A new collection of stories by Tennessee Williams, written during the Great Depression, are mostly from when he was living in St. Louis—what he called the City of St. Pollution—writing in the evenings after work, hopped up on black coffee and cigarettes.
” includes seven works of short fiction by Williams, culled from the seventy-six boxes of his archival materials at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. They are introduced by Tom Mitchell, an emeritus theatre professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who previously adapted several of Williams’s stories for the stage.
Williams once said that the best of his work was thanks to his father, who taught him to hate, and not to his mother, who taught him to expect more love from the world than he would ever be able to give in return. Really, his writing emerged from the combustible combination of an emotionally manipulative and sexually inhibited minister’s daughter and an emotionally volatile and sexually insatiable alcoholic gambler, who once lost half his ear in a fight over a poker game.
It’s as if Williams gathered all the kindling he needed but forgot to bring a match. This is especially disappointing when you learn that, around the time he wrote this story, Williams, then living with his grandparents in Memphis after a nervous collapse, witnessed a curious incident involving his grandfather.
“How absurdly inimical this whole world was to the dignity of lovers,” one of those undergraduates thinks, articulating what was already Williams’s credo. It would be years before the author fully realized that tragic theme, but he comes closest in “Stair to the Roof,” the last and most autobiographical of the stories in this collection.
If elsewhere Williams struggled to light a fire, this story is all ashes. Immediately following an epigraph from Edna St. Vincent Millay, two nuns and a candy vender are nearly hit by Edward’s dismembered body parts after he jumps to his death from the roof of the twenty-five-story factory. The story’s macabre first lines read, “It made an oddly fluid, splattering sound as it struck the concrete. One limb, amputated by the cornice, slid several feet along the walk.
Williams often said that he feared being institutionalized like his sister, but “Stair to the Roof” reveals a different fear: unrealized talent. Edward’s family, teachers, and co-workers are all adversaries of his art, and the city itself is indifferent to both his potential and his plight. That wasn’t Williams’s fate, and it wasn’t even the final version of his fictional clerk’s life.
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