Tennessee's World

IN THE WINTER OF CITIES (117 pp.) --Tennessee Williams--New Directions ($3.50).

One account has it that Thomas Lanier Williams changed his first name to Tennessee because he wanted to disassociate from the bad stuff he had written when his name was Tom. A lot of that early work was poetry; like a lot of young men and women, he had tried to write like Edna St. Vincent Millay without knowing one end of a burning candle from the other. But even as Tennessee, and even after The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire had proved where his real talent lay, Williams went on writing poetry.

In the Winter of Cities is a collection of all his poems Tennessee Williams, 42, "wishes to preserve." His publisher believes that they would make him an "important poet if he had not written a line for the stage." What is nearer the truth is that their interest derives from the way they help explain the roiled and vaporous creative innards of the tortured little man who is rated the nation's No. 1 playwright by most U.S. critics.

Like the plays, the poems are based squarely on his wanderings, his observations, his intense conviction that human love is forever battering itself to pieces on the jagged reefs of brutality, ignorance and misunderstanding. Some of them are as personal as a confession; Cortege could easily be an outline for one of his bitterly pessimistic one-acters:

Cold, cold, cold

was the merciless blood of your father.

By the halo of his breath your mother knew him . . . loathing the touch

of the doorknob he had clasped, hating the napkin

he had used at the table.

And the speaker of the poem, like any brutality-conditioned Williams stage character, lost at home his belief "in everything but loss," already sensed in the future the loveless acts of crude and familiar knowledge.

When he writes about The Man in the Dining Car, he writes of himself:

Yes, he grew restive against confinement, bought a one-way ticket to another place, changed his name, but new people and places cannot help, for

What he carried with him was an invisible ballast.

Compounded of despair and loneliness, this is the kind of mental ballast that is inevitably tied down by chains of cynicism. Rays of compassion in poems and plays notwithstanding, Williams cannot hold back part of the contempt he feels for man and his role on earth. In Carrousel Tune it comes out:

Turn again, turn again, turn once again; the freaks of the cosmic circus are men.

We are the gooks and geeks of creation; Believe-It-or-Not is the name of our star. Each of us here thinks the other is queer and no one's mistaken since all of us are!

There are a few simple mountain ballads that sing a gentler tune, and The Christus of Guadalajara shows an embracing awareness of the meaning c-Christian pity. It is true that most of these poems, some of them rich in language and nearly all steeped in emotion, are bearish on the human condition. No one reading them or seeing Williams' latest play (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) is apt to suppose that Tennessee Williams is changing his point of view. But not even Williams can stew complacently in pessimism all the time. He knows that there really are destinations other than despair, and finds that

Now my feet walk far and my feet

walk fast, But they still got an itch for heavenly grass. But they still got an itch for heavenly

grass.

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