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Book Reviews 1I9 reliable. (The pattern continues through her later years, when she has several close friendships with physicians and at least one phannacologist.) From her records of her consumption, it seems clear that she sets her own dosages, to the point where she sometimes makes herself ill, even before the center of the marriage has ceased to hold. What might O'Neill have meant when he asked Commins to "understand" Carlotta's sickness? That she had poisoned herself on a prescription drug as his mother had once done? That some madness afflicted her that caused her to erupl in various ways, with or without the influence of bromide? Did the playwright mean to justify a decision he knew Saxe disapproved of: to resume living with Carlotta because he felt responsible for returning to her the protection she had previously given him while he could still write? Did he mean that he could not tolerate the guilt that would follow from abandoning another wife as he had his first two? Did he mean that he was uniquely suited to understand and cope with a woman who used drugs and intennittently behaved dementedly? Did he mean that his numerous debilitating illnesses and almost complete physical helplessness meant he could not stand to lose the person whose winds and waters he knew best? Almost certainly he meant all these and more. Dorothy Conunins's moving book will first distress the reader with the horror of O'Neill's last years. But the horror of the ending soon fades, and one remembers instead the devotion and blessings of an extraordinary friendship. STEPHEN A. BLACK, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY ROGER BOXILL. Tennessee Williams. London: Macmillan 1987. Pp. xvi, 186, illustrated. £18.00; £5.95 (PS). To compress a career like Tennessee Williams's into the modest compass of a "Modem Dramatists" volume demands considerable flair, and Roger Boxill is to be congratulated on the sheer amount of infom ation he has crammed into this short book. It provides a comprehensive introduction to Williams's canon and career, lucidly arranged, with its literary comment balanced by analysis of perfomances on both stage and screen, and a useful bibliography for further study - though I would add to the latter Margaret Van Antwerp and Sally Johns's compilation of research documents entitled Tennessee Williams, An Illustrated Chronicle (Gage, 1984). Boxill orders his overwhelming abundance of material by careful chapter division. After introductory chapters on literary and biographical contexts and recurring patterns of"Fonn. Theme, and Character". he spends one chapter on "Early one-act plays". then devotes a chapter each to the four plays he considers Williams's major accomplishments : The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire. Summer and Smoke, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Three portmanteau chapters follow in roughJy chronological order: "The Wanderer Plays", covering Orpheus Descending. Suddenly Last Summer, Something Unspoken. and Sweet Bird afYouth; "Reversals ofPattem" considering You Touched Me! , The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Period ofAdjustment, and Night ofthe 120 Book Reviews Iguana; and "Late Plays", which includes brief comments on no fewer than twenty-five plays, with only The Two-Character Play given significant coverage. Finally, there is a short "Conclusion", organized interestingly round "Two-River County", the mythical part of the Mississippi Delta in which most of Williams's drama is set. Inevitably, such an arrangement raises questions. For my own part, I would never prefer Summer and Smoke before either Camino Real or Jguana. More seriously. Boxill's selection of which plays are to be considered major has the all-too-familiar effect of privileging Williams's early work to the neglect, and partial misunderstanding, of plays written at the end of his career. And this bias is intensified by Boxill's second unifying device, the identification of certain characters, themes, and techniques which recur throughout the canon. He focusses on two "archetypal" characters - the "faded belle" , and the "fugitive artist" who is sexually harassed (both interpreted as aspects of Williams himself) - and two recurrent situations - the "threat of eviction", and the "ruined celebration" (often connected with Easter renewal) - which are seen as wrapped around a lament for the destructiveness of Time which is Williams's central theme...

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