In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  I was very moved. To be so young, to be confronted so brutally by mortality, the confusion, the yearnings left unfulfilled, all deeds not done. I would write a play, not about Brandon’s friend—Johnny’s father, John Gunther, had already done that in a book knowingly titled, Death Be Not Proud, but my play would be informed by my own searchings into this kind of tragedy, a boy’s determination to experience a defining achievement before a predicted death.

  The play was performed Off-Broadway at the Actor’s Playhouse on Seventh Avenue. It opened on September 13, 1961. I was convinced it would secure for me the inevitable fame and fortune that I’d predicted for myself. After the first-night performance, I was briefly interviewed by a woman who would report on the play along with my comments on her radio show: “You, Joseph Caldwell,” she intoned, “have written an American classic in the tradition of Our Town and The Glass Menagerie.” Since this was hardly news to me, I accepted her kind words with equanimity. The other more powerful critics were not so kind. “If we have to have a play like this this season,” one critic wrote, “how fortunate we’ve had it now and it’s behind us and we can get on with the rest of the season.” So much for my prediction.

  A week after the closing of my flop play, I made the destined move from Hague Street. (I gave the Franklin stove to Gale. He thanked me.) The move itself coincided perfectly with a similarly drastic change in my identity. For those nine years on Hague Street, I had been deemed “a promising playwright”—a designation substantiated by the aforementioned Arts of the Theatre Foundation Award, my two fellowships, and a major production at Yale. I was also an active member of New Dramatists and was included in the playwright’s unit of the prestigious Actors Studio, which allowed me to sit in on the acting sessions (and gave me a quick glimpse of “Marilyn” wearing no makeup and with a small kerchief on her head. She looked like the flawlessly fresh-faced girl next door).

  Now I was a “failed playwright,” holding no promise whatsoever. It was more than a matter of being sent back to “GO” from where I’d just begin all over again. I was now stigmatized with that most dreaded word in a writer’s vocabulary: “failure.” All that had gone before was nullified, and it was only right that I should be evicted from the premises in which I’d lived with such encouraging expectations. What I had been I no longer was and should without ceremony be removed from the enviable precincts of youthful possibility.

  That the play flopped proved in time to be a well-disguised blessing. Had it succeeded, I would have felt that my preference to be noted as a playwright of “sensibility” had been validated and I would continue to present myself as someone sensitive and unthreatening, incapable of aggression or cynicism. In other words, as something I was not, which, as I would learn, could be fatal to a writer. My true work would not be possible until I could admit to myself that I was who I was: angry, competitive, and all those other adjectives that I had thought might justify rejection. To ward off that feared rejection, I rejected myself. What I was to be afflicted with now was inevitable: writer’s block.

  There are probably as many causes for this condition as there are writers—and just as many solutions. Since I’m familiar with only my own, I’ll stick with them and avoid any generalizations. I’ve already identified the source—self-censorship—which, in turn, prompted my imagination (my most vital asset) to shut itself down. Because of its innate integrity it refused to be complicit in a lie.

  This had become only too apparent in the play I next tried to write, The Downtown Holy Lady. The seed for this had been planted during a talk by Eammon Hennacy I attended at The Catholic Worker sometime after my earlier association. It was on the second floor of the loft building on Spring Street, close to the heart of Little Italy. I’d noticed that the front windows had been covered with heavy plastic sheeting—and I soon discovered the reason that it had been put in place.

  Not long after the talk had begun, several large rocks, one after the other, came crashing through the window. Without pause, Eammon glanced over his right shoulder and said, “The Catholics are throwing stones at us again.”

  The “Catholics,” of course, were the Italian neighbors who deeply resented having a food line and a “house of hospitality” on one of their streets. This, in a way, was greatly different from Little Italy’s response to the first years of The Worker. It was on Mott Street in the heart—both literally and figuratively—of Little Italy. Those years, however, were in the depth of the Great Depression and the food line had extended on some occasions down the block and down part of the next. The neighbors were welcoming and even proud of what was being offered.

  Of course, the circumstances then were radically different. Those in the line then were the desperate unemployed—a constituency readily recognizable as some of their own. In the late fifties, during a period of shared prosperity, the food line was peopled primarily by derelicts congregating around the flophouses and bars on the Bowery, very definitely a blight on Little Italy’s thriving community. Operative here was the ineradicable distinction between the so-called deserving poor, and the so-called undeserving poor. In a way, the hostility can hardly be surprising.

  A seed began to stir in my imagination. What I got, for starters, was the idea of an aging priest, eager to leave behind some legacy to climax his years of service. He would install in front of his church a statue of its patron, Michael the Archangel, his wings outspread, his sword unsheathed. To raise money there would be a parade through the streets.

  And here’s where the play would begin. A woman with a small deli–sized restaurant has given a free meal to a shabbily dressed bag woman who left her shopping bag behind. The bag happens to be stuffed with money. To lure the woman back to collect her bag, she begins to feed more and more of those in need. The neighbors object.

