TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.9

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The Laureate of the Outcast

March 7, 1983

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