My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams by William Jay Smith (review)

Unlike Blanche DuBois, who depended on the kindness of strangers, Tennessee Williams had an armada of friends. Admittedly, some of his friendships became love/hate relationships (with Tallulah Bankhead, for instance) or devolved into hatefests (with Truman Capote). But one of Williams’s warmest friendships was with William Jay Smith, a relationship that lasted five decades. Smith met Williams in 1935 at Washington University, when both passionately sought a poet’s life. They took classes together and critiqued each other’s work. Like his classmate Tom, Smith was a “displaced Southerner” who had a strong mother, a “drunken gambling, father,” a younger brother, and “mental illness in [his] family” (26). Seven years younger than Williams, Smith looked upon him as a “mentor” (56), a confidant, and “one of the ‘underground crew’ of our rebellious Bohemian confreres” (39). For Williams, Smith “made St. Louis endurable in [those] early days” (88). And it was to Smith that Williams sent anyone who inquired about his early years there.

Now 93 and a former U.S. poet laureate, Smith draws upon, and liberally quotes from, a wide swathe of sources: Williams’ letters (sadly, there is none to Smith in the Selected Letters, edited by Albert Devlin and Nancy Tischler, but Smith admits to being a poor correspondent [87]), notebooks, drafts of plays and poems, early reviews and commentaries, other biographies, as well as his own remarkable memory. The result is a book that evades easy classification, as it crosses the genres of biography, memoir, criticism, history of American theatre, hagiography, and meditation. Though Smith covers much familiar territory, he helps us uniquely to see Williams through a friend’s admiring eyes.

Hands down, the strongest chapter is “Thomas Lanier Williams, Washington University,” covering 1935–40. With Williams, Smith was active in the poetry club at school and later in the St. Louis Poets’ Workshop. He regards Williams as a poet first and then a dramatist, a priority engraved on Williams’s tombstone. A frequent visitor to the Williamses’ residences, Smith knew Edwina, Rose, and Cornelius; he watched The Glass Menagerie in the making. He also gives us behind-the-scenes details about Williams’s courting women, his moods, his writing habits, his reactions to his teachers, and his friendship with Clark McBurney Mills, whom Williams and Smith revered as a mentor. Most important, though, are Smith’s assessments of Williams’s early plays; no one could best him in attending their premieres. About Candles to the Sun (1936–37), a play on Alabama coal miners fighting an unjust system, Smith declares, “If taken literally as a chronicle of social protest, the play can never be fully understood. It must be read as a closely unified and carefully developed metaphor. It is an extended study of light and dark, both inside and outside the characters and the setting” (38). According to Smith, the Mummers, a St. Louis amateur theatre group, and Clark Mills deeply influenced Fugitive Kind (1937), set in a St. Louis flop-house peopled by a host of outcasts. Smith observes of it, “It is ironic that Fugitive Kind is one of Tom’s plays that his father appreciated” (43). He also heard Tom read Me, Vasha (1937), a one act-play, in a drama class as well as before friends who “exploded with laughter” at its “Babylonian Gothic” style, which made even Williams “cackle” (35).

Smith’s chapters on Battle of Angels and The Glass Menagerie further illuminate his friendship with Williams while providing valuable insights into the reception of these two foundational plays. Studying in Boston in 1940, Smith saw the premiere of Battle, “the third of my friend Tom’s full-length plays” (51). Starring Miriam Hopkins, the production was marred by a glitch that sent smoke into the audience. This mishap, plus the critics’ venom, threw Williams into a deep depression. Fearing that his friend was “suicidal,” Smith stayed in Williams’s room and...