92
PARTISAN REVIEW
It makes no difference, according to these authors, whether the belief
is objectively a delusion. In
Harvey,
the rabbit is, at long last, accepted
by the other characters as real; but the audience, of course, knows better.
In
The Streets Are Guard,ed,
the Marine is admittedly not Jesus, but
the son of a marine colonel in Washington-the pharmacist's mate was
wrong. With
A Bell for Adana,
the case is a little more complicated,
for the Bell is not conceived by the author as having supernatural powers
but only treated as if it had. But here too the Bell cannot live up to
what is expected of it. The Bell is not democracy; indeed, it
is
pre–
cisely the kind of symbolic substitute for communal well-being that
Mussolini was so expert at supplying the people of such towns as Adano.
If
A Bell for Adana
celebrates anything real at all, it is the jubilant
return of fascism, with its bells, medals, certificates, portraits of great
men, to a people which had been briefly deprived of it by the chaotic
conditions of war; and the figure of Major Joppolo is an Americanized
version of the
duce,
a great little man, as opposed to the Italian towns–
people who are very small little men, dressed in very small absurd little
clothes. The Bell does not bring democracy, but belief in it will give
the feeling of democracy, which is all that is necessary.
It is the same with the other two plays. Objective conditions are
recognizedly hopeless, they say. Nevertheless, we must have faith, for
if we have faith, we will feel better and not notice the objective condi–
tions so much. Elwood P. Dowd, with his rabbit, had ceased in any true
sense to live in his sister's middle-class household. Therefore, it did not
inconvenience him at all to be put into the lunatic asylum-if you have
a wonderful white rabbit to talk to, what difference does it make where
you are? Less outspokenly, the other plays with their apparitions, their
bells and images of Christ, are invitations to madness, to systematized de–
lusions of a harmless kind. But three swallows do not make a summer,
and it is doubtful whether the theatre
will
turn itself to the business of
supplying the public with fantasies and secular myths. The truth is (and
the weakness of these plays demonstrates it) that the drama is incorrig–
ibly concrete; it cannot, like the movies, deal in shadows, or in reverie,
like the novel. It demands that its conflicts be settled; it cannot, by its
very nature, dissolve them away, as the camera can. It is the only one
of the arts whose medium is the living flesh, and this sets a certain limit
on belief--one is always more conscious of what is excessive in a stage
performance than one is of the same kind of thing in a movie or a novel.
In fact, the very plainness, conclusiveness and realism of the stage have
unfitted it to deal with this period of irresolution, evasion and ambiguity.
MARY McCARTHY
