I have put these questions because the commentators around the world have put them, but also because they do inform the play and I meant them to. Yet, no American reviewer actually brought up any of these questions. A play is rarely discussed here as to its philosophic meanings, excepting in a most cursory way; yet the basic effect upon us and the effect upon foreign audiences is evidently very similar. What I am trying to point out, again, is that it is less often the fact itself, the object itself about which we differ, than our unwillingness to rationalize how we feel. I sense that even as we do create the things of the spirit it seems to them rather an accident, rather a contradiction of our real character. I would add that had my plays not worked in Europe, which is to say that had they really been only philosophical works and not infused with the American pragmatic need for scenes to move with a pace and with characters made clear and familiar, the European would not be likely to be interested in them either.
I think it is true to say that for the most part as a nation we do not understand, we do not see that art, our culture itself, is a very sinew of the life we lead. Truly, we have no consciousness of art even as it has changed our tastes in furniture, in the houses we buy, in the cars we want. Only as it is transformed into things of daily use have we the least awareness of its vital functioning among us, and then it is only as its by-products appear in the most plain aspects of usefulness. As an example, even while abstract art is gazed at without comprehension, if not with hatred, its impact upon our linoleum designs, our upholsteries, our drapes, our women’s dresses, our buildings, our packages, our advertising—these uses or misuses are quickly accepted without a thought. We have made in real life a most modern environment in many cases and have little conscious awareness of modernity; they have kept an outmoded environment in many cases and have a heightened awareness of what is modern.
This whole antipathy for theorizing, of knowing intellectually what we are doing, has very often crippled our ability to appraise reality. We so often become drowned in our own actions. For instance, it seems to me that this government has acted time and again as though its reasons would be automatically accepted without question or suspicion. In recent months we have armed Pakistan, a nation imbedded in the Indian nation, and one with which India has some potentially explosive disagreements. The reason given for arming Pakistan was security against Russia and China. For the Indian government, however, there could only be one result of this arming and it would be to strengthen Pakistan against India. To defend our act by claiming naïveté will simply not do under the circumstances. We intended the arms for defense against Russia and China, therefore that is all they will be used for. To rise above our immediate action and interest, to see beyond the moment and through the eyes of another country—this requires a kind of imagination which, to be sure, is not very difficult to achieve, but one must be accustomed to using it. In general, it seems to me, speaking as an artist and not a politician, this government has proceeded at times quite as though individual actions could have no larger meaning; quite as though, in dramatic terms, each moment of the play we are writing were to be judged for itself and separately from the play as a whole.
This evident inability to see a context behind an action does not stop at Politics. I think it is part of our method of seeing life. Again, I will use the theater as an example. Our critics will be inclined to see the hero of a play as a psychological figure, as an individual, a special case always, and their interest flags beyond that point. It is even said that, strictly speaking, it is not their business as to the larger significance of a character portrayed on the stage. They are present to discern whether he is interesting, logically formed, persuasive as a fiction, and so forth. The European, however, while interested in the character’s manifest surface, is equally intent upon discovering what generality he represents. It is not the business of our critics to decide or most often to even discuss whether a play is built upon a tattered and outworn idea; if an old and worn idea is made to work on the stage once again in terms of effects and suspense and so forth, it is enough. In the European review one will inevitably find some estimate of the value of the concept behind the play. In other words, it is assumed to begin with that a thing is always made with an intention and that the intention is as important to evaluate as the effects it manages to create.
Thus it is that we find ourselves unable to meet the suspicions of Europeans in many situations, and find ourselves puzzled and even angered as a result. For instance, it is no secret to anyone in Europe that our borders are, in effect, sealed. And when, as happened recently, a writer of the eminence of Graham Greene is denied entry here for a visit in transit to the Far East, I am sure that most Americans cannot find the slightest patriotic interest in the situation. It happens that for a short time some decades ago, Mr. Greene, a converted Catholic, belonged to the Communist Party and has been an anti-Communist ever since. More importantly, his works are known around the world, and they are regarded by tens of thousands of people as sincere attempts to wrestle with some of the most serious moral and religious and ethical problems of this age. I can only ascribe his exclusion to a complete unwillingness, perhaps even an inability, to admit that Mr. Greene is not any Greene but a very particular Greene existing in a definite Red context; that being a writer of his stature is not a fact of any consequence but a politically important consideration; that for millions of people in the world his profession and the high seriousness with which he has practiced it lend him a certain dispensation, the dispensation of the truth-seeker; and finally, that to refuse him entry into this country implied that this country feared what he might see here. I am sure that given these considerations, our officials would reply that the law is the law; that a writer is only another name to them. Yet it is impossible not to conclude that the real interests of the United States, to say nothing of its dignity, are transgressed by such an action.
