Tennessee williams and italy a transcultural perspective

Tennessee Williams & Italy
A Transcultural Perspective
Alessandro Clericuzio


Tennessee Williams and Italy


Alessandro Clericuzio

Tennessee Williams
and Italy
A Transcultural Perspective


Alessandro Clericuzio
University of Perugia
Perugia, Italy

ISBN 978-3-319-31926-1
ISBN 978-3-319-31927-8
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31927-8

(eBook)

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FOREWORD

The importance of Italy on Tennessee Williams’ life and literary aesthetic
is unfathomable. And yet, strangely enough, not until now has that influence ever been discussed to any great length in Williams studies, and certainly never by an Italian-born Williams scholar. For this reason alone,
Alessandro Clericuzio’s Tennessee Williams and Italy is a regalo di Dio.
Arguably, Italy shaped the second half of Williams’ life as much as
Mississippi and the South had shaped the first half. Of course, a good
deal is owed to his relationship with Frank Merlo, but the New Jerseyborn Sicilian was not the only Italian influence on Williams’ life. It should
be recalled that Williams first visited Italy in the summer of 1928, when
he joined his grandfather and parishioners of the pastor’s Episcopal
church in Clarksdale on their Grand Tour, which included stops in Rome,
Naples, Florence, Venice and Milan. In his travelogues, he described the
“parched” tongues and “glazed” eyes of US tourists as they stumbled their
way through the ruins of Pompeii under the oppressive August sun; the
“grinning skeleton“ in Rome’s old Capuchin church; or the impatience

of Italian drivers along the Amalfi drive, between Naples and Sorrento, as
his party’s chauffeurs “fought over the narrow road, swerving from side
to side, honking furiously and howling at each other in terms which probably would have scalded our ears if we had been able to understand the
Italian language.”
He even returned to Italy in January 1948, a year before he and Merlo
became long-term partners (they had met once, briefly, at the Atlantic
House Bar in Provincetown in the summer of 1947). Williams used his
recent celebrity status with A Streetcar Named Desire to engage with some
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FOREWORD

of the country’s literati, including Luchino Visconti, whose production
work on the neo-realist film La terra trema had drawn Williams to Sicily
for a visit to the set. Williams also spent time with US expat Gore Vidal,
with whom he travelled around Italy to Sorrento and Amalfi in an unsilenced US army jeep that Williams had bought off a returning GI.
World War II had succeeded in liberating Italy from its Fascist grip,
but Williams feared the country would soon fall into the hands of the
Communists, who were posed to upset the Liberal Democrats during the
country’s first democratic election. In a 1948 letter to Brooks Atkinson,
Williams wrote:
Nothing at all has apparently been done by the native government, as it now
exists, to relieve the really appalling social conditions. It honestly looks as
if seventy percent of the Italian population are mendicants and prostitutes,
families are living in the roofless shells of buildings in the bombed cities
such as Naples. I feel that if we had made real sacrificial efforts to relieve
the distress of Europe the Communists would have no appeal. As it is, the

people in their real dire circumstances, bewildered by the vacillating and
make-shift puppet governments headed by weak and blandly opportunistic
figures, rooted in no defined party or policy or philosophy, are a natural and
easy prey to extremists.

It was Merlo, of course, who introduced Williams to an Italy, and in particular to a Rome, that he would never have had access to alone. Williams
did not speak Italian, and only learned fragments of it during his time and
travels with Merlo. Now, he had access to all kinds of places, parties and
people in Rome, and one Roman in particular had transfixed him like no
other—Anna Magnani.
Williams wrote frequently about his time with Magnani, but in an essay
entitled “The Evenings of Magnani,” a short piece that eventually found
its way into his Memoirs, he pays her a homage not found elsewhere in his
work:
I often wonder how consciously Anna Magnani managed to live within society and yet to remain so free of its conventions. She was as unconventional
a woman as I have known in or out of my professional world; and if you
understand me at all, you must know that in this statement I am making my
personal estimate of her honesty which I feel was complete.
Of course I also existed outside of conventional society while contriving
somewhat precariously to remain in contact with it. For me this was not only


FOREWORD

vii

precarious but a matter of dark unconscious disturbance. For Anna what was
it? Since she has written no memoirs of the sort I’m writing, or any sort at
all, that question is going to remain a question. I can only say that she never
exhibited any lack of self-assurance, any timidity in her relations with that

society outside of whose conventions she quite publicly existed.
She looked absolutely straight into the eyes of whomever she confronted
and during that golden time in which we were dear friends, I never heard a
false word from her mouth….
She was beyond convention as no one I’ve known in my life, and I suspect that was our great bond and that it was the root of her proud assurance,
as much as it was the root of my own lack of it and the sense of guilt that
must always shadow my own life.

