French Stowaways on an American Milk Train: Williams, Cocteau and Peyrefitte

French Stowaways on an American Milk Train: Williams, Cocteau and Peyrefitte To Jacques Ouichamaud GILBERT DEBUSSCHER The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore occupies a special place in Tennessee Williams's career. It was the last of his fuU-Iength plays to be produced on Broadway before acute personal problems forced the playwright into a prolonged artistic eclipse. Moreover, it was the only one of his plays to follow such a complex path of development. Based as usual on a short story - "Man Bring This Up Road," published in 1959 - but apparently conceived earlier, it evolved quickly from a first dramatization presented at the Spoleto Festival on July II, 1962 through at least two further versions opening on Broadway in rapid succession on January 16, 1963 and January I, 1964, the second closing after only four performances. During the course of these rewritings, Williams attempted to make his sardonic tale of mortality and sex resonate with universal overtones. The kabuki-like stage assistants that provide whatever unifying frame the play has were presumably added to evoke the new philosophy of acceptance that Williams encountered in his first trip to the Far East. Flora Goforth's "friend" Vera Ridgeway-Condotti, whose name is meant to cover the Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean components of the contemporary Western world, was rebaptized "the Witch," probably in orderto capture for her the aura of Europe's time-honored tradition oflegends and folk tales. ' In addition, as critics quickly perceived, Williams had fashioned his tale into a contemporary version of Everyman, the archetypal play about dying.' His version therefore comes close to that of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Jedermann: das Spiel vom Sterhen des reichen Mannes. The story of Christopher Flanders and Flora Goforth is, as critics promptly reproved, Williams's umpteenth version of the confrontation between a young muscular male and an aging sensual woman, the battle of wills between "Adonis and the Gargoyle."3 But though the material is familiar enough from previous plays, it must have proved intractable, perhaps owing to personal 400 GILBERT DEBUSSCHER circumstances, in this new guise. The quick succession ofrewritings testifies to the artist's dogged efforts to force the work into shape. Among the devices Williams relied upon to give his drama a semblance of direction, I would suggest, is one that has thus far escaped notice: the imposition of a preexisting pattern borrowed from a successful French play, Jean Cocteau's L'Aigle d deux tetes. Opening in 1946, Cocteau's romantic drama had taken postwar Paris by surprise: Edwige Feuilliere and Jean Marais in the leading roles turned it into a triumph. It was translated into English and further adapted for the stage by Ronald Duncan, opening on Broadway on MaICh 19, 1947 as The Eagle Has Two Heads, with Tallulah Bankhead as the Queen. It seems likely that Williams would have seen this version,' since at this time he was in and out of town for preliminary work on the production of A Streetcar Named Desire which Cocteau was to adapt for the French stage. His attendance is the more probable because he was a great admirer of Bankhead; earlier he had described himself as experiencing an "intense infatuation" with the actress.s The parallels between the two plays, extending from sets to characters, plot, and even symbols, are too numerous to be coincidental. The decor of the plays is similar. Williams's stylized setting, besides helping to remove the play from the realm of conventional realistic drama, may also have prevented an all-too-ready identification of its model. In Milk Train, the thIee different sets that appear in the successive acts of L'Aigle are juxtaposed in a single set which encompasses bedroom, library and terrace. Act I of the French play confronts us with the twin ofFlora's bedroom: "Le decor represente une des chambresde la Reine, au cMteau Krantz . .. . Celte chambre est asset vaste. Un lit d baldaquin occupe Ie milieu" (p. IS). In Act II we find the correspondent of Flora's library: "La bibliotheque de la Reine, d Krantz. C'est une grande piece pleine de livres sur des rayons etsur des tables" (p. 70). Finally, the third...