The culled Letters of Tennessee Williams.

The culled Letters of Tennessee Williams, tome I: 1920-1945 * Edited on Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M Tischler * fresh Directions * $37

It was Tennessee Williams's genius to take the pain at the remarkably core of homosexuality--the loneliness of the outsider, the impair inflicted by others--and make it universally understood. Straight businessmen at their annual visit to the theater, little of advanced age ladies at matinees--he touched them all and made them, for a force anyway, kinder, more tolerant people

He also touched many of the sailors in the audience, and it is this duality--the saintly bard slightly debauched and foolish--that made him like an interesting character. In The fix uponed Letters of Tennessee Williams, convolution I: 1920-1945, the playwright's personality emanates slowly but with a clarity and humanity that will add earnestly to his legend. At first, I admit, I erect the letters rather ordinary. Many are prosaic communications with farmers would-be producers, his beloved grandparents, and celebrities he was trying to cultivate, and practically all affect his career. Then I realized they weren't about his career at all. They were about his art. And then they became fascinating.

The notes cover the period from 1920 when he was 8 years antiquated up to 1945, when The Glass Menagerie spreaded to great success on Broadway. Scattered over all of them are lines, phrases, incidents, and images--the detritus of his daily life--that will period up transformed by his art into icons of the recent theater. The story of his sister Rose waiting at fireside for her gentlemen callers while slowly going mad, is perhaps the tonic motif in Williams's writings; she became not barely Laura in Menagerie but also Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and Catherine (the Elizabeth Taylor character) in on a sudden Last Summer.

Doubtless as a terminate of all the tension in the Williams household, Tennessee became a compulsive traveler. As the postmarks attest, he was in constant motion: hitchhiking around the region spending a month or sum of two units in New Orleans or lock opener West, out to Hollywood to prove his hand at the movies. nevertheless wherever he was, the focus of his life was always his writing. Or, more accurately, his rewriting: metrical compositions become stories, stories transform into plays, plays become screenplays, then stories, then plays again. Things did not proceed easy for Tennessee. But there are remarkably hardly any moments of self-doubt, and there is, above all, an almost unlimited capacity to learn and to endure

Besides work, the other constant in Williams's life was sex and if the work has a flaw, it is that relatively scarcely any of the letters deal with his robust libido. (Fortunately, his alphabetic characters to Donald Windham do deal with this make liable and were published in 1977) further some do, and they provide insights that are worth repeating. "The evils of promiscuity are exaggerated," he wrote in 1945 "Somebody said it has at least the advantage of making you take more baths. nevertheless I think one picks a rose from each [i]role[/i] each of a somewhat different odor and color."

The opening of The Glass Menagerie was one as well as the other a beginning and end. It l to what Williams would result to call "the catastrophe of success" and his efforts to recapture his days as a struggling artist l to increasing use of physics and alcohol. Letters from that period will no doubt be just as interesting as the the sames in this book, but at no time again will we see Williams in the same manner pure, so full of youthful cause of gladness and pain.

Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and have affection for Junkie.

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