Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams
Phillips, Robert
I Evidence for fame I COLLECTED STORIES Tennessee Williams New Directions, $19.95, 574 pp. Robert Phillips D ID any major American artist suffer the abuse and neglect accorded...
...The Seven Descents of Myrtle...
...Williams began to hit his stride with "The Field of Blue Children" (1935), about seventy pages into the book...
...The anonymous editor also found a previously uncollected intimate memoir, "The Man in the Overstuffed Chair," which is placed as a prologue...
...Merrick and asked if he'd dosed the play for good...
...International relations were different...
...Science was different...
...Yet each is underpinned by the same piercing psychology, compassion, and black humor that marked his best theatrical works...
...Portrait of a Girl in Glass" deals with the themes and characters of The Glass Menagerie, and is as successful a story as the play was a play...
...It is a portrait of the artist as a young poet, and deals with matters of art and love...
...The Collected Stories reveal that Williams had several very different fictional modes -- the nostalgic, the naturalistic, the comic, and the fantastic...
...Robert Phillips D ID any major American artist suffer the abuse and neglect accorded Tennessee Williams...
...Political science was different...
...These often are quite different from the plays...
...The future was different...
...Nationalism intensified and the U.N...
...When David Merrick closed down The Red Devil Battery Sign in its Boston try-out, a reporter called Mr...
...Joan D. Chittistes" I T'S hackneyed now, perhaps, but it gets truer every passing moment...
...Yet the plays streamed forth: Over a dozen more full-length plays were unsuccessfully mounted...
...some of the very last stories read like' masturbatory daydreams ("Dear God, thought Stephen, you must have said Let there be Clove before you said Let there be light, because what this Arkansas Ozark kid is now unveiling equals or takes precedence over other works and wonders that You performed in Your six days of creation...
...In his lifetime four story collections were published...
...No one is credited) has reprinted all the stories from the earlier four collections, plus uncollected and unpublished stories, including Williams's first published effort (in Weird Tales, at age seventeen...
...I Nationalism was different...
...Commonweal: 156...
...After that, until his death in 1983, he could do nothing right in the critics' eyes...
...Their copyright dates extend from 1939 to 1982...
...Even his own producers turned on him...
...It is as if, having created living characters, Williams could let them go on acting independently of any confines of plot...
...No, I closed it for bad," was the reply...
...The science and technology of death spread like a fungus across the country, and the small towns and fine minds and hardworking laborers who were touched by it never recognized the disease...
...The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" is an authentic ghost story...
...Practically nothing changed in the way that one government dealt with another...
...Very litde changed in school curriculums...
...In "Three Players of a Summer Game," for instance, Gooper and his family, Big Mama and Big Daddy, are nowhere to be seen, and Maggie is relegated to a bit part...
...Through all this, Tennessee Williams rose every morning and continued to write...
...And nothing changed...
...Even Miss Coynte's surname is, I take it, intended as a crude pun...
...The anonymous editor (who did do all the work of gathering and dating and annotating this book...
...The day after the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima everything changed...
...It is one of several attempts by Williams to portray the pathethic figure of his sister Rose...
...Other stories prefigure plays: "The Night of the Iguana," "Three Players of a Summer Game," "Man Bring This Up Road," and "The Kingdom of Earth" are early versions and variations on Iguana, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and Smelling our smell THEOLNY' FOR A NUCLEAR AGE Gordon D. Kaufman Westminster Press, $12.95, $8.95 paper, 7$pp...
...What Clove is unveiling is his "sexual parts...
...The Williams portrait by Andy Warhol which adorns the jacket strikes just the right note...
...For love I make characters," Williams once wrote, and his characters do exceed the boundaries of the boards or the page...
...But they were not noticed like the best and worst of his plays...
...But Brick and his many problems are explored in a manner which just possibly surpasses the play...
...Another late story, "Miss Coynte of Green," is racist and sexist...
...What most don't realize is that, in addition to his plays, he wrote stories, and had done so since the late 1930s...
...New Directions should be complimented for conceiving the book, for soliciting the personal introduction from Gore Vidal, and for producing such a handsome package...
...Now, finally, we have his Collected Stories -- a hefty volume of fifty pieces and nearly 600 pages...
...It should be said that Williams has not been entirely served by the inclusion of every story...
...floundered...
...But we all went on as if they weren't...
...It belongs on the shelf with Eudora Welty's and Flannery O'Connor's collected stories...
...This is a book I will keep and revisit...
...But between the early and late stories there is an abundance of wonderful, moving, and original fiction...
...What it makes apparent is that had he written nothing else, Williams's stories would be sufficient evidence of his bid for fame...
...His last play to be well-received in this country was The Night of the Iguana -- produced in 1961...
...The exclamation point is Williams's...
...It goes a long way toward explaining the roots of Tennessee Williams's particular strange genius...
...some of the early ones are quite awful, and so is their prose ("Hushed were the streets of many peopled Thebes...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
