Ascent Out of Madness

...It is a work of acuity and devotion...

...The marriage, in short, was a hell...

...all this effort, all this longing to create something of value—it will be thrown away, gone up the spout, nothing finally gained—if I don't adhere very strictly to the most honest writing that I am capable of...

...Summing up the pattern himself, he declared in a diary entry that the "great [emotional] storms will come back too soon and with them the old lightning that I put into my work...

...Probably the experience that took its greatest toll came after he threw a "wild" party one night when his parents were out, in a desperate attempt to overcome his puritanical inhibitions via alcohol...

...Louis to his studies at the universities of Missouri and Iowa...

...Menagerie was so deeply rooted in his heart, his terror, his guilt and shame, that Williams never imagined the impact it would have on audiences worldwide...

...Leverich tracks this lightning from the life to the work and back again with authoritative ease...

...Reaching beyond these practical motivations, Leverich assigns key significance to the distinction between Tom, the repressed poet, and Tennessee, the flamboyant persona—between Tom, too inhibited to put himself into his plays, and Tennessee, free to do so...

...The result is a wrenching portrait unsoftened by sentimentality or apology...

...Leverich will be chronicling those hits and hurts in his next volume...

...He was disturbed, too, by his homosexuality and promiscuity...

...Lyle Leverich, a theater producer, met Williams in 1976 in San Francisco and revived two of his plays there...

...Along the way Leverich shows how Williams' themes and torments originated in his dysfunctional family...

...This withdrawal had its cost in guilt...

...Thereafter as well, whatever his inner turmoil or outward circumstances (and he was near starvation on several occasions), nothing slowed his output...

...For much of his life he grappled with an unresolved hatred of his father, who called him "Miss Nancy," complained about having to pay to heat his room and never gave him a moment of recognition...

...Indeed, her pathetic, frightening presence is palpable throughout Leverich's narrative...

...Williams adopted "Tennessee" in December 1938, to improve his chances of winning a $500 prize being offered in a play-writing contest...

...Passing her on the stairs the next day, he later reported, "I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her: I hate the sight of your ugly old face!' Wordless, stricken and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed out of the house...

...The Class Menagerie, his play about Rose, brought the atmosphere to the stage in a form Williams called social comedy...

...from his desperate early creative and personal struggles in New Orleans and Greenwich Village to his abortive 1943 screenwriting stint in Hollywood...

...His own Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams deserves a place on the same shelf...

...Tennessee's morbid sensitivity, not surprisingly, resembled Rose's...

...In the interim, a frustrated Leverich subsisted on a veteran's pension and Social Security...

...He wrote to a friend: "Time is short and it doesn't return again...

...It was at the typewriter that he escaped his own reticence, isolation and personal pain, and vented "emotions he could no longer repress...

...As a boy, he was close to her in an emotionally incestuous way...

...Far more affected by criticism than by praise, he suffered terribly from his failures...

...I knew then something had made me feel whole...

...While still living at home, he worked in his room even as his parents fought or his father complained about his not getting a "real job" at the shoe factory...

...He started work immediately, completing Tom six years after its subject's death in 1983...

...Here was someone who could feel my pain, my loneliness, and put it into such beautiful words...

...One of Williams' fears was that he would share her fate: He suffered throughout his life from hallucinations of what he called "blue devils," as well as from "paranoid rages," insomnia, hypochondria, fits of hysteria, and a morbid dread of people...

...It was a principled accomplishment by someone who refused to pander to the marketplace...

...Most distressing of all for Williams, though...

...To the end," according to Leverich, "he would cry out at the injustice of his failures, then pick himself up, brush off his hurt and indignation, and start all over again...

...Meanwhile, though, it can only be said that this book comes as close to the pulse of the young Williams' struggles and victories—and to the essence of his personality—as any biography of a writer that I have read...

...Rose's slow descent into madness haunted, and was exacerbated by, the entire household...

...It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition...

...Combining an extraordinary gift for characterization and dialogue with deep insights into the human heart, Williams—bom in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi—made the psychic landscape of the post-Civil War South his literary domain...

...He thought it would be more eyecatching than "Tom," especially with his grandparents' Memphis address instead of his own...

...One eagerly awaits its appearance, not least because he suggests at the outset of this one that the later unsuccessful works are on a par with the earlier triumphs, albeit at a "deeper, more obscure" level, and that the "experimental" methods the playwright introduced in them are simply over the heads of the detractors...

...Many of his enduring one-act plays were done in a single night...

...This "adversary of fear, which was sometimes terror," he once explained, "gave me a certain tendency toward an atmosphere of hysteria and violence in my writing, an atmosphere that has existed in it since the beginning...

