The Beatles and Tennessee

There was once a journalist who went to interview Tennessee Williams. Williams met him outside the house and hustled him upstairs where he proclaimed he'd just heard the music of heaven. Tennessee turned to the gramophone and started it playing and the record was the White Album by The Beatles.

That is a fantastic story. We think of Williams as a million years away from The Beatles, can't imagine any relation to Eleanor Rigby and Blanche DuBois. Two completely different mediums. Williams is the dustbowl playwright, of the four greater than great 20th Century American writers - Williams, Steinbeck, Hemmingway and Arthur Miller, his America is the most distant, a noir beyond reality that somehow anchors itself in a greater reality than any of the others. The other three I find staid, too rooted in the actual. Williams understood the power of writing, the possible rather than the probable, the others only understood the power of stories. His natural progeny are William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.

I saw The Glass Menagerie in the West End with Dame Diana Rigg. At the time I was still reeling from seeing Democracy by Frayn (Possibly the greatest play I shall ever see) and Oleanna by Mamet (Possibly the worst) so I didn't really appreciate it. Now I wish I could see it again. One of Williams' greatest assets is that southern states drawl which is imbued in his characters. It really is one of the great accents. Sometimes things strike you with immediacy, sometimes you don't realise their impact for years.

He was homosexual, apart from that I don't think I know anything about Williams. I've read and I've forgotten. But I know he liked The Beatles. I can imagine him, sitting on his bed in a sparse room, a typewriter on a table in a far corner, full moustache, gramophone on, listening to Ob La Di Ob La Da, or While my guitar gently weeps or perhaps Happiness is a warm gun. Maybe he danced when he was alone. I think that sometimes an image is all you need of a man to know him.