The Kindness of Strangers

This year is the centennial of the birth of Tennessee Williams. For my birthday I got a copy of the two-volume Library of America complete works, and I'm going to try to make my way through it. Of course I've read or seen, either on stage or the film adaptations, most of his major works, but the man was astoundingly prolific.

To get started, I thought I'd read a biography to get my bearings. Donald Spoto, who is a biographer best known for writing about film and theater celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and others, wrote The Kindness of Strangers in 1985, just three years after Williams' death. It appears to be the only one-volume biography of Williams, and is a compact, largely no-frills affair, but does offer some cogent commentary about his works, and points out warts and all.

Williams was born in Mississippi but raised mostly in St. Louis. His father worked in the shoe business, and disapproved of his inclinations toward writing (Spoto has the delicious fact that while working in the shoe factory he befriended a man named Stanley Kowalski). He was devoted to his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a minister, and lived well into Williams' years of fame, living with him in his home in Key west.

After struggling through college as a journalism major, Williams went to New York with no money and ended up meeting an agent named Audrey Wood, who believed in him. After a few promising misfires, he struck gold with The Glass Menagerie, followed that up with Summer and Smoke, which was misdirected in its Broadway debut, and was later acclaimed in a revival. Then came A Streetcar Named Desire, and Williams was known as America's greatest playwright, and its richest. Fifteen of his works ended up made into films, but he didn't like most of them. Spoto quotes a friend saying, "And once, when he heard that the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was playing--which he hated--he went downtown and said to the people on line for tickets, 'This movie will set the industry back fifty years! Go home.'"

Though he had many successes, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth, his last great play was in 1964, with Night of the Iguana. From then on he kept writing, but baffled critics and audiences. He began to grow bitter and paranoid, turning on Wood and several other friends. He seemed to wander the globe, flittering from Key West (I made a pilgrimage to his house, now called Rose Cottage, on one of my visits there) to New Orleans to Sicily. All the while, he was hopelessly hooked on drugs and alcohol.

What I took away most from the book was how incredibly sad a life he led. He was haunted by his sister Rose, who was lobotomized as a girl and kept in an institution (she outlived him). Spoto details all the mentions of Rose, either as a name or as a flower, in his works. Of course the most famous incarnation she makes is as Laura in The Glass Menagerie, which for my money is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking plays ever written.

Williams was a hypochondriac, always thinking he was dying and always saying his next play was his last, even as early as the 1940s. He took downers and speed, and washed them down with wine. When he died, at the age of 72, he choked on the cap from a bottle of pills. Spoto makes several references to Williams overwhelming sense of misery, perhaps this sums it up best: "He was withdrawing from work to the solace of drugs, and from people to the darkness of solitude. And with this unfortunate shift in the personal and professional bases of his life, a cycle of misery and despair and decreativity enveloped him through the end of the decade."

Is Tennesee Williams (Spoto covers the mystery surrounding his change of name--he was born Thomas Lanier Williams, but there is no definitive answer) America's greatest playwright? I don't know, but I can't argue against it. He has written about half a dozen true classics, and he was also a man who liked to shock his audience, covering taboo subjects like repressed homosexuality (Williams was homosexual, and didn't make much of a secret of it), castration, and cannibalism. But his plays were also tender and empathetic toward his characters, and if he lived a life of despair, it poured out through his words.