My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright
Tennessee Williams
by William Jay Smith
University Press of Mississippi. 192 pages, $28.
MORE A SERIES of set pieces than a traditional biography, this is a heartfelt, well-written collection of reminiscences by one of Tennessee Williams’ college friends, William Jay Smith. Smith went on to hold the post of poet laureate of the U. S. from 1968-1970, having written dozens of books of poetry and translations, as well as his own memoirs.
The two writers met in the mid 1930s at Washington University in St. Louis, when Tennessee was still known as Tom. Williams was a senior, having transferred from the University of Missouri, and Smith was a freshman. They bonded over poetry and theater, along with the knowledge that both had fathers who were alcoholics and compulsive gamblers. Smith often visited the Williams home, experiencing family life with Williams’ mother and sister. (Edwina Williams, Smith recalled, had a “honey-coated steady monotonous and maddeningly unstoppable voice that Laurette Taylor, in the character of Amanda Wingfield [in The Glass Menagerie]caught perfectly.”Some of the most valuable chapters in My Friend Tom are the ones devoted to close readings of both Williams’ poetry and the poets who influenced him. In addition to the well-known influences such as Rilke and Hart Crane, Smith also makes excellent an excellent case for the importance of John Donne, Sara Teasdale, and Vachel Lindsay to Williams’ lyric poetry. Throughout their lives, Smith and Williams kept up a sporadic correspondence, and they met up every few years.
The chapter “Battle of Angels” recounts the terrible failure of the play Battle of Angels in previews in Boston in 1940. (It was successfully staged in New York in 1974.) “Williams and Frank Merlo” is the story of the couple’s visit to Florence in 1949 to see Smith and his wife, poet Barbara Howes, and to visit Merlo’s parents in Sicily. Smith states, “I never discussed homosexuality with Tom, but it was clear to him that I very much approved of his relationship with Frank Merlo.”
A later and sadder chapter, “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” recounts the history of the play so named, which was partially based, states Smith, on “Tom’s early visits to the asylum residence of Rose and to the later asylum interior to which his brother relegated him.” (Williams’ brother Dakin had had Tennessee committed for a short time to the Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, after the failure of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel in 1969.) Although much of the material in My Friend Tom owes a debt to Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) and Williams’ own Notebooks (2006), among other sources, the book offers a non-scholarly introduction to Tennessee Williams’ life and works.
