102
PARTISAN REVIEW
stomach with its stink of onions and stew." And once more: "Forgive
me, Nora." This is Jimmy Porter, all over, in
Look Back in Anger:
"Darling, I'm sorry. . . . I'm sorry. . . . I mean it." Such jerky, in–
consonant behavior, like the twitching of a nerve, is found in all the
non-heroes of the modem stage, in James Tyrone of
Long Da)h
Journey into Night,
Jimmy, Archie Rice of
The Entertainer,
Lefranc,
the petty thief of
Deathwatch,
as well as Ivanov, George Dillon, and
Con Melody. They carry the unpardonable to its furthest limits, and
yet in themselves they do not appear to be sufficient cause for what
they do, even though, in fact, they may be directly responsible for the
death or destruction of another person: Ivanov for the death of
his
wife, James Tyrone for the drug-addiction of
his
wife and the near–
death of his son, Jimmy for the death of Alison's unborn child, Archie
for the death of his father, Lefranc for the murder of Maurice, a harm–
less seventeen-year-old punk. Their actions do not make them great,
even in a criminal sense, because their actions are somehow inexpressive
of who they are, and many of these non-heroes require a forgiving
woman who claims to "understand."
Of the three new plays, Jean Genet's
Deathwatch
is the coldest ex–
amination of the non-hero, because the scene is laid, not in conventional
society where "forgiveness" and "understanding" are readily accorded
and have to be (otherwise, there would be no getting on), but in a
prison cell, where an inflexible code prevails. The criminal code is one
of strict rank: a killer rates highest and a pickpocket or housebreaker is
lowest on the scale. Multiple crimes of immense daring (e.g., sensational
daylight holdups) may be matched against the beauty of a single ex–
quisite killing, and other factors, such as the amount of newspaper pub–
licity, the length and breadth of the manhunt, and the demeanor of
the accused when captured, are taken into consideration. These stand–
ards, at which the audience laughs, are taken very seriously by the
prisoners and the guards, who are concerned with definitions of great–
ness: which is greater, the Negro called Snowball (never seen onstage),
whose crimes include the hold-up of a gold train, or Green Eyes, who
has killed a little girl? In reality, the atmosphere of Genet's prison is
remarkably like that of a big-city American high school, with its foot–
ball and basketball heroes, secret societies, crushes, jealousies, favoritism,
and interracial tension. "Snowball is exotic," boasts Lefranc at the
beginning, excited because the big Negro has smiled at him in the cor–
ridor tpat morning. Nevertheless, those who laugh at all this are prob–
ably being philistines, from Genet's point of view: they are people who
laugh at a poem. "Snowball is black, but he dazzles," says Lefranc, and
