Before a play we are forced to do the chores of editing, of deciding what is more or less important, of shifting our attention from actor to actor on the stage. In reading any text we have to decide and sometimes puzzle out what the words themselves mean. At the movies we decide nothing, our treasured infantile inertia is barely nudged, for the editor, the director, the lighting, the orchestration, and the overwhelming size of the image itself hand us an unmistakable hierarchy of importance and lay before us the predigested results to wonder at and enjoy. In point of fact, a film is even more primitive than a dream if we consider how far more densely packed with ambiguity and insoluble mystery dreams are. But it is their dream-born primitiveness that accounts for the universal attraction of movies, and it is perhaps the passivity with which they are viewed that supplies the delights of release and escape for people everywhere. A movie is something being done to us, and this is very nice relative to the other forms, which by comparison are work.
So the screenwriter, charged as he is with creating and maintaining coherency in the film, stands in some contradiction to its real nature and fundamental sources of pleasure, which are incoherent, subconscious, sensuous. Indeed, it has long been standard procedure to disinvite screenwriters from the sets and locations of the films they have written (although not this one). They are like a guilty conscience arriving at the scene of a crime, necessary for upholding civilization but not really much fun. Their presence crowds the director, inhibits the actors. In the usual orgy of creative play that filmmaking is, with actors and director and cinematographer seeking to fabricate real feelings and marvellous accidents, the screenwriter—who started it all—represents the principle of good order without which all meaning is likely to escape the enterprise. Naturally, he is suspect.
But he has one final satisfaction. He may, if he so desires, contemplate the amazing fact that from this typewriter clicking away in his lonely room veritable armies of people have sprung forth—actors, makeup artists, food concessionaires, explosives teams, horse wranglers, plane pilots, chauffeurs, bankers, ushers, box office people, ad men and women, sign painters, costumers, hair designers, frogmen, attending physicians, dentists, nurses, truck drivers, mechanics, turbine experts, electricians, and people who know how to stretch shoes quickly or disguise a sudden pimple, plus their spouses and lovers. And all these regiments from the same typewriter ribbon and a few score sheets of paper with words on them. Magic.
Without in the least belittling screenwriting, I would say that it does not require one to write very well. The often agonizing stylistic effort that writing normally demands is obviated, if only because the work is not written to be read. So in this sense screenwriting is easier than other forms. On the other hand, the human relationships, the thematic coherency, and the story in a good screenplay are as tough to get right as they are in any other form. I must add my own (probably minority) view, however, that the screenplay requires much more of a shorthand approach to scene writing than the stage play or the novel. It wants things indicated, and as deftly as possible, rather than fleshed out in words, perhaps because the actor’s image on the screen is so vast and omnipotent as to be overwhelming in its suggestive power. What in other forms must be written out or spoken may on the screen be achieved with a raised eyebrow, the movement of a mouth or a hand, or a mere mute stare. But the condensation of image demanded by screenwriting is reminiscent of poetry as opposed to the prose of the stage form. In all, then, writing screenplays has its own formidable challenges, not the least of which is the capacity to bear the pleasure and the pain of being a member of the orchestra—in the first section, perhaps, but a member nonetheless—rather than playwright-soloist or novelist-virtuoso. The good part is that if the screenwriter gets less of the credit than he deserves, he may also get less of the blame, so it evens out in the end, and that, one supposes, is fair enough.
ON HIS WORKS
THE GOLDEN YEARS AND THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK
Introduction to The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck
1989
Both of these plays came out of the years leading up to World War II, between 1938, my college graduation year, and 1944 when the fighting was raging. For me they are a kind of unadulterated evidence of my reactions to that time and it strikes me oddly that, as up to my neck as I was in the feverish anti-Fascism that swept my generation, the plays I chose to write were so metaphorical. This is especially strange when the only tradition in American theater of which I was aware was realism. I can’t imagine what I thought I was doing.
Or, rather, I thought I knew that I was writing against the grain of the Broadway theater of the time, the only theater we had, which as usual was happily wallowing in its traditional sidewalk realism. My primary argument with this form was that I could not connect aspiration with it—it was too much like uninterpreted life. The Golden Years looked toward a non-existent poetic theater inspired by the Elizabethan models. Its lavish use of actors was no doubt encouraged by the fact that in the early months of its writing I was on the payroll, at $22.77 a week, of the expiring Playwriting Project of the WPA Theater, and at least in theory could call upon any number of actors for my cast. Unfortunately, before the play was finished, Congress had wiped out the WPA Theater and the play, like any play calling for several immense sets and a cast so large, was doomed as a possible commercial enterprise. It was never produced until the BBC did a radio production in 1987.
Excepting for a revision of three pages at the end of The Man Who Had All the Luck, and some mild pruning of both plays, I have left them as they were. The Man Who Had All the Luck was given a regular Broadway production and lasted less than a full week after the critics, with one or two interested but puzzled exceptions, could make absolutely nothing of it. I recall at the time being unable to find the slightest connection between the production and the play I imagined I had written, and after watching but one bewildering performance fled back to my desk and began a novel, resolved never to write for the theater again. It was 45 years later, in 1988, that I began to understand the reason for my alienation from my own play, as well, very possibly, for the total incomprehension of the critics.
