by Gore Vidal
I have often thought it would be a service to the audience if each writer was forced to refer to himself in a certain style and manner which would make clear what he is. Implicitly, each does, but it is confusing to all but a student of rhetoric. Arthur Miller (he is on my mind because I have just read the Preface to his collected plays) writes of himself not seriously but solemnly. With paralyzing pomp, splitting his infinitives and confusing number, he climbs the steps to the throne, with the enemy syntax crushed beneath his heavy boot: he is our prophet, our king, our guide in the dark. The only thing wrong is that he does not write awfully well. In other times, if one had made such a criticism it would have been quite enough. But Mr. Miller is ready for this stricture (and so are all the other hackers in the kindergarten). “We have had,” he reminds those of us who were nodding, “more than one extraordinary dramatist who was a cripple as a writer, and this is lamentable but not ruinous.” I suppose he could get out of that one by saying he meant extraordinary to mean just that: extra-ordinary, though of course there is nothing more ordinary than writer-cripples in our theater.
Now by needling the pretensions of Mr. Miller (whom I often admire as a writer-cripple), I don’t mean to scout his rightful position in the commercial theater—he is more good than bad as an influence and as a fact—but to draw attention again to the lack of any sense in our aesthetic judgments. Mr. Miller—and all the rest—can get away with just about any evaluation he wants to make of himself, and those who know differently won’t bother to straighten out the matter for an audience which seems perfectly content to receive counterfeit bills for checks drawn in good faith. As a result, our commentators are so many Madame Verdurins, hopelessly confused as to true precedence. And the noncounterfeit artist must either go in to table last or make a fool of himself, much as the Baron de Charlus did that curious afternoon.
I happen to like a number of playwrights as people. For some reason they bring out my protective and pedagogic instincts. I like to reassure them, to help them, to give them reading lists. In many ways they are to be admired for stamina, since to be produced on Broadway resembles nothing so much as being shot from a cannon at a fragile net. One should not be surprised if the more sensitive dramatists tend to get a bit punchy. Most of them (I am generalizing hugely, but life is short) experience serious difficulty in reading books, which necessarily limits their fund of general information on any subject not connected with the theater or their own psychoanalysis. The literary world, to the extent they are aware of it at all, seems to them an invidious establishment where writers dislike them because they are better known and make more money than any other sort of writer. They do not realize that, having no interest in language and even less in what we like to think of as mind, they necessarily must earn the indifference of those who do bother with such things. Although in its essential preoccupations our theater cannot help but reflect the day, it has always been estranged not only from its own country’s culture but, to strike that tinny gong, from Western civilization. The result has been a curiously artificial development, resembling nothing but itself, like those amoebae which when boxed upon a slide stop their anarchic zooming about and make perfect right angles, as tribute to an imposed environment.
“Weariness of the theatre is the prevailing note of London criticism. Only the ablest critics believe that the theatre is really important; in my time, none of them would claim for it, as I claimed for it, that it is as important as the Church was in the Middle Ages….” Ah, that crisp hopeful voice! Shaw in 1906. “A theatre to me is a place where two or three are ‘gathered together.’ The apostolic succession from Eschylus to myself is as serious and as continuously inspired as that younger institution, the apostolic succession of the Christian Church.” Brave words and perhaps true, though there have not been very many American gatherings-together one would like William Morris to attend. With some justice, intellectuals hold our popular theater in contempt, and one of the reasons seldom explicitly stated is not so much the meretriciousness of the exhibits—popular art is opportunist at best—as its moments of would-be seriousness. Milton Berle telling low-comedy jokes onstage can be very beguiling; but to be lectured to in a stern tone by a writer considerably more stupid than much of his audience is a somber experience, and were our collective manners not better, theater seats would be torn up and hurled at the stage. Earnest Neanderthals implore us not to persecute minority groups; they exhort us to tenderness; they inform us that war is destructive; they remind us that love is the only connection. There is nothing wrong with these themes except the blunt obviousness with which they are handled and the self-righteous tone of writers whose aesthetic derives partly from mental therapists and partly from those urgent dramas that once made radio wonderful. It is not that one does not admire Arthur Miller’s real gifts for theater-writing or his good heart. It is his stunning solemnity which annoys. Stop telling us what we already know! And don’t write sentences like: “That he had not the intellectual fluency to verbalize his situation is not the same thing as saying that he lacked awareness, even an overly intensified consciousness that the life he had made was without form and inner meaning.” That is not a writer writing or a man trying to get through to others; it is the voice of the holder of a degree in Education. One sympathizes with Mr. Miller’s passion to be admired, to be thought significant. All of us tend more or less consciously to arrange our personas in an attractive way. But his attempt is saddening because, though he is not taken seriously outside the popular theater and press, he is almost good enough to be respected in the way he wants. More to the point, he should be good enough: I attribute his failure to the popular theater’s estrangement from the country’s culture.
