Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  In this day of the short short story and the long long novel and the same old three-act play, Mr. Coward’s medium is a refreshing change. Only two of these nine plays are done in one scene with no lowering of the curtain until the end. The others, running from two to six scenes, are short comedies and dramas; not one-act plays, not skits. At least two of them (and maybe, in Mr. Coward’s facile hands, four) could have been expanded into full-length plays, but they would have been diluted and attenuated, they would have lost the sharp, quick glow he has put upon them. I got to thinking about certain three-act dramas I had seen (among them The Petrified Forest, no matter what you think) and wondering if they would not have profited by being cut down to an hour and a quarter (I believe Mr. Coward’s own Point Valaine would have profited by it; a dabbing on of that strange poison might have been more persuasive than its slow application; a quicker view of Mr. Lunt with his suspenders trailing, if you remember).

  Anyway, the formula Mr. Coward hit on for these particular pieces makes for three acutely pointed up evenings in the playhouse. It is a formula analagous to that which, in prose writing, Henry James called “the beautiful and blest nouvelle,” not so short as a short story, not so long as a novel. Mr. Coward’s present form is shorter than the conventional play, longer than the one-act play. If this nouvelle of the theatre has its bright, particular felicities, it also has its perils: too much could be crowded out or nervously crowded in; the thing could be abrupt, jerky, and unsatisfactory. In Mr. Coward’s hands it never is.

  The Astonished Heart has six scenes, each lasting only ten or fifteen minutes; three of them take place in November 1935, one in November 1934, one in January 1935, and one in April 1935. The gradual emotional entanglement and spiritual disintegration of a man has to be presented in a little more than an hour. There are only a few seconds between scenes. Mr. Coward persuades you that everything you see come about has come about, lingeringly, in its time. It is a fine technical achievement. (Whether you can identify yourself thoroughly with his psychiatrist in the play is, of course, another thing. This, Mr. Coward’s favorite of his nine works, is a study of a highly specialized infatuation. It is clinical rather than familiar, and for me lacks the sure authority of the basically similar situation in Still Life. I have reached the time of life when I believe that men do not die for love, or the ravages of love—or maybe only that they shouldn’t. There is, for my taste, a sterner and a livelier problem in the analysis of the astonished heart left tragically incapable of violence by the passions which send the muddled Dr. Christian Faber to his death. The shoulder of his wife would have been, to my mind, a more inevitable place for him to end up than the pavement below his window, and a damn sight harder place, both for the doctor and for the playwright. Which is all, perhaps, mere dialectic—or is it ideology? Anyway, let’s get the hell out of this parenthesis.)

  It seems to me that all these plays are written wisely and well (Mr. Coward, as you may know, bats them off in no time at all, which appalls me). His right words for those who have been long in love, or marriage, and for those who have just fallen into love, or marriage, have, at their best, a precision that moves toward the absolute. They would do, for me, as epitaphs on the loves and marriages of our time (you can go to Mr. Maugham for a harder granite or to Mr. Huxley for a colder chisel, if you want to). I remember especially the talk of the lovers in Still Life; it was exactly right.

  Before The Astonished Heart comes on, Mr. Coward and Miss Lawrence have moved gaily through a very funny mix-up in a smart London drawing room, Hands Across the Sea, and after it is over they romp loudly through a very funny brawl in a tawdry music hall. Which brings us to the outstanding thing about our cycle of nine: the really remarkable acting of Miss Lawrence and Mr. Coward throughout. As far as I’m concerned she could play Little Eva, or even Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, and he could play Grover Cleveland. They seem to be able to do anything—indeed, in these plays, they darn near do. They’re fine as the bickering Gows in Fumed Oak (one of my favorites); they’re exact as the troubled Gayforths in Shadow Play (the trickiest and most fanciful of the nine); they’re immensely moving as the stricken lovers in Still Life (the one I liked the best); they’re perfect as the pictorial Featherways in Family Album (an enchanting half hour); they’re amusingly right as the impecunious Cartwrights of Ways and Means; and, as the raucous Peppers of the music halls—well, you wonder they ever rose above the Palace of Varieties. Surely there are no other two who could so perfectly do all these things. I heard someone nominate Alfred Lunt and Ina Claire. They might be smart enough to do it, but I think they’d be too smart to try it.

