SOURCE: Wolter, Jürgen C. “Tennessee Williams's Fiction.” In Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, edited by Philip C. Kolin, pp. 220-31. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

Tennessee Williams's obvious urge to publicize his personal dilemmas shows not only in his Memoirs and the novel Moise and the World of Reason, which has been called a “fictional counterpart to the Memoirs” (Savran 154) and an “apologia pro vita sua” (Sklepowich 538), but in all of his writings, and particularly in his fiction. For Gore Vidal, the stories are “the true memoir of Tennessee Williams” (xx). Biographers (e.g., Leverich, Spoto) explain the authorial self-reflexiveness of his works and demonstrate that some stories are lightly veiled autobiographies. For example, Spoto introduces The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone as a fictionalized journal of Williams's life in the late 1940s (156, 167). For Donahue, the stories are important for their autobiographical contents because they “help us to understand the playwright and his family better” (179).

Since fiction allows space for undramatic reflections and digressions and since the breaking of taboos can be much more radical in a text that is written for the private closet of the individual reader than in a script for the “public theatre,” a story can be a more spontaneous reaction to and a less palliative expression of a writer's momentary and momentous problems than a play. Therefore, Williams's stories less frequently use what Hyman calls “the Albertine strategy” of disguising homosexual relations as heterosexual. As Savran (83) points out, in his fiction Williams could be much more candidly confessional about the central experience of his life, his homosexuality. Clum was among the first to draw attention to the difference in the treatment of homosexuality in Williams's “private” and “public” art. In reading “Hard Candy,” Clum shows that this difference relates to Williams's “dual vision,” which is highly conscious of the general split between the “public persona” and the private human being (165-68). Since they are less evasive, that is, more directly autobiographical than his plays, his stories seem to offer a more direct approach to the way Williams thought and worked (Grande 118). Nonetheless, even his stories use oblique discourse that, as Clum shows, testifies to Williams's homophobia. Similarly, in the most perceptive study of “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” to date, Savran argues that this early text (1941), long before Williams was prepared to come out publicly (1970), reflects the playwright's homophobia in those years (see also Sklepowich 534).

Even though Williams's homosexuality was the paramount autobiographical impulse, other experiences influenced his fiction. His intimate relationship with his sister prompted what Vannatta (73) calls the “Rose trilogy” (“Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” “The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin,” and “Completed”; for an analysis of the sister figure in Williams's work, see Clayton). Williams's ties to northwest Mississippi clearly informed the spiritual space of his Two River County; in her detailed reconstruction of Williams's equivalent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Leahy draws on twenty works, including the stories “The Kingdom of Earth” and “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton.” Another story very much rooted in Williams's experiences in the South is “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,” which, as Kolin (“Tennessee Williams's ‘Big Black’”) has demonstrated, reflects Williams's keen interest in the social and racial problems of the early 1930s; Kolin also suggests that in the story Williams reacted to the Scottsboro case and, possibly, the movie King Kong. Williams's experiences in New Orleans surface in some stories in One Arm; Richardson argues that the city's duality (City of Day, the American, commercial, and residential world; City of Night, the Latin, exotic world of the French Quarter) served as an informing image for Williams's fiction. For Tischler (Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan 87), New Orleans gave Williams an “obsession for the pariah theme.” His trips abroad also influenced his fiction: his sojourn in Rome, for example, inspired The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

The shock of World War II also left its traces in Williams's fiction. Spoto, for example, points out that Williams began “Desire and the Black Masseur” at the height of World War II, which, he suggests, may account for the “celebration of pain and the mute inevitability of self-sacrifice” in the story (123). From the 1960s on, Williams seems to have adopted the absurdists' existentialist point of view in that after The Night of the Iguana (1962) his work is dominated by an absurd world, a world without reason. This is most clearly demonstrated by Moise and the World of Reason, which gives a description of the absurd universe; according to Jackson, the title of this novel can only be read as irony (65).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC HISTORY

