Tennessee Williams: A Tribute ed. by Jac Tharpe, and: Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Stephen S. Stanton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 203 through humility? In an essay not reprinted by Martin, "Our Guilt for the World's Evil" (1965), Miller forgoes-as he does also in his foreword to Afte, the Fall(1964) and elsewhere-the tragic attitude as he had defined it. The individual must prevent self-defeat by discovering "his own complicity with the force he despises," Remaining unaware of one's own hatred and hostility is "tragic, fatal blindness," The protagonists in After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, and The Price survive because they are neither blind nor tragic. To admit frailty or failure, of course, was the one thing that Miller's earlier, more intemperate figures would not do. But their stubbornness ("fanaticism") ensured their vitality as well as their defeat. Arthur Miller has frequently expressed his persistent ambition to establish a civilized "social" standpoint as a search for a dramatic form that would make known the public significance of private acts. ]n his introduction to the Collected Plays- an incisive analysis of the plays through A View from the Bridge- he states, "I have stood squarely in conventional realism; [but] 1 have tried to expand it." Ibsen taught him how "to make the moral world .. . real" (factually evident) and to dramatize the past. German Expressionism taught him how to get at the "passion" residing "behind the visible fa~ades" and to "create a subjective truth." His goal as a stylist was consistent with his goal as a humanist: to unify realistic "surfaces of experience," "cogent emotionallife," and "philosophically or socially meaningful themes." His career, however, bears out the truth of his comment in "On Social Plays," that "to think of an individual fulfilling his subjective needs through social action ... is difficult for us to imagine." His Hfelong effort to integrate the radical "]n with the reactionary "we" has been impressive, but his artistic problems attest to the diffic~lty of this enterprise. Since the essays outline these matters so explicitly, I wish that Professor Martin had chosen to comment on them more fully. He does offer an insight concerning a recurring stylistic concept pertinent to the obligation felt by all Miller's protagonists to justify their lives. In almost every work, Martin observes , Miller saw "the law as a symbolic and affirmative system of values," and therefore "used the law, lawyers, a policeman, courtrooms, or judges as representatives of truth, justice, and morality." Miller places his protagonist "on trial," subject to "moral and legal litigation." And these legal allusions extend to the essays. Having discussed the trial metaphor in my own book on Miller (Twayne, 1967), I find the point an interesting one, worth further development. As a critic, then, I crave more detailed analyses. But as a fellow-admirer of America's fmest living playwrigh~ I am grateful to Professor Martin for this valuable collection. It will be useful to students of our theater. LEONARD MOSS State University College Geneseo, New York TENNESSEE WILLiAMS: A TRIBUTE. ed. Jac Tharpe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. 896 pp. $29.95. Publication of this collection of criticism "coincides with a renewal of interest in the work of Tennessee Williams," writes editor Tharpe in the Preface to this collection. Given the dearth of published book-length studies of Williams's 204 BOOK REVIEWS work, especially acute in the last ten years, we can only hope that Tharpe's remark is prophetic. [n another sense, however, the tenn renewal is inappropriate , since Williams scholarship has flourished in the same period in other fOnTIs: dissertations, articles and essays. To this latter group must now be added the fifty-four additional essays in A Tribute, a "truly huge volume," as Tharpe points out. The sheer size of the book may intimidate students just beginning work on Williams; even dedicated Williams scholars may be tempted simply to dip into it here and there. However, reading the wholeadmittedly a lengthy process- repays the effort because the essays supplement and/ or correct one another: important ideas are reworked and refined across the boundaries of essays and even sections. The essays, only one of which- Jacob H. Adier's-has been previously published, range widely, if unevenly, through nearly all of Williams's...