I think the word "notebooks" sets up certain expectations that this tome doesn't come close to satisfying, despite its enormous size. Note that the publisher is a university press, probably aiming for completist university collections. You might be hoping for character sketches, bits of dialogue or personalities that later turn up in a play. Maybe you're hoping for some Capote-style bitchy gossip since, God knows, Williams met everyone. I flipped through a good portion of this book and there's none of that.

Williams loved traveling, especially in Italy, so he's always meeting up with famous, crazy or people that were locally notorious. But they drink, they eat, they go there, they go here. You don't ever get into the gist of their conversation or opinions. TW might mention that he's reading a book but at most his review amounts to a sentence, maybe two. Same with his critiques of Brando, Kazan, Brando's co-star in Street Car, the actors in The Glass Menagerie and so on. He had long arguments with Kazan and other directors but precisely what they argued about won't be found here.

TW most certainly was an alcoholic and the older he got, the more he tended to document his consumption (Why bother?). Virtually all the material here is from the 1940s and 1950s but there's some from the 1970s.

I guess the biggest surprise here is the omissions--what is suggested about TW's methods of creation. He must have written the drafts of his plays and other works from scratch--that is, carried around the characters and dialogue totally in his head before sitting down to write.

Another surprise here is how relaxed and open the gay world seems to have been in the 1950s in the (wide) circles that TW frequented. Was the man ever in the closet? Williams became famous and successful when he was quite young, in his mid-20s. He never seems to have taken on lady companions or other measures to play down his homosexuality. (And it there were problems with his family in this regard, they aren't noted. He, a lover, and TW's beloved grandfather traveled around together in the South in the early 1950s.).

And wherever he lands, be it New Orleans or Rome or someplace in Florida, there never seems to be a problem finding the local blades. I guess there were virtual gay city guides in the 1950s. OK, I didn't go through the whole book; frankly, the notes are monotonous, very thin gruel. But you get the impression that the men TW finds himself or is introduced to aren't hookers. Sometimes they are and at least once after such an encounter TW writes that he doesn't like the idea of using another's flesh but most of the time he doesn't seem to have much trouble finding companions or falling into lengthier relationships. If he's pining after the perfect man or terminally frustrated a la Blanche, you don't detect it in these notes.

In Asia today the men and boys picked up in a park or hanging around the lake in Hanoi are hookers-- in it for the money--and may not be gay at all. TW doesn't seem to have encountered those kind of hustlers in Paris, Rome, Mexico City, etc. of the 1950s. (Atlhough TW visits Paul Bowles in Morocco, we don't get any glimpses of the pick=up scene there, which I suspect probably resembles that of poor Asia today.) Rather, these were the places where gay local men hung out in the absence of regular clubs, restaurants and so on. And there never seems to have been a problem bringing a male companion to one's hotel or apartment.

During the period the book covers, TW had one long if sporadic romance that ended with the death of the lover by cancer in the early 1960s. You don't learn much about this man either except that they two had a lot of arguments. TW doesn't come across as the violent member of the pair. ( )