Tennessee Williams at His Peak
Besides providing fascinating reading, this collection is the most valuable research tool so far for study of the period between 1945 and 1957 when Tennessee Williams did most of his best work. It includes letters covering the composition and production of seven major plays – Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and the early drafts of Sweet Bird of Youth – besides several major film projects – The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, The Rose Tattoo (with Anna Magnani), and the notorious Baby Doll (which Cardinal Spelling of Boston condemned without seeing) – plus Williams's first collection of short stories, Hard Candy, his novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (later made into a film with Vivien Leigh), and his first collection of poems, In the Winter of Cities.
The editors have cast their nets widely: thirty-one public collections have been drawn on, besides some letters still in private hands; 350 letters, addressed to ninety correspondents, have been chosen from over 800 items available. There are forty-two illustrations; illuminating footnotes drawing upon the editors' encyclopedic knowledge of Williams's life and work; bibliographical descriptions and dates for each letter; and valuable indices of recipients and Williams's own works, as well as a General Index of names and titles. The series' first volume received the 2001 Morton Cohen Award given by the Modern Language Association 'for a distinguished edition of letters'; this second volume is even richer and more exciting than the first. It is a major scholarly achievement on which the two editors, Al Devlin and Nancy Tischler, are to be warmly congratulated.
Not that the editing is without occasional slip-ups, however, as is to be expected in such a monumental undertaking. It was surely wasteful to reproduce Thomas Hart Benton's familiar painting of The Poker Night twice, when there are so many other interesting possibilities for the first production [End Page 993] of Streetcar that could have been included. The editors uncritically accept Williams's mistaken belief that 'Cothurnus' was the muse of tragedy when Melpomene is the correct name, cothurnus being merely the raised boot worn by tragic actors on the Greek stage. And, as in volume 1, refusal to key footnotes by number to specific passages in the text allows items to escape identification (or only to be identified several letters later than their first appearance) and enables the occasional intrusion of comment that is not germane. A curious example of this occurs on p 212, where two substantial footnotes, nine lines in length, refer to nothing at all in the letter they are attached to or to the letters on either side: presumably a letter was dropped out here but the notes to it accidentally retained. As in the previous volume some of the notes are gossipy rather than illuminating: is it in any way useful, for instance, to know that 'The original Burford home is now a fashionable restaurant known as The Mansion'? On the other hand, one cannot help but relish such entertaining items as Tennessee's roughneck lover, Pancho Rodriguez, propositioning the playwright's strait-laced, Catholic brother, Dakin, and incontinently climbing into Tennessee's sickbed for a 'quickie' to the scandal of the nuns; or a tipsy Carson McCullers introducing herself to Katharine Cornell by asking for a sanitary napkin. Such gossip, while irrelevant to the text, helps establish the raffish atmosphere in which Tennessee lived and keeps the notes as lively as the letters themselves.
Although there is more discussion of matters of business than in volume 1, the editors have been very judicious in their selection; it is enlightening, for example, to see how much Williams himself was involved in the cinema scripts...
