Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  There is still some timidity and confusion of thought (“anemia of thought,” Professor Ernest Hocking has called it), for two lines of mine in what we call the Word Dances caused a nervous flutter here and there. One of these was “Do you know the difference between free speech and loose talk?” The other one, seriously intended to jostle our complacent ignorance of true Americanism, was “Why do we have to have a secret ballot? It sounds so underhanded.” That line, I just now realize, is no longer in the play. Senator McCarthy did indeed make it hard for us to tell the difference between the patriotic and the subversive.

  Anyone who travels, with stopovers, between New York and Denver is likely to be disturbed, or even alarmed, by our national disdain for the processes of intellect. In almost every city I heard the word “intellectual” identified with “literary” and “sophisticated.” Too many persons seem surprised that the humor and comedy in the play is simple, clear, and understandable, and yet without those qualities there can be no humor or comedy. “Why, it isn’t too subtle at all!” one woman told me at a party. “Even my daughter understood all of it!” And another lady exclaimed, “Why, I thought it would be highbrow and recondite!” This, I must confess, bewildered me, for the long history of New Yorker humor is scarcely one of oblique and abstruse approach to laughter. Among those who have written simple declarative sentences and pointed humor for The New Yorker are Robert Benchley, E. B. White, S.J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Frank Sullivan, and Wolcott Gibbs. Two of these, to be sure, are dead, and the others are heard from rarely, and this may have confused hasty and anemic readers. Humor has declined, God knows, in quantity, but its nature remains unchanged.

  One thing that has changed since my newspaper days in Ohio, thirty-five to forty years ago, is the attitude west of the Alleghenies toward New York City. It used to be downright dislike, with more than a trace of inferiority complex, but now our great city is lightly patronized as a provincial town. Recently John Wayne put on a sneak preview of his new movie in Denver and was quoted in that city’s press as saying, “California is too professional, and New York is too provincial.” I remember when Al Smith was the figure and symbol of all that the Middle West disliked and distrusted about New York. And I remember a day in the early Twenties when I watched a traffic cop in Columbus motion the driver of a car to pull over to the curb. I was talking to the cop at the time and I asked him what the driver had done. “He’s got New York license plates, hasn’t he?” the cop said. “Let him cool off a while there. Those New York guys are too cocky.”

  In view of this, it surprised and pleased me, at a performance of Sunrise at Campobello in Denver two weeks ago, to hear the warm and delighted reception the audience gave to the actor playing the part of Al Smith, as well as its all-out appreciation of Whitfield Connor’s excellent portrayal of F.D.R. “I wish,” said a woman behind me, “they would have let Al say, ‘raddio,’ the way he always did.” Roosevelt’s eloquent attack on religious bigotry in politics was, by the way, loudly applauded.

  Many things astonished, and sometimes bewildered, all of us on the road. There was the lady in Pittsburgh who said to me between acts, “Of course I like it, but your play is much too sophisticated for New York.” And there was, even in Denver to my amazement, a general unfamiliarity with the name and achievements of Harold W. Ross, who was born in Aspen, Colorado, visited the state almost every year after he founded The New Yorker, and whose ashes were scattered by two army airplane pilots near his birthplace. One night I took part, over radio station KOA in Denver, in a panel discussion of this and that which lasted an hour and a half. This program invites phone calls, and listeners asked me to tell about E. B. White, Sid Perelman, and Dorothy Parker, but, I am grieved to say, not Harold Ross, although I kept referring to him as “the boy from Aspen.”

  So far as I know, there has never been a careful and extensive analysis of American theatre audiences. The findings of such a survey would constitute an important sociological document. A questionnaire might be handed to those attending plays everywhere, asking them, among other things, where they come from, what they liked and didn’t like, and why. A separate survey might well deal with the quality of audience laughter, but that would be hard because there are a dozen different kinds, from the inner and inaudible to the guffaw, taking in such variants as the laughter of shock, embarrassment, and, you might say, she-laughed-and-so-I-laughed-too, and even he-laughed-and-so-I-didn’t. There is also the warm continuous laughter of recognition which Paul Ford, for example, always gets along with the laughter aroused by his skill and artistry. People on trains and at parties in every city called him Colonel Hall because of his fame as the commanding officer in the “Sergeant Bilko” television show. (The same kind of reception is also given to Peggy Cass.)

  An important third survey, and a real toughy, would examine the varying reactions of actors to the feel or sense of the audience when the curtain goes up. The performer who puts himself inside a character, instead of allowing the character to disappear inside him, often seems as unaware of the audience as an artist painting a cathedral seems unaware of a crowd in the street watching him work. Then there is the performer, both male and female, upon whom the audience acts as a powerful stimulant—say, five dry martinis—and who, consciously or unconsciously, multiplies his personality and his comic technique by three, or even five. His, or her, case merits the attention not only of critics, but of psychologists.

