SOURCE: Kolin, Philip C. “Tennessee Williams's ‘Interval’: MGM and Beyond.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 1 (fall 1999): 21-7.

In the following essay, Kolin asserts that the story “Interval” “bears scrutiny as a disclosure of Williams's view of art, sex, and the imagination, all fused in America's quintessential worlds of illusion making—Hollywood and Broadway.”

Of all Tennessee Williams's short fiction, perhaps no story has been more undeservedly unattended by critical commentary than “Interval.” Yet this story characteristically unveils key places, times, and events in Williams's early life and art. “Interval” documents the recuperable hiatus Williams himself underwent—an “embarrassed chapter” in his life—played against the backdrop of the mid 1940s. The very title circumscribes the temporal and topical dimension of Williams's quest for success. He wrote “Interval” in 1945, although it was not published until 1985 in the Collected Stories. The events in this short story occur before the end of World...