The poetry of panic

Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Williams’s enormously fat notebooks, edited here by Margaret Bradham Thornton with matching obesity (every page of Williams is copiously annotated and illustrated en face), sanction the view that he was, for most of his life, his own doppelgänger, critic, cheer-leader and teddy bear.