July, 1961
AS SOON AS THIS title is announced for a lecture or an article, a question pops up: who are they? Is there, as is assumed abroad, a school of realists in the American theatre or is this notion a critical figment? The question is legitimate and will remain, I hope, in the air long after I have finished. Nevertheless, for purposes of discussion, I am going to take for granted that there is such a group, if not a school, and name its members: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Paddy Chayevsky, the Elmer Rice of Street Scene. Behind them, casting them in the shadow, stands the great figure of O’Neill, and opposite them, making them seem more homogeneous, are writers like George Kelly, Wilder, Odets, Saroyan. Their counterparts in the novel are Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, the early Thomas Wolfe—which illustrates, by the way, the backwardness of the theatre in comparison with the novel. The theatre seems to be chronically twenty years behind, regardless of realism, as the relation of Beckett to Joyce, for example, shows. The theatre feeds on the novel; never vice versa: think of the hundreds of dramatizations of novels, and then try to think of a book that was “novelized” from a play. There is not even a word for it. The only actual case I can call to mind is The Other House by Henry James—a minor novel he salvaged from a play of his own that failed. To return to the main subject, one characteristic of American realism in the theatre is that none of its practitioners currently—except Chayevsky—wants to call himself a realist. Tennessee Williams is known to his admirers as a “poetic realist,” while Arthur Miller declares that he is an exponent of the “social play” and identifies himself with the Greek playwrights, whom he describes as social playwrights also. This delusion was dramatized, if that is the word, in A View from the Bridge.
The fact that hardly a one of these playwrights cares to be regarded as a realist without some qualifying or mitigating adjective’s being attached to the term invites a definition of realism. What does it mean in common parlance? I have looked the word “realist” up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is what they say. “... In reference to art and literature, sometimes used as a term of commendation, when precision and vividness of detail are regarded as a merit, and sometimes unfavorably contrasted with idealized description or representation. In recent use it has often been used with the implication that the details are of an unpleasant or sordid character.” This strikes me as a very fair account of the historical fate of the notion of realism, but I shall try to particularize a little, in the hope of finding out why and how this happened. And I shall not be condemning realism but only noting what people seem to think it is.
When we say that a novel or a play is realistic, we mean, certainly, that it gives a picture of ordinary life. Its characters will be drawn from the middle class, the lower middle class, occasionally the working class. You cannot write realistic drama about upper-class life; at least, no one ever has. Aristocracy does not lend itself to realistic treatment, but to one or another kind of stylization: romantic drama, romantic comedy, comedy of manners, satire, tragedy. This fact in itself is a realistic criticism of the aristocratic idea, which cannot afford, apparently, to live in the glass house of the realistic stage. Kings and noble men, said Aristotle, are the protagonists of tragedy—not women or slaves. The same is true of nobility of character or intellect. The exceptional man, whether he be Oedipus or King Lear or one of the romantic revolutionary heroes of Hugo or Musset, is fitted to be the protagonist of a tragedy, but just this tragic fitness disqualifies him from taking a leading role in a realist drama. Such figures as Othello or Hernani can never be the subject of realistic treatment, unless it is with the object of deflating them, showing how ordinary—petty or squalid—they are. But then the hero is no longer Othello but an impostor posing as Othello. Cut down to size, he is just like everybody else but worse, because he is a fraud into the bargain. This abrupt foreshortening is why realistic treatment of upper-class life always takes the harsh plunge into satire. No man is a hero to his valet, and Beaumarchais’ Figaro is the spokesman of social satire—not of realism; his personal and private realism turns his master into a clown. Realism deals with ordinary men and women or, in extreme forms, with sub-ordinary men, men on the level of beasts or of blind conditioned reflexes (La Bete Humaine, The Hairy Ape). This tendency is usually identified with naturalism, but I am regarding naturalism as simply a variety of realism.
Realism, historically, is associated with two relatively modern inventions, i.e., with journalism and with photography. “Photographic realism” is a pejorative term, and enemies of realistic literature often dismissed it as “no more than journalism,” implying that journalism was a sordid, seamy affair—a daily photographic close-up, as it were, of the clogged pores of society. The author as sheer observer likened himself to a camera (Dos Passos, Christopher Isherwood, Wright Morris), and insofar as the realistic novel was vowed to be a reflector of ordinary life, the newspapers inevitably became a prime source of material. Newspaper accounts impressed the nineteenth century with their quality of “stark objectivity,” and newspapers, which appeared every day, seemed to be the repositories of everydayness and to give a multiple image of the little tragedies and vicissitudes of daily life. In America, in the early part of this century, the realistic novel was a partner of what was called “muck raking” journalism, and both were linked with populism and crusades for political reform.
