I rate Tennessee Williams as one of the best playwrights of the 20th century. He created characters on the extremes of life, the social outcasts; people whose lives are marginal. He went beyond realism and discovered in the voices of these outcasts a means of creating a new sort of theatrical poetry.

My only encounter with Tennessee Williams was when during the run of a play I did on Broadway he came to see me in my dressing room accompanied by a lean man with salt and pepper hair. After a limp handshake he settled down on a settee while I waited for pearls of wisdom. He didn’t say much except to ask me if I liked New York. I said, "Yes, oh yes," "I don’t," he said, "it is too full of superfluous people."

After a few silences during which it occurred to me that I would never be able to dine out on my meeting with the Tennessee Williams, his companion stood up to say "Come along, let Mr. Mo-yeddin (heavily accenting the second syllable) rest. "Oh," said the star playwright "She is a misery." And he walked out with a flicker of a smile. I learned later that he was known for his taciturnity.

Gore Vidal, one of America’s most distinguished men of letters, and a life-long friend of Williams, has made a profound study of the dramatist whom he used to call ‘The Glorious Bird.’

According to Vidal a curious streak in the Bird was to "appear in public flapping what looked to be a pathetically broken wing." Was it to arouse sympathy or was it to mitigate the horrific barks he had received from the press about being a queer? Vidal thinks that by arousing pity the Bird hoped to escape predators.

It is hard to realise today what a bad press Tennessee Williams had from the American newspapers. During the forties and fifties the anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march. Time magazine, in particular, made venomous attacks on real or suspected queers. A cover story on the great English poet, W.H. Auden, was killed when the managing editor was told that Auden was a fag. For over sixteen years Time attacked with ferocity everything produced or published by Tennessee Williams. His work was repeatedly described as ‘fetid swamp’.

Williams tried hard to seek approbation from the press. Vidal says that he has never known any writer who cared so much about the opinion of those who write for newspapers. "Uneasily confronting a truly remarkable hunger for absolute praise and total notice, Tennessee Williams admits that, when being interviewed he instinctively hams it up in order to provide good copy. The reason? I guess a need to convince the world that I do indeed still exist and to make this fact a matter of public interest and amusement".

One astute observation Gore Vidal makes is that "Tennessee’s mind is not, to say the least, at home with theory. Most beautifully the plays speak for themselves. Not only does Tennessee have a marvellous comedic sense but his gloriously outrageous dramatic effects can be enormously satisfying. He makes poetic the speech of those half-educated would-be genteel folk who still maintain their babble in his head."

In the old days, before a play opened on Broadway, the author would be asked to write a piece for the Sunday New York Times drama section. "Often Tennessee Williams’ piece would read how that very morning he had coughed up blood with his sputum. But valiantly, he had gone on writing knowing the new play would be his last work, ever."

During the 1973 try-out of a play in New Haven, Williams was asked to address some Yale drama students. In his Memoirs Tennessee Williams writes:

"I found myself entering (through a door marked EXIT) an auditorium considerably smaller than the Shubert theatre but containing a more than proportionately small audience. I would roughly say about two-score and ten, not including a large black dog which was resting in the lap of a male student in the front row. I am not good at discussing my feelings and after a few moments I abandoned all pretence of feeling less dejection than I felt. I heard myself describing an encounter, then quite recent, with a fellow playwright in the Oak Room bar at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. It was with my old friend, Gore Vidal. I had embraced him warmly. However, Mr. Vidal is not a gentleman to be disarmed by a cordial embrace and when in response to his perfunctory enquiries about the progress of rehearsal. I told him, it all seemed a dream come true after many precedent nightmares. He smiled at me with a sort of rueful benevolence and said "Well ‘Bird’, it won’t do much good I’ m afraid, you’ve had too much bad personal exposure for anything to help you much anymore.

Well, then, for the first time I could see a flicker of interest in the young faces before me. It may have been the magic word Vidal or it may have been his prophecy of my professional doom."

Vidal writes that he has no memory of the Plaza meeting with Tennessee. "An eye-witness, however assures me that I did not say what Tennessee attributes to me. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I was probably thinking what I did not say and what he later thought I did say. When it comes to something outspoken, the Bird had a sharp ear. He heard words in his head and when he was plugged into the right character, the wrong word never sounds."

Tennessee Williams remained guilt-ridden about his sex-life throughout his life. According to Vidal he truly believed that homosexualist is wrong and heterosexualist is right. Given this all-pervading sense of guilt, he is drawn in both life and work to the idea of expiation."

Perhaps this is why the Bird converted to Roman Catholicism late in life. Vidal recalls that shortly after he was received into the arms of the Mother Church, a priest rang him up to ask him if he would like an audience with the Pope. The Bird was delighted. "The next morning the priest arrived at the Bird’s hotel to take him to the Vatican where, presumably the Pope was waiting on tenterhooks to examine the church’s latest haul. Tennessee had forgotten all about the audience. He would have to beg off, he said, he was not up to the Pope that day. The priest was stunned. The Pope’s reaction has not been recorded."

It is with such gems that Gore Vidal has built his thesis on one of the greatest playwrights of modern times.