Collected Essays Page 22
ROXY: I think I’ll run across the street and pick up an eight-cylinder sandwich.
The audiences roared with delight at these inventions. It was as though Odets were trying to turn dialogue into jazz. And his devotees went to his plays especially to pick up his latest deliciously improbable remarks and repeat them to their friends. Had any Bronxite—or anyone else in the century—really exclaimed, “God’s teeth, no!” “What exhaust pipe did he crawl out of?” Lorna: “I feel like I’m shot from a cannon.”
Inevitably, in a theater bounded by realism, this had to be mistakenly labeled as accurate reportage, news from the netherworld. But, of course, it was an invented diction of a kind never heard before on stage—or off, for that matter. Odets’s fervent ambition was to burst the bounds of Broadway while remaining inside its embrace, and if, as time went on, his lines began to seem self-consciously labored, no longer springing from characters but manifestly from the author and his will-to-poeticize, he at a minimum had made language the identifying mark of a playwright in America, and that was something that hadn’t happened before.
Admittedly, I did not look at his style with objectivity but for its potential usefulness in breaking through the constricted realism of our theater then. Odets was tremendously exciting to young writers. I was troubled by a tendency in his plays toward overtheatricalized excess, however—lines sometimes brought laughter where there should have been outrage, or pity, or some deeper emotion than amusement—and at times the plots verged on the schematic. Odets often overrhapsodized at the climaxes when he should have been reaching to ancillary material that was not there. He wrote terrific scenes, blazing speeches and confrontations which showed what theater could be, but with the exception, perhaps, of Awake and Sing and the racy Golden Boy he never wrote a play that lifted inexorably to its climatic revelation.
I came out of the thirties unsure whether there could be a viable counterform to the realism around me. All I knew for sure was that a good play must move forward in its depths as rapidly as on its surfaces; word-poetry wasn’t enough if there was a fractured poetry in the structure, the gradually revealed illuminating idea behind the whole thing. A real play was the discovery of the unity of its contradictions; the essential poetry was the synthesis of even the least of its parts to form a symbolic meaning. Of course, the problem had much to do with language but more primary was how to penetrate my own feelings about myself and the time in which I lived. Ideally, a good play must show as sound an emotional proof of its thesis as a case at law shows factual proof, and you can’t do that with words alone, lovely as they might be.
Odets’s contribution, ironically was not his realistic portrayal of society—his alleged aim—but his willingness to be artificial; he brought back artificiality, if you will, just as ten years later Tennessee Williams did with his birdsong from the magnolias. But Williams had an advantage—his language could be far more faithful to its sources in reality. Southern people did love to talk, and in the accents Williams captured (as in The Glass Menagerie):
AMANDA: . . . But Laura is, thank heavens, not only pretty but also very domestic. I’m not at all. I never was a bit. I never could make a thing but angel-food cake. Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All by gentlemen callers were sons of planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal!—To vary that old, old saying a little bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!—That gallantly smiling gentleman over there! (Points to husband’s picture.) A telephone man who—fell in love with long distance! Now he travels and I don’t even know where! . . .
This too was called realism, and it probably was in the sense that there were people who talked like this. But then how did it differ from the conventional realistic play? Clearly, it was that the very action of Williams’s plays, certainly the best of them, was working toward the building of symbolic meaning that would embrace both the psychological development of his characters and his personal specter of a menacing America struggling with its own sexuality and the anomie born of its dire materialism. In a word, Williams’s style arose from his pain and anxiety at being overwhelmed and defeated by a gross violence that underlay the American—one might say the whole Western—ethos.
Their obsession with words notwithstanding, it was their need to communicate their resistance to something deathdealing in the culture that finally pressed Odets and Williams to address the big public and made them playwrights rather than sequestered poets. Stylistic invention without an implicit commitment of some kind to a more human vision of life is a boat without rudder or cargo or destination—or worse, it is the occupation of the dilettante. Odets, when he began, thought his egalitarian Marxism would heal America and create its new community, but that ideology devolved into a rote religion before the thirties had even passed. Williams unfurled the banner of a forlorn but resisting heroism to the violence against the oddball, the poet, and sexual dissident. But it may as well be admitted that in their different ways both men in the end unwittingly collaborated with the monster they saw as trying to destroy them.
The plays these men wrote were shields raised against the many-arrowed darkness, but in the end there was little from outside to give them the spiritual support to complete their creative lives. Odets’s best work ended with his rejection by Broadway and his move to Hollywood; Williams, likewise rejected, kept nevertheless to his trade, experimenting with forms and new methods that drew no encouragement from reviewers unable or unwilling to notice that the theater culture had boxed in a writer of greatness who was struggling to find an audience in the passing crowd of a generation other than his own. At his strongest he had spoken for and to the center of society, in a style it could relate to, an enhanced, visionary realism. In the end a writer has no one to blame for his failings, not even himself, but the brutally dismissive glee of critics toward Williams’s last plays simply laid more sticks on his burden. Toward the end he was still outside, scratching on the glass, as he had once put it, and it was the shadowed edges of life that drew him, the borderland where how things are said is everything, and everything has been said before.
