Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

National Book Critics Circle Award Biography CategoryNational Book Award Finalist2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre BiographyAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial AwardA Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014'USA 10 Books We Loved ReadingWashington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker.

John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.

The portrait of Williams himself is a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.

Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Theatre, History, Biography Memoir, LGBT, Plays

798 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 11, 2014

About the author

John Lahr is the senior drama critic of The New Yorker, where he has written about theatre and popular culture since 1992. Among his eighteen books are Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr and Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, which was made into a film.

He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Lahr, whose stage adaptations have been performed around the world, received a Tony Award for co-writing Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

He divides his time between London and New York.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tenn Williams (or 10, as he often signed his name) was a Drama Queen offstage, for sure, but as a playwright he is King of the American Theatre. This disturbing, gossipy bio confirms his stature. I've long agreed with Mary McCarthy, who wrote that Eugene O'Neill's "lack of verbal gift was a personal affliction; to be frank, he cannot write." Yes, O'Neill brought the provincial American theatre, in the 20s, into the 20thC, but his plays are rightfully forgotten today, except for the decrepit, maudlin barroom drama "The Iceman Cometh" and his personal epic "Long Day's Journey," if you can sit through it. Tenn, starting in the mid 1940s, brought maturity and poetry to the theatre with eight vital plays that cut to the heart. I cannot think of any other modern playwright who has given any theatre anywhere eight memorable works. He is an Artist.

10 explores loneliness, eroticism, repression and undefined spiritual longings of the psyche. A fragile person, always, he was paranoid, hysterical, neurotic, a hypochondriac, needy, alcoholic, and, at the end, drug addicted. Plus, I believe, there was some craziness in the genes. His father, a mean, abusive drunk, called him a Nancy; his frigid Victorian mum, who screamed during sex was, 10 thought, more psychotic than his sister who underwent a lobotomy when she was 33. (Nice, ehh?) Mum couldnt tolerate her mouth, when sis went "off" : Example, "Mother, we girls used to abuse ourselves with altar candles we stole from the Chapel--" Mum told the doctor: "Do anything to shut her up."

A virgin til his late 20s, Tenn, upon discovering sex, turned sexuality into his theology (and a pathology). "Am I looking for God?" he asked. "No -- just for myself." A rather nothing looking fella of short stature and no self-esteem, even after a Bwy hit, Tenn, wrote Gore Vidal, "could not possess his own life until he had written about it." The excitement of male pickups and cruising made him feel real, wanted, desired -- he had been chosen --- and gave emotional, creative relief. He sought rough trade, usually. On a sexual binge in Mexico, in the early 40s, he was raped, he said, by a Mexican beach boy "and screamed like a banshee." He liked to talk about being pierced by the arrows of love.

Sexuality, writes Lahr (who grapples w his own innate schmuckiness), brought the dreamy 10 down to earth and into life. In New Orleans, c 1945, he met a big. handsome trashy bad boy named Pancho Rodriguez, age 25, who dominated him with his presumed charm and other assets. Visiting the stuffy, old WASP island of Nantucket, Pancho, says 10, looked around at proper ladies in porch chairs and shouted, "What are you looking at? You're nothing but a bunch of old cock-suckers!" When told of the incident another daffy member of the 10 cast, Carson McCullers, chirped, "Tennessee, honey, that boy is wonderful."

Sensual, primitive, explosive, Pancho became Stanley in "Streetcar." Elia Kazan, the play's director, said, "I'll put it to you plainly. Tennessee is Blanche. Stanley is common as shit. He'll degrade her utterly." At the New Haven tryout, Thornton Wilder complained that an aristocrat like sister Stella would never have fallen for a vulgarian like Stanley. 10 thought to himself, "Wilder has never had a good lay." But he only said, "People are complex, Thorn."

10 never wanted a smooth, cool personal life. He thrived on fireworks. Soon he and Pancho are into screams, rants, breakage, bashings and so on. This fueled 10s juices. When Pancho is finally sent packing, 10 -- the masochist -- connects with former sailor Frank Merlo, 27, c 1948, who had already been the lover of DC columnist Joseph Alsop. For 15 years Merlo was his factotum -- not easy, and eventually the usual rants began--.

A key quarrel w Lahr is that he stupidly seems to approve of the vile-fakir therapist Lawrence Kubie (1896-1973), a fav among theatre nits, because Kubie said he could cure homosexuality. His patients included Moss Hart and Leonard Bernstein. 10, after some visits, dumped him. 10 never had a writer's burn out. His last 12 years were nonstop drugs, which pickled his brain. This bio, which covers the production of every 10 play, should be read by anyone interested in the theatre -- or the tragedies of life. (Keeping in mind, Lahr himself is fucked up).

John Garfield was first choice for Stanley in "Stcar." He issued absurd money and creative demands.
Role went to Brando, then 23. Kate Hepburn was wanted for Hannah in "Iguana." She fudged. The bo draw was Bette Davis, in another role, who brayed and busted balls of everyone.

[Christopher Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

“This biography has a strange history,” John Lahr writes in the Preface to his “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.” It might be more accurate to say that this biography has been published in a strange way. For the past decade it has been well known that Lahr was working on the sequel to Lyle Leverich’s 1995 biography “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,” the definitive study of Williams’ life up until the 1944 premiere of his breakout hit, “The Glass Menagerie.” With Leverich’s death in 1999, Lahr was importuned to complete the aborted journey Leverich had begun with “Tom.” A more appropriate choice of writer to pick up Leverich’s fallen gauntlet could hardly have been imagined—Lahr, who writes regularly for The New Yorker, is certainly one of the most distinguished theater critics in the country, author of well-received books on Joe Orton, Noel Coward, and his father Bert Lahr, among others—and in many ways he has done a creditable job with his massive (765 pages, including notes and index) study of Williams, perhaps the finest American playwright of the twentieth century.

