Tennessee
Williams Annual Review
Number 6— 2003
|
Incantato della Divina Costiera: A One-Act
Sketch for The Rose Tattoo
Brian Parker
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Il
Cane Incantato della Divina Costiera can
be found in two manuscripts of the Tennessee Williams collection of the HRHRC
at the University of Texas in Austin. The first ms.—Ms. (Williams, T.)
Works / The rose tattoo: [unsorted pages of incomplete drafts] T. and Tccms.
[c. 409 pp.] with A. emendations on c. 197 pp./n.d.—is a composite file
which contains an incomplete fragment entitled "A Tender
Scene (1-act sketch from which 'The Rose Tattoo' derived)." The
second ms.—Ms. (Williams, T.) Works / The rose tattoo / Il canne incantato
delle divina costiera (one-act sketch) / Tms. with A. revisions [16 pp.] / n.d.
/ Basis for The Rose Tattoo—is a complete text of
the one-act, with "A Tender Scene" crossed out
and the "Il Cane . . ." title written above in Williams's
own handwriting.
As usual, Williams got
his Italian wrong. Confusing it with Spanish, he misspelled it as "Il Canne
Incantade delle Divina Costiere," and mistranslated it as "The Dog Enchanted
by the Divine View." This suggests that it was a phrase that he overheard and
only partially understood, so its relevance to the play is slight. In the text,
the suitor, Paul Mangiacavallo, is described as "exactly like a big and excessively
friendly dog" who gazes fixedly at Clara, presumably his "divine view."
Actually, the Italian
means "The Enchanted Dog of the Divine Coastline." The "divine coastline" is
the bay of Naples (as later in The Milktrain Doesn't Stop Here Anymore),
and the "enchanted dog" is probably Cerberus, the guardian of Hades or Avernus,
whom Orpheus enchanted when he descended to the underworld in search of his
wife, Eurydice. There was a Lake of Avernus near the Greek city of Baia in the
north of the Bay of Naples which was reputed to be the mouth of hell.1
The one-act has many anticipations
of the later play, though the names Paul and Clara are probably derived from
D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (without in any way resembling the novel's
characters). The setting is a gaudily decorated shot-gun cottage "on the gulf-coast
of Mississippi"; Clara is "a plump widow of Italian extraction," a seamstress
(though little is made of this) with a fifteen-year old daughter named Rose
who is out on her first date; and Paul, surnamed "Mangiacavallo" (as in Tattoo),
has an "engagingly clownish" face, sweats in the hot weather, and offers a gift
of chocolates whose freshness is in question. The song Come le rose is
sung softly behind Clara's memory of her dead husband (the manner of whose death
is not specified); and there are prying neighbours, one of whom is referred
to in a deleted reference as the "strega" (or witch)—though there is no
other attempt to suggest Italian dialect or accent in the one-act. A marauding
cat anticipates Tattoo's intrusive goat; a middle-aged voyeur who spies
on Rose getting dressed foreshadows Alvaro's encounter with the half-naked girl
at the end of Tattoo; and the details of a smashed goldfish bowl and
an electric player-piano which runs amok occur also in early drafts of the full-length
play.
Both mss. specifically
claim that this is "A 1-act sketch from which 'The Rose Tattoo' derived"; but
some of the details, such as the name "Mangiacavallo" (applied to the suitor)
and the deleted term "strega," suggest that it may possibly have been spun off
(or revised) while Williams was already working on drafts of the full-length
play.2 This would be quite consistent with his very fluid, improvisatory
mode of composition. Alternatively, they may be early details that he returned
to later. Either possibility is consistent with his manner of work.3
Notes
1 Alternatively, though less probably, the Italian may refer to Sirius, the dog-star.
One of the titles considered for early drafts of Tattoo was "The Dog
of Orion."
2 See: "A Provisional
Stemma for Drafts, Alternatives, and Revisions of Tennessee Williams's The
Rose Tattoo (1951),"Modern Drama 40.2 (1997): 279-94.
3 This research
was funded by grants from the Bibliographical Society of America and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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