...Three years later he was named the authorized biographer...

...This initial volume of what may prove to be a definitive study examines the first 34 years of the dramatist's life...

...The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and a stream of subsequent powerful creations established him as Eugene O'Neill's peer in the American theater...

...He endlessly rewrote scenes that verged on self-parody, and lived to see his reputation decline even as he desperately maintained a rigorous writing schedule and tried to break new ground...

...Nevertheless, fear—of the world, of himself—was the governing trait in Williams' work under both names...

...Unable ever to find peace, he remained restless and nomadic to his last days...

...Just, blocked publication until she died in 1994...

...it filled him with shame...

...If the biographer errs at all, it is in his belabored conceit about the Tennessee/Tom dichotomy...

...Although always compassionate, Leverich never skirts the less appealing aspects of the playwright's tormented personality—his self-promotion and duplicities, his calculation (he had "a heart of solid gold bullion," one informant claimed...

...I can only write for love...

...In adolescence, once he began writing, he distanced himself from her...

...With a hit on Broadway, Williams was soon earning $ 1,000 a week and working hard on what would be his next classic, A Streetcar Named Desire...

...From the start, Williams had iron discipline...

...At one point billows of black smoke from the stage (an unfortunate special effect) sent the already discomfited crowd scrambling out the doors and shaking their fists at the actors...

...Cornelius Williams was an alcoholic, often absentee father, who raged at being caged up with an antisexual wife...

...He was 34 years old and had overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to emerge as a major force in the American theater...

...In contrast to O'Neill, however, Williams in his latter years churned out play after play that was unrecognizable as the work of one of the nation's most talented writers...

...The story of the battle to publish it is itself a drama...

...An attempt at personal catharsis and exorcism, the work reflects Williams' 1939 resolution, recorded in his diary: "Now I must make a positive religion of the simple act of endurance—I must endure & endure & still endure...

...and, finally, to his conquest of Broadway in 1945...

...A shocked Rose "snitched" and got her brother in trouble...

...Leverich pays homage to Louis Sheaffer's superb two-volume O'Neill...

...A little of this stuff goes a long way...

...Because of a contest rule barring entrants older than 25, he also moved up his birth year, from 1911 to 1914...

...Despite his bewildered soul searching in a journal entry Leverich quotes, Williams revised the play until it finally became a success in 1974...

...Friends describe him ripping pages out of the typewriter, revising them, then stacking them in unnumbered piles on the floor...

...Just a year before the breakthrough he had written to his agent, Audrey Wood: "Let's face it...

...author, "Red Love," "The One-Star Jew " UNLIKE HIS IDOL Hart Crane, and many other artists whose flames flared relatively briefly, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams enjoyed a long productive period after achieving in the mid-1940s what he would one day call "the catastrophe of success...

...Soon afterward Rose was confined to a sanatorium...

...His evolution is traced from his childhood in Mississippi and St...

...But at least until the 1960s, his psychological ailments were kept in check by his more powerful creative resources...

...An example is his account of the night the sexually-charged Battle of Angels, Tennessee's first produced play, opened before a priggish Boston audience...

...Upon finishing it, he spoke of the need to quickly move on to something more substantial than this "quiet" and "sad, little play...

...was the progressive mental illness of his sister Rose, two years his senior, and her eventual lobotomy...

...Quintero, says Leverich, "remembered this as the first time in his life that he stopped feeling alone...

...He was mystified by the success of its Chicago tryout, its thunderous Broadway reception and its winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award...

...I well remember his cry of pain in the summer of 1969, when he took out an advertisement in the New York Times to both berate and plead with the reviewers who were by then dismissing his efforts...

...It is clear now that Williams chose his biographer astutely...

...Yet because the "why" of Williams' behavior is always evident, his dignity, integrity and courage remain intact and we are better able to understand him...

...Yet Director Jose Quin-tero, who was a young drama student in 1945, recalls that after seeing the play, "I walked all night long...

...But the tyrannical executor of Williams' estate, Maria St...

...By the completion of Streetcar in 1947, Williams was already lamenting the dangers of success and "the vacuity of a life without struggle...

...For the break would mean, I'm afraid, to follow my sister?and one of us there is enough...

...For years Williams continued to credit the performance of Menagerie's star, Laurette Taylor, more than his script's intrinsic merits...

...Edwina Williams was a loving mother, but smothering...

...Williams in fact experienced many losses with the passage of time, but not before writing some of his country's greatest plays, including Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Sweet Bird of Youth...

...Such partisanship could lead to trouble for Leverich...

...Williams considered this the crudest act of his life...