Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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My Anglo-American Diet

Well, I consume plenty of them. Movies, I mean. Almost every night I take one in, along with some potato chips and a tall glass of gin and tonic. Now, looking in the mirror, I pretty much know where the chips and the gin are going, being that the residue lingers prominently around my waste. I don’t mind that much. I’m talking celluloid, not cellulite.

So, how does this motion picture diet affect me? What remains of these pictures after my eyes have lapped them up, my mind downed them? Granted, I don’t always ingest; once in a while I drop off in the very act of feasting (Elia Kazan’s Boomerang didn’t come home some nights back). Sometimes my attention throws in the napkin, losing itself like a crumb in the pleat of a leading lady’s dress or finding itself deserting the table at the sight of a mustachioed villain. Still, I pretty much finish off about three or four movies a week; and I’d sure like to know just where they are going and what they are doing to me once they have rolled off our screen, a large window blind serving as a conveyor belt for digitized treats.

I have been living in the UK for two years now; but, aside from a few British favorites such as Brief Encounter (pictured, and discussed here) or the occasional TV dinner (with the recently reunited Royle Family for instance), I still take in almost exclusively American fare. Last night, for instance, I took out two DVDs: Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood melodrama Juno and the Paycock and Orson Welles’s post-Holocaust thriller The Stranger; it was the latter that got a viewing, the former being once again returned to the drawer, yet unwatched. Perhaps I was just not in the mood for Irish stew; but the “go west” pattern in my viewing habits is all too apparent.

In fact, I am so American in my pop-cultural intake that I even missed yesterday’s 15,000 broadcast of The Archers, that British institution of a radio serial. I was too busy thinking about the mid-term elections in the US to devote time to a venerable program that, truth be told, I have never listened to even once, despite my love for radio dramatics. Do I need to point out that I am a German native (something I’d prefer to forget)? What is it, aside from having lived in the US for fifteen years and devoting an inordinate number of them to the study of American radio drama, that makes me embrace American culture of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s yet ignore or outright dismiss so much else, contemporary and internationally?

For one thing, I know what to expect from traditional Hollywood entertainments. I appreciate their formula, accept their limitations. Not unlike Victorian novels, they please me even when they leave me wanting (and Welles’s Stranger is surely a less than satisfying dish of hokum, squandering nearly all its potential to explain what it merely exploits—post-war doubts about a reformed Germany, a policing of thought for the sake of a secure nation, and a global peace founded on democratic principles). They agree with me, even when my mind insists they are nutritionally deficient and dangerously high in sodium, considering that you have to take many of these melodramas with so much more than a grain of salt. And as long as my heart’s still pumping enough blood through those hardening arteries, I keep the transatlantic meals on reels program going.

Sure, watching Hollywood movies does not make you an American. You might as well try to enter the Green Card lottery with a ticket stub. Instead, you keep circling Ellis Island, feasting your eyes on the Statue of Liberty looming in the haze. Marveling at the prospect in light of last night’s election, you can almost imagine yourself chewing the scenery in a Frank Capra feature.

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Election Day Special: Could This Hollywood Heavy Push You to the Polls?

Well, I don’t know how many voters turned out to re-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt on this day, 7 November, in 1944 because they had been listening to the radio the night before. Those tuning in to affiliate stations of the four major networks were informed that regular programming was being suspended for a “special political broadcast.” Stepping up to the microphone were Hollywood leading ladies Claudette Colbert, Joan Bennett, Virginia Bruce, Linda Darnell, and Lana Turner, composer Irving Berlin, radio personalities Milton Berle and “Molly Goldberg,” as well as the gangster elite of Tinseltown—Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, and James Cagney (pictured). Along with fellow Americans “from a great many walks of life,” Humphrey Bogart explained, they all had a “deep and common interest” in the outcome of the election.

Heading the parade of A-listers was Judy Garland, who burst into song with this “suggestion for tomorrow:”

Here’s the way to win the war, win the war, win the war
Here’s the way to win the war, you gotta get out and vote.
To get the things we’re fighting for, fighting for, fighting for,
To get the things we’re fighting for, you gotta get out and vote.
To clinch that happy ending,
On the Tokyo, the Berlin, and the Rome front,
The fellow with the bullet is depending
On the fella with the ballot on the home front.
Oh, we wanna have a better world, better world, better world,
Wanna have a better world? You gotta get out and vote.