But odd notes appear even before the reader arrives at the beginning of the narrative proper. Continuing in his Preface, Lahr writes that “although the biography started out as the second volume of Lyle’s enterprise…it didn’t end that way. In order to reinterpret the plays and the life, I needed to revisit Williams’s childhood and to take a different tack from Lyle’s encyclopedic approach. For this stylistic reason, W.W. Norton has chosen to publish ‘Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh’ as a stand-alone biography.” Note the agency in that last sentence. It was not Lahr who made this decision, nor was it Lahr and his publisher together; the author quite specifically removes himself completely from the equation, placing all responsibility for his book being taken as a “stand-alone biography” squarely on the shoulders of his publisher. This is, to say the least, interesting.

Why does it matter? Because “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” is not, simply put, a stand-alone biography. In every way it is completely dependent on the reader’s knowledge of the material in “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.” Lahr’s book begins exactly where Leverich’s left off, at the premiere of “Menagerie”; and while the author then does wind back to quickly cover a few aspects of Williams’s earlier life, this material is handled mostly in a quick-sketch, Wikipedia sort of way, and goes by so quickly that it makes little impact. As a result, readers unfamiliar with Leverich’s book will encounter a shadowy Tennessee Williams here, one whose feelings and actions often seem only murkily motivated or comprehensible. Few writers have ever been more dependent than Williams on their personal histories as a wellspring for their work. In play after play figures from his past—especially dotty and demanding Edwina, his mother; cold, violent Cornelius, his father; and his tragic sister Rose, lobotomized and institutionalized for most of her life—appear in different guises, and any understanding of Williams as an artist must begin with a clear understanding of these three people and their roles in his life. “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” offers no such understanding.

But then, one suspects it was never meant to; Leverich did a superb job covering this material, and his “Tom” is unlikely to ever be equaled. At work on his sequel for the past decade, Lahr doubtless felt no need to rehash all of what Leverich uncovered, since, he might reasonably have assumed, his own book would clearly be labeled “Volume Two.” Without that label, Lahr’s book, for all its fine writing, is hopelessly handicapped. “Stylistic” rationalizations notwithstanding, it seems likely that W.W. Norton’s decision to publish this sequel biography as a stand-alone has far more to do with financial reality than anything else. The definitive stand-alone biography of one of America’s greatest playwrights, written by one of America’s greatest theater critics? That’s saleable. Part Two of a nearly twenty-year-old biography, which was itself the work of a different, now deceased writer? That’s a much tougher sell.

Given all this, though, and given that the reader simply must be familiar with Leverich’s book in order to profitably read Lahr’s, how well does “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” work?

It works pretty well. If there are no huge new revelations here, as there were in Leverich, that’s because the portion of Williams’s life covered in “Mad Pilgrimage” has already been so thoroughly documented by numerous earlier biographers. Anyone familiar with the Williams biographies by Spoto, Hayman, Bak, Williams & Mead, and others—including Williams’s own “Memoirs”—will find little surprising here. We trace the rise of the playwright’s legend from the unquestioned masterpieces and commercial blockbusters—“Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly Last Summer,” “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “Night of the Iguana”—along with the occasional less successful detour such as “Camino Real.” Williams’s relationship with director Elia Kazan gets major coverage, as well it should—it was Kazan who shepherded several of Williams’s biggest hits onto the stage, including “Streetcar” and “Cat”; he directed the classic film version of “Streetcar,” too. The two men had an intense artistic partnership which is well-covered here, Lahr taking good advantage of Kazan’s recently published letters along with Williams’s own notebooks. The controversy over the third act of “Cat”—Kazan disliked Williams’s original version and requested rewrites, which the playwright completed grudgingly and groused about both publicly and privately ever after—is also nicely detailed.

Some of Williams’s other relationships are also portrayed in greater detail than in other biographies, but this fact does not always play to this book’s advantage. The reader is subjected to very extensive sections focusing on Pancho Rodriguez, Williams’s hot-tempered, occasionally violent lover of the 1940s; the problem is, these sections reveal nothing about the man’s character that wasn’t already firmly established in earlier volumes, and the long catalog of scenes of screaming, stalking out, throwing things, breaking up and then reconciling grows monotonous—it’s a distinct relief when Rodriguez at last makes his final exit from these pages. Also monotonous is the over-emphasized presence of Williams’s self-serving, gold-digging friend Maria St. Just, who occupies far more pages in this volume than she should, and of whom the reader can only agree with Gore Vidal, who is quoted here as calling her “a crashing bore.”

In any event what follows, as anyone interested enough in Williams to read this book likely already knows, is the playwright’s lengthy downward slide into drink, drugs, and artistic irrelevance. One of the biggest challenges for any Williams biographer lies in the twenty or so years after his final Broadway hit, “Night of the Iguana,” opens, for it’s difficult to keep these years from becoming one long, sad drone. The great love of his life, Frank Merlo, dies, and Williams never completely recovers. He never has another commercially successful play; he never even has another well-reviewed one. New York critics turn on him savagely, openly mocking and deriding his new plays; one asks, “Why, rather than being banal and hysterical and absurd, doesn’t he keep quiet? Why doesn’t he simply stop writing?” He remains enormously famous, but alcohol and drugs exacerbate tendencies he’s always had toward irrational and paranoid behavior to the point that he alienates most people who were ever close to him. By 1969, his brother Dakin has him committed to a mental institution, a decision which quite clearly saves the playwright’s life; to show his thanks, Williams writes Dakin out of his will.

