Collected Essays Page 18

  Many forget that when they read a work that has passed through censorship, they are putting themselves in the hands of an anonymous person whose name appears nowhere and cannot be held responsible for what is published.

  Perhaps we can appreciate what censorship really means by looking at a strange story that took place in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century.

  A teenager named William Henry Ireland, illegitimate son of a wealthy London antique dealer, desperate to get into his father’s good graces, came home one day claiming to have been given various papers in Shakespeare’s hand, as well as a lock of hair of Shakespeare’s wife, by a stranger whose carriage had nearly run him down on the street. Following the near accident, he and this stranger had become friends, according to young William, and as a token of the man’s regard for him he had been given these invaluable papers and the lock of hair.

  The elder Ireland immediately had the handwriting on the papers checked by the authorities who pronounced it Shakespeare’s, and the ink and paper were without question of the Elizabethan period, nearly two centuries old. All London was agog, and the boy and his father became overnight sensations. Naturally, young Ireland, until now utterly ignored by everyone, got enthusiastic and announced that his new friend had a whole trunkful of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts which he promised he might let the boy have one day.

  After producing various forged snippets of Shakespeare’s love notes, and a few of the Bard’s “lost” verses, young Ireland (would-be poet and idolizer of the late Thomas Chatterton, another young forger-poet) proclaimed that his benefactor had decided to give him nothing less than the original manuscript of King Lear, but only in due time. And sure enough, after some weeks young Ireland showed up with that very manuscript. A gathering was instantly convoked in the Ireland living room where the new discovery was read to a dozen of the most authoritative literary critics, noble patrons of the arts, and cultural leaders of the time.

  At the end, James Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, fell to his knees before the manuscript to thank God that at long last the true Shakespeare had been revealed to the world, a Shakespeare who was positive and cheerful rather than brooding and dark and defeatist, a Shakespeare who scorned foul language and never brought up sex or bodily functions, a Shakespeare who was clearly a true Christian gentleman rather than the barbaric, foul-mouthed rotter whose works had always embarrassed decent people with their obscenities and blood-covered view of mankind and the English nation.

  Of course what young Ireland had done was to clean up King Lear to suit the narrow middle-class tastes of his time. It was a time when revolution was gathering in France, threatening to British stability, if not the idea of monarchy itself. Ireland’s major fix was to brighten up the end so that the aged king, rather than raving on the heath, swamped in his madness and abandoned by the world, was reunited with his daughters in a comforting sentimental scene of mutual Christian forgiveness, whereupon they all lived happily ever after. The paper on which this version was written was indeed authentic, the young forger having snipped off sheets of it from the blank ends of Elizabethan wills and deeds in the files of the London law office where he worked as a clerk. The antique ink he had produced himself after months of lonely experiment.

  Only one critic, Edmund Malone, saw through the forgery, but he did not expose the fraud by analyzing ink or paper but rather the mawkishness of the “newly discovered” alterations, the shallow naïveté behind their versification. But as important as any technical doubts was his conviction that the spirit behind this “new-found authentic King Lear” was pawky, narrow-minded, fearful of sexuality and the lustiness of the English tongue, and fearful too of the play’s awesome image of human judgment’s frailty, and the collapse of the very foundations in reason of government itself. The real King Lear reduces man to his elemental nature, stripping him of rank and money and his protective morality, in order to present a vision of the essence of humankind with no ameliorating illusions. In place of these challenges the “newly discovered” play was a story of reassurance fit for family entertainment, one that offers comfort by turning a far-ranging tragedy into a story of misunderstandings which are pleasantly cleared up at the end.

  In a word, young William Ireland did what censorship always attempts to do—force a work to conform to what some people want life to look like even if it means destroying the truth the work is written to convey.

  Had the Ireland forgery been left uncontested, we can be sure that King Lear as a play would never have survived the hour. Many critics then and since have thought it a nasty work with an improbably black estimate of humanity, but succeeding generations have come to treasure it precisely for its truthfulness to life’s worst as well as its best.

  What Ireland did was erase the doubts about life that were in the original play and were so discomforting to the upper class of Britain at the time.

  Censorship is as old as America. The Puritans forbade the reading of novels—or, indeed, anything but scripture—as one of the condemned “vain pursuits.” A reader nowadays would find it impossible to recognize in those novels what could possibly have aroused the Puritan fathers to such fury against them. But closer to our time, there is hardly a master writer who has not felt the censor’s lash, from James Joyce to Gustave Flaubert to D. H. Lawrence to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to William Faulkner and a long, long list that just about comprises the roster of world literature. Someone somewhere could doubtless find reasons for moral outrage in a McDonald’s menu or a phone book.

  Of course there is no denying that there are people who misuse freedom to appeal to the sinister in us, our brutality, scorn for justice, or concealed violence and lust. By exploiting our suppressed feelings people with no interest in anything but making an illicit buck can prosper, for example, by exploiting human sexual curiosity even if it victimizes children.

