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 Magnaniâs 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, andâthough more indirectlyâhis relationship with Italian-American long-time companion Frank Merlo were some of the elements shaping Williamsâ literary output.
During my research the influence turned out to beânot unexpectedlyâreciprocal, 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 Williamsâ 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 exportation-importation, the sexual mores against which the dramatic plots were judged, the various critical approaches of newspapers and journals, as well as the role of Italian censorship, which was never indifferent to Tennessee Williamsâ 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since no publication in book form exists on this subject, most of the work has been done in archives that hold unpublished material, as well as in libraries.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and the Film section of the Ministero per i Beni Culturali (the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture), in which unpublished government documents regarding censorship are gathered, to the Luchino Visconti archive, and the Drama Archive of Burcardo (Rome), which collects newspaper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 Williamsâ works staged in Italy.
Tennessee Williamsâ 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 Williamsâ creative role as an âauthorâ (or co-author) of what have come to be identified as âhisâ films. This book, instead, considers the âTennessee Williams Filmsâ 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 Kazanâs Baby Doll and JosĂ© Quinteroâs The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone are here studied as undisputed specimens of Tennessee Williamsâ 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 Hollywoodâs 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 Williamsâ reputation in Italy, I cannot but refer to someone elseâs work on this subject, though it is concerned with the USA. In her study of the critical reception of the playwright, building on previous scholarship by John Gassner, Annette Saddik has distinguished between âpopular reviewers, i.e. those writing mainly for the newspapers immediately after a performance,â and a second group of critics whose members were mainly affiliated with weekly and monthly periodicals as well as academic journals. âThis distinction will serve in establishing whether there existed divergent levels of enthusiasm for Williamsâ work among his critics according to differing affiliations and venuesâ 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 Lalliâs 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 Williamsâ 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 Williamsâ 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 low-brow), for sometimes the cultured critic was harsher and more narrow-minded 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 Williamsâ 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 culture, as in the case of Alberto Moravia, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Silvio DâAmico, 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.
Williamsâ connection to Italy also directly shaped some of his works, namely The Rose Tattoo, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and The Milk Train Doesnât 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 mid- to late 1940s the unmistakable sources for Williamsâ 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, âthe story of Williamsâ 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 âcertainâ reputation, or to be a reputable man, or to haveâman or womanâa disreputable sexualityâ (Kaplan 2011a, ixâx). This undoubtedly applies to Italian culture as well. Indeed, the playwrightâs 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 criticsâ 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 Williamsâ 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 many other Western countries, eagerly awaited every new Williams title, be it on the stage, in book form, or on the big screen. The authorâs signature themes were in fact part of an ongoing cultural debate that regarded the most âpublicâ 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 âmoralâ 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 Williamsâ 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 Williamsâ 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 Williamsâ plays.
After a few years, and after initial prejudice was overcome, critics began to appreciate Williamsâ plays and to acknowledge the unique import of the combined artistic features of Visconti and Williams. Still, the history of the US playwrightâs 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 Williamsâ plays. Documents regarding both the allowed works and those vetoed by the government provide a fascinating, untold history of Italian 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 censorsâ approach to the motion pictures adapted from Tennessee Williamsâ works is also relevant to this study. Some almost unbelievable changes to the original dialogues of Elia Kazanâs 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 ârespectâ 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 Kazanâs Streetcar in order to have it distributed.
Furthermore, Tennessee Williams and Italy addresses all the main productions of Williamsâ 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 Williamsâ 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 âcirculatedâ 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 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 Williamsâ works in Italy is that, at least until the late 1950s, most reviewers looked at his playsâand often at the film adaptationsâas 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 Williamsâ 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 âdissoluteâ lives of Williamsâ women were considered as sinful, in some cases disgusting and downright objectionable. âImmoralâ was the most frequently used expression. The development of...