This dark parade makes for grim reading, and for some, perhaps, the tale is over-familiar, with too little new material to justify yet another retelling of it. And it does go on. Readers may well find themselves exhausted long before the end. As Lahr’s protagonist, Williams is so unappealing, and ultimately so pathetic, that some may find themselves sympathizing with Frank Corsaro, director of the troubled but successful Broadway premiere of “Night of the Iguana”: “He was not a very good person, really. He became very much the monster of the theater…I just didn’t want to go near him.”

There are compensations, however. Lahr is predictably incisive in discussing the plays themselves, for the most part avoiding the tendency of many biographers to declare their opinion of a given work as the final, unquestionable truth. The entirely justifiable exception comes with the late plays, which are only now starting to be seen regularly in revivals and which still to some extent carry the stench of their original poor critical receptions. Many of these plays are actually rather good, and Lahr makes excellent cases for two, “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” and “Vieux Carré.” His enthusiasm for “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” a play generally thought to be abysmal, and the strange comic fantasia “A House Not Meant to Stand” may prove enticing enough for readers to give those scripts another look. (Strangely, one of Williams’s best late plays, “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” goes completely unmentioned in Lahr’s otherwise comprehensive treatment of the later works.)

It’s unfortunate that Lahr makes the mistake of treating Williams’s short stories as mere rough drafts for the plays, worthy of no further consideration than as they relate to the better-known theater works. Williams was in fact a brilliant short-story writer, and his best tales (“Desire and the Black Masseur,” “One Arm,” half a dozen others) are masterpieces of the genre; Williams’s theatrical fame has obscured this aspect of his career, and Lahr misses an opportunity to rectify the situation. Williams’s poetry too, though hardly so masterful, deserves reconsideration, but Lahr only references it to help make the occasional biographical point.

In the end, whatever the publisher’s claims for it, “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” cannot stand as the definitive biography of Tennessee Williams. Taken, however, as it should be, as the necessary companion piece to Leverich’s “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,” the two together just might be able to support that claim. Lahr’s book is certainly not the place for the casual Tennessee Williams fan to begin, but it does offer pleasures and insights for the seasoned Williams devotee.

[ALLEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely crackerjack literary biography of Tennessee Williams' adult years by celebrated New Yorker drama critic, John Lahr. Lahr already had a fine reputation as a chronicler of theatrical figures, including Notes on a Cowardly Lion about his father, Bert Lahr; and Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton. This book is bound to expand that reputation.

Lahr has this era's freedom to portray Williams in his full-bodied sexuality (there's even a photo of the playwright naked), usually homosexuality, without compromising his appreciative but even-handed look at Williams' plays. (It is worth wondering whether Brick's football buddy "Skipper" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) would be revealed as less ambiguously gay if the play were being written today.) Sadly, Williams' literary output (which included poems and stories as well as plays) became less and less triumphant over time due almost entirely to alcoholism.

A good "prequel" to this book is Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich, which details Williams' early years of struggle.

Photo: Maggie entreats Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).


Photo: Author John Lahr


Photo: Tennessee Williams, ca. 1940

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Biography Of A Divided Self

In 1939, a struggling playwright, Tennessee Williams, confided in his diary following a New Year's Eve spree in New Orleans' French Quarter: "Am I all animal, all willful, blind stupid beast? How much better is man with all his advantages than the beast? What does he do to cultivate the spiritual, to feed the spiritual? Is there another part that is not an accomplice in this mad pilgrimage of the flesh?"

The questions posed by young Williams (1911 -- 1983) form the basis for this deeply moving and absorbing new biography, "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" by John Lahr, the renowned senior drama critic of the New Yorker for over 20 years and the author of many books on the American theater. Lahr shows a deeply divided Williams torn between sensuality and the search for meaning. Lahr's portrays a Williams also divided by his desire for love and peace and the competing pressures of demanding work as a writer. Williams is also conflicted by his desire to maintain his artistic integrity as a writer and his quest for public fame and success.

Throughout his biography, Lahr explores Williams' many internal conflicts and ambiguities as he guides the reader through Williams' life, his writing, and his friends. The biography originally was to be a successor to Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams' early years. Thus it begins in 1945 with the production of Williams' first success, "The Glass Menagerie". But Williams' early life is interwoven throughout the book, as Lahr develops Williams' tormented relationship with an absent, harsh father, a sexually rigid, controlling mother, and Williams two siblings, his older sister Rose who had a lobotomy in 1943 which left Williams plagued with guilt and his younger brother Dakin. In the 1960s, Dakin had his famous brother committed to a mental institution for three months. Although this step was justified and probably saved Tennessee's life, he never forgave his brother and disinherited him.

The book combines discussions of many of Williams works, with a discussion of Williams' life. The focus is on the plays, but Lahr also includes many excerpts from Williams poems and stories to illustrate events in Williams' life. Lahr wants to show that, more than most authors, the conflicts and passions in Williams writings have their base in the playwright's own life. Detailed critical analysis of the plays and other works melds with biography. Lahr discusses to important work relationships of Williams -- with director Elia Kazan and with his long-time agent, Audrey Wood. Both these relationships ended badly and to Williams' detriment. Lahr gives possibly even greater attention to Williams' sexual life. Williams said he had never even masturbated up to age 26. In adult life, he discovered his homosexuality and engaged in a lengthy series of relationships both short and long term. The book explores two of Williams' longer relationships, with a macho, violent young man, Pancho Rodriguez, and with Frank Merlo, with whom Williams had the longest love relationship of his life. When Merlo died two years after the relationship ended, Williams was devastated. Artistically, he never recovered. Williams' life descended inexorably into drug and alcohol abuse. Another important person in Williams' life was his closest woman acquaintance, Lady St. Just, who played what Lahr describes as an unduly prominent role in the preservation of Williams' literary estate.

