The three plays are points that plot a curve. In the first, “The Crime in the Whistler Room,” we get a mixture of realism and fantasy serving as the rites of initiation. It is a ritual of rebirth, a shift in perspective exemplifying in imaginative terms the following proposition: If one abandons one mode of living for another, and the two seem sufficiently at odds, one can call the second mode “life” only by feeling that the earlier mode was “death.” Hence we watch a preparation for bohemian “life” in contrast with a respectable family who act like corpses. The heroine is the Beatrice who guides the hero on his journey—and she helps a lot through being got by him with child, though he appears in some of the fantastic scenes as a werewolf.
In the second play, “A Winter in Beech Street,” we are wholly within this special world. I doubt whether any one else will catch as well as Wilson does here the norms of sociality that developed about the theater projects of the Provincetown Players as the American center of bohemian protest. The inventiveness of the dialogue is very appealing; one is sometimes startled out of his engrossment at the sudden realization that it is even depicting delirium tremens joyously.
In the third, “Beppo and Beth,” we come closest to attempts at finding a way out. And after a scene of violently alcoholic protest against the void lurking beneath alcohol, with one suicide stopped only by another attempted suicide, we end:
BEPPO: We’ll get married again tomorrow and we’ll take the first boat to Mexico!
BETH: Why Mexico!
BEPPO: Because Mexico’s the place where they make those little pottery animals!
BETH: You broke the little bank just now when you pulled the tapestry down.
BEPPO: I know; I want to get a new one! The train to Mexico City will be our P. L. M. Express! We’ll revive the old rebellion!
BETH: You’d better pick up those pennies: we’ll need them!
Not forgetting Chang and Chung, the Chinese servants, who had patiently, at intervals, explained to Beppo the Marxist theories of capitalist decay, and did it very well, with what looks like a good stage effect, in the midst of all the hubbub and the antics.
The talent and the incongruities of bohemianism are conveyed in lines that are bright and limpid. The void is made tremendously real, all the more so since the patter that conceals the void is given with verve. “Well, we may not have got the whole of everything,” says Sally of the Beech Street Players in a moment of inventory, “but we’ve got something very precious at this moment—we’ve got this room and this gin and these sandwiches, and we’ve got each other’s very agreeable company!” Or, as another character who has invented a new religion puts it: “All the religions of the past have either mortified the flesh in the interests of the spirit or have stinted the spirit in the interests of the flesh: and this is the first religion in history that has promoted the highest development of the spirit and at the same time facilitated the ecstasies of the flesh!”
If one would see Murger’s world again, shown with an accuracy and taste for comedy that Murger’s sentimentalizing made him incapable of, one should read these plays. And if one feels moralistic, he can discern on every page the pressure of the money economy behind the antics.
By Ice, Fire or Decay?
Paradise Lost: A Play in Three Acts by Clifford Odets. Random House
The New Republic 86. April 1936. Also in The Philosophy of Literary Form
After having been led, by the explicitly formulated objections of some dissenters, to expect that I would dislike Odets’ “Paradise Lost,” I finally went to see it, and liked it enormously. I even found that the scandalous number of entrances and exits did not bother me, except in a few instances where the action was not paralleled by a similar movement in the lines themselves. And though I had in the past complained against propagandists who compromised their cause by the depiction of people not worth saving, and had been led to believe that Odets transgressed on this score, I found on the contrary that the characters, for all their ills, possessed the ingredients of humanity necessary for making us sympathetic to their disasters. To me there was nothing arbitrary about the prophetic rebirth in Leo’s final speech. And as I had witnessed, not pedestrian realism, but the idealizations of an expert stylist, I carried away something of the exhilaration that good art gives us when, by the ingratiations of style, it enables us to contemplate even abhorrent things with calmness.
The opportunity to examine the play in print has even heightened my admiration, by revealing the subtlety, complexity and depths of the internal adjustments. For all his conscious symbolism, the author has not merely pieced together a modern allegory. His work seems to embody ritualistic processes that he himself was not specifically concerned with—and I want to discuss them briefly.
At the close of Act I, as the characters listen to Pearl playing the piano upstairs, Gus says: “And when the last day comes—by ice or fire—she’ll be up there playin’ away.” I consider this the “informing” line of the play. “By ice or fire.” It is interesting that, in The Partisan Review, James T. Farrell, who wrote a book called Judgment Day, should have objected to a work having this eschatological theme as its point of departure. But Farrell is in the stage of pure antithesis, turning his old Catholicism upside down—and hence preferring, for the time at least, the simple, hard-boiled reversal of his religious past. Odets may be more complex, admitting elements that Farrell could not admit without a corresponding expansion of his esthetic frame. Farrell’s resistance is justified on the grounds of self-preservation, rather than as a mature act of critical appraisal.
Along with the “ice or fire” epigram, I should note the significant credo of Pike who, within the conditions of the play, comes nearest to the “proletarian” philosophy: “I’m sayin’ the smell of decay may sometimes be a sweet smell.” And taking these two passages as seminal, I should say that the play deals with three modes of “redemption”—redemption by ice, fire or decay—and finally chooses the third. Like certain ancient heresies, it pictures the “good” arising from the complete excess of the “bad,” as the new growth sprouts from the rotting of the seed.
The first act rejects “redemption by ice.” In its simplest objectivization, we find the situation placed before our eyes in the form of Ben’s statue on the stage. The friends, Ben and Kewpie, had been under ice together; they had been skating with a third boy, when the ice broke and their friend had drowned. The spell of this “life-in-death” is still upon them. As Ben formulates it later: “We’re still under ice, you and me—we never escaped!” And again: “‘Did we die there?’ I keep asking myself, ‘or are we living?’ “ The first act establishes this situation—and Acts II and III show us the author’s attempts to shape a magic incantation whereby the spell is broken.
Act II, by my analysis, considers and rejects “redemption by fire.” It is in this way that I would locate the symbolic element underlying the remarkable realism of Mr. May, the professional firebug. Leo refuses to accept his impotent partner Sam’s proposal that they solve their financial troubles by employing this man. But Pike, the proletarian furnace tender (who would thaw the ice), had proclaimed his belief in “redemption by decay.” He is thus the bridge between Sam’s fire solution and Leo’s rebirth from decay. And we complete the pattern in the third act where, as the process of decay is finished, Leo’s prophecy of rebirth sprouts from the rotted grain, and the curtain descends.
I might note other features of the internal organization. Thus, Pike’s mere entrance at times foreshadows the “fatality” of the plot. For he knocks at the door (1) just as Julie has said, “When the time comes—” (2) when Gus has said he would like to “go far away to the South Sea islands and eat coconuts,” and (3) when, Clara having asked “Is it the end?” Leo has answered, “Not yet.” At these crucial moments, Pike’s message is in the offing. But whereas the message remains the same throughout the play, Leo (the “father”) must assimilate it in his own way, as he does by conscientiously completing