The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays.(Review)

Annette J. Saddik, The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Associated University Presses), 1999. Pp. 173. $33.50.

It is a truism of American culture that an artist is only as good as her most recent work: any momentary fall from grace or deviation from an approach that has attained critical approval is regarded as evidence that the artist no longer has anything worthwhile to offer. Nowhere is that commonplace better illustrated than in the career trajectory of Tennessee Williams, whose plays of the 1940s and 1950s still blaze brilliantly in the firmament of American theater while his dramaturgical experiments of the 1960s and 1970s met a critical hostility that precluded their entering the canon of regularly revived plays.

Annette J. Saddik sets out in her book to examine reasons for the failure of the latter group of plays. Challenging "the conventional wisdom" that Williams's later work was the product of a "drug-crazed mind" "incapable of sustaining his former creative powers," Saddik proposes that the real problem lay in the critics' inability to tolerate Williams's conscious striving toward new, antirealistic dramatic forms. She claims that her book offers "a new reading of Tennessee Williams' entire career" that it "argues that Williams deserves a central place in American experimental drama" (11). Though documentation of "the conventional wisdom" (a term used four times on one page without reference to the sources of such wisdom) would be useful, Saddik's point about Williams's effort to explore unconventional techniques in defiance of critical expectations is certainly valid. Indeed, it is a point I made in my own 1979 book, which I didn't consider particularly original even at that time; thus one might question the newness of Saddik's "new reading" The absence of my book--along with certain more influential works on Williams, including George W. Crandell's The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (1996)--from Saddik's field of references suggests that her research was not exhaustive. That could be overlooked if only this book delivered what it promised. Williams afficionados will be disappointed that The Politics of Reputation fails to make a convincing case for the importance of Williams's late plays.

Saddik lays the groundwork for her study intelligently, carefully distinguishing between reviewers and critics, defining what is understood as "realism" in the theater, incorporating statements by Williams about his own creative process and intentions. Chapter I traces "The Rise and Fall of a Reputation" by culling phrases and occasionally whole paragraphs from the critical responses to the original productions. The method may be valid if the scholar can maintain objectivity in the process; here, however, the contextualizing commentary--for example, "reviewers' enthusiastic support overall" (26), "reviewers found it difficult to say anything positive" (26), "he felt the need to qualify his praise" (30), "almost all unanimously" (34), "almost unanimously" (35), "reviewers generally felt" (36)--betrays authorial selectivity to serve the thesis. Certainly, reading is interpretation, so let it be noted that my reading of Walter Kerr's writing on Camino Real differs significantly from Saddik's: I see no "violent reaction" in the sentence she quotes, nor do I think it fair to say that "Kerr has a single objective standard in mind for judging good drama" (36).

Chapter 2, "`I Don't Like to Write Realistically': Williams' Uneasy Relationship with Realism" offers a thoughtful assessment of the theatricalist realism of Williams's plays of the 1940s and 1950s. Various theorists are cited to good effect in the discussion of a corpus that was able to pass for realism even as it employed all sorts of nonrealistic devices. Saddik's analysis of The Glass Menagerie (51-8) skillfully supports her view that "the contradiction between Williams' dissatisfaction with conventional realism and his simultaneous embrace of an essentially realistic mode in his early plays stems from his own struggle and ambivalence concerning the representation of truth" (62). Unfortunately, the chapter breaks down when Saddik begins to identify realism with "industrial ...