Lahr portrays Williams as a romantic writer who is committed to the centrality of emotion and who searches for truth and meaning within his own heart rather than in externals. Lahr finds Williams a great artist in his language and in his ability to take what might have been purely private dilemmas and to show that Williams' own conflicts were universal to the human condition. Lahr writes: "In his struggle to unlearn repression, to claim his freedom, and to forge glory out of grief, Williams turned his own delirium into one of the twentieth century's great chronicles of the brilliance and the barbarity of individualism. ..... In the game of hide-and-seek that he and his theater played with the world, Williams left a trail of beauty so we could try to find him."

In reading this biography, I was tempted many times to stop and to visit many of the plays or films of Williams under discussion, including, for example, "The Rose Tattoo", "Camino Real", and "Baby Doll". This book inspired me and will undoubtedly inspire many readers to revisit or to get to know the work of this great American author. The book includes many pages of photographs together, an extensive chronology of Williams' life, and detailed notes and bibliography. The publicity company for this book kindly sent me a copy to review.

Robin Friedman

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Lahr's Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is an insightful, ripping read. Tennessee Williams' life is as sad and fascinating as any character he created for the stage. This well-researched, intelligent and concise biography probes the twisted up-bringing and self-doubt that spurred the greatest American playwright to create his host of masterpieces.

Lahr, of course, is the senior drama critic for The New Yorker, and as such, he brings a critic's eye to much of the drama surrounding the dramas of Williams long and illustrious career; reminding us along the way why Williams' words are still quoted on playgrounds and sitcoms and drama classes around the world. This biography delves into the writing and the plays, of course, but Williams life away from the theater is the real focus. From his childhood - doted on by a simpering, controlling mother, ridiculed by a distant, disapproving father and guilt-ridden over a fragile, lobotomized sister - to an alcohol and drug-laced death and the fight for control of his work afterwards, Williams is surrounded by a cast of characters every bit as captivating as Stanley, Stella, Big Daddy and Maggie the Cat.

For the most part, Lahr's comments are insightful, occasionally he strays too far, for example, stretching for traces of Williams in his minor plays. It's like searching for ghosts in the fog - they're everywhere and nowhere. Still this biography delivers on so many levels I give it five stars.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Myles · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.6/5.0) Biographies can get a lot worse than this, and Lahr is one of the best writers in The New Yorker's stable. In his introduction, he prides himself on departing from the standard chronology of Williams' life. And to a degree, Lahr does skitter around the timeline, slipping back to Williams' childhood and romantic history as he establishes the impetus for both the great early plays and the strange, desperate later ones. It's impeccably researched and there are a lot of fine excerpts from Williams' diaries, but considering its subject, Mad Pilgrimage could have been a lot more decadent and a lot more agonizing.

Also, points deducted (or added??) for having the ugliest cover illustration of 2014.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fly-on-the-wall book. We hear about the intimate details of Williams's private sexual and personal life. The lobotomy of his sister. More importantly, we learn about the behind-the-scenes details of his plays and movie scripts.

We also learn some details about the lives of Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead. Then there is one of the great collaborations of the twentieth century with Elia Kazan.

Elizabeth Ashley reads this compact disc. She has to read the line calling her "the definitive Maggie the Cat."

A must read for anyone interested in the history of twentieth century American drama. The author is John Lahr, a senior drama critic for The New Yorker.

[Tuti · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic biography of tennessee williams - one of the best and most insightful books i‘ve ever read not only about tennesse williams, but about playwriting, broadway, theater in general - and life as an artist. one of those rare books which change the way you see the world. a masterpiece. can‘t recommend it more.

[Heather Fineisen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good southern rawness in the narrator. This story of Williams is full of alcohol, promiscuity, and brilliance.

[Lenore Riegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have any interest in theater, please go out and get this book. It is a powerful, emotional, all-encompassing journey through the world and history of theater. I have never read anything like it - it's as if you were inside and beside Tennessee Williams himself. Decorated with a bow, no wrapping needed, it is my new go-to gift for anyone I love who also loves the stage. Thinking of their pleasure helps me relive my own experience as I read. I'm happy just thinking that you may be the next to read it because of my review.

[Joanne Gass · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a life! John Lahr's biography of Tennessee Williams is a tour de force. Lahr writes lovingly but not slavishly of Williams' life-long struggle to create art and reconcile his life to his art. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies American theatrical history or teaches contemporary American theater.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several friends had recommended that I read this after I mentioned that I had just read TW's 'Memoirs'. Seeing how large and thorough a book it seemed, I wasn't sure I was up to reading it so soon after TW's own review of his life. But plunge in I did - and am glad I did.

It wasn't smooth sailing at first. With the 'Memoirs' so fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but notice how 'generously' John Lahr lifted from them in the opening chapters of the biography. But I soldiered on, discovering that Lahr was not to make that commonplace in his account.

In his 'Memoirs', TW comes off rather relaxed and resigned, somewhat lighthearted and humorous. Lahr's biography is more or less the polar opposite of all of that - and, indeed, though both books are 'warts and all' stuff, the warts in the biography are larger. TW does not come off well. He comes off, in life, largely as an hysteric.

TW admits time over that he was addicted to the theater and cared little for anything else. He seems to have viewed himself as 'the tortured romantic', failing to realize that he tended to construct each torture himself, when he didn't have to and, thus, could have perhaps had a happier life. But, then, he didn't think that a happy life would mirror well on a dramatic stage that feeds on conflict.

It's nearly impossible to gather sufficient thoughts here to sum up what it's *really* like to absorb the mountain of material that is in this bio. It's overwhelming, really - though Lahr (I must say) has done an excellent job in 'capsulizing' it.

