I recently finished John Lahr’s powerful biography, ‘Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of The Flesh’. It’s a complex story, artistically triumphant at many points but often personally tragic, of Williams’ struggle, on and off the page and stage, with his personal demons. Ultimately, what he created marks him as one of 20th century America’s greatest artists.

At the moment, what particularly strikes me about him as a writer (other than an indomitable work ethic) was his willingness to fully explore his inner divisions through his characters. In Walt Whitman’s phrase, Williams ‘contained multitudes’ and he fearlessly confronted and used his own complexity to create drama both within individual characters and, using different ‘parts’ of himself, in different characters within the same play.

Of course he closely observed others too, and used in his work what he saw, but always through his very personal filter..

His obsessive themes and the work that resulted were totally his own, and that of a true outsider, yet millions of people have related to the ‘people’ he created. He brought them alive for generations past and future in such unforgettable plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and many others.

Williams, a gay man who created some of the most memorable female characters in the history of drama, said:

“I contain… three sexual natures: that of the male, the female, and that of the androgynic, which is far from being a negative classification to my way of feeling and thinking. The reason I have no difficulty at all in creating female characters is because, in my psyche, there is a little congregation of panicky ladies and/or tramps. Why panicky? Because they are confined there…”

To bring life to his characters, Williams didn’t run away from accepting and using what other people might see as inner contradictions – and stopped there. Instead, he dug in. My many inner conflicts may be different from his in specifics, but I have no problem relating to Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Tom and Laura Wingfield, and other Williams’ characters.

Williams’ work reminds me to not simplify myself to make things ‘easier’; to use my own mysteries and divisions in my writing. His work reminds me that there is a world inside me as well as outside and that the conflicts inside me and how they play against the conflicts in the outside world are probably where my truest work is to be found.

A big part of Tennessee Williams’ job was to explore his deepest nature; not to turn away in fear and revulsion from his own history, his personal twists, desires, sorrows, joys, obsessions, and grief, but to use them to create with.

We each already have our own world to explore.

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