This play, then, is a trial; the trial of a man by his own conscience, his own values, his own deeds. The “Listener,” who to some will be a psychoanalyst, to others God, is Quentin himself turned at the edge of the abyss to look at his experience, his nature and his time in order to bring to light, to seize and—innocent no more—to forever guard against his own complicity with Cain, and the world’s.
But a work of fiction, like an accident witnessed in the street, inevitably gives rise to many differing accounts. Some will call it a play “about” Puritanism, or “about” incest, or “about” the transformation of guilt into responsibility, or whatever. For me it is as much a fact in itself as a new bridge. And in saying this I only dare to express what so many American writers are trying to bring to pass—the day when our novels, plays, pictures and poems will indeed enter into the business of the day, the mindless flight from our own actual experience, a flight which empties out the soul.
INCIDENT AT VICHY
Guilt and Incident at Vichy
1965
About ten years ago a European friend of mine told me a story. In 1942, said he, a man he knew was picked up on the street in Vichy, France, during a sudden roundup of Jews, taken to a police station, and simply told to wait. Refugees of all sorts had been living in Vichy since the invasion of France because the relatively milder regime of Marshal Pétain had fended off some of the more brutal aspects of German occupation. With false papers, which were not hard to buy, a Jew or a politically suspect person could stay alive in the so-called Unoccupied Zone, which covered the southern half of the country. The racial laws, for one thing, had not been applied by Pétain.
In the police station the arrested man found others waiting to be questioned, and he took his place on line. A door at the front of the line would open, a Vichy policeman would beckon, a suspect would go in. Some soon came out again and walked free into the street. Most did not reappear. The rumor moved down the line that this was a Gestapo operation and that the circumcised would have to produce immaculate proof of their Gentileness, while the uncircumcised would of course go free.
The friend of my friend was a Jew. As he got closer and closer to the fatal door he became more and more certain that his death was near. Finally, there was only one man between him and that door. Presently, this last man was ordered into the office. Nothing stood between the Jew and a meaningless, abrupt slaughter.
The door opened. The man who had been the last to go in came out. My friend’s friend stood paralyzed, waiting for the policeman to appear and beckon him into the office. But instead of walking past him with his pass to freedom, the Gentile who had just come out stopped in front of my friend’s friend, thrust his pass into his hand, and whispered for him to go. He went.
He had never before laid eyes on his saviour. He never saw him again.
In the ten years after hearing it, the story kept changing its meaning for me. It never occurred to me that it could be a play until this spring when Incident at Vichy suddenly burst open complete in almost all its details. Before that it had been simply a fact, a feature of existence which sometimes brought exhilaration with it, sometimes a vacant wonder, and sometimes even resentment. In any case, I realize that it was a counterpoint to many happenings around me in this past decade.
That faceless, unknown man would pop up in my mind when I read about the people in Queens refusing to call the police while a woman was being stabbed to death on the street outside their windows. He would form himself in the air when I listened to delinquent boys whose many different distortions of character seemed to spring from a common want of human solidarity. Friends troubled by having to do things they disapproved of brought him to mind, people for whom the very concept of choosing their actions was a long forgotten thing. Wherever I felt the seemingly implacable tide of human drift and the withering of will in myself and in others, this faceless person came to mind. And he appears most clearly and imperatively amid the jumble of emotions surrounding the Negro in this country and the whole unsettled moral problem of the destruction of the Jews in Europe.
At this point I must say that I think most people seeing this play are quite aware it is not “about Nazism” or a wartime horror tale; they do understand that the underlying issue concerns us now and that it has to do with our individual relationships with injustice and violence. But since a few critics persist in their inability to differentiate between a play’s story and its theme, it is just as well to make those differences plain.
The story as I heard it never presented a “problem”: everyone believes that there are some few heroes among us at all times. In the words of Hermann Broch, “And even if all that is created in this world were to be annihilated, if all its aesthetic values were abolished . . . dissolved in skepticism of all law . . . there would yet survive untouched the unity of thought, the ethical postulate.” In short, the birth of each man is the rebirth of a claim to justice and requires neither drama nor proof to make it known to us.
What is dark if not unknown is the relationship between those who side with justice and their implication in the evils they oppose. So unknown is it that today in Germany it is still truly incomprehensible to many people how the crude horrors of the Nazi regime could have come to pass, let alone have been tolerated by what had for generations been regarded as one of the genuinely cultured nations of the world. So unknown that here in America, where violent crime rises at incredible rates—and, for example, the United Nations has to provide escorts for people leaving the building after dark in the world’s greatest city—few people even begin to imagine that they might have some symbolic or even personal connection with this violence.