My own interpretation of at least one major thing that happened to TW is: early in his career, he had the kind of success which was not only volcanic but which changed the landscape of the American theater completely (and would for decades to come). It seems the result was that it was virtually impossible for him to keep that success in perspective, yet he wanted that peak level of acclaim repeated without end for the rest of his life. He wanted the high of writing important plays (he would refer to many of his plays, even some of the very minor ones, as "important") and remaining King of the Broadway Hill. That desire kept him at shaky odds with himself and his work.

I plan now to go back for a bit of review of TW's plays, especially the later ones. I've read or seen (or seen the film versions of) so many of the plays so many times but remain less familiar with a number of the plays that came late.

Ultimately, I suppose I feel sad for the man. He didn't have a happy life. He didn't invest much in people; he used them in countless ways for the purposes of his work - he enjoyed them hardly at all (it seems). He gave us a lot of powerful theater - and we are indeed grateful for that, to say the least. But reading about his life in this kind of detail is a sad undertaking. I so wish he had genuinely enjoyed life more and spent less of it merely figuring out how he could re-fashion conflict as something stage-worthy.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic biography.

The author is clever to frame this book by Tennessee's relationships and artistic output instead of strict chronology. It is more of a literary biography - you can see the influences his family and lovers had on the characters in his plays. The more chaotic his love life, the better for his work. It is interesting that he wound up sympathizing with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald near the end of his life, having shared the knack of putting his loved ones on paper and achieving great critical and commercial success at their expense. It's interesting to watch this habit slowly take its toll on Williams.

Although there are moments of sources rewriting history (people saying they knew immediately that he would be a success, etc) and some of the tempestuous relationships are told more from Williams' perspective (he wrote in his diary constantly and was open in his letters and memoirs), I thought the book was even handed and kept the hyperbole in the quoted rave reviews.

I was surprised that the most moving part of the story, and probably the most memorable, had to do with Williams' struggle with his sexuality. So shamed and shy throughout his teens and twenties, he longs just to be touched on the arm by anyone. It was heartbreaking and helped me to understand how growing up in a strict and forbidding home would throw a gay person into such turmoil. That upbringing never left him either - despite all the shame he still wants to be religious at the end. So I would recommend this book to anyone enduring the same struggles.

Overall a great read and a person well deserving of a great biography.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't give half-stars or I would have given this 3 and 1/2. It's a big biography and deeply researched, and it starts off like gangbusters, but once Lahr gets around to the plays, things go wrong. Lahr is a drama critic, and I'm glad to have a bio that treats the plays in detail, but he winds up going into way too much detail about the circumstances of the play's writing and production, to the point where we're buried in pages of lengthy quotes from letters between Williams and his directors (usually Elia Kazan). On occasion, Lahr spends so much time and effort on this that the plot summaries or details about the actors suffer--I'm still vague on what happens in Orpheus Descending and Summer and Smoke.

He approaches the plays from a psychological criticism viewpoint and that is helpful--it especially helps illuminate the odd Suddenly Last Summer and the late play Clothes for a Summer Hotel--yet I still came away from this book feeling like I didn't know what made Williams tick. Lahr does bring some of Williams' partners to life, particularly Frank Merlo, and I enjoyed learning that one of Williams' companions later in life was a relative of Jack Nicklaus. I would recommend this, with the caveat that it bogs down in drowning detail in the last half.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly a five start biography.

After p. 325.
The element of Lahr's biography that I find most interesting - and challenging - is his treatment of the relationship between author and work. His answer, in the case of TLW, is that that relationship was anything but straightforward and obvious.

After I finished Leverich on Williams and before I started Lahr, I read a brief, somewhat annoying, yet highly suggestive book by Nicholas Pagan, "Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach to Tennessee Williams." My principal take-away from this book is the reminder that a text exists within an "intertextual network," that TLW's plays, in particular, are replete with echoes of the poetry and plays that preceded his own. TLW's expressed his truths, of course, but it is entirely clear that his reading of other texts contributed in no small measure to his recognition - and formulation - of those truths that he expressed in ways that others had applied and that seemed especially effective for his purposes. "If Williams is present in his texts, then, it is not as origin, as author - God, as guarantor of meaning, but as simply one thread in a vast intertextual fabric." (p. 85) Perhaps Pagan puts too fine a point on his conclusion, but it bears considering nonetheless.

Then I begin reading Lahr, and Lahr's extensive use of Kazan's notes and correspondence in his account of the genesis and development of TLW's greatest plays. It's clear to me now that we must dismiss altogether the notion that TLW was the "author" of "Streetcar" and "Cat" in any common-sense definition of the term. These plays were very much the product of (1) TLW's participation in an inter-textual network and (2) a collaboration [with Kazan, among others], and the plays we know today would not exist except for this collaboration. Neither Lahr - nor I, for whatever that's worth - would designate Kazan co-author, but he did offer trenchant and correct criticisms of each of many successive drafts of these plays as they developed over months and years from the chaotic jumbles that TLW produced as first drafts to final production scripts. And Kazan simply described the faults he detected in one draft after another - and stated his reasons. He never told TLW what to write - he simply told TLW to "fix it" until there was nothing left to fix - and Kazan agreed that a play was done. After "Cat" TLW found this collaboration intolerable. "This doesn't mean that I doubt his good intentions, or don't like him, now, it's just that I don't want to work with him again on a basis in which he will tell me what to do and I will be so intimidated, and so anxious to please him, that I will be gutlessly willing to go against my own taste and convictions." (p. 313) An astonishingly distorted response to the "facts" as Lahr presents them, but then again, TLK was capable of self-delusion to a degree that's hard for me to fathom. But Lahr continues: "He [TLW] couldn't quite admit his bad faith, or his dependence on Kazan, whose collaboration was essential not only to his success but also to his poetic expression." (pp. 313-4)

So what has any of this to do with literary biography? It seems clear to me today - at this moment - that TLW's on-going and continuing development of the intertextual network in which he participated represent biographical events of the first importance. At some point in TLW's life and in the life of any writer, I suppose, he discovers/creates an inviolable private sphere in which his imagination - for whatever reason - begins to develop and express itself. The writer begins to participate in an "intertextual network," which influences his perceptions, formulations, expression of "truths" in his "work." And, of course, the network in which he participates becomes progressively more inclusive and complex over time as do his responses and interactions with the texts in that network. And in certain cases, in most cases, I suppose, a writer exposes his writing to others, editors, for example, who edit, who suggest revisions, and so on, and who enter into a sort of collaboration, the product of which is a published work.

