Category: Radio

Posted on

“Dark World”: Arch Oboler Makes Paralysis Sound Like Paradise

Nothing ends a joyful gathering more abruptly than an emergency phone call. We were taking in the sun on this mild afternoon here in Ceredigion when one in our party was being told that her mother had a wasp in her tea and was rushed to the hospital. I refrained from relating the story I had been told a few months ago during our trip to Cornwall, where I heard that the same dietary supplement had meant the end of a beloved pet. Best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery was all I could impart at parting. True, I prefer looking on the bright side and make light of dark matters—an approach to life it has taken me decades to adopt. Still, sometimes the bright side is downright garish and irritating, a neon artifice that cons or comforts none. Take the story melodramatist Arch Oboler shared with US radio listeners on this day, 3 August, in 1942.

The play was “Dark World” and was soundstaged for the anthology program This Is Our America. Heard in the leading role was screen actress Kay Francis, who is enjoying considerable critical attention these days and is being celebrated in one of my favorite webjournals, Trouble in Paradise. On that August day back in 1942, Ms. Francis had several million Americans in her spell—but what a dizzying one it was.

As might be expected, particularly given the title of the series in which it was featured, “Dark World” is a comment on the horrors of warfare. It certainly was a change from the jingoism of the day, delivered by the creator of the fiercely pacifist and similarly themed “Johnny Got His Gun,” adapted by the same playwright. And yet, Mr. Oboler was one of the chief advocates of hate as a motivator in wartime; and “Dark World,” which was first produced nearly two-and-a-half years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, is ambivalent, which is the academic term for murky and muddled.

“Dark World” opens as two nurses lean over and contemplate the body of a dead patient, the paralytic Carol. “I just don’t get it!” one nurse tells the other. “All the time you’ve been on the staff, I’ve never seen you act this way over losing a case! And especially this one—blind—paralyzed—helpless. . . .” “That’s just it!” her colleague responds. “For twenty-five years—from the hour she was born—Carol Mathews had nothing but loneliness and misery! And then to die like this—never having known anything but darkness—it isn’t fair—it isn’t fair!” Has Carol’s existence been worthless? Is her death a relief? It is the dead woman herself who has the last word on the matter:

Hello, Amy. . . .  Hello, Amy. . . .  No, you can’t hear me, can you? And yet I must speak—while I’m still here close to you.  You said I’d never known anything but darkness. . . . You’re very wrong, Amy.  There was never any darkness in my world. How cold there be? The skies that I saw never clouded.  The flowers never faded.  The trees were always green and fresh.  I saw a lovely world in my darkness, Amy—lovely. . . .

It was a world inhabited by the words of Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad, “and all the rest,” Carol insists; “theirs weren’t just words printed on white pages as you read them to me! They were white, flaming magic that carried me so far away from here—to the sea. . . .” It was a “world of space and freedom, where each man had a dignity of self so great the he could not bear the hurt of other men who are all as himself.”

Carol’s friends were the “Brownings—oh, such charming people—and Shakespeare—I used to argue with him! And Keats”; and “Walt Whitman—yes, he was here, too. . . . He taught me not to be afraid!” and “Schubert and Brahms and Mozart and Tschaikowsky—all of them—my friends!”

Carol claims to have “made a world” in her” darkness,” a world “where everyone walk in loveliness—where things were as they might some day be.” Thanking the nurse for her pity, she reminds her that “pity is for those who have nothing—and I had a world where all was beauty.”

Is “Dark World” advocating isolationism? Is it a perverse escape fantasy in which passivity, however involuntary, is deemed preferable to resistance and strife? In the triumph of mind over matter, Oboler’s play celebrates the medium; and in its sentimentalizing of inaction, it takes the side of the radio audience, those having stories read to them, stories that take on a life in the imagination of each receptive listener. It was the very passivity and solitary play that most propaganda drama, including Oboler’s own, worked hard to combat.

Dark is the world in which a case of paralytic blindness may be presented as a prelapsarian vision.

Posted on

Many Happy Reruns: Herman Melville and M. R. James

Well, August is coming across a lot like autumn. Fierce winds, cool temperatures, and short intervals of rain put an end to the July heat here in Ceredigion, Wales. Undoubtedly, I will return to hothouse climes next week, when I am back in New York City, where, on this day, 1 August, in 1819, a child was born that would eventually become one of the most celebrated authors of the 19th century: Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, his most famous work—a story everyone knows but a book hardly anyone reads—was filmed, starring Gregory Peck, not far away from here in the Welsh town of Fishguard, where, last summer, I had the misfortune to drown a cellular phone.

Losing a chance to keep in touch with humanity—that is not altogether un-Melvillian. Melville’s yarns, apart from his early Omoo and Typee, are not primarily seafaring adventures. They are stories of the forlorn, of friendlessness and frustrated ambitions. Teaching American literature in New York, I once assigned Melville’s novel Redburn, a devastatingly triste tale of a young man unable to establish meaningful and fulfilling personal relationships. It is a subject to which Melville returned frequently in his work, his Kafkaesque story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” being a prime example. It is also a fine example of literature being well served by radio; and such instances are quite rare.

