The Travails of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams never wrote his autobiography, but in 1975 he published his Memoirs written, as he himself confessed, “for mercenary reasons.” Here, without revealing much of his life, Williams sought to entertain his readers with anecdotes about his “indiscretions,” mainly of a homosexual nature. His critics were not amused.

Williams did leave his dairies, which are amply revealing. He had hoped to publish them one day: “Someday I want very much to get all these journals together and publish them intact. I think they should be eventually published that way with footnotes by their author, since they may have some usefulness as a history of an individual’s fight for survival, emotional travail.” Unfortunately he did not finish them (his footnotes alone would have been interesting), but now they have been published in a handsome volume by the Yale University Press. Margaret Bradham Thornton has edited them with painstaking meticulousness, and she has provided exhaustive notes that illuminate many of Williams’s casual jottings. She has also reproduced the facsimiles of the later comments that he made on some of the entries. They show that Williams took his diaries seriously, going back to them and mulling over what he had written earlier. There is a big gap of twenty-one years between the two sets (1936–1958, 1979–1981) of the thirty journals that have survived. Whether he stopped writing them during the intervening period or whether some have been lost cannot be determined. Probably the latter, because when Williams went back to maintaining his diary in 1979 he made no mention, as might have been expected, of resuming it. Besides, as the editor herself has noted, parts of the existing journals have disappeared.

In any case what is presented here provides remarkable insight into the world of the man who wrote some of the best plays in the English language. In his public life, as his published letters show, he was a sociable, fun-loving, and witty man; but the journals reveal the darker outlines of his private life. That world and the donnée of his works are closely interlinked. His melancholic mood drove him to write. Quite early he noted that he wrote his journal when he was unhappy: “it is usually when feeling worst that I feel the need to express it,” and he did not go back to it when he was happy. Consequently his journals, especially the last one entitled Mes Cahiers Noirs, exhaustively record searing details about his sad existence. He paradoxically derived “comfort and reassurance” from rereading them, by learning that his present miseries were nothing new. Indeed the journals furnish both the author and his readers with a glimpse of “an individual’s fight for survival, emotional travail”—a strategy that he worked out most eloquently in his best plays.

From the outset Williams had decided on his career. The journals record the early struggles, successes, and failures of the young writer. He was not always confident about what he wrote: “I wish I could write something decent—strong—but everything about me is weak—silly,” and he felt gloomy about his “whole prospect as a writer.” But, in actual fact, he soon was publishing his short stories and poems in small magazines, staging his plays locally, and winning prizes. His farce Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! was produced on July 12, 1935, and the next year the University of Missouri theater group Mummers staged two of Williams’s longer plays and a one-act play. The same year he noted that Harriet Monroe had accepted some of his poems for Poetry. This was a promising beginning for a young writer who was still in college. He got steady financial recognition too—first by the award of a Group Theater Prize in 1939 and then by a Rockefeller fellowship for one thousand dollars the next year, which was renewed in 1941. He noted all this with satisfaction, but still hungered for more. He did achieve much more. With The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other plays, he soon established his name in the pantheon...