SOURCE: Weaver, Gordon. “Apprenticeship: The Early Years (1928-40).” In Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 3-22. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

His name was not really Tennessee, of course; it was Thomas Lanier Williams. Nor was he from Tennessee; he neither was born nor lived there, except for two years in Nashville when he was too young to have remembered it and a few months with his grandparents in Memphis one summer. The nickname was hung on him at the University of Iowa by fellow students who could not remember just which of the Southern states this quiet young man with the broad accent was from.

The source of the nickname is not so important as the fact that Williams chose to keep it—he could have abandoned it at any point after leaving Iowa, obviously. Perhaps it represented for Williams a certain gentility, a golden age of sensibility and sociability that was lost when his family moved, in his seventh year, from small-town Mississippi to industrial, grimy, brutal St. Louis. Or perhaps in assuming the name, Williams was attempting to change an identity that was becoming increasingly disturbing to him. It probably will not do to make too much of the name, though. It was given in friendship and may have represented no more to Williams than affability fondly remembered. He depended heavily, after all—as his biographer, Donald Spoto, suggests—on the kindness of friends and strangers.

Tennessee Williams was the kindest, the most sensitive of men. He could also be cruel, insensitive, suspicious, and paranoid. He was generous and loving and elicited generosity and love from others. Many of those whom he loved the most and to whom he owed the most he hurt and rejected: his brother, Dakin, his longtime agent Audrey Wood, his lover Frank Merlo. The one person to whom he never wavered in his love and loyalty was his sister, Rose, who represented for him all the beauty and sensitivity that could blossom in the world and all the horrors that life could marshal against such vulnerability. Tennessee Williams loved life with an enormous passion and took his own. If we do not officially call it suicide, it is only because we hesitate to apply that term to a process of selfdestruction taking two decades to complete.

Williams was a man of contradictions and clashing passions, and so is his short fiction, which, claims Gore Vidal, constitutes “the true memoir of Tennessee Williams.”¹ He was the most autobiographical of writers. If he thought it, felt it, or lived it, it would likely show up in his fiction either directly or indirectly. For this reason, although it is not the purpose of this study to provide extensive biographical data, a gloss on Williams's life might provide a useful introduction to his short stories.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on 26 March 1911. His father was Cornelius Coffin Williams, a dashing, roguish salesman and a surprising choice for lovely young Edwina Estelle Dakin, who had her pick of eligible young men in Columbus. Edwina was the daughter of the local Episcopal minister and enjoyed the highest social, if not economic, standing in the community. The marriage was not made in heaven, and if the Williamses' domestic life was not quite hell, it was frequently unpleasant, increasingly so after the family moved to St. Louis in 1918.

Regardless of what the actual facts of the case may or may not have been, in later years Columbus came to seem a bucolic Eden to Williams, and St. Louis a cold, crowded, ugly blight where he was tormented by schoolmates because of his accent, shyness, and frailty. His beloved older sister, Rose, suffered along with him, but whereas Williams found some solace in his writing—he began writing stories and poems at least as early as junior high school—Rose's principal defense was to withdraw further and further into herself.

After graduating from high school, Williams escaped to the University of Missouri at Columbia, which he left after three years because of poor grades and inadequate funds. Back in St. Louis, Tennessee briefly attended Washington University and worked for a few months in the same shoe factory where his father was an executive, then enrolled at the University of Iowa. It was while he was at Iowa that Rose, who had been under psychiatric care off and on for years, accused her father of making sexual advances toward her, whereupon Edwina decided to allow a new procedure to be performed on her daughter: a prefrontal lobotomy. Williams never entirely forgave his mother for her hysterically hasty decision nor himself for being gone when the whole horrible event transpired. Rose thereafter became Williams's symbol for all that is beautiful and breakable in the world; ironically, she out-lived him.

After graduating from Iowa in 1938, Williams spent the rest of his life in virtual transit. He traveled to Chicago, New Orleans, California, New York, Italy and Sicily, and Florida, where he finally purchased a house in 1950, but he never spent more than a few months at a time there. His growing suspicions about himself—that he was homosexual—were confirmed again and again during his travels; a different sort of suspicion, or hope, that he was potentially a great writer, was confirmed in the mid-1940s with the success of his play The Glass Menagerie (1944).

The next decade and a half was a prolific period for Williams. His sexual appetite was surpassed only by his capacity for work. Among other awards, he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays during this period and published two collections of stories (and wrote half of the stories that later were to appear in a third collection, The Knightly Quest [1996], not to mention a novel and numerous poems). The “catastrophe of fame,” and probably other, less understood, pressures, began to take their toll, however. Over the course of the years the quality, though not the quantity, of his writing declined and his reliance on drugs and alcohol increased. At a time when he most needed understanding and emotional support, he drove relatives, friends, and professional acquaintances away from him with his paranoia. He underwent psychotherapy—unsuccessfully. He converted to Catholicism—a ludicrous farce. He was finally hospitalized, much against his will; while there he suffered a series of heart attacks, and any salubrious effects of this drying out were short-lived. What is amazing, considering his life-style, is that he lived to be almost seventy-two. But when he choked to death on a medicine bottle-cap, alone in a hotel room in New York City on 24 February 1983, one might surmise that he did not much care.

