Category: Radio

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Robert Altman (1925-2006) on the Air

Well, news is spreading fast these days; and by now anyone within reach of a computer will have learned that film director Robert Altman has died on Monday, 20 November 2006, at the age of 81. Since my own web journal can do little to propagate this message, it will provide instead an addendum to the small number of long-prepared and oft-copied obituaries currently circulating in the blogosphere. I have attempted as much on previous occasions by sharing a lesser known aspect of the careers of Don Knotts, Shelley Winters, and composer Cy Feuer, all of whom had connections to the world of radio to which broadcastellan is largely dedicated. As it turns out, Robert Altman is no exception. Indeed, his debt to the medium was far more profound than that of the other artists aforementioned.

To be sure, Altman’s name is already being closely linked to the so-called golden age of radio by virtue of what would be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a filmic realization of a world evoked by radio romancer Garrison Keillor. Altman was greatly influenced by 1940s radio. He revealed as much in a National Public Radio documentary broadcast in May 1995 (a recording of which you may find here). In a tribute to Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” Altman made the following statement:

“Anything I know about drama today comes more from Norman Corwin than anybody. If I had to list my mentors, I would say Norman Corwin, David Lean, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, and then a countless number of people whose names I forget where I learned what not do.”

Now, what could Altman have learned “about drama” from Corwin, America’s foremost radio playwright (whose first letter to me I cheered recently)? As a film director, Altman did not fare well on the stage. His production of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues earlier this year was widely panned; indeed, the reviews were so unfavorable that, while in London at the time, I decided to pass on it, despite my interest in the career of Miller, a former radio writer (one of whose works I discuss here). Perhaps, what Altman did take from Corwin—and what he could do on film more readily than on a stage—was the idea of an ensemble piece comprised of a large cast, a sprawling drama of many voices (such as The Player and Gosford Park). Everybody‘s in it, you think, when you look at the cast for an Altman production.

The same can be said for the signature pieces written and directed by Norman Corwin—plays with a vast number of characters, their stories intersecting, their voices adding up to something, to an idea, a statement, about Hollywood, for instance, about politics, about the state of American society. Corwin’s seminal On a Note of Triumph was such a piece, a play for voices; not a choir, mind you, but a cacophony; not a traditional drama of linear storytelling, but a fictionalized documentary, a record of a moment. Of this play, Altman said, some fifty years after its initial broadcast: “I can recite 40% of On a Note of Triumph from memory,” having listened to it “time and time again.”

I had not been aware of Altman’s admiration of Corwin’s work, until today. Come to think of it, both Corwin and Altman were belatedly honored at the Academy Awards this year, Altman receiving a lifetime achievement award, and Corwin being the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary about the making of “On a Note of Triumph.” Now, when I watch Altman’s films, I will look for Corwin and “Anything” he might have brought to the craft of the late director.

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Now on the Air: Sam Shepard’s True West

Well, it still does what it has been doing for over eighty years now. If you let it. And on this wet and stormy afternoon, I was ready to let it. Take me to a show, I mean. The radio can do that for you, even today. Drama on the air started out like this, back in the early 1920s: broadcasts right from the Broadway stage. In fact, such home entertainment predates wireless technology. As I discussed here, remote theater-going began in the 1880s by way of the telephone. However grateful for the service, those tuning in to wired or wireless theatricals must have realized right away that something was amiss.

Not being there to see what unfold as the curtain rises makes it difficult to follow all that transpires onstage, especially when characters are speechless or when one responds to the silent actions of another. You cannot hear a hand being raised, a cold shoulder being turned, or a door being opened quietly so as to escape the notice of the characters present.

Obviously, some translations are in order to avoid the chaos of an auditory void. This problem was initially dealt with by an announcer or narrator who filled in the blanks as the action progressed. Soon, however, it became clear that stage plays had to be properly adapted if they were to succeed in the non-visual medium. Carefully reworked, radio adaptations can be both culturally significant and aesthetically satisfying, even though those advocating pure audio drama—plays conceived for the airwaves—deem such efforts at translation inferior or downright detrimental to the of true aural arts.