These were Tennessee Williams’ recollections of Magnani—and of Italy—
and I cite them here to whet the appetite of this volume’s readers. Perhaps
it takes an Italian to really understand Williams’ love-affair with the country and its people, and Alessandro Clericuzio has undertaken the task to
examine and explain that admiration for us. In doing so, he provides other
rich stories about Williams’ time not just with Magnani but with all of
Italy, from its dark days just after World War II to its renewed love-affair
with the US playwright. We have waited a long time for a book like this to
appear. We will all savor it, as Williams did his Chianti.
John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, France


SOURCES

Archival documents are cited as ACS (from Archivio Centrale dello Stato)
and MBC (Ministero Beni Culturali) followed by call number.
In-text quotations from newspaper and magazine articles that are on a
single page are given without the page number (which is provided in the
chapter bibliographies) because there is no need for disambiguation.
All translations from the Italian, unless noted otherwise, are mine. I
have chosen to give all criticism only in English, while quotations from literary texts (and, in one instance, from a Williams interview) are provided
along the original Italian text.
Due to its aim, namely that of assessing Williams’ reputation in Italy,

Chap. 2 (more than the following chapters) contains many quotations
from Italian critics and journalists, which I have not rephrased because I
find that literal translations are more revealing of the intellectual milieu
that lay behind such reviews and are quite effective in giving the twentyfirst-century reader a taste both of the text and of the possible subtext they
entailed when they were first published. And, as a critic assessing Williams’
reputation in the US maintained, “judgments sometimes reveal as much
about the judges as what’s being judged” (Kaplan 2011a, x).

ix


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book is the outcome of a research that led me to unearth hundreds
of articles in the Italian press covering about 70 years and many other
unpublished documents, all of which have given me the chance to learn a
great deal not only about Tennessee Williams, but about my own country
as well. I hope I have been able to transmit all this through the pages of
my book.
Any completed book is a milestone on the road of life, the result of old
and new choices, routes taken or abandoned, intellectual passions and, at
the same time, a starting point for future developments. My first encounters with theater took place, when I was a child, thanks to my parents, who
brought me to see Eduardo De Filippo at the Eliseo in Rome or Valeria
Moriconi (who would later play Serafina delle Rose) performing in The
Taming of the Shrew in the magnificent Teatro Romano in Verona, where
we would spend our summers. I can never thank them enough for these
early—forced—but very fruitful experiences. My second, meaningful confrontation with dramatic literature already had the imprint of US stages,
when I attended Annalisa Goldoni’s classes at the university of Rome La
Sapienza in the mid and late 1980s.
Apart from this “historical” background, the book wouldn’t exist without the long talks and intellectual exchanges it was my pleasure to have

with friends and colleagues John S.  Bak, Djelal Kadir, Andrea Mariani,
Salvatore Mura, Giuliana Muscio, and Brenda Murphy. The book also
owes a lot to my colleagues in Perugia, working with whom has enabled
me to pursue my research, and to my students, who have been fed with
Tennessee Williams’ extravaganzas over the years.
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xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Albert Bell in Perugia, Silvanus Slaughter in Oxford,
North Carolina, and Stephen Clifford Wilson in Rome, who were always
ready to check on my English. To Colleen Boggs for her precious lastminute suggestions. To Pavao Zitko, without whose help my time for
research would have been much less.
Earlier, shorter versions of Chap. 3 were published in A Streetcar
Named Desire. From Pen to Prop, edited by Marie Liénard-Yeterian and
Aliki Diaz-Kostakis, Paris, Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2012 and in
the Italian journal RSA 25, 2014.


CONTENTS

1

1

Transatlantic Exchanges: An Introduction

2

Tennessee Williams’ Italian Reputation

11

3

Luchino Visconti and Tennessee Williams: Various Stages of
Censorship

55

4 More Streetcars: The Screen and the Stage

87

5 The Rose and the Stone: Williams’ Two “Most Italian” Works 109
6

The Golden Years: 1957–1964

151

7

Decline and… Comeback. The Last 50 Years: 1965–2015

183

Appendix: List of Main Italian Productions

209

Index

219

xiii


LIST

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1
Fig. 3.2
Fig. 3.3
Fig. 3.4
Fig. 3.5