What is it about his life that is important for us to remember? That Tennessee Williams was on intimate terms with loneliness, pain, violence, and death, but also passion, love, beauty; and that he was able to transform these intimacies, through the peculiar alchemy of his genius, into a voice and the voice into something resembling myth. Many more specific incidents and details from Williams's life appear in the stories, and where essential, these will be discussed. But more important is that beguiling interplay of voice and passion, recalled not always in tranquility, that marks the short fiction of Tennessee Williams.

“THE VENGEANCE OF NITOCRIS”

Tennessee Williams wrote at least twelve stories² before 1941, when his first fiction of unqualified merit began to appear. Of these dozen stories, only a third were published (prior to the posthumously published Tennessee Williams: The Collected Stories [1985]), and one of those appeared in a student publication at the University of Missouri and another in a pulp magazine (Weird Tales). His pre-1941 fiction obviously is apprentice work, but it is interesting not simply because its weakness helps us measure his later success but because the seeds of that success are so evident in the early fiction.

Of his first published story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris” (1928 in Weird Tales), Williams has observed that “if you're well acquainted with my writings since then, I don't have to tell you that it set the keynote for most of the work that has followed.”³ Williams took the basic outline of the story from Herodotus's The Persian Wars. Nitocris is the sister of a pharaoh who, for rebelling against his religious duties, is torn apart by a priest-led mob before his sister's eyes. Nitocris takes her revenge by constructing a temple on the Nile, inviting the priests, then trapping and drowning them in an underground vault. Realizing that she cannot long escape retribution, she fills a room with hot ashes and perishes therein.

Williams's later fiction is prefigured in this early story in a number of ways. Most obvious is the interrelationship of passion and violence—although the more mature Williams would hardly agree, one surmises, that “vengeance [is the] strongest of passions” (8). Prefigured too is the pattern of brother and sister aligned against a punishing world—although never again in Williams's work, fiction or drama, will the pair be so physically and emotionally fit to meet that challenge. In addition, the public dismemberment of the pharaoh is a scene that will be reenacted more than once in Williams's stories (and most famously in the play Suddenly Last Summer).

Subtler parallels between apprentice and mature Williams are found in “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” too. At sixteen, his age when the story was published, Williams probably had the barest, if any, inklings of his incipient homosexuality, yet already in the story we find that the most sensuous description is reserved for the brother. The sister is described in vague, general terms. “She was tall and magestically handsome as he [the pharaoh]. … She was the fair and well-loved Nitocris” (2). She may indeed have been as “magestically handsome” as her brother, but her brother's magesty evokes much more vivid imagery. “Superbly tall and muscular, his bare arms and limbs glittering like burnished copper in the light of the brilliant sun, his body erect and tense in his attitude of defiance, he looked indeed a mortal fit almost to challenge gods” (3). Some years later a more self-aware Williams will declare, “I cannot write any sort of story … unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”⁴ The pharaoh may be the first such example.

The most important technical feature of the story that also appears in later works is the distanced narrator, most evident in the beginning of the last section. “I would be content to end this story here if it were but a story. However, it is not merely a story” (11). In later fiction, Williams will use a distanced narrator to lend mundane characters and events a mythic scope, the grandeur of tragedy. Here, unfortunately, Williams's narrator is intrusive, almost comically insistent, with an effect the opposite of his intentions: events are robbed of their vigor and immediacy.

“The Vengeance of Nitocris,” in fact, may well be the “keynote” for what follows, but it is also notable for how far it is from Williams's mature fiction. The prose is almost uniformly clichéd, strained, and dreadful. “Hushed were the streets of many peopled Thebes. Those few who passed through them moved with the shadowy fleetness of bats near dawn, and bent their faces from the sky as if fearful of seeing what in their fancies might be hovering there” (1). In other words, at this point in Williams's career he was writing just about the way one would expect a sixteen-year-old contributor to Weird Tales to write.

More important than the adolescent prose in the story is the adolescent worldview. Years later Williams remarked, “The one dominant theme in most of my writings, the most magnificent thing in all human nature, is valor—and endurance.”⁵ In “The Vengeance of Nitocris” the valor is preeminent; even in their violent deaths brother and sister are larger than life, superior to the vain and mundane machinations of mere mortals. Despite Williams's claim, in his later fiction, outright valor is difficult to find, and endurance often becomes something closer to hanging on, and not very long, against a pitiless and indomitable world.

“The Vengeance of Nitocris” is, then, a definitive example of an apprentice story, and it will do neither to exaggerate its “keynote” status nor to overlook therein the seeds of later success.

“A LADY'S BEADED BAG,” “SOMETHING BY TOLSTOI,” AND “BIG BLACK: A MISSISSIPPI IDYLL”

Williams's next three short stories, “A Lady's Beaded Bag,” “Something by Tolstoi,” and “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,” were written between 1930 and 1932, during which time Williams was attending the University of Missouri at Columbia. “A Lady's Beaded Bag,” in fact, was published in that school's literary magazine, the Columns; the latter two remained unpublished until the appearance of Collected Stories.