  The rest of the cast are by no means thrown into shadow; they are all very good; there is a smooth unity about everything this company does. Joyce Carey plays a variety of character parts with effective sureness; Alan Webb, in an even wider range of roles, is bound to catch your respectful attention; you will remember Edward Underdown and Moya Nugent—particularly her little Elsie in Fumed Oak. The credit line, “Decor by G. E. Calthrop,” covers a multitude of always fitting, sometimes brilliant, sets. Miss Lawrence’s gowns were exclaimed over by the ladies of Boston, where I enjoyed the Coward cycle. The audience there on the last night stood and cheered. I heard a gray-haired woman say that in twenty-eight years of Boston playgoing she had no memory of such a letting go. More decorous and self-contained than Boston folk, I did not rise and shout, but I applauded loudly and, here in this place, I do so again. I had a swell time.

  (This tableau presents Mrs. Rockett [Joyce Carey], the carping mother-in-law of Fumed Oak, screaming at Hubert Charteris [Alan Webb], the puzzled and indignant husband of We Were Dancing. Elsie [Moya Nugent], the awful little child of Fumed Oak, here looks on dully. This scene does not happen in Tonight at 8:30; it just happens here.)

  Letter from the States

  You are probably still trying to get tickets to South Pacific, and I wish you luck, but what has interested me most in the current New York theatre season is a trio of plays by three men who unquestionably belong to the literary ages. Such a display of fame and genius is not a common occurrence on Broadway. The plays are Caesar and Cleopatra by G. B. Shaw, a great playwright, The Cocktail Party, by T. S. Eliot, a great poet, and The Turn of the Screw, by the late Henry James, a great novelist. This last, called The Innocents, and written by William Archibald, is a faithful stage version of the master’s famous old ghost story.

  Caesar and Cleopatra is more than fifty years old, but is still as fresh as a daisy and as bright as a 1950 dollar. It has been done before, but never so brilliantly and gaily as in the present production, which stars Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Caesar, and Lilli Palmer as Cleopatra. Shaw’s Caesar is not the marble-faced, laurel-wreathed fellow whose Commentaries turned you against him in high school, but just about the most wonderful man you ever saw on any stage or in any book. Sir Cedric makes the most of Shaw’s idol, and Miss Palmer would have been executed instantly by the real Cleopatra for her beauty, her radiance, and her lovely figure. Shaw is said to have got the idea for his play after reading Mommsen’s History of Rome. I happened to read Mommsen in Rome in 1938, but I am a Hannibal man and I skipped the chapters on Caesar.

  It has always been a contention of mine that Hannibal could have beaten Caesar the best day Caesar ever saw, just as I think that Jack Johnson could have taken Gene Tunney if both men had been in their prime at the same time. I looked up the dates on Caesar and Hannibal the other day to see how far they missed each other. Hannibal had been dead eighty-three years when Caesar was born in 100 B.C. Since Caesar’s expedition into Gaul was made in 58 B.C., when he was forty-two years old, something like a hundred and forty years lay between the military heydays of the two immortal generals. This is too bad. A clash between Caesar and Hannibal would have been something to translate from the Latin, always providing that Julius would have been in shape to write about it. Vercingetorix and his Gauls were just so many Primo Cameras, or antique pushovers, compared to the light
and heavy cavalry of Hannibal and the storm troops that broke the center of the Roman line at Cannae. I discussed the relative merits of the two imperators with a man from V. M. I. [Virginia Military Institute] recently. He contends that Stonewall Jackson could have taken them both in the same ring, or across the same Rubicon or pass of the Little St. Bernard.

