Collected Essays Page 17

  The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of the day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars. A viewpoint bounded by affects cannot engage the wider balance of our fates where the great climaxes are found.

  In my opinion, if our stage does not come to pierce through affects to an evaluation of the world it will contract to a lesser psychiatry and an inexpert one at that. We shall be confined to writing an Oedipus without the pestilence, an Oedipus whose catastrophe is private and unrelated to the survival of his people, an Oedipus who cannot tear out his eyes because there will be no standard by which he can judge himself; and Oedipus, in a word, who on learning of his incestuous marriage, instead of tearing out his eyes, will merely wipe away his tears thus to declare his loneliness. Again, where a drama will not engage its relevancy for the race, it will halt at pathos, that tempting shield against ultimate dramatic effect, that counterfeit of meaning.

  Symbolically, as though sensing that we are confined, we have removed the doors and walls and ceilings from our sets. But the knowing eye still sees them there. They may truly disappear and the stage will open to that symbolic stature, that realm where the father is after all not the final authority, that area where he is the son too, that area where religions are made and the giants live, only when we see beyond parents, who are, after all, but the shadows of the gods.

  A great drama is a great jurisprudence. Balance is all. It will evade us until we can once again see man as whole, until sensitivity and power, justice and necessity are utterly face to face, until authority’s justifications and rebellion’s too are tracked even to those heights where the breath fails, where—because the largest point of view as well as the smaller has spoken—truly the rest is silence.

  Ibsen and the Drama of Today

  1994

  I am not scholar enough—or journalist either—to be able to say with any real certainty what Ibsen’s influence is today. I have only impressions, which may or may not be accurate.

  I don’t believe that many of today’s playwrights look to his methods as models, but his standing as a modern has nevertheless improved, I think, over the past thirty or forty years. When I began writing plays in the late thirties, he was a favorite of the Left for his radical politics and rebellious mind. His work, however, not often performed, was frequently regarded as quaintly methodical onion-peeling. If you had the patience to labor through it, an Ibsen play was more like argument in a legal case than an entertainment. Such was the prejudice and ignorance of the time, his most important lack was thought to be the poetic spirit; it was fashionable, as it still is in some places today, to call him more of a carpenter than the visionary architect that Shaw, among others, thought him to be. What the young avant-garde wanted in the thirties, positioned as ever against clunky Broadway realism, was the lyrical voice. Clifford Odets and Sean O’Casey specifically, were the more or less Marxist prophets while Saroyan, a premature or closet absurdist, sang basically for his supper. In the Broadway/West End mainstream Maxwell Anderson and Christopher Fry were trying to wring popular drama from unconventional word usage, reviving even Elizabethan iambics. These were very different writers but they were all attempting to sing the language on the stage, as Yeats had done for a more recondite audience and Eliot, too. All of these were self-conscious artists rather than stage shopsmiths, but they would all have no doubt thought that Ibsen’s time had passed.

  Ibsen’s language, lyrical as it may sound in Scandinavia, does not sing in translation, although his ideas often do. Of course, they were only Ibsen’s realistic social plays that were produced but these became his stamp, his mysticism having been more or less overlooked and his metaphysical side likewise. Probably his more social plays, like the genre itself, are fundamentally optimistic—demanding change, which is itself an upbeat notion and therefore easy to grasp, while his deepest personal thought is the opposite; symbolist, mythic, muffled in pessimism as it surveys the changeless sea, the sky, aging, cowardice, the classic brick walls against which philosophy has always broken its head.

  It is the quasi-journalistic element therefore which came down to later generations, at least in America. He seemed to write about “issues,” rather than circumstance. Especially in the Leftist tide of the thirties his stance was translated into an anti-capitalist militancy, but occasionally his apparent elitism seemed relevant to Fascism. For example, a small controversy developed over whether An Enemy of the People had a Fascistic tendency with its admittedly confusing claims for an elite of the intellect which must be trusted to lead ordinary folk. Nowadays the wheel has turned once more and probably something similar is happening now that political correctness is (again) in vogue. But An Enemy of the People, it seems to me, is really about Ibsen’s belief that there is such a thing as a truth and that it bears something like holiness within it, regardless of the cost its discovery at any one moment entails. And the job of the elite is to guard and explain that holiness without compromise or stint.

