A wind of irony blows in sharply with this piece on Washington University Professor Henry I. Schvey’s new book, Blue Song. The irony is that this article is showing up in a magazine called St. Louis. Williams professed to despise St. Louis and to blame it, for good measure, for a stormy life in which various neuroses competed for his attention.
The book, subtitled “St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams,” is built on a foundation of Schvey’s research and is illuminated by his experience and his lapidary writing. In Blue Song, Schvey examines the literary music of the churning cantata that is Williams’ work and puts the literary spotlight on the real-life dramatis personae whose behavior stoked the playwright’s artistic engine with fuel enough to produce scores of plays, poems, novels, and essays. His unraveling, down-on-its-luck Southern semi-aristocratic family was a wellspring of his malignant mental illnesses, sexual obsessions, morbid addictions, and his sapphiric genius. A further irony is that so much about St. Louis and his life here actually informed and enriched his art. Throughout, St. Louis assumes personality, and its geography and built environment substantially underpin his work.
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The ultimate irony is this titanic writer hoped to be buried at sea, yet after his death in New York City, in 1983, St. Louis held a mass in the cavernous Cathedral Basilica and he was laid to rest in a Roman Catholic cemetery called Calvary, near his mother, on dry land, on West Florissant Avenue, in north St. Louis.
