There's something about a good writer's bad writing that sticks to the side of your throat like a hot dime signaling the onset of a flu. You can't get it out, you can't get around it; you've just got to hunker down for the sickness. Tennessee Williams' 1975 autobiographical novel Moise and the World of Reason is back in print (New Directions Paperbook), and it's possible that the main result will be amplification of the argument, steadily gaining ground, that Williams is among the most overrated writers of the last century.
That Williams is an important writer is a secure enough truth to allow for the corollary idea that the three plays �" The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof �" on which his reputation stands are a notably small part of the output of a lifelong compulsive writer, one who had to write come hell or high water. Moise is hell. It's a thinly veiled memento of the writer's desperate, alcoholic, drug-addled late years, and in 2016, it's hell to read.
"As a writer I don't concentrate much on craftsmanship," says the unnamed voice ("protagonist" seems too positive here) telling the tawdry tale. Yet what makes this novel weirdly compelling is that it's not without craft. It's preposterously self-conscious, but the down-and-out writer is making an effort, and you wouldn't write this book off as a hasty, undigested first draft. It is, if anything, overworked, which only compounds the horror. The writer is, as ever, a Charlie McCarthy to ventriloquist Williams' Edgar Bergen; even the historical period fits.
Some hapless doctoral candidate may decode the novel to expose the actual people from Williams' life. That student will be glad for the playwright's altogether finer Autobiography, yet may feel betrayed by John Lahr's Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. In that renowned 600-page biography this novel earns half of a single sentence, wherein we learn that it was the idea of Bill Barns, the agent trying to get the playwright's career back on track. Here lies Williams' much-vaunted "late style," the kindest thing it was ever called.
The miscalculations are devastating and right on the surface. The Moise of the title is another of Williams' fading females, an artist whom we first meet giving a farewell party to, yes, the World of Reason. For a title character she's a vague wisp of a thing, equally principled and foul-mouthed. Even though the author provides the pronunciation of her name (mo-EASE) early on, the tongue in the reader's eye never ceases to trip over it.
The writer's main squeeze is Lance, a professional ice skater, though the reader is as apt to hear him referred to as the "little nigger on ice." Exactly what he's good for beyond bringing a fresh case of scabies and the clap back from circuit tours is not clear �" unless it would be to call attention to the fact that said writer, a white runaway from Thelma, Alabama, has a bigger dick. "After all, I am Southern with foreskin intact and the organ is somewhat larger than would be proportionate to most male bodies of my size."
After Lance comes Charlie, and, in this novel devoid of meaningful plot, a spectral, recurring figure identified as "a has-been playwright attempting a comeback at the Truck and Warehouse." The writer himself claims a dislike of theater because of the "curtains," that is, completion.
New Directions is calling Moise "an erotic, sensual, and comic novel generations ahead of its time" �" as though by the early 70s the real one-hand books, such as the John Rechy novels, were not already thoroughly thumbed. To get to the explicit stuff, which is there, you have to get past passages such as this: "I, with my customary sense of the marvelous, very gently picked up the thick and velvety length of human asparagus that sprouted from his bush, half hoping that it would stiffen into erection." It did not, and neither will yours. The writing about vaginas is worse.
Little wonder that the fear of "the Gay Libs to whom my heart is committed in a bruised-ass way" haunts the later sections. The author's self-hatred is unrelenting and always associated with writing: "Thinks he's got a literary career but I happen to know that his career is what he's sitting on whenever he's not standing or lying down." "Scriveners fuck off," is Moise's final judgment. "The whole pack of you are abominations and monsters of ego."
A back-cover blurb by no less than John Waters declares, "There is no such thing as 'bad' Tennessee Williams, only wounded, subtle, sad little songs of defeat." But I'd say only those already besotted with Tennessee Williams have any business with this book �" and they, arguably, least of all.