  For myself, I was deeply stirred by his indignation at the social lies of his time, but it was in his structures that I was thrilled to find his poetry. His plays were models of a stringent economy of means to create immense symphonic images of tragic proportions. It wasn’t that things fit together but that everything fit together, like a natural organism, a human being, for example, or a rose. His works had an organic intensity making them, or most of them, undeniable. To me he was a reincarnation of the Greek dramatic spirit, especially its obsessive fascination with past transgressions as the seeds of current catastrophe. In this slow unfolding was wonder, even god. Past and present were drawn into a single continuity, and thus a secret moral order was being limned. He and the Greeks were related also through their powerful integrative impulse which, at least in theory, could make possible a total picture of a human being—character sprang from action, and like a spiritual CAT scan the drama could conceivably offer up a human being seen from within and without at the same. (In fact, my Death of a Salesman would proceed in that fashion.) Present dilemma was simply the face that the past had left visible. Every catastrophe was the story of how the birds came home to roost, and I still believe that a play without a past is a mere shadow of a play, just as a man or woman whose past is largely blank or ineptly drawn is merely a suggestion of a man or a woman, and a trivialization to boot.

  I don’t know what exactly has happened to the concept of the past in contemporary dramaturgy, but it is rarely there any more. Things happen, God knows why. Maybe we are just too tired of thinking, or maybe meaning itself has become an excrescence. But most likely it is that we have too often been wrong about what important things mean.

  Perhaps it comes down to our loss of confidence in our ability to lay a finger on the inevitable in life; in the name of freedom and poetry it is now customary to declare, in effect, that our existence is itself a surprise and that surprise is the overwhelmingly central principle of life. Or maybe we are just surfeited with entertainment and prefer to lie back and let our brains enjoy a much needed rest.

  The triumph of the past-less art is of course the film. A film persona requires no past or any other proof of his existence; he need only be photographed and he is palpably there.

  The past keeps coming back to our art, however, if only in the parodistic form of the detective or crime story, probably our most popular fictional entertainment. The crime exists, or is about to happen, and we have to move backwards to find out whose general character fits the crime, who has dropped hints of his dire tendency, and so forth. It is the tragic event scrubbed clean of its visionary moral values, its sole job being the engendering of anxiety and fear. (Detective fiction also reassures us about the stability of our civilization, but that’s another story.)

  The so-called Absurd theater, in a different wa
y, also helped make any obsession with the past seem quaint, and Ibsen with it. The proof of a character’s existence was simply his awareness of his ironical situation, that was all and that was enough. Character itself, which surely must mean individuation, smacked of realism, and in its stead were interchangeable stickmen whose individuation lay in their varying attitudes and remarks about the determining force, the situation. Without a past the present, and its anxieties, was all that was left to talk about. And the situation of the stickman is of course so utterly overwhelming—war, or concentration camps, or economic disaster—that what individually he may have had, his will or lack of will, his self-doubt or assurance, his faith or cynicism is squashed out, leaving only the irony of humans continuing to exist at all.

  So that the quality we instantly recognized as supremely human was not characterological definition, which requires a history, but its very absence; whatever his personality, it is without significance because it doesn’t affect history—that is, his kindness, his dreams of a different kind of life, his love, his devotion to duty or to another human being simply do not matter as he is marched towards the flames. It may be the Holocaust clinched the case for reducing personality to a laughable affectation. I am inclined to believe this to be so, even for people who never think about the events in Eastern Europe directly. The Holocaust—the story of a great nation turned criminal on a vast scale—implicitly defeated us, broke confidence in our claims to being irrevocably in the camp of what was once securely called humanity, and left us with absurdity as the defining human essence.

  Again, the concept of a gradually in-gathering, swelling, evidentiary, revelatory explosion is now reserved for thrillers, by and large; but instead of insights we have clues, mechanically dropped most of the time, to both lead us on and astray. We are given, if you will, the skeleton of the Ibsen form without the soul or the flesh.

  The revolt—or rather the loss of interest in what is commonly thought of as Ibsenism—also imagines itself to be a revolt against the well-made play, quite as though Ibsen was not himself the first to attack that kind of play. Instead of being well-made his plays are true. That is the difference. They follow the psycho-moral dilemma, not the plot. But we have arrived at a point where, as indicated, the very notion of inevitability is itself highly suspect—in short, no one can know why great events happen, let alone why the shifts and changes in human attitudes take place. Under the rubric of a new freedom and a deeper wisdom we have turned against the rational, claiming the delightful license to simply express feeling and impressions, the more randomly the better to create surprise, the ultimate aesthetic value.

  In short, Strindberg has won the philosophical battle with Ibsen and Ibsenism. The poet of instinct and the impromptu, of the paradoxical surprise, his mission is not to save anyone or a society, but simply to rip the habit of hypocrisy from the human heart and cant from the life of the mind. He is the destroying rebel chopping off the ever-growing heads of a thousand-armed dragon, a pessimistic labor to be sure. Ibsen, quite otherwise, is the revolutionary groping for a new system, an optimistic business, for when the old is destroyed, the new construct implies rational decisions, and above all hope.

