Life of an Antihero

...Second, he writes in an exceedingly flat, unsyntac-tical style that comes to grief whether it sinks to lower-than-sea-level platitudes or circuitously ascends into the cloudily opaque...

...Donald Spoto's book, bearing the threadbare title The Kindness of Strangers, is sedulous, pretentious, pedestrian, erratically researched, pontifical, and hopelessly shallow...

...Spoto relates an incident, as told by Stephen Silverman, of Williams years later receiving an entire press delegation " half-naked and very coquettish...

...He was, unquestionably, a consistently tireless writer, and even if one concedes that writing was therapeutic for him, one has to admire his doggedness in the teeth of despair...

...Dotson Rader, alas less literate than Spoto, does write with some gusto at times verging on flair...

...When he tries to correct Williams' wretched German in his title Kirche, Kutschen und Kinder, he comes up with the equally incorrect Kitchen ioxKuche...

...Vidal concedes hypochondria alone from the above-cited nosology, but something like manic de-pressiveness emerges from his description and, a fortiori, from those of Spoto and Rader...

...So you have your choice between the perceptions of a diligent but obtuse truffle hound who seldom gels at the truffles, and a worm's-eyeview, neit her uncrafly nor unfunny, but no less limited in vision and fairly slimy to boot...

...b) the closest and truest friend of the playwright, his confidant and platonic lover...

...whether this casts doubt on either Williams' or Rader's veracity, or whether it is simple, blameless coincidence, he will have to decide for himself...

...A manifest memoir like Rader's does not require a critical stance...

...Something was clearly deleterious about the parental home: Edwina, especially as she grew older, seems to have been quite demented...

...He explained that we could not linger over lunch because soon someone was coming to take him on a tour of the state insane asylum...

...Only two relationships of some duration seem to have mattered...

...Rader merely makes out a case for humor—sometimes jolly, often bitchy, and most frequently confined to ribald stories about other people...

...Their relations deteriorated, and when Frank was dying in New York Hospital of cancer, Tennessee could barely bring himself to visit...

...In my naivete, it took me a while to figure out that I had not been invited either for my expertise in Existentialism or for my critical astuteness...

...Eager grad student that I was, I volunteered...

...Autoeroti-cism...

...Reviewed by John Simon We have simultaneously two new biographies of Tennessee Williams— equally albeit differently unsatisfactory...

...But what can we expect from a biographer who has Dakin "recalling" something that took place long before he was born...

...Gore Vidal, in his critique of these two books in the Mew York Review of Books, presents a third, characteristically revisionist, picture...

...Or consider: "Iguana was becoming a journal of Williams' soul passed through the prism of his poetic-dramatic art...

...The attentive reader will note the schematic recurrence of "20 years" in these sad love stories...

...the 10 miserable months of working in the shoe factory where Cornelius, the father, was profitably employed—before his drinking and wenching started to take their toll...

...Spoto, after attributing great wit to Williams, cites few if any devastating witticisms...

...Yet because their few virtues are likewise antithetical and thus complementary, to read both of them may provide some sense of Tennessee Williams the man, though not the author...

...I froze too: such a platitude from our most poetic dramatist...

...and (c) a fellow author of sufficient talent and acumen to be able to present an accurate and penetrating portrait of his illustrious boon companion...

...Tom's trip to Europe with the aforesaid grandfather, the Reverend Walter Edwin Dakin, who would later lose his money, apparently as the result of a homosexual escapade (though on this, as on many such things, Rader is more explicit...

...That was Bill Becker, now of Janus Films, and wildly heterosexual...

...Or this: "Summer and Smoke is one of Tennessee Williams' masterworks for the stage, a play of the eternal conflict between flesh and spirit—although these are often schematically represented.' A schematic masterwork—that is certainly something new...

...Thereupon I proceeded to talk almost exclusively about women...

...it was not until his late 20s, as a struggling writer in New Orleans, that he had his first homosexual experience and discovered his sexual destiny...

...you generally mistrust Rader, whoisoul to be sensational, tosettleper-sonal scores and, concomitantly, aggrandize himself...

...He is content to wallow in anecdotes, scabrous or otherwise, while he tries to make out a case for himself as (a) a major political activist during the Vietnam War who almost succeeded in radicalizing the apolitical Williams...

...Every account indicates periods of raucous euphoria, plus others of crushing depression, and if perhaps "not unuseful" to the writer, they were surely not unharrowing to the man and those around him who became the butts of his rages...