“A Lady's Beaded Bag” is the sort of effort one would expect from a college freshman who, up until that time, had exhibited no great potential. The story concerns a ragpicker who finds a beaded bag and, out of fright, returns it to the owner, only to have the owner show perfect indifference to the whole affair. “A Lady's Beaded Bag” is facile irony reminiscent of O. Henry or Maupassant at his worst. Because of its date of composition and its theme of downtrodden masses contrasted to the indifferent wealthy, the story could be seen as an early example of proletarian fiction—but that would be stretching a point indeed. More significantly, the ragpicker—“frantic as a small animal caught in a trap” (15)—is the first example in his fiction of the loner, the outsider, what Williams would later call the “fugitive.” (Nitocris and her brother are outsiders, too, in a sense, but they are too haughty and powerful to qualify as genuine Williams fugitives, who are notable for their vulnerability as much as for their isolation.)

Whether “A Lady's Beaded Bag” marks an advance on “The Vengeance of Nitocris” is open to debate. Neither are interesting stories except insofar as they prefigure later, nobler achievements. We can say, however, that Williams's prose has improved somewhat in the later story. Indeed, an occasional sentence pulses with the wise sensuality of a much older writer. “He drew his finger over its [the purse's] soft, cool surface with the lightness of a cautious Don Juan caressing a woman of whom he is not sure” (14).

“Something by Tolstoi” is a more interesting story than “A Lady's Beaded Bag.” In it a young bookseller marries an ambitious woman who soon leaves him to seek fame as an entertainer in Europe. Fifteen years later she returns to the bookstore but is not recognized, apparently, by her husband. She asks for a book and describes the plot, which is essentially the story of the couple's lives. “There is something familiar about the story,” the husband muses. “I think I have read it somewhere. It seems to me that it is something by Tolstoi” (25).

The story recalls O. Henry or Maugham more than Tolstoi, yet its ending is more thought-provoking, less facile than that of “A Lady's Beaded Bag.” Here the husband's forgetfulness or indifference demands explanation. We might conclude that he is numbed by his wound—the wounded character a virtual archetype in Williams's fiction—or that certain situations are imbued with too much passion and pain to be faced honestly and directly—probably a combination of the two.

The story, alas, is more interesting in summary than in toto. It exhibits almost no compelling sense of place; the characterization on the whole is weak and shallow; at its best the narrative achieves a sort of mechanical slickness. Concerning its place in the development of Williams's short fiction, “Something by Tolstoi” is notable primarily for the author's attempt at a more complex narrative voice. Here the point of view is neither omniscient nor filtered through one of the two principals. Rather, the narrator is a young shop assistant, another of Williams's fugitives, as is clear in the opening lines. “I was dead tired and I felt myself a failure; the place looked like a quiet hole, in which a person could hide from a world which seemed all against him” (17). Using a secondary character as a narrator is an old strategy but, nevertheless, one that must be handled with some skill. Fitzgerald's choice of Nick Carraway as narrator of The Great Gatsby was a brilliant stroke, richly rewarded, but what does Williams gain by using his outsider as narrator? Nothing at all. It does show a young writer struggling to find out what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. If the struggle at this point is still largely a failure, that is to be expected. It is failure, after all, that defines an author's apprentice years.

“Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” shows Williams still in search of a voice and subject matter—and coming closer to finding it. The title character is a member of a Mississippi road crew who labor in cruel heat and under the even crueler tyranny of the Irish boss. Big Black does not openly rebel, but periodically he rips open his shirt and bellows out a “savage” cry: “YOW-OW. YOW-OW-W-W” (27). Exactly what the enigmatic cry means, no one seems to know, but it invigorates Big Black's fellow workers. In the central scene, Big Black accidentally comes upon a white girl swimming in a river. He spies on her, then almost rapes her, stopping short when he realizes how bestial he has become. He dives into the river and swims away; the last scene finds him in Georgia, working on another road gang, periodically letting out his savage cry.

Once again, the story is riddled with clichés and generally shallow characterization, but we do not have to strain to find interesting elements. In between the clichés lurks some telling, violent imagery, a hint of the more mature Williams prose. The Irish boss, for instance, is “wet and fiery red as if he had just been dipped into a tub of blood” (26). Big Black's hand during the near-rape scene seems to cover the white girl's face “like a hideous, huge black spider” (30). Moreover, the story exhibits a new and vivid sense of place—the American South. Any of Williams's previous stories could have been written by Maugham or O. Henry or Maupassant (in a weak moment), but not “Big Black.” It is a Mississippi idyll, after all.

The “Idyll” part of the subtitle is also important. What still approaches shallowness also borders on something finer: a stylized quality invoking the mythic, the epic. The story is, or is intended to be, as “elemental, epical” as the cry that Big Black flings “like a challenge and like a prayer … at Life” (27). Moreover, the mythic quality is heightened by the first scene's ritualistic repetition at the end.

In “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” Williams does not yet have his considerable powers under control, but we can say that for the first time those powers are truly in evidence, and we receive a hint of at least one direction that those powers will take him.

