Globalization and Culture: More Than Your Money's Worth

702 brian parker university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 capacity,= he worries in August 1948, >it is like having sixteen cylinders in a jalopy=; and he confesses to Audrey Wood, >I don=t believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.= But he resolves, >you cannot give way to such feelings. And I don=t. This is a one-way street that I have chosen and I have to follow it through.= To Joe Hazen he affirms, >We must make a religion of endurance,= a memorable phrase with implications for Iguana. Besides such glimpses into Williams=s roller-coaster emotions and the circumstances of his bohemian way of life, the letters are also vivid in their documentation of how difficult it was for any unknown writer to get work published at that period and, particularly, to get it on the stage. Not inappropriately, then, he anticipates Blanche DuBois in a one-line letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of the Chicago journal Poetry: >Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?= This volume covers the Battle of Angels débâcle in Boston; revisions and manoeuvrings for a production of You Touched Me! and the sad rupture of his friendship with Donald Windham, his collaborator in that play; and the gradual evolution of The Gentleman Caller into The Glass Menagerie. About the latter he is surprisingly lukewarm in a letter of September 1944: >It has some interesting new techniques and all in all I am not displeased with the outcome. That is, when I consider the terrible, compulsive struggle it was to do the thing and what a frightful, sentimental mess it might well have been, and was at some stages. It needs a good deal of pruning ... [but] I think it contains my sister, and that was the object.= There is also a fascinating outline with three alternative endings of what was to become Streetcar Named Desire, sent to Audrey Wood as early as Menagerie=s tryout in Chicago; and, as was mentioned earlier, descriptions from Acapulco in 1940 that would become part of The Night of the Iguana more than twenty years later. The letters document the wearisome infighting of the production process, and the constant pressures upon Williams to revise to suit the box-office. And of particular interest to this reviewer are long, detailed letters in which he explains the thinking behind successive revisions of Battle of Angels and You Touched Me! Analysing the genetics of his plays through a bewildering network of revisions is one of the most formidable tasks still facing Williams scholarship, and letters such as these will be invaluable as guides. Unfortunately, they are of less interest to the ordinary Williams enthusiast because they reflect versions that are very different from the texts that eventually reached print. Finally, to return to Professors Devlin and Tischler and the editing: whatever small disagreements one may have about some details, their hard work and immense erudition merit only the highest praise. The project is of major importance for the study of Tennessee Williams, and the editors are to be warmly congratulated on such an auspicious debut. Globalization and Culture: More Than Your Money=s Worth JERRY A. VARSAVA globalization and culture 703 university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 John Tomlinson. Globalization and Culture Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999. viii, 238. $40.00, $21.00 Over the course of the last decade or more, no single issue has garnered the attention of the world=s citizenry to quite the same degree as globalization. Generating outlandish hopes and fears, subject to often specious and narrow definition, globalization has provided a frame for new and old debates surrounding, pre-eminently, global economic development and the allied matters of wealth distribution and environmental integrity. These debates have often given rise to an unfortunate manicheanism wherein globalization is seen as wholly benign or wholly malignant. Instructively, Globalization and Culture avoids the twin perils of econocentrism and reductive value judgments by providing a measured and probing analysis of globalization...