KEY POINTS:
Literary egos dilate to fill up the yawning spaces of America. Walt Whitman's epic was his Song of Myself, and Tennessee Williams' Notebooks - shelves of confidential ledgers in which for over 40 years he compulsively scribbled a record of tricks turned, pills popped, Martinis swallowed and imaginary heart attacks survived - might be called his "Ode to Me'.
His pet pronoun swishes and sashays through adolescence: it's just "Me being me,"' as Williams notes, which means behaving like "a damn sissy" and forgetting that his brawnier ancestors shot Indians.
" 'Me'," he writes on another occasion, adding that this is "an adequate one-word-two-letter entry for every day!" Sometimes, beset by a spurious neurotic frenzy, the homunculus rages in its solipsistic prison: "A frantic little caged beast - Me!"
More often, the rabid ego is treated with solicitude by its doting owner. "At what last barrier will you collapse, Mr Williams?" the fraught writer asks himself. Or, down on his knees in the YMCA he commends his nearest and dearest to the deity: "Oh, God, be a little bit sorry for Tom tonight."
Despite the battalions of male hookers that troop through his rented bedrooms, Williams' only abiding concern outside himself is for his piteous sister Rose, lobotomised on his mother's orders because, like Ophelia in her so-called madness, she talked out loud about sex.
His love for Rose is directed towards an alter ego, a tributary self like Blanche du Bois in Streetcar or the rest of his heroines, who are all travesties of Williams. "R in psychopathic ward at Missouri-Baptist," he comments. "I belong in one myself."
Tennessee's self-flaunting "Me" has a diminutive companion, like Mini-Me, who is inseparable from Dr Evil in the Austin Powers films. He shivers with delight as he remembers "the sweet thrill of caressing my little one". No, this is not a lover or even a puppy. It is his indefatigable penis - his best friend, perhaps his only begetter.
Tennessee believed that his alley-catting would guarantee creative renewal, that his tawdry nights in fetid bars or public parks would grant him "new days". At its crudest and quickest, sex offered a brisk pelvic workout, "simple indoor exercise", as he remarks after a vigorously "sluttish" month in Key West. When the transactions turn nasty, he glories in humiliation and relishes his martyrdom: with a swollen face, after being beaten by a pick-up, he blesses the blow for tenderising him. The experience is religious, requiring submission to the whim of a cruel, rampant god. "Last night," he notes during a spell in Hollywood, "I was couched with Eros, who moaned like a wounded beast."
At his most trillingly lyrical, he ponders the metaphysics of this physiological addiction. Copulating with a drifter who has "eyes like fiords" he seems to be "possessing distance and flight - space - freedom".
With another partner he feels the bed becoming enormous as he embarks on his own Whitmanesque passage to India. The orgasm, when it arrives, is oceanic: "Pacific, Atlantic, the North American continent." For once, cruising sounds like a genuinely nautical metaphor, since it sets Williams afloat on the buoyant welter of desire.
He longs to "lose myself in universal being", which would teach him to "accept organic dissolution". As ardour cools and fees are negotiated, he realises that sex is a rehearsal for death.
"A play is a phoenix," he declares; "it dies a thousand deaths." There may be a naughty Shakespearean pun in that formulation: actors in tragedy, like the deflating penis, fall and then rise again at the next performance.
The analogy intrigues and saddens Tennessee, who in his sexual career is condemned to runs as short as those of his later, commercially unviable plays. The ultimate stylistic test comes during the settling of accounts: "When sex becomes art - after the orgasm - one must be an artist to keep it from falling to pieces uglily." All he can rely on, in the end, is his own inseparable organ. The quest for love concludes in the narcissist's love affair with himself. "So long, Mon Amour!" he writes at the end of one entry, giving himself a fond goodnight kiss.
Before, during and after these erotic episodes, Williams ingests a pharmacopoeia of medicines, washed down with cocktails. His chemical dependency begins with bromides and Epsom salts for a temperamental tummy, after which, beset by causeless anxiety, he graduates to barbiturates, morphine and Valium.
The editor's notes, which take up half of this unwieldy volume, document the side effects of all these potions: sedation, dizziness, mood swings, along with "difficulty in thinking, poor comprehension and memory, slurring of speech and exaggeration of basic personality traits". By the end, his diary writing has become a means of self-sedation. On planes, he scurries to the lavatory to drink from his contraband flask of liquor, and scribbles as he does so. "Now we are rocking a bit," he woozily notices. Turbulence or delirium tremens?
In one of the last entries, he asks an almost posthumous question: "Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group?" He is blaming the critics who trashed his final plays; self-obsession precludes self-knowledge.
He goes on, however, to offer a shrewd justification for his muddled, maudlin life. "Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn't, my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence."
He existed in order to give birth to Blanche and his other heroines, spawned with no help from his otherwise-occupied "little one".
Incorrigibly romantic, he dreamed of a ritualised suicide like that of Mishima, or of slipping quietly into the sea like his hero Hart Crane.
As it happened, in 1983 he choked on the cap of a small plastic bottle in his Manhattan hotel room. The bottle contained that most theatrical of accessories, artificial tears.
This was the absurd and otiose death of a drama queen, but probably preferable to dying the grim, grey death of a salesman.
- OBSERVER
Williams - A Life
* Born: Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, March 26, 1911.
* Education: University of Missouri-Columbia, where he was nicknamed Tennessee because of his strong Southern accent.
* Career: his first full-length play was Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! (1935). Won Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954). Also known for The Glass Menagerie (1944), Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) (filmed in 1959 by Joseph L Mankiewicz, starring Elizabeth Taylor, below) and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Williams pioneered the Southern Gothic style. He also used his mentally ill sister Rose as a model for many of his unstable heroines. He began his descent into alcoholism after her lobotomy.
* Died: aged 71 in 1983, choking on a bottle top in a New York hotel having ingested barbiturates.
* He said: "All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress."
