The poetry of panic

Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Williams’s enormously fat notebooks, edited here by Margaret Bradham Thornton with matching obesity (every page of Williams is copiously annotated and illustrated en face), sanction the view that he was, for most of his life, his own doppelgänger, critic, cheer-leader and teddy bear. What he called ‘the mad pilgrimage of the flesh’ was a via dolorosa with rarely a shortage of pit-stops or passing trade. If he was gay as a bird (and was he not?), we learn of an early heterosexual passionate physical love affair before he was ‘thrown over by beloved bitch’. She is identified as ‘Bette’ Reitz who, if we care, later had two marriages but no children. The notes are nothing if not exhaustive, and then some, but they do also retrieve lost minor characters and do them precise, often pictorial, obituary justice.

Ken Tynan, in his uncited diary of 1970, came to this conclusion: