The reader who approaches Tennessee Williams' Where I Live in the expectation of finding a unified statement of the playwright's philosophy of art or his metaphysics will be disappointed. There is really no pattern to the thirty short prose pieces included here other than chronology, since most of them are incidental works, written either as forewords or afterwords to published editions of the plays or written for newspapers in advance of the opening of new productions. However, for the reader who is content with brief and fleeting insights into the attitudes and feelings of the author on a wide range of topics—from a consideration of Elizabeth Taylor as "one of the great phenomena and symptoms of our time in America" to defenses of freedom and nonconformity as essential conditions for the creation of viable art—Where I Live is an exciting and gratifying work. Despite the fact that the essay is not Williams' forte—a fact he himself more than once acknowledges—the prose here makes for pleasant reading…. (p. 760)
When Tennessee Williams writes of other authors, he usually reveals more about himself than about his subject. The evidence of the plays and other works makes it clear that the playwright is not, relatively speaking, a well-read man, that his choice of reading has indeed been somewhat eccentric. Those writers he has chosen to pursue, however, he has read well, and his fierce loyalty to those he admires is well exhibited here in two essays devoted to Carson McCullers…. He alludes frequently to his ardent devotion to three poets, Hart Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Emily Dickinson, and his evaluations of them seem, like many of his views in Where I Live, to be more of the heart than of the head. Often he seems more drawn to the character of the particular poet than to the work. His description of Dickinson, for example, as "that lyrical spinster of Amherst, Massachusetts, who wore a strict and savage heart on a taffeta sleeve," is indicative of Williams' romantic viewpoint; but it is also, one must admit, a peculiarly apt description of the poetess and evidence of the power of Williams' own poetic language at its best. (p. 761)
W. Kenneth Holditch, "Surviving with Grace: Tennessee Williams Today" (copyright, 1979, by W. Kenneth Holditch), in The Southern Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 753-62.
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