Complicity Across the Atlantic

A Literary Liaison between Two Androgynous Artists

Abstract

Never anxious about artistic ‘borrowing,’ Tennessee Williams reputedly considered himself heir to this perennial practice as he lavishly ‘littered’ his own ‘original’ works with overt and covert references to literary luminaries from past and present. And yet, it is safe to state that much of his cultural renown is due to his unique artistic sensitivity. However, with one fellow artist this barefaced borrowing takes on a reciprocal turn – nurtured by a shared fascination with the mythological figure of Orpheus, an ambitious adaptation of Streetcar by one of them, an equally shared admiration by and fascination for the actress Tallulah Bankhead, and finally a conspicuous copying of significant chunks from The Eagle Has Two Heads by the other. Indeed, the artistic interactions between Tennessee Williams and the French paragon of modernism Jean Cocteau strike by their repeated returns. This essay therefore picks up where leading Williams scholar Gilbert Debusscher’s analysis about the impact of Cocteau’s Eagle on The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore left off thirty years ago. By both retracing the intricacies of their mutual influences while assessing the stylistic and semiotic means with which these came into being, it purports to present an analogy-based reassessment of the Williams-Cocteau interchange and of the so-called ‘problem of influence’ alike.