The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  This, of course, is only a bare summary of Mr. O’Neill’s theme. There is also an almost intolerable mass of supporting detail, for each derelict in the bar is relentlessly determined to give his own personal history, often as many as three or four times. Obviously, there isn’t room for all of these here, but a few may help to indicate the play’s impressive range and, incidentally, since this review is necessarily a work of drastic compression, give a partial listing of the cast that supports James Barton in the tremendous central role. Harry Hope (Dudley Digges), the owner of the bar, has never stepped out of it for twenty years. It is his pipe dream, his special evasion of the fact of lost will, to imagine that he has sequestered himself because of his grief over his wife’s death and that any day now he will go out and resume his old career as a wardheeling politician. Piet Wetjoen (Frank Tweddell) and Cecil Lewis (Nicholas Joy) fought on opposite sides in the Boer War, and it is their delusion that presently they will go back across the sea to an honorable old age. Willie Oban (E. G. Marshall), a law-school graduate, is the son of a convicted bucket-shop operator. The most hopeless alcoholic of them all, he dreams of straightening up and getting a brilliant job in the district attorney’s office. Rocky Pioggi (Tom Pedi) is Harry’s night bartender, and his illusion is of a peculiar and negative character. He is under the impression that although two agreeable girls turn over their earnings to him, he is not a pimp, for the excellent reason that he holds a regular job and prostitution is only a casual sideline in his life. Unlike the rest, Larry Slade (Carl Benton Reid), a disenchanted radical, appears to be without any hope whatever. He is, he says, through with the Cause and only waiting around to die. In spite of the fact that he is able to identify the real nature of Hickey’s peace and to fight it for the others, he is finally obliged to accept it for himself, since, if I am not mistaken, he is the symbol of tragic omniscience (or the author) on the stage. Of them all, only Dan Parritt (Paul Crabtree), who has betrayed his Anarchist mother to the police out of motives very similar to those that led Hickey to shoot his wife, dies in the end. All through the play, he and the metaphysical drummer have had a curious sense of identity with each other, and when the truth about Hickey is revealed and he is taken off to the electric chair, the other man finds his parallel solution in suicide.

  There are many more in the cast, but these characters—all superlatively acted, by the way—should be enough to establish Mr. O’Neill firmly in the company of William Saroyan as a wonderfully prolific inventor of damned and fascinating people. His other qualifications for the position of America’s leading playwright, however, I’m afraid remain just about what they were before. The construction, the ponderous building up, over three acts, of a situation that is to be resolved by a much too abrupt theatrical trick at the end of the fourth, is at least questionable, especially when the trick is so executed that it can be interpreted in two ways by the audience. If, that is, my own impression is right and Hickey’s insanity is feigned for the purpose of giving his companions back their drunken hopes, he is simply a misguided philanthropist who has sincerely believed right up to the last that peace can be found only in the final, absolute acceptance of defeat. If, on the other hand, he is really insane, he is only a figure of crazy malevolence and the point of the play is hard to imagine. This alternate explanation, while it can hardly be justified on reflection, is nevertheless one that seems to have been subscribed to by a great many reasonably attentive people, including at least one critic, after the opening night, so it is hard to credit Mr. O’Neill with wholly satisfactory craftsmanship from a sheerly theatrical point of view. He has erred even further, I think, in a certain obscurity of intention that seems to mark several members of the cast. The demented Nihilist, for instance, undoubtedly keys in with Hickey’s own spiritual Nihilism, but the analogy is never clearly developed and all that appears on the stage is a sort of irrelevant, comic-supplement bomb-thrower. The same thing applies to a lot of the others—they are obviously meant to be essential pieces of the total design, but their exact relation to it is not sufficiently defined and they become merely atmospheric “characters,” present for a scenic effect rather than for comprehensible artistic purposes. I’m sure, of course, that Mr. O’Neill could readily explain how each actor is vital to the pattern and the forward movement of his play, but it is certainly by no means apparent in the theatre, where, unfortunately, the playwright’s secret mind is not on view.

  In regard, finally, to the style in which The Iceman has been written, I can only say that there is little evidence of the lofty eloquence that distinguished Mourning Becomes Electra or even, indeed, some of Mr. O’Neill’s lesser works. As several critics have pointed out, the locale of the play and the prototypes of the bums who appear in it have been taken from the author’s own remote past. The assumption, however, that he has exactly recaptured the sound of their speech may be open to question, and it is my opinion that, while Mr. O’Neill is a superb reporter of behavior and even of processes of thought, the language he uses to convey them is actually non-realistic, being of the conventional dese-dem-dose school of dialect, which a certain kind of abstracted literary intelligence, from Richard Harding Davis to Thomas Wolfe, has somewhat arbitrarily decided is the language of the lower depths. It is odd but nevertheless a fact that a writer can often understand perfectly what is being said around him without really hearing the accent of the voice or the structure of the sentence, and I’m afraid that this is particularly true of Mr. O’Neill.