Hence, perhaps, in part, the unsavory associations in common speech of the word “realistic,” even when applied in nonliterary contexts. Take the phrase “a realistic decision.” If someone tells you he is going to make “a realistic decision,” you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad. The same with “Realpolitik.” A “realistic politics” is a euphemism for a politics of harsh opportunism; if you hear someone say that it is time for a government to follow a realistic line, you can interpret this as meaning that it is time for principles to be abandoned. A politician or a political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.
Whatever the field, whenever you hear that a subject is to be treated “realistically,” you expect that its unpleasant aspects are to be brought forward. So it is with the play and the novel. A delicate play like Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, though perfectly truthful to life, seems deficient in realism in comparison with the stronger medicine of Gorki’s The Lower Depths. This is true of Turgenev’s novels as well and of such English writers as Mrs. Gaskell. And of the peaceful parts of War and Peace. Ordinary life treated in its uneventful aspects tends to turn into an idyl. We think of Turgenev and Mrs. Gaskell almost as pastoral writers, despite the fact that their faithful sketches have nothing in common with the artificial convention of the true pastoral. We suspect that there is something arcadian here—something “unrealistic.”
If realism deals with the ordinary man embedded in ordinary life, which for the most part is uneventful, what then is the criterion that makes us forget Turgenev or Mrs. Gaskell when we name off the realists? I think it is this: what we call realism, and particularly dramatic realism, tends to single out the ordinary man at the moment he might get into the newspaper. The criterion, in other words, is drawn from journalism. The ordinary man must become “news” before he qualifies to be the protagonist of a realistic play or novel. The exceptional man is news at all times, but how can the ordinary man get into the paper? By committing a crime. Or, more rarely, by getting involved in a spectacular accident. Since accidents, in general, are barred from the drama, this leaves crime—murder or suicide or embezzlement. And we find that the protagonists of realistic drama, by and large, are the protagonists of newspaper stories—“little men” who have shot their wives or killed themselves in the garage or gone to jail for fraud or embezzlement. Now drama has always had an affinity for crime; long before realism was known, Oedipus and Clytemnestra and Macbeth and Othello were famous for their deeds of blood. But the crimes of tragedy are the crimes of heroes, while the crimes of realistic drama are the crimes of the nondescript person, the crimes that are, in a sense, all alike. The individual in the realistic drama is regarded as a cog or a statistic; he commits the uniform crime that sociologically he might be expected to commit. That is, supposing that 1,031 bookkeepers in the state of New York are destined to tamper with the accounts, and 304 policemen are destined to shoot their wives, and 1,115 householders to do away with themselves in the garage, each individual bookkeeper, cop, and householder has been holding a ticket in this statistical lottery, like the fourteen Athenian youths and maidens sent off yearly to the Minotaur’s labyrinth, and he acquires interest for the realist theatre only when his “number” comes up. To put it as simply as possible, the cop in Street Scene commits his crime—wife-murder—without having the moral freedom to choose to commit it, just as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman commits suicide—under sociological pressure. The hero of tragedy, on the contrary, is a morally free being who identifies himself with his crime (i.e., elects it), and this is true even where he is fated, like Oedipus, to commit it and can be said to have no personal choice in the matter. Oedipus both rejects and accepts his deeds, embraces them in free will at last as his. It is the same with Othello or Hamlet. The distinction will be clear if you ask yourself what tragedy of Shakespeare is closest to the realistic theatre. The answer, surely, is Macbeth. And why? Because of Lady Macbeth. Macbeth really doesn’t choose to murder the sleeping Duncan; Lady Macbeth chooses for him; he is like a middle-class husband, nagged on by his ambitious wife, the way the second vice-president of a bank is nagged on by his Mrs. Macbeth, who wants him to become first vice-president. The end of the tragedy, however, reverses all this; Macbeth becomes a hero only late in the drama, when he pushes Lady Macbeth aside and takes all his deeds on himself. Paradoxically, the conspicuous tragic hero is never free not to do his deed; he cannot escape it, as Hamlet found. But the mute hero or protagonist of a realistic play is always free, at least seemingly, not to emerge from obscurity and get his picture in the paper. There is always the chance that not he but some other nondescript bookkeeper or policeman will answer the statistical call.
