by Gore Vidal
The same is true now in television. With patience and ingenuity there is nothing that the imaginative writer cannot say to the innocent millions. Of course the naturalistic writer has a more difficult time. He is used to making his point directly and bluntly: You are a slut. And he is morose when he cannot bluntly hammer out the obvious, the way he could on the stage or in the lower novel. But for my kind of second-story work, television is less confining. Also, the dramatic art is particularly satisfying for any writer with a polemical bent; and I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise. This sort of intensity, no matter how idiotic, works well in the drama if only because there is nothing more effective than having something to say.
As for the world of television, the notable characteristics are youth and enthusiasm. The dramatists, directors and producers are all young men, and their deep pleasure in this new toy is communicable and heartening. There is none of the bored cynicism one often finds in Hollywood studios, nor any of the rapacity and bad temper endemic to the theater in New York. Most television plays are bad, but considering that television uses up hundreds of new plays a year and that there have not been a hundred fine plays written in the last two thousand years, they can be excused their failures if their intentions are honorable. And at the moment, the very real sense of honor the better television writers possess lends excitement to their work.
Another novelty for me has been working with people. I had never before worked with anyone, and the thought of belonging to a group was unnerving. But to my surprise I enjoyed it. Working on a play is not unlike being stranded on an island with a group of strangers from a foundered ship’s company. For ten days, actors, director, author, technicians work together, getting to know one another almost morbidly well. Then, when the play is over, sadly, sweetly, the players and the management separate, never to meet again—until the next play together.
A play on television of the sort I write is not filmed. It is seen on the air at the exact moment it is performed. The actors build their performances as they would on the stage. The only difference is that they are being photographed by three cameras and we, the audience, are watching a play as though it were a movie.
In the last two years I have written nearly twenty plays. All but seven were either half-hour plays or adaptations. Incidentally, adapting is neither easier nor more difficult than writing an original play. There is, I think, only one basic trick to it: simply knowing how to read precisely and critically. One must get the point of the work. I make this obvious comment because just as literary men are seldom playwrights, playwrights are almost never literary men, and they are usually baffled and bored by the slower, denser order of the novel. In fact, excepting the poet-dramatists, there is a good case that the drama is not literature at all but an entirely separate art requiring collective means to achieve its moments, sharing with prose nothing beyond the general human preoccupation. A gift for playwriting is only a form of cleverness, like being adept at charades or Double-Crostics, while novel writing goes, at its best, beyond cleverness to that point where one’s whole mind and experience and vision are the novel and the effort to translate this wholeness into prose is the life: a circle of creation.
Of course it can be argued that a Shaw or a Chekhov achieves a comparable wholeness in the theater, but the very exceptionalness of any play which is better than viable suggests the narrow boundaries of a literary form whose effectiveness depends as much on interpretation as on the line written, the idea proposed, the light cast. We have all been moved by plays whose productions led us to believe that truth had rent the air about us, only to find later, upon reading the script, that we were tricked, or rather served beautifully, in the theater by a number of talents of which the writer’s was but one, and perhaps the least.
There are a number of mechanical limitations in television which time may eliminate. For instance, a play done “live” is seen only once, and that is the end. So many fine performances, so many good plays written on air, with nothing to show for all the work done but a kinescope (a filmed record of the play) that because of labor-union and technical considerations may not be shown again on television. It is a waste of many talents. Someday, perhaps on the new magnetic tape, a play which is broadcast live will be accurately recorded and reshown.
One would also like to see a repertory system in television, not only for the actors of course (television is a kind of repertory for actors, providing the talented with work and experience) but for the redoing of plays whose value has been established; and there are now a number of interesting plays to choose from. Finally, waiting in the wings, is something called subscription television. Certain productions will be available only to those viewers who pay to see them, a miraculous state of affairs for the writer, who will then have an audience which in a sense is his and not accidental. Also, he will be free of those nervous men the advertisers, who now largely control television.
All things considered, I suspect that the Golden Age for the dramatist is at hand. There is so much air to be illustrated, so many eyes watching, so much money to be spent, so many fine technicians and interpreters at one’s command, that the playwright cannot but thrive.*
New World Writing #10, 1956
*See footnote on this page. Twenty years ago it was possible for me, on rare occasions, to make a mistake. Rest assured this no longer happens.
VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET
I am not at heart a playwright. I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer; and I chose to write television, movies, and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar—and not dissimilar—sphere of operations. The reasons for my conversion to piracy are to me poignant, and to students of our society perhaps significant.
