The 89% Solution

By Gerald Clarke

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' LETTERS TO DONALD WINDHAM, 1940-65

Edited by DONALD WINDHAM 333 pages. Sandy Campbell. $50.

When he appears on TV talk shows these days, Tennessee Williams seems to be his own Doppelganger: a pale, cackling self-parody. Even his 1975 memoirs were oddly out of focus, as if someone had jiggled his elbow every time he captured a memory. But in this rare collection, the author escapes the stream of self-consciousness to appear confessional and ceaselessly entertaining.

Horace Walpole, the greatest English epistolarian, said that letters should be nothing but conversations on paper. By that definition, Williams ranks as one of the best (and least known) American letter writers. The publication of this volume is unlikely to enhance his fame: following a promise to Tennessee, Donald Windham has published an elegant, limited edition of 526 copies. A great pity. The assemblage amounts to an autobiography available in no other form.

The letters, 159 in all, begin in 1940, when Williams is 28. His correspondent, Windham (Two People) is an aspiring novelist of 19. Both are unknown and penniless. The mail continues until 1965, when the increasingly cool friendship--it was never a romance--turns gelid. In the early letters money and sex dominate. "It seems that [a Pulitzer prizewinner] has swindled Mr. Mayer out of $60,000 on some kind of legal fraud," Tennessee says in 1942. "We must find out how he did it. There is no trick too low for my present nature."

Williams' first success comes in the mid-'40s with The Glass Menagerie. But during out-of-town tryouts, that too looks hopeless, and he despairs of the performance of Laurette Taylor, who plays Amanda, the mother. A tantrum rescues two careers: "Taylor was ad-libbing practically every speech and the show sounded like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour," he recalls. "We all got drunk, and this A.M. Taylor was even worse. I finally lost my temper and when she made one of her little insertions, I screamed over the footlights, 'My God, what corn!' She screamed back that I was a fool and all playwrights made her sick -- that she had not only been a star for 40 years but had made a living as a writer, which was better than I had done. Then she came back after lunch and suddenly began giving a real acting performance -- so good that I wept."

Greta Garbo tells him that she would like to make another picture -- so long as the part is neither male nor female. "Regrets that she was not able to play Dorian Gray . . ." writes the acidulous scenarist. "In appearance she is really hermaphroditic, almost as flat as a boy [with] the cold quality of a mermaid." Williams finds the 23-year-old Gore Vidal amiable, but only after "the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit. He has studied ballet and is constantly doing pirouettes and flexing his legs. The rest of the time he is com paring himself and Truman Capote [his professional rival and Nemesis] to such figures as Dostoevsky and Balzac."

Changing Ratio. Despite the time he spends in high-toned gossip or cruising the underground tributaries of the gay world, Williams remains an artist, obsessively devoted to his craft. "Ordinarily my ratio of concerns is something like this," he tells Windham. "Fifty per cent work and worry over work, 35% the perpetual struggle against lunacy, 15% a very true and very tender love for those who have been and are close to me as friends and as lover. But [sometimes] the ratio changes to something like this: Work and worry over work, 89%; struggle against lunacy (partly absorbed in the first category) 10%; very true and tender love for lover and friends, 1%. A stranger would doubt this, but you have known me and observed me for a long time. Surely you see how it is!"

One of the inestimable merits of this book is that through this newly discov ered treasure of prose, the reader too sees and cares how it is and how it has been with America's greatest living playwright.

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