Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  But after applause and cheers, what? The masks which the Elizabethan theater proposed were exotic, fantastic, playful. Shakespeare’s audience did not come streaming out of the Globe Theatre to butcher a Jew or string up a Florentine. The morality of The Merchant of Venice is not incendiary, but merely simplifying. But the masks which Blues for Mister Charlie holds up for our scorn are our reality. And Baldwin’s rhetoric is incendiary, though let loose in a carefully fireproofed situation. The result is not any idea of action—but a vicarious pleasure in the rage vented on the stage, with no doubt an undertow of anxiety.

  Considered as art, Blues for Mister Charlie runs aground for some of the same reasons it stalls as propaganda. Baldwin might have done something much better with the agitprop scheme of his play (noble, handsome Negro student youth pitted against stupid, vicious town whites), for to that in itself I have no objection. Some of the greatest art arises out of moral simplification. But this play gets bogged down in repetitions, incoherence, and in all sorts of loose ends of plot and motive. For example: it is hard to believe that in a town beset by civil rights agitation and with a race murder on its hands, the white liberal, Parnell, could move so freely, with so little recrimination, from one community to another. Again: it is not credible that Lyle, who is Parnell’s close friend, and his wife aren’t bewildered and irate when Parnell secures Lyle’s arraignment on the charge of murder. Perhaps this remarkable equanimity owes to the place of love in Baldwin’s rhetoric. Love is always on the horizon, a universal solvent almost in the manner of Paddy Chayefsky. Again: from what we are shown of the romance struck up between Richard and Juanita—which begins only a few days before Richard is killed—it is unconvincing that Juanita should proclaim that what she has learned from Richard is how to love. (The truth seems rather that Richard was just beginning to learn to love, for the first time, from her.) More important: the whole confrontation between Richard and Lyle, with its explicit tones of masculine sexual rivalry, seems inadequately motivated. Richard simply has not enough reason, except that the author wants to say these things, to introduce the theme of sexual envy on all the occasions that he does. And quite apart from any consideration of the sentiments expressed, it is grotesque, humanly and dramatically, for Richard’s dying words, as he crawls at Lyle’s feet with three bullets in his gut, to be: “White man! I don’t want nothing from you. You ain’t got nothing to give me! You can’t talk because nobody won’t talk to you. You can’t dance because you’ve got nobody to dance with … Okay. Okay. Okay. Keep your old lady home, you hear? Don’t let her near no nigger. She might get to like it. You might get to like it, too.”

  Perhaps the origin of what seems forced, hysterical, unconvincing in Blues for Mister Charlie—and in Dutchman—is a rather complex displacement of the play’s true subject. Race conflict is what the plays are supposed to be about. Yet also, in both plays, the racial problem is drawn mainly in terms of sexual attitudes. Baldwin has been very plain about the reason for this. White America, he charges, has robbed the Negro of his masculinity. What whites withhold from Negroes, and what Negroes aspire to, is sexual recognition. The withholding of this recognition—and its converse, treating the Negro as a mere object of lust—is the heart of the Negro’s pain. As stated in Baldwin’s essays, the argument strikes home. (And it doesn’t hinder one’s considering other consequences, political and economic, of the Negro’s oppression.) But what one reads in Baldwin’s last novel, or sees on the stage in Blues for Mister Charlie, is considerably less persuasive. In Baldwin’s novel and play, it seems to me, the racial situation has become a kind of code, or metaphor for sexual conflict. But a sexual problem cannot be wholly masked as a racial problem. Different tonalities, different specifics of emotion are involved.

  The truth is that Blues for Mister Charlie isn’t really about what it claims to be about. It is supposed to be about racial strife. But it is really about the anguish of tabooed sexual longings, about the crisis of identity which comes from confronting these longings, and about the rage and destructiveness (often, self-destructiveness) by which one tries to surmount this crisis. It has, in short, a psychological subject. The surface may be Odets, but the interior is pure Tennessee Williams. What Baldwin has done is to take the leading theme of the serious theater of the fifties—sexual anguish—and work it up as a political play. Buried in Blues for Mister Charlie is the plot of several successes of the last decade: the gruesome murder of a handsome virile young man by those who envy him his virility.

