Sweet

bird of youth

Frederic Raphael

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (VOL. 1, 1920-1945) Edited by Albert .1. Delvin and Nancy M. Tischler Oberon Books, £19.99, pp.581 ISBN 1840022264 Dear 10,

Thanks for your letters. Interesting to discover you chose your stately forename during a stay in Memphis, when you also lied about your age to qualify for an award. You tried to stay forever young after that, but with increasing desperation. Precocious you certainly weren't though. I don't know how pleased you'd be to see with what recuperative diligence even your most bread-and-buttery epistles have been collected and annotated by the usual duo of hagiographic academics. If these were selected, what kind of trivia got dumped?

Al and Nancy lead us down every by-way of your sad, often tedious, early history. Your sister Rose, who was finally lobotomised for unsocial — and embarrassingly outspoken — behaviour proved central to your rebellion against fate, obscurity and stigma (as a sissy). She was your unlucky (for her) lucky star: if she hadn't suffered as she did, and you hadn't watched her agony with such helpless vigilance, where would Blanche Dubois and all those other unembellished, yet haunting, Southern belles have come from?

Tenn the artist transformed the trite into the translucent. Letter 58, for dull instance, reminded me of a story of yours I read years ago, entitled — wasn't it? — Players of a Summer Game, about a kid watching a group of doomed people playing croquet; it reflects a sense of imminent, small catastrophe, like the lurid prelude to a summer storm. Shades of Carson McCullers, whom you rightly admired (and, unusually, never dumped on).

Your capacity for rendering fugitive experience into something emblematic was primed, I guess, by your own sexual — as they would now say — preference. You'd probably smile (or giggle helplessly, which was more your style, we gather) at the decorousness with which your world of screaming queens and flagrant exception has been politically corrected into a mundane 'community'. We're told that you had only one (but apparently pleasurable) heterosexual experience — with a Jewess, as Rose might have been tactless enough to

emphasise — and then opted for a succession of male lovers, and hustlers, who varied from those, like Paul Bigelow, for whom you had a sustained and garrulous affection, to the pick-ups and rough trade, whose violence you didn't crave exactly, but did not entirely dislike.

I didn't get much out of these letters until you were on the lam in Mexico, living rough. The early years of aspiring writers have a lot of banality in common: good teachers/bad teachers, encouragement/ discouragement, supportive/unsupportive family. Your dad, Cornelius, was the father from hell, but even he was turned to immortal use as a maquette for Streetcar's Stanley Kowalski, whose name was filched from someone you worked with. Nothing was wasted on you, except prudent advice.

You were evidently never a manifest case of raw, natural talent waiting to be broached: you didn't shine at school or college, but your provincial literary education was a lot more prolonged than that of any barefoot boy. I never realised how central to your 'philosophy' was the work and character of D. H. Lawrence. Your long efforts to make a viable play out of his story You Touched Me recalls how liberating (if addled) Lawrence's genius was in the days before Ken Tynan made 'fuck' famous and ordinary, and DHL started to signify a delivery service. Lorenzo's cult of 'aliveness' and its use as a 'secret sanctuary' inspired your insatiable — some might say 'crazed' — drive towards reckless hedonism and its re-enactment, ambered in theatrical art. One of these letters is on paper filched from the La Fonda Hotel in Taos, whose owner, my friend Saki Karavas, kept DHL's

'obscene' — in fact coyly anodyne — paintings on display. Are they still under Joynson-Hicks's embargo from entry into the UK? A chance for Mr Blunkett to play the liberal!

'My emotionalism,' you say to Lawrence Langner, of the Theatre Guild, in August 1940, 'is much too great for my intellectual capacity, it is like having 16 cylinders in a jalopy.' Confessional lament or cute appeal for contradiction? Your the-kid-can't-helpit recklessness was often tempered by toadying calculation, sometime spiced with treachery. You crawled to William Saroyan when he was a dominant theatrical luminary and revelled, with open bitchiness, in his flops. You combined willingness to bide your time and accept commercial advice, with nervous, increasingly justified faith in your own muse.

At first you were a lonely little semi-tropical fruit, but the gay world supplied your way out, and in. Its argot liberated you from cliché and its promiscuity (you can say that again) from furtive frustration. The gay 'perspective by incongruity' — your editors would footnote the phrase as originating with Kenneth Burke — allowed you to be a poet, a hyperbolist, a virtuoso of accurate exaggeration. Ambition always seems justified in the unfavoured. 'Illicit' homosexuality turned you into a gregarious spy: the insignificant little faggot who clocked it all.

Bad sight kept you focused on your career, and exempt from danger. Europe's war was nothing but irrelevant noises off to you. Even Pearl Harbor mattered less than getting a play produced on Broadway, or anywhere else. Your self-obsessed novitiate lasted almost through the war, until your early thirties when — like Lord Byron, who was one of your talismans right through to Camino Real — you woke up and found yourself famous, and rich: The Glass Menagerie was a hit, first in Chicago and then in New York, and suddenly you were a major contender for king (OK, queen) of Broadway. With A Streetcar Named Desire (you sure could pick titles), you won the crown, which you more or less abdicated by preferring to live high on the hog, or just plain high. This Property is Condemned was a title you chose to live by, which is both sad and somehow admirable. You burned up like the phoenix and were born again as a classic.

You also managed to get the work done, and many, many letters written. The most businesslike (and least fey) were to that often despised figure, your literary agent. Audrey Wood — a tough babe who was remorselessly gentle with you — is the heroine of this first instalment of what threatens to be your very voluminous 'selected' correspondence.

That's all for now, maestro. En avant, as you would say (whereupon your editors would tell us that the platitude derived from Rimbaud. 'Et ta soeur', as he used to

say to Verlaine of an evening). F. R.