The advent of the Absurd and of Beckett and his followers both obscured and illuminated the traditional elements of the discussion of theater style. For O’Neill a good style was basically a question of the apt use of metaphor and argot. “God, if I could write like that!” he wrote to O’Casey, who, incidentally, would no doubt have labeled himself a realistic writer in the sense that he was giving his audiences the substance of their life conflicts. But like Williams, O’Casey came from a culture which loved talk and sucked on language like a sweet candy.
MRS. GROGAN: Oh, you’ve got a cold on you, Fluther.
FLUTHER: Oh, it’s only a little one.
MRS. GROGAN: You’d want to be careful, all th’ same. I knew a woman, a big lump of a woman, red-faced and round-bodied, a little awkward on her feet; you’d think, to look at her, she could put out her two arms an’ lift a two-storied house on th’ top of her head; got a ticklin’ in her throat, an’ a little cough, an’ th’ next mornin’ she had a little catchin’ in her chest, an’ they had just time to wet her lips with a little rum, an’ off she went. (Juno and the Paycock)
Even in the most mundane of conversational exchanges O’Casey sought, and as often as not found, the lift of poetry. Indeed, that was the whole point—that the significantly poetic sprang from the raw and real experience of ordinary people. J. M. Synge, O’Casey’s forerunner at the turn of the century, had struck a similar chord; Synge was in a supremely conscious revolt against the banality of most theater language. As John Gassner noted, in Ireland the popular imagination was still, according to Synge, “fiery and magnificent, and tender; so t
hat those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.”
Synge rejected the then-dominant Ibsen and Zola for the “joyless and pallid words” of their realism and as in Riders to the Sea, when the women are lamenting the deaths of so many of their men working the angry sea:
MAURYA: In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old.
As far as style is concerned, the Beckett difference, as it might be called, was to introduce humble people—bums, in fact, or social sufferers—with the plainest of language, but arranged so as to announce and develop pure theme. His could be called a presentational thematic play, announcing what it was about and never straying very far from what it was conceived of to prove, or what his instinct had led him to confirm. Beckett had parted with inferential playwriting, where speeches inferred the author’s thematic intentions while hewing to an apparently autonomous story building to a revelatory climax that united story and theme. In Beckett the story was the theme, inseparably so. Moreover, as will be shown in a moment, he interpreted the theme himself in his dialogue.
If—instead of the prewar poetic drama’s requirement of an elevated tone or diction—the most common speech was now prized, it was not the speech of realistic plays. It was a speech skewed almost out of recognition by a surreal commitment to what at first had seemed to be the impotence of human hopes, and hence the futility of action itself. All but the flimsiest connections between speeches were eliminated, creating an atmosphere of sinister danger (in Pinter) or immanence (in Beckett). It was quite as though the emphatic absence of purpose in the characters had created a loss of syntax. It seems that in later years Beckett took pains to clarify this impression of human futility, emphasizing the struggle against inertia as his theme. In any case, however ridiculous so much of his dialogue exchanges are, the tenderness of feeling in his work is emphatically not that of the cynic or the hard ironist.
The dominating theme of Godot is stasis and the struggle to overcome humanity’s endlessly repetitious paralysis before the need to act and change. We hear it plainly and stripped clean of plot or even incident.
ESTRAGON: Then adieu.
POZZO: Adieu.
VLADIMIR: Adieu.
POZZO: Adieu.
Silence. No one moves.
VLADIMIR: Adieu.
POZZO: Adieu.
ESTRAGON: Adieu.
Silence.
POZZO: And thank you.
VLADIMIR: Thank you.
POZZO: Not at all.
ESTRAGON: Yes yes.
POZZO: No no.
VLADIMIR: Yes yes.
ESTRAGON: No no.
Silence.
POZZO: I don’t seem to be able . . . (long hesitation) . . . to depart.
ESTRAGON: Such is life.
This is a vaudeville at the edge of the cliff, but vaudeville anyway, so I may be forgiven for being reminded of Jimmy Durante’s ditty—“Didja ever get the feelin’ that you wanted to go? But still you had the feelin’ that you wanted to stay?”
It is a language shorn of metaphor, simile, everything but its instructions, so to speak. The listener hears the theme like a nail drawn across a pane of glass.