There was no doubt just what kind of “suggestion” Garland and company had in mind. What radio listeners were treated to was an hour-long campaign ad for the Democratic party. Sing it, Judy:

Now we’re on the right track, right track, right track,
Now we’re on the right track, we’re gonna win the war.
Right behind the President, President, President,
Right behind the President for 1944.
The track ahead is clear now,
Let’s keep the engines humming.
Don’t change the engineer now,
‘Cause the ‘New World Special’ is a-coming.

Throughout the program, those fighting overseas or laboring at home for victory voiced their fears of a “Third World War,” presumably less likely under the current administration, expressed themselves grateful for Democrat bureaucracy (which, they held, kept the groceries affordable to everyone), or openly attacked a dangerous “amateur” of a Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, by whom they claimed to have been “torpedoed.” Dewey was argued to have rigged the voting laws of New York State, making it “impossible” for “thousands” to go to the polls and cast their ballots for FDR. Even registered Republicans came out in support of the President, expressing themselves dismayed at or ashamed of the candidate representing their party.

It’s a rousing hour of radio electioneering, concluding with an address by the President—and his prayer. With all the microphones on the Democrats that night, the opposition (even if aided by Dewey’s decimating system) simply had none.

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Delayed Exposure: A Man, a Monument, and a Musical

Well, I don’t know why I took it. This picture, I mean. Over the years, I must have walked past that plaque hundreds of times without paying attention to it. A few months ago, returning for a visit to my old neighborhood in Manhattan, it insisted I take notice at last. I went to an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. Erected in memory of the journalist W. T. Stead, this modest cenotaph stands opposite the museum, on the Central Park side of the avenue. I had no knowledge and little interest in the life of Mr. Stead, which (the plaque tells you as much) ended spectacularly aboard the Titanic. Last weekend, some three months after my return from New York, the man insinuated himself into my life once again, this time in the guise of a character in a Welsh musical.

Amazing Grace, staged at the local Arts Centre, tells the story of Evan Roberts, a Welsh miner turned preacher who, in the words of Mr. Stead, became the “central figure” of the early 20th-century “religious awakening in Wales.” Stead followed the movement, interviewed Roberts, and reported about this so-called Welsh Revival. In Mal Pope’s play, he appropriately serves as narrator and commentator on Roberts’s fabulous rise and his equally sudden disappearance from public view.

Unfortunately, Stead doesn’t get all that much to say or sing about Roberts, and the musical, which, in this particular production, featured the aforementioned Peter Karrie as a fierce reverend envious of the enigmatic upstart, suffers from a serious case of anticlimax: whether daunted by his fame or no longer driven to preach, Roberts simply shuts up—a silencing that doesn’t make for a rousing finale.

Unimpressed by Pope’s 1980s-styled power ballads and his by-the-numbers approach to biography, I was easily and gratefully distracted when I saw Mr. Stead walking across the stage and back into my conscious, as if to demand the leading role denied to him in this production. Now I find myself compelled to follow up on Stead’s life and writings.

As it turns out, Stead was fascinated by the spiritual, by premonition and second sight, by ghostly doubles and “long-distance telepathy.” For instance, he wrote about a case in which a telegram, then presumably the fastest means of telecommunication, was several hours slower in conveying a story than a message alleged to have been transmitted by a “disembodied spirit.” It is the extra-scientific (rather than the supernatural) speculated about by those growing up in the age of Darwin, an age of industrialism and shattered systems of belief.

Researching Etherized Victorians, my study on old-time radio, I came across one such comment on modernity by one of Stead’s contemporaries, Rudyard Kipling, whose 1902 short story “Wireless” marvels at psychic phenomena while questioning scientific progress: telepathy as the ultimate wireless connection.

It seems Mr. Stead is anxious to continue the debate from the beyond. I have unwittingly become a ghost writer for the late journalist; recalling him to life in word and image, I am merely his chosen amanuensis.

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On This Day in 1950: Chain-smoking Belle Gives Radio Mouth-to-Mouth

Well, let’s get out the matches. It’s time for some festive display of pyrotechnics. No, I am not responding to the news that Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. It is Guy Fawkes Day here in Britain, celebrated with rockets and bonfires lit in commemoration of a rather more decisive victory against terrorism than could be claimed in the Middle East: the foiling of a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London back in 1605. “Remember, remember, the Fifth of November”:

Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.