If I may recall in nostalgic terms the near past, I began writing novels at the end of the Second World War. Those were the happy years when a new era in our letters was everywhere proclaimed. We would have, it was thought, a literature to celebrate the new American empire. Our writers in reflecting our glory would complement the beautiful hardness of our currency. But something went wrong. The new era did not materialize and the work of my generation was dismissed—for the present at least—as a false dawn. It is a fact that the novel as a popular art form retrogressed gravely in our reign. Not clever enough to interest the better critics or simple enough to divert the public, we lost the critics to pure criticism and the public to impure television. By the 1950’s I and my once golden peers were plunged into that dim cellar of literature characterized as “serious,” where, like the priests of some shattered god, we were left to tend our prose privately: so many exiles, growing mushrooms in the dark.
The passage of time has only confirmed the new order. Less and less often is that widening division between the commercially possible and the seriously meaningful bridged by the rare creator who is both. Most of the large publishing events of recent years have been the crudely recollected experiences of nonwriters. Lost is the old conception of the man of letters creating a life’s work to be enjoyed by the common reader in continuity. True, that nineteenth-century phenomenon never quite took root in this country; for lovely though New England’s Indian summer was, winter when it came was killing. Nowadays, our literary men seek refuge in the universities, leaving what is left of the public novel to transient primitives and to sturdy hacks. Nor, let me say, are the serious writers themselves responsible for their unpopularity, as our more chauvinistic editorial writers would have it. The good work of the age is being done, as always. Rather it is the public which has changed. Television, movies, the ease of travel…so many new diversions have claimed the attention of that public which once read that I think it doubtful if the novel will ever again have the enormous prestige, the universal audience it enjoyed that morning when an idler on a Mississippi wharf shouted to t
he pilot of a passing steamer: “Is Little Nell dead?” And, alas, Mistah Kurtz, he dead, too; solemnly embalmed by the Academy.
Today, the large audience holds communion in a new, more compelling establishment. I doubt if many Americans could identify a single character in a work of modern fiction, but there are few who could not describe in exact detail the latest comedian’s joke on television. Yet it is vain to deplore a cultural change. If after two pre-eminent centuries the novel no longer is useful to the public, only novelists need mourn, for it is a fact of civilization that each society creates the games it wants to play and rejects those it regards as irrelevant.
The main audience has turned back to the play (in all its various forms, both “live” and filmed). Nevertheless, it is a stoic consolation for those of us whose first allegiance is to the novel to know that there will always be some serious interest in one’s work and that the keys to the kingdom of prose will continue to be passed on from hand to hand. And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth doing.
Over the years I attempted three stage plays. When I was nineteen I wrote a quasi-poetical work about, Heaven alone knows why, a man who became a were-wolf in Manhattan. I destroyed all copies of this early effort only to learn recently that a collector has somehow got hold of a copy, a ghastly prospect for some as yet unborn English major.
The next play I wrote was on an equally obscure subject, written in a frenzy in the spring of 1948 at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. Later that summer, I gave it to Tennessee Williams to read. He pronounced it the worst play he’d read in some time, and I solemnly abandoned playwriting for good, after first pointing out to him that a literary form which depended on the combined excellence of others for its execution could hardly be worth the attention of a serious writer, adding with deliberate cruelty that I did not envy him being stagestruck and his life taken up with such frivolous people as actors and directors. He agreed that I should not expose myself just yet to this sort of tedium.
Six years later, driven by necessity, I took the plunge into television, the very heart of darkness, and to my surprise found that I liked it. But despite television’s raw youth there is a tradition already firmly established that comedies seldom work on the small screen and that satire never does. Like most traditions, this one is founded on a part truth. For one thing, the comedy timing of stage-trained actors is inevitably affected by the absence of human response during a performance, and for another several people sitting at home glumly staring at a television set are not apt to find anything very amusing unless it is heavily underscored by laughter from a studio audience. And plays on television are performed without audiences.
Satire presents a further difficulty for the mass audience. If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized. If they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately for our native satirists, the American mass audience possesses very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but, as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others. Even political jokes, if they were allowed on television, would not have much relevance. Recently one national poll disclosed that almost half of those queried could not identify the Secretary of State. The size of the population has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information—literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education too bland to hope for much change. As a result, satire, unless done very broadly puzzles and irritates rather than amuses.