OF

FIGURES

Tennessee Williams, Luchino Visconti and part of the cast of
A Streetcar Named Desire on the opening night at the Eliseo
theater in Rome, 1949
Tatiana Pavlova and Rina Morelli as Amanda and Laura in
the 1946 Zoo di vetro directed by Luchino Visconti in Rome

Giorgio De Lullo and Rina Morelli on the Eliseo stage
in December 1946 in Visconti’s Glass Menagerie
Vittorio Gassman as Stanley and Vivi Gioi as Stella on the
Eliseo stage in Rome, January 1949
Marcello Mastroianni as Mitch confronts Rina Morelli as
Blanche in Visconti’s Un tram che si chiama desiderio
Rina Morelli as Blanche walks along a New Orleans street as
it was recreated by Franco Zeffirelli for Luchino Visconti.
The shop blinds would go up to reveal the Kowalskis apartment

22
58
62
70
71

81

xv


CHAPTER 1

Transatlantic Exchanges: An Introduction

This book was conceived as a response to two questions: the transnational/global turn that American Studies have taken in the past decades,
and the gap in Williams scholarship regarding his relation to a geographical and cultural area that had an enormous yet mostly uncharted influence
on his work. Anna Magnani’s film roles in the 1940s, Italian Neo-realist
cinema, the theater of Eduardo De Filippo and of Salvatore Di Giacomo,
as well as the actual experience of Italian life and culture during his long

stays in the country, and—though more indirectly—his relationship with
Italian-American long-time companion Frank Merlo were some of the elements shaping Williams’ literary output.
During my research the influence turned out to be—not unexpectedly—reciprocal, revealing the author (and soon the celebrity) and his
work as fruitful sites for the investigation of transcultural relationships
between Italy and the USA in a period of time that goes from the highly
politicized post-World War II years to the present: seven decades of profound changes in moral and aesthetic canons. It is exactly the interaction
between these two features of Italian society that the book looks at, from
the perspective of Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre.
Working on a US playwright in Italy, in fact, has inevitably involved
many fields of speculation: the conditions and the features of drama staged
in both countries, the different stage direction and acting techniques as
well as stage design over the decades, the practices of cultural exportationimportation, the sexual mores against which the dramatic plots were

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
A. Clericuzio, Tennessee Williams and Italy,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31927-8_1

1


2

A. CLERICUZIO

judged, the various critical approaches of newspapers and journals, as well
as the role of Italian censorship, which was never indifferent to Tennessee
Williams’ artistic output.
This leads to the identification of the physical sites involved in the
research: since no publication in book form exists on this subject, most
of the work has been done in archives that hold unpublished material, as

well as in libraries. From the National Libraries in Rome and Florence,
where most of the periodical publications of the twentieth century are collected, to the Central Archive (the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome)
and the Film section of the Ministero per i Beni Culturali (the Ministry of
National Heritage and Culture), in which unpublished government documents regarding censorship are gathered, to the Luchino Visconti archive,
and the Drama Archive of Burcardo (Rome), which collects newspaper
clippings, playbills, and other materials regarding some of Williams’ works
staged in Italy.
Tennessee Williams’ work being by no means limited to theater and
drama, his impact on and his connections with Italian culture go beyond
the world of theater, to encompass prose fiction, poetry, and, in greater
measure, the history of cinema, as his name was for many generations of
Italians associated more with films than with drama (Savioli 1983). This
does not mean that Tennessee Williams and Italy investigates Williams’
creative role as an “author” (or co-author) of what have come to be identified as “his” films. This book, instead, considers the “Tennessee Williams
Films” as part of what audiences and critics ascribed to his authorship. In
other words, motion pictures as different in style and in subject matter as
Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll and José Quintero’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
are here studied as undisputed specimens of Tennessee Williams’ creative
genius, as it was perceived in Italy and not as works in the canon of one
or the other director. At the same time, this study acknowledges previous
critical literature regarding his films, which have been analyzed with different perspectives by other scholars, namely by Maurice Yacowar and Gene
D. Phillips (authors of two early studies that lacked a sturdy theoretical
approach) and, more recently, by R. Barton Palmer and William Robert
Bray in their extensively researched and illuminating volume Hollywood’s
Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America.
A note should be added, which regards my entire study, but especially
Chap. 2. Since in this section I address the construction of Williams’ reputation in Italy, I cannot but refer to someone else’s work on this subject,
though it is concerned with the USA. In her study of the critical reception

TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES. AN INTRODUCTION

3

of the playwright, building on previous scholarship by John Gassner,
Annette Saddik has distinguished between “popular reviewers, i.e. those
writing mainly for the newspapers immediately after a performance,” and a
second group of critics whose members were mainly affiliated with weekly
and monthly periodicals as well as academic journals. “This distinction will
serve in establishing whether there existed divergent levels of enthusiasm
for Williams’ work among his critics according to differing affiliations and
venues”1 (Saddik 1999, 12).
Though distinctions were not so sharp in Italy, some differences in
the treatment of the playwright are noticeable. In Italian academia virtually no attention whatsoever was devoted to Tennessee Williams before
the twenty-first century, in spite of Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli’s remark
that among US writers working in the early 1960s, his output (be it for
theater or for other genres), was by far the most widely covered by the
Italian press of the time (1982, 7). Tedeschini Lalli was one of the founders of American Studies in Italy in the mid-1950s, and the total neglect of
Williams’ oeuvre on the part of academic members for over half a century
already reveals a lot about the reception that the writer was receiving in
Italy. A too-strict dividing line between high-brow and low-brow culture
in the tradition of Italian academic scholarship led many intellectuals for
years to look down on Williams as an uninteresting phenomenon of popular culture. One book on Tennessee Williams was published in Italian, no
earlier than 2005, a chronology of his life and works which, paradoxically,
is also sadly full of mistakes, typos, and platitudes.
Still, in the 40 or so years from when the first news about the playwright reached Italian readers to his death in 1983 several hundred articles
on Williams were published in Italian. This means that it is important to
distinguish between the popular reviewer and the more objective and/or
cultivated critic in Italy as well. This distinction, though, will not lead to
an explanation of why Williams’ reputation followed a quite schizophrenic

pattern of praise and rejection for at least the first three decades of his
activity. It was not a matter of cultural milieus (high-brow versus lowbrow), for sometimes the cultured critic was harsher and more narrowminded than the unknown newspaper reviewer.
In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of cultural
importation and of intellectual reception that shaped Tennessee Williams’
career in Italy, I have chosen to quote the text alone if the reviewer is
an otherwise unknown journalist, and to give some information about
the critic whose name and opinion had greater prominence in Italian


4

A. CLERICUZIO

culture, as in the case of Alberto Moravia, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe
Prezzolini, Silvio D’Amico, Morando Morandini, Mario Soldati, and others. At the same time, when it seemed relevant, I have identified the source
of a piece of criticism as coming from one or another kind of publication,
considering as more pertinent, this goes without saying, drama journals
rather than gossip weeklies. One more distinction that will be found in the
book is the political affiliation of the publications, be it that of left-wing
Espresso or the right-wing Specchio.
Williams’ connection to Italy also directly shaped some of his works,
namely The Rose Tattoo, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and The Milk
Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, that are set in Italy or in Italian-American
communities and are very revealing of the practices of transatlantic cultural
exchanges that were taking place after World War II.  Williams scholars
have long looked unsuccessfully for the possible sources for these works,
especially for The Rose Tattoo.
This book takes into account the circulation of cultural and, more specifically, dramatic works in Italy during the years in which Williams spent
many months in Rome and met artists, common people, actors, and writers. Articles in Italian newspapers of the time confirm that he often went
to the theater, even though he did not understand the language. I have

thus been able to find in the plays that were staged in Rome in the midto late 1940s the unmistakable sources for Williams’ idea of Italian and
Italian-American culture and life as he was going to re-create it in The
Rose Tattoo.
Besides this, the book goes on to follow the establishment of his reputation in Italy from the early years of his career to the twenty-first century.
As a critic has stated with regard to the USA, “the story of Williams’ changing reputation necessarily tells a story of the changes in what it means to
be reputable: what it means to be a woman with a ‘certain’ reputation, or
to be a reputable man, or to have—man or woman—a disreputable sexuality” (Kaplan 2011a, ix–x). This undoubtedly applies to Italian culture as
well. Indeed, the playwright’s reputation in his beloved land of election
fluctuated during the decades due to a number of factors that included the
characteristics of plays staged in Italy at the time (which shaped the critics’
expectations and reactions), the sexual mores against which his own plays
were judged, and the practices of cultural exchange that marked the relationship between the USA and Italy. Tennessee Williams’ art, considered
in general as including his plays, his fiction, and the films adapted from his
works, were intellectual goods with a high transcultural value, as Italy, like


TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES. AN INTRODUCTION

5

many other Western countries, eagerly awaited every new Williams title,
be it on the stage, in book form, or on the big screen. The author’s signature themes were in fact part of an ongoing cultural debate that regarded
the most “public” arts (film and theater) and were addressed not only by
foreign writers and directors, but also by Italian ones. These goods also
had an economic value as, especially in their cinematic versions, they could
enforce the hegemony of US pictures imported in Italy to the detriment
of Italian-made films. This means that censorship was not only a “moral”
tool, but, sometimes, also an economic one.
As regards his theater, after the slight interest aroused by The Glass
Menagerie (more because of the director who staged it than because of

the author), the episodic structure of A Streetcar Named Desire baffled
critics for quite some time, as had happened in other European countries,
for most of them were used to more traditional theater pieces. Indeed,
the most important factor to which Williams’ oeuvre is linked in the
1940s is that his works were being staged in Italy by Luchino Visconti.
At a time in which the Italian film industry was forced to stop production
until a few months after the liberation from the Germans, Visconti turned
from film-making to theater and practically served as the cultural ambassador who first introduced Williams’ plays to Italians. He directed The
Glass Menagerie in 1946 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949 receiving
harsh criticism of himself, of the plays, of the playwright, or of what some
reviewers believed was the US life-style as could be assumed by simply
watching Williams’ plays.
After a few years, and after initial prejudice was overcome, critics began
to appreciate Williams’ plays and to acknowledge the unique import of
the combined artistic features of Visconti and Williams. Still, the history
of the US playwright’s theater under the direction of Luchino Visconti
was all but uneventful. Censorship was lurking behind every new project
and Visconti had to give up his plans to stage The Rose Tattoo because the
play was denied permission, while, after a few rehearsals, the company was
too scared to even submit Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the censorship office.
In the decade between 1951 and 1961, the office had turned particularly strict for a number of reasons that are investigated in the following
chapters.
A large amount of unpublished documents from Italian government
archives have been consulted, regarding permits and vetoes to Tennessee
Williams’ plays. Documents regarding both the allowed works and those
vetoed by the government provide a fascinating, untold history of Italian


6

A. CLERICUZIO

mores, Italian politics and Italian culture in the 20 years following the end
of World War II, as well as quite unexpected insights into the relationship
between Italy and the USA in matters of cultural politics. As strict censorship rules were being applied also in the film industry at least until the
early 1960s, the Italian censors’ approach to the motion pictures adapted
from Tennessee Williams’ works is also relevant to this study. Some almost
unbelievable changes to the original dialogues of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar
Named Desire were suggested by Warner Bros. themselves in order to be
allowed to distribute the film in Italian theaters at a time when Catholic
and political (often combined) control over the circulation of popular culture was stronger than usual. The reels of the film were in fact left on the
shelf for three years before the audience could watch it, in spite of the
fact that its world premiere was given at the Venice Film Festival in 1951,
where the picture was awarded two prizes, one for Vievien Leigh and one
for the director. Even though film historians confirm that the practice
of dubbing foreign films in Italy started involving a total “respect” for
the original only in the mid-1960s, it is almost unbelievable to see what
drastic changes Warner Bros. in Italy were willing to make to the original
dialogue of Kazan’s Streetcar in order to have it distributed.
Furthermore, Tennessee Williams and Italy addresses all the main productions of Williams’ plays in Italy through the decades, providing a history of their different stagings and of their reception, on the background
of the development of dramatic techniques, and of audience tastes over
the years. It is not exaggeration to say that some pivotal changes in the
tastes of Italian theatergoers and film-buffs of the 1950s and 1960s were
indeed brought about by Williams’ style and subject-matter, as this was
undoubtedly happening not only in his home country (Palmer and Bray
2009, 5). His innovative aesthetics left a stronger mark on Italian culture
than has been assumed so far, and his name is doubtlessly that of the US
writer who has “circulated” most widely in Italy in the four decades after
World War II, only comparable to that of Ernest Hemingway.
In the long run, the play that was staged more often in Italy was, surprisingly enough, not Streetcar, globally considered his masterpiece, but

The Glass Menagerie, which had some 15 major stage productions and was
also produced three times for television. A Streetcar Named Desire, possibly because it was staged every 10 to 15 years, is an interesting case study
of the evolution of stage direction and scene design in Italian theater,
from the more realistic New Orleans setting of the Visconti production
(designed by Franco Zeffirelli), to the highly stylized and minimal 1993


TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES. AN INTRODUCTION

7

stage, to the all-but minimal, somehow hyper-realistic setting of the latest
major production in 2012.
Besides the specific features of the stagings, which reflect aesthetic
changes over the years, an interesting aspect of the reception of Williams’
works in Italy is that, at least until the late 1950s, most reviewers looked at
his plays—and often at the film adaptations—as specimens of US society.
They maintained that from plays and films, aspects of the actual US Way
of Life could be inferred, and their comments were sometimes harsh judgments of what they considered to be the conditions of ordinary people in
the New World at the time.
Matters of sexuality were understandably of primary relevance, as critics never avoided addressing Tennessee Williams’ signature topics and his
recognizable characters, whose fictional and dramatic lives provoked outrage. This shows how deep-rooted sexual taboos were in the burgeoning
middle-class culture of the post-World War II years, as well as how constant
and unceasingly strong was the power of the Catholic Church over the
circulation of popular culture. Hints at the homosexuality of some characters, but even more those at the “dissolute” lives of Williams’ women were
considered as sinful, in some cases disgusting and downright objectionable. “Immoral” was the most frequently used expression. The development of social attitudes towards sex in the following decades is obviously
also mirrored in the reviews to Williams’ plays staged after the 1960s, as
sexual liberation was slowly making its way into a country where a mixture of machismo and a Catholic sense of guilt was hardly ever overcome.
While some sections of the Italian intelligentsia were ready to dismiss his
plays and themes as obsolete when some radical changes were making

their way in various fields of the arts and of society at large, the same plays
and themes were being appropriated by a cluster of queer Italian artists
who recognized the unending potential of Williams’ properties.
Williams’ highest level of visibility in Italy—not necessarily of appreciation—was in the years between 1957 and 1964, when most films adapted
from his works were distributed in their dubbed versions and theaters kept
staging his plays, without the towering figure of Visconti, that had somehow overshadowed Williams for the first few years. It was in the early to
mid-1960s that, after a series of flops, his career dwindled and his theater,
in Italy, became a specimen of past dramatic conventions that the new
experimental companies were explicitly demolishing. In a pattern similar
to several other Western countries, shortly before his death in 1983, the
fervent season of alternative theater was slowly giving place to a cyclic


8

A. CLERICUZIO

return to “traditional” texts, often performed in utterly new fashions, as
the discoveries of decades of experimentation were being used to allow
a creative dialogue with classic texts. Williams’ plays, by the end of the
twentieth century, had no doubt entered the canon of modern classics for
Italian critics and theater practitioners.
Besides the already mentioned, universally recognized icons of Luchino
Visconti and Anna Magnani, the story that unfolds in this book takes into
account such twentieth-century giants as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico
Fellini, François Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Moravia, Roberto
Rossellini, poet laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, lesser known Italian artists
as Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, as well as contemporary filmmakers, playwrights, and stage directors. As Williams’ works
circulated in Italy when the Western world was taking its first steps toward
a really globalized culture, the book inevitably crosses national boundaries to include a number of artists (stage or film directors and performers)

who were connected to Williams’ works in Italy, but came from other
countries, namely Belgium, Russia, France and, in later years, Germany
and Argentina, for Williams’ aesthetics has always proved a strong magnet
for international confrontation.

NOTE
1. Similar research has been conducted by Jürgen Wolter (1993, 199–221) as
regards Germany and by Dirk Gindt (2011, 153–167) as regards Sweden,
as well as by most other essays published in Tenn at One Hundred (Kaplan
2011a, b), in relation to the USA.

WORKS CITED
Gindt, Dirk. 2011. Tennessee Williams and the Swedish Academy: Why He Never
Won The Nobel Prize. In Tenn at One Hundred. The Reputation of Tennessee
Williams, ed. David Kaplan, 153–167. East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen.
Kaplan, David. 2011a. Introduction. In Tenn at One Hundred. The Reputation of
Tennessee Williams, ed. David Kaplan, ix–xii. East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen.
———. 2011b. Mr. Williams is Advised to Stay Silent. In Tenn at One Hundred.
The Reputation of Tennessee Williams, ed. David Kaplan, 183–207. East
Brunswick, NJ: Hansen.
Palmer, R. Barton, and W. Robert Bray. 2009. Hollywood’s Tennessee. The Williams
Films and Postwar America. Austin: University of Texas Press.


TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES. AN INTRODUCTION

9

Saddik, Annette J.  1999. The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of
Tennessee Williams’ Later Plays. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press.

