THEATER
275
Southman's town in
Saint's Day
were to be treated with greater thematic
lucidity in Arden's remarkable play,
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance,
and
the violence unleashed before Paul Southman's birthday celebration was
to achieve greater impact in Pinter's
The Birthday Party.
But the de–
cisive steps beyond Terence Rattigan's notions of theatrical craft and
T. S. Eliot's of dramatic poetry had been taken, and they help
to
ex–
plain the strength of Whiting's English reputation.
Whiting'S c.ontrolling themes are self-destruction and responsibility,
humanism and terror. In
Saint's Day
Paul Southman, the Swiftian
misanthrope with a daughter named Stella, destroys himself when he
deprives the literary humanist, Robert Procathren, of
his
"faith in
man." For Southman, himself a great writer, thereby releases the un–
spoken forces of nihilistic destruction lying beneath the deceptions of
humane letters and civilization. (Southman's attack .on Procathren re–
calls Nietzsche's attack on the
Bildungsphilister
David Strauss and it is
one of the admirable features of Whiting's play to engage Nietzschean
themes without submitting, as his continental contemporaries like
Camus did, to Nietzschean formulations.) Southman's self-destructive
action provides the .occasion for his personal salvation. The day of his
death is his birthday and he is delivered from the darkness of hatred
on the day that St. Paul is reckoned to have seen the light.
Saint's Day
is marred by its contrived symbolism and its echoes of
Eliot at his most portentous: "Careful! We are approaching the point
of deviation.... The moment of the call from another room." While
The Devils
is free of these faults it is deeply flawed by Whiting's in–
ability to adapt Huxley's
The Devils of Loudun
to his thematic purpose.
Father Grandier, despairing of man's "fiddledeevinity" and seeking to
regain his faith by destroying his self, works this self-destruction over
so vast a social terrain that Whiting dissipates his dramatic energies
recording it. The theme of self-destruction requires that Whiting estab–
lish the force .of Grandier's provocations, and yet the Church, the
Clergy and the Middle Classes are presented as fatally easy to provoke.
Thus, and it would seem unwittingly, he dramatizes society'S destructive–
ness rather than Grandier's self-destructiveness. This emphasis has
given rise to the impression that Whiting is writing an English version
of
The Crucible,
an impression that is strengthened by the critical event
in
Grandier's downfall. He is falsely charged with the diabolic possession
of Sister Jeanne of the Angels and the nuns of St. Ursula's Convent
on the basis of the "hysterical" delusions of the humpbacked prioress
(whom Grandier has never even met). Grandier is simply victimized,
and there is no relation- as there was in Paul Southman's
cas~be-