So there are at least three sets of events (apart from the events that an external observer could recount) that appear in only a very few of the literary biographies I read: (1) the events of the writer's inner, imaginative life, (2) the writer's participation in networks of other texts that shape a writer's imagination and its expressions in written work, and (3) the effects of a writer's interactions with other persons in bringing a work to completion and final form. Normally one has to read the narratives of numerous biographers even to begin to gain the most tenuous of knowledge and understanding of events of these kinds.

Lahr gives us two of the three - and I am most grateful.

At End

Lahr's book has evoked a rather intense and insistent curiosity in me regarding the question of the relationship between "author" and "work" over a career, how that relationship changes over time and how, exactly, those changes relate to events in the inner life and observable conditions of a writer's existence.

While TLW was "writing" "Sweet Bird of Youth," he admitted, as Lahr writes, "Williams had, in fact written 'Sweet Bird' with [Brooks] Atkinson's critical precepts in mind." (p. 392) TLW wrote: ""I think this statement should serve as a warning for our production, since we need a good notice from Brooks. I don't want to suck up to any critic's artistic predilections unless I can sincerely buy them. In this case, I do." (p. 392) But, be that as it may, these precepts and predilections weren't Williams' until they first were Atkinson's.

Lahr also presents this highly interesting exchange between Kazan and TLW: "As it turned out, William's passion for success was the tipping point in Kazan's decision to say good-bye to him and to Broadway. 'I [Kazan] thought. why does he want me to direct his plays? The answer: Because of some superstition that I bring commercial success. Which you [TLW] terrifyingly want. .. I also think that you are willing to make some sacrifice in integrity and personal values to get the commercial success which I bring you.'" (p. 409)

Further, I find it highly interesting that as TLW lost his audience over the 1960s and 1970s, as he became a laughing-stock and an easy target of gratuitous critical ridicule from all sides, TLW's relationship to his work also changed. As Lahr summarizes and quotes TLW: "Williams was now of an age as an artist where he felt humiliated by 'too much domination, too many decisions for him not made by himself,' and 'where he would rather make wrong decisions that accept right ones from someone else.'" (p. 512)

So what is the significance of all this for literary biography?
It seems to me that as a biographer plots and traces the trajectories of a writer's inner and outer lives, a particular sort of textual analysis of the 'work' becomes essential. In the case of TLW, at least, one might assume from the outset that any one of TLW's plays, particularly the 'great' plays, is actually a stew - as it were - the product of many voices and many influences. This means that a biographer must examine changes in a script from the very first draft to the final published version, and answer questions of the following type: How did these changes occur - from one version to the next? Who changed them and for what reasons? Under what conditions? In this way, the biographer identifies all the 'cooks,' as it were, who actually contributed ingredients to this particular stew of a play - and how each of them attained sufficient influence to add his bit to the pot. It seems to me that the influence of each cook - whether they were many, few or just one - reveal a set of events of biographical significance. How and under what conditions did TLW become susceptible of that particular influence at that particular time, in that particular circumstance? Then there's the need to establish a kind of trajectory that describes the relationship of "author" to work over time. And then the need to formulate an interpretation of that trajectory that describes the relationship between 'author' and 'work' over a writing career/lifetime.

Oh my. Now there's a challenge that I suspect would intimidate even a Joseph Frank. Be that as it may, Lahr's biography suggests to me, for one, that a biographer of a literary figure can't even pretend to completeness of his narrative without an analysis and interpretation of this kind.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author: J. Lahr
Title: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Published: 2014
Genre: non-fiction
#20BooksOfSummer


Quick Scan
Explain the title. In what way is it suitable to the story?
The title refers to Williams’s frequent trips to the artsy enclave of Provincetown Massachusetts. The Pilgrims first landed near the site of modern Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620 before moving to Plymouth. They made a pilgrimage for religious freedom, Williams made his his pilgrimage for the the animated Greek male marble sashaying around the P-town dinner party circuit.

What sort of conflict confronts Tennessee Williams?
a.external - Williams is forever battling between the destructive (pills, alcohol ) and creative (plays).
b.internal - He tires to free himself from his mother’s puritan repression, while trying to win the affection of distant, dismissive and combustible father.

Was there a villain in the biography?
Tennessee William’s mother: She boasted “ the only psychiatrist in whom I believe is our Lord” (pg 55). She lodged a paranoia and terror in her children. She changed Tennessee’s behaviour and drove Rose her daughter into madness.

What do you think the purpose of the Tennessee Williams was by writing his most famous plays (Glass Menagerie, Streetcar named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth) ?
Williams used his plays to enter an imaginary world: “ Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me: actors appeared out of nowhere…and too the stage over.” ( pg 34).

The driving force, impulse and impetus for writing was to break free from his dysfunctional family.The comparison between his plays and his childhood was the BEST part of the book. Mother’s monolithic puritanism was the most damaging element in Tennessee’s life.

In in my opinion. his mother was more damaging than the pills (when TW died they found 13 bottles of prescription drugs, Aldomet, Zyloprin, Reglan, Seconal etc) and alcohol.

