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Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories

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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 The contents of these volumes are combined with Williams's unpublished stories.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

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.

For a small price you get the best of Tennessee Williams with forty-nine stories packed into 570 pages of crisp oblique dialogue that will keep you awake at night as you laugh in bed with the turn of each page. His characters are so unusual that you can only describe them as cast of freeks that we all recognize at one time or another in our travels. Mr. Williams short stories are a wonderful contribution to his craft and the American reader. The only negative is that I could not buy this in hardcover so I could share it with my yet-to-be-born children and grandchildren!

For a small price you get the best of Tennessee Williams with forty-nine stories packed into 570 pages of crisp oblique dialogue that will keep you awake at night as you laugh in bed with the turn of each page. His characters are so unusual that you can only describe them as cast of freeks that we all recognize at one time or another in our travels. Mr. Williams short stories are a wonderful contribution to his craft and the American reader. The only negative is that I could not buy this in hardcover so I could share it with my yet-to-be-born children and grandchildren!

Rarely do we assimilate Williams with short fiction, but Williams rivals Hemingway as being the greatest American short story writer. Never have I enjoyed every story in a collection before. His descriptions are concentrated and explode visions in the mind. The characters are richly unique and completely human and explore all the details of life so many never see. Good for a big time read, a partner on the beach, and as a study guide for society. A must own!!

Williams's ear for dialogue, his eye for character, his exploration of love, longing and loneliness are as powerful in these short stories as they are in his plays. On occasion, the glimmer of a future work rises out of the text, such as the line, "But the sweet bird of youth had flown from Pablo Gonzales..."

Tennessee Williams wrote beautiful prose. His stories are not just a sidelight to his plays but well worth reading in their own right. The characters may not be happy or well-adjusted but they are memorable: an emasculated husband in "Three Players of a Summer Game," a self-centered writer in "Rubio y Morena," a dissolute son, his aging housekeeper and her daughter in "Mama's Old Stucco House," or quarreling New York roommates in "Happy August the Tenth." The mood of spring and collegiate youth magically come to life in "The Important Thing" and "The Field of Blue Children." "Chronicle of a Demise" is one of the best analyses of cult behavior I've ever come across. "The Yellow Bird" is an excellent, laugh-out-loud story, a wonderful barb aimed right at American Puritanism. One sign of a great artist is the ability to make any topic interesting, great or small. Williams writes with equal insight and artistry about the American military-industrial complex and Cold War ("The Knightly Quest") and about a woman buying a red dress ("Oriflamme").

Some of the stories (like "The Kingdom of Earth") were probably considered "dirty" or "filthy" in the 1950s and `60s. Prudish spinster librarians (the kind who sometimes appear in Williams; one appears briefly in "Something about Him") may have tried to keep them away from young people. By today's standards these stories are pretty tame and we can more easily understand them as explorations of human character. Some readers might still be made uncomfortable by "The Knightly Quest," "Hard Candy," and "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," which portray men who seek sexual encounters with other men in semipublic places. "One Arm" is about a male prostitute on death row. "Desire and the Black Masseur" is a weird, edgy tale which will always be unsettling. Some people will accuse Williams of political incorrectness; others will be dismayed at the ambivalence he expresses about his sexuality.

This volume includes all the stories from the four previous collections published by New Directions as well as other early and late stories, some published for the first time; if you are a true Williams fan this is an essential collection to have. The "new" stories may vary in quality but they give us a more complete understanding of his development as an artist. The essential idea of "Gift of an Apple" of 1936 (the encounter of a young man with an older woman, each with their own kind of hunger) appears again later in "Man Bring This up Road," in the play "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More," and in the screenplay for the 1968 film "Boom." The stories are arranged chronologically, and since a number of them are autobiographical, they add up to something like a memoir. There are wonderful surprises, like the perfect little drama "Tent Worms."

Few authors write as well as Williams does about human essentials--loneliness, sexual desire, time, and mortality--and produce such well crafted dialogue and such memorable characters and situations.

Williams has a power with words. While not as lyrical as his plays, Williams captures scenes and characters as well as any writer.