As such inflammatory (and subsequently watered-down) rhymes suggest, this all occurred long before Islam came to define what many now so closely associate with terrorism. Then again, organized religion is never far from terror—and often the foundation or instrument, the cinder heap and match of it.

While no radical symbolism was intended, Guy Fawkes Day also marks the second anniversary of my move from the United States to Wales, which, in a symbolic act fully premeditated, was scheduled to coincide with the 2004 presidential election in the US: a leave-taking on a note of triumph or, as it turned out, a sorrowful singeing of bridges. But these political and personal anniversaries are rather beyond the scope of the broadcastellan journal, which breaks its never-on-a-Sunday tradition to salute a firecracker of a Southern Belle who knew how to make a display of herself, simply by lighting another Craven A, her cigarette of choice.

I have already cheered the tar-pitched voice of Tallulah Bankhead in my first podcast, a salute that was promptly answered by what struck me as a nod from the lady herself (as shared in the concluding paragraph of this entry); but another toast is quite in order, since it was on this day in 1950 that Ms. Bankhead made radio history with her debut as mistress of ceremonies for The Big Show, an unseen spectacular of unheard of proportions.

NBC’s Big Show was US broadcasting’s last major investment in aural entertainment. It was also an admission and a compromise: an admission that Americans did no longer take radio seriously enough to sit down for a longer piece of audio theater, and a compromise in the form of a ninety-minute variety program delivering songs, gags, and snippets of drama.

The inaugural broadcast featured old pros like Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman, as well as newcomers including Danny Thomas and Jose Ferrer (in a scene from Cyrano de Bergerac). Also on mike for this premiere were semi-retired radio comedian Fred Allen, character actor Paul Lukas, and recording artist Frankie Laine. It was musical-variety gone hit-parading: a quick succession of acts introduced by an engaging and radiogenic personality.

This Sunday Night Live spectacular was well received by critic and audiences alike, even though it proved ultimately too extravagant to be at once effective in cost and consistent in quality in an age when money and talent were being siphoned into television, the new everyman’s home theater.

Short-sidedness aside, I don’t see why a variety program like The Big Show could not work on radio nowadays as something you tune in on a long journey or a dull evening to be turned on by contemporary singers, stand-up comedians, and a gaggle of celebrities promoting their latest movies, albums, or books.

Of course, there is no one to take the place of the hot-tempered Ms. Bankhead, a seasoned siren who, aware of the futility, the profligate waste of starting over—Tallulah rasa, as it were—managed to make use of an outmoded medium that allowed her to draw on a life in the limelight while keeping her out of it in prominent invisibility; to send her image up in smoke while firing barbs at the luminaries around her; and to become a breath of fresh air while all along indulging in the excesses of a malignant and much maligned habit.

So, if you got a match to spare, why not dim the lights, listen to the fabulous Tallulah, and spark up a candle (or a cigarette) in her honor!

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So Proudly We Hail(ed); or, Movies They Dare Not Make Today

Well, they sure don’t make them as they used to. I don’t know how many times you have uttered that line, indifferent to the rules of grammar, whether as a lament or a sigh of relief. Take So Proudly We Hail, for instance, the 1943 war drama I watched last night. Until I decided that doing so would be rather too self-indulgent (considering my love for a certain leading lady), I thought of discussing it yesterday, corresponding with the anniversary of the radio version in which stars Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake reprised their original roles (along with the long forgotten Sonny Tufts) on the Lux Radio Theatre.

So Proudly We Hail is a well-crafted, surprisingly unsentimental, and highly engaging melodrama about US army nurses serving their country in the battlefield that was the Philippines during the Second World War; as such, it is also unabashed wartime propaganda. I do not think that any producer in Hollywood today would dare to remake it, say, with Julia Roberts, Winona Rider, and Scarlett Johansson (to pick three contemporary actresses approximately of the respective ages of the three original leads). Why not? Allow me to speculate.

There’s a war on, lest we forget; but it doesn’t seem to reunite the West (or any Western nation) against a clearly defined enemy. Instead, we find ourselves in a war on terror—and the terror appears to be as much the cause as it is the effect, violence and violations being brought on by so-called anti-terrorist measures that continue to provoke it.

This is not a time in which to express pride in one’s country or its elected representatives; and those making decisions in Hollywood today seem least inclined foster a sense of loyalty and regard. I don’t think, though, that widespread dissatisfaction and skepticism—a critical attitude only the thoughtless or unthinking ever entirely suppress—account for the current rejection of propaganda drama.