So the struggle with what might be called reportorial realism, written “the way people talk,” is at least as old as the century. As for myself, my own tendency has been to shift styles according to the nature of my subject. All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, Death of a Salesman, The Price, The American Clock, my earliest work, like The Golden Years, about the destruction of Mexico by the Spaniards, and the more recent plays, like The Creation of the World, Some Kind of Love Story, and The Last Yankee, differ very much in their language. This, in order to find speech that springs naturally out of the characters and their backgrounds rather than imposing a general style. If my approach to playwriting is partly literary, I hope it is well hidden. Leroy Hamilton is a native New England carpenter and speaks like one, and not like the New York working men and women in A Memory of Two Mondays, or Eddie Carbone, who comes out of a quite different culture.
So the embrace of something called realism is obviously very wide; it can span the distance between a Turgenev and a Becque, between Wedekind and your latest Broadway hit. The main thing I sought in The Last Yankee was to make real my sense of the life of such people, the kind of man swinging the hammer through a lifetime, the kind of woman waiting forever for her ship to come in. And second, my view of their present confusion and, if you will, decay and possible recovery. They are bedrock, aspiring not to greatness but to other gratifications—successful parenthood, decent children and a decent house and a decent car and an occasional nice evening with family or friends, and above all, of course, some financial security. Needless to say, they are people who can be inspired to great and noble sacrifice, but also to bitter hatreds. As the world goes I suppose they are the luckiest people, but some of them—a great many, in fact—have grown ill with what would once have been called a sickness of the soul.
And that is the subject of the play, its “matter.” For depression is far from being merely a question of an individual’s illness, although it appears as that, of course; it is at the same time, most especially in Patricia Hamilton’s case, the grip on her of a success mythology which is both naïve and brutal, and which, to her misfortune, she has made her own. And opposing it, quite simply, is her husband Leroy’s incredibly enduring love for her, for nature and the world.
A conventionally realistic play would no doubt have attempted to create a “just-like-life” effect, with the sickness gradually rising out of the normal routines of the family’s life, and calling up our empathy by virtue of our instant identification with familiar reality. But while Patricia Hamilton, the carpenter’s wife, is seen as an individual sufferer, the context of her illness is equally important because, for one thing, she knows, as do many such patients, that more Americans (and West Europeans) are in hospitals for depression than for any other ailment. In life, with such people, a high degree of objectification or distancing exists, and the style of the play had to reflect the fact that they commonly know a great deal about the social setting of the illness even as they are unable to tear themselves free of it. And this affects the play’s style.
It opens by directly, even crudely, grasping the core of its central preoccupation—the moral and social myths feeding the disease; and we have a discussion of the hospital’s enormous parking lot, a conversation bordering on the absurd. I would call this realism, but it is far from the tape-recorded kind. Frick, like Leroy Hamilton, has arrived for a visit with his wife, and after a moment’s silence while the two strangers grope for a conversational opening . . .
FRICK: Tremendous parking space down there. ’They need that for?
LEROY: Well a lot of people visit on weekends. Fills up pretty much.
FRICK: Really? That whole area?
LEROY: Pretty much.
FRICK: ’Doubt that.
The play is made of such direct blows aimed at the thematic center; there is a vast parking space because crowds of stricken citizens converge on this place to visit mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. So that the two patients we may be about to meet are not at all unique. This is in accord with the vision of the play, which is intended to be both close up and wide, psychological and social, subjective and objective, and manifestly so. To be sure, there is a realistic tone to this exchange—people do indeed seem to talk this way—but an inch below is the thematic selectivity which drives the whole tale. Perhaps it needs to be said that this split vision has informed all the plays I have written. I have tried to make things seen in their social context and simult
aneously felt as intimate testimony, and that requires a style, but one that draws as little attention to itself as possible, for I would wish a play to be absorbed rather than merely observed.
I have called this play a comedy, a comedy about a tragedy, and I am frankly not sure why. Possibly it is due to the absurdity of people constantly comparing themselves to others—something we all do to one degree or another, but in Patricia’s case to the point of illness.
PATRICIA: There was something else you said. About standing on line.
LEROY: On line?
PATRICIA: That you’ll always be at the head of the line because . . . breaks off.
LEROY: I’m the only one on it. . . . We’re really all on a one-person line, Pat. I learned that in these years.
The play’s language, then, has a surface of everyday realism, but its action is overtly stylized rather than “natural.”
Finally, a conventionally realistic work about mental illness would be bound to drive to a reverberating climax. But repression is the cultural inheritance of these New Englanders and such theatricality would be a betrayal of their style of living and dying. Indeed, short of suicide, the illness, properly speaking, never ends in the sense of tying all the loose strings, nor should the play, which simply sets the boundaries of the possible. For the theme is hope rather than completion or achievement, and hope is tentative always.
A play about them should have a certain amplitude of sound, nothing greater or less, reflecting their tight yet often deeply felt culture. And in a play about them they should recognize themselves—and even possibly what drives them mad—just like the longshoremen who saw themselves in A View from the Bridge or the cops in The Price or the salespeople in Death of a Salesman. That would be a satisfactory realism as I saw it.