...the intensive toil over poems, stories and, eventually, plays, which gradually began to be published or produced in magazines and small theaters...

...He invited me to lunch at the Ritz, where he was staying, and I was thrilled...

...And just how does a seven-word utterance consisting of not one but two cliches become "most poignant'".' Pathetic, perhaps...

...17.95...

...Rose, Tennessee's adored sister, had to be institutionalized for life...

...Ned Rorem, who knew Tennessee well, asked me recently: "Didn't you find him a bore...

...So neither Williams nor I got much out of that lunch...

...Whenever I come to a new city, I like to visit the local mental institution," he informed me, expatiating a bit on this theme...

...Now I write chamber music, smaller plays...

...Unfortunately this does not make up for his slapdash-ness, inaccuracies, self-promotion, mawkishness, and, above all, disingen-uousness...

...There are three main troubles with Spoto...

...The other thing 1 couldn't help noticing was an unhealthy curiosity, a rampant voyeurism...

...Pathetic as well—beyond the bad thinking, the ungrammatical writing, the appallingly scrambled images ("'Williams was surrounded by a pack of glamour-hungry jackals who used sex like a flyswatter"), the cliches paraded as deep insights, the total irresponsibilities (the "plays" of Kurt Weill...

...Tennessee had attacks of hysteria very early on, and, in 1969, was briefly committed by his brother...

...Simon should know that, nowadays, he, Williams, wasn't writing symphonies any more, only chamber music...

...She was to be everything from friend to mother, from secretary to business manager, to this man helpless in practical matters...

...As a graduate student at Harvard, I attended one of his Cambridge appearances...

...If that's what it is," Williams cackled, "I've been an Existentialist since the age of 10...

...Through his windows, we could see soldiers waiting atop their tanks and armored cars to join the parade...

...Then, speaking rapturously about Garbo, he gushed: "When she came into the room, she seemed to be walking on air...

...He certainly helped friends and needy artists, yet Spoto cites him, when already very rich, unwilling to pay $50 for the coveted Van Gogh Letters...

...but it is more sloppily written, disorganized, unresearched, self-serving, and awash with scandalous tales about Williams and everybody else famous or near-famous whose name Rader can drop and reputation darken...

...Third, he harps on his moral disapproval of Williams' sexual indulgences (one mention would be quite enough), yet at other times he attempts to justify the playwright's worst excesses with such empty terms as" Dionysian or Bacchic impulse," to which he resorts some dozen times...

...In any case, he perceives both authors as pandering to "brains already overloaded with tales of celebrity-suffering, the ultimate consolation—and justification—to those who didn't make it or, worse, didn't even try...

...Within the same gripe about Irene Selznick, who didn't invite him to one of her dinner parties, Tennessee says both "All she loves is the almighty dollar" and "All I ever was was just a meal ticket for her...

...Tennessee got my message and behaved irreproachably...

...Rader's writing is ungrammat-ical, messy and would-be literary ("He panted heavily, like an old dog in the sun or a child molester spotting a sandbox in the park"), and no one at Double-day has corrected his misspellings of well-known proper names...

...According to Rader, these were "five words that [Williams] could not forget, and when, even 20 years later, he would recall them, tears would come to his eyes...

...Rader's, with its many gossipy anecdotes, is at any rate one of relieved gloom...

...Few plays do, but Streetcar is one of them...

...the family's frequent uproot-ings before reaching Saint Louis, and the incessant changes of domicile there...

...Also: the sacrifices of Grandmother Rose to support Tom when he dropped out of the famous University of Missouri journalism school...

...the unhappily married, largely destructive parents, and the kindly and supportive maternal grandparents...

...Somebody once asked me what kind of relationship this unlikely pair could have...

...but he is incapable of an incisive and convincing psychological interpretation of his subject...

...Yet by turning his world into a sealed-off, stifling, exacerbating hothouse, he was able to convey with steamy intensity his moving but limited vision...

...As if that ill-fitting metaphor covered the gap between, say, Menagerie and Clothes for a Summer Hotel...

...Icy winds blew across Boston Common...

...Rader tells of his never buying paper, instead using the back of mail from others...

...I was less so when, on the appointed day, he answered the doorbell in his robe, under which his pajamas seemed more unbuttoned than necessary...