As the reception of Clint Eastwood’s latest film suggests, people are not lining up to see movies with a political message. They might accept a controversial documentary inviting us to take sides; but they no longer appreciate being manipulated or swayed by dramatic fare. Propaganda is a dirty word these days, dirtier by far than advertising, which is still being tolerated.

However much we might groan, we tend to allow the promotion of a product, but get squeamish when it comes to the advancement of an idea. Corporations have taken a prominent place in—or even taken the place of—the government; and when peddling products, advertisers appeal to the individual, whereas propaganda seeks to motivate the community. It simply pays to stimulate division and selfishness, a targeting strategy generally marketed as choice. There no longer is a public, it seems; there are only people; and for advertising purposes, several million of these supposed individuals will do.

Unlike today’s conflicts, the Second World War was not endorsed by big business; companies were not eager to surrender sales or give up the production of consumer goods for a nation that needed to consolidate precious resources. So, I don’t think we’ll get to see Scarlett Johansson grabbing a hand grenade and blowing herself up for the sake of her country (as Veronica Lake’s character does) or picking up an empty can of soda for the benefit of the planet. Instead, she’ll grab that soft drink or lipstick or pair of designer shoes and fight for what she believes in . . . or what those placing the products in her hands want us to believe.

I did not grow up in a country or an age in which it was easy or felt right to be proud of one’s people; and, watching a film like So Proudly We Hail I sense that to be a profound loss. We so proudly hail individuality these days because corporations hand out the flags and buttons to match, knowing that we are at our most receptive and vulnerable when we are at our greediest.

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The Man in "The Open Boat": Stephen Crane, War Correspondent

I’m happy to report that he is back.  Not that I had time to report the incidence.  This afternoon, Montague, our Jack Russell terrier, snuck through the seasonally thinned hedge and, driven by the promises of chicken and cows in the cool air, dashed off into the field—for which offense, any farmer has the right to shoot him. It seems that my responsibility toward the imp “has not created in [him] a sense of obligation.” I don’t mean to break his spirit; but I am trying hard to counter his instincts, especially those laws of nature that run counter to the ones we make for (or against) ourselves and others.

Instincts, spirit, laws of nature. That takes me to the anniversary I meant to celebrate: the birth of Stephen Crane, journalist, short-story writer and novelist who emerged from his mother’s busy womb (he was one of fourteen) on this day, 1 November, in 1871. Crane died before he reached his thirtieth year; but along the way he turned in his reports, turning out stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. One of which, “The Open Boat” was, in turn, adapted for radio. Dramatized by E. Jack Newman for the adventure-thriller series Escape, “The Open Boat” was tossed into the airwaves on 19 July 1953.

Somber, stark and unsentimental, it is a story of survival, a realist’s story of a small community of men exposed to the elements and realizing just how little they seem to matter beyond the confines of the dinghy in which they find themselves. Far from naturalist or objective, these observations are served with—and are in the service of—irony, conveying a lesson brought home with somewhat greater economy by Crane’s equally famous poem:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Escape artist Newman clearly had a sense of obligation toward Crane’s universe; the changes to the original are numerous, but do little harm to the “Boat.” Adaptations are often less than subtle in their hacking and rehashing; as such, they are questionable, indeed objectionable, to someone who, like me, studied, taught and respects such works, someone eager to attack those chomping at them like a dog would a herd of cows indifferent to what he assumes to be his domain. It should be gratifying, then, to come across a dramatization that preserves Crane’s prose, at times word for word, aside from a few mild curses the radio censors would not allow even in the name of fidelity. Yet perhaps one can be rather too faithful and thus overly timid in one’s approach to adapting literature.

Had Newman been less duteous, for instance, he might have turned “The Open Boat” back into the report as which it first reached the American public on 7 January 1897. After all, it was Crane himself who, along with three others, was aboard that dinghy. “Based on a true story.” I guess I owe it to the folks running the Lifetime channel that I have grown suspicious of any drama thrust at me with such a preface. Why should such a label do so much (if not all of) the creative work, readily applied to render even an artistically negligible production significant? To blame for this practice is the old and rather tired pitting of fact against fiction, in which the latter is too often looked upon as the inferior or spurious offspring of the former.

