• The diary of an important writer is always worth reading—but not necessarily for pleasure. Tennessee Williams kept a journal more or less continuously between 1936 and 1958, and the thirty notebooks in which he set down his fugitive thoughts have now been published in their entirety. Alas, Notebooks (New Directions, 828 pp., $40) proves to be far too much of a not-very-good thing, for like a remarkable number of famous playwrights, Williams didn’t know how to do anything but write dialogue. To be sure, he was capable of tossing off good lines by the carload when speaking through the mouths of his characters, but as a diarist he was something of a dull dog, whiny and trite and repetitive in the extreme, and I freely admit that I found it impossible to read Notebooks from beginning to end. A parodist could have a field day with it had Williams not already done the job for himself: “Travelling alone is a bit frightening at times.” “Some day everything will stop for always.” “Perhaps if I could have escaped being peddled I might have become a major artist.” “Oh, how sweet it would be to exist altogether without this tired old fabrication of flesh.” “Mind seems utterly torpid except for the nightly anxiety over falling asleep.” “I am dull, but I go on writing.” Indeed.
Margaret Bradham Thornton, the editor of Notebooks, is something of an unintentional self-parodist herself, for her scholarly apparatus turns out to be almost as long as the notebooks themselves. Each page of text is preceded by a page of introductory notes, a good many of them written on the assumption that nobody knows anything: “Blond, buxom Lana Turner (1920-95) was an established glamorous actress whose first role, at age sixteen, earned her the nickname ‘the Sweater Girl’ for the tight blue sweater she wore in the film.” Such fawning treatment would be excessive even for a truly great writer, and Williams was nothing remotely close to that. The Glass Menagerie is a masterpiece, one of the half-dozen greatest plays of the 20th century, and A Streetcar Named Desire is a brilliantly effective applause machine, but most of the rest of his vast output strikes me as overblown and underbelievable, and I found nothing in this monstrously obese book to made me think otherwise.
• Edwin Denby’s Dance Writings (University Press of Florida, 608 pp., $29.95 paper) is back in print, and about time, too. Denby, who covered the New York dance scene regularly in the 1940’s and sporadically thereafter, was by a very wide margin the best and most influential dance critic who ever lived, and anyone who wants to know what it was like to see the premieres of such masterpieces as George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, and Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire need only consult his lapidary reviews, most of them written on a tight deadline and published in the New York Herald Tribune the next day. He was both quotable and insightful, a rare combination, and he also made one of my all-time favorite remarks about ballet: “Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening—nobody on the stage at least.” It’s in here, along with dozens of other permanently memorable remarks about the most evanescent of art forms.