Tennessee Williams's creativity in the field of fiction was unflagging for over fifty years and was at least as continuous, though by far not as successful, as his achievements as a playwright. Apart from two poems, his first published work was the short story “A Great Tale Told at Katrina's Party” (October 1924; Crandell, Tennessee Williams 477-78; Leverich, Tom 65; Kolin discusses “Isolated,” November 1924, as Williams's first published extant story [“‘Isolated’”]). During his last years, Williams was still working on nondramatic fiction: It Happened the Day the Sun Rose was published in 1981, and the projected novel The Bag People (Arnott 69) was announced for 1982, but never published. During his lifetime, he wrote over fifty short stories, some of which appeared first in such periodicals as Antaeus, Esquire, and Playboy. Most of them were collected in four anthologies: One Arm and Other Stories (1949); Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954); The Knightly Quest: A Novella and Four Short Stories (1967); and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: A Book of Stories (1974). In addition, Williams published two novels: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975). Crandell meticulously describes all of these publications (Tennessee Williams 73-92, 116-23, 200-04, 238-45, 286-301, 353-54, 362-70). Crandell's notes show that there are only a very few changes in subsequent editions of some stories (77-78, 89, 91-92, 293).

Apparently, Williams's attitude toward his fiction was completely different from that toward his plays. If he ever went back to a published story, it was never with the objective to revise it as a story, but to use its dramatic potential and turn it into a play. This difference in attitude may be due to the fact that the “text” behind most of his (more immediately autobiographical) fiction was his life experience, which could not be changed, whereas the texts behind his major plays were other texts (stories and one-act plays), which as more detached fictional constructs could be reconstructed. There are only two exceptions: “Hard Candy” is a rewriting of “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (for a comparison, see Summers 145-50), and “The Important Thing” reads like an “updated version” (Vannatta 44) of “The Field of Blue Children.” Tischler (“Romantic Textures” 155) sees Williams's urge to constantly revise/rewrite his works as an expression of “the true romantic spirit.”

Most critics have commented on the relationship between the stories and their stage versions, and many think that the stories are only “notable for the manner in which they serve as companion pieces to his larger dramatic works” (Nelson 165; Weales 15; Tischler, Tennessee Williams, 1969, 10-11). Since the stories may add to our understanding of the plays, as Goodfarb concludes, some critics have presented more substantial analyses of the prototype stories and the dramatic revisions: for “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” and The Glass Menagerie, see Beaurline and Cohn (98-102); for “Three Players of a Summer Game” and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, see Cohn (111-12) and May; for “The Kingdom of Earth” and Kingdom of Earth, see Derounian; for “The Night of the Iguana” and for “The Malediction” and “The Strangest Kind of Romance,” see Draya (“Fiction” 649-51). In what is still the most valuable study of the relationship between Williams's fiction and drama, Reck defines three ways in which Williams uses his stories in his plays: the transfer of a single line or element out of its context; the repetition of a particular theme, but with different characters and situations; and the direct transposition with similar characters and events, and sometimes even dialogue. That allusions and repetitions may serve the purpose of parody has been demonstrated by Derounian in her comparison of the story “The Kingdom of Earth” and its stage version.

The comparative studies foreground definite continuities in Williams's work, irrespective of the genre he used. Vannatta finds much of Williams's later fiction prefigured in his early story “The Vengeance of Nitocris” (6-7). Similarly, Kolin (“‘No Masterpiece Has Been Overlooked’”) not only outlines the genesis of “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” at the University of Missouri, but also shows that this early story already features many elements that were to become typical of Williams's later works. Vannatta traces the development of the short fiction from the apprenticeship years (1928-1940) through maturity (1941-1952) to decline (1953-1983). Crandell, however, is doubtful about such a pattern of progression (Rev. 91). Vannatta's book is supplemented by an important selection from Williams's own remarks about his writing, Where I Live.

MAJOR CRITICAL APPROACHES

THEMES

In the only book-length study of Williams's short fiction to date, Vannatta identifies themes identical with the ones on which Williams focuses in his plays, such as “the power and destructiveness of passion” (20), “the fate of the fugitive in a harsh world” (42), and the need for love. Other critics supplement Vannatta's catalog: Nelson adds “loss” (174) and Draya “the passage of time” (“Fiction” 661) as central themes.