“ACCENT OF A COMING FOOT”

Three years elapsed between the writing of “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” and the next selection in Williams's Collected Stories, “The Accent of a Coming Foot” (written in 1935). The years were significant for Williams in a number of ways. By then he had dropped out of the University of Missouri and had worked for a time in a St. Louis shoe factory, until suffering a breakdown of sorts (he called it a heart attack, a diagnosis not shared by his doctors). He continued to write poetry, and in 1935 coauthored a play that was performed by an amateur group in Memphis, where he stayed that summer with his grandparents. More important, perhaps, is what Williams had begun to realize about himself. His brief tenure at the shoe factory convinced him that he was not meant for success, or even employment, in more traditional lines of work. That he was destined to try to be a writer was already evident at the University of Missouri; and that this destiny would be in some ways a painful one—putting him beyond the pale in the eyes of his father, for one thing—was becoming equally evident. Two other realizations from this period are important. His homosexual tendencies were becoming clearer, disturbingly so, to him; equally disturbing was his sister Rose's deteriorating emotional condition, her inability to adapt to life's harsh realities.

It would be several years before Williams would directly employ homosexuality as subject matter for a short story, but his and Rose's inability to fit in with “normal” society is dramatized in “The Accent of a Coming Foot.” Thus, “The Accent of a Coming Foot” is a watershed of sorts for Williams. For the first time he clearly employs his own experiences as substance for a short story, a phenomenon that will soon become the rule rather than the exception.

The personal experience is not directly recorded—this is fiction, after all, not reportage—but we do not have to delve very deeply to find Williams and Rose. The story concerns a young woman, Catharine, who returns to her home town after a year as a career girl in the city. She visits the Hamiltons: the mother, Mrs. Hamilton, her daughter, Cecilia, and son, Bud. Immediately the reader feels an undercurrent of tension. Bud has failed to meet Catharine at the train station, a lapse mother and sister find alarming but not totally unexpected. Bud, never quite the same as everyone else, has begun spending increasing amounts of time by himself. That he is spending this time primarily in writing does not seem sufficient justification to the Hamilton women.

Over the course of the story, a strange tension begins to grip Catharine as she waits for Bud to show up, and it is evident that the relationship between her and Bud has been a strong one. Exactly what that relationship was is not entirely clear, but sexual imagery predominates when she thinks of Bud. She expects to “see Bud's face peeking faun-like between the quivering shafts of green vine” (36). When she finally sees his shadow on the window, “she felt herself impaled like a butterfly upon the semi-darkness of the staircase” (40). When he opens the door and enters the hallway, however, Catharine stares down at him “like a haughty old dame,” upon which “Bud bowed slightly from the waist as though this house were a bathroom which he had inadvertently entered at the wrong moment, finding Catharine there unclothed or in an unfortunate pose” (41). He backs out of the door and closes it, after which Catharine throws herself on a bed and weeps. The story ends.

What has happened? How does all of this pertain to Williams and Rose? The associations evoked by the story were powerful indeed for Williams, for he claimed to have suffered his first “heart attack” immediately after writing the story; the attack was brought on by “something too close to myself in the character of Bud and the tension of Catharine.”⁶ Most obviously, Williams and Bud are both writers. Bud had chosen his writing over the company of others and had been deemed “odd” for his choice. If Williams was not in fact the hermit in the attic, he was already living outside the sympathy and understanding of his father and, to a degree, his mother. On a subtler level, however, Catharine also shares a great deal with Williams. Both had gone out into the world, Catharine to a career in the city, Williams to the University of Missouri. Both had returned to find things changed, for the worse, and both have a hard time dealing with the situation. For both, the overt changes are less important than their subconscious reactions to these changes. Catharine's inner tensions, more apparent to the reader than to her, are reflected in the generally distasteful sexual imagery. She cannot face, much less understand, her feelings for Bud. Just so, the young Williams must have been having considerable difficulty coming to grips with his growing homosexual inclinations.⁷

If Williams is present in both Bud and Catharine, so too is Rose. Rose's problem, Williams said over and over again, was rooted in sexual frustration and hysteria. Catharine's emotional collapse at the end of the story was frequently reenacted by Rose; only two years after this story was written, Rose underwent a lobotomy. Moreover, Rose resembles Bud, whose name is the first of many “flower” names Williams would employ in his fiction. Bud's sequestering himself to write is not too dissimilar from Rose, who “often sat alone in the dark, waiting for Edwina [her mother] knew not what.”⁸

Two tendencies converge in “The Accent of a Coming Foot”: Williams's tendency to divide himself, so to speak, between two or more characters (i.e., both Catharine and Bud partake of their creator's characteristics) and his tendency to blur, commingle the identities of himself and Rose. His tendency to discuss his and Rose's fates in the same breath is seen in the following quotation: “I've had a great deal of experience with madness; I have been locked up. My sister has been institutionalized for most of her adult life. Both my sister and I need a lot of taking care of.”⁹ Rose, after all, represents a fate that Tennessee evaded only, perhaps, because he had his writing. Rose had nothing.