  And who can gainsay Strindberg any more? Apart from the Holocaust are we not witnesses to the implosion of the Soviet Union, the most “rationally” run society, falling in upon itself, a fraud and a farce? And what has survived but old, chaotic, irrational capitalism, blinding itself to its poor behind the glaring lights of its packed store windows, and hiding its spiritual starvation under the shiny bonnets of its marvellous cars? How to rationally account for this surprise—the victory of the decadent doomed and the disgrace of the historically “inevitable victors,” the “new men” who stand revealed as medieval fief-holders when they were not actual gangsters and killers of the dream?

  Compare this awesome moral chaos, this wracking collapse of the comfortably predictable, with Ibsen’s methodical unravelling of motives and the interplay of social and psychological causation, all of it speaking of rational control! They cannot jibe, our reality and his. So he must seem outmoded, a picturesque mind out of a more orderly time.

  Perhaps that is why he seems to be coming back, at least his prestige as a modern, if not precisely his methods. For while it is purely a sense of the new mood on my part, it does seem that the taste for “real plays” rather than only fun effusions has begun to stir again. Of course, there are still old-fashioned critics who think that anything that has a beginning and end is out of date, but there are young playwrights who would disagree and are looking to life rather than the theater for their inspiration, and life, of course, includes not only surprise but the consequences flowing from our actions or structure, in other words.

  Perhaps I ought to add here that in these past dozen years my most Ibsen-influenced play, All My Sons, written nearly fifty years ago, is more and more frequently and more widely produced now and the reviewers no longer feel obliged to dismiss its structure as not-modern. I have had to wonder whether this is partly due to the number of investigations of official malfeasance in the papers all the time, and the spectacle of men of stature and social influence being brought down practically every week by revelations excavated from the hidden past. From the heights of Wall Street, the Pentagon, the White House, big business, the same lesson seems to fly out at us—the past lives! As does Ibsen, the master of the explosive force when it bombs in the present, and above all, with the soul-rot that comes of the hypocrisy of its denial.

  Needless to say, I have not attempted in this short note to deal with Ibsen as poet and creator of mythic plays, beginning with the opening of his career. For one thing, those plays remain to be interpreted for modern audiences, their mythology having little obvious meaning for most people outside Scandinavia.

  Tennessee Williams’ Legacy: An Eloquence and Amplitude of Feeling

  1984

  So long as there are actors at work in the world, the plays of Tennessee Williams will live on. The autocratic power of fickle taste will not matter in his case; his texture, his characters, his dramatic personality are unique and are as permanent in the theatrical vision of this century as the stars in the sky.

  It is usually forgotten what a revolution his first great success meant to the New York theater. The Glass Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theater’s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it. In him the American theater found, perhaps for the first time, an eloquence and an amplitude of feeling. And driving on this newly discovered lyrical line was a kind of emotional heroism; he wanted not to approve or disapprove but to touch the germ of life and to celebrate it with verbal beauty.

  His theme is perhaps the most pervasive in American literature, where people lose greatly in the very shadow of the mountain from whose peak they might have had a clear view of God. It is the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits, who exist in order to remind us of our trampled instincts, our forsaken tenderness, the holiness of the spirit of man.

  Despite great fame, Williams never settled into a comfortable corner of the literary kitchen. It could only have been the pride born of courage that kept him at playwriting after the professional theater to which he had loaned so much dignity, so much aspiration, could find no place for his plays. But he never lost his humor and a phenomenal generosity toward other artists. A few months before his death, I had a letter from him about a play of mine that had had some of the most uncomprehending reviews of my career. I had not seen Tennessee in years, but out of darkness came this clasp of a hand, this sadly laughing voice telling me that he had seen and understood and loved my play, and in effect, that we had both lived to witness a chaos of spirit, a deafness of ear and a blindness of eye, and that one carried on anyway.

  His audience remained enormous, worldwide. Hundreds of prod
uctions of his plays have gone on each year—but not on the Broadway that his presence had glorified. He would end as he had begun, on the outside looking in—as he once put it, scratching on the glass. But of course, past the suffering the work remains, the work for which alone he lived his life, the gift he made to his actors, his country, and the world.

  The Good Old American Apple Pie

  1993

  What a strange irony it is that at the very moment when all over Europe and Latin America repressive regimes have been driven out of power and with them their censors from office, that we Americans should be increasingly discovering the uses of censorship over our own writers and artists. The devil, as was once said, has many disguises; defeated in one place he pops up somewhere else.

  Evidently there are many Americans who still do not understand why censorship and democracy cannot live happily together. What so many seem to forget is that a censor does not merely take something out, he puts something in, something of his own in a work that does not belong to him. His very purpose is to change a work to his own tastes and preconceptions.