The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. Volume 1 — 1920-1945 ed. by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler (review)

262 REVIEWS ALBERT J. DEVLIN and NANCY M. TISCHLER, eds. The Selected Lellers ofTennessee Williams. Volume I - 1920-1945. New York: New Directions, 2000. Pp. ix + 581, illus. $37.00 (Hb). Reviewed by Philip C. Kolin, University ofSouthern Mississippi Along with the recently published early plays, Albert Devlin and Nancy Tischler 's edition of Tennessee Williams's letters contributes immeasurably to our understanding of the playwright and his works. Theirs is not the first collection of Williams's letters, however. Tennessee Williams's Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965 was published in .1976, and Five O'Clock Angel: Lellers ofTennessee Williams 10 Maria St. Just, 1948-1982 came out in 1990. Devlin and Tischler include 330 letters, culled from more than 900, that Williams wrote from the age of nine to his mother Edwina Dakin Williams - "tell Rose fussy the big old Plymouth Rock turned out to be a Roster so Grand killed him and ate him" (3) - to a 1945 salvo to his agent, Audrey Wood, after the "smash success" (560) of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago. Most of the letters are written to his mother and to Wood, "Child of God" (564), his guardian angel/protector. While a few previously published letters are reprinted here - some of these in expanded form - most are new to publication , gathered from collections at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard , the University of Missouri - Columbia, and Yale, as well as from private collections. In one remarkable instance, one library held the first part of a letter , while a second provided the last part. Among the most significant letters is one written to Wood in 1945, in which Williams includes a detailed plot summary ofA Streetcar Named Desire, which he would write over the next two or three years. The letters are best read alongside Lyle Leverich's magisterial biography Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) and Williams's own journals, from which Tischler and Devlin generously draw for their helpful collateral annotations. Divided into six chronological sections, the letters progress through Williams 's childhood, college days, life as a vagabond-artist, and early professional period as an aspiring playwright experiencing failure and success. In fact, the letters might be subtiUed "The Apprenticeship of Tennessee Williams ." Devlin and Tischler's artful sequencing provides judicious narrative links to enable readers to best savor the playwright's early life. What unfolds is epistolary theatre, directed by and starring Williams, who, in different voices ranging from respectfully polite to salaciously camp, moves as actofsignatory from "Tom" to "Thomas" to "TenD"and then to "10." Williams' life in the letters is the continuing drama of the artist as picaro whose psychic journeys are encapsulated within physical ones. Yet Williams's prodigious peregrinations only occasioned his escapes, a defining metaphor of his life. The chimeras he fled included family censure, illness (especially his sister Rose's Reviews madness), penury, feisty paramours, angry landlords, intolerant critics, unsupportive teachers, rapacious producers, hostile audiences, and, most of all, rebuffs of his insatiable quest for success. The letters are anchored creatively to the places to and from which Williams fled: Clarksdale, Memphis, S1. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, Provincetown, Taos, and Mexico. His responses to these places shed light on his interior landscape and, proleptically, the symbolic terrain of his plays, stories, and poetry. S1. Louis ("S1. Pollution") was claustrophobic, squeezing Williams (and his character Tom Wingfield) between the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the shoe factory. Characterizing life with his family, Williams bitterly observed, "There is a kind of spiritual fungus or gangrene which sets in here after the second or third month's residence " (219). New Orleans, his spiritual home, elicited lyrical rapture on his first visit: I'm crazy about the city. [...] The Quarter is really quainter than anything I have seen abroad [....] I visited Audubon Park, which is lovelier than Icould describe, blooming like summer with Palm Trees and live oaks garlanded with Spanish moss. t...] The courtyards are full of palms, vines and flowering poinsetla, many with fountains and wells, and all with grill-work, balconies, and liule winding stairs. It is heaven for painters and you see them working everywhere. (140...