  So I had my situation: a clash between the old pieties for statues and candles and the central mission of Christianity of caring for those in need. All I had to do was dramatize the process by which these forces resolve, or fail to resolve, themselves.

  As heaven would have it, Yale was offering six playwriting fellowships for the coming academic year, part of a workshop that would also include six third-year Drama School playwriting students. If I were accepted, it would be my third Yale fellowship.

  I applied by sending in a paperback version of Cock-eyed Kite, which had been published at his own expense by a young enthusiast who found in it qualities that had escaped the critics. I guess he had good instincts because on the basis of it I got in. I told myself, writer’s block or not, that with this opportunity everything would change. My work would flourish and I would become again a laudable writer.

  Such was not to be the case. To begin with, when I’d phoned my former mentor from those years before and told him I’d been chosen, he made the mistake of telling me that he was particularly pleased because the last he’d heard was that I was first alternate. One of the original six had apparently dropped out. I was the least of the chosen six. In my battered psychic state, this was not helpful knowledge.

  What I’d gotten myself into was two semesters to be devoted entirely to the writing of the play I was expected to write.

  It was one of the more wretched periods of my life. My imagination would not be goaded into action. It still refused to open wide a store of revelations and insights in answer to my pleadings. It refused to give me the inspired scenes that only I could write.

  Painfully, despairingly, I struggled on. I wrote—and then I wrote some more. But this was not the way writing should be. For each of my previous plays I’d realized that a “work in progress” was a continuing series of revelations, gifts served up by a fertile imagination. With that most needed tool denied me, I had to resort to my intellect—for me, a far from sufficient solution. (For obvious reasons, I had earlier been relieved to realize that my intellect was not my primary instrument. Compared to my brothers and sisters, I’m the family dumb bunny.)

/>   Even under my present circumstance, I still had two faithful attributes that had not deserted me: my craftsmanship and a fairly good ear for dialogue. But without revelations, I had to come up with ideas—ideas for scenes that would advance the plot, then struggle to summon some way to make them interesting. I would take long walks, most often to East Rock, where I’d climb the switchback steps to the top of the cliff to see all of Yale, all of New Haven, spread out before me. And all of my memories from seven years before when I would have reveled without challenge to the life then being made available: eager creativity, rewarding achievement.

  Added to all this, New Haven in those intervening years had lost all its elm trees to the continental blight. Street after street after street that had been of uncommon beauty were now denuded thoroughfares offering nothing more than a minimal convenience in getting from here to there. It didn’t occur to me at the time to see this as an accurate metaphor for my own diminished condition, so I’ll just let it remain simply itself, one more absence from among the splendors I’d previously known.

  The play progressed. My colleagues and the workshop’s mentor, David Davidson, were for the most part encouraging about the work I was doing, and I kept my disappointments to myself.

  As the end of our time together approached, David took me to the most expensive restaurant in New Haven—not Casey’s but one reputed to be even more expensive. His purpose, he admitted, was to ask me if I had been aware that I was the first alternate for one of the fellowships.

  “No,” I lied, because it was simpler than going into what I considered a painful subject. He then went on to note that I had been accepted last but had proved to be the most gifted. This was, of course, ironically welcome, but the satisfaction had its limits. I was, after all, nearing the end of one of the more difficult years I’d ever lived through.

  Ultimately the resources that hadn’t given up on me—my craftsmanship and my ear for dialogue—had responded rather generously, and my play and a play by another of the fellows were being considered for the final major production of the year. For me this would have been a repeat of a previous honor. The other play was chosen and, to be honest, I was not all that disappointed. I didn’t feel my work was completed. I hadn’t been able to give it all that it deserved, all that it needed.

  If that were the end of this sorry tale, I’d be content. But what I did next was nothing short of shameful. I betrayed my play. Instead of continuing the struggle to give it its fulfillment, I reworked it into something I thought might be more marketable. I had never let this be a consideration before—nor have I since.

  Although it in no way excuses my decision, I note here that if the theater is to secure its vitality, it must change (as the times change, as audiences change). And the changes were, for me, formidable. I’ve already mentioned the dismissal of the “play of sensibility,” but what had overwhelmed and replaced it were highly uncongenial to a playwright reluctant to deal with the less attractive aspects of his nature.

  First there was the Theater of the Absurd, which challenged my need to bring order out of chaos (Ionesco, Beckett). Then, too, plays dramatizing cynical hostility (Albee the avatar).

  My Downtown Holy Lady was permitted to retain only its title. The rest was garbage. The conflict was now between a woman and her adulterous boyfriend. She was feeding the poor; he was afraid of the competition. When it was given the inadequate production it deserved, Off-Off-Broadway, my matronly cousin from Connecticut who had seen my three previous plays provided the definitive critique. “That is the worst thing you’re ever going to write.” I have tried since to prove her correct.

  During all this time I’d still been seeing Dr. Gould, going to New York from New Haven once a week for a one-on-one session with him as well as a group session. I was beginning, not without difficulty, to know myself better and, with even more difficulty, accepting what I was discovering.