  My own theatrical and literary allegiance is to that provincial town, New York City, U.S.A., whose drama critics were kind enough to detect the meaningful, the serious, and even the mordant beneath the comedy. West of the Alleghenies my humor was variously described as zany, pixie, wispy, quaint, not hip, old-fashioned, and elfin (I have challenged the man who used that word to a duel at ten paces with cold potato cakes).

  In conclusion, a charming young lady at a garden party in Denver assured me that Edgar Allan Poe and Hemingway are intellectual, and therefore hard to understand. I asked her to name a non-intellectual who was easy to understand, and she said, “Why, W. Somerset Maugham.” You take it from there, gentle reader. After all, the American scene, from the standpoint of humor, is too much for an aging pixie to handle by himself.

  How to Tell Government from Show Business

  History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business. The Congress of the United States, for many years now, has staged, rather than conducted, its sub-committee investigations, turning them into veritable television plays, starring various Senators and Congressmen. During the probe of the so-called Hollywood Ten, some years ago, at least one scene was actually rehearsed in advance, the way a drama is rehearsed in the theatre. A famous movie actor, whom I shall call the Friendly Witness, said, on the stand when the curtain went up, “There is one name that is never heard at a meeting of Hollywood Reds.”

  “What name is that?” a rehearsed Congressman demanded.

  “God,” said the Friendly Witness.

  Congressional procedures reached the high-water mark of show business, of course, when that great ham, Joseph McCarthy, was starred in a series of television plays that might have been called “The War Against the Army.” At that time, in my histrionic country, one Professor of Political Science deplored the bold and bald entrance of government into the area of show business, but the trend could not be stopped.

  As if to fight back, or at least to hold its own, the Broadway theatre in recent years has staged plays dealing with government, such as Sunrise at Campobello, which starred Ralph Bellamy as Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Gang’s All Here, which starred Melvyn Douglas as Warren G. Harding, and The Best Man, in which more than one President or presidential aspirant was identifiable. Previously, we had had The Patriots, in which both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson appeared, but by far our best-known Broadway President is Raymond Massey, who pl
ayed Abraham Lincoln more than once, so often, in fact, that the American playwright and wit, George Kaufman, said of him, “Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated.”

  This determined and continuing erasing of the line that once separated government and show business reached its most notable point during the last presidential campaign, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were co-starred in a series of television plays, mistakenly called debates. As everybody knows, the physical appearance, or make-up, of the two political actors, played at least as important a part in the shows as what they had to say. From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.

  As a fond follower, or rather fan, of the new leading man in the White House, and his theatrically effective family, I am somewhat concerned about the choice of “The New Frontier” as the general title of the series of plays he is so dramatically staging in Washington. What is to prevent Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a conservative opponent of the President’s Party, and a man described by other men as handsome and by women as cute, from getting himself starred in a television Western called “The Old Frontier” and winning the audiences of America away from Caroline’s father? If there is one fact about the United States that can be stated without fear of successful contradiction, it is that Americans, or the vast majority of Americans, are in love with the Far West, the Old Frontier.

  There is much discussion in America at present about a proposed Federal, or National, theatre. It has stirred up great opposition, as any project called Federal or National is bound to do in a nation dedicated to free enterprise and States’ rights. I think though that I see the way in which a compromise will finally be effected. Senators and Congressmen will demand, as a prerequisite to the establishment of a National theatre, the right to be cast in Broadway plays. It does not trouble me to imagine Adlai Stevenson playing Hamlet, but what does worry me is a recurring nightmare I have about the rewriting of certain plays of Shakespeare to fit the modern governmental scene. In the first of these bad dreams, I saw Lady Macbeth enter, not with a taper, but with a ballot box. From then on my fancies got out of hand, almost out of mind. I could hear a Senator declaiming, “To be elected or not to be elected, that is the question.” I also heard the ugly paraphrase, “Out, out, brief candidate!” Everybody is having bad dreams nowanights, and I have no wish to make them worse, so I will cease all this wild imagining with one final bit of denigration of the Bard’s lines: “Flights of voters sing thee to the White House.”

  The rest is silence.

  On the Brink of Was

  The twentieth century and I will be 70, Man willing, within six years of each other—I am the older—but the chances of either of us making it have been steadily reduced since the Wright brothers began fooling around with flying machines. The human being is the most self-destructive of animals, unless you count the Ed Wynn horse that kept banging into things, not because he was blind, but because he just didn’t give a damn. The result has been that we are now living under the threat of total demolition on the Brink of Was. All this is having its effect upon every area of comedy, in England and on the continent, if not in America, which gives up the traditional more slowly than any other country.

