DWIGHT MACDONALD
the low point of the war; its message--the adaptability and
tenacity of the human race through the most catastrophic events
~was
a welcome one and was well received. "I think it mostly
comes alive under conditions of crisis," writes the author. "It
has
often been charged with being a bookish fantasia about
history, full of rather bloodless schoolmasterish jokes. But to
have seen it in Germany soon after the
war,
in the shattered
churches and beerhalls that were serving as theaters, with
audiences whose price of admission meant the loss of a meal
. . . it was an experience that was not so cool. I am very proud
that
this
year [1957] it has received a first and overwhelming
reception in Warsaw. The play is deeply indebted to James
Joyce's
Finnegans Wake."
Personally, its bookish quality
is
one of the things I like about the play, and its jokes are often
good;
in fact, as entertainment
The Skin of Our Teeth
is
eXcellent, full of charm and ingenuity; its only defect
is
that
whenever it tries to be serious, which is quite often, it
is
pre–
tentious and embarrassing. I quite believe the author's state–
ment about its reception
in
postwar Germany-he enjoys a
much greater reputation abroad than here-and I agree that
the audiences responded to it because it seemed to speak
to
them"of the historical cataclysm they had just been through.
I
find"~this
fact, while not unexpected, depressing. The bow to
Finnegans Wake
is a graceful retrieve of a foul ball batted up
in the
Saturday Review
fifteen years earlier by Messrs. Camp–
bell and Robinson, the authors of
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans
Wake.
They hinted at plagiarism, but I think one should rather
admire the author's ability to transmute into Midcult such an
impenetrably avant-garde work. There seems to be no limit to
this kind of alchemy in reverse, given a certain amount of
talent and brass.
XIV
Since 1900 American culture has moved, culturally, in"a
direction' that on the whole appears to be up. Ella Wheeler
