Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 11

Young Peter Orlovsky looks like he could have lit “the world on FAH-EE-UH” years before the idea struck Fun’s lead vocalist (Nate Ruess.)

Playwright Tennessee Williams isn’t a bad match for Clark Gable, plus a few pounds and a receding hairline.

And how about Ivan Turgenev? Give the man a shave and a haircut and he could have played Mr. Matuschek or the Wizard of Oz as well as Frank Morgan.

Another writer-to-writer doppelganger: I give you a young Thomas Mann and Australia’s only Nobel Laureate, Patrick White.

And for the fans of Mad Men (and tortoiseshell specs), here’s Truman Capote and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris). 

The many-tentacled influence of Miss Eudora Welty

We’ve covered Eudora Welty’s influence on a Grammy-winning album here. But she may also have inspired the titles of a couple of famous plays, as well.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” premiered in early 1949, thirteen years after Welty’s short story “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” a story whose main character is named Bowman.   Bowman? Loman? Coincidence?... Yeah, probably. But still, both have to do with man’s search for meaning and worth and accomplishment in life, and both characters come up empty in their search and then die. So I’m going to go ahead and say: DUN, DUN, DUN!)

But what about Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which premiered at the end of 1947? The title makes an allegory of the streetcar label that marked the line serving Desire Street in New Orleans. Did he come upon the idea on his own? Mmmm probably, but take a look at this excerpt from Eudora Welty’s novel from two years earlier, Delta Wedding :

“They had fooled everybody successfully about their honeymoon, because instead of going to the Peabody in Memphis they had gone to the St. Charles in New Orleans. Walking through the two afternoons down streets narrow as hallways, they had to press back against the curb, against uncertain dark-green doors, to let the streetcars get through. The streetcars made an extraordinary clangor at such close quarters, as they did in the quiet of the night, and some of them had “Desire” across the top. Could that have been the name of a street? She had not asked then; she did not much wonder now.”

I’m going to go ahead and give her credit for that one, too. Call it penance for this post.

H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.