MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
The lights have gone out
in
the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we'll see by and by . . . .
601
Robert Brustein in
The New Republic
and Gore Vidal
in
Partisan Review
have lately had some
good
things to say about
the tendency of our playwrights to bring in love as a
deus ex
machina
to magically resolve the problems raised by the pre–
ceding two hours of conspicuously loveless dramaturgy, so I
merely note the fact here. The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric
at Harvard made many mistakes in
J.B.,
but one was fatal–
intermingling with his own versification some actual passages
from the Book of Job. It is true that Elia Kazan, who directed
the play with appropriate vulgarity, reduced the effects of
these passages considerably by having them delivered over a
loudspeaker in an orotund voice reminiscent of the fruitiest
manner of Westbrook Van Voorhees on the March of Tune.
Even so, the contrast was painful between the somber and pas–
sionate elevation of the Book of Job and Mr. MacLeish's
forcible-feeble style. It's really too much to go from:
To:
Hast thou given the horse strength?
Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder!
He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha!
Job won't take it! Job won't touch it!
Job will fling it in God's face
With half his
guts
to make it spatter!
The clever author of
Our Town
would never have made such a
gaffe.
Finally, Mr. Benet's 377 page orgy of Americana, much
admired in its day and still widely used in the schools as com–
bining History and Literature. The opming Invocation strikes
at , once the right note, patriotic yet sophisticated:
