9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE REAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HIS ART AND LIFE, November 15, 2005
This review is from: Collected Stories (A New Directions Book) (Paperback)
During his career as one of America's most distinguished playwrights (The Glass Menagerie, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, A Strretcar Named Desire), Tennessee Williams also produced four volumes of short stories. The contents of these volumes are combined with Williams's unpublished stories.
As Gore Vidal, the author of the introduction, notes these stories are "the real autobiography of Williams's art and inner life."
The stories are arranged chronologically, beginning with a vignette about his father and the Williams family. Whether written early or late in his life, the prose is pure Williams, related in his distinctive voice.
Together these pieces form a mosaic of his life and work, splendid dramas and vignettes that puzzle, surprise and enrich us.
- Gail Cooke
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"All That You Need's To Be Given A Push On The Head", May 23, 2005
This review is from: Collected Stories (A New Directions Book) (Paperback)
Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories (1985) is a highly readable if frequently unpleasant volume by an author who, like the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, is one of the uncelebrated masters of the short story form. Beginning with Williams' first published work and including stories written just before his death in 1983, most of the pieces, which originally appeared in literary journals, are very much of their time, and thus powerfully reflect the degree to which Williams internalized the shame and self hatred he experienced as a homosexual male in a predominantly heterosexual and anti-homosexual society.
Never less than forthright to the point of bluntness, several of the stories wantonly revel in the repulsive and the grotesque, and thus seem intended not merely to illuminate but to shock and repel. In essence, many of the pieces seem like both acts of revenge and blows against the empire, but Williams was awkwardly wielding a double-edged sword, one which did not by any means only reveal the hypocrisies of those he intended to mock and revile.
In 'Hard Candy,' for example, an obnoxious elderly man who has been a lifelong 'secret' homosexual dies by choking while on his knees during a sexual act with a young drifter he solicits. Thus the story's title refers not to the sweets the man carries in his pocket as a means of establishing an opening dialogue with attractive strangers, but to a portion of the drifter's anatomy. Williams clearly intends the irony of the title to be so blatant as to be unironic, and this doubling, reflexive quality unequivocally establishes 'Hard Candy' as a piece of dark, unabashed camp humor. But such humor will always find only a limited receptive audience, especially since most camp humor today seems like little more than a long and happily outmoded culture artifact.
Throughout Collected Stories, most of Williams' homosexual characters are depicted in caricatural fashion, whether as overly poised, somewhat brittle aesthetes or as shrill, irresponsible merrymakers whose singular goal is continual sexual interaction with as many partners as possible. Those that fit neither of these categories are poorly socialized and isolated, but never developed in other ways so that they become shadow-casting, three dimensional characters for whom homosexual responsiveness is but one factor in their existence.
Not surprisingly, it is the objects of these characters' desire whom Williams depicts sympathetically, but these men, who are usually young, handsome, muscular, and somewhat unintelligent if not brutishly stupid, are typically one dimensional caricatures as well. In his short stories, Williams was at his best when describing those "betwixt and between" men who are ostensibly heterosexual but nonetheless nonchalantly open to passive sexual intercourse with other men, especially if money is involved. Thus, 'One Arm,' the story of a boxer who loses a limb in an automobile accident and then drifts into hustling before finding himself on death row for murder, is one of the most fully realized works in the volume.
Collected Stories also includes a number of powerful stories which revolve around heterosexual characters, such as the Caldwellesque 'Kingdom of Earth' and 'Miss Conte of Green,' but in these, as in the others, brutality, coarseness, and lasciviousness are the order of the day, and qualities such as integrity, respect for others, and fundamental human decency are presented as little more than sham social hypocrisies that have little genuine presence in actuality. Also included is 'The Knightly Quest,' a brilliant, extended piece of sociological science fiction which hilariously examines governmental attempts at cultural control and world domination as Williams perceived it in the Cold War era.
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