A staged reading of the play under the direction of Ralph Bell, an old friend who had always had a soft spot in his heart for this play, quickly revealed that it is, indeed, a fable with no relation to realistic theater. A fable, of course, is based on an obsessive grip of a single idea bordering on the supernatural and it is the idea that stands in the forefront, rather than the characters and the verisimilitudes of the tale. The coincidences are arrantly unapologetic in this play and so they should be played, rather than attempts made to rationalize them and dim them down.
I recall the original production lit in reassuring pink and rose, a small-town genre comedy. Given the threatening elements in the story, this atmosphere must indeed have been puzzling. The play is after all attacking the evaluation of people by their success or failure and worse yet, denying the efficacy of property as a shield against psychological catastrophe.
From a distance of half a century I am struck by a certain optimistic undercurrent in both plays, despite one being a tragedy and the other veering pretty close. I must say that, at the time, life at best seemed headed for a bloody showdown with Fascism, or at worst a hapless surrender to it, but while there is plenty of worry in these plays, there is no real despair or defeat of the spirit. This will strike some as perhaps a reflection of a callow Leftism, but in truth it was the way most Americans felt even after a very long decade of Depression. By the late thirties and early forties we had, of course, known much social violence and all kinds of vileness, but not yet a Holocaust, not yet the bursting of the banks of evil. I can still recall my incredulity at the daylight bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. As bombings go, it wasn’t a very big one. The big ones were still on the way. But I simply could not believe that a European flying low in an airplane on a sunny day over an undefended to
wn, could, whatever his politics, drop live bombs on women out shopping with their baby carriages, on old men sitting before their doorways, on young lovers strolling across the ancient square! It was hard to sleep for weeks afterwards. It was still possible to be shocked. At least within one’s mind the lines of some sort of order of permissible human behavior still held.
In the West since the War of 1914–18 every period has known its main menace, some single force threatening life on the planet. For a long time now it has been Communism, and as this menace disintegrates, there are signs that ecological catastrophe is developing into a worldwide substitute. From the mid-thirties to the outbreak of war with the Axis powers it was the Fascist threat—and for some its promise—that pervaded every discussion. An important source of the energy in these plays was my fear that in one form or another Fascism, with its intensely organized energies, might well overwhelm the wayward and self-fixated Democracies. A reader today may find it strange that two such very different works could spring from the same source, or even, perhaps, that they are at all related to contemporaneous political events.
The telltale mark of this preoccupation, as I now see quite clearly, is much the same in both plays, even if one is a tragedy about the Cortés invasion of Montezuma’s Mexico in 1522 and the other the tale of a very successful young man in a pastoral Ohio village. They are both struggling against passive acceptance of fate or even of defeat in life, and urge action to control one’s future; both see evil as irrational and aggressive, the good as rational, if inactive and benign. Plainly, I was hounded at the time by what seemed the debility of Americans’ grasp of democratic values or their awareness of them. And I must recall—to fill out this picture—that these plays were written after a decade of Depression, which had by no means lifted with any certainty as yet, and that the Depression had humbled us, shown us up as helpless before the persistent, ineradicable plague of mass unemployment. Reason had lost a lot of her credentials between 1930 and 1940.
If as the decade ended, the devaluation of the individual—the main lesson of the Depression—was still spiked to the common consciousness, these plays are somewhat surprising testimony to me that I had not lost the belief in the centrality of the individual and the importance of what he thought and did. On this evidence I suppose I might even have been called an individualist—there is nothing like writing a play for unveiling one’s illusions! The Man Who Had All the Luck tells me that in the midst of the collectivist thirties I believed it decisive what an individual thinks and does about his life, regardless of overwhelming social forces. And likewise, in The Golden Years, the fate of all Mexico hung on what an individual—Montezuma—believed about himself and his role in the universe. Indeed, if these plays are to be credited, there is no force so powerful, politically as well as personally, as a man’s self-conceptions.
Hearing The Man Who Had All the Luck read after four decades, it only then occurred to me that I had written the obverse of the Book of Job. The story of a man who cannot come to terms with the total destruction of his property and all his hopes, when he has done nothing to earn such treatment from God or fate, is very much the same as that of a man who can’t seem to make a mistake and whose every move turns out to be profitable and good. What had Job done to deserve such disasters? David Beeves has much the same question in mind, oppressed by his invariably good luck in everything he attempts. And he projects an imminent disaster that will even things up between himself and the rest of humanity. For both these characters the menace is much the same—anarchy in the high command of the universe, a yawning breach between effect and conceivable causation, and they are both an argument with God.