Williams used the “privacy” of the genre of fiction for a more straightforward elaboration of his major theme, the destructiveness of desire, than he could ever achieve or dare on the stage. Generally, “Desire and the Black Masseur” has been seen as a typical example of Williams's concept of personal and universal guilt in an imperfect, fragmented world and of the corresponding desire for at-one-ment through violence. Blades finds the story essential for an understanding of “the self-hatred and violent self-destruction found throughout Williams' works” (101), while Presley regards it as “the earliest and clearest example” of Williams's “grotesque vision” (43). Rogers reads the violence in this and other stories and plays as an indication of their characters' refusal to accept their hopeless existence in an absurd world (81-82). For Ganz, the violence is rather a form of ritual punishment for the key crime in Williams's moral world, the crime of the rejection of sexuality/life (111). Hurley (“Tennessee Williams” 107-13) sees the relationship between guilt and punishment in the story from the social-psychological perspective of David Riesman's Individualism Reconsidered (1954) with its claim that Americans have a desire to belong and to be accepted; however, identification and conformity with other members of society is never fully achieved and causes guilt that is expiated by self-punishment as self-sacrifice. Thus it is not the story that is “horrifying and repugnant,” it is rather our world (112). Schubert explains Burns's desire for self-annihilation as due to the social situation in the United States of the 1940s as analyzed by Vance Packard (The Status Seekers, 1959) and David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1950); he regards the story as an apocalyptic vision, as a prophetic warning about the potential violence of race relations in the United States, and as a foreshadowing of the threat of “Black Power” in the 1960s. Savran studies “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,” and “Rubio y Morena” in light of the relationship between differences in ethnicity or race and the intensity of desire: “the greater the difference in skin color, the more violent the sexual encounter.” There is also a correlation between desire and speech: the fiercer the desire, the greater the vocal inarticulateness of the character, whose only means of expression left is the “pen(is)” (125-26). The idea of the inexpressibility of desire is taken up in Williams's late work, for example, in Moise (156).

The focus on sexuality in many of Williams's works suggests a kinship with D. H. Lawrence, which Fedder purports to analyze (see 27-46 for the fiction). He contrasts Lawrence's dexterity with Williams's “inept” writing (43). A more appreciative and appropriate study of Williams's treatment of sexuality and desire has been undertaken from the perspective of gay studies. Sklepowich was the first to discuss thoroughly homosexuality in Williams's fiction, arguing that what has been decried as grotesque, decadent, and neurotic in Williams's fiction can only be understood as the manifestation of a “homosexual sensibility”; his survey of the fiction from One Arm to Moise demonstrates that Williams's treatment of homosexuality changed from “a mystical to a more social perspective, … from the mythic to the real” (526-27). More elaborate studies of Williams as a homosexual writer have been presented by Summers and Savran. Summers focuses on the gay fictions in One Arm and Hard Candy and reads them as explorations of “universal themes of loneliness and isolation” (154). Savran argues against the widely accepted transvestite reading of Williams's fiction (a reading that is based on Hyman's theory of the “Albertine strategy”) because it completely disregards the “complexly gendered network” (117) that Williams weaves and Savran, using The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone as an example, unravels (115-18).

Whereas most early criticism of Williams's fiction focused on his interest in the dilemmas of the individual (Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, for example, finds most of his work “free” of “social content” 39), more recent critics raise social and political issues in the canon. America is a constant theme in Williams's fiction, with Two River County as a fictional representation of contemporary America (Blades 25). Summers points out that the stories “document the cruelty and oppression suffered by gay people in mid-century America” (155), and he detects a strong undercurrent of social protest against a repressive and hypocritical society in “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (146-47). Savran locates “revolutionary potential” in the “fractured discourse” of Moise and the World of Reason (166). Hurley (“Tennessee Williams” 33-43) argues that The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone castigates the rugged individualism and perversion of values in America. Gérard, on the other hand, thinks that the destructive materialism that Williams condemns in the novel pertains “to man in general, not to America alone” (152-53). Falk sees Mrs. Stone as an epitome of “the corruption of her time” (146), while Tischler (Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan 177) reads the novel as “a study of Anglo-Saxon decadence” (see also Nelson 149-54). The function of the artist in society is defined in Williams's story “The Poet,” which Hurley (“Tennessee Williams” 159-67) analyzes as Williams's fictional manifesto on his concept of art and which Tischler (“Romantic Textures” 147) reads as the artistic creed of a “natural romantic.”

A central issue has been whether Williams's worldview is optimistic or pessimistic. Disagreeing with critics who see Williams as a pessimistic writer of existentialist despair, Grande sees a metaphysical optimism behind the moral hell of the stories. For Rogers, Williams's view is more optimistic than that of the absurdists because his characters “still search and respond” (82).

