TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

A LITERARY LEGEND NAMED TENNESSEE

(Saturday Telegraph March 25^th 2011) (HISTORY SECTION OF PAPER).

TENNESSEE Williams is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights of the last century.

Born 100 years ago today in the US Deep South, he drew on his personal suffering and turbulent family life, which were vividly explored and poured into his theatrical pieces.

Elia Kazan, who directed many of Williams’s greatest film successes, said of the author: Everything in his life is in his plays and everything in his plays is in his life.

In a career from 1930 to 1983 Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

The first, in 1947, was for A Streetcar Named Desire, which became a film starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in 1951, He won again with Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1955, the 1958 movie starring the late Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.

His first critical triumph, The Glass Menagerie, was first staged in Chicago in 1944, moving to Broadway a year later. It won him the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play and was later made into a film.

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, the second of three children. His mother, Edwina Dakin, was the daughter of a Welsh born local Episcopal minister. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, cold towards his bookish son, was a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman. In 1918, when Williams was seven, the family moved to St Louis, Missouri.

His cash-strapped parents often argued violently, creating tensions that terrified him. His sister, Rosie, whom he loved and regarded as his muse, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent most of her adult life in mental institutions.

After Williams’ mother allowed doctors to perform a pre-frontal lobotomy, Rose was left incapacitated. This is believed to be a catalyst for Tennessee to seek solace in alcohol and prescription drugs.

He began to write stories in childhood and at 16 won third place in a national essay contest. Two years later, studying at the University of Missouri, he saw a production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, which resulted in him becoming a playwright.

Shortage of family funds forced him to return home to work as a shoe clerk with the same company that employed his father. The young man with whom he worked, Stanley Kowalski, turned up later as a character in A Streetcar Named Desire, the role played by Marlon Brando.

Williams hated the job but stuck it out until he had saved enough to complete his studies. He worked as a waiter, roamed the Pacific shores and read the works of D.H. Lawrence whom he went to meet in New Mexico.

He finally enrolled at the University of Washington, St Louis, for a year, and received his BA degree from the University of Iowa in 1938.

In 1939 he moved to the French Quarter of New Orleans and changed his first name to Tennessee, his university nickname and the place of his father’s birth.

Characters in his best plays were often inspired by members of his own family. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was generally accepted as representing Rose, the mother, Amanda, was seen as Williams’s own mother. Tom Wingfield, in the same play, and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer was seen to be based on Williams himself.

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own egos, Williams said.

That’s the way we all see each other in life.

He was troubled by his homosexuality from his youth.

His one enduring relationship was with Sicilian-American Frank Merlo, whom he met in New Orleans in 1947, when Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963 it plunged Williams into a decade of mental and physical breakdown.

Despite his impressive literary output, Williams wrote bitterly in the New York Times, in 1977 that he has regarded as a ‘ghost of a writer remembered mostly for his works from 1944 to 1961.’

However, from the 1970s he still wrote some of his most innovative and experimental works, including The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carre (1977), A lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur (1978) about loneliness, and Clothes For A Summer Hotel (1980) about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, his last Broadway play during his lifetime.

Williams’ death on February 25, 1983, at 71, could have been from one of his own plays. After a night of heavy drinking he reportedly choked on an eye-drop bottle cap alone in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He left his literary rights to the University of the South in Tennessee.