Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series: An Illustrated Chronicle ed. by Margaret A. Van Antwerp and Sally Johns (review)

Book Reviews MARGARET A. VAN ANTWERP AND SALLY JOHNS, edd. Dictionary o/Literary Biography Documentary Series: An Illustrated Chronicle. Volume Four: Tennessee Williams. Detroit: Gale Research 1984. pp. xviii, 436, illustrated. $88.00. This collection ofdocuments illustrating "the personal orprofessional1ife" ofTennessee Williams ranges through essays, prefaces, poems, speeches, and reviews by Williams himself; letters by, to, and about him; interviews; reviews ofhis works from The Magic Tower (1936) toAHouseNotMade to Stand (1982); production notes - by Margo Jones about Summer and Smoke, Elia Kazan on Streetcar, and Williams himself for The Two CharacterPlay; articles assessing Williams's achievement at various stages ofhis career or detailing bizarre occurrences in his life; tributes and obituaries after his death; and a series of special interviews: with William Jay Smith (a college friend from St. Louis), Hume Cronyn (an early director of Williams's one-act plays, whose wife, Jessica Tandy, created the role of Blanche DuBois), Kate Medina (the Doubleday editor who worked with Williams on his Memoirs), and Dakin Williams, Tennessee's younger brother, who explains his share in hospitalizing the playwright in 1969 and makes the startling claim that his brother was probably murdered. There is also a wealth of pictures: photographs of Williams, his family, friends and associates from all periods of his life; typescript pages of his work in progress; letters, citations, playbills, advertisements, dustjackets ofhis many books; and scenes from his scripts as they appeared on both stage and screen. And on nearly every page there is a box with a short quotation from one or other of his works relevant to the documents reproduced there. Among such richness of material some items inevitably strike one as too trivial or tangential for inclusion. Robert Downing's "Streetcar Conductor: Some Notes from Backstage," for instance, could well have been excerpted because, though it contains such interesting items as the fact that an assistant stage manager puffing cigarette smoke was more successful than dry ice in simulating steam from Blanche DuBois's bathroom, Book Reviews 181 two thirds of the piece merely explains the duties of stage-managing. Marya Mannes's mock interview about Garden District, "Theater: Something Unspeakable," is neither funny nor informative. Though Don Lee Keith's account of a conference to which both Williams and the waspish Truman Capote were invited, "Fear and Loathing 'neath the Old Magnolia," is amusing, it adds little but a sidelight on what was after all a very petty quarrel. I personally would sacrifice such items as the pictures ofthe letter awarding Cat on a Hot Tin Roofthe Pulitzer Prize or the certificate announcing Williams's election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for more set designs and musical scores; and I see no justification at all for such trivialities as the inaccurate and ill-written item from Palm, the magazine ofAlpha Tau Omega, Williams's old fraternity at the University of Mississippi. However, such reservations are more than outweighed by the interest of most of the material: two early poems, for example, published in the magazine ofWilliams's Junior High School when he was fourteen, one ofwhich, "Old Things," already contains what were to become central Williams images and themes - or "Five Fiery Ladies," his Life magazine tribute to some ofthe great actresses who brought his heroines to life. It is also very convenient to have together such seminal essays as Eric Bentley's "Tennessee Williams and New York Kazan," Louis Funke and John E. Booth's "Williams on Williams," Tom Buckley's notorious Atlantic article which first openly proclaimed Williams's homosexuality, Robert Jennings's interview for Playboy, and Dotson Rader's for Paris Review - the last and fullest interview that Willil}.ms gave; and of particular pleasure for sheer brilliance of phrasing among so much journalism, Kenneth Tynan's "Valentine to Tennessee Williams" (1958) and Gore Vidal's lovingly malicious review of Memoirs, "Selected Memories of the Glorious Bird and the Golden Age" (1976). Williams admitted to Dick Moore in 1959, "I don't censor my remarks to interviewers the way I should. Ijust say impulsively what I'm thinking at the moment." One cantrace through successive interviews the inconsistencies that such a cavalier approach...