TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.9

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                                                                                March 7, 1983

The Laureate of the Outcast

Tennessee Williams: 1911-1983


A great artist is reborn at the hour of his death. His works
cast a larger and more durable shadow than the man who wrote
them. So it will prove with Thomas Lanier Williams, a.k.a.
Tennessee, who choked to death in Manhattan last week (after
swallowing the cap of a medicine bottle). With the debatable
exception of Eugene O'Neill, he was the greatest playwright in
U.S. dramatic history.

O'Neill gave the American theater a new birth of seriousness.
Williams annexed for it a new terrain of freedom. In his plays,
the previously unmentionable was said; the formerly unavowed,
acknowledged. He once defined the motivation at the core of
his writing:  "I was brought up puritanically. I try to outrage
that puritanism."

Outrage it he did, to the point of being regarded by some as a
kind of Southern gothic erotomaniac. Williams dealt in taboos,
yet the taboo is often the touchstone of drama: in the
profoundest Greek play, a man murders his father and marries his
mother. Williams mesmerized as well as outraged playgoers with
Orpheus Descending (murder by blowtorch), A Streetcar Named
Desire (rape, nymphomania), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality) Sweet
Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration), Suddenly Last Summer
(homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana
(masturbation, fetishism, coprophagy).

Yet the shocking surface was never the substance in Williams.
He was, and will remain, the laureate of the outcast, what he
called "the fugitive kind"--the odd, the lonely, the emotionally
violated. The sense of loss and vulnerability that one finds
in his characters was imprinted on the playwright at an early
age. Williams was born in his Episcopalian clergyman
grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. His forebears included
a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables:
Poet Sidney Lanaier (1842-81), some Tennessee Indian fighters,
an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis
Xavier's. When Tennessee was seven, the sunlit backyards of his
boyhood were exchanged for rows of St. Louis brick flats the
color of "dried blood and mustard."  The change was shattering
for Williams, and he was to make of the South a mythic past, an
expulsion for Eden.

His mother, whom Tennessee always called "Miss Edwina,"
nourished the myth with illusory memories of a grand and
gracious heritage. His father was a gruff and aggressive
traveling shoe salesman, who, on rare home stays, taunted his
son as a sissy and called him "Miss Nancy."  His older sister
Rose, an imaginative muse to Williams, tragically retreated into
schizophrenia until a prefrontal lobotomy in 1937 immured her
in a perpetual mental twilight.

In his highly autobiographical The Glass Menagerie, Williams
tenderly exorcised the painful burden of his family history.
When the pay opened on Broadway in 1945, it galvanized a theater
that had exhausted its creative momentum. Onto this becalmed
stage, Williams brought a kind of drama that reflected an entire
generations' failure of nerve, and touched the exposed nerve
ends.

It combined three basic elements:  Chekhovian sensibility, with
that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the
Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting
the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which
Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of
passion--any passion--just because it is violent, overwhelming,
unreasonable."

Passion is also the heart's blood of the theater, and Williams
is to the stage what a lion is to the jungle. At its best, his
dialogue sings with a tone-poem eloquence far from the drab
disjunctive patterns of everyday talk. He is an electrifying
scenewright simply because his people are the sort who are born
to make scenes, explosively and woundingly. In Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, Bid Daddy jerks the crutch out from under his son Brick's
arm and sends him sprawling in agony; a few minutes later Brick
kicks the life out of Big Daddy by telling the old man that he
is dying of cancer. Williams' vibrantly durable characters
stalk the mind. Try to forget Maggie the Cat, or Blanche DuBois
or Big or Stanley Kowalski, the hairy ape in a T Shirt.

Williams was also a moral symbolist. His earthy characters
journey over a landscape that pulses with the strifetorn
dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the
Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and
corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal
Able. In the American tradition, this links Williams to three
19th century moral symbolists: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville.

As a playwright, Williams had the minor defects of his major
virtues. He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter
and gushed where he should have dammed. Occasionally, his
characters were too busy striking attitudes to hit hones veins
of emotion. His symbols sometimes multiplied like fruit flies
and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger was the unhealthy
narcissism of most modern art, whose tendency has been to gaze
inward and contemplate the artists' ego, as well as his navel,
to the point of myopia and hallucination. Almost inevitably,
he suffered the attrition of dramatic power that affects most
playwrights after the age of 50.

In the greatest drama, Greek and Shakespearean, there is a
final reconciliatory acceptance of man's fate. Williams could
not achieve that exalting serenity of vision. "Hell is
yourself," he said more than once, and the only redemption he
knew of was "when a person  puts himself aside to feel deeply
for another person."  In the finest moments of his finest plays,
Williams achieves the lesser, but genuine, catharsis of
self-transcendence. In breaking out of the imprisoning cycle
of self-concern, the playwright and his characters evoke a line
from Ecclesiastes:  "To him that is joined to all the living
there is hope. . ." Tennessee Williams is no longer joined to
the living. At one point in Streetcar, Blanche pleads with her
sister not to "Hang back with the brutes," saying, "such kinds
of new light have come into the world since then!"  Williams was
one of the bearers of that light.

--By T. E. Kalem