  Inaccurate as his bums may be, however, I’m not sure that they are as painful as some of his more articulate types. Slade, the radical, who serves more or less as his author’s spokesman, is naturally given some rather towering sentiments to express and perhaps he may be forgiven a certain grandiloquence, but there can be no such excuse in the case of the burlesque old-school-tie locutions employed by the British captain, the elaborate, pedantic witticisms of the fallen Harvard man; or the laborious Babbittries and really stupefying repetitions of Hickey himself. On the whole, in fact, I suspect that Hickey is the worst of all, and there were times during the now famous sixteen-minute speech when I felt a deep sympathy with the old saloonkeeper and his guests, who could only murmur hopelessly, “For God’s sake, Hickey, give us a rest! All we want to do is pass out in peace.”

  FEBRUARY 19, 1949 (ON DEATH OF A SALESMAN BY ARTHUR MILLER)

  Though it seems to me that Arthur Miller still has a tendency to overwrite now and then, his Death of a Salesman, at the Morosco, is a tremendously affecting work, head and shoulders above any other serious play we have seen this season. It is the story of Willy Loman, a man at the end of his rope, told with a mixture of compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence you don’t often find in the theatre today, and probably the highest compliment I can pay it is to say that I don’t see how it can possibly be made into a moving picture, though I have very little doubt that somehow or other eventually it will. The acting, especially that of Lee J. Cobb, as the tragic central figure, Mildred Dunnock, as his loyal wife, and Arthur Kennedy, as a son whose character he has lovingly and unconsciously destroyed, is honest, restrained, and singularly moving; Jo Mielziner’s set, centering on the interior of a crumbling house somewhere in Brooklyn but permitting the action to shift as far away as a shoddy hotel room in Boston, is as brilliant and resourceful as the one he did for A Streetcar Named Desire; Elia Kazan, also, of course, an important collaborator on Streetcar, has directed the cast with the greatest possible intelligence, getting the most out of a script that must have presented its difficulties; and an incidental score, by Alex North, serves admirably to introduce the stretches of memory and hallucination that alternate with the actual contemporary scenes on the stage. Kermit Bloomgarden and Walter Fried, to round out this catalogue of applause, are the fortunate producers of Death of a Salesman, and I think the whole town ought to be very grateful to them.

  The happenings in Mr. Miller’s play can hardly be called dramatic in any conventional sense. Willy
is sixty-three years old, and he has spent most of his life as the New England representative of a company that I gathered sells stockings, though this point was never exactly specified. Recently the firm has cut off his salary and put him on straight commission, and the income from that is obviously not enough for him to get along on, what with a mortgage, and insurance, and the recurring payments on an electric icebox, an ancient contraption about which he remarks bitterly, “God, for once I’d like to own something before it’s broken down!” In addition to his financial troubles, his health and his mind are failing (he has been having a series of automobile accidents, basically suicidal in intent), and his two sons aren’t much comfort to him. Long ago, he had had muddled, childish dreams for them both—the elder, in particular, was to be a famous football star, greater than Red Grange—but things didn’t work out, and now one is a stock clerk, not interested in much except women, and the other, when he works at all, is just an itinerant farmhand. Willy’s deep, hopeless recognition of what has become of him, of the fact that, mysteriously, society has no further use for him, has reduced him to a strange borderland of sanity, in which fantasy is barely distinguishable from reality. The only remaining hope he has, in fact, lies in some crackbrained scheme the two boys have for making a fortune selling sport goods in Florida, and when that collapses, too, there is clearly nothing left for him but to kill himself, knowing that at least his family will manage somehow to survive on the money from his insurance.

  That is the rough outline of Mr. Miller’s play, and it doesn’t, I’m afraid, give you much idea of the quality of his work, of how unerringly he has drawn the portrait of a failure, a man who has finally broken under the pressures of an economic system that he is fatally incapable of understanding. There are unforgettable scenes: the interview in which he is fired by the head of the firm, a brassy young man, who plays a hideous private recording in which his little boy names the capitals of all the states, in alphabetical order; a sequence in the Boston hotel, when his son finds him with a tart and his love turns to hatred and contempt; a dream meeting with his brother Ben, who has made a fortune in diamonds in the Kimberley mines and stands, in his mind, as the savage, piratical symbol of success; and, near the end of the play, a truly heartbreaking moment when Willy at last comes to realize that he is “a dollar-an-hour man” who could never, conceivably, have been anything more.

  Death of a Salesman is written throughout with an accurate feeling for speech and behavior that few current playwrights can equal. It may not be a great play, whatever that means, but it is certainly a very eloquent and touching one. The cast, besides Mr. Cobb, Miss Dunnock, and Mr. Kennedy, includes Cameron Mitchell, Thomas Chalmers, Howard Smith, Don Keefer, and Alan Hewitt. They are all just what I’m sure the author hoped they’d be.

