It was a direct response to lates America, in which a macho materialism prevailed over spiritual and artistic values. Before Williams entered what he himself called his "stoned age" of the s, when drink and drugs stifled his talent, his subject was America in the biggest, most political sense.
Even Camino Real, first performed in and apparently showing Williams at his most woozily symbolic, is a vivid metaphor for s America. Set in a crumbling plaza, the play brings together a group of doomed romantic idealists, including Don Quixote, Lord Byron, Casanova and Marguerite Gautier.
Far from being a hazy phantasmagoria, the play was a direct and passionate response to an America where, as Williams said, "the spring of humanity had gone dry"; the fascist demagoguery of Senator McCarthy was all-pervasive.
Intriguingly, Camino Real appeared in the same year as Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and was just as opposed to the ethos of the times; Williams was among the first to protest at the withdrawal of Miller's passport by the US state department.
Williams remained an implicitly political writer up to and including Orpheus Descending, first performed in Here, the heroine discovers that her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan for his failure to practise racial discrimination. Williams is known as an explorer of interior landscapes; what we miss is his capacity to record, and to fight against, any form of prejudice, intolerance or oppression.
At his best, Williams pinned down America at its worst. But for all his empathy, he saw the human condition — and his own especially — as faintly absurd. I have some evidence for this, in my only encounter with him, on Radio 4's Start the Week in I had been briefed to begin with a summary of the plot, and as I described the struggles of the play's writer-hero, living in a New Orleans apartment-block surrounded by starving gentlefolk, alcoholics and deadbeats, I heard a steadily growing rumble of laughter from across the table.
At first, I thought it was a comment on my inept synopsis. Gradually, I realised it was the sound of a writer who saw his own remembered tribulations as hilarious.
I recalled that a year earlier he had been asked by the management to leave a performance of The Glass Menagerie at the Shaw theatre in London, because his incessant hilarity at this memory of his own youth was disturbing the rest of the audience. Williams's gift for comedy is partly temperamental, and partly a product of a southern inheritance that extends from Mark Twain to Carson McCullers. It pervades much of his work. You can see Cat On a Hot Tin Roof as a tragedy about self-delusion, in which the hero, Brick, can no more admit to his homosexuality than his father, Big Daddy, can to his cancer.
But, as Howard Davies's superb production at the National in reminded us, the play is also very funny. It opens with a hilarious monologue by Maggie the Cat, in which she protests against the "no-neck monsters" bred by her endlessly fecund sister-in-law.
Williams could also be ribald and Dionysiac. In The Rose Tattoo, a devout American-Sicilian widow, Serafina, is aroused from a three-year period of mourning by the arrival of a sexy, muscular buffoon.
At a deeper level, of course, the play is about the force for renewal in human life and the need to break with the past. Some of Williams's later work borders on self-parody, but the best of his plays will endure the ravages of time, for a number of reasons: there is his capacity to write great parts for actors, for one thing; his instinctive love of the marginalised and defeated; and his fervent opposition to any form of tyranny, whether domestic or political.
As Williams once wrote significantly, he used capital letters : "to be an Artist is to be a Revolutionary", whose words are always feared and misunderstood. February , Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine. February 27, April , February 25, Louis Riverfront Times. Books and Articles Hale, Allean. Hale, Allean. Leavitt, Richard F. The World of Tennessee Williams. New York: G. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. New York: Paragon House, Tennessee Williams: A Tribute.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. New York: New Directions, The Society is not responsible for the content of the following websites:. In , Williams enrolled at the University of Missouri to study journalism.
But he was soon withdrawn from the school by his father, who became incensed when he learned that his son's girlfriend was also attending the university. Deeply despondent, Williams retreated home, and at his father's urging took a job as a sales clerk with a shoe company.
The future playwright hated the position, and again he turned to his writing, crafting poems and stories after work. Eventually, however, the depression took its toll and Williams suffered a nervous breakdown. After recuperating in Memphis, Williams returned to St. Louis and where he connected with several poets studying at Washington University. In , returned to college, enrolling at the University of Iowa. He graduated the following year. When he was 28, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name he landed on Tennessee because his father hailed from there and revamped his lifestyle, soaking up the city life that would inspire his work, most notably the later play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
More importantly, it landed him an agent, Audrey Wood, who would become his friend and adviser. In Williams' play, Battle of Angels , debuted in Boston. It quickly flopped, but the hardworking Williams revised it and brought it back as Orpheus Descending , which later was made into the movie, The Fugitive Kind , starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.
Other work followed, including a gig writing scripts for MGM. But Williams' mind was never far from the stage. On March 31, , a play he'd been working for some years, The Glass Menagerie , opened on Broadway.
Critics and audiences alike lauded the play, about a declassed Southern family living in a tenement, forever changing Williams' life and fortunes. Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire opened, surpassing his previous success and cementing his status as one of the country's best playwrights.
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