56
PARTISAN REVIEW
"They say there is no time but we grow old ....
" Now Mr. Anderson
takes the theory of the simultaneity, the presentness of time, and fashions
a period comedy-drama out of it. Two old inventors, who have made
millions of dollars for capitalists at a combined salary of $27.50 a week,
build a machine which will take them back to any given moment in
history. After a short scientific explanation of the machine and the
theory behind it, and a good deal of exposition about the characters, the
inventors throw the switch and the play is off. They elect to return to
their youth in an American village at the turn of the century. For some
reason, not explained by the dramatist, they have the power of inter-
vention in the action of the past. They therefore attempt to rectify their
errors, and they wind up rich but very unhappy. The moral is that
everything is for the best, and if one wouldn't make the same mistakes a
second time, one ought to. Charmingly produced by Guthrie McClintic,
the play is richer in period comedy than in metaphysics. It is entertain-
ing and quite harmless. To the critic it is interesting only because it
seems to demonstrate certain facts about the nature of Mr. Anderson's
work.
Though Mr. Anderson has lately been hailed as America's first
dramatist, it has long been obvious that he was essentially a popular
playwright, distinguished from his follows only by his ambition. Yet am-
bition alone would hardly account for his enormous commercial success,
for many of Mr. Anderson's subjects, no matter how sugar-coated, must
have been at least partially indigestible to the public. Neither
Winterset
nor
High Tor
were "easy" plays; the turgidity of Mr. Anderson's verse
made it arduous going. The answer, I think, lies in Mr. Anderson's at·
titude toward his material. Mr. Anderson is a genuine
naif,
a rustic, a
Mr. Deeds. He has no discrimination, no system of intellectual values; he
is moved solely by his own fancy. In the present play, a joke about
bloomers and a metaphysical speculation are on a par, simply because
the playwright is not aware of a difference between them. Unconscious
of categories, he makes himself at home in the Infinite, because he has
no sense of not-belonging. It is his sublime unseH-consciousness which
endears him to his public. The spectacle of Mr. Anderson relaxing in the
Forbidden Places of the intellect induces a corresponding feeling of com-
fort in the spectator: whether or not he understands exactly what Mr.
Anderson is doing, he is put at ease by the utter homeyness of Mr. An-
derson's manner. The familiar jokes about Irish policemen, horseless cars,
and gangsters heighten the illusion of security.
To this gift, Mr. Anderson, a native middle-westerner, adds a real
sense of old-fashioned American symbols. In
The Star-Wagon
there is
the inventor; in
High Tor,
the American Indian; in
Winterset,
the senile,
learned judge; in
Valley Forge,
George Washington; and everywhere
there is the passion for soci1l1justice which is visualized in terms of the
square deal. In a more subtle way, the blank verse is itself a symbol of an
obsolescent American taste. Mr. Anderson's mind is like a musty, middle·
western law-office of thirty years ago, full of heterogeneous books, on the
law, on American history, on philosophy, and the morocco-bound com-
plete works of William Shakespeare.
MARY MCCARTHY