CHARACTERS

The biographies (e.g., Leverich, Spoto) draw attention to the fact that many relatives and friends became models for characters in Williams's stories. In the process of fictionalization, their individual personalities were transformed to types. Draya points out that Williams, in his plays and his stories, used the same character types, such as “the earthy middle-aged woman,” “the handsome … young man,” and the repressed and fearful “outcast” (“Fiction” 653-54), but he concedes that “most of Williams's characters … are more complex” (655). Despite the similarities between the stories and the plays, there seems to be a significant difference: Most of Williams's short stories are dominated by male characters, whereas in the plays the women (Amanda, Laura, Blanche, Maggie, Alma) are the most memorable figures. This may be due to the generic differences outlined earlier: the stories are more “private,” and therefore Williams could take the risk of being less oblique here about personal matters.

Vannatta is also an indispensable guide to Williams's representative, almost allegorical stock characters, such as the “sensitive artist, the fugitive, the vulnerable soul” (22), and “the Rose archetype” (74). Peden groups the stories in One Arm and Hard Candy into unsensational stories with nonexceptional characters and grotesque or Gothic “fantasies” about pathological outcasts and derelicts (“Mad Pilgrimage” 248). Dersnah investigates the Gothicism of Williams's characters (37-50). Blades (163-68) finds the “dominating female” and Boxill “the faded belle” as character types in Williams's fiction (31, 33). Ramaswamy's impressionistic study sees Williams's “typical” characters as “frustrated and incomplete,” daydreamers who “are miserable when they are not indulging in their peculiar form of ‘escape’ like films or alcoholism” (277). Rogers (81-82) draws a much more positive picture of Williams's characters: they are never paralyzed by despair, but struggle on, although sometimes extremely violently. Reconstructing the mythic geography of Two River County, Leahy maps a spiritual space inhabited by “children of the earth,” “corruptors of the earth,” and “spirits of the wild.”

Williams's black males in “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” and “Desire and the Black Masseur” frustrate critics because these characterizations seem to coincide with the racist stereotype (see, e.g., Hurley, “Williams' ‘Desire’” 55). Kolin (“Tennessee Williams's ‘Big Black’”), however, argues that the portrayal of Big Black is “compassionate and sophisticated” and surpasses the stereotype (11), while Savran (126-27) elaborates on the contradiction between Williams's “antiracist” notions and the way his work “objectifies and exoticizes the dark Other.”

SYMBOLS

Critics have frequently commented on Williams's use of religious symbols in his fiction, especially in “Desire and the Black Masseur” and “One Arm.” Draya (“Frightened Heart” 49-51) and Dersnah (47-50) elaborate on Williams's Christian metaphors and imagery in “Desire,” while Summers shows that by reducing the symbolic to the literal, Williams here parodies “theological doctrines” and “conventional religious symbolism,” especially Christian communion (138-39). Similarly, Boxill (130) reads the title of “Desire and the Black Masseur” as a pun on Black Mass. The religious imagery and allusions in “One Arm” suggest for Summers a form of counterreligion to Christianity, an unchristian belief in the possibility of “salvation and resurrection” during life on earth through “sexual sharing” (137).

Other symbols have also found perceptive analyses: Vowles studies the images of liquid and water as symbols of homosexuality in Williams's works, using “The Field of Blue Children,” “The Malediction,” and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone as major examples. Falk and Gérard explicate the recurring vulture image in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Falk 146-47; Gérard 148-51), while Dersnah elucidates the Gothic imagery of “Desire and the Black Masseur” (37-50).

Some stories have recently been read as complex metaphors. Of particular interest here is Savran's excellent analysis of the description of the derelict movie theatre in “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” which he reads as a metaphor for Williams's use of the dramatic tradition in general: “recolonizing an old-fashioned theater and turning it into an enigmatic, if slightly queer, site of resistance” (78). In his metaphoric reading of Moise and the World of Reason, Savran comments on the symmetry of pen and penis, of textuality and sexuality as a constant feature in Williams's work (156-57). May suggests that the meaning of Brick's enigmatic detachment in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof can best be approached (if not explained) by an analysis of the metaphor of game in “Three Players of a Summer Game”; he comments on the clash between the “ideal game of art” and “the real game of existential reality” (286).

