56
PARTISAN REVIEW
cemetery and these are the dead. A young woman whom we have seen
grow up and marry the boy next door has died in childbirth; a small,
shabby funeral procession is bringing her to join her relatives and neigh–
bors. Only when she is actually buried does the play proper begin. She
has not yet reached the serenity of the long dead, and she yearns to
return to the world. With the permission of the stage manager and
against the advice of the dead, she goes back-to a birthday of her
childhood. Hardly a fraction of that day has passed, however, before
she retreats gratefully to the cemetery, for she has perceived that the
tragedy of life lies in the fragmentary and imperfect awareness of the
living.
Mr. Wilder's play is, in a sense, a refutation of its own thesis.
Our
Town
is purely and simply an act of awareness, a demonstration of the
fact that in a work of art, at least, experience
can
be arrested, imprisoned,
and vicariously felt. The perspective of death, which Mr. Wilder has
chosen, gives an extra poignancy and intensity to the small-town life
whose essence he is trying so urgently to communicate. The little boy
delivering papers, for example, becomes more touching, more meaningful
and important, when Mr. Craven announces casually that he is going
to be killed in the War. The boy's morning round, for the spectator,
is transfigured into an absorbing ritual; the unconsciousness of the char–
acter has heightened the consciousness of the audience. The perspective
is, to be sure, hazardous: it invites bathos and sententiousness. Yet Mr.
Wilder has used it honorably. He forbids the spectator to dote on that
town of the past. He is concerned only with saying: this is how it was,
though then we did not know it. Now and then, of course, his memory
fails him, for young love was never so baldly and tritely gauche as his
scene in the soda fountain suggests. This is, however, a deficiency of
imagination, not an error of taste; and except in the third act, where the
dead give some rather imprecise and inapposite definitions of the nature
of the after-life, the play keeps its balance beautifully. In this feat of
equilibrium Mr. Wilder has had the complete cooperation of Mr. Craven,
the serene, inexorable matter-of-factness of whose performance acts as
a discipline upon the audience. Mr. Craven makes one quite definitely
homesick, but pulls one up sharp if one begins to blubber about
it.
MARY McCARTHY
