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university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 Reviews The Letters of Tennessee Williams BRIAN PARKER Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler, editors. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, vol. I, 1920B1945 New York: New Directions 2000. xxvi, 582. $52.00 This is a very learned and handsome but not completely successful attempt to relate a selection of Tennessee Williams=s letters to the events of his early life. I shall deal with what I consider its shortcomings first, then go on to its much more important virtues. The selection presents 330 letters, chosen from over 900, divided into seven chronological periods, from 1920, when Williams wrote his first surviving letter, to 1945, when he fled to Mexico City from the >catastrophe= of The Glass Menagerie=s Broadway success. This period of his life has already been extensively discussed because of its importance for his writing B by Williams himself (though unreliably) and by Lyle Leverich in his magnificent Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) B so a problem with the selection is that often (though not invariably) the letters can only patchily cover material we know well from other sources (and shall know even better when Yale publishes Williams=s Journal in 2002). Necessarily, this leaves gaps that the editors have had to fill with footnotes, which in turn can set up a tension between text and annotations B rather like Dan Marquis=s Archie and Mehitabel (if anyone still remembers them) or the design of Nabokov=s Ada B in which, paradoxically, it is the commentary that sometimes presents the more interesting material. This problem seems also occasionally to have skewed choice of text. Ideally, the letters chosen should be of intrinsic literary or psychological interest, but occasionally Professors Devlin and Tischler have chosen items mainly, or even merely, so that they can add editorial notes to fill up gaps in the narrative of Williams=s career. A blatant example is the telegram that ends period 6: AUDREY= OKAY THANKS FOR WIRE WONT LEAVE TILL YOU WISH= TENNESSEE. the letters of tennessee williams 699 university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 This has no intrinsic interest whatsoever, in style or content. It is there solely to allow the editors to bring this period to a close by explaining in the notes how Williams=s agent, Audrey Wood, secured a contract for him as a writer with Metro-GoldwynMayer . The format here is obviously faulty. The strain for biographical comprehensiveness is rarely as obvious as this, but there are recurring mismatches between text and notes. In their introduction, the editors say they have chosen not to key these notes with numbers in the text (as is usual) in order to avoid editorial >intrusion,= but this is disingenuous: the expedient allows them to add quite a bit of material that is not strictly relevant to the letters even as context, and also conceals a few occasions when they have neglected to identify obscurities that strict editing would want glossed. Williams=s letters to members of his family, which make up over a quarter of the selection, pose a particular problem. He always resembled his most famous heroine, Blanche DuBois, in preferring subjective elaboration to unattractive truth, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his letters home. He seems always to be on the defensive in these letters, anxious to placate and please; not only does he lie constantly about miserable academic grades, the state of his finances, and social popularity (and casually refer to non-existent girlfriends long after he has embraced homosexuality), but, more seriously from a biographical point of view, he rarely mentions the family traumas B his parents= grotesquely dysfunctional marriage and his sister Rose=s tragic slide into schizophrenia B which were at the very core of his imagination. There is a marked difference here between the letters and his agonized attitude to those events in Memoirs and the Journal. Necessarily, the editors have to correct his lies, and they also try to fill in the subjective lacunae with their notes. Another example is the religious epiphany Williams experienced in the cathedral at Cologne during a European tour in...

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