Does the story contain a single effect or impression on me?
Of course the brilliant rise and tragic fall of Tennessee Williams is the first impression I experienced. He used sex as ‘spiritual champagne’ and Rx prescription pills for his blues. By being desired he was empty of need. (pg 88).

Conclusion:
I was deeply impressed by the life of Tennessee Williams. Of all the characters he created it I think Alma in Summer and Smoke is the best representation of the playwright. Once she casts off her parents and the rectory, the serenity she finds is not the peace of heaven but the bliss of pickups and pills. (pg 99)

What is the line in his plays that made a lasting effect of me?

Summer and Smoke:
“The prescription number is 96814” she says in the finale.
“I think of it as the telephone number of God!”

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best theater books, and one of the best biographies, I've ever read. Loved it from start to finish.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

60% DNF - long & repetitive. In sum, it seems Mr.Williams did not have a very interesting life - neurotic & hedonistic, with no interest in politics when everyone needed to be. Also hated the autobiographers approach - messy, non linear & drawing extensively on other memoirs, writings, letters, making for a disjointed ‘voice’ and lack of depth. Also do not like narrator in audiobook - too theatrical, distracting from the narrative.

[Matthew Warnecke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful

A magnificent bio and a fascinating examination of America's premiere dramatist. this is a not to be missed biography by a master

[Bruddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this acclaimed biography, John Lahr does not simply offer an insightful portrait of Tennessee Williams, with his prodigious drinking, his pill popping and promiscuity, his struggles with mental health, his tragic family life and strained romances, but, more importantly, shows how Williams painstakingly transformed all these aspects of his life into his art. The most vital feature of this transformation was in Williams’s collaboration with the director Elia Kazan, whose partnership resulted in what many consider the highwater mark of American theater: A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams (as writer) and Kazan (as director) collaborated first on the play’s stage production and later its film adaptation, both of which featured the young powerhouse actor, Marlon Brando. As Lahr shows, it is not too much to say that Williams and Kazan through this play revolutionized American theater.

Like many people, I’ve experienced Tennessee Williams's plays solely through film adaptations rather than live performance. Plays such as Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana, among others, became classic films. Watching some of these after being informed by Lahr’s detailed explications of the plays really open’s one’s eyes to the creative process. For example, in Streetcar, the promiscuous and alcoholic Blanche Dubois is a representation of Williams own intemperate lifestyle. Her guilt over her husband’s suicide reflective of Williams’s remorse over his treatment of his sister Rose, who was partially lobotomized and committed to an institution. Blanche’s brother-in-law Stanley is partially based on Williams’s volatile lover at the time, Pancho Rodriguez, a man prone to rage and occasional violence. At the end of the play, Blanche (like Williams’s sister Rose) suffers a breakdown is sent off to an asylum.

Notwithstanding the cliché of the suffering artist, as Lahr points out, there was a degree of self-cannibalization to Williams’s art. His plays were intricately drawn from personal tragedy and as his success with the public and critics alike began to wane, he feared that the reservoir of suffering which had fueled his earlier plays would in some way need to be replenished.

Like all great biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh offers not just a portrait of the person but a portrait of the times. We learn about the American theater of the 20th century, the stage productions, the Actor’s Studio, the principal producers, directors, agents, etc., all against the backdrop of history. It’s quite a book.

[Edward · Rating 2 out of 5]

What's good in this is very, very good. The theater history, certainly and especially the fully explored artistic and social relationship between Williams and Elia Kazan, is at the center of the book as it was the center of Williams' most productive and successful years. The biography of the man Tennessee Williams, his unhappy upbringing, his late emergence as a sexual being, his circle of friends, can be both entertaining and enlightening. And in the final chapters there is some wonderful stuff about Williams' relationship to Dotson Rader, his attempt to become radicalized, and his hasty withdrawal from politics. Also, Williams lived long enough to have face the first wave of post-Stonewall literary criticism, one that often took his work to task for the closeted meanings.

But what's wrong is badly wrong. It's such a shame that people with no knowledge or psychology and addiction are allowed to prattle on at such length. First off, there is the terrible story of Rose Williams, the playwright's sister, lobotomized under the direction of Williams' horrible mother. This would a much more interesting and honest account if Lahr knew anything about schizophrenia. He reports that Rose got most trouble when she was around 21. This is the exact age (late teens to early 20s) for onset of schizophrenia. All the symptoms he reports, e.g. paranoid delusions and hypersexuality, are classic presentations. As for Tennessee, their is too much, much to much, of putting the cart before the horse when discussing his problems with alcohol and drugs. Perhaps it's not as entertaining but this should have been the biography of a talented addict. Lahr doesn't know anything about the drugs that Williams took, their action on the mind and body.

Lastly, I found the writing style deeply off-putting. It can be a spiderweb of quotes, analysis, commentary, all congested together. It is sometimes difficult to know who is being quoted (and why). For this reader it was headache-inducing. Literally.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a hard time staying with this book. First, Lahr bypasses a strict chronology of Williams’s life in favor of a looser structure based on the chronology of his plays. (Example: We are introduced to Williams’s family background through our introduction to “The Glass Menagerie,” his first major play and the one that sets the stage for the haunted family dynamics that inform all the others.) While this structure makes sense for a playwright whom Lahr calls “our most autobiographical,” I missed the kind of context-setting provided by Robert Caro in the first volume of his LBJ biography, in which the subject’s story begins before his birth, with his geography! Second—and I’m embarrassed to admit this—I got bored by the many summaries of Williams’s plays. Once I realized that every plot is based on the same template—the quest of the artist/outsider/romantic to prevail in a brutal world—I realized that the persistence of the template is the story. Some artists buckle under the criticism that comes with changing times and tastes, but Williams never stops defending his vision. Along the way, we witness his coping mechanisms: the hunger for human connection, his relentless test of others’ devotion, and the giant roar of pain and eloquence his characters put forth. A high point of the book is Lahr’s exploration of the relationship between Williams and Elia Kazan, the director who best understands him and who liberates his message through a combination of plot recalibration and pure stagecraft. Part of the magic of this biography is found in the other lives it illuminates.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been on the lookout for a biography of Tennessee Williams for some times. John Lahr is a well known biographer and drama critic so when his biography of Williams came out I bought it. It is a long but well written critical biography of the famous playwright. Williams died in 1983.
Williams famously fictionalized and immortalized his dysfunctional family in his drama “The Glass Menagerie” which premiered on Broadway in 1945. Other famous plays are “A Streetcar Named Desire” 1947, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” 1955. These plays were also made into movies.