The heroes of realistic plays are clerks, bookkeepers, policemen, housewives, salesmen, schoolteachers, small and middling businessmen. They commit crimes but they cannot be professional criminals (unlike the heroes of Genet or the characters in The Beggars Opera), for professional criminals, like kings and noble men, are a race apart. The settings of realistic plays are offices, drab dining rooms or living rooms, or the backyard, which might be defined as a place where some grass has once been planted and failed to grow. The backyard is a favorite locus for American realist plays, but no realist play takes place in a garden. Nature is excluded from the realist play, as it has been from the realistic novel. The presence of Nature in Turgenev (and in Chekhov) denotes, as I have suggested, a pastoral intrusion. If a realist play does not take place in the backyard, where Nature has been eroded by clothes-poles, garbage cans, bottled-gas tanks, and so on, it takes place indoors, where the only plant, generally, is a rubber plant. Even with Ibsen, the action is confined to a room or pair of rooms until the late plays like A Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman, when the realistic style has been abandoned for symbolism and the doors are swung open to the garden, mountains, the sea. Ibsen, however, is an exception to the general rule that the indoor scene must be unattractive: his middle-class Scandinavians own some handsome furniture; Nora’s house, like any doll’s house, must have been charmingly appointed. But Ibsen is an exception to another rule that seems to govern realistic drama (and the novel too, for that matter)—the rule that it must not be well written. (Thanks to William Archer’s wooden translations, his work now falls into line in English.) This rule in America has the force, almost, of a law, one of those iron laws that work from within necessity itself, apparently, and without conscious human aid. Our American realists do not try to write badly. Many, like Arthur Miller, strive to write “well,” i.e., pretentiously, but like Dreiser in the novel they are cursed with inarticulateness. They “grope.” They are, as O’Neill said of himself, “fogbound.”
The heroes are petty or colorless; the settings are drab; the language is lame. Thus the ugliness of the form is complete. I am not saying this as a criticism, only observing that when a play or a novel fails to meet these norms, we cease to think of it as realistic. Flaubert, known to be a “stylist,” ceases to count for us as a realist, and even in the last century, Matthew Arnold, hailing Tolstoy as a realist, was blinded by categorical thinking—with perhaps a little help from the translations—into calling his novels raw “slices of life,” sprawling, formless, and so on. But it is these clichés, in the long run, that have won out. The realistic novel today is more like what Arnold thought Tolstoy was than it is like Tolstoy or any of the early realists. This question of the beauty of form also touches the actor. An actor formerly was supposed to be a good-looking man, with a handsome figure, beautiful movements, and a noble diction. These attributes are no longer necessary for a stage career; indeed, in America they are a positive handicap. A good-looking young man who moves well and speaks well is becoming almost unemployable in American “legit” theatre; his best hope today is to look for work in musical comedy. Or posing for advertisements. On the English stage, where realism until recently never got a foothold, the good-looking actor still rules the roost, but the English actor cannot play American realist parts, while the American actor cannot play Shakespeare or Shaw. A pretty girl in America may still hope to be an actress, though even here there are signs of a change: the heroine of O’Neill’s late play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, was a freckled giantess five feet eleven inches tall and weighing 180 pounds.
Eisenstein and the Italian neo-realists used people off the street for actors—a logical inference from premises which, being egalitarian and documentary, are essentially hostile to professional élites, including Cossacks, Swiss Guards, and actors. The professional actor in his greasepaint is the antithesis of the pallid man on the street. But film and stage realism are not so democratic in their principles as may at first appear. To begin with, the director and a small corps of professionals—electricians and cameramen—assume absolute power over the masses, i.e., over the untrained actors picked from the crowd; no resistance is encountered, as it would be with professional actors, in molding the human material to the director-dictator’s will. And even with stars and all-professional casts, the same tendency is found in the modern realist or neo-realist director. Hence the whispered stories of stars deliberately broken by a director: James Dean and Brigitte Bardot. Similar stories of brainwashing are heard backstage. This is not surprising if realism, as we now know it, rejects as nonaverage whatever is noble, beautiful, or seemly, whatever is capable of “gesture,” whatever in fact is free. Everything I have been saying up till now can be summed up in a sentence. Realism is a depreciation of the real. It is a gloomy puritan doctrine that has flourished chiefly in puritan countries—America, Ireland, Scandinavia, northern France, nonconformist England—chilly, chilblained countries, where the daily world is ugly and everything is done to keep it so, as if as a punishment for sin. The doctrine is spreading with industrialization, the growth of ugly cities, and the erosion of Nature. It came late to the English stage, long after it had appeared in the novel, because those puritan elements with which it is naturally allied have, up until now, considered the theatre to be wicked.
