999 commercial (189). Fittingly, the last two essays in Magical Muse—Holditch’s “Tennessee Williams in New Orleans” and Dan Sullivan’s “Tennessee Williams: The Angel and the Crocodile”—recall the essayists’ personal encounters with the author. Sullivan, the Los Angeles Times drama critic for 21 years, acknowledges “the critic’s temptation—and maybe the scholar’s—to leave out the blaze when we discuss art: to explain away a writer’s work according to some theory we’ve devised” (206). Sullivan states a simple but profound reminder: “Good plays leave room for us to wonder” (213).

To Williams’s credit and their own, this book’s contributors do not neglect “the blaze.” With the University of Mississippi’s Colby H. Kullman as moderator, their enthusiasm is obvious in a final section, “Afterwords: A Panel Discussion,” where the conversation covers everything from the writer’s politics and paintings to recent developments in gender studies. Kullman’s World of Tennessee Williams is one of the most popular classes in the Ole Miss English Department; and he encourages panelists to offer Williams courses at their universities because “there are new generations who are going to do wonders for the world of Tennessee Williams” (230). Partly obscured by his own smokescreen, the magical muse on the dustcover contemplates these wonders to come.

 

Joan Wylie Hall