Lahr writes that Williams spent the 1960s drunk, drugged, and in precarious-to-shattered mental health with his hits mostly behind him. William wrote “The Gnadiges Fraulein” 1966 while on amphetamines. Lahr defended Williams’s agent Audrey Wood and director Elia Kazan. Williams blamed them for his difficulties. Lahr said Williams always blamed others for his difficulties and failures. In the saga of Williams rise and fall Lahr provides information about the actors who were in the plays and movies.

Lahr did a great deal of research to write this biography, he made extensive use of Williams’s letters and journals. The book is a study of William’s imagination, his career, as well as his life. It is well-written biography of a difficult and mentally-ill man who wrote great plays. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Elizabeth Ashley narrated the book.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it reads fairly briskly, there were few 'revelations' not already covered in previous biographies, and for having taken twelve years to write (and having been nominated for a National Book Award), I was expecting a whole LOT more. There is some shockingly sloppy writing and structuring (e.g., he covers the film version of 'The Rose Tattoo' and then backtracks and covers the play version), and oftentimes there are strings of quotes without proper elucidation. Often Lahr stops his biographical discussion to launch into a long-winded critique of one of Williams works. And also, rather bizarrely, he buries what would seem interesting or essential information (such as Williams' first meeting with longtime lover Frank Merlo) to the copious notes in the rear of the volume! However, I was gratified that he spent the last chapter vilifying the heinous Lady Maria St Just, as I was one of the unfortunate scholars prevented by her from access to Williams' later writings, on which I had intended to do my doctoral dissertation. Having to switch subjects had a profoundly negative impact on my own career....

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mission accomplished: this week I finally made it to the end of this massive-but-rewarding biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr. It's been waiting on my shelf for a couple of years until I found time to read it.

I recommend it to all playwrights and lovers of the stage, because it gives a great insight into the world of American theater in the previous decades, and it's also a deep dive into the psychological process of producing great works of art. The biographical nature of Tennessee's plays is undeniable. He mined his life for his art, which many writers are not courageous enough to try.

There are also some juicy bits with backstage stories that are unbelievable. The scene where Bette Davis tries to fire her co-star in the Broadway version of "Night of the Iguana" was jaw dropping.

For anyone who read "Tom" by Lyle Leverich, this is the second volume that was promised after that was published. Lyle died before he could write the follow-up, so John Lahr took on the duties here. But this is really a stand-alone work and you don't have to have read "Tom" before this one.

[Sean Agass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant biography. Achieves real depth and stubbornly refuses to idealise its subject while conveying how brilliant his contribution was to theatre and our culture. But as a man Williams was restless, tormented by his repressive upbringing and ruthlessly obsessed with achieving greatness through his work — often at the expense of those around him, who he apparently treated like bit-players in his own narcissistic psychodrama. One of many quotes that stick: “The glaring difference between the vivacity of William’s early letters and his garrulous memoirs demonstrated an internal sea of change: at the start of his career, Williams had survived to write; now, he wrote to survive.” Williams spent much of his late career feverishly trying to recapture the “goodness” of his early career, never really doing so, and feeling increasingly ignored as a playwright. Lahr’s book suggests some of William’s later plays are definitely worth revisiting. Cannot recommend this biography enough and makes me want to read more of William’s work with a better understanding of his life.

[Sue Scheve Zerjal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite simply, I believe a biography does NOT have to include the volume of details that John Lahr has written in Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. I found much of the story interesting and quite sad. Lahr captures Tennessee Williams' quest to be loved and to be remembered quite well. On the other hand, he gives the readers a redundant read by including Tennessee's almost bi-polar reactions to each play's ups and downs. There was so much drama in his relationships. The reader is forced to read too much of his constant need for stroking and reassurance, along with his cruel jabs at every suggestion made to improve his chance for success. Second verse, same as the first. At times, I wanted to scream, "Get on with it."

I am glad I read this book, but I am even happier that am finished.

[Susan Chapek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most interesting and readable literary biography I've ever encountered (and one of the few I actually read every page of).

I started reading every scrap of Williams I could find when I was young, but Lahr makes me see it all in a new light, illuminated by (and illuminating) Williams' relationships, experiences, and stages of life.

(". . . a poet's life is his work, and his work is his life in a special sense," right?)

I give a book 5 stars only if I like a book so much I can grab it at lunchtime, open it at random, and happily re-read whatever chapter Fate sends me.

[wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything you wanted to know about Tennessee Williams perhaps the greatest American dramatist and more. A tremendously well researched biography chock full of interesting photos of his friends, family, lovers and professional acquaintances. Williams was a lonely troubled man who grew up in a dysfunctional family. He was able to write about his life in his plays using his characters to represent those around him. There is drinking, drugs, lovers and thoughtful introspection and writing plays gave this troubled author a therapy of sorts. I loved the book and see why it got all the acclaim that it did.