Yesterday, BBC Radio 3 presented an audio version of Sam Shepard’s dark comedy True West (1980), by now a classic of American drama. The Radio Times heralded this very nearly “True West” as a copy that “could well be the drama of the year.” While that may be an overstatement, the radio adaptation, featuring David Soul in the role of Lee, is certainly an event worth catching. For those ready to grab, the Drama on 3 production by Peter Kavanagh is available online for the entire week; you may listen in (by visiting the BBC’s “Listen Again” page and selecting “Drama on 3”).

It is difficult for me to sit through an eighty-minute radio play. Listening to “True West,” I found myself scrubbing pots and pans, which is something I would not have done (and very rarely do) otherwise. It seems I needed to do something and that listening was not activity enough, as reading most certainly is. After years of studying and taking in radio drama, I still lack the attention span to take in a play I might easily follow in a theater, even if there is as little to see as there is in True West.

It is two brothers engaged in the kind of verbal sparring that makes for good radio drama. One of them is a successful (or at any rate, busy) Hollywood screenwriter, the other a seasoned and desert-hardened crook. They couldn’t be more different, it seems, and at first you can’t help but feel sorry for Austin, the writer, who is so rudely interrupted by his no-good sibling; but, while housesitting for their mother, who is away on a trip, the estranged brothers are forced to brush up on and against each other. In the friction that ensues, the tarnish of the one and the polish of the other rub off, muddling the personae and laying bare the common nature of both, their true insecurities and western discontent.

Soul is excellent as the irascible Lee, even though he sounds rather old for the part (especially when compared to Richard Laing as Austin). He reminded me of the cantankerous Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) on The King of Queens. In fact, the entire play comes across like an extended sitcom episode, rather than a profound comment on the human condition. It also pales somewhat when revisited in the shadow of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), which pushes a very similar situation quite a bit further. That said, “True West” is still an outing to stay in for, an evening (or afternoon, or morning) of free theater, if you are at home and aching for such.

Unfortunately, the BBC Radio Player does not allow you to fast-forward, to skim and skip, which is bad news in case you, like me, need one or two (or more) intermissions to take in an audio drama of this length. So, I recorded it on my laptop and listened to it in instalments—theater chopped up for easy digestion and ready review—the True West of Silicon Valley.

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An Inspector Calls Our Bluff

Yesterday’s gloomy afternoon gave way to a splendidly sinister evening at the theater. The play was J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which I had previously seen back in 1995, with 80’s heartthrob Maxwell Caulfield in his Broadway debut. In that production, the set pretty much upset the text—a huge, dark house confronting the audience from behind a curtain of rain. It was an impressive spectacle calculated, it seemed, to veil or countermand Priestley’s directives, the stark simplicity and artifice of his didactic play. Yet, as I realized last night, watching a touring Clwyd Theatr Cymru production directed by Barry Kyle, An Inspector Calls loudest when the lines are clear and the stage bare.

I had prepared for the evening by reviewing the 1934 film adaptation of Priestley’s Dangerous Corner, starring Virginia Bruce and Melvyn Douglas.  The movie struggles to open Priestley’s play to the demands of a dynamic camera.  The cinema audience wants, or is at any rate accustomed to, something other talking heads and sedentary bodies.  Even Martyn Bainbridge’s design, while effectively sparse compared to the melodramatic Broadway treatment of An Inspector Calls, at times displayed a doubt in the sufficiency of Priestley’s script by underscoring his words with visuals, turning walls into movie screens and tilting the stage to demonstrate the downfall of a supercilious and self-centered family.

Do we need images to get the picture? The theater of ideas is best accommodated by radio, a non-visual medium that forces our mind to focus on the spoken word and telling silences. Back in the early 1930s, Priestley may not have been convinced of this. After all, Dangerous Corner is a rather scathing commentary on the wireless as a soundcarpet under which the unspoken and unspeakable can be swept: the receiver has to break down to crack the surface of idle chatter among the civilized yet rotten.

