252
PARTISAN REVIEW
imaginary orchestra playing softly and my imaginary sound effects man
making Door Bangs, Rainfall, Wind Soughing, Machine gun fire, etc., the
resulting impression is that Mr. Oboler is for peace, the flag, motherhood,
marriage, boyhood, mankind, and above all the underdog. This isn't so
crazy as it sounds, for last year Proctor and Gamble paid him $4000 a
week for a half hour show and that was just peanuts to what he earns now
combining the cinema with his radio work. The fertility of his imagination
is so frightening it would take a propaganda analyst to predict where
Oboler will strike next. Here in one tiny volume horrid wives turn into
cats before your very ears
(The Cat Wife),
innocent Bronx merchant sells
reefers to high-school boys but gets citizenship papers
(Mr. Whiskers),
pregnant wife finds doubtful husband really wants baby
(Bab y) ,
prize–
fight manager turns illwon gains to priest to ease conscience
(Mr.
Gins–
burg)
,
boy surrenders father to Gestapo by mistake
(The Man
to
Hate),
Nadeja Philaretovna reminisces for an hour on her strange love affair
with Tschaikovsky while orchestra plays 'None But the Lonely Heart,'
radical takes cruel dictator three thousand feet under water in bathysphere
to Palmgren's
The Sea
segueing (technical term) into wind sighs and
splash of water; bridegroom-to-be finds baby in auto backseat to music of
Wedding March
segueing into sound of automobile moving along; old
man loses job fo son, capitalist heiress sees error of profit system, two
richies see their death dates written in sand by a little old man who isn't
there. The one great virtue to be noted as Mr. Oboler's genius whizzes
through its gamuts is his avoidance of the phoney poetic cadence. The
empty oratory of the MacLeish radio plays is agreeably missing; surpris–
ingly enough there is no pompous wallowing in Word Magic.
As human beings the Oboler characters are not convincing, possibly
because the ear needs more repetition than the eye. These fifteen-and–
thirty-minute-people are about as genuine as the little Brooklyn men that
come around, their dilemmas as profound as Li'l Abner's or Popeye's. It
may be that the author has lived so exclusively in his radio world that
people to him have microphone faces and exist only as long as they're on
the air. Anyhow the effect of reality does not come through in these one
shot plays the way it does in a year-in-year-out serial show like Fibber and
Molly McGee. In his ivory powerhouse of frequency modulation, color
television, hi-aural sound broadcasting, three-dimensional radiovision
Oboler seems to have made no contact with the living world; bathyspheres
are easier for him to conjure up than baby carriages.
Time
magazine says that Oboler now lives in Hollywood and by
pinching a little here and there has managed to buy a twenty-five acre
mountain top and has even cut into his little savings to have a Frank
Lloyd Wright house with a mountain river running through the simple
living room. This shows a love of natur·e surpassing most people's. Even
Joyce Kilmer, loving his tree the way he did, never took it home to live
with him. A radioplay is forming in my mind now (to mood music of
