Glass palaces

"The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all." Daniel Mendelsohn on whether Tenessee Williams' plays are too "fragile" for our times. He includes a neat anecdote: "In his introduction to Williams's collected short stories, Gore Vidal recalls the result of his attempts to edit Williams's prose. 'So I reversed backward-running sentences, removed repetitions, simplified the often ponderous images. I was rather proud of the result. He was deeply irritated. 'What you have done is remove my style, which is all that I have.'"