Instead of merely chronicling Williams’s rise as an author on the world stage and his death nearly forty years later, Lahr has made a critical and biographical mosaic. Lahr begins his life of the playwright with Williams’s first hit-1945’s “The Glass Menagerie.” (Williams’s first thirty-four years were chronicled in Lyle Leverich’s excellent, if a trifle standard, 1995 biography, “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.”) Shifting effortlessly between that historic play’s record-making opening night, a critical assessment of its importance, and Williams’s personal history-the playwright’s backstage dramas with his lovers, agent, family, and so on, always equalled what was on stage indeed, there was not much of a difference to Williams-Lahr’s study is a masterpiece of the form because he has invented his own. A great deal that made Williams appear out of order and out of touch during the latter part of his life and career-he called the nineteen-sixties his “stoned age”-grew out of forces that Lahr not only describes but explicates, illuminates, and makes resonate.
It’s Holroyd’s witty view of it all that lifts the narrative up and propels the reader forward. John Lahr’s distinctly American sense of humor-it never comes at his subject’s expense-informs “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” his authoritative and felt new biography of the playwright (1911-1983). The British biographer Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey, for instance, is a major work about a minor Bloomsbury figure that is fascinating to read because Holroyd recognizes, without admonishing, Strachey’s spectacular selfishness.
All that the star could not achieve in life-tenderness, care, responsibility toward others-doesn’t get vanquished in great studies so much as explained and folded into the grand story of the complicated, arresting self.
Biographies, when they matter, can act as a kind of corrective to the subject’s boorishness.
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