Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams and the South, by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. vu, 184 pp. $30.00; Magical Muse: Millennial Essay s on Tennessee Williams, edited by Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. xii, 251 pp. $39.95; The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 240 pp. $32.95.

IT is "OUT OF REGRET FOR A SOUTH that no longer exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it," Tennessee Williams explained. This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South'2 Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity. According to the authors, this paradise lost was crucial to the dramatic imagination of Williams, but above all it seems to have inspired their own.

Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies. The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll," regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health. However, these fundamental problems erupted suddenly and violently, so the authors insist, only with the family's move north to St. Louis. Notably, it is not the innate family situation that clouds Tom's otherwise sunny childhood, but his displacement to the North. And since "southerners . . . have deep roots in their own native soil and do not tend to forget the land that gave them birth," the young Tom could never feel at home in "the cold North."

Rehearsing such cliches of a long-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts. The alienation and conflicts of the North, in turn, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality." That this myth had little to do with the concrete reality of the South stands beyond question. But one wonders for whom the magical conversion of the past took place. After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring gentility and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very concrete and often cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts. Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Vacarro of 2 7 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalsky of Streetcar.

It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as VaI reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods. Two other pictures show little Tom and Rose with their black nurse Ozzie, who stayed with the family for some five years. From her, we read, Tom learned "an aspect of southern life totally different from that they knew from their family." A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters." Thus it is left to the reader/beholder to imagine what sort of stories Ozzie might have told. Gathering from her distant gaze in the photographs, deliberately avoiding the camera, they probably had little to do with the charming, romantic, and cavalier South that Holditch and Leavitt sketch out.

Tennessee Williams and the South is comprised of three chapters. The first follows Williams through his early childhood years in Columbus, Nashville, and Canton, Mississippi. It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier. The second chapter portrays Williams's life in the Mississippi Delta of Clarksdale-a place of happy childhood memories, signs of which would find their way into a number of his plays (e.g., Moon Lake Casino, the Cutrer Mansion, the angel of the Grange Cemetery). The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered."

In the final and largest chapter, Holditch and Leavitt first briefly discuss the "harsh reality" of St. Louis, marked by Tom's increasing alienation from his father and the rapid deterioration of Rose's mental state. Then the book quickly moves on to Williams's life in New Orleans and Key West, "One of the Last Frontiers of Bohemia," as the chapter's tide suggests. New Orleans is identified as the place of Williams's creative and sexual awakening. With detailed eloquence, the authors show how tightly Williams's fiction is connected to the Big Easy. Their discussion of the playwright's personal life, however, reveals considerable unease, if not awkwardness. Thus promiscuity is politely paraphrased as the introduction to "all aspects of life in the Quarter, both the surface and the underground." William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merlo, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely." In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality. Between the lines one distinctly hears Blanche's invocation: "I don't want realism, I want magic!"

What then does the book accomplish? Without doubt, its greatest strength consists in its extensive and detailed portrayal of Williams's intimate ties to the American South (which in the