Tom's Two Cents: Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr

Terry Mathews recently posted a great review of the above book on Facebook's "Between the Covers," to which I can add very little except some background material and a few juicy tidbits about Williams' co-literary executor, Maria Britneva St Just.

Lahr's biography was preceded a number of years back (1995) by Lyle Leverich's "Tom: the Unknown Tennessee Williams," an exhaustive study of Williams' early life and career, up to the production of his first major Broadway success, "The Glass Menagerie." Named Williams' "official" biographer, Leverich was nonetheless upstaged by Maria Britneva St Just, who withheld permission for him to quote from Williams' unpublished works, which by that time had been placed in several literary archival collections, including the Humanities Research Center at UT Austin.  (A personal note: I happened to be working at the HRC in Austin in 1963 when a collection of Williams' early manuscripts was acquired from his mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, and I personally catalogued a major portion of that collection). Leverich waited twenty years to try to complete his biography, but died before it was possible.  John Lahr's book covers the early period, but places most of its emphasis on the years after "The Glass Menagerie."

 
Maria Britneva St Just and her long association with Williams are treated fully in Lahr, who had already published a long article on her in The New Yorker.  To say the least, she was quite a woman--an aspiring young actress in London, presenting herself when Williams first met her as a Russian ex-patriate, whose father had medically attended the Czar's family (not true), she insinuated herself into the early period of his London stage productions and flitted in and out of his life for the rest of his tormented days.  Later she married an English lord, had a child by him, and gained a title--thus as a kooky Lady St Just, she maintained a certain status and reputation among the international set--all this would have amounted to little or nothing, were it not for the control she exerted over Williams' estate after his death, which included production rights to all his plays.  To be fair, however, she also provided a high level of care from the Williams Estate for his mentally ill sister, Rose, who lived into her 80's.

By 1960 Williams and his highly personal, lyrical style had given way to a new European avant-garde type of theatre called "Theatre of the Absurd," and the heyday of Broadway, starring Eugene O'Neill, Williams, and Arthur Miller, was practically over.

Next time: Arthur Miller and his marital nemesis, Marilyn Monroe: Arthur Miller: His Life and Work, by Martin Gottfried