John Lahr’s Biography of Tennessee Williams

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The first rule of biography, the writer Justin Kaplan was known to say, is: “Shoot the widow.” But John Lahr’s new biography, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” originated with something closer to a literary commando raid.

It was 1994, and Mr. Lahr, the recently appointed drama critic for The New Yorker, had been called to the aid of Lyle Leverich, a former theater producer and Williams’s chosen biographer. Mr. Leverich had two letters attesting to that fact. But Maria St. Just, a longtime confidante of Williams’s who became his iron-fisted literary guardian after his death in 1983, had steadfastly refused to grant permission to quote from any of his letters or journals, effectively holding the project hostage.

So Mr. Lahr started digging around. Lady St. Just — who “was neither a lady nor a saint nor just,” Mr. Lahr wrote in the acidic first line of his eventual 15,000-word New Yorker profile of her — had just died, and his dogged reporting of her sometimes comically highhanded machinations prompted the estate to cry uncle even before the article appeared.

“They wanted a happy ending for that embarrassing tale,” Mr. Lahr recalled recently by telephone from his home in London. “One of the things I’ve done that I’m most proud of is liberating Lyle’s book.”

Published in 1995, Mr. Leverich’s “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,” the first of two planned volumes, drew strong reviews for its excavation of the years up to 1945, when the wild success of “The Glass Menagerie” made Williams famous. And now, Mr. Lahr, who inherited Leverich’s archives upon his death in 1999, has finished the job, after a fashion, with a free-standing book that begins with that play’s Broadway opening night but circles back to cut a fresh path through his life.

Mr. Lahr’s book, to be published on Sept. 22 by W. W. Norton, offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama, if perhaps less sex than his subtitle, taken from a 1939 letter, might suggest. But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center.

“I think of this book as a club sandwich,” he said. “I wanted to explore this synergy between the private life, the public life and the plays, with some extra mayo of storytelling and interpretation.”

The book has already won enthusiastic advance notice — American Theater magazine called it “as compelling a drama as any Williams himself wrote” — along with blurbs from a kick line of A-list “theatricals” (to use a favorite word of Mr. Lahr’s), including Helen Mirren, John Guare and Tony Kushner.

 

Among Williams scholars, it has also stirred hope that the fog of gossip and sensationalism surrounding Williams’s life, much of it stoked by the playwright’s own scandalous (and often unreliable) 1975 memoir, will finally lift.

“Most previous efforts have tended to sensationalize, or have been very narrow,” said Thomas Keith, a consulting editor at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, who contributed a chronology to Mr. Lahr’s book. “John has really humanized the life and brought the focus back to the work.”

Mr. Lahr, a son of the actor Bert Lahr and himself a Tony winner for his collaboration on the one-woman show “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,”, may give the impression of knowing everyone who’s anyone in theater. But he crossed paths with Williams only once, in 1970, when the playwright came backstage during the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center’s production of “Camino Real.” 

“Not that he was sober enough to remember,” Mr. Lahr, the theater’s literary manager at the time, recalled. “It was very shocking. He had to be literally lifted.”

When it came to putting legs under his biographical portrait, Mr. Lahr knew he wanted to stick as closely as possible to Williams’s own words and the first-person accounts of his closest professional comrades. “Williams was a very cool customer, very detached,” he said. “Where he really came alive was in collaboration with these equally brilliant people.”

Since St. Just’s death, a flood of Williams’s own words have been pouring out of the archives, with the publication of his private diaries, two volumes of letters, a collection of his poetry and some 50 previously unpublished — and, some have grumbled, often distinctly inferior — plays. “It’s been a little bit like free love after the fall of Communism,” said John S. Bak, a Williams expert at University-Nancy in France and the author of “Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life” (2013).

Mr. Lahr’s book synthesizes that material while drawing on a number of sources that he is the first to plumb. Among the 70 cassettes of untranscribed interviews in Leverich’s papers was a long conversation with Pancho Rodriguez, Williams’s lover from 1946 to 1948 and the model for the brutish Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Through an acquaintance, Mr. Lahr gained access to previously unknown letters by Frank Merlo, Williams’s lover and frustrated helpmeet of 14 years — “I sleep with Mr. Williams,” he once replied when asked about his occupation — whose death in 1963 helped set the stage for the playwright’s long years of decline.

Mr. Lahr also drew on a wealth of correspondence with Audrey Wood, Williams’s longtime agent and a crucial dispenser of criticism, and secured “carte blanche,” he said, with the papers of the director Elia Kazan, who significantly shaped some of Williams’s most important plays, including “Streetcar” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The biography certainly has its dishy moments, from Laurette Taylor’s drunkenly throwing up between scenes on the opening night of “Menagerie” to Bette Davis’s Godzilla-grade offstage scenery chewing during the chaotic gestation of “Night of the Iguana” (1961), Williams’s last Broadway hit. But Mr. Lahr devotes more space to Williams’s creative push and pull with Kazan and Wood, and the fateful breaks with each, which he attributes to Williams’s “artistic vanity” and rising paranoia.

“I wanted to convey the arguments he had with them — not the gossip, but the actual aesthetic arguments, the actual ideas they were trying to pull out of each other,” Mr. Lahr said.

Mr. Lahr’s own approach to Williams might be described as tough love. He is stern in his depiction of the playwright’s involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in 1969. Nowhere in any written account of his time in “Spooksville,” as Williams called it, does he mention that “the medical team he vilified gave him back his life and another decade of writing,” Mr. Lahr writes.

He is similarly staunch in his defense of Williams’s aborted 1957 psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, pushing back against the “unverifiable notion,” put forth by Gore Vidal and others, that Kubie had tried to turn Williams into a heterosexual.

“They made him seem like a kind of quack,” Mr. Lahr said. “Quite the contrary. Kubie was a most impressive man who helped Williams see and understand and change the story of his family.”

Mr. Lahr sees Williams as a “borderline personality” and a “hysteric” who worked out in his art the conflicts that destroyed his sister, Rose, who was lobotomized in 1943. If the term “hysteric,” invoked repeatedly in the book, has a musty midcentury ring today, Mr. Lahr, who said he is himself in psychoanalysis, defends it as the playwright’s own.

“Freud said hysterical suffering is a way of remembering the child’s suffering, and that’s what Williams was about,” he said. Williams “would always say about his plays they were too hysterical, that he had to pull back the violence, the screaming.”

By the 1960s, critics were increasingly saying the same thing, dismissing him as a washed-up — and often embarrassingly drugged-out — relic of the past. Two decades of nearly unrelieved critical pummeling followed, reaching a climax with Robert Brustein’s suggestion, in a review of “Clothes for a Summer Hotel” (1980), that Williams book “a flight to Three-Mile Island on a one-way ticket.”

Mr. Lahr said, “It was as if the critical corps were wishing him dead.”

He makes a strong case for some of the later plays. If he doesn’t anoint any new masterpieces, he sees a mixture of solid works (including Williams’s last play, "A House Not Meant to Stand”) and interesting failures that deserve to be seen in the context of his earlier dramas, not just his personal dissolution.

“I just hope I’m able to expand people’s appreciation of the plays by making these connections, by giving a detailed sense of his bulldog battle for sanity and for his art,” he said.

He added: “I’m 73 now, and I don’t want to give it up. I admire him for refusing to give up.”

  
source: New York Times, September 1, 2014, Jennifer Schuessler