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the next one by the same author may not prove a success.” “I am right smack behind the eight-ball. And it is going to take plenty of luck to keep me out of the pocket,” Williams wrote to Langner from Key West, where he had gone to lick his wounds and rewrite his play. “A few weeks ago I was a bright possibility. Now I’m just a bubble that burst in Boston!” He added, “You all know that I’m something more than that. But nobody else knows it.”

    Margaret Webster, the British director of
Battle of Angels
    WHILE UNDER SIEGE in Boston, Williams had written “Speech from the Stairs,” a poem that seemed to acknowledge a change in the geography of his interior.
    O lonely man,
    the long, long rope of blood,
    the belly’s rope that swung you from your mother,
    that dark trapeze your flesh descended from
    unwillingly and with too much travail,
    has now at last been broken lastingly—
    You must turn for parentage toward the stars . . .
    Romantic idealism—the notion of beauty and sensation as a means of redemption—would be the guide and inspiration for his young adult self. “That is the one ineluctable gift of the artist, to project himself beyond time and space through grasp and communion with eternal values,” Williams wrote to his friend Joseph Hazan in 1940, invoking Van Gogh, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield. He went on, “Isn’t there beauty in the fact of their passion, so much of which is replete with the purest compassion. . . . Let us both have the courage to believe in it—though people may call us ‘esthetes,’ ‘romantics,’ ‘escapists’—let’s cling tenaciously to our conviction that this world is the only reality worth our devotion.”
    In “the days AB—After Boston,” as he referred to the debacle in his diary, Williams could still take hopeful stock of himself. He was young, fresh, “capable of passion and tenderness—my mind—vague, dreamy, but sincere and thoughtful and with a wealth of experience—my heart still with a purity, after all this time.” He added, “The past—the future—a continuing stream—something will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes.” Those impecunious days—he had as little as five dollars in his pocket and even had to briefly pawn his typewriter for food—were filled mostly with work and wonder at what lay ahead. Williams had everything to play for and a bracing resilience to survive his disappointments. “This is a one-way street I have chosen, and I have to follow it through with all the confidence and courage that necessity gives you,” he wrote to Wood. The adventure of his writing, his travels, and his sexuality filled him with expectation and a kind of optimism. On the day in 1941 when he recorded the final rejection of
Battle of Angels
in his diary, Williams also noted, “I have diverted myself with the most extraordinary amount of sexual license I have ever indulged in. New lover every night barely missing one.” It was, he wrote, “a rich and exciting period sexually—the most active of my life. But I wasn’t happy—neither was I unhappy.”
    In the years that followed the failure of
Battle of Angels
, Wood steered Williams to important theater connections, to grant-giving agencies, even to Hollywood, where for five months in 1943 he worked haphazardly on a Lana Turner movie for MGM—“a celluloid brassiere,” he called it—making the studio minimum of $250 a week. (During that time, Williams also wrote a screen treatment for a play he had titled “The Gentleman Caller,” which he would rework over the next two years into
The Glass Menagerie
.) With her formal eloquence and her starchy bearing, Wood was a kind of empowering mother whom Williams saw as his salvation. (“Dear Child of God,” he began one letter to her.) In these early years, her messianic belief in his talent was almost all that sustained him. In his voluminous correspondence with Wood, he poured out his deepest longings. “I