Simultaneous with the New York Times advertisements for Tennessee Williams' latest (but short-lived) drama, Period of Adjustment, came prophecies of a new and happier direction to his writing. Such predictions seemed not only premature (especially in light of the rather strained comedy that Period turned out to be and also word that The Night of the Iguana, based on a far-from-hilarious short story, was next due for Broadway consumption), but also, in a sense, ominous; since, despite some critics' objections to his apparently obsessive preoccupation with seamy subjects, it is with his unhappy, fugitive characters that he has provided contemporary American drama with its most serious inquiry into the human predicament.

Tragedy has never yielded easy or happy solutions to man's essential problems, yet it has consistently illumined life, showing it to be perennially a fearful and awe-inspiring thing. Such an undertaking is too rarely embraced by the dramatist today when our stages are overflowing with glittering musicals or sentimentalized and superficial social comedy.

Any fears that Williams will join the “happy breed” may, I think, be laid to rest. Some critics have accused him of bartering his garbage can for a mess of pottage; however, from his first stories and one-act plays to his later full-length dramas, an underlying and fundamentally somber view of life has given to his work a unity that, fortunately, is “the man” and not merely a convention that can be artificially doctored to the tastes of his audiences.

The short stories (most of them are available in two collections, both published by New Directions: Hard Candy, a Book of Stories [1959]; and One Arm, and Other Stories [1954]) are particularly illuminating, for in them Williams' essential vision is evident even more clearly than in his dramas; the themes are simplified, sharpened, reduced to almost painful clarity. The dramas gain in complexity (if not in subtlety), but the short stories are the seminal stages, the theses, the eggs from which the dramas are hatched. His characters and themes germinate, stir, and metamorphose with the passage of time, producing multiple mutations, sometimes running the gamut of forms: from short story (stories) to one-act play to three-act drama.

One suspects, for example, that “Billy” (with overtones of “Oliver” in “One Arm”) of the story “Two on a Party” is the hero also of Battle of Angels, which became in succession Orpheus Descending and The Fugitive Kind; “Cora” of the same story is an embryonic “Blanche” of Streetcar Named Desire; “Brick” of “Three Players of a Summer Game” eventually becomes the impotent hero of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (even the fat child “Mary Louise” of the same story becomes a whole brood of “no-neck monsters” in Cat). Then, of course, there is “Baby Doll” of the one-acter “The Long Stay Cut Short, or The Unsatisfactory Supper” who reappears in “Twenty-seven Wagon Loads of Cotton” and eventually gives her name to the full-length movie version; “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” sketches the heroine of Glass Menagerie; and we may even see at some later date a new “Lucio” (the dispossessed victim of modern economics who finds consolation in a bedraggled cat), who has already made his appearance in a one-act play and two short stories.

To enter the world of his short stories is thus to come into Williams' study where he is preparing the public dramatic concoction from the distillation of his evolving thoughts.

Nowhere else, for example, than in the short stories does the theme of man's metaphysical alienation stand out quite so clearly as Williams' conception of man's major problem. The stories may be poetic or realistic, or, more probably, may verge upon the allegorical, yet each, while starting down a different road, arrives at the same universal conundrum: man, seeking happiness by understanding through love and union with someone or something, is perpetually lured down false labyrinths that leave him staring at the blank wall of his neurotic self; starting again and again on his lonely hegira, like Christian in the Valley of Despond, he is tricked into hope in a hopeless maze, the doors labeled “Answer” opening only into himself and he is ever alone. On no other psychiatric couch has the agony of man's isolation been so carefully analyzed.

Is this isolation simply self-dramatization, egotism, or a sentimental pose? Hardly. The uniqueness of each soul, the impossibility of its breaking out of its fragile box of flesh to find here a lasting city, is, after all, the temporal condition of man. His search is for the total communion, the total love for which he was meant; and his futile shifts at substitutes are eloquent hound-of-heaven reminders of every man's destiny.

Williams' intransigence then, in pursuing each individual search and its ultimately puzzled frustration, is what gives him his peculiar universality and power, and dictates, to some extent, his choice of subjects. For the complacent, the static, the euphoric “bourgeois” who rests happily in his ersatz heaven-on-earth, there is no problem: he has been adequately distracted from his ultimate goal by sex or success in Vanity Fair. But for the restless fugitives of Williams' nightmarish world, nothing as yet has solved the insoluble problem. And this is as far, perhaps, as Williams dares to go at present. The problem in spatial and temporal terms is insoluble and his dazed or dreamy heroes and heroines continue their journey or recognize that they will not end it with anything the world has to offer. For today's theater, so much is gain; and so much is very much.

Unlike the existentialist who concludes that the struggle itself is the meaning of life, Williams refuses to accept, gratefully, merely the pursuit of happiness, and recalls us (perhaps in rather tenuous and negative terms, it is true) to some transcendent end for which man was intended. He does not, therefore, seem to merit the facile epithet, “another twentieth-century pessimist,” simply because he repudiates the slick solutions offered by the humanitarians, the epicureans, the hedonists, or the pseudo-philosophers.

To claim a fundamental, that is a metaphysical, optimism for Williams is to raise the usual questions of those who find his characters—those degenerates and off-scourings of the earth—depressing or revolting or both. Nevertheless, it is with the human beings of the “lowest” common denominator that the dazzle of man's insatiable desire is revealed in stark black and white; they have not made, nor do they have anything to gain by making, the compromises which reconcile the distracted modern to finding his happiness in less than absolute happiness itself.