  But the problem, clearly, is that when we legitimize censorship of what we agree is antisocial art we come very close to legitimizing it for real art. For example, right now some three hundred and fifty lines of Romeo and Juliet are customarily removed from American school textbooks because they are about sex. There is a similar emasculation of the two other most commonly taught Shakespeare plays, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. In other words, lines of very high poetry are forbidden American students who, it is assumed, will think that much less often about sex. Of course this is ridiculous; all this censoring does is deprive them of realizing that there is something sublime and beautiful in sex and that it is not merely dirty. It throws them entirely to the mercies of suggestive videos and rock lyrics and really raw pornography which apparently nothing will stop, and will certainly not be slowed by censoring Romeo and Juliet.

  The purported aim of censorship is always to preserve public morality but we ought not forget that for those who advocate censorship pornography is by no means necessarily the only kind of immoral communication. If it becomes established policy that blotting out certain sexual images in art is acceptable, then there is nothing in principle to stop the censoring of other “immoral” expression.

  I have had some experience with “moral” censorship myself. In 1947, my play All My Sons was about to open in the Colonial Theatre, Boston, for its first performances before coming to Broadway. The Catholic Church at that time exercised censorship over the Boston theaters and threatened to issue a condemnation of the play unless a certain line were eliminated from it. I should add that the raunchiest burlesque shows in America were playing on the Boston “Strip” at the time, but these apparently were not bothersome to the moral authorities. What troubled them terribly was the line, “A man can’t be a Jesus in this world!” spoken by Joe Keller, a character who has knowingly shipped defective engine parts to the Air Force resulting in twenty-odd fighter planes crashing and who is now pleading for his son’s forgiveness. The name of Jesus was forbidden utterance on the Boston stage, no matter that in this case it
was used to indicate Jesus’ high moral standard. I refused to change the line, as much because I could not think of a substitute as anything else, but the hypocrisy of the complaint was painful to contemplate, given the level of entertainment of the Boston “Strip” a few blocks from my theater.

  In 1962, when my film The Misfits was previewed by religious censors, the gravest displeasure was expressed with a scene in which Marilyn Monroe, in a mood of despair and frustration—fully clothed, it should be said—walks out of a house and embraces a tree trunk. In all seriousness this scene was declared to be masturbation, and unless it was cut the picture would be classified as condemned and a large part of the audience barred from seeing it. Once again it was necessary to refuse to oblige a censor, but I would not have had that privilege had I lived in a different kind of country. Experiences like these have helped me to stand against censorship.

  Life is not reassuring; if it were we would not need the consolations of religion, for one thing. Literature and art are not required to reassure when in reality there is no reassurance, or to serve up “clean and wholesome” stories in all times and all places. Those who wish such art are welcome to have it, but those who wish art to symbolize how life really is, in order to understand it and perhaps themselves, also have a right to their kind of art.

  I would propose to censors and their supporters that they write the stories and paint or shoot the pictures they approve of, and let them offer them to the public in open competition with the stories and pictures of those whose works they want to suppress.

  Let them write a new Romeo and Juliet that is wholesome and unoffending and put it on a stage and invite the public to come and enjoy it as millions have enjoyed Shakespeare’s play for three hundred years. Who knows?—maybe they will win out.

  But of course they cannot accept this challenge; censorship is an attack on healthy competition. It comes down to a refusal to enter the arena and instead to wipe out the competitor by sanctions of suppressive writs and the police power.

  I write this as one who is often disgusted by certain displays that call themselves art and are really raids on the public’s limitless sexual curiosity, purely for the purpose of making money. As an artist I sometimes wonder at my having to compete with this easy and specious way of attracting attention and gaining a public following. And I will not deny my belief that there may ultimately be a debasement of public taste as the result of the incessant waves of sexual exploitation in films and other media.

  But bad as this is, it is not as bad as censorship, because the censor is given a police power no individual ought to have in a democracy—the power not only to keep bad art from the public, but good art, too; the power not only to protect people from lies but from uncomfortable truths. That way lies not wholesomeness, not community values, but the domination of the many by the few acting in the name of the many. Nobody said it was easy to be a free people, but censorship not only makes it harder, it makes it in the end impossible.

  Probably because we in general enjoy freedom to express ourselves we are unaware of not only the power that a censor takes but the hypocrisy that inevitably accompanies it. In the winter of 1965 I interviewed a lady in her Moscow offices, one Madame Elena Furtseva, then head of all culture of the Soviet Union. In theory and often in practice this woman and the committee she headed had the power to shut down any play before or during its run in a theater, or to cancel a film or suppress a novel or book of poems or whatever. She could also promote certain books if she so pleased. She had been Khrushchev’s special friend and when he was ousted she cut her wrists but was saved and restored to her job.

  Behind her chair was a long table piled high with at least a hundred books lying on their sides. Each volume had a few slips of paper sticking out of its pages which I deduced marked passages of censorable writing which her assistants were submitting to her to decide upon.