When we turn our attention to technique, we find that “The Accent of a Coming Foot” represents a clear maturing. Williams follows the modernist strategy (used by Joyce, Mansfield, Anderson, and others) of investing seemingly trivial, everyday actions with great emotion and significance. Nothing much happens in the story, after all, but what does happen is dramatized in such a way as to lay bare the characters' lives. The story's emotional intensity is conveyed in part through the spare action and seemingly irrelevant dialogue, but primarily through Williams's use of imagery. In “The Accent of a Coming Foot” we can begin to see emerging the writer of great verbal power. In this story, the potential is more evident than the accomplishment, exemplified in the telling but ultimately labored description of Catharine's hat.

She talked for a while about her work in the city, but as she talked her head moved with such a nervous vivacity that the red cherries on her hat kept clinking brittlely together and she was unpleasantly reminded, for some reason, of a time in college when her coatsleeve had brushed against the arm of a human skeleton in the zoology lab: it had rattled like those cherries and she had glanced sharply up to see the death's-head staring straight in front of it with a fixed, grimly patient smile.

(35-36)

“The Accent of a Coming Foot” is not, it must be admitted, altogether successful. Mrs. Hamilton and Cecilia are shallow and unconvincing characters, and as interesting as Catharine and Bud are, their conflict seems more introduced than fully realized. Yet the story is one more very large step down the road to maturity for its author.

“TWENTY-SEVEN WAGONS FULL OF COTTON”

Also in 1935, Williams began a story, “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton,” that was published the following year in the highly respected journal Manuscript. “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” is the prototype for the one-act play of the same title, and the famous (or infamous) movie Baby Doll is also based in small part on the story. Obviously, then, “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” was Williams's most successful story up until that time.

It is also more fully realized than any of his previous efforts. Although Williams does not attempt a very great deal in the story, what he aims to do he achieves with hardly a misstep. Therefore, the label “apprentice work” applies to “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” only by a strict, and in this case arbitrary, chronological categorizing.

The story has an elemental simplicity. Twenty-seven wagons of cotton from a nearby syndicate farm have arrived at Jake Meighan's cotton gin, and while the daylong ginning is in progress, Mrs. Meighan entertains the syndicate man on the front porch of her home. The entertainment consists primarily of Mrs. Meighan's phlegmatic attempts to resist the syndicate man's advances. At the end she half retreats and half is forced into the house by the man, and we sense that her last words, “don't hurt me!” (48), preface something quite imminent and quite sordid.

All of Williams's previous stories smacked not only of apprentice fiction but also, at times, of juvenile fiction. With “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton,” however, it will no longer do to be condescending about the young author's understanding of the world. The psychological truth of the story is supported by Williams's use of specific, accurate detail. “It was late in the afternoon. The gin stands were pumping and the pneumatic pipes still sucking. A fine lint of cotton was floating through the sunny air, across the tired gray road and the fields of copper-topped Johnson grass, grown nearly waist-high, and onto the porch where Mrs. Jake Meighan and her guest from the syndicate plantation were seated on the swing” (43).

The story's setting is not mere decoration. The characters' passions seem to arise naturally from the landscape—or perhaps one should say unnaturally from a landscape out of which life is unnaturally tortured into being by the cruel heat. Mrs. Meighan can barely move in the heat. She can hardly summon the energy to resist the syndicate man's advances, to object to his swatting her with the little whip. In fact, she almost likes the whip, when the man “didn't swing it too hard” (44). But the man swings it harder and harder, becoming more and more insistent, almost demonically so, we feel. “Hell's fire but you're big!” the man says (45).

Mrs. Meighan is big. “You're bigger'n the whole southern hemisphere” (46), the man says, twisting her wrist now. She no longer likes the game as much, tries, in her almost helpless way, to resist. She rises to go into the house, to make lemonade, she says. “I'll go in, too,” the man says. “I'll squeeze the lemons” (48). She hesitates; he forces her into “the dark hall,” where she begins crying, “a tremendous, sobbing Persephone” (48). Into the bedroom he propels her. “Oh, my God, it's so hot!” she moans. “Please, for God's sake … don't hurt me!” (48).

With the “tremendous sobbing Persephone” the story becomes not simply elemental but mythically elemental—but then it has been all along. Hence, the “Hell's fire”; “bigger'n the whole southern hemisphere”; “dark hall” of Hades; and the preternatural heat and pleas to God at the end. Mrs. Meighan is Persephone, forced by the demonic little man and the destructiveness of her own passions to enter the dark underworld of hot, adulterous lust, leaving behind a virtual wasteland broiling in the sun, with who knows what consequences.

Mrs. Meighan is not simply a grotesque Persephone, however; she is also Mrs. Meighan. Mythic parallels in fiction can be artificial and trite if not anchored to a vivid quotidian reality, and the latter is a greater and more difficult accomplishment than the former. Williams's great achievement in “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” is the skillful wedding of the mythic and the quotidian. A hot Arkansas afternoon, for example, comes uncomfortably alive in the following description:

Feeling a bit faint, she brushed the fuzz of cotton lint from her moist cheeks and leaned back in the swing which she kept lazily in motion with the lopsided heels of her white kid slippers. Her legs were bare. They had been shaved not so long ago but now they needed shaving again. The sweat trickled deviously between the stubbles of dark hair down the bulging calves and lumpy ankles and splashed into little pools underneath the swing. A swarm of flies was buzzing around her. The little man from the syndicate plantation kept brushing them off with his riding crop. Sometimes he struck her bare legs so smartly that it left a small red mark.