  The English theatre has been experimenting with what the Times of London calls “The Comedy of Menace.” In a recent article, Mr. David Campton was named as one of the authors most closely connected with this type of comedy, and the writer comments, “Most of the Campton plays can be reduced to brief statements, such as politicians are dangerous half-wits.”

  EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is Thurber’s response to the following two questions posed by the New York Times: “Are we taking ourselves too seriously? Has satire on our private and public mores, as Will Rogers once practiced it, become unhealthfully scarce?”

  I am afraid it is too soon after McCarthy for American playwrights to deal comically with such bold assumptions. During the past five months in England and France, the word I most often heard applied to American writing, including comedy, was “conformist,” a polite way of saying “timid.” Intelligent people among our European allies are still shocked and bewildered by the beating American writers and artists took during the McCarthy era. It is not expected that we will soon recover and contribute to a new and brave world literature of comedy.

  The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor in depth. It is generally felt that a jumpy American—”afflicted with night terrors,” as one London critic put it—has lost its right to leadership in the field of political satire. As a people, we have always preferred the gentle to the sharp, Will Rogers to Mencken, Finley Peter Dunne, William Allen White, and Elmer Davis.

  Will Rogers was a skillful and lovable performer who held his audiences in the circle of his lariat by mild kidding and affable joshing of many close friends of his—Presidents, Cabinet members, Senators, Congressmen, and even state legislators. His was not the satire that comes from the heart by conviction, but the spoofing that comes from the top of the mind as a vaudeville routine. He deserves, but has never got, a competent biographer who could explode the myth and reveal the man.

  The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal. After the Comedy of Menace may comes the Comedy of Horror. The Lunts’ vehicle, The Visit, comes close in places to the grisly whimsies of demonism. To a basically jolly people like us, lovers of tranquilizers in a perilous world, the New Comedy will come slowly, if ever, to the printed page. Even in the Twenties we had nobody who showed such promise in the area of the Comedy of Menace as Evelyn Waugh. We have the grisly, and even the ghastly, on all sides of us, but we are not apt to turn it into satire that would bring readers to books or audiences to theatres. And what would The New Yorker do if presented with such a drawing as this: “Please don’t kill Mummy and Daddy tonight, Junior. It’s our twelfth wedding anniversary"?

  “Humor,” said Lord Boothby the other day, “is the only solvent of terror and tensions.” That is why the Communists have always discouraged humor. Their fixed grin, or Geneva smile, of three years ago, was as phony as a parrot’s laugh. American must learn that humor, whatever form it may take, can be one of our strongest allies, but it cannot flourish in a weather of fear and hysteria and intimidation. Bravest of the brave in wartime, we are known abroad as the jumpiest of the jumpy in peacetime.

  A few years ago, even wise men, who should have known better, were saying, “If Will Rogers were alive today, he would be put in jail.” I keep telling my European friends that this is the sheerest nonsense. Will Rogers would have kidded around with the subcommittees of Congress as he once kidded around with Mussolini (“Dictator form of Government is the greatest form of Government there is, if you have the right Dictator. Well, these folks certainly have got him.” That irresponsible observation was made by Mr. Rogers in The Saturday Evening Post in 1926, when nobody cared much about what anybody said).

  Political satire can be as dangerous as an unguided missile when it is unsound. Political comedy must be grounded in serious knowledge of our nation and of the world. Perhaps Mort Sahl is the answer, or one of the answers. I have not yet heard him or his records. From what I have heard about him, he will not be intimidated.

  Yes, Virginia, there is a bomb in Gilead, but don’t just take another tranquilizer and walk the other way. Let’s face it.

  “One more of these and I’ll spill the beans about everybody here.”

  “He says he’s just about got the government where he wants it.”

  At the crossroads.

  Thinking Ourselves into Trouble

  Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force whi
ch controls its measured eccentricities hasn’t got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady’s watch are revolving more purposefully than he is. These black doubts creep up on a man just before thunderstorms or at six in the morning when the steam begins to knock solemnly in the pipes or during his confused wanderings in the forest beyond Euphoria after a long night of drinking.

  Where are we going, if anywhere, and why?

  It will do no good to call up the Times or consult the Britannica. The Answer does not lie in the charts of astronomers or in the equations of mathematicians; it was not indicated by Galileo’s swinging lamp or the voices of Joan of Arc; it evaded Socrates and Archimedes and the great men of the Renaissance and everybody else from Francis Bacon to John Kieran.

  The fearful mystery that lies behind all this endless rotation has led Man into curious indulgences and singular practices, among them love, poetry, intoxicants, religion, and philosophy. Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies—and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.