I believe that this attitude toward culture is a disservice to us all because it lays us open to extremely dangerous suspicions which can spread out to stain our whole effort to preserve the democratic idea in the world, especially when we have had to create so large a military machine. A display of force is always a generator of fear in others, whether it be in private or public, local or international affairs. We consent to the policeman’s carrying a gun not because we have lost our fear of the bullet but because we have agreed to suspend that fear on the assurance that the policeman carrying it is acculturated with us, that he shares our values, that he holds high what we hold high. But at the same time he must be willing to use that gun, he must be psychologically able to commit violence if we are to believe in his protection, and his willingness to slay, if it is not securely hedged about by his very clearly displayed respect for our values, quickly becomes a fearful thing. It is no different with a nation which would convince the world of its peaceful intentions even as it is heavily armed and its troops are stationed around the world. In the final analysis a reliance on force is always a confession of moral defeat, but in the affairs of nations it is tragically necessary sometimes to confess that defeat and to gather and rely on force. But to forget even for a moment that only the most persuasively demonstrated belief in civilized values can keep the image of force from being distorted into a menacing image—to forget this is to invite the easy demolition of our efforts for peace.
To prove an assertion whose implications are so vast is impossible, yet I must say that in a very profound way the differences I have indicated in our attitudes toward culture itself have often made it possible for Russian propaganda to raise fear of us in foreign peoples.
In passing, I should like to touch for a moment on a minor but I think indicative paradox inherent here. A recent article in The New York Times Magazine on Russian education and another group of photographs in Life described the high seriousness of the Russian college students, their evident dedication to their work, a picture so intense as to throw up in the mind the counter-image of so many
American students for whom college is quite another thing. Unless I am entirely mistaken, the same article and the same photographs would not appear extraordinary to the European. What would be strange to him and cause him to wonder on his community with us, would be pictures of some of the shenanigans indulged in by some of our students. What I am trying to indicate here again is that there are superficial differences in our attitudes to culture in this particular area which show us to be less intimately connected to the European than the Russian is. The same is true of our kind of theater as contrasted with the German, let us say, and the Russian. I emphasize that the official attitude toward these manifestations of culture is extremely weighty outside this country. Yet the fact remains, and I believe it to be a demonstrable fact, that with all our absence of apparent awe, we have produced more than a decent quota of cultural works in the past two decades. The crucial importance of the image we cast in the world is not appreciated among us and, in my opinion, is one of the wounds through which the blood of our influence and our dignity is constantly seeping out. I go back once again to the image of our force. If our enormous power to destroy—and whatever else it is, military force is a destructive force—if we are content to allow it to appear in the hands of a people who make nothing of culture, who are content to appear solely as businessmen, technicians, and money-makers, we are handing to the Russian, who appears to make so much of culture, an advantage of regiments. And the further irony is that the serious Russian, both student and artist, has been so hamstrung by the tyrannical strictures on thought in his country, that his intellectual production has in recent years been brought to nearly a standstill, excepting in those scientific pursuits connected with militarily valuable science. It is, in their case, an irony which does not escape the notice of the world, in fact, it is precisely their tyranny that has kept nations out of their grasp. I believe, in short, that if we could only recognize and admit to our successes in culture, if the policy of our government and our people toward the things of the mind and the spirit were especially conscious and made serious, we have at hand a means of coming into closer harmony with other peoples who at bottom share our basic values.
But lest I seem to advocate a new advertising campaign, let me quickly correct the impression. To be sure, the object of a business or a nation in its relations with the world outside is to show its best qualities. More precisely, the obvious thing to do is to exhibit to the world whatever the world will most easily take to its heart for its own, those things which will make other peoples fear us less and love us more, those things with which they can identify themselves. For it is easier to misunderstand and hate that which seems alien and strange.
Our most popular, most widely seen cultural export is the American movie. It is a powerful convincer because hardly anybody in the world doesn’t like to go to the movies. More important, however, it is spontaneously made, it appears without an ulterior political motive. So the man who sees it does so voluntarily and with his resistance down.
The trouble with the movies, however, is the same sort of trouble which Americans themselves often create when they go to Europe. Our movies draw the affections of people, their admiration, and envy for the opulence they generally portray, and also their disgust—as for instance, when a woman douses a cigarette in a perfectly good, uneaten, fried egg. At the same time, the movie star is beloved, his private life is followed with the interest long ago reserved for the minor gods. As such, we can only be glad so many foreigners like to see our pictures.
But even as we gain by them, we lose something of tremendous importance. Most movies are admittedly and even proudly brainless. When you have as much destructive power as we do, it is of the first importance that the world be continuously made aware not merely of how silly we can be, and at times how vulgar, but of how deep an attachment the American people have for the nicest cultivation of humane values.