(44)

In a letter to his grandparents,¹⁰ Williams said that the story was supposed to be “humorous,” a curious comment unless one notes that the young man (still living with his parents) was attempting to justify the story to his grandparents (and his grandfather a minister) after just describing to them how shocked his mother was by the tale. Rather than being humorous, “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” shows that the young author already knew how powerful passion could be—and how destructive. Such would become one of his most frequent themes in fiction.

“SAND” AND “TEN MINUTE STOP”

The years 1936 through 1940 were important ones in Tennessee Williams's life. Nineteen thirty-six witnessed his greatest literary success to that time, the publication of “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” in Manuscript. In 1937, Williams entered the University of Iowa, from which he was graduated in 1938. Nineteen thirty-seven was also the year that Rose underwent a lobotomy. By 1939 Williams's pattern of restless travel was already established; more important, in that year he acquired a prestigious agent, Audrey Wood. Finally, by 1940 Williams was beginning to attract considerable attention as a playwright, with the opening of Battle of Angels in Boston.

Williams's Collected Stories includes six stories from the 1936-40 period. If “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,” “The Accent of a Coming Foot,” and “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” seem to show an author assuming ever more confident command of his talents with each new effort, these next half-dozen stories remind us that writers reach learning plateaus, too, and even regress. None of the six stories in this period are as fully realized as “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton,” although several are interesting in their own right and deserve some attention.

“Sand,” Williams's next story, is not one of them. It is competently done, stylistically, but far too flat and static; the account of an old woman caring for her feeble husband, who suddenly remembers her in her youth, “Sand” is hackneyed and unenlivened by vivid imagery or evocative descriptive detail. Altogether, the story seems more “written” than profoundly felt by the author.

“Ten Minute Stop” is not entirely successful but is more interesting than “Sand.” Were it not for the simple fact that Williams had not yet begun his wanderings in 1936, we could be forgiven for assuming that the story is directly autobiographical. At the beginning of the story, Luke is in Chicago, where he had come from Memphis in search of a job. (Williams also failed to find work in Chicago, coincidentally, but that was not until two years later, after graduating from Iowa, in 1938.) When he finds that his would-be employer is out of town, Luke takes the bus back toward Memphis. The ride and subsequent “ten minute stop” in Champaign are occasion for the disgruntled protagonist to consider his own condition and that of the downtrodden in general.

The theme of the downtrodden masses—1936 was not only the midst of the depression but also the height of the proletarian-fiction movement—is too vague to be very moving or thought-provoking. Although he occasionally attempted stories of a vaguely political nature, Williams was rarely very successful. Luke's personal plight is more interesting, however. He is another of Williams's fugitives, emotionally and, in this case, physically uprooted, homeless, alone. We never know precisely what awaits Luke in Memphis, but that seems to be part of the issue: he has no compelling reason to return to Memphis, no emotional reason to consider it a home. On the bus, “he didn't feel like himself. He felt as though the thread of his identity had snapped and he was moving on with nothing at all left behind him” (54). Over the course of the story he reaches the conclusion that the problem is not simply the loss of the job or the alienation many of us feel on buses (or in airports or subways); rather, his whole life is little more than a “ten minute stop in a strange town … just a ten minute stop! I get you, thought Luke. I don't belong. I'm not one of the actors” (58).

The story ends, for all thematic purposes, with that realization, but Williams drags it out by adding a rather pointless scene between Luke and some college boys. The scene is interesting only because the mob's brutal attack on Luke is an inchoate dismemberment scene, the first since the pharaoh's fate in “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” but hardly the last in Williams's writing.

Williams knew no more where to go with his story, one surmises, than Luke knew where to go with his life. Still, we sense Williams struggling to expand his technical range. The “rootless” theme of the story is reflected in its structure, divided into increasingly short segments until, by the end, the last few segments (set off by line breaks) are no more than a brief paragraph or two in length. Concomitantly, Williams uses long lines—“And all that happened and was allowed to happen and the rich and poor alike lived and died, the fawning poets, the lewd and elegant lords, the prudish lascivious ladies, the diseased and ignorant multitudes—all these lived and died upon the earth and nothing was done about it” (58)—followed by bursts of short fragments: “Over and done long ago. Doesn't count anymore. New people to cover the earth these days. And the earth merrily reeling through space” (58). The fragmentation of narrative structure and grammar, paralleling the fragmentation of Luke's life, works better in theory than in practice. But it is all a part of a learning experience bringing Williams ever closer to genuine accomplishment.

“GIFT OF AN APPLE”

Much the same can be said for Williams's next story, “Gift of an Apple.” Once again we find a young man on the road, this time hitchhiking from California to Lexington, Kentucky. The reason for the trip is never stated, underscoring the sense of rootlessness and alienation. Hitchhiking is easy enough in California, but once the young man reaches the vast emptiness of Arizona and New Mexico, it is harder and more dangerous. One must take his rides where he finds them, generally from drunks and “queers”—“all sons of bitches” (63). The central scene of the story occurs when the young man stops at an isolated house trailer to ask for something to eat. The fat woman who lives in the trailer will not share her dinner but does give him an apple. He eats it with great relish, and the woman gradually becomes sexually aroused by the young man but stops short of seducing him when she learns that he is the same age as her son. The young man leaves, and the story ends with him walking on down the road, regretting the missed meal but concluding that “maybe it was better that way, just having that taste in his mouth, the clean white taste of the apple” (69).

