Playwrights in Print

I DON'T NEED YOU ANY MORE by Arthur Miller. 240 pages. Viking. $5.

THE KNIGHTLY QU EST by Tennessee Williams. 183 pages. New Directions. $5.50.

Short-story collections have such notoriously poor sales records that U.S. publishers bring them out under a kind of duress. Either they are anxious to get an option on the first novel of a promising new writer or they are even more anxious to keep a bestselling novelist or playwright happy.

These two books clearly belong in the second category. In the U.S., writes Playwright Arthur Miller in his foreword, short stories are "ranked more or less as casual things at the lower end of the scale of magnitude, like bungalows in the architectural world." Then why bother? Miller supplies his own answer: The short story is a form in which a writer can be as concise as his subject requires him to be. For a playwright, he says, the short story offers "a vessel for those feelings which, unelaborated, are truer, and yet for one reason or another do not belong on a stage."

Bandy-Legged Touqh. Though written over a period of 15 years, Miller's tales have a certain unity, concerned as they are with that incessant search for identity common to so many American writers. The title story is a discursive account of a momentous day in the life of a precocious five-year-old. The Misfits is the cow-country ballad about obsessed horse hunters that later became a celebrated movie starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. One of the best stories, Fitter's Night, has a sibling relationship to Miller's 1955 Broadway play, A View from the Bridge. It describes the life and hilarious hard times of Tony Calabrese, shipfitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Tony is a bandy-legged tough guy, a graduate of "skyscraper construction, brewery repairing, and for eight months the City Department of Water Supply, until it was discovered that he had been sending a substitute on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays while he went to the track and made some money." In Miller's phrase, these stories may all be bungalows, but they have striking interiors and a fine view of the surrounding country.

Homo Hero. Tennessee Williams' stories are less successful. This is especially true of Williams' grotesque title story, a long, long fable that is intended to be a parody of spy thrillers and introduces its readers to debonair Gewinner Pearce, a homosexual Superman. Of the remaining four stories, the best is Man Bring This Up Road, a chilling confrontation between a hickory-hard, female old moneybags and an aging, importunate beach boy--which provided the theme for Williams' 1963 flop play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore.

Arthur Miller's arguments notwithstanding, the crafts of the stage and the short story are entirely distinct: the difference between someone telling a quiet anecdote and someone engaging in a public debate. Only a few writers have managed both with equal felicity, among them Chekhov and Maugham. Such fiction practitioners as Saul Bellow, John O'Hara and Norman Mailer have had little success at playwriting. With the direction reversed, Miller and Williams at least make a better showing.

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