  It’s here that I reduce my terrifying panic attacks to a mere footnote.

  Working my way through the labyrinth of my mind with Dr. Gould, I came to realize that the cause was deeply repressed anger. I was writing, during some of this time, the commentary for WQXR. One of my colleagues went on vacation as did the head of our unit. I took on some of the vacationer’s assignments, expecting another writer to do the same. He refused repeatedly to be the least bit of help. I took on all of the work. No insistence on fair play. Goody-Two-Shoes Caldwell took it all onto himself, working his butt off. Without the least whimper of complaint, completely denying the wrath that would reveal my truer nature. Deeper down in my psyche I raged against myself. Why hadn’t I stood up for myself? Why hadn’t I asserted myself? I was complicit in the injustice. All this compressed anger threatened to explode, spattering my detonated brain against the stones of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  My reluctance to show aggression was what lay at the source of my writer’s block. I had punitively silenced the one voice that could have spoken the truth. It took me a year to liberate my voice. One day, I made a direct, furious attack, not on the WQXR colleague who deserved it but on my dear, long-time friend Eddy Parone.

  He and I were walking up Seventh Avenue in the Village after dinner together. Eddy, at the time, was enjoying a deserved reputation as one of the better directors of new and interesting Off-Broadway theater. We ran into a playwright, Leonard Melfi, who was a growing theater presence. Eddy told Leonard he was putting together an evening of short plays—about eight or ten minutes each—and would he please write one for him? The playwright casually agreed, and Eddy and I walked on.

  During our entire evening together he had never mentioned the project, which would later have an Off-Broadway success titled Collision Course. As close a friend as I might be, he had written me off as a playwright. I was hurt. I was angry. But I said nothing.

  The next morning I was bitterly determined to write a short play. I went into my living room. I reminded myself of what Chekhov was reputed to have said to a friend: “I can write a story about anything. See that ashtray? Do you want me to write a story about an ashtray?” (How unfair that there should be only one Chekhov.)

  I looked around the room. I saw my rocking chair. I would write a play about a rocking chair. And, lo and behold, revelations that could come only from my imagination began to present themselves. Pounding away at my typewriter was my way of saying, “Take that, Eddy! See? I’m writing. I’m writing a real play. A real play, you son of a bitch.”

  In less than an hour I was finished. I phoned Eddy and told him I was coming over with a play for his project. I went over. He read it. He crossed out half of the last page. He’d let me know. But I already knew.

  Soon after, he told me it wasn’t right for what he had in mind. But nothing could diminish my satisfaction. Maybe Eddy didn’t know it. But I did. I was a playwright again.

  The first full-length play I wrote after my true identity as a playwright had been restored was actually a rewrite. In a way I was indeed going back to “GO,” to where I’d originally started. The rewritten play, titled The King and Queen of Glory, was, in its beginnings, the first of my writings for which I was paid—in this instance, in 1954, an hourlong television drama, titled at that time, Giant Killer and aired on NBC.

  This play and the television script are the closest I’ve ever come to autobiography. It’s my response to my father’s devastation when the firstborn child of his late-in-life marriage, my eldest sister, Mary Ellen, entered a religious order, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the summer after her high-school graduation.

  In those days, when a girl age seventeen entered a convent, she removed herself almost completely from her family. Her life was now dedicated to the rigors and demands of religious life. My father was losing his most beloved child. He would also, the following year, be retiring from his lifelong job. My oldest brother, Jim, speculated that our father believed that Mary Ellen was joining the Order because
it was the only possible way she would get the education her superior intelligence deserved. My father had failed her. If that’s what he thought, he was very much in the wrong. Her calling was genuine, and she gave almost eighty years of rewarding service.

  At one time she was head of the Theology Department at her Order’s Clarke College in Iowa. Because she was a tenured professor, a college in a secular situation would have provided a tuition-free education for her children. To compensate for this impossibility, nieces and nephews were eligible in their stead. My sister, with her vow of poverty, put one niece and three nephews through college.

  The plot of the play revolves around whether the teenage girl can conscientiously leave her family when it will soon be without a sufficient income after the father’s retirement. All this sort of works its way out, not the way it really happened, but I intended the play to be a tribute to my father—and tributes, by their nature, often allow for revision if basic truths are respected. And the basic truth here was that my father suffered—and attention must be paid.

  It gives me a particular satisfaction that this was the subject to which I returned when a return was finally made possible.

  I cannot leave my writings about my father with only the few sentences already included. Allow me to offer the following:

  I have written of my father’s near two-year alcoholic binge as his response to his humiliation as an inadequate provider for his family. To give some redemptive balance to this record, here is an anecdote that is more expressive of my father’s deeper nature. To begin, I note that he not only survived his binge, but found rewarding employment as the head of the mailing and messenger unit of a thriving factory in Milwaukee and died in his sleep at age 74 after working a full schedule the day before.