Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (review)

Reviews Ralph F. Voss, ed. MagicalMuse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams.Tuscaloosa: UniversityofAlabamaPress,2002.Pp. xii + 251. $39.95 casebound. An arrogant academic skeptical ofall pressblurbs,I must confess that the"unique and engaging collection" enticement for this volume pre-empted my own lofty pronouncement. Over- and misused though the first adjective may be, there is indeed something of the unique here: perhaps the serendipitous yet impressive range of essays and authors, perhaps their suspect (again to an academic) yet compelling readability,perhaps the casual yet substantive tone of the afterward. These distinctions are attributable, of course, to the book's origins in a symposium, only the second ofthe Alabama Symposia on English and American Literature to honor a single author. The first honorée being Shakespeare, the organizers' choice of Tennessee Williams obviously stemmed from more than the proximity of Columbus, Mississippi, his birthplace, to Tuscaloosa. A profound devotion to this twentieth-century playwright/poet seems to have been the impetus, a devotion contagiously conveyed by the participants as well. This offspring ofthe symposium so merits the publishers' second adjective "engaging" that a reviewer's disengagement becomes impossible, my quibbles becoming increasingly with myselffor not attending the symposium than with the inevitable weak points of the collection. Who can not be disarmed by an editor who yields his opening act to a poem by one of his contributors? Philip Kolin's"A Party at Tennessee's,"while unashamedly more birdlike than bardlike, conjures a whimsical gathering of Williams's fictional flock in his French Quarter courtyard and evokes the magic of the title and of the epigraphs of Ralph Voss's admirably displaced introduction. Evocative yields to provocative in Voss's opening line: "As the bloodiest century in the history of the planet wound down, few things seemed magical and even fewer seemed certain; death and taxes held their usual reliable places, but almost everything else was up in the postmodern air" (1). Though scholars may not, as Voss assumes, "largely 225 226Comparative Drama agree" (1) on a failed American Renaissance in drama until the twentieth century —nor on the uncontested enthronement of O'Neill and Williams as the "greatest"American playwrights ofthat century—we can agree that/i« desiècle events from Maria St. Just's death to the publication of the first volumes of the authorized biography and ofselected letters did augur a renaissance in Williams studies. The perspectives presented here, grouped "roughly" (3)—but edited impeccably—into bibliographical/biographical, critical and theoretical, and cultural studies rubrics contribute significantly, if not evenly, to those studies. The order ofthe collection presumably replicating that ofthe symposium, GeorgeW. Crandell's opening with allusions to Tony Kushner may have worked as a reminder of the millennial theme in conjunction with his arguing for the addition of "apocalyptic" to the "labels" (8) applied to Williams. The written version,however, ostensibly an overview of"TennesseeWilliams Scholarship at the Turn of the Century," falters on its noble ambition, which is apparently to cover all of Voss's groupings. As a bibliographical essay, it is admirable in the thoroughness ofboth its coverage and its own bibliography; as criticism, it inevitably falls short, the Kushner analogy peremptorily abandoned so that Crandell quotes Savran quoting Walter Benjamin without relating the philosopher to Angels. Also puzzling is the undermining ofan informative summation ofscholarship by theoretical approach with separate summations by playwhich could more fruitfully have been incorporated into the former and thereby disproved Crandell's assertion of a "generally unnoticed complexity" (23) in Williams's work. Despite these shortcomings and a conclusion as perfunctory as the introduction is far-reaching, Crandell's rigor of research and integrity of intent are unimpeachable. Not surprisingly, this praise extends to the next essay, Albert J. Devlin's "The Year 1939," which argues compellingly, through the Selected Letters coeditor 's knowledge of published and unpublished material, that this year was an extraordinarily pivotal one in Williams's life. In an inadvertent counterbalance to the previous essay, however, Devlin stretches the analogies to Vachel Lindseyand Richard Halliburton too far.Albeit intriguing,this focus ultimately seems to overshadow Williams and the events of 1939, the year's end for Williams being eschewed in favor...