Glimmers the Kindness of Strangers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Tennessee Williams outlived his talent but not his yearning to create. Throughout his final years of drunkenness, lewd confessions and paranoiac public feuding, in the face of critical rejection and box-office failure, he went on writing, morning after diligent morning, no matter how he had misspent the night before. That poignant fact confers dignity on what was otherwise the pathetic wreckage of genius. Unlike Eugene O'Neill, his chief rival for the laurel as America's greatest playwright, Williams left no posthumous masterpiece. Indeed, unless future generations discern something more than glimmers of incandescence in the murky, forgettable plays of his last two decades, his effective career may be said to have stopped after the production of Night of the Iguana in 1961, when he was 50. He staggered on, sometimes crazy and always outrageous, until his strange death, from choking on the cap of a bottle of barbiturates, on Feb. 24, 1983.

Perhaps the most explicitly and consistently autobiographical of major American dramatists, Williams balanced lyrical language and wistful reverie against a backdrop of barely repressed violence and sex (for him, they were much the same). He sided always with the outcast, and most of his social exiles were reviled, not merely because they belonged to an oppressed group but because there was something deeply askew in their psyches. Williams pursued men sexually but delighted in the company of women and viewed most of his heroines as extensions of himself, valorous but doomed. In Iguana, Summer and Smoke, Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he sketched the lives of a wandering poet, a lonely small-town maiden, a rapaciously promiscuous homosexual and a weak boy who failed his family. All reflected the author's image of himself.

In his greatest play, The Glass Menagerie, Williams portrayed his mother, clinging to outworn social "standards" to validate her life, and his withdrawn sister Rose, her madness and eventual lobotomy transmuted onstage into shyness and a limp. His own surrogate alternated between cries of self- justification and outpourings of guilt. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams depicted the brute half of himself, Stanley Kowalski, destroying the fragile, distracted half, Blanche DuBois.

Given the complex interconnections between his life and art, and his willful propensity to exaggerate and misrepresent, Williams merits the scrutiny of a master biographer, capable of comprehending his personality, capturing his voice and explaining that unquenchable need for self-evocation. Donald Spoto might seem up to the task, based on his shrewd if unadmiring assessment of Alfred Hitchcock in The Dark Side of Genius. But Spoto's The Kindness of Strangers is merely thorough, precise and methodical. Almost perversely, it stops short of risking deep perception of the playwright or his plays: it focuses instead on a tedious hunt for the minutiae of names, addresses and trivial incidents that made their way from Williams' life into his art. Spoto's writing lacks lilt, and his themes often bog down in a glut of detail. The book's most conspicuous shortcoming is an absence of the engaging Williams voice and personality as they emerged in his chatty, scurrilous Memoirs (1975). Spoto, who did not know his subject personally, captures neither the man's whimsy nor his power to entertain, views his perversities with apparent distaste and responds with plodding, academic disapprobation to Williams' generally innocuous love of exaggeration and self-dramatizing.

Dotson Rader, who is seen embracing Williams on the back cover of Cry of the Heart, was a close companion in the playwright's declining years. Unlike Spoto, he evokes the winsome qualities of Williams' naughtiness and ructions, the merriment as well as the anguish of that time. Rader's reminiscences are if anything raunchier and more explicit than Williams' own, and without footnotes or explanation of sources, some of his anecdotes about the peccadilloes of the famous seem too bad to be true. Beguiling as gossip, Rader's book has none of the inclusiveness or gravamen of Spoto's tome. But it has one crucial advantage: Rader genuinely liked Williams, and the reader can understand why.