Notebooks
Tennessee Williams, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton
Yale University Press, 784pp, £27.50
The omens for America's greatest playwright didn't look good. Personally, I would rather have written Tintin than the collected works of Brecht. I will drink and I will take drugs, and in my weaker moments I will even eat, but I will never, ever, go to a theatre. Why should I? My life is theatre. But Mother brought me up with Tennessee Williams. She had an appetite for sadness that no amount of misfortune could satisfy. She always told me that my name came in part from Sebastian Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer. So, reluctantly, I began this volume.
Williams's notebooks span the years 1936 to 1981, from his 25th birthday to two years before his death at the age of 71 in 1983. Much of the writing is casual, spontaneous and confessional. Unlike his letters, in which he modulated his tone and style to suit the recipient, the journals reveal Williams's authentic voice, genuine and unadorned.
And this is the problem with the book. His authentic voice is pitiful. Most of the entries are about his health. He just loafs around all day trying out various illnesses. Heart palpitations, fevers, panic attacks, diarrhoea, kidney stones, gall stones, appendicitis, peritonitis, hepatitis, tapeworm, blood in his bowels, cancer, burning stomachs, abdominal twinges, bellyaches, nausea, nervous crises, mononucleosis, vomiting, haemorrhoids (as big as walnuts), depression, insomnia, scabies, food poisoning, dysentery, colitis, piles (again), peripheral neuritis, and more and more and more diarrhoea (sometimes green and other times with bleeding, since you asked). Hypochondria is the only disease he never seems to get. So, sadly, he never realises that there is an imaginary cure for it.
You are always animated with a faint hope that he will die. No such luck. But it is not his ailments that are repulsive. It is his attitude. He gets crabs: "a nasty, humiliating business - I am probably a social pariah from now on. A vile creature, unclean." You want to reach into the book and slap the man. Recently the doctors told me I had syphilis. My response? I was delighted! It is unthinkable for a dandy to arrive at middle age without having syphilis. Without it, one simply cannot claim genius.
The rest of the book is pure Pills and Swoon. He is woken every morning with stimulants in order that he may drift through the day on sedatives. "I had at least eight drinks during the day and had three seconals, combating an intense depression that had fallen over me." Nothing like a depressant to chase the blues away, eh Tennessee? The wretched man has absolutely no self-awareness. He thinks he drinks because he is miserable. It never occurs to him that he is miserable because he is drinking.
If a man talks about his misfortunes, it means there is something in them that he enjoys. "Then the beach, and I am spurned by the kid I tried to talk to. I can feel only a little pleasure in the beach alone. Alone, I return home, and walk the whole long way. Alone I eat and alone I wander. I go and sit in a bar - alone. Return home alone. Now I prepare to sleep. Alone." Throughout the book, he refers to himself as a "worm", a "dog" and a "whining sissy", and he is prone to comments such as "I do find myself a pretty despicable object, decent only in comparison to Hitler".
Self-pity is the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics: it is very addictive and very pleasurable. But I have always found it rather uncouth to hate oneself.
I soon realised just why Mother had loved him: she was a failed suicide. Suicide was a romantic notion for Williams, too. Over a 50-year span, he wrote about suicide or attempted suicide in more than 20 works. The methods of suicide chosen for his characters include burning to death, running in front of a train, jumping off a building, slitting wrists, smoking opium, overdosing on pills, drinking Lysol, poisoning by gas, shooting oneself with a revolver, drowning in a river, drowning in the ocean, starving and hanging.
To justify its existence, writing has to be extraordinary. If it's ordinary, it's simply clutter. And I'm afraid this is clutter. It is easy to see why this has happened: the poet skims off the best of life and puts it in his work. That is why his work is beautiful and his life bad. This is the unpainted Tennessee, the raw material. I would rather not have seen this side of him. And nor should you.
Do we show the audience to what extent instinct and sincerity are mixed with artifice and charlatanry, all indispensable to the work? Do we expose all the horrors and joys that make up the sanctuary of art? Do we invite the audience behind the scenes, into the workshops of the costume and scene designers; into the actress's dressing room? The answer is no. Throw the sketchbook away and look at the finished painting. Go and see the plays. It is always better to have a solid anchor in artifice than to put out on the troubled seas of truth.
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