At the same time, in defense of realism, it must be said that its great enemy has been just that puritan life whose gray color it has taken. The original realists—Ibsen in the theatre, Flaubert in the novel—regarded themselves as “pagans,” in opposition to their puritan contemporaries, and adhered to a religion of Beauty or Nature; they dreamed of freedom and hedonistic license (Flaubert) and exalted (Ibsen) the autonomy of the individual will. Much of this “paganism” is still found in O’Casey and in the early O’Neill, a curdled puritan of Irish-American stock. The original realists were half Dionysian aesthetes (“The vine-leaves in his hair”) and their heroes and heroines were usually rebels, protesting the drabness and meanness of the common life. Ibsen’s characters complain that they are “stifling”; in the airless hypocrisy of the puritan middle-class parlor, people were being poisoned by the dead gas of lies. Hypocrisy is the cardinal sin of the middle class, and the exposure of a lie is at the center of all Ibsen’s plots. The strength and passion of realism is its resolve to tell the whole truth; this explains why the realist in his indictment of society avoids the old method of satire with its delighted exaggeration. The realist drama at its highest is an implacable exposé. Ibsen rips off the curtain and shows his audiences to themselves, and there is something inescapable in the manner of the confrontation, like a case slowly being built. The pillars of society who sit in the best seats are, bit by bit, informed that they are rotten and that the commerce they live on is a commerce of “coffin ships.” The action on the Ibsen stage is too close for comfort to the lives of the audience; only the invisible “fourth wall” divides them. “This is the way we live now!” Moral examination, self-examination are practical as a duty, a protestant stock-taking, in the realist mission hall.
For this, it is essential that the audience accept the picture as true; it cannot be permitted to feel that it is watching something “made up” or embellished. Hence the stripping down of the form and the elimination of effects that might be recognized as literary. For the first time too, in the realist drama, the accessories of the action are described at length by the playwright. The details must strike home and convince. The audience must be able to place the furniture, the carpets, the ornaments, the napery and glassware as “just what these people would have.” This accounts for the importance of the stage set. Many critics who scornfully dismiss the “boxlike set” of the realistic drama, with its careful disposition of furniture, do not understand its function. This box is the box or “coffin” of average middle-class life opened at one end to reveal the corpse within, looking, as all embalmed corpses are said to do, “just as if it were alive.” Inside the realist drama, whenever it is genuine and serious, there is a kind of double illusion, a false bottom: everything appears to be lifelike but this appearance of life is death. The stage set remains a central element in all true realism; it cannot be replaced by scrim or platforms. In A Long Day’s Journey into Night, surely the greatest realist drama since Ibsen, the family living room, with its central overhead lighting-fixture, is as solid and eternal as oak and as sad as wicker, and O’Neill in the text tells the stage-designer what books must be in the glassed-in bookcase on the left and what books in the other by the entrance. The tenement of Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (in the opera version) was a magnificent piece of characterization; so was the Bronx living room of Odets’ Awake and Sing—his sole (and successful) experiment with realism. I can still see the bowl of fruit on the table, slightly to the left of stage center, and hear the Jewish mother interrupting whoever happened to be talking, to say, “Have a piece of fruit.” That bowl of fruit, which was the Jewish Bronx, remains more memorable as a character than many of the people in the drama. This gift of characterization through props and stage set is shared by Paddy Chayevsky in Middle of the Night and by William Inge in Come Back, Little Sheba, where an unseen prop or accessory, the housewife’s terrible frowsty little dog, is a master-stroke of realist illusionism and, more than that, a kind of ghostly totem. All these plays, incidentally, are stories of death-in-life.