  The plot of Dutchman is similar, except that here there is an added fillip of anxiety. In place of the veiled homoerotic hang-ups of Blues for Mister Charlie, there is class anxiety. As his contribution to the mystique of Negro sexuality, Jones brings up the question—which is never raised in Blues for Mister Charlie—of being authentically Negro. (Baldwin’s play takes place in the South; perhaps one can only have such a problem up North.) Clay, the hero of Dutchman, is a middle-class Negro from New Jersey, who has gone to college and wanted to write poetry like Baudelaire, and has Negro friends who speak with English accents. In the early part of the play, he is in limbo. But in the end, poked and prodded by Lula, Clay strips down to his true self; he stops being nice, well-spoken, reasonable, and assumes his full Negro identity: that is, he announces the homicidal rage toward whites that Negroes bear in their hearts, whether they act on it or not. He will not kill, he says. Whereupon, he is killed.

  Dutchman is, of course, a smaller work than Blues for Mister Charlie. In only one act and with only two speaking characters, it is a descendant of the sexual duels to the death dramatized by Strindberg. At its best, in some of the early exchanges between Lula and Clay, it is neat and powerful. But as a whole—and one does look back on the play in the light of the astonishing fantasy revealed at the end—it is altogether too frantic, too overstated. Robert Hooks played Clay with some subtlety, but I found the spasmic sexual contortions and raucousness in Jennifer West’s performance as Lula almost unbearable. There is a smell of a new, rather verbose style of emotional savagery in Dutchman that, for want of a better name, I should have to call Albee-esque. Undoubtedly, we shall see more of it.… In contrast, Blues for Mister Charlie is a long, overlong, rambling work which is virtually an anthology, a summa of the trends of serious big American plays of the last thirty years. It has lots of moral uplift. It carries on the good fight to talk dirty on the legitimate stage to new, splendid victories. And it adopts a complex, pretentious form of narration—the story is told in clumsy flashbacks, with the ornament of a non-functioning chorus, some kind of world-historical disc jockey ensconced stage-right, wearing earphones and fiddling with his apparatus all evening. The production itself, directed by Burgess Meredith, wobbles through several different styles. The realistic parts come off best. In roughly the last third of the play, which takes place in the courtroom, the play founders completely; all pretense at verisimilitude is dropped, there being no fidelity to courtroom rituals observed even in darkest Mississippi, and the play crumbles into bits of internal monologue, whose subjects have little bearing on the present action, which is Lyle’s trial. In the last part of Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin seems bent on dissipating the play’s dramatic power; the director needed only to follow. Despite the flabbiness of the direction, though, there are a number of affecting performances. Rip Torn, a sexy aggressive Lyle, rather upstaged the other actors; he was fun to watch. Al Freeman, Jr., was appealing as Richard, though he was saddled with some remarkably maudlin lines, especially in the Moment of Truth With Father scene, which has been obligatory in the serious Broadway theater for the last decade. Diana Sands, one of the loveliest actresses around, did well with the underrealized role of Juanita, except in what has been the most praised part of her performance, her downstage-center-and-face-the-audience aria of lament for Richard, which I thought terribly forced. As Parnell, Pat Hingle, an actor spectacularly embalmed in his own mannerisms, is still the very same indecisive lumbering old dear that he was last year as Nina
Leeds’ husband in the Actors Studio production of Strange Interlude.

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  The best occasions in the theater in the last months were freewheeling efforts, which made wholly comic use of the mask, the cliché of character.

  At a small theater on East Fourth Street on two Monday evenings in late March, two short plays, The General Returns From One Place to Another by Frank O’Hara and The Baptism by LeRoi Jones, were performed. The O’Hara is a set of skits involving a kind of General MacArthur type and his entourage in perpetual orbit around the Pacific; the Jones play (like his Dutchman) starts more or less realistically, and ends in fantasy; it is about sex and religion and takes place in an evangelical church. Neither the O’Hara nor the Jones seemed very interesting as plays, but then, there is more to theater than plays, that is, than literature. Their main interest for me was as vehicles for the incredible Taylor Mead, poet and “Underground” movie actor. (He has been in Ron Rice’s Flower Thief.) Mead is a skinny, balding, pot-bellied, round-shouldered, droopy, very pale young man—a sort of consumptive, faggot Harry Langdon. How it is possible for such a physically self-effacing, underprivileged-looking fellow to be so immensely attractive on the stage is hard to explain. But one simply cannot take one’s eyes off him. In The Baptism, Mead is delightfully inventive and funny as a homosexual in long red underwear camping-in in the church, prancing, wisecracking, kibbitzing, flirting, while all the spiritual doings are taking place. In The General Returns From One Place to Another, he was more varied, and even more captivating. Rather than a role, this part is more like a set of charades: the General saluting while his pants are falling down, the General courting an inane widow who keeps popping up along his route, the General making a political speech, the General mowing down a field of flowers with his swagger stick, the General trying to crawl into a sleeping bag, the General dressing down his two adjutants, and so on. It was not, of course, what Mead did, but the somnambulistic concentration with which he did it. The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy. Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of four. This is the quality Harpo Marx has; Langdon and Keaton among the great silent comics have it; so do those four wonderful floppy Raggedy Andy dolls, the Beatles. Tammy Grimes projects something of it in her very stylized and exciting performance in an otherwise unremarkable Broadway musical now running, High Spirits, which is based on Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. (The marvellous Bea Lillie is in it, too; but either she doesn’t have enough scope for her gifts in this play or she just isn’t up to form.)