Without for an instant intending to lift the weight of condemnation Nazism must bear, does its power not become more comprehensible when we see our own helplessness toward the violence in our own streets? How many of us have looked into ourselves for even a grain of its cause? Is it not for us—as it is for the Germans—the others who are doing evil?
The other day on a news broadcast I heard that Edward R. Murrow had been operated on for lung cancer. The fact was hardly announced when the commercial came on—“Kent satisfies best!” We smile, even laugh; we must, lest we scream. And in the laughter, in the smile, we dissolve by that much. Is it possible to say convincingly that this destruction of an ethic also destroys my will to oppose violence in the streets? We do not have many wills, but only one: it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.
The first problem is not what to do about it but to discover our own relationship to evil, its reflection of ourselves. Is it too much to say that those who do not suffer injustice have a vested interest in injustice?
Does any of us know how much of his savings-bank interest is coming from investments in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant real estate, those hovels from which super profits are made by jamming human beings together as no brute animals could be jammed without their dying? Does anyone know how much of his church’s income is derived from such sources?
Let the South alone for a moment—who among us has asked himself how much of his own sense of personal value, how much of his pride in himself is there by virtue of his not being black? And how much of our fear of the Negro comes from the subterranean knowledge that his lowliness has found our consent and that he is demanding from us what we have taken from him and keep taking from him through our pride?
It was not to set forth a hero, either as a fact of history or as an example for us now, that I wrote this play but to throw some light on evil. The good and the evil are not compartments but two elements of a transaction. The hero of the play, Prince Von Berg, is mistakenly arrested by a Nazi race “expert.” He comes into the detention room with his pride of being on the humane side, the right side, for he has fled his Austria and his rank and privilege rather than be part of a class which oppresses people.
None of the horrors he witnesses are really sur
prising to him here, nothing is forbidden any more, as he has long known. What he discovers in this place is his own complicity with the force he despises, his own inherited love for a cousin who, in fact, is a Nazi and an oppressor, the material cause, in short, for what before was a general sense of guilt, namely, his own secret joy and relief that, after all, he is not a Jew and will not be destroyed.
Much is made of guilt these days, even some good jokes. Liberalism is seen now as a response to guilt; much of psychiatry has made a business of evaporating guilt; the churches are no longer sure if their age-old insistence on man’s guilt is not an unwitting spur to neurosis and even the acting-out of violence; the Roman Catholic church has only recently decided to lift the Crucifixion guilt from the Jews alone and to spread it evenly over mankind.
I have no “solution” to human guilt in this play, only a kind of remark, no more. I cannot conceive of guilt as having an existence without the existence of injustice. And injustice, like death itself, creates two opposing interests—one more or less profits from it, the other more or less is diminished by it. Those who profit, either psychically or materially, seek to even out the scales by the weight of guilt. A “moral” ounce is taken up to weigh down the otherwise too-light heart which contemplates uneasily its relative freedom from injustice’s penalty, the guilt of having been spared.
In my play, the hero is that man whose guilt is no longer general but suddenly a clear transaction—he has been, he sees, not so much an opponent of Nazism but a vessel of guilt for its brutalities. As a man of intense sympathy for others he will survive but at a price too great for him to pay—the authenticity of his own self-image and his pride. And here I stop; I do not know why any man actually sacrifices himself any more than I know why people commit suicide. The explanation will always be on the other side of the grave, and even that is doubtful.
If they could speak, could the three boys who were murdered in Mississippi really explain why they had to go to the end? More—if each of them could discover for us in his personal history his motives and the last and most obscure corner of his psychology, would we really be any closer to the mystery of why we first require human sacrifices before our guilt can be transformed into responsibility? Is it not an absurdity that the deaths of three young men should make any difference when hundreds have been lynched and beaten to death before them, and tens of thousands humiliated?
The difference, I think, is that these, including Chaney, the young Negro, were not inevitable victims of Mississippi but volunteers. They had transformed guilt into responsibility and in so doing opened the way to a vision that leaped the pit of remorse and helplessness. And it is no accident that the people of Mississippi at first refused to concede they had been murdered, for they have done everything in their power to deny responsibility for the “character” of the Negro they paternalistically “protect,” and here in these three young bodies was the return with interest for their investment in the guilt that does not act.
