Books, Arts & Manners: Irregular Combinations

The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams, by Donald Spoto (Little, Brown, 409 pp„ $19.95)

Though he is by common consent America’s leading modern playwright, many literate Americans remain highly uncomfortable with even the best work of Tennessee Williams: its Gothic subject matter, its emotional extravagance, its humid air of unreality. And they are just as uncomfortable with Williams the drug-sodden public figure, author of a squalid autobiography. Stanley Kauffmann once called Williams “a man who, although a giggling, silly, bitchy voluptuary, is the second most important dramatist this country has produced.”