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On
July 16, 1939, in one of his first letters to his literary agent,
Audrey Wood, Tennessee Williams announced that he didn’t like
novels because “they seem purely esthetic, not living as
plays are” (179). A month later, from Frieda Lawrence’s ranch
in New Mexico, Williams entitled a letter to Wood “American
Blues,” identified the setting “(In Taos),” and imagined a
comic dialogue between “Tennessee” and “Brett” (Dorothy
Brett, friend of D. H. Lawrence and his widow). The scenario poked
fun at Brett’s deafness and her boring reminiscences on the
great “Lorenzo,” but Williams also satirized
“Tennessee’s” poverty and his ambition to write a play about
Lawrence. For
many Williams fans and scholars, this first volume of a two-volume
edition of Selected Letters will be of greatest value for
the scores of insights that letters like these to Wood provide on
the playwright’s developing sense of his craft. Editors Albert
J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler were careful “to document both
the literary foreground and the early production history of the
two major plays of the period: Battle of Angels, which
closed ingloriously in Boston in 1941, and The Glass Menagerie,
whose long and uncertain gestation came to brilliant issue in
Chicago and New York” (xi). The triumphant emergence of Glass
Menagerie from the midst of Williams’s several concurrent
projects (including fiction and poetry, as well as one-act and
full-length plays) is the culmination of years of physical and
artistic journeying. The
first volume of Selected Letters is thus a perfect
companion to Lyle Leverich’s authorized biography, Tom: The
Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995), which likewise builds up to
Glass Menagerie’s climactic and (to Tennessee Williams)
unsettling role in the plot of his life. Belying the anxieties
surrounding this achievement, the last of the 25 or so
illustrations in the edition of correspondence is a cheerful
photograph of a bowtied Williams receiving the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle Award for the best American drama of 1944-45. The
Wingfields’ family tensions in the world of the play are
anticipated throughout Selected Letters, starting with the
very first missive, greetings from eight-year-old Tom on a happy
visit at his grandparents’ familiar house in Clarksdale,
Mississippi, to his fragile mother Edwina
in dreary St. Louis. In a typically substantial annotation, Devlin
and Tischler cite an interview in which Williams referred to that
Missouri metropolis as “the City of St. Pollution” (3), and
they summarize the events that led the travelling salesman
Cornelius Coffin Williams to uproot his young family so
disastrously from their Delta home. In this earliest letter, Tom
also sends love to his sister Rose, who became the model for Laura
Wingfield of Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois of Streetcar
Named Desire, and many other vulnerable women in the Williams
canon. “It
was with Rose Williams that the family chronicle gave the most
profound evidence of its literary potential,” Devlin and Tischler
observe (xiii)--which makes it surprising that Rose’s permanent
hospitalization after the 1943 lobotomy “is not close to the
surface of the letters” (xiv). Nor does Williams’s
correspondence often speak of his own “blue devils,” the
struggles against madness that appear vividly in the journal he
began to keep in 1936. The journal (recently edited by Margaret
Thornton, to be published by Yale University Press) is a crucial
resource for Devlin and Tischler’s task of editing the 330
letters, notes, and telegrams they chose from the 900 such pieces
that remain from the years 1920 to 1945. So are Leverich’s weighty
biography, the letters that are not printed here, countless
interviews with those who knew Tennessee Williams (including Jim
Parrott, who drove to California with the young Tom), Williams’s
literary works, obscure newspaper articles, a range of drama
reviewers and literary critics--a huge bibliography marshaled to
make this edition as complete as the two longtime Williams scholars
could make it. Because
most of the early correspondence had never been published, Selected
Letters will become an essential tool for all future research on
Tennessee Williams. The University of Texas at Austin, Harvard
University, and Columbia University are the major holders of the
letters printed in volume 1, but Devlin and Tischler also thank many
other institutions and private collectors for sharing additional
correspondence. Brought together in one book, these letters convey a
large spectrum of tones as Williams adjusts his voice to his
audience: tender with his beloved Dakin grandparents, “colloquial
and sexually vivid” with “tieless young casuals” (xi), and
with his mother “curiously flat and devoid of emotion but informed
by a deep regard for the binding effect of family relations”
(xiii). Whether the signature is “Tom,” “Tennessee
Williams,” or “10,” the correspondence charts “a literary
life that nearly failed to beat the heavy odds arrayed against it”
(xv). Devlin and Tischler repeatedly remind us, in their
introduction and annotations, not only of Williams’s difficult
family life but also of his historic context: the Great Depression,
World War II, and the “demise”--just as he arrived in New York
in 1939--of the Group Theatre, “whose playreader, Molly Day
Thacher, admired his work, and of the Federal Theatre Project, which
might have produced his early topical plays had its funding not been
cut by a partisan congress" (xv). Volume
1 of Selected Letters reflects many such hardships and
disappointments, but it simultaneously reveals the “lyrical core
of memory that sustained Williams during his prolonged
apprenticeship and maturity as a writer” (xiv). Sensitive to the
author’s lyricism, Devlin and Tischler respond with a poetic
spirit of their own. The letters selected from the years 1939-45,
they say, “are intended to catch the alternating rhythms of life
on the road, at the Williams’s unhappy home in St. Louis, and upon
the Broadway stage” (xi). Another rhythm is generated by the
pattern of letter and annotation, unbroken by distracting footnote
numbers. The outstanding editorial performance in this collection will
create an audience clamoring for the curtain to rise on the
epistolary dramas of Selected Letters, Volume 2. Joan
Wylie Hall |
The
Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume 1, 1920-1945.