This urgent correspondence with a familiar reality, down to the last circumstantial detail, is what makes realism so gripping, like a trial in court. The dramatist is witnessing or testifying, on an oath never sworn before in a work of art, not to leave out anything and to tell the truth to the best of his ability. And yet the realistic dramatist, beginning with Ibsen, is aware of a missing element. The realist mode seems to generate a dissatisfaction with itself, even in the greatest masters: Tolstoy, for example, came to feel that his novels, up to Resurrection, were inconsequential trifling; the vital truth had been left out. In short, as a novelist, he began to feel like a hypocrite. This dissatisfaction with realism was evidently suffered also by Ibsen; halfway through his realist period, you see him start to look for another dimension. Hardly had he discovered or invented the new dramatic mode than he showed signs of being cramped by it; he experienced, if his plays are an index, that same sense of confinement, of being stifled, within the walls of realism that his characters experience within the walls of middle-class life. Something was missing: air. This is already plain in The Wild Duck, a strange piece of auto-criticism and probably his finest play; chafing, restless, mordant, he is searching for something else, for a poetic element, which he represents, finally, in the wild duck itself, a dramatic symbol for that cherished wild freedom that neither Ibsen nor his characters can maintain, without harming it, in a shut-in space. But to resort to symbols to make good the missing element becomes a kind of forcing, like trying to raise a wild bird in an attic, and the strain of this is felt in Rosmersholm, where symbols play a larger part and are charged with a more oppressive weight of meaning. In The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder, and other late plays, the symbols have broken through the thin fence or framework of realism; poetry has spread its crippled wings, but the price has been heavy.
The whole history of dramatic realism is encapsulated in Ibsen. First, the renunciation of verse and of historical and philosophical subjects in the interests of prose and the present time; then the dissatisfaction and the attempt to restore the lost element through a recourse to symbols; then, or at the same time, a forcing of the action at the climaxes to heighten the drama; finally, the renunciation of realism in favor of a mixed mode or hodgepodge. The reaching for tragedy at the climaxes is evident in Hedda Gabler and still more so in Rosmersholm, where, to me at any rate, the climactic shriek “To the mill race!” is absurdly like a bad film. Many of Ibsen’s big moments, even as early as A Doll’s House, strike me as false and grandiose, that is, precisely, as stagey. Nor is it only in the context of realism that they appear so. It is not just that one objects that people do not act or talk like that—Tolstoy’s criticism of King Lear on the heath. If you compare the mill-race scene in Rosmersholm with the climax of a Shakespearean tragedy, you will see that the Shakespearean heroes are far less histrionic, more natural and ordinary; there is always a stillness at the center of the Shakespearean storm. It is as if the realist, in reaching for tragedy, were punished for his hubris by a ludicrous fall into bathos. Tragedy is impossible by definition in the quotidian realist mode, since (quite aside from the question of the hero) tragedy is the exceptional action one of whose signs is beauty.
In America the desire to supply the missing element (usually identified as poetry or “beauty”) seems to grow stronger and stronger exactly in proportion to the author’s awkwardness with language. The less a playwright can write prose, the more he wishes to write poetry and to raise his plays by their bootstraps to a higher realm. You find these applications of “beauty” in Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; they stand out like rouge on a pitted complexion; it is as though the author first wrote the play naturalistically and then gave it a beauty-treatment or face-lift. Before them, O’Neill, who was too honest and too philosophically inclined to be satisfied by a surface solution, kept looking methodically for a way of representing the missing element in dramas that would still be realistic at the core. He experimented with masks (The Great God Brown), with the aside and the soliloquy (Strange Interlude), with a story and pattern borrowed from Greek classic drama (Mourning Becomes Electra). In other words, he imported into the American home or farm the machinery of tragedy. But his purpose was always a greater realism. His use of the aside, for example, was very different from the traditional use of the aside (a kind of nudge to the audience, usually on the part of the villain, to let them in on his true intent or motive); in Strange Interlude O’Neill was trying, through the aside, to make available to the realistic drama the discoveries of modern psychology, to represent on the stage the unconscious selves of his characters, at cross-purposes with their conscious selves but just as real if not realer, at least according to the psychoanalysts. He was trying, in short, to give a more complete picture of ordinary people in their daily lives. It was the same with his use of masks in The Great God Brown; he was appropriating the mask of Athenian drama, a ritual means of putting a distance between the human actor and the audience, to bring his own audience closer to the inner humanity of his character—the man behind the mask of conformity. The fact that these devices were clumsy is beside the point. O’Neill’s sincerity usually involved him in clumsiness. In the end, he came back to the straight realism of his beginnings: The Long Voyage Home, the title of his young Caribbean series, could also be the title of the great play of his old age: A Long Day’s Journey into Night. He has sailed beyond the horizon and back into port; the circle is complete. In this late play, the quest for the missing element, as such, is renounced; poetry is held to be finally unattainable by the author. “I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now,” says the character who is supposed to be the young O’Neill. “I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” In this brave acknowledgment or advance acceptance of failure, there is something very moving. Moreover, the acceptance of defeat was in fact the signal of a victory. A Long Day’s Journey into Night, sheer dogged prose from beginning to end, achieves in fact a peculiar poetry, and the relentless amassing of particulars takes on, eventually, some of the crushing force of inexorable logic that we find in Racine or in a Greek play. The weight of circumstance itself becomes a fate or nemesis. This is the closest, probably, the realism can get to tragedy.
