The tiger within.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean

The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957

Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler

New Directions. 662 pages, $39.95

Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama

by Michael Paller

Palgrave Macmillan. 269 pages, $26.95

"AFFLICTIONS, mortal afflictions! Especially those of love, how troublesome they are," Tennessee Williams lamented to a new friend, Gore Vidal (whom he addressed as "Bright eyes!"), from the apartment in Rome to which the playwright had retreated in the spring of 1948 following the crushing success of his first Broadway production, The Glass Menagerie. The letters included in this volume, the second of a projected four volumes of Williams' selected correspondence, narrate the picaresque adventures of a comically inept clown who was driven in equal measure by a fear of aging and death, a sometimes desperate need for human contact (more often than not sexual), and the most tenacious will to create that the American theatre has known.

Volume II opens with the premiere of Menagerie and carries Williams through the creation, production, and publication of what remain his most approachable and popular plays--A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof--in addition to the film script for the controversial Baby Doll, the novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and a dozen of his most important short stories, including "Two on a Party," which is both a hymn in praise of a life of sexual pursuit and a frank appraisal of the compromises that one is often forced to make along the way. The letters map the new ground that Williams broke on the American stage, documenting his relentless fight to keep things both emotionally and sexually "hard and pure," and recording his arguments with producers and directors over such matters as the "secret" of Brick's relationship with Skipper in Cat, Stanley's on-stage rape of Blanche in Streetcar, and the use of a condom as a stage prop in The Rose Tattoo.

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Williams' letters assume an extraordinarily intimate yet wryly ironic tone, as though he's ever alert to the absurdity of a life lived intensely if not with great practicality. He is sensitive to the absurdity of having to ask his weekend guests, including some of theatre's reigning royalty, to "go out in the bushes" due to a plumbing problem at the house he was renting in Provincetown--until a young Marlon Brando arrived and proved capable of repairing it. He records his fight with U.S. Customs when, re-entering the country from a working vacation in Mexico, he thought that a government agent had confiscated the manuscript of "One Arm" (his poignant story of a physically maimed male hustler whose sexual generosity redeems the lives of countless johns), only to discover that he had absent-mindedly packed it with his dirty laundry. He's frank and always amusing about his performance on the "trapeze of flesh" (a phrase he borrowed from his mentor, Hart Crane), describing his adventures while cruising Italy with Gore Vidal in an army surplus jeep that neither could drive; and about his embarrassment at having been excluded from his health club in Rome, apparently for an indiscretion committed on the premises with a street hustler; and finally about his relationships with both the tempestuous Pancho Rodriguez, who tried to run him over with a car (or so Williams later claimed), and with Sicilian-born Frank Merlo, who would become his long-term and much beloved partner.

Above all, these letters illuminate the deeply rooted loneliness that impelled Williams to connect with others, both sexually and through his writing. And they reveal the extent to which his writing was inseparable from his sexual performance. Actress Alexis del Largo, the "sacred monster" of Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, explains her use of drugs and her predilection for paid male companionship in terms that mirror Williams description of his own life: "I couldn't get old with that tiger still in me raging." The tiger is the rage to enjoy sexual warmth and find affirmation in another person, for however brief a time. It is also the craving for a satisfying outlet for his performance as an artist. Williams' letters bespeak a ferocious creativity that is powered, paradoxically, by his fear of losing his sexual attractiveness and his artistic potency. Individual missives read like "outcries" (one of his favorite words) from a heart that survives in the hope of connecting with other people, but one that has heroically enured itself to going it alone if need be. A major irony of this period of Williams' life is that the man who was routinely condemned in the press for dealing with "sordid" subject matter was such an uncompromising romantic idealist.

As expertly as this volume has been annotated by Albert Devlin and Nancy Tischler, the editors betray an unfortunate ignorance about, or perhaps unease with, certain gay matters. For example, they leave unglossed Williams' use of the affectionate nickname "Little Horse" for his lover Frank Merlo, as if embarrassed to acknowledge that part of Merlo's appeal was the combination of his short stature and his generous sexual endowment. And while they include one of Williams' letters describing a police crackdown on gay cruising joints in Key West, they choose an account that is less explicit than the one quoted by Michael Paller in Gentlemen Callers, his study of the circuitous ways in which Williams placed homosexuality at the center of mid-20th-century American drama.

Paller's book, in fact, proves not only a useful complement to the Selected Letters but the best analysis of the dynamic of Williams' work now available. Writes Paller: "The motor that drives most of his best work is the conflict between a never-quenched desire to reveal sexual truth and all the social and personal conditions that militated against such revelations." Paller's book is partly a work of cultural history in which he recovers specific contexts for individual plays, such as the McCarthyist pogrom being waged against homosexuals in government service in the early 1950's, a backlash against the findings in the Kinsey Report, contemporary psychoanalytical practices (including Williams' own analysis by Dr. Lawrence Kubie, who encouraged him to give up both writing and sex as a way of controlling his sexual anxieties), and shifting trends in Broadway theatre. The book is also an exploration of the tension between desire and self-loathing in Williams himself--between the call of freedom from convention and the shock that he felt at the reality of sex; between a societal homophobia that he heroically resisted and his own guilt at needing sexual contact so desperately that, like Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, he sometimes exploited others for it. In this respect the book is an analysis of the "need to reveal and urge to conceal" that constitutes the essential creative dynamic of Williams' work.

That dynamic is at work in a letter that Williams wrote Oliver Evans shortly after arriving in Rome. "My first night on the Boulevard I met a young Neapolotan [sic] who is a professional lightweight boxer. How I thought of you! Thick glossy black hair and a small but imperial torso! The nightingales busted their larynx! And Miss Keats swooned in her grave!... I wish I could tell you more about this boxer, details, positions, amiabilities--but this pale blue paper would blush! Besides such confidences are only meant to be whispered in the bed-chamber. Orally! The tongue has inflections which the typewriter wants!" Damn those "mortal afflictions."

Raymond-Jean Frontain, whose most recent book is Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (second ed. 2003), is at work on a study of Terrence McNally's plays.