Hilton Als: "The Glass Menagerie" Review: The New Yorker Writers, for the most part, find themselves not in writing but in revision. The "I" of personal narrative - the egotism it takes to display one's point of view in a novel, a poem, or a play - tends not to reveal itself at the first stroke of the pen; even the most soul-baring authors usually have to work themselves up to the trauma of ruthless self-revelation, especially if the story involves other people, and it almost always does. Then comes what Joan Didion calls "the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print." Of course, endless revision can be a way of keeping that humiliation at bay, of keeping alive the hope that the text will achieve perfection in this draft or the next. Tennessee Williams was a notorious reviser. In the introduction to Williams's "Collected Stories" (1985), Gore Vidal wrote, "I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. "Why," I asked, "rewrite what's already in print?" He looked at me vaguely, then said, "Well, obviously it's not finished." And went back to his typing. Williams's barrier-breaking 1944 memory play, "The Glass Menagerie," first found shape as a short story. Composed in 1943, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" introduces us to the characters that Williams would realize more fully in his first stage success: Tom Wingfield, the narrator, a poet who works in a warehouse to help support the family; his sister, Laura; their Southern-born mother; and Jim, the Gentleman Caller. The setting - a run-down tenement in St. Louis - and the plot are also similar to those in the play. Laura is crippled by shyness; unable to cope with the world, she spends much of her time marvelling at her collection of glass figurines, or playing the old records that her father left behind when he split without explanation. He's a ghost of the past, heard at 78 r.p.m. Tom, at his mother's bidding, brings home a date for Laura - an attempt to legitimatize her - but Jim can't follow through; he's involved with another girl. "Portrait" doesn't entirely work. Like Laura, it seems recessive: Williams is telling a story, but also not telling it; the piece is oddly dispassionate, depthless. One senses that Williams is artistically hobbled by his sympathy for Laura, who is modelled on his sister, the schizophrenic Rose, to whom he was extremely close. But what Williams is most hobbled by is his complicated feelings for his shallow and solipsistic mother - the woman who demanded star billing in his theatrical and emotional autobiography, who nurtured both his imagination and his filial guilt. By the time he wrote "The Glass Menagerie," he had got enough technical distance from his mother to know how to craft a play that was partly fuelled by her ungovernable talk - talk that he used to help shape the poetic betrayal he had to write in order to become himself. . . .