PARTISAN REVIEW
so expertly, if it had avoided high climaxes and dramatic confronta–
tions and remained insistently on the plane of the ordinary, where the
teacher's tragi-comedy really takes place. The atrocity committed by
the professor, who makes a student read aloud a very intimate love–
letter, is robbed of its proper shabbiness by the hysterical emphasis
Mr. Van Druten, the author, puts on it; what is horrible about the
academic life is not that a teacher should do such a thing in a crisis
of passion and jealousy, but that he would do it as a matter of course,
without any sense of emergency, as a routine disciplinary measure. That
a teacher should be a tyrant is not so terrible as that he should be a
petty tyrant, yet the whole tendency of his profession is to narrow his
actual opportunities while investing him with sovereign powers. Jealousy,
consequently, is the pedagogue's occupational habit, jealousy of his
colleagues, of his pupils, of the world, of the very authors he elueidates;
to present this ever-present irritant as a kind of fit arising from sexual
causes, as a folly, a momentary aberration, is to divest it of that daily
meanness which is its distinguishing mark. In the professor's
descent
to
persecution of the ugly little pair who are his victims lies the play's real
pathos and squalor, but a false nimbus of pathos is drawn about this
smug couple by the author's inveterate stagecraft, which transforms
a timeless study of character into a rather belated defense of youth and
its sexual rights. Here, as in
The Voice of the Turtle,
Mr. Van Druten
encases a certain amount of realistic observation within a sentimental
convention without appearing to notice the leak of meaning that results.
Mary McCarthy
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