Inhibited Introspection

...He manages a bare, albeit moving recital of the terrible events that landed him in the psychiatric ward, but neither he nor we learn what caused his breakdown...

...John Steinbeck to his apartment...

...The older Williams, we are told rather indifferently, "grew up mostly without the emollient influence of a mother" and became "a rough and tough character who acquired a great taste for poker and light ladies??which was another source of distress to my mother...

...His mother, despite her continual presence, emerges as more of a shadow than his boyfriends...

...Instead, he kept right on with his undigested confessions...

...It was about this time, age 11 or 12, that I started writing stories-it was a compensation, perhaps...

...He was a successful businessman in St...

...more likely, the playwright instinctively realized he had better leave the sources of his art unexamined if he hoped to go on writing...

...Louis, lost his position, then plunged his family into the lower classes following a scandal that resulted from having his ear bitten off by a man he accused of cheating at an all-night poker game...

...And when such a person attempts to "tell all,' it is perhaps our cultural duty to pay close attention to what he has to say about his life, about the material and spiritual conditions under which his songs of neurotic desperation and misery were written...

...And his personal inflection of the social problem??all those ladies fallen from former grandeur, itself shoddy and rather squalid but nevertheless believed in??would seem to account for his public status much more than his concern for what Jean Cocteau called "the malady of love...

...The most he can say is, "I am afraid that dear Mother has at times seemed to me to have been a moderately controlled hysteric all her life" His father receives equally shallow treatment...

...Remarkably, throughout the '60s when Williams was so bound up by neurosis and guilt and paranoia that he literally could not speak, he continued to write play after play-a fact attributable, I suspect from his tongue-tied memoirs, to his violent need for success, his devouring ambition, and not to some vague esthetic predilection...

...Williams' treatment of his parents, for whom he claims exceptional love, is a measure of his incapacity...

...It would be easy to suggest that Blanche, or her spirit, got in the way...

...At first one thinks he is protecting something??his fantasy-life, his self-image...

...No perhaps about it...

...He is a bard who speaks for some part of every man yet is utterly incapable of speaking for himself??although, as he repeatedly declares, his life depends on it...

...Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Translator, Pietro Citati's "Goethe" Whatever your feelings about him, there is no denying that Tennessee Williams is one of America's authentic bards...

...The most arresting aspect of Williams' book is its patent honesty...

...In putting together this book, Williams clearly hoped to reach the roots of the hell he has suffered during the last 15 years...

...only someone talking from the heart could be so corny...

...I've never wished to be seen by strangers at a time of crisis,' Williams writes, recalling how after a disastrous Broadway opening his friend and director Elia Kazan brought Mr...

...The social goad is more accurately described than any other-sexual, philosophical or artistic-because it is the one Williams reacts to with his whole being...

...Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance...

...It had never occurred to us that material disadvantages could cut us off from our friends...

...He does not examine her importance in his sexual development...

...Yet it is precisely the author of those plays who is addressing us, using a social and literary manner derived almost solely from the faded, tacky elegance, the wistful falls of Blanche DuBois' characteristic rhetoric...

...The style, moreover, is offhand, slipshod, hardly the work one would expect from the creator of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie...

...Although the incident may indicate a great deal about Williams' so-called private life and how he imagines himself in his introspective moments, it is-like so much else in the autobiography??far from uninhibited self-examination...

...The malign exercise of snobbery in 'middle America' was an utterly new experience to Rose [his sister] and to me and I think its sudden and harsh discovery had a very traumatic effect on our lives...

...It is a measure of his honesty, though, that faced by pages uncovering so much a cautious person would want to hide, and surely aware that he was not achieving his original objective, he did not burn the manuscript...

...Everyone suffered from the father's dissipated ways, and about this Williams suddenly becomes quite explicit: "It was a radical step down in the social scale, a thing we'd never had to consider in Mississippi, and all our former friends dropped us completely-St...

...Even when he says he is deeply in love, he never ventures an explanation of why he is attracted to the beautiful boys who follow each other in his memoir like interchangeable shadows...

...Williams suffers from an intense narcissism that prevents him from standing back to look at himself...

...His description of his many homosexual affairs, for example, sticks to the obvious, the clinical...

...He reacted to the well-meaning act of consolation by screaming hysterically and locking himself in his bedroom until the intruders had left...

...By the book's end, however, one senses the answer is as much a mystery to him as it is to us...

...Indeed, looking back on his plays, it is the social content that looms ever larger, making Williams into a kind of sensitive John O'Hara or, in his best moments, a grotesque F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...and Mrs...