  What all these performers, from Buster Keaton to Taylor Mead, have in common is their total lack of self-consciousness, in the pursuit of some absolutely invented idea of action. With even a touch of self-consciousness, the effect is spoiled. It becomes insincere, distasteful, even grotesque. I am speaking of course of something rarer than acting ability. And since the ordinary conditions of work in the theater promote a great deal of self-consciousness, one is at least as likely to find this kind of thing in informal circumstances, such as those in which The General and The Baptism were put on. I am not sure whether Taylor Mead’s performances would have prospered in another setting.

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  My favorite theatrical event of recent months, though, did survive the jump from semi-amateur production to off-Broadway; at least it was still surviving the last time I saw it. Home Movies opened in March in the choir loft of the Judson Memorial Church off Washington Square and eventually moved to the Provincetown Playhouse. The scene is A Home. The characters are: a Margaret Dumont mother; a super-athletic mustachioed father; a shrivelled whiny virgin daughter; a girlish youth; a red-cheeked stuttering poet sporting a muffler; a pair of bouncy clericals named Father Shenanigan and Sister Thalia; and an affable Negro delivery man with a thick foot-long pencil. Certain gestures are made in the direction of a plot. The father is believed dead, mother and daughter are lamenting his absence, friends of the family and clergy are paying condolence calls, and in the middle of it all father is delivered, alive and kicking, in a wardrobe. But it doesn’t matter. In Home Movies, only the present exists—charming people coming and going, reclining in various tableaux, and singing at each other. There is a fast and witty script by Rosalyn Drexler, in which the oldest cliché and the fanciest fancy are meant to be uttered with the same solemnity. “It’s the truth,” says one character. “Yes,” answers another, “a terrible truth like a rash.” The gentleness and warmth of Home Movies delighted me even more than its wit; and this seemed the work of the adorable music composed by Al Carmines (who is assistant minister at the Judson Memorial Church) and played by him on the piano. The best numbers are a tango sung and danced by Sister Thalia (Sheindi Tokayer) and Father Shenanigan (Al Carmines), the winsome strip tease done by Peter (Freddy Herko) and the duets between him and Mrs. Verdun (Gretel Cummings); and the song “Peanut Brittle” belted out by the maid Violet (Barbara Ann Teer). Home Movies is great fun. The people on the stage look happy to be doing what they are doing, too. One could hardly ask for more in the theater—except for great plays, great actors, and great spectacles. Lacking these, one hopes for vitality and joy; and these seem more likely to turn up on out-of-the-way stages, like the Judson Memorial Church or the Sierra Leone pavilion at the World’s Fair, than in midtown or even off-Broadway theaters. It helps that neither Home Movies, nor The General or The Baptism, is, strictly, a play. They are theatrical events of a use-and-throw-away kind—spoofs, joyous and insouciant, full of irreverence for “the theater” and “the play.” Something similar is taking place with the movies: there is more vitality and art in the Maysles brothers’ film on the Beatles in America, What’s Happening, than in all American story films made this year.

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  Last, and I suppose least, a few words about two Shakespeare productions.

