MORE, MUCH MORE, BY CORWIN (1999)

In 1939 I heard a voice hurled round the world a dozen, two dozen times by the unseen miracle of a thing called radio, then only a few years old.

My God, I thought, age nineteen, what was that?

I waited anxiously to hear the name of this lord of all invisible space.

Norman Corwin.

A new name for a new space in a new time.

Like most volcanoes, Norman Corwin erupted at sea level and rose to Mount Everest peaks within a few short years.

Even as Shakespeare and Walt Whitman taught us the love of words striking our ears, so did Corwin sound our timpani to occupy our imaginations.

He drove us with ethereal whips to the library, where, lacking funds, we took his notions, fancies, and towering insights on loan.

If you asked what the word “broadcast” means, few listening Americans could have given the answer: to move across immeasurable fields casting seed in all directions. Corwin was that splendid sower of golden seed. His words, broadcast, lifted a harvest of wild response.

With his half-hour They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease, Corwin targeted and shot Mussolini’s son, who relished the sight of his bombs exploding like flowers on Ethiopian soil.

He raised from death the vibrant spirit of Thomas Wolfe, whose incantations, uttered by Charles Laughton, broke us to tears, in the midst of a genius score by Bernard Herrmann.

He directed the first broadcast of Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans and The Lonesome Train, Lincoln’s cortege locomoting across America to bury our hearts.

In a lighter vein, he rhymed The Plot to Overthrow Christmas with Will Geer, dramatized My Client Curly, about a caterpillar dancing in a matchbox, a program that was later filmed, starring Cary Grant.

And always it was words, words, words, a love of their swiftly vanishing sounds. Roget’s Thesaurus in his blood, Webster’s Dictionary in his fingertips, as a linguist he was the linguini of them all!

The Constitution, and our presidents, had no better friend than Corwin. Early on, he directed a one-hour radio drama with a delicatessen of talent from Broadway and Hollywood sounding the Bill of Rights. Sensing that our Constitution is rarely read, he blew the dust off with the help of Orson Welles, James Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Fifty years later he repeated that feat of political loudspeaking by engaging the likes of James Earl Jones, Stan Freberg, Richard Dysart, and even myself, making virtually real the amendments, name one, name all. His glue fixed our ears to radios or cassette players.

Between times he toiled for a year screenplaying the life of Thomas Jefferson. The film was never produced, but one can imagine it as a forthright portrait of a literary and inventive giant, leaving his black mistress to a sexually fixated film future.

Similarly he corralled the ghosts of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson in Together Tonight, a tapestry of their writings woven to become a flying carpet through time and landing them, reborn, on a lecture podium.

Lincoln and Douglas debated their timeless arguments, recalled by Corwin.

His Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin did the impossible, proved the relationship between what is seen and what is painted, how to notice and re-create. The sort of metaphor the film The Snows of Kilimanjaro failed to prove with Hemingway’s African typewriter.

A few days before the 1940 presidential election, Corwin crammed a hundred celebrities into a studio, gave each four seconds. One by one they jumped to the microphone and spoke.

“This is Claudette Colbert. I am voting for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

“I am Humphrey Bogart. Roosevelt’s my man.”

“This is Edward G. Robinson. Roosevelt.”

“James Cagney. Roosevelt.”

Did it work? Sheer political flimflammery? Yes and no. The job of electing Caesars or jerkwater town mayors has always been chicken in the garage, new tin lizzies out front, and vodka in your beer. Thousand of voters that night might not have shifted allegiance, for hearing was almost seeing. Their fingers itched for the voting-booth pad.

There was no similar broadcast before or since.

His radio drama On a Note of Triumph, aired on the eve of our European victory in June 1945, was a singular triumph for Corwin. The drama was broadcast over CBS, a light and dark celebration because the war was not yet over—we had yet to bring down Japan. For those who missed the program, as well as those who wanted to hear it again, it was repeated live eight days later. The country was in raw need of great sun and shadow declarations, and this program helped to fill the need.