In the last fifteen years the French theater has been used by Gide, Sartre, Camus, de Montherlant, Genet, Anouilh, Julian Green, Giraudoux—an eclectic list which goes on and on, comprising most of the interesting French writers. And what have we had? Tennessee Williams (whom I happen to admire), Mr. Miller, one small mood play by Carson McCullers, Thornton Wilder in his later, three-cheers-for-Love manner, and, of course, the heady splendors of J.B. It is not a heartening record.
The cult of feeling has not only undone much of our theater writing, it has also peculiarly victimized those gentle souls, the actors. They have been taught that “truth” is everything. And what is “truth”? Feeling. And what is feeling? Their own secret core, to which the character they are to interpret must be related. To listen to actors talk about “truth” is a chilling experience. They employ a kind of baby talk compounded of analysts’ jargon and the arcane prose of the late Stanislavsky. As one of them said severely of another’s performance: “He’s not thinking; he’s only thinking he’s thinking.” Our actors have also been taught to condemn the better English or French actors as “technical.” “Technical” here seems to mean—in these circles words are employed for transient emotive effects, never meaning—that a separation has been made between the actor’s own feelings and those the part he is playing calls for. To understand just who Iago is, the “technical” actor will deliberately make the separation. Then, having got the proper range, he will inhabit the character, using himself as much or as little as he pleases, his goal being the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Iago, not the revelation of his own inner state as he grapples with Iago. Our actors may not be able to say a line of verse intelligibly or begin to understand what Iago is all about, but you can bet they will bring floods of irrelevant feeling to the part. It is not acting but group therapy. And though this kind of acting is usually disagreeable to watch, it is so delightful to do that the actors won’t change without a struggle. The queen of the method is the genuinely gifted Kim Stanley, and the whole mistaken thing is all there in her large bland face, in the small eyes turned inward though they seem to be looking out, in the whiny voice rising and falling according to the beat of some private metronome of “truth,” in her whole being as it radiates self-love. The final effect is onanistic.
A minor phenomenon of the theater today is the milieu: kitchens in Kansas, cold-water flats, Bronx apartments, the lower-middle-class venue depicted in naturalistic terms by “truthful” actors before an audience of overdressed, overfed burghers. How does that audience stand it, even when it’s good? Is it that they enjoy a nostalgic frisson at looking back to their own origins? Or is there a desire to know about things today, to be instructed by the narcissism of a John Osborne, who tells them: “This is the way we are, young, angry, unique”? The burghers nod and belch softly, and some doze: it is the theater of the editorial and the survey. Even those who dislike Tennessee Williams must give him credit for castrating a hero here, eating one there; and with Elia Kazan racketing the actors about the stage, it is not easy to sleep. I save any further defense of Williams for another occasion, since my intention in these notes is entirely destructive.
And where do we go from here? I confess I have no very clear notion of what I should like to see the theater become. As a playwright I am a sport, whose only serious interest is the subversion of a society that bores and appalls me (no world elsewhere, alas; this is the one to fix). Yet I don’t see much change for the good. Plays cost too much to put on. That means investors will be wary of new things. I also suspect that despite the enviable example of the French, our comparable good writers are not apt to be much of an improvement on the ones already in the theater. In England, the Royal Court Theatre has offered hospitality to some of the good writers, but the plays so far produced have been disappointing. In fact, it may very well be that the simplemindedness we score in our playwrights is a necessary characteristic of play-making.
In any case, there is no use in worrying about Broadway. Expect less rather than more intelligence on the stage, especially as costs increase. Revel in the graver efforts, which will more and more resemble J.B.—that portentous magnum of chloroform Elia Kazan so accurately broke across our collective brows, launching us upon a glum sea anodyne. In fact, the former Assistant Secretary of State may well have got our Age’s number back in the 1930’s, when he decided that a poem should not mean but be. Our theater certainly does not mean; it is. Yet to the extent that it is, it mirrors us. Look in it and you will see quite plain the un-Loved face of Caliban.
Partisan Review, Spring 1959
*1Eisenhower, the Great Golfer, is gone, yet the flab persists because the pseudodemocracy can only maintain itself by a blurring of all distinctions, a wilful ignorance of what is. But in twenty years things have changed. Where once soared on high the imperial American eagle, predatory, greedy, fierce, now in the DDT-ed greensward crouches our newest totem, the soft, fuzzy image of our present soul, the dumb bunny.
*2As of this morning John Updike.
*3The young critic was most hurt by this piece, and over the years has tried to redress the balance by writing unkindly of me. (See this page.)
BERNARD SHAW’S HEARTBREAK HOUSE*
“Heartbreak House…rhapsodized about love; but it believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money, whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of La Rochefoucauld’s saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. Heartbreak House in short did not know how to live, at which point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the first-born of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the hopeful expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.”
