by Harry Heuser
[The following is an invited talk I presented at the international conference Tuning in to the Neo-Avant-Garde, held at Ghent University in November 2018. The presentation has been edited for the purpose of publication here.]
Another “Air Raid”: Modernism and US American Network Radio in the Eisenhower Era
I am glad to have ignored my academic timetable to be with you today. These days, I lecture in art history, and not entirely by choice. So, I welcome any opportunity to return to the study that, two decades ago, my naïve former self had hoped to turn into an academic career.
Wondering what and how to contribute meaningfully to our discussion today, I looked back at what I knew or thought I knew about aural play. And right up until yesterday, until I heard your talks, I still felt as if I were about to crash some private memorial service. I was fairly confident, if ever I permit myself to be at ease, that I knew the memorialized one well enough, which is why I was less sure about the commemoration.
My aim was to make use of this outsider position, as I felt it, to query the terms of our conference – “avant-garde” and “modernism” – and to reconsider their aptness in the context of broadcasting – US American broadcasting of the 1950s in particular – and in relation to “tuning in” as distinguished from acts of “reading” or “listening to” broadcasting content at a remove from the system in which it was enmeshed.
I have reworked this paper last night in response to what I learned from you yesterday, to give it another, different spin.
The word “Another” in my title was initially meant to point to the fact that the play I am considering here as a case study was neither “neo-” nor “avant-garde” at the time of its staging in the period indicated – the 1950s.
The realization of a play – the turning of the potentialities that is a script into the performance that plays for the ear are intended to become – is key to the determination of whether or not that play can meaningfully be termed “avant-garde.” Without an engagement with – and an understanding of – context, both of historical time and of airtime – the term “avant-garde” in a broadcasting context is meaningless.
“Another” was also meant to suggest that the play “Air Raid” as restaged in 1957 was not the same play that it had been in 1938, but quite another thing. It was not “Air Raid,” again. It’s a case of repetition with a difference.
The play “Air Raid” was composed eighty years ago and was first produced on 27 October in 1938. It was written by the Pulitzer-prize winning US American poet Archibald MacLeish in response to an invitation extended by the producers of the weekly anthology program Columbia Workshop. MacLeish had contributed to the program once before, in 1937, when he wrote his first play for radio, “The Fall of the City.”
The Columbia Workshop was named after the network, the Columbia Broadcasting System, through whose facilities “Air Raid” was staged and as part of whose programming schedule it was broadcast nationwide via affiliate stations of that network. The term “workshop” was intended to distinguish the program from the factory conditions of creating regular and steady output for network radio.
Along with the photographs of the rehearsal, an extant recording suggests that MacLeish was personally involved in the production of “Air Raid.”
The Columbia Workshop was a sustaining program, which means that it did not depend on a sponsor and did not need to accommodate commercials. Given this apparent absence of a perceived taint or ulterior motive, it is not surprising that the play has attracted the attention of a few Modernist scholars, or I should say, scholars of Modernism.
Now, I may sound a bit prickly when I say this, but it strikes me that scholars of Modernism are programmatically ill equipped to engage with a system such as network broadcasting as opposed to the international networking initiated by Modernists in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. And it irks me when they congratulate themselves for the discovery of a territory that has already been home to dilettantes, historians and a few transgressive others, including my queer self.
That “Air Raid” is a play about a catastrophic failure in connecting – and that the 1957 staging of “Air Raid” is a case of wilful mistranslation – will perhaps to some extent justify this self-conscious preamble, especially since “Air Raid,” like many radio plays – from Hans Flesch’s “Zauberei auf dem Sender” in 1924 to Norman Corwin’s “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” in 1939 is self-conscious to the degree of being proto-Postmodern. The same goes for MacLeish’s “Fall of the City,” which opens with the lines: “Ladies and gentlemen. This broadcast comes to you from the city.”
The anthologised US American radio play, not to be equated with – and no equal to – “audio play” or Hörspiel, of which the radio play is a subgroup – tended to fictionalise and thereby playfully – but not necessarily humorously – acknowledge the system whose strictures or superstructure it could not surmount. By being tongue-in-cheek, playwrights could signal their awareness that their tongue was kept in check. But regardless of whether this was intended as an institutional critique, ironic posturing or mirroring or meta-textualising was an attempt at appropriating the frame that was imposed on radio play production.
“Air Raid,” as I said, was written and first staged in 1938, just days prior to “The War of the Worlds,” with which it shares its theme, its framing device, and its lead voice talent, Orson Welles, whose overstated influence in – and on – broadcasting is just one of the distorting effects of the preoccupation of scholars of Modernism with the mythical “auteur.”
The intention of the author – the playwright – of Air Raid can be deduced by auditing the play in context, namely that it was a sonic version of Picasso’s Guernica, which MacLeish had seen in reproductions before the painting arrived in the US in May 1939.
“Air Raid,” like Picasso’s Guernica, is abstracted horror. Unlike Guernica, “Air Raid” exacts the cruelty of which it speaks. One contemporary reviewer, while otherwise commending the play, called it “depressing as poetry has no right to be.” Well, judge for yourselves. Here is a short clip from the 1938 broadcast.
As hinted at in the pun that serves as its title, “Air Raid” is an assault on the radio listener. It also implicates, unwittingly or otherwise, US American broadcasters who were obliged to remain politically neutral. At its core, “Air Raid” is a reflection of – and on – the fundamental disconnect between listener and speaker, which is played out as a mock-broadcast.
The women die because our remote access to their killing cannot prevent them from dying. They also die because they refuse to heed official warnings that are uttered by men who kept them sheltered so as to restrict the sphere that, as it turns out, is no shelter at all.
