Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

Overview

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category

National Book Award Finalist

2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography

American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award

A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014'
USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading
Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014


The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker.

John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.

With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.

The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.

Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780594677703
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/22/2014
Pages:	784
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

National Book Award finalist John Lahr is the author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, among other books. He was the senior drama critic of The New Yorker for over two decades. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and is the first critic ever to win a Tony Award (coauthor, Elaine Stritch at Liberty).

Table of Contents

Preface xiii

1 Blood-Hot and Personal 1

2 The Heart Can't Wait 68

3 The Erotics of Absence 151

4 Fugitive Mind 215

5 Thunder of Disintegration 279

6 Beanstalk Country 346

7 Kookhood 397

8 Waving and Drowning 456

9 The Long Farewell 509

10 The Sudden Subway 583

Acknowledgments 603

Chronology 605

Notes 617

Sources 725

Credits 731

Index 741

Editorial Reviews

This Tennessee Williams means to be the definitive Williams book, and to combine biography with criticism in an effortless synthesis. To a large extent, it succeeds…

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

★ 06/16/2014
Writing with sympathy and insight, former New Yorker drama critic Lahr (Prick Up Your Ears) invests the Tennessee Williams of this brilliant new biography with the same vitality and honesty that the playwright used to bring his characters to life. Williams wrote that he “saw every play and every film I ever worked on as a confession,” and Lahr looks to his scripts as the chief means of understanding his turbulent life, beginning with the delicate poetry of The Glass Menagerie, which is encoded with sentiments from his fraught childhood relationships with his mother and sister. Quoting extensively from diaries, notebooks, and journals, Lahr depicts Williams as an artist who “made a spectacle of his haunted interior.” His detailed account of Williams’s work with Elia Kazan on the stage productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other projects reveals the complex dynamics of one of the greatest partnerships in modern theater, just as his exploration of Williams’s troubled romantic relationships highlights the self-destructive proclivities that fueled and threatened his creativity. Lahr’s feel for Williams’s literary creations—he describes The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda Wingfield as an “embattled bundle of Southern decorum and Puritan denial”—and for Williams himself show a perspicacity wanting in previous biographies. Though Lahr acknowledges the successes of previous Williams scholars, his achievement is not likely to be surpassed. 80 photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Witting, moving, ferociously intelligent… essential reading for any theater fan.

Jocelyn McClurg - USA Today

[P]rodigiously researched… acute and elegant… Lahr is most superb on the relationship between Williams and the director Eliz Kazan, perhaps his greatest collaborator.

New York Times Holiday Gift Guide

Elegantly written as well as psychologically acute… Lahr balances quotation and interpretation, sympathy and criticism, in this searing and unforgettable portrait of the artist who gave voice to the repressed, the reviled and the restless.

Brenda Wineapple - Wall Street Journal

Lahr’s expansive, polished and keenly observed volume is a major work of American theater criticism and biography.

Gerald Bartell - San Francisco Chronicle

Excellent… A forceful claim for the playwright’s immortality.

Laura Collins-Hughes - Boston Globe

Fascinating… Lahr gives us a sense of the ebb and flow of Williams’s life, exercising a critic’s keen eye on the plays, a novelist’s gift for characterization, and a historian’s awareness of the way a changing American society colored his work… As much a biography of the plays as of the playwright—a book that lets the life illuminate the work and the work illuminate the life.

Charles Matthews - Washington Post

Dazzling… an epic achievement.

Ann Levin - Associated Press

Essential reading for anyone who cares about the theater.

Wendy Smith - Daily Beast

It is a masterpiece on several levels: of synthesis and analysis (an amazing life apprehended afresh, with great learning lightly borne and a strong streak of showbiz savvy; a page-turner that is almost embarrassingly devourable).

Paul Taylor - The Independent

At once sensitive and magisterial, and it fulfills the ultimate test for a literary biography by convincing you that the works cannot be understood without it. Once you have read it, it becomes part of their meaning.

John Carey - Sunday Times (UK)

Magnificent…one of the best written and most extraordinary biographies I’ve ever read, in any field.

Mike Fischer - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The singular achievement of John Lahr’s magisterial book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is that it’s one betwitching writer’s journey into the lives—public and private—of another.

Jeremy Gerard - Deadline Hollywood

A splendid book, one of the finest critical biographies extant.

Robert Brustein

Unsurpassable…An eloquent, spellbinding narrative that emerges as an instant classic.