Savioli, Aggeo. 1983. Muore a New York lo scrittore Tennessee Williams. L’Unità,
February 26, 20.
Tedeschini Lalli, Biancamaria. 1982. Prefazione. In Repertorio bibliografico della
letteratura americana in Italia, vol IV, 7–8. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura.
Wolter, Jürgen C.  1993. The Cultural Context of A Streetcar Named Desire in
Germany. In Confronting Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Essays
in Critical Pluralism, ed. Philip C. Kolin, 199–221. Westport, CT: Greenwood.


CHAPTER 2

Tennessee Williams’ Italian Reputation

“A WORLD THEATER”
The first time Italians ever had news of an American playwright named
Tennessee Williams was through the pages of the specialized theater
and drama journal, Il dramma. In the December 1945 issue an anonymous correspondent from the USA wrote a lengthy article on The Glass
Menagerie, translating the title of the play not as Lo zoo di vetro, as it was
going to be titled for the Italian premiere and in the following years, but as
Il serraglio di vetro. “Serraglio” was the exact translation of “menagerie,”
but the term was immediately eliminated from the title and is rarely ever
used in today’s common language.
Williams was presented as a 31-year-old author (he would go on lying
about his age for some more time) who had “studied in Jowa” [sic] and
who had just been granted the New York Circle Drama Critics Award for
The Glass Menagerie. Little else was said about him and just one paragraph
was devoted to the plot, in which Laura was presented as “crippled from
birth.” The rest of the one-page article is a transcription of an interview
Williams had given on the radio, presented by “the great playwright’s son,

Eugene O’Neill, jr.”
At the end of the article, a short note in smaller print reminded the readers that the young playwright had already been introduced in the previous
issue of the journal. “As can be seen,” went the note, “we have already
noticed Tennessee Williams, but his name has now become familiar with

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
A. Clericuzio, Tennessee Williams and Italy,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31927-8_2

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12

A. CLERICUZIO

the success of the new play” (“Ribalta” 1946). A short text in the former
issue was, therefore, one of the first appearances of Tennessee Williams’
name in Italian print. Published in early December 1945, it consisted of a
few lines as a caption to a picture of the author with Donald Windham and
Edmund Gwenn, the former two presented as the authors of Tu mi toccasti
(You Touched Me), from the D. H. Lawrence novella. The blurb focused
on Gwenn, who, in spite of his 70 years of age, gave the captain’s character
“an extraordinarily youthful nature” (“Donald” 1945). The picture was
relatively small, and shared the space of the photographic portfolio with
a full-page image of Clare Boothe, whose Women (Donne) was presented
in translation in the same issue, and, among others, with a big caricature
of Anna Magnani playing in Simon Gantillon’s Maya in a Roman theater.
The full-length article is relevant not only as the first substantial specimen of Italy’s interest in Williams, but more so as it contains statements
that have never been published in English. During his radio interview,

Williams justified the unusual lack of action in The Glass Menagerie with
his need to “foreground mainly the thoughts and the nature of these characters.” “I was more interested in their inner conflicts than in dramatic
action,” he went on:
The characters are three dreamers…. Then there’s a man of action who only
appears in the final scene…. The theme could have been the subject of a
story or a novel, thus offering more psychological insight, but I believe novels are made of written words only and words are not enough to satisfy me.
What I find much more interesting—or at least as interesting as words—is
the visual and plastic element of theater. I like lights and the use of light that
can be done in theater. I think of my plays in visual terms, I see the color of
female characters and even the jewelry they are supposed to wear.
I see nuances of wall-paper, shadows projected by candelabra. I have all
the visual elements of my play in my mind before even starting to write it.
The expression I have for this, and that I often use, is plastic theater….
I am deeply convinced of the future possibilities of theater. Theater will
surely be a great strength for international comprehension. My big dream is
a state theater, possibly one for each State of the Union. I wish these theaters
held festivals and competitions every year. I think they should be sponsored
with public money, like schools or parks.
Fewer wars will be waged if people feel higher emotions. Good theater
builds comprehension between all classes and races. It helps people look
through other people’s eyes and experiences.
Through mutual understanding we can fight fundamentalisms, suspicion, hatred and all that creates barriers between people in the world. The


TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ ITALIAN REPUTATION

13

war has made us all feel closer together: we should stay as close as that. I
wish we could move towards a world theater, and I think that we might not

be far from it, now. We must make this dream come true in all the countries
of the world.1
(“Ribalta” 1946)

