In the same way, he sees the sisterliness beneath Hemingway’s skin with a texted accuracy that trumps Gore Vidal’s bitching. He also has a genuine appetite for good writing, even if a published list of his bedside reading at the height of his fame — Human Destiny by Lecomte de Nouy, The Theory of Relativity, The Idiot and Camus’ The Stranger among others — smacks of Little Miss Goody-two-shoes. No Jean Genet, for instance?

The notebooks break off in October 1958 when T.W.’s stock is tilting downwards and resume only in March of 1979, when he is in a protracted terminal slide. Failure to set down much except his états dame, as he might put it, deprives us of his intelligence, not least about eminent contemporaries whom he rarely mentions, unless they please or betray him (or he them). However, his editor quotes a letter to Gadg Kazan responding to that director’s criticism of the character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which indicates an alert and articulate appreciation of human weakness. What emerges beyond doubt is that homosexuality — or at least T.W.’s kind of compulsive ‘devigation’ — is not a matter of preference, as gay cant has it, but of addiction to (frequently rented) promiscuity. Danger — he is oddly thrilled to be beaten up by a bunch of sailors — is part of the pleasure. So Williams was a psycho-logical and pharmacological mess; so what? The best of the work was a marvel of ventriloquial intuition, the poetry of panic; you can’t take that away from him or her.

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