There is mitigation in the Book of Job, of course, since we are shown a purpose behind Job’s catastrophe. God starts all the trouble by wagering with the Devil that nothing he can do will shake good Job’s faith in Himself. So it is clearly the Evil One who strips Job of his good life in order to destroy his belief in God’s justice. And indeed, it turns out that after much twisting and backsliding Job, despite everything, clings to God—and he is promptly rewarded with the return of all his worldly goods plus God’s personal gratitude for his having kept the faith. Of course this won’t do in our time if only because most of God’s argument with Job consists of reminding the poor man of the incomprehensibility of his obscure powers—“Can you draw out the Leviathan with a fishhook?” and so on. This sort of humiliation is less impressive now when we can press a trigger and destroy whales and might even lift them up with helicopters, and the atom in our hands has the power of a sun. It is the question of justice that we haven’t come any closer to clearing up, and indeed the goal of achieving it may be moving further away, so perhaps there is still a little room for The Man Who Had All the Luck.
As for the ending of this play—which I am sure I have rewritten twenty times over the past half century, it is as satisfactory as it is possible to be, as complete, let’s say, as Job’s, which also doesn’t quite come down on both feet. The simple fact is that, as moving and imperative as our questioning of our fates may be, there is no possibility of answering the main question—why am I as I am and my life as it is? The more answers one supplies the more new questions arise. David Beeves in this play arrives as close as he can at a workable, conditional faith in the neutrality of the world’s intentions toward him. I would emphasize the conditional side of it, but it is better than shooting out your brains in sheer terror of what may happen tomorrow.
The Golden Years, its purplish passages notwithstanding, is a harder if earlier look at passivity and its risks, but here the society as well as an individual is at stake. Montezuma, like the Democracies facing Hitler, was as though hypnotized. Weakened by self-doubt, he looks to Cortés, manifestly a brute and a conqueror, as one who may nevertheless bear within him the seed of the future. Something has ended for Montezuma before Cortés ever arrived in Mexico, the heart-lifting glamor of what men call the future is gone out of his life and he can foresee only deadly and meaningless repetition. There was a metaphorical poetry in this in the late thirties when perfectly intelligent, respectable, even heroic folk like the great flier Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne could return from a visit to Nazi Germany and call it “The Wave of the Future.” I recall feeling myself surrounded in those times by a kind of drifting into cultural suicide and a self-blinded acceptance of murder in high places, and this play was written in alarm. A few years later I did believe that had the Japanese not been deluded enough to attack Pearl Harbor there might well have been sufficient isolationist sentiment in the American people to simply let Hitler have his way with a defeated England and Europe. In a word, our passivity seemed in reality a drift toward an unacknowledged arrangement with Fascism. So—perhaps despite appearances—these are two anti-Fascist plays that were written quite close to the abyss. But perhaps more importantly, they were one very young writer’s wrestling with enormous themes.
FOCUS
The Face in the Mirror: Anti-Semitism Then and Now
1984
Some part of the genesis of this novel, Focus, must lie in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where I worked the night shift in the shipfitting department during World War II, one of some 60,000 men and a few women from every ethnic group in New York. It is no longer possible to decide whether it was my own Hitler-begotten sensitivity or the anti-Semitism itself that so often made me wonder whether, when peace came, we were to be launched into a raw politics of race and religion, and not in the South, but in New York. In any case, whatever the actual level of hostility to Jews that I was witnessing, it was vastly exacerbated in my mind by the threatening existence of Nazism and the near absence among the men I worked with fourteen hours a day of any comprehension of what Nazism meant—we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
Moreover, it was by no means an uncommon remark that we had been maneuvered into this war by powerful Jews who secret
ly controlled the federal government. Not until Allied troops had broken into the German concentration camps and the newspapers published photographs of the mounds of emaciated and sometimes partially burned bodies was Nazism really disgraced among decent people and our own casualties justified. (It is a fiction, in my opinion, that national unity around the war reached very deep in a great many people in those times.)
I cannot glance through this novel without once again feeling the sense of emergency that surrounded the writing of it. As far as I knew at the time, anti-Semitism in America was a closed if not forbidden topic for fiction—certainly no novel had taken it as a main theme, let alone the existence within the Catholic priesthood of certain militants whose duty and pleasure was to stoke up Jew-hate. When one is tempted to say that everything in the world has gotten worse, here is one shining exception.
I was reminded of this only recently when, quite by chance, I happened to tune in on a local Connecticut radio station and heard a Catholic priest trying to reason with an obviously anti-Semitic man who was laying the blame for several bombings of Jewish homes and synagogues in the Hartford area on the Jews themselves. There was a widespread search going on for the perpetrators, so the man had called in to the priest’s talk program to offer his ideas as to who might have been responsible. He had no doubt it was somebody whom a Jew had mistreated, either one of his employees, or somebody who had bought some defective item from him, or someone he had bilked out of money. Or maybe it was the work of the client of a Jewish lawyer outraged at having been defrauded. There were, he thought, all sorts of interesting possibilities since the Jews, as everyone knew, have a habit of defrauding and exploiting their workers, and in general have no respect for right and wrong and feel responsible only to one another. (The arsonist was caught some weeks later—a mentally disturbed young Jew.)
Collected Essays Page 24