Crane prefixed his story with a similar label, reapplied by Newman; but its authenticity, a sense of witnessing and partaking, can be impressed on its audience otherwise, in a reportorial style as only radio can bring it to storytelling. To achieve this, the narrator might recall the incident in the first person of Crane himself, the correspondent aboard the arms-carrying Commodore, sunk on 2 January, in 1897, on its way to Cuba. It would have accounted for the narrating voice (of William Conrad, in Newman’s dramatization) and added urgency to the account. It would return the story to its author in the very act of taking it from him and taking liberties with it.

Were I to rework Crane’s narrative, I might even refresh its irony by alluding to the current debate on global ecology, on the boat we’re all in, facing nature that is neither “cruel, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise,” but “indifferent, flatly indifferent” to our insistence on governing it, a seemingly tamed, domesticated environment turning on us like a cur. Translators, as they say, are traitors; but those who simply repeat words without making them worth your while, without making them work for you by making your mind work with them, are traders in spoiled goods. Indeed, by not investing anew in a seemingly old boat, they betray the very nature of literature as a vessel of shared ideas.

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Carl Sandburg Makes a Confession

Well, I didn’t get a pumpkin to carve and, the weather excepting, there is no sign of Halloween around the house. As a German, I did not grow up with the custom; before they realized how to make a killing by marketing this un-holy day, something that did not happen until the 1990s, my country(wo)men skipped the dressing up, parading, and trick-or-treating and went straight to the cemetery to remember the dead, November 1 being a national holiday.

Halloween struck me as an odd mixture of carnival (when Germans do put on costumes to make a spectacle of themselves) and the feast of St. Martins (when, on November 11, their children light lanterns and go caroling from door to door begging for candy); except that, rather than symbolically splitting St. Martin’s mantle in the spirit of charity, some folks in Hollywood decided it was high time to slice open a few random souls in the spirit of Friday, the 13th.

At any rate, donning fanciful guises, stepping into the crowd to be gawked at or approaching the public in hopes of a swift, sweet and easy pay-off is not just a Halloween tradition. It pretty much sums up the advertising racket. On this day, 31 October, in 1939, American poet Carl Sandburg went so far as to assume the role of a quiz show panelist to spread the word about his latest work.

Mind you, that show was Information, Please!, the most longhair or highbrow of all the popular quiz programs on the air. As I argued in a previous entry in the broadcastellan journal, Information, Please! had an ingenious formula that attracted both to the erudite and the illiterate, since questions were sent in by the audience for the express purpose of stumping the so-called experts.

The regular (and rather generously remunerated) panelists—Franklin P. Adams, John Kieran, and Oscar Levant (all pictured above)—were joined by a special guest expert, a noted author, film director, explorer, politician or actor. Would the public succeed in cutting those luminaries down to size? Would these articulate, gifted celebrities falter behind the microphone? That, along with the ensuing banter, accounted for the appeal and success of the program.

The people? No, Mr. Sandburg did not seem to mind them. Indeed, he was so eager to present himself as one of the commoners that the first question posed to him by master of ceremonies Clifton Fadiman, the literary critic of the New Yorker, extracted somewhat of a confession: “What notorious living American author was thrown out on account of his ignorance of arithmetic when he tried to break into the West Point Military Academy?” “Should I answer ‘me’ or give my name?” the poet inquired and, when encouraged to recount the incident, affirmed that he was indeed the “notorious” one, his attempt to enter West Point having been foiled some forty years earlier, back in 1899.

A little while later in the program, Sandburg is again given a question relating to his own life when asked whether he knew of a poem (a word used loosely, since even advertising slogans were deemed acceptable as answers) featuring a description or mere mention of fog. “Little ridiculous,” Sandburg chuckled with a note of embarrassment in his voice. After all, he was being prompted to recall one of his own works describing just such a weather condition (“Fog”):

The fog comes
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Again, the author let listeners in on a secret: it had taken him just “about five minutes” to compose those lines—yet, to his professed astonishment, they were not only the best known in all his works, but practically the only ones the general public could recall.

While managing to mention John Wilkes Booth in one of their answers, another nod to Sandburg’s Lincoln biography, panelists did rather poorly that night, failing to recall how the regretful Miss Otis met her death or from which ports Gulliver embarked on his travels, and struggling to come up with five flowers with “masculine names,” Mr. Sandburg advancing “frankincense.” I gather this bit of silliness might have been a relief to its author, considering that there weren’t as many occasions to plant a pun in a serious (and eventually Pulitzer Prize-winning) history than there are opportunities to plant a plug for such a tome in a quiz program.

