The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia.
Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood, 2004.
350 pages. $89.95.

Marlon Brando died at 80 this past July, but the face pictured in many news stories was that of a vibrant Stanley Kowalski. As the male lead in Tennessee Williams’s 1947 hit, A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando swaggered to fame in Stanley’s tight Tshirts and blue jeans. Jacqueline O’Connor, who wrote the Marlon Brando entry for The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia, explains that the jeans were adjusted for a close fit by costume designer Lucinda Ballard. “In Stanley,” says O’Connor, “Tennessee Williams created a complicated figure of postwar energy and masculinity—sensual, boyish, and violent—whom Brando brought to life” (18). Alphabetically arranged, from “A” (the dramatist Edward Albee) to “Y” (the comedy You Touched Me!), the Williams encyclopedia abounds in such intriguing facts and interpretive insights.

Editor Philip C. Kolin, of the University of Southern Mississippi, is probably the world authority on
Streetcar Named Desire and has published many books and essays about its author. In collaboration with Maureen Curley, he discusses Streetcar’s themes, characters, performance history, symbolism, and
biographical-cultural contexts in nine lively pages for this valuable new reference work. In a separate two-page entry, Leonard J. Leff chronicles “A Streetcar Named Desire as Opera,” a fascinating look at “the most prominent—and easily promoted— contribution to the late 1990s rebirth
of American opera” (253).

With Kolin as director, a talented cast of more than 50 scholars produced close to 160 additional articles for The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Kolin estimates that it would take a five- or six-volume encyclopedia to treat both the whole of Williams’s canon (about 70 plays, together with novels, stories, memoirs, poems, paintings, letters, and journals) and the writer’s “endless friendships and associations” (xi). Consequently, the TWE’s modest goal is to present “the most essential information on Williams and his work.” An “Alphabetical List of Entries” at the beginning of the volume reveals that these essentials
extend to William Faulkner, Madness, St. Louis, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary
Festival, and Gore Vidal. Another instructive list is Kolin’s “Guide to Related Topics,” which groups
encyclopedia entries into eight areas:
“Awards, Collections, and Festivals”; “Culture, Politics, Religion, and Social Issues”; “Family and Early History”; “People”; “Places”; “Theater and Films”; “Works”; and “Writers and Publishers.”

In the Preface, Kolin explains that most of the entries fall into four general categories. These include Individuals, from the influential playwright Anton Chekhov to Williams’s agent Audrey Wood; Places, such as Key West, Florida, the “most fantastic” spot in the United States (112), according to Williams, who was attracted to the the town’s gay nightlife and the literary culture; and Works, from his 1930s socialist dramas to the late absurdist plays and self-revelatory 1975 Memoirs. Like A Streetcar Named Desire, such famous dramas as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and The Night of the Iguana receive extensive treatment, including photos of performances and up-to-date bibliographies. In fact, even the briefest discussions in the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia are followed by at least one or two sources of further information–Web sites and library archives among them.

Kolin describes the fourth type of entry—Concepts—as “perhaps the heart” of the encyclopedia. Exploring “key ideas, themes, ideologies, and Williams’s techniques/dramaturgy” (xiii), the several conceptual essays range from Allean Hale’s “Art” and Mark Edward Clark’s “Mythology” to Thomas P. Adler’s “Religion” and Kimball King’s “Southern Culture and Literature.” A Southern literature specialist, King explains just how firmly Tennessee Williams was “culturally and spiritually rooted in the South” (231). Not only is he the region’s major playwright, but King compares him to Faulkner and Eudora Welty for his examination of “the psychological and familial burdens of the past, both those of the Old and the New South” (232). The critic further suggests that Williams reflects such “potent factors in Southern literature” as “deep religious fervor, a love of the land, and family traditions” (232). While most readers know that the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans are thematically crucial settings in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Streetcar Named Desire, Kimball King points out that “Battle of Angels/Orpheus Descending may embody most clearly the Southernness of Williams’s dramatic universe with its portraits of life in Two River County, Mississippi, the Williams equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County” (232)
.
Conceptual entries like King’s supply important contexts for students, teachers, and fans of Tennessee Williams; most of these compact essays end with a list of related topics treated in the encyclopedia. For further discussions of Southern culture, the reader is invited to “See also Clarksdale, Mississippi; Film Adaptations; Gender and Sexuality; Race; Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One- Act Plays” (234). Another form of cross-referencing is the use of boldface type. Thus, when King mentions Kingdom of Earth and Sweet Bird of Youth, the type- font indicates that these plays have their own entries.

Many Williams dramas, including Sweet Bird of Youth and Kingdom of Earth (as Last of the Mobile Hot Shots), were made into movies; and the sixpage essay “Film Adaptations,” by Gene D. Phillips, S.J., is a noteworthy source for material on actors, screenplays, directors, censorship, prizes, and teleplays. Williams’s most important director, Elia Kazan, is the subject of a separate entry by Richard E. Kramer, who is himself a director and actor. Of the scores of biographies in the encyclopedia, Felicia Hardison Londré’s essay on Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams III, is obviously the most significant. As Kolin recommends, this is “an especially good starting point” (xi) for anyone who wants to learn more about the writer. Williams’s maternal grandfather, Walter Edwin Dakin, who appears briefly in Londré’s account, is the topic of an entry by Colby H. Kullman, who teaches a popular course on Tennessee Williams at the University of Mississippi and frequently gives tours of Williams’s Delta. Kullman emphasizes the impact of the Reverend Dakin’s library and the impact of his love on young Tom, who— decades later— “always had a room waiting for him at his various residences” (54).

Details like that make for deep understanding and pleasurable browsing. An indispensable reference work, The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia is also an absorbing narrative because, along with their great knowledge, the contributors share poignant, vivid, and even wry reflections. In the book’s “Chronology,” for example, editor Kolin parenthetically exclaims,“(Elysian Fields!),” after recording that Williams choked to death at New York’s Hotel Elysee (xxviii). This wonderful aside evokes Stanley Kowalski’s old stomping ground, which was familiar turf to Williams.

In the encyclopedia’s long “New Orleans” entry, Jürgen C. Wolter remarks that the city was Williams’s “sure refuge in a lifelong flight from the familial restraints of his youth and, later, from loneliness and himself” (164). Alluding to paradise, the Elysian Fields neighborhood where Stanley and Stella will raise their new baby in Streetcar Named Desire is “symbolic of an energetic vivacity that springs up amid decay,” says Wolter (167). The curtain has closed on Williams, and on Marlon Brando too, but the energetic, vivacious Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia is a grand encore.

JOAN WYLIE HALL