I have often thought that the domination of naturalism in our letters is directly attributable to the breakdown of the old homogeneous American society of the nineteenth century, caused by the influx of immigration, the discovery of exciting new machinery, the ease of travel. Before this burst of population and invention, an educated man, writing allusively, could assume that his readers would respond knowledgeably to a fairly large number of references both literary and social. Since 1900 this has been less and less possible, and it is no coincidence that naturalism should be to this day the preferred manner in the novel, if only because the naturalistic writer, by definition, takes nothing for granted. He assumes that the reader knows no more than he chooses to tell. He constructs a literal world of concrete detail. His narrative is easily followed. He records the surface of life with a photographer’s care, leaving the interpretation, the truth of his record, to the reader’s imagination. The result is that our time’s most successful popular writing is journalism, another dagger at the novel’s heart.
The idea for Visit to a Small Planet (from outer space arrives a charming hobbyist named Kreton whose blithe intent it is to start a war: “I mean it’s the one thing you people down here do really well!”) was rejected by three television sponsors before Philco-Goodyear Playhouse bought it. I was told that the advertisers found the premise alarming, which was certainly disingenuous of them. Had I not spun my fragile satire about the one glittering constant in human affairs, the single pastime that never palls: war? In fact, one might say that Visit is the happiest of pro-war plays.
But only Philco saw the charm of this conceit, and on the night of May 8, 1955, it was telecast. With some anxiety we waited for the roof to fall in. To my surprise it did not, and most people were pleased with the result. I was then informed that a producer would like me to do a stage version for Broadway. And so it came to pass. Expansion was not difficult. As a novelist, I was accustomed to using a hundred thousand words to net my meaning. My problem theatrically has always been one of compression.
After the script was ready there were the usual trials, delays, problems of temperament; each participant convinced that the others had gone into secret league to contrive his professional ruin (and on occasion cabals did flourish, for the theater is a child’s world).
On January 16, 1957, the play opened in New Haven. From that moment until the New York opening on February 7, I was more dentist than writer, extracting the sharper (and not always carious) teeth. The heart of the play’s argument was a scene in the second act between Kreton and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. At each performance the audience, charmed by the fooling that had gone before, grew deathly cold as the debate began. This was not what they had anticipated (a fault, I own, of the dramaturgy), and their confidence in the play was never entirely regained. A few days before we left Boston, I replaced the scene with a lighter one, involving the principals and giving the curtain to our subtlest player, the cat. The substitute was engaging; the play moved amiably; no one was shocked. (Earlier, some observers in New Haven had declared the entire conception unwholesomely menacing. If only they had seen the first draft of the play, in which I blew up the whole world at the end, the perfect curtain!) So by deliberate dulling of the edge of the satire, the farce flourished.
A number of reviewers described the play as a vaudeville, a very apt description and one in which I concur, recalling a letter from Bernard Shaw to Granville-Barker: “I have given you a series of first-rate music hall entertainments thinly disguised as plays, but really offering the public a unique string of turns by comics and serio-comics of every popular type.” That of course is only half the truth, but it is the amiable half. In the case of Visit, the comedic approach to the theme tended to dictate the form. Having no real commitment to the theater, no profound convictions about the well-made or the ill-made play, I tend to write as an audience, an easily bored audience. I wrote the sort of piece I should like to go to a theater to see, one in which people say and do things that make me laugh. And though monsters lurk beneath the surface, their pres
ence is sensed rather than dramatically revealed. My view of reality is not sanguine, and the play for all its blitheness turns resolutely toward a cold night. Fortunately for the play’s success, the incisors were extracted out of town and the venture was a hit. But in that word “hit” lies the problem.
I was obliged to protect an eighty-thousand-dollar investment, and I confess freely that I obscured meanings, softened blows, and humbly turned wrath aside, emerging with a successful play which represented me only a little. It is not that what was fashioned was bad or corrupt; I rather fancy the farce we ended up with, and I think it has a good deal of wear in it. But the play that might have been, though hardly earth-shaking, was far more interesting and true. Like too many others I played the game stolidly according to rules I abhorred, realizing that the theater and its writers are seriously, perhaps fatally, hampered by economic pressure. Because it costs too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. It is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in the Broadway theater to fail is death, and in an atmosphere so feverish it is difficult to work with much objectivity. Only the honest hacks have a good time of it. Cannily, they run up a banner: It’s just us again, kids, trying to make a buck. And they are let off with genial contempt. It is the crankier, more difficult writers who must work at a disadvantage, and efforts to divert them into familiar safe channels are usually disastrous. Is there a solution? I see none; unless it be the decentralization of the theater to the smaller cities and to the universities, where the means of production will be less than good but the freedom greater, particularly the luxurious freedom to fail.