...There are similarly divergent reports of Williams' willingness to spend money...

...One day, as Frank seemed to be dozing off, and Tennessee was starting to tiptoe out, Merlo said, "No, I'm used to you," and died...

...Still later, when I criticized his grammar in a language column I was doing for Esquire, he wrote a letter to the editor, as pitiful as it was irrelevant, saying that Mr...

...On Williams the writer neither Spoto nor Rader can come up with anything approaching the following simple, compelling insight from Vidal: " Just as Williams never really added to his basic repertory company of actors: Cornelius and Edwina, Reverend Dakin and [grandmother] Rose, himself and [sister] Rose, he never picked up much information about the world during his half-century as an adult...

...He further insists that "since those who write about [Williams] are usually more confused about human sexuality than he was, which is saying a lot, some instruction is now in order...

...My own recollections of Williams are meager...

...Vidal has mild contempt for Spoto and such loathing for Rader that he will not let his pen trace the latter's name...

...Someone asked what he thought of Existentialism, Sartre being the rage in that fall of 1947, when Streetcar was trying out in Boston...

...You can get the outline of Williams' life from The Kindness of Strangers: the birth in the Bible Belt in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911...

...You cannot always trust Spoto, who is clearly too dull-witted for the task at hand...

...The other maj or love was Frank Mer-lo, Williams' companion for many years: He was a decent, loving Sicilian-American, whose benign influence on the playwright could not, however, convert him to monogamy...

...It was very late...

...the difficulties of young Thomas Lanier Williams (Tennessee's baptismal name) at school and in college...

...This must have been his standard answer to critics deploring the falling off of his work (a sad truth I hadn't mentioned in that column), for Rader quotes him as saying, "I used to write symphonies...

...The fault, of course, was almost always the critics...

...Had not Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill—Williams' models—done the same thing...

...is Spoto's need to impress us with his threepenny erudition...

...Describing a clutch of hysterical or bitchy women around Tennessee, Spoto writes: "Euripides himself, in The Trojan Women, or Shakespeare in the opening of Macbeth, or Goethe describing a Walpurgisnacht, could not have assembled a team more ready for what Jane Bowles called an exercise in feminine wiles...

...He remained throughout his life the man who, having at age 10 discovered Existentialism, did not need to read Sartre or anyone else...

...He could be realistic about the quality of his work or totally deluded—though probably less so than Spoto, who calls far too many of the plays masterpieces, and the movies brilliant...

...Note the faulty parallelism along with the platitudinous insight and the historical absurdity...

...Dakin kept running for high political office without any qualification or prospects...

...New...

...In later life he changed agents almost as fast as friends, and friends nearly as often as shirts, possibly more so, considering his slovenliness and the filth in which he often lived...

...Still, things cannot be that simple for someone who feels he is simultaneously "entirely natural" and "evil, sick, vicious...

...It was a question-and-an-swer session—he couldn't and didn't give lectures...

...Although Spoto finds merit in several of the later critically and financially unsuccessful works, he, even more than Rader, portrays the middle-aged and older Williams as a man suffering from hypochondria, paranoia, erotomania, dromomania, fateful fascination with all sorts of perversion, drug addiction (vast excesses of medicines, stimulants, depressants, and one mention of cocaine), and schizophrenia...

...He also never tried, consciously at least, to make sense of the society into which he was born...

...No wonder that after two or three powerful plays Tennessee Williams was irreversibly depleted...

...Dotson Rader's tritely and histrionically titled Tennessee: Cry of the Heart has the ad vantage of being based on first-hand knowledge of Williams during his later years and has a dash of bravura...

...A Ford and a Datsun...

...the excessive closeness to Rose, the older sister, who became weirder and weirder and was finally lobotomized at her mother Edwina's behest...

...And further: " 'The tables have turned with a vengeance,' Alma observes, inTennesseeWil-liams' most poignant assertion that balanced unions between right mates are very rare indeed...

...After Tennessee's huge successes on stage and (to a lesser extent) screen, after the impressive celebrity and wealth, his life went into depressing decline...

...So we get an essentially cheerful Williams who " never doubted that what he liked [i.e., homosexuality and promiscuity] was entirely natural...

...Once, in a Manhattan restaurant, he sat at the next table and, without recognizing me, asked what time it was...

...As for Rader, he takes Williams' supremacy for granted ("the greatest playwright of the age" tout court) never bothering to cast so much as a passing glance at the work...

