I PASSED from a film that dealt with the broadest possible scene, a panorama of human suffering, to a play that penetrated into the most intimate area of all, the soul of an artist. Camino Real is as private as a nightmare. No playwright except Eugene O’Neill in his last plays was as personal as Tennessee Williams. His collected dramatic works might be read as a massive autobiography, one far more truthful than the book he wrote and titled Memoirs. The plays, with a little discernment, prove to be as naked as the best confessions. They—and this play perhaps more than the others—are about great fears of the author, of distrust and betrayal: distrust of his own fate and of other humans and the betrayal he was certain would come, both from other men, even those close to him, and, because of its anarchy and cataclysmic speed, from time itself.

Already world famous in 1953, Tennessee lived like a fugitive from justice, always changing his whereabouts, ever moving. He traveled along an archipelago of culture islands that were congenial to him, places where he might feel, for a time, at liberty to be unobserved and totally himself—London, Paris, Rome, Sicily, North Africa, Key West. Only a few people knew where to find him. Their communications frequently reached him after he’d departed for a “destination unknown.” I was one of the privileged; we were in continuous touch by mail. The centers of civilization that he found agreeable were, of course, those populated by his own kind: artists, romantics, freaks of one kind or another, castoffs, those rejected by respectable society. He settled into these nests of outsiders to feel at ease. But it was never for long; he’d soon be off again. “I usually work best,” he explained, “when I’ve just come to a new place.”