Of Sin and Grace

MEMOIRS by TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 264 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

Tennessee Williams stands in an apostolic succession from Aeschylus in that slender company of men who, by vocation, are destined to write high drama. Within his own life span, Williams' characters, scenes and lines have become part of the civilized world's fabric. But Williams is a lyric playwright. and these prose memoirs, no matter how candid, cannot quite resolve the mystery of his artistic gifts Since he writes as naturally as birds fly (one of his nicknames is "Bird"), the book is immensely readable as well as valuable. It radiates good humor, randiness, poignancy and a gallant resilience of spirit. If Williams' sensibility could be compressed to a single line, it would be Terence's "Nothing human is alien to me."

The memoirs are not written chronologically. They shift backward and forward in time without warning. The whole "thing," as he calls his book, is a relief map of the Williams temperament. One particularly pertinent section concerns early traumas. The family move from Mississippi to St. Louis, when Tennessee was about eight years old, was devastating to the boy. In his mind, it became an expulsion from the Elysian fields to a dingy urban purgatory. He promptly contracted something diagnosed as diphtheria, which rendered him bedridden and turned his nature inward toward solitary fantasy. The resemblance to O'Neill's bout with TB is unmistakable.

A second trauma was his elder sister Rose's prefrontal lobotomy in 1938, one of the earliest performed in the U.S. In some fundamental way, Rose was Tennessee's muse, the "White Goddess," in Robert Graves' term, who inspired him to write. She, of course, is the crippled Laura of The Glass Menagerie. But his mother, whom he calls "Miss Edwina," has been the love-hate pivot of his life. Quite apart from supplying the model for the memorable Amanda Wingfield in Menagerie, this formidable lady, now in her 90th year, stamped certain irreversible traits on Tennessee's attitudes, character and dramatic style. Valiant in coping with her stingy shoe-salesman husband Cornelius' early desertion of the family, self-willed and prone to fits of delusive grandeur as a Southern gentlewoman, Miss Edwina is the greatest single influence on Williams' life and work. When Tennessee uses such locutions as "the study of equitation" for horseback riding or "none of us had breath to waste on the totally fruitless complaint that we were not being fed with spoons of precious metal," that is his mother talking. The arias of gentility in Williams' plays, whether they be those of Amanda Wingfield, Blanche du Bois or Hannah Jelkes (The Night of the Iguana), derive from maternal speech patterns. Mrs. Williams' predilections are also present in her son's fondness for plush hotels, in his dropping -and sometimes drop-kicking -names and in his notion that people, particularly critics, are not properly genuflectory before some of his poorer works.

Cruising Tours. Whatever cocktail-party gibber is stirred by the Memoirs will not stem from any of the above. It will arise from a portrait of the artist as a homosexual superstud. Why Tennessee chose to make this assault on his own privacy is not entirely clear. The confessional mode has been much in vogue in recent years, and perhaps he wanted everyone to know that he has had plenty of "gentlemen callers" in his time. In any case, his reminiscences take the reader on detailed "cruising" tours for sailors, to gay bars, to one-night stands that in at least one instance ended in a bloody beating. It is a gamy, scarcely edifying spectacle; yet Tennessee's all-too-human needs elicit compassion. Loneliness terrifies him, as it does most of us, and he has a hunger for tenderness and love, as do most of us.

Williams' great love was Frank Merlo, a wiry Sicilian American nicknamed "the Little Horse," with whom he lived for 14 years. As late as 1962, when Merlo was afflicted by lung cancer, he was an unflinching model of loyalty and affection. He saw that Tennessee kept his appointments, fended off tedious interviews and nursed the dramatist's continually bruised ego.

The tidal wave of drugs and alcohol that engulfed Williams through the '60s may be traced, conjecturally, to his desertion of the dying Merlo, though Tennessee quite probably did not know Merlo was mortally ill at that time. Williams has since been pursued by that self-imposed guilt, and though he has learned to live with culpability, it never entirely leaves him. The stained past has become part of an abiding sense of sin, and of God's redeeming grace, with which Williams' life and dramas are saturated. One of his students once asked the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich about the meaning of Christian existentialism. Tillich replied: "Read the plays of Tennessee Williams." The book of Tennessee Williams may now be added to that testament.

T.E. Kalem

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