PLOT

Short stories in general and Williams's fictions in particular present a limited number of situations and instead focus on the development of character. Boxill (22-23, 69, 145) suggests that this typical characteristic of the genre might have influenced Williams's drama, that is, that the episodic, basically undramatic structure of many of Williams's plays might result from their genesis as stories. Reck's study of the metamorphosis from story to play comes to an interesting conclusion: when Williams “is most certain about the fiction … the chances are better that the resulting play will be successful” (153). Reck even suggests that the failure of Williams's plays of the 1960s may be due to the fact that these plays did not develop from prose tryouts.

MAJOR PROBLEMS THE FICTION POSES FOR CRITICS

Two major problems confront critics of the fiction. First, they have to accept homosexuality as a serious and genuine expression of humanity. Studies by Sklepowich, Clum, Summers, and Savran are among the most insightful on Williams's fiction. Savran's interpretation of “Hard Candy,” for example, concludes that the text might be read as a metanarrative that polyvocally presents different ways of reading and thus provides a “guide … to the way that homosexuality … is coded and decoded” in a Williams text (113-14).

Second, critics have had trouble accepting the stories as works of art in their own right. Of particular interest are Vannatta's comments on Williams's experiments with elements of narrative technique, such as narrative voice, point of view, and dialogue.

CONCLUDING OVERVIEW

No standard history of the contemporary American novel mentions Williams as a novelist, and if studies of the American short story draw attention to his stories, they prefer the early ones. Even Williams specialists are undecided about the quality of his fiction. Their reactions are as mixed as those of one of the first reviewers of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, who “liked the manner more than the substance; I admired and was repelled” (Alpert 19). The situation has hardly changed over the years and can still be characterized by the image Peden used in his 1955 review of One Arm and Other Stories: Williams's stories are “like a dead mackerel in the moonlight … that shines and stinks” (“Broken Apollos” 11). Such emotional reactions are perhaps inevitable with a writer who in his fiction (and life) was just as passionate in his responses. However, despite the critical disparagement of his fiction and the much more enthusiastic reception of the plays, Williams, surprisingly enough, never gave up fiction for drama. Even in the years of his greatest international success as a playwright, he did not desert the genre in which he had started his literary career; he even considered his “best writing to be in his short stories and one-act plays” (Gaines 217). His criteria for assessing the quality of a piece of art seem to have been as off-center/ex-centric as his life, and his fiction with its foregrounding of a homosexual sensibility and concern for the Other may also have been too unconventionally ex-centric for mainstream critics, who therefore found it impossible to give it appropriate, let alone sympathetic, attention.

Critics still have not really fathomed Williams's concept of writing as an autobiographically expressionist art: what did it mean to Williams to fix(ate) unresolved personal dilemmas in a linear, monovocal text on silent paper and then dissolve this text into polyvocal events, into voices and roles for acting? Why did he in many cases choose the narrative genre first and only later, sometimes many years later, turn these monologues into dramatic polylogues? Critics may not have found answers to these questions because they have not taken his fiction seriously enough. If they really want to understand Tennessee Williams's creative genius, its oscillation between writing and acting, text and role, “pencil and penis” (Savran 156), they cannot continue to ignore a large part of his work. Furthermore, Williams's stories and plays, in which he uses the same themes, characters, and images, provide excellent material for studies in the field of narratology and genre definition; critics have wrongly let themselves be obsessed by some of his plays and repelled by most of his fiction, just as they seem to have been obsessed by his biography, but repelled by his life.

Critics may have decried Williams's fiction as repulsive because they noticed, but could not appreciate, its revolutionary potential. Many of Williams's fictions are unconventional not only in their themes, but also in their narrative technique. In some cases, his experiments with the intrusive narrator and the first-person perspective are remarkable, for example, when the narrator is used as a persona, a mask in the sense of the ancient drama. Occasionally Williams takes off this mask, the persona becomes transparent, and then the narrator turns into the writer's substitute and mouthpiece.

Williams's “revolution” as regards both his unconventional themes and his experimental narrative technique is personally motivated and must be seen in the context of his ideology of love, which, in his fiction, is often expressed by images of (homo)sexual violence and longing. This ideology, however, is subversive only in that it attacks a world gripped by a cold war that mainstream society wages on the Other.

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