Welcome to Pass Christian Books -
Your Bookstore at the Harbor in Pass Christian!

Pass Christian, MS 39571
Telephone: (228) 452-7399
E-Mail: info@passchristianbooks.com

Among his Plays Are:

The Glass Menagerie
Summer and Smoke
A Streetcar Named Desire
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Suddenly Last Summer
The Night of the Iguana
Sweet Bird of Youth
Small Craft Warnings

In his essay, "The Catastrophe of Success," written three years after the theatrical success of "The Glass Menagerie" in 1944, flush and drained by financial reward and unshakeable fame, Tennessee Williams commented on the only way he could hope to regain sanity, "It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial." Indeed, throughout his life, only when Williams was able to work did he appear to reach a tenuous plain of temporary contentment.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, Cornelius, was a traveling salesman who spent much of his time in southern Mississippi. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of Walter Edwin Dakin, a minister that moved from parishes in Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale as Thomas Lanier was maturing. Reverend Dakin remained close and a favorite of Tennessee Williams' until the Reverend's death at ninety-seven in 1955.

It was not Mississippi, but New Orleans, where Williams found not only a comfortable lifestyle, but source material for much of his work, "If I can be said to have a home, it is in New Orleans where I've lived off and on since 1938 and which has provided me with more material than any other part of the country." As if to signify his new freedom and identity, he began calling himself "Tennessee" soon after his arrival in The Big Easy.

Williams struggled throughout his life with his traditional Christian upbringing and the laissez faire lifestyle he encountered in New Orleans and in which he and his work seemed to thrive. It was not guilt that troubled him, for he saw nothing wrong with the life of an artist that he pursued, but perhaps it was a gnawing fear, an indecisiveness, that he was missing a grand secret, a door, that would open to a peaceful pasture. This restlessness fueled his drinking, promiscuity, and retreats into psychoanalysis.

But this same restlessness is what often drives a great writer to seek and create a more perfectly ordered universe. Few great artists are ever at peace. Note that in the first passage quoted above, Williams found "reality and satisfaction" in his "world of invention," and a feeling of inconsequence and insubstantiality in the actual world.

Amanda Wingfield, the wistful mother in "The Glass Menagerie," straddles the fence between illusion and reality. Floating above the living room and kitchen stage set in the play, and coating the walls is a damp mist that obscures and holds back the outside world. The outside world contains a husband that ran off long ago, a perfect suitor for Amanda's crippled daughter Laura, and a son that escapes every evening to the world of make-believe movies.

Inside the small apartment, Amanda does everything she can to keep the outside world at bay. Amanda's disillusions have stunted the social growth and outlook of her daughter. But the son Tom, a budding poet that is forced to work in a warehouse to keep a roof over the heads of his mother and sister, rebels. He can see something beyond the mist, he is not sure what it is or what it may bring, but life as a delicate glass ornament, dusted weekly, sitting on a shelf in repose with the others in the menagerie is not the life for him.

Tom is aware that his frequent trips to the theater are escapism, "People go the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them!" Relevant today as social commentary (great literature is perpetually fresh), this is a prescient statement on the lives of the many that live vicariously today, glued to a TV screen, transfixed by the ultimate irony, Reality TV.

Williams' plays are great reads. Playwriting does not allow for verbosity and flabby prose. The heart of the matter must be found immediately. But there need not be a shortage of meaning, of depth, for brevity does not need to be derelict of emotion. Poets have it the toughest - they must distill language to its core, for the words they have are the fewest. Williams was a poet of the theatre.