Nothing, however, has stopped Williams’s major works of the 1940s and 1950s being regularly revived. Since the death of the de facto controller of his literary estate, Lady St Just (aptly described as neither a lady, a saint, or just), his later works are gradually being re-evaluated and relaunched. The arrival of John Lahr’s mammoth biography should accelerate the process.

Lahr inherited the project when Lyle Leverich, a producer Williams had twice authorised to write his biography, was stymied from publishing his first volume by the Cerberus of the estate, the aforementioned Lady St Just. Leverich came to Lahr for advice, they became friends, and Lahr agreed to finish the work if anything happened to Leverich. When Leverich died, Lahr took on the project. Lahr realised that to make any sense of Williams’s work he had to describe the playwright’s upbringing and so has written what he calls a stand-alone biography. But although much is rightly made of Williams’s relationship with his family, details of his early career are passed over, and the book starts with his first great success, The Glass Menagerie (1944).

Tennessee Williams in his Key West Studio

There is no doubt that Williams was the most autobiographical of writers. Gore Vidal wrote of him; ‘Tennessee could not possess his own life until he had written about it … he would have [a] play produced so he could, at relative leisure, like God, rearrange his original experience into something that was no longer God’s but his.’ Lahr teases out the autobiographical elements in all the plays mostly illuminatingly. But there are times when he produces analysis of a floridity that rivals Williams at his worst. Of Milk Train he writes: ‘Woven from the tattered strands of his imploding life, the play is a kind of fairy tale of his own decline … Williams claimed that Milk Train was … “An allegorical portrait”. The allegory was in Mrs. Goforth … whose willful perversion and mysterious empowerment were a simulacrum of the destructive and creative sides of Williams, vying for domination of his overworked, balky imagination.’

As a man of the theatre himself, Lahr understands the blood, sweat, and frequent tears that go into the production of a play, and his book is rich with backstage gossip. Particularly juicy are the descriptions of the turbulent rehearsal periods for The Night of the Iguana (1961) and the second production of Milk Train and of the mayhem created by their stars, Bette Davis in Iguana and a seemingly unhinged Tallulah Bankhead in Milk Train, the latter account taken almost verbatim from the autobiography of its director, Tony Richardson.

There were two great pillars of support in Williams’s career: his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan. Drawing heavily on Kazan’s autobiography, Lahr acutely analyses the relationship between the two men. ‘Kazan’s psychological and structural acumen provided Williams with a safety net that rallied him out of his writing blocks, challenged his melodramatic excesses, chivied him for work of greater depth, and allowed his imagination to soar. But Williams’s artistic vanity would never allow him to acknowledge to the public or himself just how much Kazan’s prowess had affected his work.’ Although most of the creative tension between them was positive, their disagreement over the third act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Williams accused Kazan of forcing him to a rewrite which softened the ending, was the beginning of a rift which eventually led to a parting of the ways five years later. Their mutual respect, however, did not waver, and Williams was never again to find as dynamic and understanding a collaborator.

Marlon Brando on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire

Lahr sees Wood, who was Williams’s earliest and most devout supporter, as the nurturing mother figure he had lacked as a child. Wood was much more than an agent to him; she nursed him through his down periods and helped to unravel the emotional tangles he got himself into. It was when in his drugged, paranoid state he finally sacked her that his life truly fell apart.

Freud has taught us that creativity and sexuality are closely linked. In the case of Tennessee Williams, they were practically interchangeable. After a late start (he was twenty-eight when he had his first homosexual encounter), he rapidly made up for lost time. He never entirely lost his sense of guilt and the tension between purity and ‘corruption’ played out through his entire opus. Lahr chronicles his long list of lovers and attachments, from his great love Frank Merlo to the increasingly venal and neurotic companions of the final years. It must have been interesting for his new agent, Mitch Douglas, to be told when he asked if he could drop in on the playwright: ‘Well that could be difficult, Robert.’ Williams’s latest squeeze had ‘got wasted last night and wrecked the car. Now he’s sitting on the front porch with a gun in his lap threatening to blow the brains out of anyone who approaches. I’d say we’re under siege.’

Melodramatic moments like that aside, the final years make for sad reading. But Lahr makes a good case for some of the later plays, which were often casualties as much of bad direction and production as of Williams’s waning powers. Vieux Carré (1977) has proved a stayer, and others will doubtless have their chances. Lahr also, quite rightly commends Williams’s letters. The volume addressed to Donald Windham and those edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler are, in their vitality and quality of writing, among the best of the twentieth century.

This is a long book and could have used a firmer editorial hand. Do we really need to know about the patrician pedigree of Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thacher, or to delve into the war history of Frank Merlo? But Lahr’s understanding of the creative pressures of the theatre and his empathy have produced a book worthy of a man of whom Arthur Miller wrote: ‘He chose a hard life that requires the skin of an alligator and the heart of a poet. To his everlasting honor, he persevered and bore us all toward glory.’