What else could possibly be written about the lives of Tennessee Williams, John Kennedy Toole and Reynolds Price? Lyle Leverich’s door-stopper of a biography of Williams (“Tom,” 1997); two in-depth looks at Toole with “Ignatius Rising” (Nevils/Hardy, 2005) and Joel Fletcher’s “Ken and Thelma”; and Price’s three volumes of memoirs covering his life from infancy to 1994, left few stones unturned.
Or so it seemed. But a critical study of Williams, a new biography of Toole, and the fourth memoir from Price, who died last January, have recently hit the shelves, offering fresh perspectives on this trio of classic Southern writers.
My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, by William Jay Smith, University Press of Mississippi, $28, 192 pages
Former poet laureate William Jay Smith met Tennessee Williams in 1935, when Smith was a freshman and Williams a senior at Washington University in their hometown of St. Louis, Miss. Along with fellow student Clark Mills — “Tom’s mentor and mine,” as Smith calls him — both joined the university’s Poetry Club, which met often at Williams’ family home, an “antebellum mansion” on Pershing Street.
Smith had always studied his friend’s work intently — so much so, that for years after Tennessee’s success, the playwright gave out Smith’s name to “reporters, editors, theater and film critics, biographers, teachers — to anyone anywhere who was, he thought, seriously interested in learning about the beginning of his extraordinary career.”
Poetry becomes the filter for Smith’s sensitive portrait of his old friend, a counterbalance to the Tennessee Williams whose later alcoholism and drug addiction contributed to his increasingly tarnished image. For all the “melodramatic violence” in Williams’ work, Smith honors the playwright’s deepest, original ambitions: “He was first and foremost a poet,” Smith writes; when he finally made a name for himself, it was “not for his poems as such but rather for the poetry of his plays.”
As examples of themes he would later explore in “Candles to the Sun,” “Battle of Angels” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” many of Williams’ poems are included in full, and Smith explores his influences, analyzes his early plays, and quotes critics, such as Kenneth Tynan and John Simon, who recognized Williams’ poetic strain and “underlying lyric fiber.”
Smith takes his role as Tennessee’s interpreter seriously, and his book is at once scholarly and devoted, a fond tribute to a man whose belief was that “for every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work. To the poet his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse and this in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.”
Butterfly in the Typewriter: the Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, by Cory MacLauchlin, Da Capo Press, $26, 288 pages
A “permanent, indestructible life” was not to be the fate of John Kennedy Toole, whose fragile relationship with literature failed to sustain him. Anyone familiar with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has by now encountered the familiar legend, nearly petrified into truth, that paints Toole as a closeted, alcoholic mama’s boy whose response to the rejection of his novel by a cold-hearted New York City publisher was to kill himself at 31, leaving his adoring mother to fight for his novel by buttonholing Walker Percy at a party …
As Ignatius J. Reilly might say, “Stop! I cried imploringly to my godlike mind.”
Cory MacLauchlin’s fair-minded biography unpacks one myth at a time, beginning with Toole’s mother, Thelma, and her zealous ambitions for her only child. Letters between Toole and Robert Gottlieb, the Simon & Schuster editor who “discovered” Toole’s novel — and whom Thelma accused of rejecting it — reveal that Gottlieb’s support for the book continued well after Toole withdrew the manuscript, unable to cope with what he perceived as failure. It was Thelma, friends said, who most ridiculed Gottlieb’s editorial critiques.
“Whenever I visited,” Nick Polites told MacLauchlin, “Ken’s mother would sit with us, and Ken would tell of another letter from the publisher requesting more changes, and Ken’s mother would take over and rail in the most sweeping terms of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘genius’ and how publishers didn’t understand anything at all. And Ken would sit silent as his mother would swell with scorn. It was quite a performance.”
MacLauchlin neither confirms nor rejects the possibility of Toole being gay, but he does argue that there’s no real evidence to support it — most of Toole’s friends, and the women he dated, describe him as asexual or possibly inexperienced. He traces Ken’s gradual descent into mental illness, beginning with a disastrous episode in New York City, progressing to problems in his classroom, where Toole had begun to imagine his students plotting against him, and culminating in a roadtrip that ended tragically in 1969 outside of Biloxi, Miss.
Along with its portrait of a complicated, conflicted and flawed young writer, “Butterfly in the Typewriter” provides a comprehensive look at Toole’s childhood, college years, his army posting in Puerto Rico (where he wrote “Confederacy of Dunces”), and his lifelong love affair with New Orleans.
Midstream: An Unfinished Memoir, by Reynolds Price, Scribner, $25, 192 pages
Price’s memoirs (“Clear Pictures,” “A Whole New Life,” “Ardent Spirits”) have been praised for their “nearly Proustian recall,” and the one he was working on at the time of his death in January 2011 is no exception. Beginning where 2009’s “Ardent Spirits” left off, “Midstream” recounts the years 1961-1965, when Price returned to Cambridge for a break after his novel, “A Long and Happy Life” had been accepted for publication.
Most of this warm, in-depth backward glance is devoted to Price’s social life in Cambridge, at a point when, approaching the age of 30 and in his own words, “unready to begin a second novel,” his main concern was male companionship. The platonic kind came in the form of long, serious conversation with men like Nevill Coghill (his former teacher), poet Stephen Spender, and David Cecil — Price says he missed this exclusively "mature male" fraternity in America, where it didn’t exist.
The rest was fun: flirtations with potential boyfriends, trips into the countryside for “rural teas,” “dashes up to Stratford for Shakespeare on stage,” dinner parties and jaunts to London, which in the early '60s, was no small watering hole. There, Price lunched with Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood and Iris Murdoch. During a trip to Italy, Price shared drinks with Richard Burton and then-lover Liz Taylor, who had “violet eyes you could dive into” and laughed like “a fishwife.”
Returning to the states, Price met and worked with American composer Samuel Barber and a 36-year-old opera singer named Leontyne Price. At the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he observed William Faulkner looking like “a mad little briar pipe — dry and dark brown and indescribably distinguished but bored.”
Chatty, dishy, frank and funny, Price’s blow-by-blow accounts of life in the literary fast lane are all the more intimate for being unedited; the charm of “Midstream” is how the author takes us so fully into his confidence, sharing even his naps, his breakfasts (“a soft-boiled egg, two rolls, the usual apricot jam, and coffee”), and apparently everything he wrote in letters and jotted down in notes. Fans will no doubt savor even these cozy domestic details by a writer who was, as his former student, writer Anne Tyler, refers to him in the forward, “an exclamation point in a landscape of mostly declarative sentences.”