  She looked quite exhausted and I remarked sympathetically on this. “Well I have so much I must read, you see,” she said, and gestured toward the possibly offending books behind her.

  With nothing to lose—my U.S. passport snug in my pocket, I ventured: “You know, I have never met writers anywhere who are as patriotic as your Russian writers. Whatever their criticisms, they have a deep love of country. Why don’t you make an experiment; don’t tell anybody but let’s say for one month just don’t read anything. See what happens. Maybe nothing will happen. Then you won’t have to be reading all this stuff every day.”

  She tried hard for a sophisticated smile but it came out looking hard and painful. And then she said something interesting: “The Soviet worker cannot be asked to pay for the paper and ink to print ideas that go counter to his interests and his moral ideas of right and wrong.”

  I can’t help thinking of that statement when I hear people saying that the American taxpayers ought not be asked to pay for artworks that offend their tastes or their ideas of right and wrong. The fundamental fallacy in such a statement is quite simple and inexorable; how did Madame Furtseva know what the Soviet worker thought was right and wrong, moral or immoral? How could she know when no one but her and her assistants were allowed to read possibly offending works?

  Indeed, for nearly three-quarters of a century Soviet writing has been kept remarkably chaste, with very strict rules about depicting sex, while at the same time the Soviet abortion rate was rising to the highest in the world. It was also very strict about barring negative pictures of Soviet conditions in all the media and forbade any genuine attack on the system. After three-quarters of a century of such censorship the Soviet system appears to have collapsed. Why? Because reality does not go away when a censor draws a line through a sentence or tears a page out of Romeo and Juliet.

  If there is a way to curb pornography, if there is any possibility of preventing people from lathering after obscene material, it can only be the result of changing their tastes. If they don’t want the stuff it won’t be profitable and it will vanish. I doubt that day will ever come, no matter what, but surely cursing the darkness never brought light. Through education raising the intelligence level of the population, sensitizing people to real rather than cosmetic feeling, enhancing mutual respect between the sexes and between races—these are the paths to decency, not calling in the cops to drive out the bad guys.

  There is an analogy here to the narcotics problem. We spend tens of millions on planes to spot smugglers, more millions to wipe out Peruvian coca crops, more millions on narcotics police; but of course the narcotics keep coming in because Americans want dope. Meantime, an addict who wants to get rid of the habit has to wait as long as a couple of years to get placed in a rehabilitation clinic because these are underfunded.

  Censoring Shakespeare won’t make us good and may possibly make us a little more stupid, a little more ignorant about ourselves, a little further from the angels. The day must come when we will stop being so foolish. Why not now?

  Notes on Realism

  1999

  Twenty-five years ago I used to defend Broadway against its detractors, because it was where American theatrical innovation almost always began, the rest of the country timorously following behind. Now the Broadway producer is scared stiff, and in those rare cases when he does produce a serious play—Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—it needs to have proven itself somewhere else, such as Texas or London. A play likely to alienate some part of the audience, as so many great plays have done, or whose style is strange or requires some effort to penetrate, simply will not get produced on today’s Broadway. George Bernard Shaw once remarked that businessmen always want to talk about art, but playwrights want to talk about business. This is inevitable, especially now, when one knows, for example, that a play like my Crucible would be inconceivable, with its cast of twenty-one and its four large sets. Put another way, the aesthetic of that kind of play is beyond the reach now of the commercial theater, though it would be a mistake
to think that serious, expensive-to-mount plays like this were exactly welcome in the theater of the Forties or earlier. On the contrary, producers then as now prayed for the next Life with Father, a genial comedy with a smaller cast and one set. The difference is that there existed then a handful of producers, most notably Kermit Bloomgarden and Robert Whitehead, who longed for artistically ambitious and socially interesting plays and could put their money where their mouth was. The nub of the problem is that a “straight” play could be mounted in those times for well under $50,000, as opposed to the $1 million or more frequently required today.

  Directly and more subtly, theatrical economics translates into theatrical style, unless one is thinking of closet drama put on for a few recondite friends. Fantastic production costs have combined almost lethally with the rise to near total domination of a single paper, the New York Times, and its critic over a play’s fate, so that stylistic innovation has been left to small and Off-Broadway venues, where the risk of financial loss is lessened. It seems to me that a resulting confusion has crept into the reviewing and discussion of the various styles of playwriting in fashion today. “Realism” is now a put-down; “poetic” is praise. “Experimental” is attractive; “traditional” is not. “Metaphorical” is intriguing, though perhaps not so much as “lyrical,” “nonlinear,” “dreamlike,” and “surreal.” It is almost as if “realism” can hardly be poetic, or as if the “poetic” is not, at its best, more real than the merely “realistic” and, at its worst, more conventional beneath its elusive or unfathomable skin. It would be impossible in a small essay to comb out all this fur, but perhaps at least some of the fundamental fault lines, as well as the overlaps among various approaches to the art, can be illuminated by examining a tiny bit of the history of age-old stylistic strategies employed by playwrights to trap reality on the stage.