Ron Chernow

This is a masterpiece about a genius. Only John Lahr, with his perceptions about the theater, about writers, about poetry, and about people could have written this book. What a marvelous read.

Helen Mirren

Splendid beyond words. It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying biography.

Bill Bryson

Raises the curtain on Tennessee Williams.

Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair

A crucial contribution to the arguments that should always rage around a man who was one of the greatest American playwrights of his tempestuous century.

Chris Jones - Chicago Tribune

A masterpiece.

Hilton Als - New Yorker

Intricately detailed… gripping.

Janet Maslin - New York Times

Scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams’ art.

Charles McNulty - Los Angeles Times

Offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama…. But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center…. The book has already won enthusiastic advance notice…along with blurbs from a kick line of A-list ‘theatricals’ including Helen Mirren, John Guare and Tony Kushner.

Jennifer Schuessler - New York Times

Scrupulously researched and elegantly written…makes you feel the day-to-day life of Tennessee, onstage and off, like no other I’ve read…required reading for anyone in the theater.

Nathan Lane - New York Times Book Review

Lahr has managed to capture the complex and at times contradictory qualities—the razor wit and gracious Southern charm, the bottomless drive and uncanny capacity for self-destruction—that characterized one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

Elyse Gardner - USA Today

A work that is scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams' art.

Kevin Nance - Chicago Tribune

Scintillating on the backstage and bedroom dramas and almost intrusively perceptive on the autobiographical nature of Williams' art.

Charles McNulty - Chicago Tribune

There's never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art.

Tony Kushner

Swear-to-god, it's the most original, insightful, thrilling biography I've ever read!

Elizabeth Ashley

Could this be the best theater book I've ever read? It just might be. Tennessee Williams had two great pieces of luck: Elia Kazan to direct his work and now John Lahr to make thrilling sense of his life.

John Guare

This is by far the best book ever written about America's greatest playwright. John Lahr, the longtime drama critic for the New Yorker, knows his way around Broadway better than anyone. He is a witty and elegant stylist, a scrupulous researcher, a passionate yet canny advocate… He brings us as close to Williams as we are ever likely to get.

J.D. McClatchy - Wall Street Journal

Brilliant and seamless. A labor of the profoundest love, and it comes from the heart and mind of one of our greatest theater writers.

André Bishop

It is a MAGNIFICENT work. Mesmerizing, illuminating, and heartbreaking.

André Gregory

Raises the curtain on Tennessee Williams.

Vanity Fair

04/15/2014
Senior drama critic of The New Yorker, Lahr has what it takes to detail Williams's difficult family and love lives as well as the genius of his plays.

Library Journal

★ 2014-06-15
The tormented life of a celebrated American playwright.WhenThe Glass Menageriedebuted on Broadway in 1945, the opening-night audience erupted in thunderous applause. After 24 curtain calls, shouts of “Author, Author!” brought a “startled, bewildered, terrified, and excited” Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to the stage. At 34, after a decade of failed productions, he had achieved the success for which he had been desperately striving. Arthur Miller called the play “a revolution” in theater; Carson McCullers saw in it the beginning of “a renaissance.” But praise could never quash the demons that haunted Williams throughout his life. In this majestic biography, former longtimeNew Yorkerdrama critic Lahr (Honky-Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People,2005, etc.) delineates the fears, paranoia and wrenching self-doubt that Williams transformed into his art. “I have lived intimately with the outcast and derelict and the desperate,” Williams said. “I have tried to make a record of their lives because my own has fitted me to do so.” In stories, poems and such plays asA Streetcar Named DesireandCat on a Hot Tin Roof,Williams drew upon his stultifying childhood; his anguish over his sister’s mental illness; and his promiscuity and failed love affairs. Addicted to alcohol and a pharmacopeia of narcotics, Williams at one point sought help from a psychoanalyst; however, when the treatment forbade him to write, he fled. His self-worth, Lahr concludes, “was bound up entirely in his work” and consequently in how directors, actors and especially critics responded to what he produced. Feeling “bullied and intimidated” by others’ expectations, he projected onto them (director Elia Kazan, most notably, or his long-suffering agent Audrey Wood) “his own moral failure and turned it into a kind of legend of betrayal.” Lahr knows his subject intimately and portrays him with cleareyed compassion. Drawing on vast archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, as well as interviews, memoirs and theater history, he fashions a sweeping, riveting narrative.There is only one word for this biography: superb.

Kirkus Reviews

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