DRAMA NOW
249
American play and nothing else. It was conceived, written, and pro–
duced solely to entertain." It closed after thirteen nights on Broad–
way. In presenting to the American public four recent plays,
none of
which Broadway has produced,
J.
B. Priestley takes the opposite line
of protesting that "New York deliberately prefers to produce what
is left of our [i.e. British] drawing-room stuff instead of bolder and
more original work." Obviously both Saroyan and Priestley wish to
be
at once entertaining and artistic, and nothing could be more
laudable if, in their desire to please everybody, they were not ignoring
the cultural stratification of modern society-the rungs of our ladder.
This is no mere error in their publicity.
It
is a mistake that vitiates
most of their work.
If
a certain earnestness prevents them from step–
ping down to the lowest rungs of the ladder, a fear of minority cul–
ture, a yearning to be taken to the bosom of the public, limits their
thinking and their sensibility. Occasionally, as in the movie
The
Human Comedy,
Saroyan does step down to the lowest rungs. And
when he hops back into place he is bewildered and unsure:
his
latest
play even has a bitter ending! But all Saroyan's work is flabby inside,
sentimental at the center, because he is in his work a moral and aesthe–
tic coward. Choices are refused. Distinctions are obliterated. All sub–
stance melts into the ocean of sentiment. "The whole world's gone
mad," says the protagonist in
Get Away Old Man,
"and no man
knows who is innocent or guilty." What a staggering lie! To know
nothing, according to Saroyan, is also to forgive everything.
Priestley finds what may be the only exit into speculation that
is open to this class of philosophers: occultism. In the early 'thirties
he wrote phoney plays about eternal recurrence as expounded by the
egregious
J.
W. Dunne. Today he offers us a play about "an extra–
sensory or second-sight relationship" and three socio-political plays
calculated to make you what New Yorkers are now calling "PM
happy." They lack a dialectic of ideas and of artistic structure. They
might almost be by
J.
Donald Adams. Priestley also is the kind of
man who has his picture taken with a pipe in his hand.
Saroyan and Priestley are the two prime instances in the dra–
matic world of highbrows trying to be lowbrows without losing caste.
Hence their exaggerated hominess, their forced simplicity, their pa–
triotism and insistent local color, their chronic fear of the esoteric.
It
is interesting to note what comes of their attempt to speak to every–
body on everybody's behalf: they speak to the lower middle classes
(socially
and
culturally speaking) and they express the lower middle
class mentality.