The full “meal” that the protagonist misses obviously includes the woman. The story is, indeed, filled with sexual resonances, not the least of which is the eating of the apple itself. “The hard red skin popped open, the sweet juice squirted out and his teeth sank into the firm white meat of the apple. It is like the act of love, he thought” (66). The hungry young man continually confuses images of sex and images of food. He remembers an earlier sexual encounter in an alley: “… all those cold wet smells. Potato peelings and cantaloupe rinds and damp coffee grounds. … And the nervous spasms and groanings. Not normal perhaps” (67).

Where does “normal” reside in the story? It is difficult for the reader to locate because this is a story about sex, and the young man's alienation is rooted in sexual disorientation. He is disgusted by having “to be groped all over to pay for your ride” (63) with the “queers.” Memories of sex with the young girl are “sweet” but also vaguely disgusting, as the foul imagery pervading the recollection suggests. He is almost willing to trade sex with the obscenely fat woman for a meal, but more than just the age and size of the woman disturb him. She has hair on her chest, for one thing, making him think of the “hermaphrodite” at the sidewalk show (65), and this mannish woman, as the lust begins to burn within her, remarks, “You got nice skin like a girl's” (68). Little wonder that the young man feels relieved to get away at the end. His yearning to preserve that “clean white taste” of the apple (ancient symbol of sex, sin, and the Fall) represents a yearning for purity and normality—a normality that does not exist in harsh reality and, most especially, does not exist for an author becoming increasingly aware of his homosexuality.

The story works better in summary than in a close reading. The young man's alienation is not so convincingly dramatized as is Luke's in “Ten Minute Stop.” At no point, in fact, is the conflict more than vaguely felt by the young man or the reader. One might conclude that the author has not yet squarely faced the issue of sexual disorientation himself; therefore, he is not yet able to dramatize vividly and passionately the conflict in his fiction. He is, however, coming closer.

“THE FIELD OF BLUE CHILDREN”

“The Field of Blue Children” was the only one of the last six apprentice pieces to be published prior to Williams's Collected Stories, first in Story magazine (1939) and then in Williams's first collection, One Arm and Other Stories (1947).

“The Field of Blue Children” is Williams's most directly autobiographical story up until that date. The setting is obviously the University of Missouri, and the conflict concerns both sex and writing. The protagonist of the story is Myra, who one spring suddenly feels herself overcome with a “neurotic” restlessness that she can assuage only by writing poetry. She joins a poetry club and becomes infatuated with the poetry and the person of shy young Homer Stallcup. Eventually, they make love in the field of blue children, as Homer has described a flower-strewn field in a poem. Afterward, Myra becomes frightened at her impetuosity, returns Homer's poems, and marries a more normal beau. A few years later, she returns to the field and weeps, but then steadies herself: “now she had left the last of her troublesome youth behind her” (78).

“The Field of Blue Children” resembles “The Accent of a Coming Foot” in several ways. Here again we find a conflict between a young man and woman, and once again both represent aspects of their creator. Most obviously, the shy young poet Homer is the shy young writer Williams. Just as important, however, Myra's fear of her burgeoning sexuality and her desire for normality dramatize a time in Williams's life when he was beginning to awaken to his own abnormal sexual desires.¹¹ In both stories, significantly, the writer in the pair comes off the better. By trying to reject a frightening sexual urge, both Catharine in “The Accent of a Coming Foot” and Myra in “The Field of Blue Children” end by rejecting, Williams implies, a vital part of themselves: the spark of creativity. If Williams had not found refuge in his art, after all, he might have become another Rose—or a Myra, doomed to the sterility of a timorous normality.

“IN MEMORY OF AN ARISTOCRAT” AND “THE DARK ROOM”

The last two stories of Williams's apprenticeship, “In Memory of an Aristocrat” and “The Dark Room,” were written in 1940. By then Williams had begun his life of travel, which took him, among other places, to New Orleans, the setting for “In Memory of an Aristocrat.”

Williams loved New Orleans, and perhaps that fondness helps lend a lighter touch to the story of Carl, a young writer from the University of Missouri, and Irene, an artist and, in her own words, “whore.” The story, in fact, displays some of the first touches of intentional humor in Williams's canon. The humor, unfortunately, helps vitiate the conflict, which occasionally seems a parody of the, by now standard, Williams theme of the sensitive artist in the hands of an indifferent, insensitive world.

Although “In Memory of an Aristocrat” manages to be entertaining even as it generally fails as a story, “The Dark Room” never quite manages to be even entertaining. The story concerns a social worker who pays a visit to Mrs. Lucca. Mrs. Lucca's daughter, Tina, is so distraught over an old beau's decision to marry someone else that she has stayed in her room, naked, in the dark, for six months. The social worker has seen a good deal of strange behavior, of course, but she is shocked to learn that Tina's one consolation is an occasional visit from the old beau. Yes, Tina remains in the nude during the “visit.” The story dramatizes another standard Williams's theme: the power and destructiveness of passion. The story, unfortunately, is more shocking (if even that) than passionately felt and dramatized. The reader remains at a curious distance from the conflict, as if watching the reenactment of a perhaps true-life scene on a television monitor.

