THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS?: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY

Abstract

Until the 1920s, Europe supplied almost all of what counted as elite culture in the United States: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Brahms, Cervantes, Moliere. But with the advent of Modernism and the Machine Age, the US became the world's leading economic power and began to export wide range of goods, from soda fountains and slot machines to jazz, movies and plays. This is not to say that la mode americaine universally embraced. On the contrary, it became source of great controversy among European elites.After World War II, the Marshall Plan and the start of the Cold War, cultural exportation became highly charged politically as the US State Department tried to disseminate what it deemed salutary, anticommunist art, like the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, to devastated Europe. More covertly, the CIA founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1950 to try to prove that liberal democracies could produce elite culture that outshone that of the Soviet bloc. Because the US was struggling against the international view that it essentially nation without culture, culture became a crucial arena in which to fight for global dominance.1 In Europe, Tennessee Williams (who, in fact, had attended the inaugural meeting of the CCF) became favorite import and A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin notes, took the world stage by storm.2 The play quickly translated or directed by some of Europe's most eminent theatre artists, Jean Cocteau, Luchino Visconti, Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman, and became popular success and subject of critical controversy. (A notable exception to this rule Spain, which, for political reasons, had to wait until 1961 to see it onstage.3) No other US play received such an impressive European welcome, and A Streetcar Named Desire continues to hold the stage around the world.If Tennessee Williams remains the best-known US playwright outside his native land, however, it is due in large part to the fifteen feature films made of his plays between 1950 and 1970, films far better known than his plays in the non-Anglophone world. Say Un tramway nomme Desir or Un tranvia llamado Deseo to cultured French or Spaniard, and he or she will likely think of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Indeed, Williams' films continue to ghost his European stage productions, despite the fact that most represent distorted, melodramatic and ruthlessly expurgated versions of his plays. The relentless slippage, however, between stage and screen, Broadway and Hollywood, is indicative of serious difficulty in analyzing the reception of Williams' plays both in the US and abroad. No other major US playwright has been the subject of as much controversy as Williams, over his works' alleged sensationalism, violence and frank treatment of sexual desires, practices and identities.A similar slippage between the playwright and his work made Williams' homosexuality the subject of opprobrium long before he came out in 1970 and then later with the publication of his notorious Memoirs. These problems are compounded by the widely propagated, erroneous and, I would venture, homophobic myth that Williams and his writing suffered an irreversible decline following The Night of the Iguana in 1961. (The wages of sin, and all that.) Thomas Keith points out that the marketing of his films, and of the Signet movie tie-in editions of the plays, solidified the image of Tennessee Williams in the public imagination as that of writer of violence, sex, scandal, and shock.4 In Europe even more than in the US, Williams' sensational themes - fetishism, castration, rape, homosexuality, cannibalism - became the source of persistent controversy.Williams' plays provide an especially telling example of my thesis, which I have developed elsewhere, that serious theatre in the US since the 1920s has been constructed by the arbiters of taste as representing an unnatural intercourse of highbrow and lowbrow.5 Williams' work in particular has been perceived as recycling and recombining elements of, on the one hand, popular entertainments like pulp fiction, vaudeville and melodrama, and, on the other, poetic, high Modemist, symbol-laden art. …