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On This Day in 1947: Havoc in "Subway" Gives Commuters Ideas

Well, if you’re on the edge, you’d better not take the subway and stand next to someone who has the job you want, wants the partner you have, and won’t stop yapping about her career and the lucky breaks she’s had. You’d better hold on to the strap and, crowds permitting, take a deep breath—especially if you got a sharp pair of scissors in your bag. “Idea and scissors. Scissors . . . and idea!” That’s what the down-on-her-luck Paula has running through her mind in a Suspense play titled “Subway,” which aired on this day, 30 October, in 1947.

The leading role in this thriller is played by June Havoc, who happened to be the wife of Suspense producer William Spier (both pictured above). A few years after teaming up for this broadcast, Spier directed Havoc in the motion picture A Lady Possessed (1952), which pretty much sums up the driven yet frustrated Paula, the central character riding this New York City “Subway.”

While somewhat overpowering at first, the sound effects transported me back to the underbelly of the city. I thought of my commutes from Manhattan to the Bronx and back, or to wherever I was studying and working at the time. Having been squeezed in and shoved by the “five-o’clock mob,” as Paula calls her fellow straphangers, it is easy to sympathize with someone who suddenly “hated everybody” and “felt like committing murder.” She certainly has reason to resent Ruth, the woman next to her, who insists on unfolding her success story at a time when Paula’s career has pretty much folded. Scissors, please!

Perhaps someone ought to have handed a pair to veteran radio playwright Mel Dinelli, co-writer of “Subway.” The set-up, certainly, is well suited to a twenty-minute thrill ride on the airwaves, especially to the noirish psycho-dramas in which Suspense excelled after the departure of puzzle-crafter John Dickson Carr (previously mentioned here). A character sketch, narrated in the first person, that revolves around a possible turning point in that person’s life, a moment demanding quick decisions and swift action. “Idea and scissors.” Will the two meet so that Paula might get her break, taking over for Ruth, as suggested by this none-too-bright former rival? Or will Paula cut her losses and run off empty-handed? It’s all a matter of minutes. Why, Paula marvels, “I wouldn’t even be late for supper!”

Dinelli dealt with such a tense instant and the instincts it triggers very successfully in thrillers like “To Find Help,” a Suspense play he reworked into Beware, My Lovely, a motion picture starring Ida Lupino. Here, however, the survival drama is given a rather more ambitious treatment, as the protagonist’s drives—her desire to be Ruth-less—are being met by her conscience, the consideration that even strangers on a train, even those she thinks of as “an obstruction to be cleared away for something more important,” are part of a grandly designed human fabric her scissors are poised to slice and destroy. It is an awakening that, in order to ring true or convince, requires a finer tuning than the crude but effective formula devised for Suspense, the will she/won’t she scenario that, in order to sustain tension, pushes the moral issue of such an epiphany to the edge, where it is in danger of falling flat instead of rising to the occasion of being uplifting. Hearing about someone regaining self-control is decidedly less thrilling than listening to the unravelling of nerves.

“Subway” is a troubled ride of a domesticated Wild West show in which the law of the gun has become a split decision for scissors. The frustrated Paula stands in for the women in post-WWII America whose careers have been cut short by a return to the ostensibly normal; women who were pushed back into kitchen and nursery, away from the promises of assuming center stage among men, overshadowed by the ordinary and outdone by opportunists fighting with weapons fit for man-hunt or matrimony; women who were expected to keep their ambitions and their anger in check.

What are the rewards for patience and sacrifice in a post-war society reclaiming its entrepreneurial edge with a vengeance? While not as suggestive as that most famous of all radio plays to air on this day, “The War of the Worlds,” “Subway” might have given a few commuters ideas about running with scissors.

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Dylan Thomas, the Man Who Sounded Dreams

To “begin at the beginning”: 27 October 1914. Birth of Dylan Thomas, the poet who put the town of Llareggub on the map—an imaginary, sound-wrought community whose Welsh enough sounding name takes on an everyday crudeness when reflected upon in the mirror, a curse of the visual that the ear does not appreciate. Nor could it have been uttered on national radio back in the late 1940s, when Thomas began to work on the play that would, after years of revisions, become “Under Milk Wood.” Yet it is far from muted, this “Play for Voices,” which eventually went on the air in January 1954, just weeks after Thomas’s binge drinking-induced death in New York City.