The “stammering” of O’Neill was what made his later plays so long, and the stammering, which irritated some audiences, impatient for the next syllable to fall, was a sign of the author’s agonized determination to be truthful. If O’Neill succeeded, at last, in deepening the character of his realism, it was because the missing element he strove to represent was not, in the end, “poetry” or “beauty” or “philosophy” (though he sometimes seems to have felt that it was) but simply meaning—the total significance of an action. What he came to conclude, rather wearily, in his last plays was that the total significance of an action lay in the accumulated minutiae of that action and could not be abstracted from it, at least not by him. There was no truth or meaning beyond the event itself; anything more (or less) would be a lie. This pun or tautology, this conundrum, committed him to a cycle of repetition, and memory, the mother of the Muses, became his only muse.
The younger American playwrights—Miller, Williams, Inge, Chayevsky—now all middle-aged, are pledged, like O’Neill, to verisimilitude. They purport to offer a “slice of life,” in Tennessee Williams’ case a rich, spicy slab of Southern fruitcake, but still a slice of life. The locus of their plays is the American porch or backyard or living room or parlor or bus station, presented as typical, authentic as home-fried potatoes or “real Vermont maple syrup.” This authenticity may be regional, as with Williams and Paddy Chayevsky (the Jewish upper West side; a Brooklyn synagogue) or it may claim to be as broad as the nation, as with Arthur Miller, or somewhere rather central, in between the two, as with William Inge. But in any case, the promise of these playwrights is to show an ordinary home, an ordinary group of bus passengers, a typical manufacturer, and so on, and the dramatis personae tend to resemble a small-town, non-blue-ribbon jury: housewife, lawyer, salesman, chiropractor, working-man, schoolteacher. ... Though Tennessee Williams’ characters are more exotic, they too are offered as samples to the audience’s somewhat voyeuristic eye; when Williams’ film, Baby Doll, was attacked by Cardinal Spellman, the director (Elia Kazan) defended it on the grounds that it was true to life that he and Williams had observed, on location, in Mississippi. If the people in Tennessee Williams were regarded as products of the author’s imagination, his plays would lose all their interest. There is always a point in any one of Williams’ dramas where recognition gives way to a feeling of shocked incredulity; this shock technique is the source of his sensational popularity. But the audience would not be electrified if it had not been persuaded earlier that it was witnessing something the author vouched for as a common, ordinary occurrence in the Deep South.
Unlike the other playwrights, who make a journalistic claim to neutral recording, Arthur Miller admittedly has a message. His first-produced play, All My Sons, was a social indictment taken, almost directly, from Ibsen’s Pillars of Society. The coffin ships, rotten, unseaworthy vessels caulked over to give an appearance of soundness, become defective airplanes sold to the government by a corner-cutting manufacturer during the Second World War; like the coffin ships, the airplanes are a symbol of the inner rottenness of bourgeois society, and the sins of the father, as almost in Ibsen, are visited on the son, a pilot who cracks up in the Pacific theatre (in Ibsen, the ship-owner’s boy is saved at the last minute from sailing on The Indian Girl). The insistence of this symbol and the vagueness or absence of concrete detail express Miller’s impatience with the particular and his feeling that his play ought to say “more” than it appears to be saying. Ibsen, even in his later, symbolic works, was always specific about the where, when, and how of his histories (the biographies of his central characters are related with almost too much circumstantiality), but Miller has always regarded the specific as trivial and has sought, from the very outset, a hollow, reverberant universality. The reluctance to awaken a specific recognition, for fear that a larger meaning might go unrecognized by the public, grew on Miller with Death of a Salesman—a strong and original conception that was enfeebled by its creator’s insistence on universality and by a too-hortatory excitement, i.e., an eagerness to preach, which is really another form of the same thing. Miller was bent on making his Salesman (as he calls him) a parable of Everyman, exactly as in a clergyman’s sermon, so that the drama has only the quality—and something of the canting tone—of an illustrative moral example. The thirst for universality becomes even more imperious in A View from the Bridge, where the account of a waterfront killing that Miller read in a newspaper is accessorized with Greek architecture, “archetypes,” and, from time to time, intoned passages of verse, and Miller announces in a preface that he is not interested in his hero’s “psychology.” Miller does not understand that you cannot turn a newspaper item about Italian longshoremen and illegal immigration into a Greek play by adding a chorus and the pediment of a temple. Throughout Miller’s long practice as a realist, there is not only a naïve searching for another dimension but an evident hatred of and contempt for reality—as not good enough to make plays out of.