In An Inspector Calls, which reworks the central idea of the earlier play, the part of the radio is performed by a telephone that rings to shut up a group of culpable and contemptible individuals talking themselves back into a state of calm. Unreliable or intrusive, both means of telecommunication are called upon to penetrate the walls of bourgeois conventions, obliging those standing apart to connect and disclose what has been carefully concealed from others.

Priestley could and did rely upon the wireless to spread the word and to popularize his ideas. His novels and plays were often heard on American and British radio during the 1930s and ‘40s, among them adaptations of Angel Pavement and Laburnum Grove, as well as the two works discussed here. The author-dramatist even made an appearance on Rudy Vallee’s show, as I read in a September 1939 issue of the Radio Times, and agreed to let the BBC serialize one of his novels prior to publication, with its author reading the first installment.

While expressing his reservations about the experiment and its effect on book sales, Priestley nonetheless decided to reach out to the populace he was eager to unite. Perhaps, some six years prior to the completion of An Inspector Calls, he had already gotten the call from his inquisitive messenger. It is a call that still resonates strongly today, not so much as socialist propaganda, but as an appeal to think beyond economics, beyond present self-interest, for the sake of turning a Dangerous Corner in the path of the planet we share.

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Budd Hulick, the "Man With a Platform"

Well, this would be a perfect day to kick the proverbial bucket, especially one of those in which it has been coming down all day. Most of us seem capable of resisting the impulse, and some wretched creatures are rewarded for their restraint by having to slosh through the muck of life toward senility, whether or not they care to prolong the journey, until they are too fragile to kick at all and waste away ingloriously like an abandoned experiment in resilience. If the Internet Movie Database got it right—and did not merely neglect to keep up with the subject*—one such mortality-resisting mortal might be Budd Hulick, an American radio comedian once known as one of a couple of “gloomchasers.” He was born on this day, 14 November, in 1905.

Hulick was an announcer at station WMAK in Buffalo, New York, where he met his comedy partner, writer-announcer-utility man F. Chase Taylor. Together they became known as Stoopnagle and Budd, an act that sounded fresh and unconventional because the two tossed caution to the wind and did what was generally discouraged on the add-littered airwaves: they ad-libbed.

Indeed, or according to legend, that is just how they got started one October evening in 1930 after a hurricane had caused the network to collapse and CBS affiliates, bereft of their regular transmissions, were temporarily left to send for themselves. Hulick and Budd filled a quarter hour with music and banter, to which impromptu performance the audience responded so favorably that WMAK gave them a regular spot.

While slow to attract a national sponsor, the team proved a popular success on radio in the early to mid-1930s with their show. Together with the big names of vaudeville, wireless and motion pictures, the voices of Stoopnagle and Budd answered the public’s curiosity by appearing alongside W. C. Fields, Rudy Vallée, Burns and Allen, Bela Lugosi, Cab Calloway, and Baby Rose Marie in the Paramount comedy revue International House (1933).

After Stoopnagle and Budd split in 1937, Hulick carried on as a radio quiz show host. It was another unforeseen advent—always dreaded in the big business of unseen entertainment—that turned Hulick into “A Man With a Platform,” the title character of a “musicomedy” by America’s foremost radio playwright, Norman Corwin. Corwin had written this piece “expressly” for Henry Morgan, a caustic radio wit who apparently got his dates mixed up, as the author-director reasoned in his notes on the play, which was broadcast on 2 November 1941. Corwin “quickly revamped the show to accommodate the sly and ingratiating comedy of Budd Hulick.”

As “A Man With a Platform,” Hulick played a know-it-all of the kind we all know: some nobody who thinks that “things should be done about things.” The character sounds familiar today, considering that most people who keep a blog such as this step on the old soap box once in a while (or frequently, even) to advocate and accuse, to bemoan and belittle. We all grab this virtual microphone to voice what we feel passionate about, even though we may be opining without sound argument, in the face of facts we dare others to face.