  From John Gielgud’s excellent essay, “The Hamlet Tradition—Some Notes on Costume, Scenery and Stage,” published in 1937, one could educe most of the particular mistakes in Gielgud’s present production of Hamlet in New York. For instance, Gielgud cautions against playing Act I, Scene 2—the scene in which Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude all appear for the first time—as a family quarrel, rather than a formal privy council meeting, the first (according to tradition) held after the accession of Claudius to the throne. Yet this is just what Gielgud has allowed in the New York production, with Claudius and Gertrude looking like a weary suburban couple having it out with a spoiled only son. Another instance: in staging the Ghost, Gielgud in his essay argues convincingly against increasing ghostliness by using a miked voice coming from offstage, rather than the voice of the actor who is on stage and being seen by the audience. Everything must work toward making the Ghost as real as possible. But in the present production, Gielgud has forfeited the entire physical presence of the Ghost. This time the Ghost is really ghostly: a taped voice, Gielgud’s own, resonating hollowly through the theater, and a giant silhouette thrown on the rear wall of the stage.… But it is a waste of time to look for reasons for this or that feature of the current production. The overall impression is of complete indifference, as if the play hadn’t really been directed at all—except that one gathers that some of the dullness, at least the visual dullness, is actually deliberate. There is the matter of the clothes: most of the actors, whether courtiers or soldiers, wear old slacks and sweaters and windbreakers, though Hamlet’s pants and shirt match (they’re black), and Claudius and Polonius wear natty business suits, and Gertrude and Ophelia have long skirts (Gertrude has a mink, too), and the Player King and Queen have gorgeous costumes and gold masks. This silly conceit appears to be the one idea in the present production, and is called “playing Hamlet in rehearsal clothes.”

  The production affords exactly two pleasures. Hearing John Gielgud’s voice on tape, even thus Cineramarized, reminded one of how beautiful Shakespeare’s verse sounds when it is spoken with
grace and intelligence. And the excellent George Rose, in the brief role of the gravedigger, rendered all the delights of Shakespeare’s prose. The rest of the performances gave only various degrees of pain. Everyone spoke too fast; that fault apart, some performances rose to the height of mediocrity, while others, for example the performances of Laertes and Ophelia, deserve to be singled out as particularly immature, unfelt. It might be mentioned, though, that Eileen Herlie, who does a perfunctory Gertrude, gave a striking performance in the same role in Olivier’s movie some fifteen years ago. And that Richard Burton, who does as little as possible with the part of Hamlet, is indeed a very handsome man. Correction: he does play the whole of Hamlet’s death scene standing, when he could have sat down.

  But no sooner had one recovered from Gielgud’s effrontery in presenting a Shakespeare play absolutely nude, without any interpretation at all, than a Shakespeare production arrived which, putting the best face on it, was marred by overinterpretation and too much thought. This was Peter Brook’s celebrated King Lear which was staged at Stratford-on-Avon two years ago, was received with great acclaim in Paris, throughout Eastern Europe, and in Russia, and played—more or less inaudibly—in the New York State Theater (which, it is now discovered, was designed for music and ballet) at Lincoln Center. If Gielgud’s Hamlet was without thought or style, Brook’s King Lear came laden with ideas. One read that, inspired by a recent essay by Jan Kott, the Polish Shakespearean scholar, comparing Shakespeare and Beckett, Brook had decided to play King Lear as Endgame, so to speak. Gielgud has mentioned, in an interview this April in England, that Brook told him it was his controversial “Japanese” King Lear (sets and costumes by Noguchi) in 1955 which gave him the basic idea for the current production. And by consulting the “Lear Log” of Charles Marowitz, Brook’s assistant at Stratford in 1962, one can find other influences, too. But in the end none of the ideas that fed into the production matter. What matters is what one saw and, hopefully, heard. What I saw was rather dull—if you liked it, it was austere—and arbitrary, too. I can’t see what is gained by going against the emotional climaxes of the play—leveling off Lear’s tirades, bringing the Gloucester plot almost to equal scale with the Lear plot, cutting out “humanist” passages such as where Regan’s servants move to aid the newly blinded Gloucester and where Edmund attempts to revoke the execution of Cordelia and Lear (“Some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature”). There were a number of graceful and intelligent performances—Edmund, Gloucester, the Fool. But all the actors seemed to work under an almost palpable constraint, the desire simultaneously to make explicit and to underplay, which must have been what led Brook, in one of the most curious choices of the production, to keep the stage fully lit and bare during the storm scenes. Paul Scofield’s Lear is an admirably studied performance. On Lear’s great age—with its egotism, its awkward movements and appetites—he is especially good. But I cannot see the point of his throwing so much of the role away, Lear’s madness for instance, by arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines. The only performance which seemed to me to survive this strange, crippling interpretation which Brook has imposed on his actors—even, to thrive on it—was Irene Worth’s complex and partly sympathetic Goneril. Miss Worth appeared to have searched every corner of her role and, unlike Scofield, to have found more, rather than less, than others had before.