THE GRAND DISSEMBLER

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

THINK OF ALL THE LIES I GOT TO put up with!" bellows Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He's a cantankerous colossus--a self-made cotton mogul whose vast fortune has drawn around him a circle of toadies and fools. His is the glutted cry of someone finally facing the truth about his life. Only he hasn't yet met the truth. For he has been lied to even more extensively than he supposes. Told that he's suffering from a minor intestinal ailment, he's actually riddled with cancer. Those closest to him have conspired to conceal his condition.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with its layers of grandiloquent Southern mendacity, might serve as an emblem for the life of its creator. The playwright with the arresting name of Tennessee was born plain Thomas; Williams wreathed himself in beguiling inventions and evasions. Some of these were the by-product of a well-meaning gentility, as in his and his family's attempts to veil from the world the tragedy of his sister Rose, whose schizophrenia ended catastrophically in a lobotomy. Some were solitary acts of cool calculation, as when he lopped three years off his age to render himself eligible for a young playwrights' competition. (He won a prize, thereby wedding himself for life to a false resume.) Some were the necessary dissemblings imposed by a society too jittery or bigoted to countenance his homosexuality. And some were merely the blithe fabrications native to the creative temperament; like many writers, Williams often treated the hard facts of his life as so much soft raw material, always amenable to a resourceful reshaping.

Given so broad a range of distortions, his life presents a towering challenge to any biographer. Lyle Leverich, whom Williams chose as his official biographer before his death in 1983, has done a commendable job of combining skepticism and sleuthing. With gentleness and insight, he corrects many of the claims Williams set forth in his lively but unreliable memoirs. (Williams was especially prone to minimize the floundering and guilt of his early sexual encounters.) Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (Crown; 644 pages; $35) is the first installment of what will be a two-volume portrait. It tracks Williams from 1911--when he was born, in St. Louis, Missouri, to an indrawn, alcoholic father who worked most of his life for a shoe company and an outgoing, garrulous mother of frustrated social ambitions--until 1945, when the playwright achieved his first great success with The Glass Menagerie.

It was a topsy-turvy life. In those first 34 years Williams flunked many classes and lost many jobs; scrounged meals and dodged creditors; drifted around the country, in amorous pursuit of men and, occasionally, women; and labored--relentlessly, indefatigably--on poems, stories, plays.

Readers who turn to books for escape from the dailiness of life will find little respite in Leverich's biography. He is a great one for minutiae--bills, appointments, schedules--as if by the sheer amassing of mundane detail he could arrest his notoriously flighty subject. The book is a solid job, but at times a weighty one--as dense as a memorial stone.

Still, the irresistible fervor of the artist comes through. Williams, who eventually succeeded in publishing some volumes of poetry, was never much of a poet. But his greatest plays are flush with poetry in the broad sense--with moments of compressed lyrical yearning. A number of his most famous lines (like Blanche DuBois' valedictory "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers") might well have surfaced in one of Robert Frost's adage-laden verse-monologues.

Within his plays, Williams' pursuit of the poetic extends beyond the dialogue. Is there another American playwright whose stage directions are so revealing, so entertaining, so rich? Suddenly Last Summer calls for a garden that is "more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin." The Glass Menagerie asks for light "such as El Greco's, where the figures are radiant in atmosphere that is relatively dusky." If demands like these normally would appear affected or ostentatious, Williams makes them look like the hospitable requests of a man desperate to convey his vision.

Though Leverich's style has too much of the plod-and-pile of the worker ant, he does manage to capture the leaping grasshopper's heart of his subject. He brings to life the young man whose journals are a thicket of exclamation points and who wrote in praise of the "excessive romanticism which is youth and which is the best and purest part of life."