That is from Bernard Shaw’s odd preface to his even odder play, now revived on Broadway. The preface is odd, among other things, because it is written with the wrong sort of hindsight. Shaw did not know when he began the play in 1913 that the first-born were going to be struck down. Nor is there any reference to war, actual or impending, in the first two acts. The third act, however, was completed after the first aerial bombardments in history, and Shaw, rather casually, uses this to drop a bomb and end the play. Yet it is not the residents of Heartbreak House or their first-born who get blown up; only a businessman and a burglar expiate the folly and worthlessness of…what? Not Heartbreak House certainly; capitalism, perhaps.
Everything about the play is queer, even its production history. Plans to put it on during the war went awry. Shaw finally published it, with preface, in 1919. Not until 1920 was the play produced, in New York. The next year it got to the West End. The preface is unique in Shaw for its bitterness and hysteria, and the play…well, there are those who put it first among his work and there are those who don’t know what to think of it. I’m afraid after seeing it performed for the first time the other day that I liked it a good deal less than I thought I did from having read it; parenthetically, I should put quite plainly here at the beginning that I regard Bernard Shaw as the best and most useful dramatist in English since the author of Much Ado About Nothing turned gentleman and let fall the feather.
What is Heartbreak House? In the context of the play it stands for the ruling class of England pre-1914: the “nice people,” somewhat educated, somewhat sensitive, somewhat independent financially (their cousins the hearties lived over at Horseback Hall). They were devotees of laissez-faire; they rhapsodized about love—but I have already quoted Shaw’s indictment. Heartbreak House, of course, is only another name for our new friend the Establishment, a protective association made up of public-school boys who come down from Oxbridge to take over Whitehall, the Church of England, the BBC, Fleet Street, the better-looking girls, and everything else that’s fun, while (so young writers tell us) sneering at the newly articulate Lumpenproletariat who have gone to red-brick colleges where, if one reads the new novels accurately, the main course given is Opportunism: Don’t reform, adapt. The jocose nihilism of many of the anti-Establishment novels and plays is no more than a love-hate acceptance of the Establishment; the Kingsley Amises approach it on its own terms in a way Shaw would have detested. Where he would have leveled Heartbreak House to make way for a carefully planned housing project, the new attackers of the Establishment merely want to move into some of those nice rooms at the top, an attitude ignoble to a socialist and hopelessly petty to an outsider who is aware that the rooms at the top of a diminished England are not much b
etter than those directly under. The Establishment has only an island to tend, while Heartbreak House, with Asquith and Bonar Law and Ramsay Mac for weekend guests, governed much of the world. To put it plain, Shaw’s target was important; and he knew what he wanted, which was not to adapt, or to make his own way, but to reform.
I think we know pretty much what Shaw intended to do in Heartbreak House, yet what actually did he do in the play itself? For one thing, it is improvised work. Shaw admitted he made it up as he went along, not knowing from day to day what his characters would do or say or become. He always tended to work this way, regarding a play essentially as an organism with a life of its own; one need only nurture it and let it assume its own shape. He even used to keep a checkerboard at hand to remind him who was onstage and who was off at any given moment in the writing. There is no doubt that this method served him as well as any other; his night mind was not, to say the least, fantastic. I am sure deep in his unconscious there lurked not the usual nightmare monsters of the rest of us but yards of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, all neatly labeled and filed. Yet in Heartbreak House Shaw’s improvisatory genius breaks down; he keeps marching into conversational culs-de-sac.
For example, in the second act the play comes to a grinding halt after Boss Mangan, recovered from hypnotic trance, denounces and is denounced by those who happen to be onstage at the moment, and exits. Then Captain Shotover tosses a Delphic phrase or two upon the night and paddles off. (Later the Captain, while again trying for an exit, says, almost apologetically: “I must go in and out,” a compulsion he shares with everyone else in this play; they all go in and out at whim.) This ill-madeness is often beguiling except on those occasions when it defeats the author, who finds himself with nobody left onstage except a couple who don’t have much of anything to say to one another at the moment. It is then that Shaw invariably, shamelessly, brings on the New Character, who is very often a member of the lower classes with a colorful speech pattern usually written out phonetically in the text. This time he is the Burglar, a comic character right out of Dickens, where Shaw claimed, not entirely facetiously, to have got most of his characters, at least those who are not himself. The Burglar is one of Shaw’s standbys, used in play after play; he is awful, but at least he starts the second act moving again and gives it a certain vivacity. As usual, Shaw, delighted with his own cunning, starts tying up ends; the Burglar is really the Captain’s old bos’n, the nurse’s husband, etc., etc. And now let’s have a long chat about the poor and the exploited, the exploiters and the rentiers, and then end the act.