Books: Jam of the Gods

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (148 pp.)—Tennessee Williams—New Directions ($2).

Playwright Tennessee Williams’ first novel shows no trace of the warmth and grotesque humor that made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire into first-class stage hits. It is written in the gutless, languid, pseudo-Jamesian manner which has become the trademark of such young novelists as Truman Capote and Frederick Buechner. In fact, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone would seem to make Tennessee Williams a member in good, if junior, standing of the new school of decadence.

One insidiously balmy Roman spring, Karen Stone, past 50, discovers that her life is slipping away. She has been a successful actress and great beauty; now, after a ludicrous stab at playing Juliet, she is through with the stage and, even worse, aware that her beauty is dead. Lonely and anxious, she is taken in tow by a ravenous old contessa who supplies her with “beautiful” young men as escorts. Mrs. Stone, good American that she is, pays them as expected but politely declines their ultimate services. But when she meets Paolo, a gigolo with the face of an angel and the soul of a pig, she falls hard.

The rest of Roman Spring is pretty predictable: Mrs. Stone gets herself cruelly humiliated by the vicious Paolo and, at the end, drops him for another beautiful youth who has attracted her by making obscene gestures. Along the sordid route of this story, Williams offers such gems of wisdom as, “. . . beauty was a world of its own whose anarchy had a sort of godly license,” and such gems of prose as, “Because you are very young, said Mrs. Stone, and very foolish and very beautiful. And because I am not so very young any more and not so beautiful, but beginning to be very wise . . .”

Since Mrs. Stone is never very real or substantial, no one can care much about her fate; it is doubtful whether even Author Williams cares much. He is much more credible when writing about those beautiful young men. One of his liveliest scenes shows Paolo getting himself a thrill from the ministrations of his barber. “The sensuality of that hour,” Williams notes enthusiastically, “was exquisite as the jam of the gods.”