Mounting his platform, Hulick gets to go on about the inanity of baby talk (as if responding to the phenomenon of the “mommy blogs”) and the need for changes in public education, however questionable his suggestions. Not in favor of “singing the praise of unsung heroes,” the “Man” proposes a “dishonor system,” singling out those “whose annoyance to the public takes the form of chronic overeager optimism” (as if speaking of those who maintain that the war on terror is going well). He even gets to meddle with established broadcasting practices (something that web journalists are wont to do, simply by insisting on doing things their way).

I was glad to have learned about Hulick’s 101st birthday when, rather listless and unsure whether to write anything at all today, I sauntered over to the IMDb, and, after consulting the invaluable GOLDINdex, dug out a recording of Corwin’s play. The “Man” was just the kind of gloomchaser I needed on this miserable November afternoon; indeed, it made me rethink my remarks about kicking the bucket, being that Corwin is still kicking at 96.

*The date of Hulick’s departure has since then been added to the IMDb entry

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On This Day in 1950: The Man to Whom My Dog Owes His Name Makes His Magnificent Debut

Well, this takes me back. All the way to May 2005, when I made up my mind at last and set out to keep the broadcastellan journal. Apprehensive about disclosing my true identity (the name my parents pinned on me), I entered the blogosphere with the fanciful moniker “The Magnificent Montague.” It took me about five months to shove that nominal cloak into the closet and leap out, as it were, in the buff (or as near to that natural state as my virtual modesty permits). Some five months ago, I once again reached for that retired garment and passed it on to my dog. Such an act of questionable charity would doubtless have infuriated the original bearer of said name, who, on this day, 10 November, in 1950, made his radio debut in a sitcom aptly titled The Magnificent Montague.

Truth be told, I’ve got a thing for Monty Woolley, the man who played him. If he were The Man Who Came to Dinner—and if I did not already have both the man and the machine for the job—I might almost stoop to doing the dishes. Mr. Woolley was, of course, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and a lot of other compelling characters besides. Over the years, I’ve seen him in films like Midnight, Since You Went Away, As Young As You Feel, and the delightful if lesser known Molly and Me (opposite Gracie Fields). He also did a bit of campaigning for Roosevelt in 1944, as I found out when I heard him in a line-up of FDR supporters in a recently discussed radio special. Now, Mr. Woolley could almost talk me into anything—and talk he did. His voice was such an integral part of his persona—prickly, pompous, and proud—that it is not surprising he was talked into playing that sort of man in a weekly sitcom written for radio.

His is a beard you could hear on the air. I mean, Woolley was such an iconic figure in American culture that those tuning in did not require a picture. They knew exactly what Woolley looked like—and there was no need to create a new look for Edwin Montague, the character he portrayed. Montague and Woolley were one; or, let’s say that Montague was so ideally suited to the Woolley persona that it was easy to confuse the star and his role. One was an extensions of the other, so that Montague seemed at once caricature and lifelike portrait, as flat and vivid as a Dickensian character, a Mr. Pecksniff or Pickwick or Turveydrop.

Written and produced by Nat Hiken (who had previously worked for comedians Fred Allen and Milton Berle), The Magnificent Montague cast Woolley as an accomplished Shakespearean actor who, luckless of late (indeed, for nearly a decade), accepts a role in a sentimental daytime radio serial. However disdainful, the venerable thespian charms millions of listeners as Uncle Goodheart, a popular success he is anxious to keep from the members of the Proscenium Club who would be offended by such a shameful act of selling out.

It is a perfect setup for a radio sitcom, considering that broadcasting was generally frowned upon by serious or distinguished actors . . . unless, that is, they realized how much money there was to be made and how comparatively easy it was to make it. The Magnificent Montague was radio’s way of ridiculing highbrow culture, of deriding those who dismissed it as vulgar or trivial but were nonetheless envious of its tremendous pull.

In the 1950s, radio was no longer the live medium it had been prior to the development and widespread use of magnetic tape; for the most part, dramatic programs were being recorded for later broadcast, which meant greater flexibility and fewer scheduling conflicts for performers who would otherwise not have committed to a weekly series. Some of the great names in film and theater—Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, and Laurence Olivier among them—pulled an “Uncle Goodheart” during those days by becoming radio regulars (rather than being special guests whenever there was some promoting to be done).

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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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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.