John Lahr’s lengthy and exhaustively thorough new biography of Tennessee Williams makes a fair claim to be the definitive account of the playwright’s life. Initially planned as a follow-up to Lyle Leverich’s 1995 account of Williams’s childhood and early success, Tom, Lahr’s research soon transformed the proposed sequel into a grander account of an extraordinary and in many ways unfulfilled life. Lahr deals with Williams’s sexuality, his (many) neuroses and dramatic successes, as well as with his eventual decline and pitiful, lonely death.
As in his earlier biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, Lahr is a sympathetic but no means uncritical chronicler of his subject’s torrid life. As he notes early on: “Williams was the most autobiographical of American playwrights”, and watching him expose the process by which lacerating personal misery led to such classics as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire is a fascinating testament to literary detective work. The wealth of (largely previously unpublished) primary material, including everything from journals to interviews, is hugely useful, but Lahr’s compulsively readable style means that, despite its length, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh never feels baggy or long-winded. This fine book does its complex subject justice, and confirms Lahr’s standing as one of the greatest biographers writing today.
