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{ 168 } BOOK REV IEWS Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music proves an excellent model for future investigation of this fascinating but little-researched aspect of performance. —STEPHEN HARRICK Bowling Green State University Notebooks. By Tennessee Williams. Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. xxvii + 828 pp. $40.00 cloth. In 1936, Tennessee Williams began writing a journal that eventually filled thirty composition books, ledgers, and spiral tablets. Although he apparently abandoned the project in 1958 for two decades, the notebooks resumed with occasional entries from 1979 to 1981. Margaret Bradham Thornton has gathered all of Williams’s known journals from widely scattered collections, faithfully transcribing the hundreds of pages and annotating the playwright’s entries with remarkable thoroughness. The 1,090 notes make frequent reference to letters from archival holdings and other unpublished sources; Thornton also corresponded extensively with several of Williams’s friends, including Donald Windham, Frances Kazan, and William Jay Smith. Her four pages of acknowledgments hint at the scope of this research, as do the four pages of credits for the stunning array of images reproduced in this volume. Thornton frames the compiled Notebooks with views of the curly haired toddler Thomas Lanier Williams and Tennessee Williams’s 1983 death mask; other illustrations include set designs for his plays, sketches from his letters, pictures of his homes, snapshots of friends and family members, several of Williams ’s paintings, typescripts of his poems, reproductions of journal covers and selected entries, postcards from Williams’s travels, and even the ID badge from his brief service with the War Department’s “U.S. Engineers” in 1942. While journal transcriptions are printed on the right-hand pages, and notes appear opposite the appropriate entries, the scores of images are reproduced on both the left and the right, enhancing the book’s visual appeal. Like the annotations, these illustrations are keyed to Williams’s relevant remarks. Thus, his account of rehearsals for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in late February 1955—“Bel Geddes improved but Burl Ives acted like a stuffed turkey” (665)—appears above a photo of Ives and Barbara Bel Geddes in costume as Big Daddy and Maggie. Thornton pairs this stage view with a photograph of Jordan “Big Daddy” Massee, the \ { 169 } BOOK REV IEWS model for Williams’s character; readers can’t miss Ives’s striking resemblance to Massee. On the opposite page, beneath notes on Ives and Bel Geddes, Williams is pictured with his agent Audrey Wood, who attended the rehearsal on February 26. The notebook transcriptions are a major contribution to future studies of Williams. “Unlike his letters, where he modulated his tone and style to suit the recipient,” Thornton suggests,“the journals reveal Williams’ authentic voice— genuine and unadorned” (ix); they “allow glimpses into Williams’ secretive world” (xvi). Helpful though it is to have this new autobiographical resource, Thornton’s additional material greatly increases the volume’s usefulness to scholars and theatre professionals, and to fans as well. The annotated Notebooks is an editorial masterpiece, an accomplishment that belongs on the same shelf with Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler’s Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, 2000 and 2004). In high spirits at the start of his undertaking on March 6, 1936, the twentyfive -year-old Williams salutes the moon and ambitiously labels the text“a writer ’s journal” (3). In mid-January 1939, however, soon after his move from the Midwest to New Orleans, he makes a harsh assessment: “When I read through this book I’m appalled at myself—what a fool I am!” (133). His journal, he says, “is valuable as a record of one man’s incredible idiocy,” an account of “abominable dullness” relieved by an occasional “glimmer of intelligence” (133). Sick, depressed, and down to his last dollar in St. Augustine, Florida, a few years later, Williams observes that “I use this journal mostly for distress-signals and do not often bother to note the little and decently impersonal things which sometimes have my attention” (327). “Mes Cahiers Noirs” is the bleak heading for his reflections in the spring of 1979; in these “Black Notebooks,” drama critics are “potential assassins” (747), and...

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