The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams ed. by Matthew C. Roudané (review)

Book Reviews 493 MATTHEW C. ROUDA NE, ed. The Cambridge Compallioll to Tennessee Williams . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. Pp. xxiv, 277, illustraled . $1 1.95, paperback. This new Cambridge Companion contains fourteen original essays covering Tennessee Williams's career from apprentice work in the 19305 to Something Cloudy, Somethillg Clear of 1981. It is certainly a volume no library or scholar interested in Williams will want to be without, but it suffers from some major weaknesses. Traditionally, Companion volumes try to cover all aspects of a writer's career, but though a few of the essayists refer briefly to non-dramatic texts, the collection contains no consideration of Williams as a prolific writerof poetry, short stories, two novels, a memoir and many brilliant essays. This is a major omission for a Companion that aims presumably at comprehensiveness. Format is inconsistent, moreover, in that some essays have bibliographies for "further reading" while others do not. And the variableness in quality inevitable in any collection by diverse scholars is much more marked than usuaJ. Contributions can be divided roughly into four categories: distinctly weak essays, amongst which I would class Jan Balakian on Camino Road as an "allegory about the fifties," Jacqueline O'Connor's sketchy collage of Broadway reviewers' reactions to Williams (which are in themselves of very questionable value), and Roudane's own nugatory introduction; unexceptional but unexciting essays, of which O'Connor's overview of Williams scholarship in the 1980s and 1990S, and Ruby Cohn's consideration of stage techniques in selected plays since Night ofthe Iguana are exempla; original but controversial essays by Clum, Tischler and Devlin; and essays of high quality by Hale, Bigsby, Londr", Adler, Debusscher, Murphy and Palmer. Because of space, [ shall confine discussion to the last two categories, beginning with the less controversial group. Allean Hale opens the volume with a lucid discussion of Williams's career up to The Glass Menagerie. Necessarily, this covers material treated at greater length in Lyle Leverich's 1995 biography (some of which was based on Hale's research), but the essay establishes its own shape by focusing on the quite extraordinary amount of writing accomplished by Williams in this period and by keying early experiences into work that would only appear much later in his career. Similarly, C.W.E. Bigsby's analysis of The Glass Mellagerie recapitulates his previous exegeses of the play but establishes a special focus by illuminating Williams's "pretexts" to the published version: that is, the essay on "The Catastrophe of Success," the character and production notes and the edition's elaborate stage directions. The essay's only, minor, weakness is that Bigsby's understanding of the textual genetics of Menagerie is now out of date. 494 BOOK REVIEWS Another good traditional essay drawing on earlier work is Felicea Hardison Londre's "A streetcar running fifty years." Despite its title, this is not a stage history but a sensitive scene-by-scene reading of A Streetcar Named Desire. At the end, Londre tentatively suggests that Blanche's acceptance of the doctor may be interpreted less as a symptom of insanity than as "a way to salvage her dignity in spite of everything and to be the lady she has been striving to be" - an original but quite plausible reading with interesting ramifications. Exploring the implications of two of Williams's most ovenly "Christian" plays, Thomas Adler argues that Alma's rendezvous with the salesman at the end of Summer and Smoke should not be interpreted as a collapse into protligacy but rather as spiritual acceptance of the physical in which "sexuality to assuage loneliness is also pan of grace." Similarly, he interprets the theme of Night of the Iguana as a spiritual affirmation of human community, with Shannon, Hannah and Nonno seen also as facets of Williams's own sensibility as an anist. By enabling the guilt-obsessed Shannon to regain his self-respect, Adler argues, Hannah makes possible his healing acceptance of Maxine, though it is not on this that the play concludes but on Hannah's own aloneness after her grandfather's death, the "Beckettian endurance" of her genuine "GcLhsemane" replacing Shannon's spurious "crucifixion" in the hammock. This...