Gore Vidal famously claimed that Collected Stories, published posthumously in 1985, constituted the “true memoir” of Tennessee Williams.Footnote ¹ Here, rather than in Williams’s gossipy, scurrilous Memoirs (1975), Vidal maintained, we could witness the peculiar and shifting familial relationships that would dominate Williams’s creative output and partly account for his theatrical fame. As if to endorse this reflection, Williams’s previously unpublished piece reevaluating his fraught relationship with his father, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” appears ahead of Vidal’s introduction as a preface to Collected Stories. Purporting to be a memoir, it seems deliberately positioned to highlight how deeply Williams mined his own life for creative inspiration. As Dennis Vannatta, reworking a comment by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), vividly puts it, “Williams was never the indifferent artist sitting on the edge of the universe paring his fingernails.”Footnote ² Though both Joyce and Williams sought a state of exile, the latter could not extricate himself artistically from the circumstances of his life, nor could he assume the god-like detachment that Joyce held to be the highest creative position.

Yet Vidal’s soundbite is misleading. Though he adds that “whatever happened to him, real or imagined [my emphasis], is here,” the writer and critic surely risks underestimating Williams’s creativity, his ability to spin the mundane and unremarkable, beyond an immediate realm of autobiographical experience, into the universal and even the magical. This applies to Williams’s fiction, routinely (and unfairly, to my mind) considered to be a lesser achievement, as much as it does to his drama.

I arrived at Collected Stories via Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories, a 1960 collection that contained several works that Vannatta attributes to Williams’s “maturity,” a period dating from the writing of “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (not, however, in Three Players) in 1941 to “Three Players of a Summer Game” itself, a 1952 story that bears a close relation to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that premiered three years later. An undergraduate, I read these initial stories on the back of several of the canonical plays and was struck by the quality of the writing – by the poetic rendering of fugitive, misfit characters; by the alternately poignant and frank handling of sexual desire; and by the expert pacing of narratives that seemed to prepare the reader for quietly reflective, non-judgemental denouements. Much like The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), “The Night of the Iguana” (1948) short story, for example, appeared to confirm Williams’s alignment with lonely figures seeking a shared humanity, and, in the process, to balance humor with a satisfying tenderness. By way of illustration, we can compare these tonal shifts from the beginning and end of the story respectively: “Miss Jelkes was outwardly such a dainty tea-pot that no one would guess that she could actually boil,” and “she remembered and felt again the spot of dampness, now turning cool but still adhering to the flesh of her belly as a light but persistent kiss.”Footnote ³ After relentlessly spying on two gay writers, the prim Edith Jelkes is sexually assaulted by the older of the two. However, instead of seeing his premature ejaculation, the “spot of dampness,” as a hostile and embarrassing attack, she comes to regard it as an act of love that goes some way towards dismantling her loneliness. By no means do all of Williams’s characters make this fleeting moral transition, but (it struck me then and does to this day) that the subtlety and gentle irony of this story’s final moment rival much that we encounter in the plays.

When I came to it, the chronological arrangement of Collected Stories gave me an immediate sense of where the prose fiction fitted around the plays. After a while, though, I was fully persuaded that while several of the stories appeared to be elaborate sketches for their correspondent dramatic treatments, they were, just as importantly, works in their own right. On the one hand, Williams differentiated his writing, experimenting in the theater, for instance, with living newspapers (social plays consisting of scenes that dramatize newspaper articles) and expressionism (a symbolic form of drama that uses miscellaneous stage effects to communicate characters’ inner realities); on the other, he just created, writing rather than form being the sine qua non. Viewing the multitudinous drafts and fragments kept in the largest repository of Williams’s work, the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, brought that home to me.

At the point where my subsequent research focussed on the sexual power struggles of Williams’s characters, as opposed to their wider political pretensions (critically touted in the 1990s and beyond), the stories became a still more compelling resource. In particular, “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” (1931–32), “Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton” (1935), “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (1941), “One Arm” (1945), “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1946), “Rubio y Morena” (1948), and “Hard Candy” (1953) seemed to show desire, both a commodity and an implacable drive, as assuredly not sinful but as a vital, often self-consuming, stage in our evolution towards the love and reassurance of connection, and beyond towards a sense of completion. To my mind, this prose fiction paralleled, even exceeded, the plays’ preoccupation with sexual desire. Further – and as David Savran’s indispensable reevaluation of Williams’s Cold War political credentials (especially in his lesser-known works), Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (1992), helped me to see – Williams’s fiction was able both to push past boundaries of decency, like those imposed by the Wales Padlock Law, and to highlight the playwright’s creative, but more modest, evasions of that censorship.Footnote ⁴

Vannatta’s judgments on the stories are discerning but also unfairly harsh at times. For example, he finds Williams’s fine, sensitively handled narrative about an aging stroke victim and his wife, “Sand” (1936), “hackneyed and unenlivened by vivid imagery,” and he complains that in reworking “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” as “Hard Candy,” the writer created a cold and excessively ironic narrator whose “intrusiveness results in awkward prose.”Footnote ⁵ Williams’s experiments with narrative voice deserve more credit than this, and Vannatta’s attempts to classify the stories neatly according to chronological phases are limiting and self-defeating.Footnote ⁶ There is, inevitably, an unevenness to almost any short-story collection, not least a collected edition as large as this, but Williams’s achievement in his short fiction is comparable to that of his many one-act plays: concise, deftly controlled plots that sensitively interweave the familiar themes and symbols of exclusion, defeat, and desired intimacy through finely tuned and often wryly comic dialogue. Discovering the stories when I did gave me a greater appreciation of, and a better means of navigating, Williams’s art – a sense of both his creative versatility and his original, inimitable voice. This has not left me. And the steady trickle of stories coming into print since Collected Stories, like those in the recent volume The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories (2023), is further proof both of Williams’s capabilities in the short-story form and of the indispensability of the genre to him as a writer. If Williams’s short fiction is a memoir, or even more than a memoir, as I am suggesting, it is one that will likely require both an expanded collected edition of his stories and a critical reassessment in the future.