Unless a reader can appreciate this artistic necessity which dictates to Williams his use of characters from the moral underworld, perhaps it is better for him to leave the short stories unread. Abstracting from the superficially sensational subject matter, he can be profoundly moved by Williams' twentieth-century echo “Vanitas vanitatis …” and will at least find here a much more profound answer to the meaning of life than that offered by the various and currently popular versions of existentialist despair.

Of course, a sound idea and a basically vindicated technique do not necessarily excuse Williams completely from all responsibility for his aesthetic lapses—and lapses there are. His comments, in the story, “Hard Candy,” indicate that he himself is aware of the risk:

The grossly naturalistic details of life, contained in the enormously wide context of life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself.

To some readers, obviously, he could use considerably more “softening.” Despite his caution, certain vulgarities, as well as insensitivity to good taste, whether the result of an inherent misunderstanding of the word honesty or a subconsciously exhibitionistic effort to tell “all,” manages to nibble away at a reader's supply of tolerance at times; but the net gain to the reader in insight can be more impelling than the loss in revulsion.

Are his heroes, indeed, heroes? Are they not merely case studies in the descent from the lower depths to the lowest? In “Two on a Party,” Williams suggests the question and at least his answer, when he says of the two “cruising” degenerates:

They're two on a party which has made a departure and a wide one.

Into brutality? No. It's not that simple.

Into vice? No. It isn't nearly that simple.

Into what, then?

Into something unlawful? Yes, of course.

But in the night, hands clasping and no questions asked.

In the morning, a sense of being together no matter what comes, and the knowledge of not having struck nor lied nor stolen.

The answer verges dangerously on the sentimental, but whatever the social or moral level of his subjects, their very aspirations tend to give them a dignity that at first glance they might not seem to deserve; it is their humane yearnings that give them human stature and make them worth investigating.

“Flora” and “John,” for example, in “The Important Thing,” two students who dabble in socialism and try, successfully, to shock the world, are typical Williams-outsiders. “Flora” belonged nowhere, “she fitted in no place at all, she had no home, no shell, no place of comfort or refuge, she was a fugitive with no place to run to.” The pervasive symbol of escape from the personal void into the world of belonging in Williams' stories is sex, but always abortive or frustrating: so here the fumbling attempt is made with the ultimate parting, both “knowing, each [to be] completely separate and alone”—one incident of the long search in “the effort to find something outside common experience, digging, rooting among the formless rubble of things for the one last thing that was altogether lovely” (the lost garden of Eden?). Almost identical plot and theme are used also in “Field of Blue Children.”

In “Night of the Iguana” (the story upon which the play is based), where a spinster invades the private world of two homosexuals in a neurotic bid to abolish loneliness, the crisis is reached in a sexual experience which forces each of the trio to face the nature of his own isolated unhappiness.

In Williams' gallery of broken Apollos, half-gods looking for their complements, stands the “fugitive” “Oliver Winemiller” of “One Arm” (“A personality without a center throws up a wall and lives in a state of siege. So Oliver had cultivated his cold and absolute insularity, behind which had lain the ruined city of the crippled champion”); the “lonely, bewildered” “Lucio” of “The Malediction” (who, when his only tie with life, the cat Nitchevo, is dying, crushed and festering, commits suicide, crying, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”); the artist-alien of “Angel in the Alcove” (“He lived in a world completely hostile to him, unrelentingly hostile, and no other being could enter the walls about him for more than the frantic moments desire drove him to”); the infantile “Donald” of “The Vine” (“There was a whole world of things to which he had no entrance, and though he was vain, he was humble at heart, and never scoffed at enthusiasms to which he was an outsider”)—and on and on: pimps, prostitutes, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, a whole confessional of untouchables encased in themselves.

Inevitably the key to unlock their personal prison is sex. For the lush “Cora” and the queen “Billy” of “Two on a Party” it “dissolved loneliness, any reserve and suspicion … you got the colored lights going” (shades of Streetcar Named Desire); for grotesque “Mr. Krupper” of “Hard Candy” (and “Mysteries of the Joy Rio”), hunting in the darkened movie theater, it is a moment of communication, “a pursuit of a pleasure which was almost as unreal and basically unsatisfactory as an embrace in a dream.”

Searchers. Searchers. And always the tentative exploration and always the failure. They make the discovery that happiness is transitory, satisfaction elusive and impermanent.

In his own voice we hear Williams in the autobiographical “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch” musing philosophically:

What a cheap little package this is that we have been given to live in, some rubbery kind of machine not meant to wear long, but somewhere in it is a mysterious tenant who knows and describes its being. Who is he and what is he up to? Shadow him, tap his wires, check his intimate associates, if he has any, for there is some occult purpose in his coming to stay here and all the time watching so anxiously out of the windows.

Williams has pictured all men's restless vigil at the windows of the soul—the house may be in a sad state of repair, the windows broken, the sash unpainted, but the tenant is every man, and his desires are infinite. Williams' compassion for the inhabitants of the “cheap little packages” belies the pessimism which is frequently attributed to him. Man, whatever he is, is important, he seems to say, even in the most unwholesome setting and beset by the most fantastically wrong-headed desires.

Such a painter of mankind deserves respect, encouragement, and gratitude for not taking the rosy way out—and, perhaps, some day he may even learn to see beyond the problem of here and now to the only inevitable solution—a God of infinite love and understanding.