It is natural, therefore, that he should never have any interest in how people talk; his characters all talk the same way—somewhat funereally, through their noses. A live sense of speech differences (think of Shaw’s Pygmalion) is rare in American playwrights; O’Neill tried to cultivate it (“dat ol davil sea”), but he could never do more than write perfunctory dialect, rather like that of somebody telling a Pat and Mike story or a mountaineer joke. The only American realist with an ear for speech, aside from Chayevsky, whose range is narrow, is Tennessee Williams. He does really hear his characters, especially his female characters; he has studied their speech patterns and, like Professor Higgins, he can tell where they come from; Williams too is the only realist who places his characters in social history. Of all the realists, after O’Neill, he has probably the greatest native gift for the theatre; he is a natural performer and comedian, and it is too bad that he suffers from the inferiority complex that is the curse of the recent American realists—the sense that a play must be bigger than its characters. This is really a social disease—a fear of being underrated—rather than the claustrophobia of the medium itself, which tormented Ibsen and O’Neill. But it goes back to the same source: the depreciation of the real. Real speech, for example, is not good enough for Williams and from time to time he silences his characters to put on a phonograph record of his special poetic longplay prose.
All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered—no laughter, no tears, no purgation. This sadism had a moral justification, so long as there was the question of the exposure of a lie. But Williams is fascinated by the refinements of cruelty, which with him becomes a form of aestheticism, and his plays, far from baring a lie that society is trying to cover up, titillate society like a peepshow. The curtain is ripped off, to disclose, not a drab scene of ordinary life, but a sadistic exhibition of the kind certain rather specialized tourists pay to see in big cities like New Orleans. With Williams, it is always a case of watching some mangy cat on a hot tin roof. The ungratified sexual organ of an old maid, a young wife married to a homosexual, a subnormal poor white farmer is proffered to the audience as a curiosity. The withholding of sexual gratification from a creature or “critter” in heat for three long acts is Williams’ central device; other forms of torture to which these poor critters are subjected are hysterectomy and castration. Nobody, not even the SPCA, would argue that it was a good thing to show the prolonged torture of a dumb animal on the stage, even though the torture were only simulated and animals, in the end, would profit from such cases being brought to light. Yet this, on a human level, is Tennessee Williams’ realism—a cat, to repeat, on a hot tin roof. And, in a milder version, it is found again in William Inge’s Picnic. No one could have prophesied, a hundred years ago, that the moral doctrine of realism would narrow to the point of becoming pornography, yet something like that seems to be happening with such realistic novels as Peyton Place and the later John O’Hara and with one branch of the realist theatre. Realism seems to be a highly unstable mode, attracted on the one hand to the higher, on the other to the lower elements in the human scale, tending always to proceed toward its opposite, that is, to irreality, tracing a vicious circle from which it can escape only by repudiating itself. Realism, in short, is forever begging the question—the question of reality. To find the ideal realist, you would first have to find reality. And if no dramatist today, except O’Neill, can accept being a realist in its full implications, this is perhaps because of lack of courage. Ibsen and O’Neill, with all their dissatisfaction, produce major works in the full realist vein; the recent realists get discouraged after a single effort. Street Scene; All My Sons; The Glass Menagerie; Come Back, Little Sheba; Middle of the Night, perhaps Awake and Sing are the only convincing evidence that exists of an American realist school—not counting O’Neill. If I add Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, it is only because I do not know where else to put them.