A Portrait of the Playwright : TOM: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, <i> By Lyle Leverich (Crown Publishers: $35; 644 pp.)</i>

The life of Tennessee Williams presents an unusual challenge to the biographer. His early childhood always sounds like a story by Eudora Welty, while his years of youthful triumph have the ring of a Norman Vincent Peale lecture on the rewards of perseverance and the power of positive thinking. In fact, Williams’ early accomplishments, together with those of William Faulkner and Truman Capote, could have set the stage for an entirely new Southern genre--the Gothic success story--had it not been for his almost tragic decline in later life.

Rumors of Williams’ collapse, creative and emotional, which circulated throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, brought to mind something straight out of “Weird Tales,” with John Waters directing a middle-aged Bette Davis playing Williams, in drag. One could never get enough of the good parts, but finally sadness overtakes the initial fascination, leaving one feeling more than a little guilty for having intruded on Williams’ nearly 20 years of embarrassment.

The greatest indignity Williams was made to suffer in his last years was seeing his reputation as a playwright tarnished by his dissolution. Neither the publication of his memoirs in 1976 nor the numerous revivals of his best work succeeded in fully restoring his shattered public image. It took his death (in 1983 at age 71) to bring Tennessee Williams back to life.

Lyle Leverich’s new biography of Williams contributes enormously to the resurrection of America’s premier lyrical dramatist. Leverich writes with an authority that casts doubt on the value of virtually all previous biographical studies of Williams. The author’s decision to devote this volume exclusively to Williams’ formative years, ending in 1945 with the New York premiere of “The Glass Menagerie,” invites the reader to view Williams’ life from the perspective of the genesis of his inspiration instead of from its eclipse, the point from which virtually all previous biographies have begun.

This is no small accomplishment. Wresting the theatrical legacy of Williams from the hands of myth-makers, rumor-mongers and celebrity hounds not only corrects the distorted image of Williams himself, but makes possible an adjustment to our understanding of a critical period in the history of American regional theaters, both amateur and professional, during the heyday of Broadway.

Young Tom Williams, as Leverich makes clear, did not simply burst onto Broadway out of nowhere. Leverich’s treatment of the production history of Williams’ early works functions as a fascinating portrait of the regional theater scene in the prewar years, while offering a glimpse into off-Broadway in its infancy. Ten years before the Broadway premiere of “Menagerie,” Williams had seen his one-act “Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!” performed in Memphis. Two years later, in 1937, “Candles to the Sun” was first staged in St. Louis. The year 1940 saw Williams’ short play, “The Long Goodbye,” produced in New York by students at the New School for Social Research, and “Battle of Angels” optioned by the Theatre Guild. That production would eventually open in Boston to disastrously bad notices and close after a brief run. Only the success in 1944 of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie” set the stage for its triumphant opening one year later at the Playhouse Theatre in New York.

Leverich takes seriously all of Williams’ early writings, providing crucial insights into the young writer as he gained confidence, first as a poet and writer of short stories, and only later as a playwright. He traces Williams’ creative roots back to the Mississippi Delta region, which Leverich shows to have been of deeper significance to Williams than either St. Louis or New Orleans, and provocatively suggests Williams’ ties to the blues. Leverich quotes an old friend who was struck by the improvisational nature of Williams’ creative style:

“He was never sure if he knew where he was going, but when he got there--when he finished that passage and it might not be right--he’d toss it aside and start all over again. . . . It was as if he was throwing dice--as if he was working toward a combination or some kind of result and wouldn’t have any idea what the result might be but would recognize it when he got there.”

Williams developed professional writing habits from early on. He was wildly ambitious and wrote with fanatical devotion, partly, Leverich maintains, out of a desperation to escape the emotional suffering of living at home. Leverich’s treatment of Williams’ family could not be more thorough; in fact, one shares in very short order Tom’s desire to get away from his awful parents. Reading about his mother set my teeth on edge. An old friend of Tom’s remembered that she never stopped talking:

“It was a nightmare, just yammer, yammer, yammer, to the point you were ready to go through the ceiling. From a distance, it had a comical aspect, but close up, watch out: It was absolutely destructive. . . . Mrs. Williams as a social figure had an element of lunacy about it--it had no connection with reality except in a grotesque way--all that talk about her elegant past and their Southern gentility.”

While this portion of the biography reads at times like a novelization of “The Glass Menagerie,” Leverich succeeds in persuading the reader that gaining insight into Williams’ wretched family life provides the key to his theatrical universe. Through “Menagerie”, “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Suddenly Last Summer,” audiences are made to feel a sympathy for the author’s heroines. Leverich, however, challenges readers to understand Williams’ more complex relationships with the men in his family, particularly with his mysterious grandfather and his distant father.

While the superiority of Leverich’s study to previous biographies of Williams cannot be overemphasized, “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams” does not meet the highest standards of biographical writing established by such works as Michael Holroyd’s massive, multivolume study “Bernard Shaw,” or by the elegantly masterful biography by Richard Holmes of 18th-Century playwright Richard Savage (‘Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage”). Leverich’s work lacks their intellectual refinement and displays of brilliance. His is a sparkling wine to their champagne.

One can, however, readily understand why Williams selected Leverich to be his authorized biographer. Williams seems to have recognized that his story required the expertise of a theater professional. The author’s association with Williams as a producer is, no doubt, responsible for Leverich’s sympathetic treatment of the young playwright’s initiation into the profession’s unique terrors.

Leverich in this first of a projected two-volume study has already produced the kind of work Williams has long deserved. It is finely written, thoroughly researched and lavishly documented. In his second volume, Leverich will have to explore more fully Williams’ artistic accomplishments in the context of developments in American drama. A study of Williams’ personality cannot account for his enormous artistic success. The author’s greatest challenge will be in establishing Tennessee Williams’ place as a 20th-Century artist. If he can pull it off, Leverich will have produced the finest biography of an American playwright since “O’Neill,” Louis Sheaffer’s magnificent study of Eugene O’Neill.