The play begins decades later on the attic floor of the decrepit brownstone where the cop and his father had lived, surrounded by piles of furniture from their old apartment that the father had clung to. Now the building, owned by the father’s brother, is to be torn down, so the furniture must be sold.
The conflict of how to divide the proceeds cuts open the long-buried lives of both men, as well as that of Victor’s wife, Esther, and reveals the choices each has made and the price each has paid. Through it all weaves the antic ninety-year-old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon, who is yards ahead of them as he tries to shepherd them away from the abyss toward which he knows they are heading.
Behind the play—almost any play—are more or less secret responses to other works of the time, and these may emerge as disguised imitation or as outright rejection of the dominating forms of the hour. The Price was written in 1967, and since nobody is going to care anymore, it may as well be admitted that in some part it was a reaction to two big events that had come to overshadow all others in that decade. One was the seemingly permanent and morally agonizing Vietnam War, the other a surge of avant-garde plays that to one or another degree fit the absurd styles. I was moved to write a play that might confront and confound both.
I enjoyed watching some of the absurd plays—my first theater experiences were with vaudeville in the Twenties, after all, and absurdist comics like Bert Williams and Willie Howard, with their delicious proto–shaggy-dog stories and skits, were favorites. More, for a while in the Thirties our own William Saroyan, who with all his failings was an authentic American inventor of a domestic absurdist attitude, had held the stage. One would not soon forget his Time magazine subscription salesman reading—not without passion—the entire page-long list of names of Time’s reporters, editors, subeditors, fact checkers, department heads and dozens of lesser employees, to a pair of Ozark hillbillies dressed in their rags, seated on their rotting porch and listening with rapt incomprehension.
But the Sixties was a time when a play with recognizable characters, a beginning, middle and end was routinely condemned as “well made” or ludicrously old-fashioned. (That plays with no characters, beginning or end were not called “badly made” was inevitable when the detonation of despised rules in all things was a requisite for recognition as modern. That beginnings, middles, and ends might not be mere rules but a replication of the rise and fall of human life did not frequently come up.)
Often against my will, however, I found myself enjoying the new abstract theater; for one thing, it was moving us closer to a state of dream, and for dreams I had nothing but respect. But as the dying continued in Vietnam with no adequate resistance to it in the country, the theater, so it seemed to me, risked trivialization by failing to confront the bleeding, at least in a way that could reach most people. In its way, Hair had done so by offering a laid-back lifestyle opposed to the aggressive military-corporate one. But one had to feel the absence—not only in theater but everywhere—of any interest in what had surely given birth to Vietnam, namely, its roots in the past.
Indeed, the very idea of an operating continuity between past and present in any human behavior was démodé and close to a laughably old-fashioned irrelevancy. My impression, in fact, was that playwrights were either uninterested in or incapable of presenting antecedent material altogether. Like the movies, plays seemed to exist entirely in the now; characters had either no past or none that could somehow be directing present actions. It was as though the culture had decreed amnesia as the ultimate mark of reality.
As the corpses piled up, it became cruelly impolite if not unpatriotic to suggest the obvious, that we were fighting the past; our rigid anticommunist theology, born of another time two decades earlier, made it a sin to consider Vietnamese Reds as nationalists rather than Moscow’s and Beijing’s yapping dogs. We were fighting in a state of forgetfulness, quite as though we had not aborted a national election in Vietnam and divided the country into separate halves when it became clear that Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming favorite for the presidency. This was the reality on the ground, but unfortunately it had to be recalled in order to matter. And so fifty thousand Americans, not to mention millions of Vietnamese, paid with their lives to support a myth and a bellicose denial.
As always, it was the young who paid. I was fifty-three in 1968, and if the war would cost me nothing materially, it wore away at the confidence that in the end Reason had to return lest all be lost. I was not sure of that anymore. Reason itself had become unaesthetic, something art must at any cost avoid.
The Price grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world. It seemed to me that if, through the mists of denial, the bow of the ancient ship of reality could emerge, the spectacle might once again hold some beauty for an audience. If the play does not utter the word Vietnam, it speaks to a spirit of unearthing the real that seemed to have very nearly gone from our lives.
Which is not to deny that the primary force driving The Price was a tangle of memories of people. Still, these things move together, idea feeding characters and characters deepening idea.
Nineteen sixty-eight, when the play is set, was already nearly forty years since the Great Crash, the onset of the transformed America of the Depression decade. It was then that the people in this play had made the choices whose consequences they had now to confront. The Thirties had been a time when we learned the fear of doom and had stopped being kids for a while; the time, in short, when, as I once noted about the era, the birds came home to roost and the past became present. And that Depression cataclysm, incidentally, seemed to teach that life indeed had beginnings, middles and a consequential end.