  Eliot’s The Cocktail Party quickly became the talk of the town after it opened early this year. Even its producers hadn’t held out much hope for the American success of a play in verse written by a distinguished poet famous, even among the literati, for the profundity of his thought and the difficulty of his meanings. The play became an instant hit, somewhat to the surprise of everybody. Anti-intellectuals, haters of poetry, and other Philistines who go to the play expecting to endure an ordeal find themselves under the spell of a new and strange enchantment. A voice of unique authority speaks from the astonished Broadway stage, in subtle and magical rhythms that make even the businessman, dragged to the play by his wife, lean forward and listen. Eliot himself has said that his play means anything its audiences think it means, and this has led American theatregoers, who love argument and debate, to plunge loudly and freely into the general controversy The Cocktail Party has aroused. There are even those who claim to know more about the true meaning of the play than Eliot does. He would be the last to disagree with them. It is played by a perfect cast of English actors who have the fine flexibility of instruments in an orchestra.

  No story in the past hundred years has aroused more controversy among literary critics and literary psychiatrists than Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which Mr. Archibald has transcribed for the theatre with devotion and sensitive understanding. There are six in the cast, including the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who are properly left unlisted in the program, out of broadminded deference to those grim and relentless critics and psychiatrists who do not believe there are any ghosts in the story. The literature of controversy as to the meaning and motivation of The Turn of the Screw is voluminous. Is it a simple, but subtle, story, deliberately created by a great artist, about the ghosts of two servants who came back from hell to capture and corrupt the souls of a twelve-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl in a dark English manor house of the late nineteenth century, or is it the unconscious projection, in Freudian symbolism, of the tortured psyche and the inner conflict of a complicated human being named Henry James? The Freudian literary critics and the Freudian literary psychiatrists, who are becoming more and more literary by the hour, find that the story falls into a fairly familiar pattern of human experience, when the searchlights of psychiatry are turned on it, but those of us who believe in the independent selective power of the artistic intelligence cannot be overwhelmed by their arguments, even though we accept the basic assumptions of the followers of Freud. It is interesting to note that Freud himself held that the creative artist was beyond this full and facile taking apart, but his successors think nothing of dividing the magnificent intelligence of Henry James into a few simple causes and effects.

  However all this may be, Mr. Archibald has stuck loyally to James’s belief that his ghosts are real ghosts. He has written a play of charm, fascination, and quiet excitement, and if it doesn’t always have the dark depths and special eloquence of the original story, it is nevertheless a play that holds you in the theatre and haunts you afterwards. It is superbly acted by an English boy of thirteen and a nine-year-old American girl, who seem to have something greater than an adult understanding of the secrets and shadows that walk in the garden, peer through the windows, and inhabit the halls of the house with thirty-five rooms, most of them locked. The two grown women who support the precocious youngsters are brave indeed to take on such a thankless task.

  A Farewell to Santa Claus

  (OR, VIOLINS ARE NICE FOR BOYS WITH CHINS)

  (The idea of this playlet grew gradually in the mind of the writer while he was quietly trying to read Chekhov’s Notebooks at a cocktail party where the guests were discussing Hemingway, while one man in a lady’s hat was imitating Ed Wynn.)

  [It is Christmas Eve. Santa Claus, in a patched suit, is working on a wooden toy, using only a gouge, for he has had to sell his other tools. In one corner his wife is dying of grief; in another corner a student is attempting suicide. Enter from time to time several Italian army officers and Russian government clerks.]

  SANTA CLAUS: This toy is no good.

  JUNIOR CLAUS: I am cold.

  MRS. CLAUS: Hush.

  STUDENT: What, no prosperity! [Shoots self.]

  ARMY OFFICER: It’s no good flying all over the world with one toy.

  SANTA CLAUS: As each child reaches for it, I will pull it back up the chimney. It will teach them they can’t even trust Santa Claus. JUNIOR: I am hungry.

  MRS. CLAUS [rocking back and forth, keening]: When I was a young woman, I married a prominent myth. I ceased to believe in him and he no longer existed. Then my son believed, and my husband existed again.

  JUNIOR: I don’t believe in him. [Santa Claus vanishes.]

  CLERK: I believe in him. [Santa Claus reappears.]

  SANTA CLAUS: Cut it out. This toy is no good.

  MRS. CLAUS: Never make toys, Junior. Make practical things. Your father will teach you to make practical things.

  SANTA CLAUS: I don’t know how to make practical things. I know how to make toys.

