Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2014) is a biography of American playwright Tennessee Williams written by John Lahr. A book review in The Guardian calls the 758-page biography “compulsively readable.” Although it is meticulously researched, stylistically, the book is very obviously written by a film critic more accustomed to descriptive language punctuated with insightful one-liners than the more formulaic biographical genre conventions that tidy and organize details. The book lacks a critical introduction and conclusion, and even the chapters are mostly left to their own devices. Lahr follows events chronologically, but without proper introductions and conclusions to each chapter, the organization of the book bleeds together.

The book starts with the opening of The Glass Menagerie. Here, and throughout the book, Lahr draws connections between the plays and Williams’s own experience, calling Williams “the most autobiographical of American playwrights” for the way he takes personal and familial pain and trauma and transforms it into art. The second chapter opens on the aftermath of The Glass Menagerie’s success, and Williams’s new and tumultuous relationship with Amado “Pancho” Rodriguez y Gonzalez. Lahr discusses Williams’s struggle with sexuality and coming out, again connecting his real-life struggles (homosexuality, the fears of sex instilled in him by a puritanical mother) to the plays You Touched Me! and A Streetcar Named Desire. A virgin until the age of twenty-six, Williams’s first sexual forays were so terrifying that he vomited afterward; he then carried on a string of failed relationships and a prodigious number of one-night stands.

Lahr follows Williams while he is abroad in Europe, including a stay in London for the opening of The Glass Menagerie. While abroad, he strikes up a friendship with the actor Maria Britneva. Williams also reconnects with his old flame Frank Merlo, rekindling a relationship with him that is fraught with jealousy and temperamental outbursts. To equalize their relationship, Williams gives Merlo a percentage of The Rose Tattoo’s earnings. Meanwhile, Williams contends with the disastrous Hollywood film adaptation of The Glass Menagerie and tries to get The Rose Tattoo off the ground. Lahr focuses on Williams’s friendship and fraught collaborations with director Elia Kazan, while Williams’s relationship with Merlo continues to fracture.



Lahr discusses one of William’s most famous plays, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof. Williams’s health problems, brought on by stress (including huge hemorrhoids) and emotional exhaustion, lead the playwright to seek psychiatric help. Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie takes up the psychiatric challenge Williams presents: “a borderline personality with tenacious addictive and depressive tendencies who was rich, famous, and a genius to boot.” With therapy, Williams confronts his many neuroses and his deep-rooted issues with his parents. The full story of his younger sister’s madness and subsequent lobotomy is also revealed—she had been committed to an asylum for violence, delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and a host of other indications of severe mental illness. Once deemed a hopeless case, she was lobotomized. The play Suddenly Last Summer was Williams’s attempt to exorcise his guilt and grief over his sister’s fate.

In 1960, Williams and Merlo are once again together, but Williams and Kazan start falling apart. Enraged with Kazan for taking a project by one of William’s creative rivals, the two argue and Kazan decides that after a decade of being a director on stage and screen, he wants to create his own projects. In 1961, Williams’s fourteen-year on/off relationship with Merlo finally ends; he later takes up with the poet Fredrick Nicklaus. Merlo dies of lung cancer in 1963.

The tables start to turn on the famous playwright. In his youth, he had been experimental and avant-garde, but now he fights to stay relevant. This fight results in The Gnadiges Fraulein, a slapstick play poking fun at itself and the bad press Williams had received. During the late sixties, his mental health deteriorates again, and Williams finds himself committed to a psychiatric hospital for two months following an addiction-fueled meltdown.



Nineteen seventy-one sees the play Out Cry, Williams’s first production in more than two years. Meanwhile, his relationship with his long-time agent deteriorates and ends. Throughout the sixties, Williams had increasingly become a relic, but in the seventies, the fight for relevancy gets harder. Gay rights activists slam him for not contributing more to gay theater, wanting a different narrative from him, while also “characterizing Williams as a fogy, whose writing had no purchase on homosexual reality.” For a man who had been openly gay for decades, facing the slurs and getting beaten on several occasions, being told by critics that he somehow wasn’t gay enough enraged him.

Gripped by depression, Williams’s final days are grim. His friend finds him dead beside his bed, accompanied by empty pill bottles, red wine, and a short story about a boy who dies of a broken heart. He wished to be buried at sea, but in an ironic and depressing turn of events, his brother has Williams relocated to St. Louis and the body interred beside their parents, while a battle over his estate (an estimated five million dollars in assets) ignites.

Throughout the biography, Lahr includes numerous black-and-white photographs of Williams, the people in his life, and stage and set stills. The end of the book contains an appendix of a dozen or so more photos spanning the length of his career. Lahr also includes a helpful chronology section, starting with his parents’ marriage in 1907 through to 2011.



The biography was well received, winning several awards. In America, it won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in the “Biography” category, the 2015 Lambda Award for “Best Gay Biography,” and was nominated for a National Book Award. In the U.K., it won The Sheridan Morley Prize for Theater Biography (2015).