In both “In Memory of an Aristocrat” and “The Dark Room” Williams seems more concerned with technique than with a compelling dramatization of conflict. This is especially true in the latter story, which is composed almost entirely of dialogue. Strangely enough for a man who was America's greatest living playwright, Williams rarely loaded his stories with dialogue, if anything using less than most modern short story writers. In fact, an admittedly unsystematic browse through Williams's stories seems to show that the better efforts employ less dialogue than the inferior ones. It is difficult to account for this phenomenon except to observe that in the dialogue of even his great plays a very fine line often separates the sublime from the ridiculous. (The easiest character to parody in American theater is Blanche DuBois—because she is so nearly a parody of herself.)

In contrast to the “pure” dialogue of “The Dark Room,” in “In Memory of an Aristocrat” the dialogue is frequently rendered through indirect quotation, and even when characters are directly quoted, no quotation marks are used. Never again will Williams come so close to composing a story entirely in dialogue as he does in “The Dark Room,” but he will use dialogue without quotation marks on a number of occasions and quite effectively, most frequently in his “memory” stories, when voices blend unobtrusively with other images from the past. The technique does not works so well in “In Memory of an Aristocrat,” however, because it clashes with the near-burlesque tone.

Still, once more we have to conclude that the effort to find what works, even when the effort fails, is part of the learning process. By 1940 Williams was on the verge of applying, with dazzling success, all that he had learned.

LESSONS OF APPRENTICESHIP

Just what had Williams learned during his apprenticeship? What aspects of his early writing can, in retrospect, he considered prototypical of his mature work?

These questions are difficult to answer with some writers because the apprentice years are for them largely a time of rejecting and abandoning that which does not work. Williams's thematic and technical inclinations were so strong from the beginning, however, that the roots of his mature work are plainly visible.

Williams never became a great innovator in the short story, but even in the apprentice period his willingness to try what were for him new techniques is evident, and his canon in general demonstrates a fairly wide variety of styles. In particular, he experiments with point of view, using the involved first-person narrator (“Ten Minute Stop”), the uninvolved first-person narrator (“Something by Tolstoi” and “In Memory of an Aristocrat”), and various degrees of omniscience. His experiments with dialogue have been noted; like the experiments with point of view, they are attempts to bring a certain immediacy to the action or, even more commonly, to distance the reader from the conflict, which, ideally, transpires in a sort of mythic nimbus (“Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” and “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton”). “Big Black,” “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton,” and even “The Accent of a Coming Foot” show Williams attempting to make setting a living presence in his stories. Taken together, the experiments with point of view, manipulation of dialogue, and importance of setting constitute the author's attempt to arrive at a certain texture of voice, which will become a hallmark of his fiction.

Two phenomena are noteworthy in regard to Williams's characters in the apprentice years. First, it is already apparent that he has a fondness for certain types of characters: the sensitive artist, the fugitive, the vulnerable soul buffeted by a harsh world, the person struggling, and generally failing, to come to terms with sex and passion. Second, these characters seem almost stock figures at times because they stand so much in service of a theme; they frequently seem representative, at times almost allegorical. When Williams is able to bring it all off, as he so frequently does in his mature period, his characters (and themes; we cannot separate them) have the power of myth. When he is less successful, the characters and stories seem shallow and lack immediacy.

Most obvious of all at this point in our discussion is Williams's willingness to employ autobiographical materials in his fiction. This tendency will grow ever stronger in his writing, and it is the secret of both his success and his weakness. Williams was never the indifferent artist sitting on the edge of the universe paring his fingernails—although he often tried to create a narrative voice that gave that impression. He created out of his passionate, personal concerns, and his best stories have the force of emotion deeply felt. However, his obsession with these passionate concerns led at times to staleness and, it could well be argued, eventually destroyed him as a man. Williams would have appreciated the irony. He lived it, after all.

Notes

1. Gore Vidal, introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1985), xx.

2. Williams wrote dozens of stories, especially during his teenage years but also later, that do not appear in his Collected Stories. I have proceeded under the assumption that these unpublished stories are not essential to an understanding of Williams's development as a short story writer and have not included them for discussion in this study. (The Collected Stories does include a number of previously unpublished stories; I do discuss a few of these.)

   All references to Williams's stories, unless otherwise specified, are to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories and will hereafter be cited in the text.

3. Notes to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories, 574.

4. Quoted in Gore Vidal's introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories, xxiii.

5. “The Life and Ideas of Tennessee Williams,” P.M., 6 May 1945, 7.

6. Notes to Collected Stories, 571.

7. See Gary Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 48ff., for a discussion of various pressures affecting Williams at this time.

8. Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 337.

9. Eugene B. Griesman, “Williams: A Rebellious Puritan,” Chicago Sun-Times, 27 Mar. 1983, 4.

10. Quoted in Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 52.

11. See Spoto, Kindness of Strangers, 35ff., for a discussion of this period in Williams's life.