After these fireworks it is time to admit my timeless friendship with Corwin.

In 1947, when I published my first book of stories, I sent him a copy inscribed, “If you like these stories half as much as I love your work, I would like to buy you drinks.”

The phone rang three days later. It was Corwin. “You’re not buying me drinks,” he said, “I’m buying you dinner.”

During that first dinner, I described a story, just finished, of a Martian woman who dreams an astronaut lands and flies her back to Earth. Norman, most kind, told me to write more about Mars.

I promptly did so.

And invited Norman down to meet my wife, Maggie, who married me for my money (forty dollars a week in a good week). And, by God, he came!

Norman Corwin, the world’s most acclaimed radio writer, brought his fine actor wife, Katie, to share bad wine and fair pizza on a card table in a matchbox parlor with this errant Martian heading for a far shore: up.

Two years later Norman said the most important thing: I must come to New York and let the book editors know I existed. He and Katie would welcome and protect me. Would I do this?

With Maggie pregnant and sixty dollars in the bank, I took the Greyhound bus to New York, a stack of stories on my lap.

Don’t you write novels? the editors said. I’m a sprinter, I said. I have one hundred stories, all bright and shiny new.

Norman and Katie, to console me, took me to animated cartoon festivals and sat me in at the taping of one of his magnificent One World broadcasts, which knocked my soul out of my body.

Finally, at the last moment, a Doubleday editor, Walter Bradbury (no relation), suggested that I had already written a novel but didn’t know it. All those Martian stories, inspired by Norman, wouldn’t they make a tapestry called The Martian Chronicles? Go back to the YMCA, said my editor, type an outline, and if it’s half good, I’ll hand you an advance. I stayed up all night in a hot un-air-conditioned Y, wrote the outline, and sold the book. Norman and Katie flew home, happy. I said to hell with the bus and rode west, el cheapo, on a train chair-car, triumphant.

We met again to celebrate with one bottle of red wine, seventy-nine cents—mine—and a red worth nine bucks—Norman’s—and more pizza. What a feast!

When John Huston asked me to write the screenplay for Moby Dick in August of 1953, the first person I telephoned was Norman Corwin.

My God, I cried, how do I do it?

Call you in three days, Norman said. He called. He had reread Moby Dick and gave advice.

It was much like that I got from my eight-year-old daughter, Susan, a few years later. One day I found her deep fathoms under, reading Melville.

I circled her gingerly. “Reading Melville?” I said.

“Yep,” Susan said.

“How do you like it?” I said cautiously.

“Fine,” Susan said, “but I skip a lot.”

“So do I,” I said.

So said Norman. Do every other chapter, he said. And then go back to make sure nothing’s left out. The whaling stuff is fascinating, but you can’t cram it all in. Do Richard III, then dress it with the White Whale’s oil.

I did just that and woke one dawn to stare in a London mirror crying, “I am Herman Melville!” In the next eight hours, I furnaced my typewriter to finish the last forty pages of Melville’s tempest.

Back home the first one I showed the script to: Corwin.

“You’ve done superb work,” he said.

“No, you,” I said.

Not male bonding, but mind bonding.

Norman showed the way, I could but follow.

It has been said that the voice of history and creative drama, delivered and broadcast, might light-year travel beyond Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto and ricochet on to eternity, where, if we speed fast enough, we might catch Roosevelt’s bravado, Hitler’s lunacies, and Corwin’s rhymed and unrhymed philosophies. We would like to believe that his tripled and quadrupled voices linger in Andromeda because he revitalized dictionaries and recast more words in new echo chambers. He dined on Marcus Aurelius, Daniel Webster, and Homer, blind with bright sound waves for a tongue.

After the silence of ages, Corwin spoke, and the field beasts froze in the fields and listened.

And we were the beasts.