Here is the interview as it was published in Italian:
I personaggi sono tre sognatori…. Poi c’è un uomo d’azione, che compare
soltanto alla scena finale…. Questo argomento, lo capisco, avrebbe potuto
essere sfruttato con superiori vantaggi psicologici, in un racconto o in un
romanzo, ma—secondo me—i romanzi sono fatti soltanto di parole scritte
e le parole non bastano a soddisfarmi. Ciò che mi pare molto più interessante—o per lo meno altrettanto interessante quanto le parole—è la parte
visiva e plastica del teatro. Mi piacciono le luci, l’uso delle luci. Io penso
le mie commedie in termini visivi, vedo il colore dei personaggi femminili,
perfino i gioielli che devono avere indosso.
Vedo le sfumature delle tappezzerie alle pareti, le ombre proiettate dai
candelabri. Io ho in mente tutti i particolari visivi della commedia prima
ancora di mettermi a scriverla. Ho un’espressione per indicare questo, che
adopero molto volentieri: teatro plastico….
Infine, io sono profondamente convinto delle possibilità avvenire [sic] di
sviluppo del teatro. Il teatro, infatti, sarà certamente una grande forza per la
comprensione internazionale.
Il mio sogno è un grande Teatro di Stato, possibilmente uno per ogni
Stato dell’Unione. Vorrei che tutti questi teatri tenessero dei Festival ogni
anno e facessero delle gare fra loro. Penso che dovrebbero essere finanziati
col danaro pubblico, come le scuole e i giardini. Tanto migliori saranno le
emozioni che la gente prova e tanto meno saremo portati a future guerre. Il
buon teatro crea comprensione fra tutte le classi sociali e tutte le razze. Aiuta
la gente a guardare attraverso gli occhi e l’esperienza degli altri.
Per mezzo della reciproca comprensione possiamo combattere il fanatismo, il sospetto, l’odio e tutto ciò che serve a creare barriere fra i popoli
del mondo. La guerra ci ha stretti più vicini tutti quanti: dovremmo restare
così affiatati. Io vorrei che ci si avviasse verso un teatro mondiale, e penso

che possiamo essere vicini. Bisogna realizzare questo sogno in tutti i paesi
del mondo.2

Apart from his well-known statements on plastic theater, Williams was
here voicing quite original opinions on the transcultural aspects of the
literary genre he had chosen, at the same time feeling the need to justify
his choice of a medium that could still risk appearing less canonical than


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A. CLERICUZIO

fiction. His innovative ideas were prompted by the victorious atmosphere
of Post-War USA, even though most of his plays were marked by profound
feelings of sadness and loss. Indeed, he was already applying this transnational perspective to his early works: the opening of The Glass Menagerie
juxtaposes the USA to Europe: “In Spain there was revolution. Here there
was only shouting and confusion. In Spain there was Guernica. Here there
were disturbances of labor, sometimes pretty violent, in otherwise peaceful
cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Saint Louis” (T 1 145).
A Streetcar Named Desire, universally considered one of the most
meaningful expressions of Southern culture, represents this culture as
it clashes with a second-generation Polish immigrant. The perspective
through which Williams meant this character to give his personal view
of the nation had to be “foreign,” for Stanley’s previous incarnations
in the early manuscripts of the play were as an Italian first and then as
an Irishman (Scott and Rutkoff 1999, 330). Right after the success of
Streetcar on Broadway, as we shall see in Chap. 5, Williams became infatuated with Italy and Italian culture. This infatuation was at the root of The
Rose Tattoo, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop
Here Anymore, of Silva Vacarro, the Sicilian character in Baby Doll, and

led him to transform Battle of Angels, a very Southern play, into Orpheus
Descending, in which he added an Italian twist to the original story.
Though he came to know Italians, Italian Americans and their culture in
his thirties, Williams’ interest in the subject must have had older roots.
One of his very first plays already had an Italian American family as main
characters, namely The Dark Room, one of the original three pieces titled
American Blues (together with Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry and The Case of the
Crushed Petunias) that he submitted to the Group Theater in 1939. The
following year, at the age of 29, in a letter to a friend, he quoted Enrico
Caruso’s song “Il Paradiso” as an apt description of a perfect day at Cape
Cod (Windham 1977, 8).
Beyond the boundaries of this life-long love for Italy, “Europe’s intelligentsia nourished Williams’ creativity for over four decades in ways that
his traditional Southern roots never could. Thus, while the US South (and
St. Louis, by opposition) helped shape Williams’ literary thesis, Europe
often served as the muse through which that Southern thesis was given a
voice” (Bak 2014, xxii). The transnational aspect of his plots was further
enhanced by the artistic form chosen by Williams: no other literary genre is
as cross-cultural in its border passages as dramatic theater. Whereas poetry
and fiction undergo a translation and virtually no further changes in their