BOOKS

DECEMBER 8, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 25

How shy and lonely Tom became celebrated artist Tennessee

Tom: The Unknown

Tennessee Williams

by Lyle Leverich

Crown Publishers. $35.00.

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

Tennessee Williams was one of this century's greatest playwrights, and one of its most famous queers. He has been the subject of several biographies both before

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The Unknown TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

and after his death in 1983. The basic facts of his life are reasonably well known, and they are, of course, the source for much of his work.

Lyle Leverich was authorized by Will iams to write a new and definitive biography. Lady Maria St. Just, Williams's literary

executrix, became increasingly difficult to deal with, and managed to stall publication of Leverich's work. Her death last year has made it possible for the publication of Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, the first volume of Leverich's biography. It is a massive work (672 pages) covering the first thirty-four years of Williams's life. Leverich has had access to correspondance and diaries that have not been used by previous biographers, and he has conducted numerous interviews with Williams's friends and colleagues.

Leverich's thesis is fairly simple: "In Tennessee Williams, there was a psychic split between the gentle, poetic Dakin side of his nature and the hard, aggressive Williams side, an irreconcilable division that made him 'half-mad,' as he would say over and over again." Ironically, it was the strength he inherited from his hated father that gave him the will to succeed, while his insecurities and personal failures seem to come from his supportive and much loved maternal grandparents. Leverich rightly sees that in Williams, "the artist was the rational force and the man the irrational dissembler."

Although I can't say there is much depth to Leverich's analysis, nor much flair in his writing, he has succeeded in pasting together his sources in a way that finally makes for compelling reading. The voices of the key people in Williams's formative years— his grandparents, his mother, his sister-are vividly present. And Williams's own voice is heard more truthfully than ever before. His profound sense of isolation and loneliness is a constant torment for the young writer. In his 1936 diary, Williams noted: "Another decent thing about me is my tolerance and my love of people and my gentle-

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ness toward them. I think I have acquired that through suffering and loneliness." And three years later he wrote: "All my deep loves and friendships have hurt me finally-I mean have caused me pain, because I have felt so much more than the other person could feel."

Williams was ambivalent about his homosexuality through most of his life. He has been quoted as saying, "All homosexuals have to live with a deep wound that never heals." This is very much the statement of someone who grew up in the 1930s, and a reflection on what it meant to be queer in America before gay liberation. Although Leverich does not analyze this idea, he pro-

vides enough material that the astute reader can begin to understand the personal torment Williams's world created for him. And, to some extent, in dealing with his "difference," shy and lonely Tom became the celebrated artist Tennessee.

In my own tortured adolescence, Williams was my hero: someone who spoke to me directly. I think his work had this effect for many gay men of my generation. Leverich's portrait makes it possible to understand who Tennessee Williams was, and allows us to understand the very real differences and important connections between his life and work.

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