Plays leave a wake behind them as they pass into history, with odd objects bobbing about in it. Many of these, in the case of The Price, are oddly funny for such a serious work. I had just finished writing it and with my wife, Inge Morath, went to the Caribbean for a week’s vacation. Hurrying onto the beach in our first hour there, we noticed a man standing ankle-deep in the water, dressed in shorts and a wide-brimmed plantation hat, who looked a lot like Mel Brooks. In fact, he was Mel Brooks. After a few minutes’ chat I asked if there was any fishing here. “Oh, God, yes,” he said, “yesterday there was one came in right there,” and he pointed a yard away in the shallow water. “Must have been three feet long. He was dead. But he may be over there today,” he added, pointing down the beach.
He wanted to know if I was writing, and I said we were casting a new play called The Price, and he asked what it was about. “Well,” I said, “there are these two brothers . . . ”
“Stop, I’m crying!” he yelled, frightening all the Protestants lying on the beach.
Then there was the letter from the Turkish translator, who assured me that he had made only one change in the text. At the very end, he wrote, after the two brothers nearly come to blows and part forever, unreconciled and angry, there follows a quiet, rather elegiac moment with the old furniture dealer, the cop, and his wife.
Just as they are leaving the stage, the translator explained, he had to bring back the elder brother, Walter, to fall tearfully into the cop’s arms. This, because the audience would fear that the actors themselves would have had to have a vendetta that could only end in a killing if they parted as unreconciled as the script required. And so, out of the depths, rose the Turkish past . . .
THE ARCHBISHOP’S CEILING AND THE AMERICAN CLOCK
Conditions of Freedom: Two Plays of the Seventies
1989
I
It is pointless any longer to speak of a period as being one of transition—what period isn’t?—but the seventies, when both these plays were written, seemed to resist any definition even at the time. The Archbishop’s Ceiling in some part was a response to this indefinition I sensed around me. Early in the decade the Kent State massacre took place, and while
the anti–Vietnam War movement could still mobilize tens of thousands, the freshness had gone out of the wonderful sixties mixture of idealism and bitterness that had sought to project a new unaggressive society based on human connection rather than the values of the market economy. There was a common awareness of exhaustion, to the point where politics and social thought themselves seemed ludicrously out of date and naively ineffectual except as subjects of black comedy. Power everywhere seemed to have transformed itself from a forbidding line of troops into an ectoplasmic lump that simply swallowed up the righteous sword as it struck. Power was also doing its own, often surprising thing.
At least as an atmosphere, there was a not dissimilar disillusion in Eastern Europe and, for different reasons, in France too. As president of International P.E.N., I had the opportunity to move about in Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union, and I felt that local differences aside, intellectual life in the whole developed world had been stunned by a common failure to penetrate Power with a more humane and rational point of view. It may have been that the immense sense of relief and the high expectations that rushed in with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism had to end in a letdown, but whatever the causes, by the seventies the rational seemed bankrupt as an ultimate sanction, a bar to which to appeal. And with it went a sense of history, even of the evolution of ideas and attitudes.
The ups and downs of disillusionment varied with time and place, however. It was possible to sit with Hungarian writers, for example, while they talked of a new liberalizing trend in their country, at the very moment that in Prague the depths of a merciless repression were being plumbed. There, with the Soviet ousting of Dubcˇek and the crushing of all hope for an egalitarian socialist economy wedded to liberal freedoms of speech and artistic expression, the crash of expectations was especially terrible, for it was in Prague that this novel fusion seemed actually to have begun to function.
The seventies was also the era of the listening device, government’s hidden bugs set in place to police the private conversations of its citizens—and not in Soviet areas alone. The White House was bugged, businesses were bugging competitors to defeat their strategies, and Watergate and the publication of the Pentagon Papers (which polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved) demonstrated that the Soviets had little to teach American presidents about domestic espionage. The burgling of psychiatrists’ offices to spy out a government official’s private life, the widespread bugging by political parties of each other’s offices, all testified to the fact that the visible motions of political life were too often merely distractions, while the reality was what was happening in the dark.
Thus, when I found myself in Eastern European living rooms where it was all but absolutely certain that the walls or ceilings were bugged by the regime, it was not, disturbingly enough, an absolutely unfamiliar sensation for me. Of course there were very important differences—basically that an Eastern writer accused of seditious thoughts would have no appeal from his government’s decision to hound him into silence, or worse. But the more I reflected on my experiences under bugged ceilings, the more the real issue changed from a purely political one to the question of what effect this surveillance was having on the minds of people who had to live under such ceilings, on whichever side of the Cold War line they happened to be.
Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright who was later to serve a long term in prison, one day discovered a bug in his chandelier when house painters lowered it to paint the ceiling; deciding to deliver it to the local police, he said that it was government property that he did not think rightfully belonged to a private person. But the joke was as unappreciated as the eavesdropping itself was undenied. Very recently, in the home of a star Soviet writer, I began to convey the best wishes of a mutual friend, an émigré Russian novelist living in Europe, and the star motioned to me not to continue. Once outside, I asked if he wasn’t depressed by having to live in a tapped house. He thought a moment, then shrugged—“I really don’t know how I feel. I guess we figure the thing doesn’t work!”—and burst out laughing at this jibe at Soviet inefficiency. Was he really all that unaffected by the presence of the unbidden guest? Perhaps so, but even if he had come to accept or at least abide it fatalistically, the bug’s presence had changed him nonetheless. In my view it had perhaps dulled some resistance in him to Power’s fingers ransacking his pockets every now and then. One learns to include the bug in the baggage of one’s mind, in the calculus of one’s plans and expectations, and this is not without effect.
The occasion, then, of The Archbishop’s Ceiling is the bug and how people live with it, but the theme is something different. There are a number of adaptations to such a life: one man rails furiously at the ceiling, another questions that a bug is even up there, a third has changes of opinion from day to day; but man is so adaptable—and anyway the bug doesn’t seem to be reacting much of the time and may simply be one more nuisance—that resistance to its presence is finally worn down to nothing. And that is when things become interesting, for something like the naked soul begins to loom, some essence in man that is simply unadaptable, ultimate, immutable as the horizon.
What, for instance, becomes of the idea of sincerity, the unmitigated expression of one’s feelings and views, when one knows that Power’s ear is most probably overhead? Is sincerity shaken by the sheer fact that one has so much as taken the bug into consideration? Under such pressure who can resist trying to some degree, however discreet and slight, to characterize himself for the benefit of the ceiling, whether as obedient conformist or even as resistant? And what, in that case, has been done to one’s very identity? Does this process not overturn the very notion of an “I” in this kind of world? It would seem that “I” must be singular, not plural, but the art of bureaucracy is to change the “I” of its subjects to “we” at every moment of conscious life. What happens, in short, when people know that they are—at least most probably, if not certainly—at all times talking to Power, whether through a bug or a friend who is really an informer? Is it not something akin to accounting for oneself to a god? After all, most ideas of God see him as omnipresent, invisible, and condign in his judgments; the bug lacks only mercy and love to qualify, it is conscience shorn of moral distinctions.
In this play the most unreconcilable of the writers is clearly the most talented. Sigmund really has no permanent allegiance except to the love of creating art. Sigmund is also the most difficult to get along with, and has perhaps more than his share of cynicism and bitterness, narcissism and contempt for others. He is also choking with rage and love. In short, he is most alive, something that by itself would fuel his refusal—or constitutional incapacity—to accept the state’s arrogant treatment. But with all his vitality, even he in the end must desperately call up a sanction, a sublime force beyond his ego, to sustain him in his opposition to that arrogance; for him it is the sublimity of art, in whose life-giving, creative essence he partakes and shares with other artists whose works he bows to, and in the act transcends the tyranny.
In a sense Archbishop begs the question of the existence of the sacred in the political life of man. But it begins to seem now that some kind of charmed circle has to be drawn around each person, across which the state may intrude only at its very real economic and political peril.
Glasnost, which did not exist in the seventies, is to the point here, for it is at bottom a Soviet attempt, born of economic crisis, to break up the perfection of its own social controls in order to open the channels of expression through which the creativity, the initiatives, and the improvisations of individual people may begin to flow and enrich the country. The problem, of course, is how to make this happen in a one-party state that in principle illegalizes opposition. But the wish is as plain as the desperate need of the economy itself, indeed of the regime, for the wisdom of the many and the release of their energies. Finally, the question arises whether, after so many generations of training in submission, the habits of op
en-minded inquiry and independence can be evoked in a sufficient number of people to make such a policy work.
Late in 1986, when glasnost was a brand-new idea scarcely taken seriously as the main thrust of the new administration, a Russian writer expressing the pre-glasnost view said to me, “What you people in the West don’t understand is that we are not a competitive society and we don’t wish to be. We want the government to protect us, that is what the government is for. When two Western writers meet, one of them most likely asks the other what he is writing now. Our writers never ask such a question. They are not competing. You have been in our Writers Union and seen those hundreds of writers going in and out, having their lunches, reading newspapers, writing letters, and so on. A big number of those people haven’t written anything in years! Some perhaps wrote a few short stories or a novel some years ago—and that was it! They were made members of the Union, got the apartment and the vacation in the south, and it is not so different in any other field. But this is not such a terrible thing to us!”
But, I countered, there were surely some highly talented people who produced a good deal of work.
“Of course! But most are not so talented, so it’s just as well they don’t write too much anyway. But is it right that they should be thrown out in the streets to starve because they are not talented? We don’t think so!”
What he had chosen to omit, of course, was that the mediocrities, of which he was all but admittedly one, usually run things in the Writers Union, something the gifted writers are usually too prickly and independent to be trusted to do. And so the system practically polices itself, stifling creativity and unpalatable truth-telling, and extolling the mediocre. But its main object, to contain any real attempts at change, is effectively secured. The only problem is that unless the system moves faster it may be permanently consigned to an inferior rank among the competing societies.
Collected Essays Page 36