At the end of Incident at Vichy, the Prince suddenly hands his pass to a Jew, a psychiatrist, who accepts it in astonishment, in awe and wonder, and walks out to freedom. With that freedom he must accept the guilt of surviving his benefactor. Is he a “good” man for accepting his life this way or a “bad” one? That will depend on what he makes of his guilt, of his having survived.
In any case, death, when it takes those we have loved, always hands us a pass. From this transaction with the earth the living take this survivor’s reproach; consoling it and at turns denying its existence in us, we constantly regenerate Broch’s “unity of thought, the ethical postulate”—the debt, in short, which we owe for living, the debt to the wronged.
It is necessary to say something more about Germany in this context of guilt. I cannot read anyone’s mind, let alone a nation’s, but one can read the drift of things. About a year ago I wrote some thoughts about the current Frankfurt trials of Nazi war criminals, which were published in Germany, among other countries. There was much German mail in response and a good lot of it furious, in part because I asked the question whether a recrudescence of Nazism was possible again in the future. The significant thing in many letters was a resentment based on the idea that the Nazis and the regime were something apart from the German people. In general, I was giving Germany a “bad name.”
Apart from the unintended humor, I think this reaction is to be faced by the world and especially by the Germans. It is, in fact, no good telling people they are guilty. A nation, any more than an individual, helps nobody by going about beating its chest. I believe, in truth, that blame and emotional charges of a generalized guilt can only help to energize new frustrations in the Germans and send them striving for dignity through a new, strident, and dangerous nationalism. Again, guilt can become a “morality” in itself if no active path is opened before it, if it is not transformed into responsibility. The fact, unfortunately, is that for too many the destruction of the Jews by Germans has become one of Orwell’s non-actions, an event self-propelled and therefore incomprehensible.
But if the darkness that persists over human guilt were to be examined not as an exceptional condition or as illness but as a concomitant of human nature, perhaps some practical good could come of it instead of endless polemic. If the hostility and aggression which lie hidden in every human being could be accepted as a fact rather than as reprehensible sin, perhaps the race could begin to guard against its ravages, which always take us “unawares,” as something from “outside,” from the hands of “others.”
The reader has probably been nodding in agreement with what I have just said about Germany, but who among us knew enough to be shocked, let alone to protest, at the photographs of the Vietnamese torturing Vietcong prisoners, which our press has published? The Vietnamese are wearing United States equipment, are paid by us, and could not torture without us. There is no way around this—the prisoner crying out in agony is our prisoner.
It is simply no good saying that the other side probably does the same thing; it is the German’s frequent answer when you raise the subject of Nazi atrocities—he begins talking about Mississippi. And more, if he is intelligent he will remind you that the schoolbooks sent to Germany by the United States immediately after the war included the truth about Nazism, but that they were withdrawn soon after when the Cold War began, so that a generation has grown up which has been taught nothing about the bloodiest decade in its country’s history.
What is the lesson? It is immensely difficult to be human precisely because we cannot detect our own hostility in our own actions. It is tragic, fatal blindness, so old in us, so ingrained, that it underlies the first story in the Bible, the first personage in that book who can be called human. The rabbis who collected the Old Testament set Cain at its beginning not out of some interest in criminology but because they understood that the sight of his own crimes is the highest agony a man can know and the hardest to relate himself to.
Incident at Vichy has been called a play whose theme is “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Not so. “Am I my own keeper?” is more correct.
Guilt, then, is not a featureless mist but the soul’s remorse for its own hostility. We punish ourselves to keep from being punished and to keep from having to take part in regenerating that “unity of thought, that ethical postulate,” which nevertheless is reborn with every child, again and again forever.
THE PRICE
The Price—The Power of the Past
1999
The sources of a play are both obvious and mysterious. The Price is first of all about a group of people recollected, as it were, in tranquillity. The central figures, the New York cop Victor Franz and his elder brother, Walter, are not precise portraits of people I knew long, long ago but close enough, and Gregory Solomon, the old furniture dealer, is as close as I could get to reproducing a dealer’s Russian-Yiddish accent that still tickles me whenever I hear it in memory.
First, the bare bones of t
he play’s story: the Great Crash of 1929 left Victor and Walter to care for their widowed father, who had been ruined in the stock market collapse and was helpless to cope with life. While Victor, loyal to the father, dropped out of college to earn a living for them both and ended up on the police force, Walter went on to become a wealthy surgeon.
Collected Essays Page 35