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that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice
-which Marx corrected to read: the first time as genuine tragedy, the
second time as farce; the second parodies the old, takes flight from reality,
merely makes a ghost walk again. The anxious return to Lincoln and the
Civil War years reveals an exhausted society, wanting in any new creative
energy, falling back to its own point of departure. In its beginning, appar–
ently, was its end.
But to return to Smith, credit for one unforgettable contribution must
be conceded. I quote a passage which casually might appear to be a mere
confession to a sentimental idiosyncrasy. "... The sun is down-the
February sun, without even a golden glow to lighten the leaden sky.
If
the weather lifts, I shall visit the tomb of Lincoln before I sleep tonight,
looking softly at its majesty in the starlight. But if it snows as the darken–
ing sky portends I shall presently walk down the front steps of the state
house, past the statue of Douglas, pausing as many times before in the
snow, to see how Lincoln is tonight. His face always seems to me to
lighten its sorrow when seen through the falling snow.... He saw things;
he heard voices out of the past; he saw visions of what was yet to be....
Let
him remain, as he has become, the symbol of the promise of our
Democratic-Republican politics, and the steadying eidolon of our American
overcause." So very far from being sentimental or idiosyncratic; what
Smith has done is to work out a sacred formula for the deference to Abra–
ham Lincoln which has already established itself as an inviolable ritual
of bourgeois politics in America.
JoHN MELVIN
RADIO'S GIFT TO ART
FOURTEEN RADIO PLAYS. By Arch Oboler, with an essay, "The Art
of Radio
Writi~'
by the author, and foreword by Lewis Titterton and
Irving Stone. Random House, New York.
$2.00.
Fourteen plays have been culled from the few thousand radio plays
of Arch Oboler, radio's Odets, and Lewis Titterton and Irving Stone intro–
duce them to a reading public with reverent forewords. For instance, says
Mr. Stone, the ideal way to read these plays is in a darkened room. They
must be read with the ear, and with mental mood music. There is an art,
in
reading a radio play, says Mr. Stone, the art of being one's own sym–
phony orchestra and sound-effect man. To the playwright's first five min–
utes the radio dramatist has a bare five seconds to capture his audience,
which impels Mr. Stone to say that the playwright can be ·a seductor in
capturing his audience, the radio dramatist must be a rapist. Continuing
the pretty play of words Mr. Stone advises that the radio play reader must
therefore wholeheartedly surrender to Rapist Oboler if he is to be richly
rewarded.
Studying these fourteen chosen works in a darkened room with my