...All this merely meant, we are assured, that "he suffered from a sense of otherness, not unuseful for a writer...

...A prestigious address, but no mention of Ruth Ford, the considerably older actress and star of the Margo Jones production of You Touched Me, who for several years kept the openly homosexual (and self-confessed one-time male hustler) Rader in a style he was scarcely accustomed to in her Dakota apartment...

...From then on, it was an endless chain of pickups and affairs, a very few more serious, but always there was that psychic priapism that ruled out monogamy...

...Even assuming much of this may have been drug-induced, what induced the drugs...

...Cornelius became increasingly shiftless and less visible...

...First, he has no qualifications whatever as a critic or literary historian, despite many hollowly grandiose gestures in that direction...

...I said...

...Greater mastery of truism is unimaginable...

...Only because sexual taboos, being the most truly ecumenical, are the most effective "arbitrary prohibitions" of a ruling class that rules largely through prohibitions, says Vidal, did Williams believe to the end of his life that he was on the "bad team," proclaimed "evil, sick, vicious...

...Parroting his mentor, Rader writes: "[The critics] certainly defeated Tennessee...

...and then the beginnings of making it as Tom— now Tennessee—moves to New York and enters his alliance with the agent Audrey Wood...

...Williams allowed as how he did not know anything about it but maybe somebody in the audience could offer a brief description...

...One of the few times I saw him cry was when he read a review about his work by John Simon...

...Our subsequent meetings, about one per decade, were mere hellos or handshakes...

...Even his books on Hitchcock, his specialty, are paltry stuff...

...At least Rader is not humorless, has genuine affection for Williams, and does stumble on the occasional suggestive phrase or tell some believably devastating stories, as about the content ptibleEv genyEv-tushenko...

...Nonetheless, years afterward when his creative powers were failing and delusions gaining, he turned on her with paranoiac ferocity and signal ingratitude...

...Two things struck me about him...

...Tennessee made a couple of feeble stabs at heterosexual relations...

...Those poor boys," Williams remarked, "must be cold as a witch's teat...

...The proclivity for madhouse visitations I find in neither book (it may be my sole contribution to Williams lore), but Spoto reports that the playwright, during his friendly visit with Castro, "attended public political executions in Havana...

...No doubt there is truth to this picture too, particularly for the younger Williams in his artistic and vital prime, the years of Vidal's closest fraternization with him...

...Rader, on the other hand, confirms Williams' reliance on cliches in his conversation...

...It was Armistice Day...

...In its place, we get:" What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it...

...Tennessee, if we are to believe Rader, carried Kip's pictures in his wallet "some 20 years," until they "disappeared mysteriously...

...he may even have buttoned up his pajama jacket...

...First, the dullness, in fact cliche-rid-denness, of his conversation...

...the self-distancing of Tom from his younger brother, Dakin...

...He brushed aside my questions about Jessica Tandy and Kim Hunter, saying the only interesting female in the cast was a middle-aged black woman in a bit part, and suggested that I have a blond fellow student he had seen me with call him...

...a biography like Spoto's, with self-professed critical standards and assessments, does...

...Spoto's picture, with its repeated outbursts against the male whores and parasites hanging around the playwright, is grim indeed...

...Said Tennessee at 70: "Kip lives on in my leftover heart...

...Afterward we talked, and I told him how tht Harvard Advocate had turned down my review of Streetcar because no play could deserve an unqualified rave...

...I won't say that was when I lost my illusions, great writers subdivision, yet it was distressing...

...In matters of courage, he appears to have been self-contradictory—composing, for example, a brave letter protesting the denial of a passport to Arthur Miller, then losing the nerve to post it...

...See my review of his The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of A If red Hitchcock, NL, May 16, 1983...

...Rader casually informs us, "I was living at the Dakota then...

...in Spain, he chided his friend Marian Vaccaro for getting sick at bullfights, which he loved...

...At the end of the essay-review Tennessee and Gore are on a restaurant terrace in Key West in the early' 50s, and the playwright—martini in hand, bare feet on the terrace railing—smilingly declares, "I like my life...

...One was with a young dancer, Kip, whom Williams loved during a Provincetown summer: A sweet draft-dodger from Canada, he subsequently married, and died at age 26 of a brain tumor...

...But the assessments of Williams' traits vary, as much from one page to the next of the same biography as from one biographer to the other...