That the women whose massacre we witness were misled – and that ignorance is not innocence – is driven home in the final line of the play, in which a male lover implores his female beloved to remain passive. Denied a voice, a lone female survivor is reduced to a siren going off too late. “Air Raid,” anno 1938, casts radio listeners as passive receivers to cast broad its anti-isolationist, anti-fascist message.
How do you revive such a play in an era when anti-fascism was being equated with anti-Americanism? Can such a play retain its meaning in a climate of conservative-cultured mass hysteria? Before I respond to those questions, I should state that it was remarkable that “Air Raid” could air at all on US network radio in 1957. With the exception of daytime serials, the number of radio play series was reduced dramatically compared to just three or four seasons earlier.
MacLeish had not had a play produced on US network radio since the end of the war that had given politically engaged writers a platform as long as their writing could be demonstrated to be in the service of wartime propaganda, which was then considered a close enough translation of “in the public interest.” MacLeish’s third radio play, “The Trojan Horse,” which dates from 1952, was produced by the BBC.
To present it on US radio “seems to be impossible,” MacLeish stated at the time, “at least by one of the broadcasting chains.” The left-wing or left-leaning writers who had contributed to US American radio culture in the 1930s and early to mid-1940s were either turned off by the increased commercialism of postwar broadcasting or else had been blacklisted.
Radio had also been supplanted by television as the main purveyor of dramatic or narrative content for home consumption. In 1954, Swanson’s popular TV Dinners neatly parceled out the message that radio was no longer fresh. That same year, the retired US American radio satirist Fred Allen, reflecting on his career in broadcasting, declared that radio had been “abandoned like the bones at a barbecue.”
The revival of the Workshop in 1956 may suggest that the barbecue was still on. But it was leftovers all the same. When “Air Raid” was dished up once more on the tenth of March in 1957, it followed MacLeish’s script without any substantial deviations or abridgment. The changes are mainly the result of the staging.
In the 1957 version of the climactic scene I played earlier, jets have replaced the aircrafts of 1938. There is no “stammering of machine guns” that MacLeish’s script calls for.
What kind of weapon is employed becomes clear when we compare the boy’s unanswered cry for his friend as it was interpreted in each version.
Here is the 1938 version.
By the way, as self-reflexive as I may be, hearing that call of “Harry! Harry! Harry!” is not why I chose this play for today’s presentation. In the cry as it was uttered in 1957, the boy is crying, then dying. The weapons, this suggests, are capable of killing after rather than on impact. This is atomic-age warfare.
Unlike in the 1938 version, the CBS Radio Workshop production reclaims the frame that MacLeish’s play had appropriated. It insists on restoring that frame, on having the last work to fix meaning. Thus re-contexualised, MacLeish’s anti-fascist statement was turned into Cold War propaganda. Its 1938 context and intent are overwritten with a single word: “prophesy.” Its former currency is denied in this act of post-dating.
The broadcasting context is lost on online listeners, as a result of which one of our contemporaries now identifies the sentence “Learn what you can do to increase your chances of survival: contact your Civil Defense Office” as his favourite line from the play.
What I mean to suggest by this single example is not simply and simplistically that MacLeish’s play was a victim of the Eisenhower era’s conservative climate. The 1950s were a decade whose non-conformist spirit has generally been under-appreciated partly as a result of mainstream visual media – television and film – being regarded as official records of the age. The diverse, diverging voices of the 1950s tell alternative stories – just not on network radio.
When, in 1958, Allan Kaprow described the death of Jackson Pollock as an opportunity for a new art of the everyday, he cited sonic examples such as “three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly.” Those sounds are directly experienced, however. They are not mediated through radio, which, eight years earlier, Pollock – being interviewed on the radio – had declared to be of his “modern” age.
“[A] century of recorded sound […] has utterly transformed what it means to be human,” Debra Rae Cohen claims in Broadcasting Modernism. It does not follow that that transformation should be claimed for “Modernism” or that it is a manifestation thereof. Those claims are being made in the case of “Air Raid” as well, for instance in an article, published in 2016, titled “Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid.” Citing a “trend toward studies of modernism and mass culture,” the writer argues that “recent work on radio has stressed how the medium forced modernist writers to reconsider their relation to audience.” The article concludes that the ‘prophetic’ Air Raid, anno 1938, “remains rooted in modernism’s distrust of the female mass” but “also seems to signal that this distrust could not last. As societal change brought women into the public sphere, a chauvinistic modernism would perhaps be replaced by a postmodern order less likely to divide taste and authority on gendered lines.” So, prophetic – and prematurely conflicted – about its own status as, what, postmodern?
MacLeish’s reputation, it needs to be remembered, suffered as a result of his presumably a-modernist social engagement and public addresses. “[E]very poet with a dramatic leaning – and what poet ever lived who was really satisfied with writing the thin little books to lie on the front parlor tables? – should have been storming the studios for years.” That is how MacLeish prefaced his “Fall of the City.” “[S]torming the studios” sounds excitingly avant-gardist to me – but the US system was too closely guarded for an avant-garde to take hold of the microphones.
To tell US radio’s controlled experiments apart from the avant-garde which it forestalled, we need to pay attention to the system in which the radio play is embedded and which prevented it from becoming Hörspiel. Even more than “avant-garde” subjects, we need avant-garde approaches. Working together, we can be at the forefront of transdisciplinary studies in literature, science, the performing arts, in history and broadcasting.
To do radio plays justice, you must be prepared even to let go of your chances of forging a career in academia still too invested in keeping disciplines alive rather than making us alive to their deadliness. We need another ‘Air Raid’ on the disciplines that keep us apart and that keep us from raiding the air … jointly.
Harry Heuser 