It is in our novels, our poems, our dance, our music, and some of our plays, primarily, that we can and do reveal a better preoccupation. Yet, I can say from personal experience and from the experiences of other writers, that the work of art in which we really examine ourselves, or which is critical of society, is not what this government regards as good propaganda. I am not aware, for instance, that the export of any comic book has been interfered with, but only recently a nonfiction book was refused a congressional appropriation for inclusion in our overseas libraries because it showed a dust storm and a picture of an old-time country schoolhouse. In my opinion, it is not only not bad to show such things, nor bad to send our critical works around the world, but a necessity. For it is clearly one of our handicaps that we somehow insist, at least officially, that we have no inkling of a tragic sense of life. We posture before the world at times as though we had broken with the entire human race and had hold of a solution to the enigma of existence that was beyond questioning. As a dramatist I know that until the audience can identify itself with the people and the situations presented on the stage, it cannot be convinced of anything at all; it sits before an utterly uncomprehensible play of shadows against an unseeable wall. Thus, when a work or an action or a speech or a declaration of the world is presented without a trace of decent humility before the unsolved problems of life, it is not only that we do not really reflect our real selves, but that we must inevitably alienate others. For the truth is that we have not discovered how to be happy and at one with ourselves, we have only gone far in abolishing physical poverty, which is but one single element in the solution. And by harping only on that, we in effect declare a want of spirituality, a want of human feeling, a want of sympathy in the end. I believe we have solutions for poverty which the world must eventually come to adopt or adapt to other conditions, and we are obligated to demonstrate always what we have accomplished, obligated not only to ourselves but to humanity, which hungers for ways to organize production and create material wealth. But along with our success we have created a body of art, a body of literature which is markedly critical, which persists in asking certain human questions of the patterns we have created, and they are questions whose ultimate answers will prove or disprove our claims to having built a genuine civilization and not merely a collection of dominating inventions and bodily comforts. We are too often known abroad as dangerous children with toys that can explode the planet for us to go on pretending that we are not conscious of our underlying ethical and moral dilemmas.
It is no disgrace to search one’s soul, nor the sign of fear. It is rather the first mark of honesty and the pool from which all righteousness flows. The strength of a Lincoln as he appeared in the eye of the world was not compounded of a time-bound mastery of military force alone, nor of an image monolithic and beyond the long reach of doubt. That man could lead and in our best moments leads us yet because he seemed to harbor in his soul an ever-renewing tear for his enemies and an indestructible desire to embrace them all. He commanded armies in the cruelest kind of war between brothers, yet his image is of a peaceful man. For even as history cast him as a destroyer of men, as every leader in war must always be, he seemed never to have lost that far-off gaze which cannot obliterate the tragic incompleteness of all wisdom and must fill with sympathy the space between what we know and what we have to do. For me, it is a reassuring thing that so much attention and appreciation is shown our novels and plays of high seriousness, for it signifies, I think, that others wish to see us more humanly and that the world is not as satisfied as we sometimes wish to appear that we have come to the end of all philosophy and wonderment about the meaning of life. It is dangerous to be rich in a world full of poverty. It is dangerous in obvious ways and in ways not so obvious.
During the war I worked for some time in the Brooklyn Navy Yard repairing and building ships for our fleet. The ships of many allied nations were often repaired there and we got to know many of the foreign crews. I remember one afternoon standing on the deck of a British destroyer with a British sailor at my side, when alongside us an American d
estroyer was passing out into the harbor. It was a boiling hot summer day. As the American ship moved slowly beside us a sailor appeared on her deck and walked over to a water cooler on the deck and drank. On British destroyers a thirsty man went below to a tap and drank lukewarm water; when he bathed it was out of a portable basin, the same one he washed his clothes in. I glanced at the British seaman sweating on the deck beside me and I said, “That’s what you guys ought to have, eh?” “Oh,” he said, with an attempt at a sneer, “your ships are built for comfort.” It was not that he couldn’t bear the idea of ice water on a hot day. I feel reasonably sure he would not have joined a demonstration against the British Admiralty had a water cooler been installed on his deck. But the mere fact that we had coolers on our decks did not at once overwhelm him with a reverence for our superiority. The essential emotion in his mind was a defense of his own dignity and the dignity of his country in the face of what ought to have been a promising hope for himself but was taken as a challenge, if not a kind of injury to his own pride. I am not saying we ought not to have water coolers, either in our ideas or on our ships, but a foreign policy based solely on water coolers and water coolers alone may create as much envy, distrust, and even hatred as anything else. As a matter of fact, his deprivation he made into a positive virtue. It was common to hear Britishers say that their fleet was made to fight, unlike ours, that they had no comforts, no shower baths, plenty of cockroaches, and what to us would be miserable food, because they had no time and ought to have no time for anything but their guns, and because a ship of the fleet had no right to be anything but a floating gun platform. And finally, they convinced themselves that we couldn’t hit anything anyway.
Collected Essays Page 44