“To begin at the beginning.” It is with this sound plan of action that Thomas’s narrator ushers us into the world of “Under Milk Wood,” a fourth-dimensional non-space, the anti-matter of a dreamscape unfolding in time. Listen, and you “can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea [. . .].”

“Time passes. Listen. Time passes,” we are reminded. “Come closer now,” the voice beckons. “Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despair and big seas of their dreams.” It is an irresistible invitation, this: to close ones eyes and conceive of imaginings beyond images. “Under Milk Wood” is a play unfit to be seen.

It certainly wasn’t suited for the big screen, as I found out in my attempt to celebrate the anniversary of Thomas’s birth this evening. I rarely shut down the projector before a film has flickered out; but I was grateful to a friend of ours who interrupted Andrew Sinclair’s 1972 adaptation, a tawdry spectacle of ill-conceived literal-mindedness. Starring Burton and featuring Elizabeth Taylor, the film shows us horses and cats and false teeth in a glass whenever Thomas speaks of them (and “cocklewomen” at work when he tells us they are sleeping). It offers visuals for visions, a prosaic fidelity that is the very death of poetry.

I decided not to pick up where we had left off. Instead, I’ll turn down the lights and listen to the 1954 radio version (also narrated by Burton). I might drift off; but I will let it happen and even will this mingling of dreams, allowing Thomas’s word-made world to stream in and out of my consciousness, catching his redolent names and hyphenate-strung metaphors only to let them sink in the “black, dab-filled sea” amid the coasting boats of my unguarded thoughts.

For years, while researching my study on so-called old-time radio, I have been resentful of Thomas’s reputation among the radio dramatists. It irks me still that so much attention is being paid to this one piece, a zooming in on Llareggub that did not lead to a sustained effort in charting radio’s vast and varied soundscapes or to a widespread awareness of radio as a poetic medium. “Under Milk Wood” has been singled out and set apart as literature, glorified at the expense of a great number of unheralded and silenced performances.

Tonight, I am going to stifle this resentment—an anger rightly aimed at blinkered critics, not at the poet at play—and slide between the eyelids of Thomas’s dreamers to ease my way into that town made of time, a town made by those taking a moment, and by them only.

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Curtains Up and "Down the Wires"

Well, aren’t we rather quaint in our high-tech ways? Getting our entertainment via cable? Subscribing to so-called premium channels? Pshaw, old hat! Even Queen Victoria had a home entertainment center. Called the Electrophone, it was a service that allowed those who signed up to tune in to theatrical performances live—not time delayed—from the London Stage. No need to sit through commercials or settle for anything not worth your while. You simply selected a program, dialed in and an operator standing by connected you to the opera, the theater, or—who’s going to tell—a bawdy music hall.

I became aware of this state-of-the-dramatic arts 19th-century invention while researching for my doctoral study, in which I mentioned it in passing as a precursor to radio’s earliest theatrical entertainments, which relied rather heavily on such stage hook-ups. The BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour presentation of “Down the Wires” provides a thorough—and thoroughly engrossing—introduction to the Electrophone’s dial-up service, which gave audiences access to operatic performances, political speeches, and religious services, piped into the sitting room (or wherever you chose to have it installed).

In this fashion, live theater was being made available to home listeners in the 1880s France and 1890s Britain and America. Matthew Parris’s “Down the Wires” (which is once again available online until Saturday), features rare recordings of early 20th-century performers, reformers, and politicians, including the voice of Teddy Roosevelt.

There are accounts as well of those who used this service, which, in the UK, was available for over twenty-five years, until the wireless cut those wires in the mid-1920s. Now, I’m not the nostalgic sort, really, but right now I’m thinking of all the thrilling plays that I might have caught over the phone (that fickle and fiendish device featured in my latest old-time radio podcast) had I been able to afford the considerable fee of £10 per annum for the service, in addition to the charge for the equipment.

Using my horn-honed imagination, which you’d need to flesh out what the stage business did not render intelligible to the home listener, I might have been able to take in sensational melodramas like The Worst Woman in London (1899) or The Ugliest Woman on Earth (1904)—the original Desperate Housewives. The title character of the former is a siren who blackmails her ex-lover, sets fire to his new home, disguises herself as a man and fights it out with his new bride whom she drags by the hair, onto the rooftops of London, until the virtuous rival manages to escape by tip-toeing to safety on a telegraph wire. Now, with my mind supplying the props, that’s an act fit to go “Down the Wires.”