LOVE
617
they are to be admired for stamina, since to be produced on Broadway
resembles nothing so much as being shot out of a cannon at a fragile
net. One should not be surprised if the more sensitive dramatists tend
to get a bit punchy. Most of them (I am generalizing hugely but life
is short) experience serious difficulty reading books, which necessarily
limits their fund of general information on any subject not connected
with the theater or their own psychoanalysis. The literary world, to
the extent they are aware of it at all, seems to them an invidious estab–
lishment where writers dislike them because they are better known and
make more money than any other sort of writer. They are in this not
entirely mistaken. But they do not realize that having no interest in
language and even less in what we like to think of as mind, they neces–
sarily must earn the contempt of those who do bother with such things.
The result is that although in its essential preoccupations our theater
cannot help but reflect the
Zeitgeist,
it has always been estranged not
only from its own country's culture but, to strike that minatory gong,
from Western civilization. The result has been a curiously artificial de–
velopment, resembling nothing but itself, like those amoebae who when
boxed upon a slide stop their anarchic zooming about and make perfect
right angles, as tribute to an imposed environment.
"Weariness of the theater is the prevailing note of London criti–
cism. Only the ablest critics believe that the theater is really important;
in my time, none of them would
claim
for it as I
claimed
for it, that
it is as important as the Church was in the Middle Ages...." Ah, that
crisp hopeful voice! Shaw in 1906. "A theater to me
is
a place where
two or three are 'gathered together.' The apostolic succession from
Eschylus to myself is as serious and as continuously inspired as that
younger institution, the apostolic succession of the Christian Church."
Brave words, and perhaps true though there have not been very many
American gatherings-together we could, with any confidence, have in–
vited William Morris to attend. But the weariness of tone endures. In–
tellectuals with much justice hold our popular theater in contempt and
one of the reasons seldom explicitly stated is not so much the meretri–
ciousness of the exhibits-at best popular art is opportunist-hut its
moments of would-be seriousness. Mr. Milton Berle telling low-comedy
jokes on stage can be very beguiling; but to
be
lectured to in a stern
tone by a writer considerably more stupid than much of his audience
is
a somber experience and were our collective manners not better, theater
seats would be tom up and hurled at the stage. Earnest Neanderthals
implore us not to persecute minority groups; they exhort us to tender–
ness; they inform us that war is destructive; they remind us that love
is the only connection. Now there is nothing wrong with ·these themes
