Tennessee Williams and the South.
By Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 112 pages. $ 30.00 cloth.

Tennessee Williams and the South creates a moveable feast of engaging text and arresting photographs for the Williams gourmet as it moves from the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. Combining the best of Holditch’s narrative style from his The Last Frontier of Bohemia: Tennessee Williams in New Orleans (1987) and Leavitt’s photographic approach to biography in The World of Tennessee Williams (1978), this collaborative effort entertains while it informs. It is guaranteed to be in demand for many years to come.

A guide book to places in the South that were of great importance to Williams, this biographical photo album takes the armchair traveler to Columbus, Mississippi, on Palm Sunday, March 26, 1911, providing a proper introduction to the newly born Thomas Lanier Williams III. The gothic rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where the Reverend Walter Dakin and his wife, Edwina Dakin, the playwright’s grandparents, lived was Williams’s first home. During his first seven years, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee; Canton, Mississippi; and Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Clarksdale area is rich in associations that involve Williams: St. George’s Episcopal Church and rectory (where his grandfather preached and the family lived); Moon Lake (immortalized in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke); the angel statue in Clarksdale’s Grange Cemetery (Miss Alma’s “patroness in Summer and Smoke), Big Daddy’s 28,000 acres of “the richest land this side of the Valley Nile,” and “27 wagons full of cotton”—and then some. The Mississippi Delta is said to begin in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, and end on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, Mississippi. What better way to explore this territory than with Tennessee Williams and the South in hand.

As Holditch and Leavitt explain, Williams’s move to the urban environment of St. Louis in 1918 (“a city that I dread,” Williams claimed) was “a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtues, and social decorum” he remembered and loved from the “the dark, wide world” of Mississippi. A crane out of water in St. Louis, Williams migrated South to New Orleans where he found the liberating effect of the climate more congenial. A place where he could catch his breath, New Orleans became Williams’s spiritual home, enabling him to discover himself. Holditch and Leavitt assert that Williams’s alter ego “was born in 1939 in a roach-infested, cramped, and romantic garret in a rooming house in the French Quarter.” Today, one may visit this National Historic Landmark at 722 Toulouse Street, meditate by the statue of Christ in the Garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, have a drink and socialize in the courtyard of the Napoleon House, and stroll by the grand mansions and beautiful gardens of the Garden District as one retraces the footsteps of Tennessee Williams through his South.

Most important, Holditch and Leavitt explore the various ways in which the South touched the life and works of Tennessee Williams—his plays, short stories, essays, and poems. From the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans—from the land, the people, the culture, the folk ways, even the food and drink—Williams drew inspiration, creativity and strength. “That his being Southern provided him with an inherent mass of material” to shape into an imaginative world where the truths of the human heart are timeless cannot be denied. To experience Tennessee Williams and the South is to be more familiar with the meaning of the term “Southern,” to come to a closer and more personal understanding of America’s great playwright, and to gain invaluable insights into the artist and his craft—be it his original characters, unique humor, sense of place, concept of the gothic grotesque, or themes involving insensitivity and violence, compassion and understanding.

Colby H. Kullman