  APRIL 16, 1949 (ON RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S SOUTH PACIFIC)

  While South Pacific, the only musical, as far as I know, ever to be based on a Pulitzer Prize book, lacks the special quality of Oklahoma!, a sort of continuous sunny gaiety, it has about everything else. Richard Rodgers’ score, if not his best, certainly isn’t far from it, and Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, with one or two exceptions, are just as successful; the plot, a difficult combination of sentimental love, tragic passion, and the rowdy behavior of our armed forces, is admirably handled on all three levels; the performances, especially those of Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin, are practically flawless; and Jo Mielziner’s sets, ranging from the cockeyed disorder of a naval base to the strange beauty of a tropical island, are executed with extraordinary humor and charm. Altogether, it is a fine show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were still at the Majestic when another Presidential election rolls around.

  I don’t remember James Michener’s stories very clearly (somehow I have a feeling that they weren’t really especially memorable) but I do know that it never occurred to me that they might furnish material for a musical comedy, since, like most honest pieces about war, they hadn’t much in the way of orderly design and an acceptable love interest was conspicuously missing. However, Mr. Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, who collaborated with him on the libretto in addition to serving as director, have taken care of all that with the greatest possible ingenuity. The principal theme now is the romance between an exiled French planter, who didn’t, as I recall, appear at all in Mr. Michener’s book, and a jaunty nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, who did turn up in one of the stories, though in a rather different context. The only obstacle to their marriage is the fact that he is the father of two children by a Polynesian wife, and though she has died, it is a circumstance that would probably make any young woman think twice.

  The secondary plot has to do with a lieutenant of Marines and his affair with a beautiful native girl. This is doomed from the outset, partly because her mother is a disreputable old baggage, dealing in grass skirts and shrunken human heads, but mostly because he is a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Princeton and, naturally, somewhat conscious of his glorious heritage. These two separate but parallel stories are firmly joined together in the end, when the two men undertake a suicidal mission against the Japanese (an English remittance man was the hero of this episode in Mr. Michener’s version), in the course of which the Marine is killed but from which the planter comes back to the nurse, who by now has realized the error of her ways. As you can see, this is a fairly weighty narrative sequence, calling for a liberal administration of comic relief. I’m glad to say that the authors have been generously and happily inspired about that, too, creating any number of fine, tough characters and providing them with some wonderfully funny material, including a vaudeville number, featuring Miss Martin in an outsize sailor suit and Myron McCormick with a full-rigged vessel tattooed on his heaving stomach, that may be the best show-inside-a-show you ever saw.

  Some time ago, in an interview, Cole Porter remarked that he wished to hell theatre critics would refrain from discussing music, on the ground that even the most educated of them wouldn’t recognize the national anthem unless the people around them stood up. Having taken this advice to heart, I will confine my comment on Mr. Rodgers’ score to saying that “Some Enchanted Evening,” magnificently delivered by Mr. Pinza, seems to me a tremendously moving song; that “I’m Gonna Wash That Guy Right Outa My Hair” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” as rendered by Miss Martin, and “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” as sung, or bellowed, by the naval personnel, strike me as being among the liveliest of Mr. Rodgers’ and Mr. Hammerstein’s joint efforts; and, to intrude one dissenting note in this rhapsody, that I wasn’t particularly impressed by “Bali Ha’i,” which sounded to me a good deal like any number of other songs celebrating exotic place names, or by something called “You’ve Got to Be Taught,” a poem in praise of tolerance that somehow I found just a little embarrassing.

  There is nothing, of course, to say about Mr. Pinza’s voice, beyond the fact that no greater one has been heard on the musical-comedy stage. Since he is also an intelligent and imposing actor, his appearance in South Pacific is one of the pleasantest things that have happened to the theatre this season. Miss Martin, whose talents as a comedienne haven’t had much scope, at least in New York, since she first enchanted us all with “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” has just what she wants this time, and I think her performance is a delight from beginning to end. Of the others, Mr. McCormick gives perhaps the funniest and most hideous female impersonation in history; Betta St. John is astonishingly lovely as a kind of Tonkinese Madame Butterfly; Juanita Hall, as her unspeakable mother, is not only an accomplished comedienne but also the possessor of another notable voice; and there are sound, attractive contributions by William Tabbert, as the faithless Princetonian, and by Martin Wolfson and Harvey Stephens, as a couple of irascible officers. The nine young ladies who represent Navy nurses didn’t look very medical to me.

  A NOTE BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

  “Manhattan—great unfilleted sole spread out on a rock—is no good except along the backbone; the edges are slu
ms,” Le Corbusier had written in 1935. The words appear in the majestic Profile of the architect, published in three issues of The New Yorker in 1947, by Geoffrey T. Hellman, who was the magazine’s extravagantly sophisticated reporter on New York institutional culture and high society. The quote is germane to a furious debate about where to put the United Nations buildings, which ranged Le Corbusier, who endorsed the East River site, against Robert Moses, who—grumping, “What do these foreign fellows know about our foundations, our hard-rock problems?”—plumped for Flushing Meadows. Those were dramatic days in the edifice game. Having added nothing much to the skyline for more than a decade, New York suddenly found itself the capital city of planet Earth, with wealth and bursting ambition to match. Dynamite thumped, bulldozers howled, and cranes bristled. No one knew that the first major International Style skyscrapers would remain, for all time, the best. Briefly, power could seem at one with poetry, in stanzas of steel and glass.