  JUNIOR [whining]: I don’t want to make toys. I want to make practical things.

  SANTA CLAUS: All right, I’ll teach you to make practical things, but they’re not going to look like practical things.

  OFFICER: It’s going to be a hard winter. It’s no good having a hard winter. The reindeer will die of cold.

  SANTA CLAUS: The reindeer are no good.

  JUNIOR: I want to kill a storekeeper. I want to shoot myself.

  CLERK [going to window]: It is raining.

  OFFICER [moodily, holding up piece of rope]: I have either lost a horse or am about to hang myself.

  MRS. CLAUS: I don’t like the rain. I am afraid of the rain.

  CLERK: It is no good having rain.

  SANTA CLAUS: It is time to go. [Santa puts on an old hat and an old coat, and puts his one toy in an old bag. He whistles for his reindeer.]

  MRS. CLAUS: I am afraid of the rain.

  FIRST REINDEER [putting nose in doorway]: I am no good.

  MRS. CLAUS: Nothing is any good.

  SANTA CLAUS: Which deer are you? You all look so much alike.

  REINDEER: I am Vixen. Who are you?

  SANTA CLAUS [aside]: He doesn’t know me. I have grown so thin and emaciated; I am so gaunt and pale, [to the reindeer] You know me. I’m sure you know me. Look. [He smiles in a pathetic attempt at jollity, tries to shake his sides like a bowl of jelly, blows out his sunken cheeks.] See? Remember?

  [The reindeer studies him in a puzzled way for a few moments, then brightens slightly, and points a hoof at him.]

  REINDEER: Are you a short, fat man?

  [Outside, sleighbells are ringing and bits of torn-up pencil-tablets, shaded to represent rain, drift by the window.]

  SANTA CLAUS: Well, I’m off. Nothing ever happens to the brave.

  [He swings his bag, with the one toy in it, over his shoulder, whistles with affected cheer, goes over to kiss Mrs. Claus, and finds she has died of grief. He stands looking at her. He doesn’t say anything.]

  SANTA CLAUS [slowly]: Her word was law. It’s like saying goodbye to a statute.

  [He walks to a hotel in the rain.]

  JUNIOR: I’m hungry.

  ITALIAN OFFICER: Eat some cheese.

  JUNIOR: I don’t like cheese. Cheese is for rats.

  OFFICER [angrily]: Let the rats have it.

  [Machine-gun fire offstage. All fall riddled except one government clerk. He hangs himself from the chimney with a stocking. Not a creature is stirring.]

  [CURTAIN]

  “I had the strangest feeling in the elevator that I was changing into Clare Luce.“


  “Well, I’ve found Mai Gish for you, Mr. Freeman. No relation to the sisters, incidentally.”

  “Slip something on, Mrs. Parks, and take a look at the new Warner Brothers sign.”

  One Man in His Time

  Everything from chagrin to humiliation has happened to me in the long years of my going to see Eugene O’Neill’s plays. For instance, I remember how the lovely young lady who accompanied me to The Emperor Jones, out in Columbus, persisted in believing that the curtain-raiser, that old chestnut Suppressed Desires, was the first act of the tragedy. We drifted gradually apart after that until we came to the point where we simply exchanged Christmas cards. Then there was the humiliating moment during a performance of The Hairy Ape when my uncle Jake Schoaf, who hadn’t seen a show since the Hanlons’ Superba in 1907 and who was no longer able to lend himself to the illusion of make-believe, crawled halfway over the footlights before the bull-fiddle player and two ushers could pull him down. Jake had taken as a personal reflection on his own courage and strength some of the wild speeches of Yank in the play.

  All this is simply by way of introduction to my rather confused feelings about the new O’Neill play, Days Without End, which I haven’t yet got up the courage to go and see but which I have been reading about. Instead of making one man become two men, simply by putting on and taking off a mask, or standing still and talking in a flat monotone and then moving around and talking in a natural voice, he has made two men become one man. There is, as the old saying goes, no use in crying over split personalities, but nevertheless the breaking up of a man into himself and his alter ego moves me. I may not exactly cry about it, but I worry about it, and I find that in this case it has moved me to endless speculations.