Tennessee Williams by Felicia Hardison Londré (review)

112 Book Reviews frustrates his enormous good wil1. He either ends up baffled: "I can't say," "} can't evaluate writers," "This is a question I would rather not answer," "I really don't know how to answer that, frankly." Or he gets trapped into matching the banal queries with banal responses:"significant playwrights need a relevance to their time" and "I think that man is a social animal ." Miller can do infinitely better than that. but he could use a little help from the interviewer - a few real questions and some persistence with them. The interviewer's goal, after all, is to direct the subject to define himself. In all immodesty, I offer my own interview, especially sections one and three, in the revised edition of Arlhur Miller (1980). So what do we have? As far as I can see, we have an expensive sourcebook for the undergraduate who must write on Miller and who seeks easy access to secondary material. Several other collections of essays would serve as well, and none of them substitute for the student doing a little digging on his own. He might, on his own, locate a wider range of opinion on a particular play. He might exercise discrimination, deciding for himself which sources deliver the best insights on America's finest living dramatist. And who knows? He might even make a pennanentand significant addition to American literary scholarship. LEONARD MOSS, STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GENESEO FELICIA HARDISON LONOR£.. Tennessee Williams. New York: Frederic Ungar 1979. pp. vi, 213, illustrated. One might well ask whether the world needs yet another introduction to the works of Tennessee Williams. But the sensitivity and efficiency of Felicia Hardison Londre's study justify its existence. Professor Londr~ covers an astoniShing range within the slender compass of the 19s-page text. Hereighteen-page chronology includes all the salient facts about Thomas Lanier Williams's life. His boyhood bout with diphtheria, in which his imagination was fueled by tbe women in his family and a black nursemaid, Ozzie; his sister Rose's mental disturbances, that began in 1935 and culminated in a prefrontal lobotomy in 1937; his meetings with Frieda Lawrence in 1939 and 1943; his long and intimate relationships with Kip and with Frank Merlo; his baptism in 1969: the professional successes and failures - biographical detail is vital for an understanding of this most personal playwright. The text also "covers the waterfront," as Williams might say. Professor Londre provides brief summaries and analyses for each of the publiShed plays, to 1979. In "Staking Out the Territory," she treats the sixteen early one-acters, including the hitherto neglected At Liberty. In "Creating a New Eden," she gives us fuller discussions of the thirteen full-length plays from Battle ofAngels through The Night ofthe Iguana. The third section, "Entering Dragon Country," deals with the eight mature one-acters from In the Bar ofa Tokyo Hotel to The Demolition Downtown. She concludes with a survey of the later full-length plays, "Tilting at Windmills," and an epilogue on Williams's works in progress. On two matters of historical difficulty, Professor Londre is especially helpful. Forone thing, she untangles the confusing metamorphoses of the plays that were lengthily Book Reviews 113 reworked. As well, she ventures beyond the American career of the plays. A Moscow Art Theatre production of Sweet Bird o/Youth in 1975 claimed that "the play shows the life of simple, contemporary American people" ! So, too, the photographs include refreshing relief from the familiar images. A German and a Russian Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois quite jar with our habit of Branda and Leigh. The discussions of the plays are effective because Professor Londre deals with small effects as well with the large themes. She prods us to respond to those fine details of staging that have always been important in Williams, such as his early experiments with lighting and his later ones with the structure of dialogue. Students should find a lively model in her remarks upon the meaning of sound effects (e.g., the eat's screech in A Streetcar Named Desire; the croquet sounds in the "vocabulary of gamesmanship" in Cat on a Hot Tin RoofJ. Her close...