Coming of Age : TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: Everyone Else Is an Audience, <i> By Ronald Hayman (Yale University Press: $27.50; 268 pp.)</i>

Like Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams is one of those supremely troublesome artists the cultural watchdogs of this country have never quite forgiven themselves for letting in the front gates. Wildly hailed for their early works, the silent clown and the sound-era writer-director went on to be damned by both the popular press and the academy for subsequent efforts deemed either “too serious” (Chaplin) or “not serious enough” (Welles). With Williams, however, the thumbs-down signal came in a much more cryptic fashion.

In the wake of his twin Broadway triumphs, “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Time magazine declared Williams guilty of creating works that were “basically negative” and “sterile.” Why were these seminal contributions to the American theater, whose vivid language, complex characters and rich emotional texture had captured the world’s attention suddenly being dismissed so offhandedly? Because Time knew that Tennessee Williams was gay.

In the late 1940s, homosexuality was deemed unfit for open discussion in a “family” publication like Henry Luce’s, so the (aforementioned) code language was used to get the point across instead. But by the 1960s (then) New York Times drama critic Stanley Kaufman had mustered up the effort to be somewhat less cryptic when he revealed in a Sunday column that “three of the most successful playwrights of the last 20 years are (reputed) homosexuals” whose works offered “a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general.” There was no doubt that Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee were two of the names on Kaufman’s hit list, but the identity of the third man was somewhat obscure: You could count on being the toast of every cocktail party in town back then if you knew it was William Inge.

Ordinarily it would be the height of absurdity to launch a polemical attack against a foe who can’t be identified by name. Kaufman, however, wriggled off this hook by declaring that “in society the homosexual’s life must be discreetly concealed”: “Society” supplied the excuse for not naming names.

It was this social pressure, the critic insisted, that forced gay playwrights to create “two-sex versions of the one sex experiences” they “really” knew--thus leading to “distortions” of heterosexuality. Claiming he wasn’t making a case of sexual apartheid, Kaufman declared this sad situation was “our” fault (all New York Times readers apparently being heterosexual) and that homosexual playwrights should be “allowed” to write freely. But the truth of the matter was Tennessee Williams had never made any effort to “discreetly conceal” his sexuality: he had been writing freely about such matters long before Kaufman gave him permission to do so.

The primary subject of Williams’ writings (both dramatic and fictional) was the social outcast--people whose lives were so marginal their presence barely registered. Going beyond the limits of realism, Williams discovered in the voices of these outcasts a means of creating a new sort of theatrical poetry. Far more inspired by women than men in his writings, Williams dealt with homosexuality for the most part in passing. Still, short stories like “One Arm” and “Desire and the Black Masseur” and such one-act plays as “Auto-Da-Fe,” “Something Unspoken” and “Suddenly Last Summer” find him illuminating different aspects of gay life. Significantly one of Williams most important full-length works, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” deals explicitly with an All-American football hero who would rather share his bed with another All-American football hero than his far from unattractive wife.

You will look long and hard to find any mention of this simple fact in any of the initial reviews of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which invariably insisted that its hero’s motives for spurning his wife were “vague” and “mysterious.” But then what could you expect from a critical context that refused to recognize that Albee’s “The Zoo Story” was about a homosexual pick-up, insisted on seeing the thoroughly heterosexual “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as a transvestite tragicomedy, and praised Inge as the poet laureate of middle-class heterosexuality with his “Come Back Little Sheba” and “Bus Stop,” only to scream “degenerate” when he turned to homosexual themes in “Natural Affection” and “Where’s Daddy?”

Of course that was back in the (allegedly) freewheeling 1960s. Today with Tony Kushner’s self-proclaimed “gay fantasia” “Angels in America” winning the Pulitzer prize, the atmosphere would seem to be ripe for a proper reassessment of Williams’ work. His plays, in near-constant revival, are more popular than ever. Moreover, a whole generation of new writers--Kushner in particular--bears witness to his incalculable influence on the theater.

So it is something of a shock to come across a book like Ronald Hayman’s “Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else is an Audience.” Claiming to be a study of the relationship between Williams’ life and art, this 268-page volume is little more than a rehash of every canard that has been volleyed at the playwright since Time fired the first shot across its bow.

“More than 20 years of drug and alcohol addiction, coupled with devastating openness about his promiscuous homosexuality, had all but destroyed one of America’s greatest playwrights,” screams the dust jacket. Paying only the mildest lip service to Williams’ talent, Hayman strikes sob-sister-like poses of disingenuous concern for the substance abuse, hypochondria, and emotional problems that plagued the playwright’s later years. Raising a sternly disapproving eyebrow at Williams sexual life, Hayman makes not the slightest effort to comprehend it, going so far as to state “in his dealings with men (Williams) often enjoyed talking as if he--and they--were women,” utilizing such terms as “My Dear Daughter” and “My Sainted Mother.”

In a year that has seen such insightful studies of gay artists as Edmund White’s “Genet” and Brad Gooch’s Frank O’Hara biography, “City Poet,” there’s no excuse for Hayman’s inability to navigate the simplest forms of camp slang. But you can’t expect much from a writer who toes the ‘60s-era line on the alleged transvestite substitutions of gay playwrights.

That Williams was able to identify with both sexes is not merely a measure of his talent, but a key to why the plays continue to fascinate audiences regardless of sexual orientation.

You don’t have to have a doctorate in English to recognize the fact that Williams used persons and incidents in his own life as models. But it takes more than a little insight to explain how Williams transformed raw reality into the stuff of fiction. Hayman doesn’t even try.

One can only wonder at this biographer’s motives when in another passage he quotes Gore Vidal’s approving words about Williams’ dedicated writing habits only to turn around and remark that: (Williams) spent so many strenuous hours at his typewriter that he gave the impression of being self-disciplined, but the need to write was so urgent that it was more like self-indulgence.” These are dangerous words coming from Hayman who, in an exceedingly short space of time, has put biographies of Sade, Nietzsche, Kafka, Brecht, Sartre and Proust under his belt.

Williams’ life may have been a mess--particularly toward its end--but the same can’t be said of his art. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Summer and Smoke,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Sweet Bird of Youth” are in near-constant revival all over the world.

A few years ago Vanessa Redgrave brought “Orpheus Descending,” one of Williams’ most eccentric plays, to unexpectedly vivid life. And, if reviews are to be believed, a Chicago theatrical company has revealed “The Night of the Iguana,” a work frequently cited as proof of Williams’ late period decline, to be thoroughly first-rate. Maybe there’s hope for such problematic works as “Camino Real,” “Out Cry” and “The Red Devil Battery Sign” provided the right actors and directors can be found.

There’s also an opening for a new Williams biographer.