Those adapting literature for the airwaves were often asked to synopsize popular pieces of 19th-century fiction, to produce hurried rehashes that rarely captured the varied aspects, let alone the experience of epic tomes like Moby-Dick. The far shorter story of “Bartleby,” however, was well translated for radio by the creative team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. As the host of the series, Ronald Colman, told listeners of Favorite Story back in the late 1940s (the series was transcribed and syndicated, rather than broadcast live on network radio), “The Strange Mr. Bartleby” was an obscure work of fiction. It was owing to actor Robert Montgomery, who allegedly chose it as his favorite, that the story was picked up by Favorite Story and dramatized starring William Conrad and Hans Conried (as Bartleby).

As a short story, it is far more suitable for a twenty-minute dramatization than the novels that were generally bowdlerized in the process. Despite the changed title (the word “scrivener” being deemed rather too quaint and alienating, no doubt), Favorite Story‘s rendering of “Bartleby”—a dark tale in which communication failure is having a “dead letter” day—is probably the most satisfying and faithful Melville adaptation heard on American radio.

A similar success in adaptation may be reported in the case of another author born on this day (in 1862), a spinner of a very different sort of yarn: M. R. James, who shares his first name with our terrier, Montague (pictured). Still somewhat outside the canon of western literature—a canon that now includes Frankenstein and Dracula—James is a highly regarded teller of antiquarian ghost stories.

A decade before it was adapted for the movies, his “Casting the Runes” was readied for radio by Irving Ravetch and John Dunkel. With a score composed by the recently deceased Cy Feuer (commemorated here), it was heard on the thriller anthology Escape on 19 November 1947. Unlike Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, which exists in two versions and points up the Curse of visualizing terror as horror, the sound-only adaptation is both literate and liberating, depending on the listener’s imagination rather than showy yet inadequate special effects.

was often and not unjustly accused of playing fast and loose with literary classics. It reduced novels like Moby-Dick to skeletons best left in the closets of those who were commissioned to strip the meat from the bones of such meaty fictions. Shorter works like “Bartleby” and “Casting the Runes,” concentrating on one central idea and exploring a key situation involving a few main characters, fared considerably better on the air. These two plays are worthy of the men who conceived them without a microphone in mind.

Posted on

Celebrated East-West Menace Starts Out Selling US Magazines

Well, I hadn’t intended to continue quite so sporadic in my out-of-date updates, especially since a visit to my old neighborhood in New York City is likely to bring about further disruptions in the weeks to come, however welcome the cause itself might be. A series of brief power outages last Friday and my subsequent haphazard tinkering with our faltering wireless network are behind my most recent disappearance. It is owing to the know-how of this creative talent that broadcastellan is now back in circulation. So, it seems fitting that, upon returning today, I should commemorate the career of a man who was particularly adept at vanishing, of casting his voice, and of having a laugh at matters least laughable: The Shadow. After all, he first went on the air on this day, 31 July, in 1930.

As expert Anthony Tollin relates it in The Shadow Scrapbook, the invisible man with the menacing laugh was at first little more than a radio announcer—a mouthpiece for Street and Smith, a company specializing in the cheap thrills of magazine fiction. While radio had little drama to offer during those early days of network broadcasting, its promotional prowess had long been proven by sharks, shysters, and shamans alike. As is often the case, the advertisement took on a life of its own, as tuners-in were more intrigued by the voice than by the product it was called upon to peddle. So, The Shadow was rushed into the limelight and, after being promoted to the narrator of Street and Smith’s Detective Stories, stories, became a bona fide superhero in print and on the air.

As the Orient—that is, the US concept of such non-Western territory with traditions predating the old world of Europe—was then all the rage, The Shadow is somewhat of a Fu Manchurian candidate, casting himself under an imported family tree from which branches dangle the wise Charlie Chan, the magical Chandu, and the sly Mr. Moto.

All those Americanized adventurers and much-relied-upon crime solvers owe some of their mystique to an element of the sinister or suspicious, even though this quality became diluted and, in the case of Charlie Chan, was obscured over the years whereas Mr. Moto was sent on leave when the allure of the extra-occidental seemed irreconcilable with the cultural reorientation of the US after Pearl Harbor and the expediencies of wartime propaganda.

Lamont Cranston, as listeners of The Shadow were told each week, had brought back a secret from the Orient—the hypnotic power to “cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.” He revelled in this invisibility, the hunt, hide and seek it made possible; as his menacing laugh suggests, he was no kindly Mr. Keen, no detached Sherlock Holmes, no matter-of-fact gumshoe. He enjoyed feeding his enemies the “bitter fruit” borne by the “weed of crime” and of feasting on its juices, on employing powers which, on this day in 1938, for instance, helped him to catch a group of western diamond mine raiders with the aid of a non-western sage turned servant who passed on “The Message from the Hill,” through “mental telepathy, the oldest wireless in the world.”

It is a telling case of a Hollywood identity crisis that screen villain Bela Lugosi first played Chandu’s archenemy and then returned to impersonate the radio original himself in subsequent movie serial sequels; nor should it be surprising that someone as typecast to play outcasts as Peter Lorre was chosen to play Mr. Moto. The duality—the duplicity—of Easterners gone West or Westerners under Oriental influences suggests something adulterated, ominous, and forbidding. It is a spinning forth of yarns like Dracula and The Green Goddess, stories of an East that not so much meets West but infiltrates it or insinuates itself.

Perhaps, in today’s global market, the Shadow might have started out as a hawker of Japanese electronics, the hardware of choice with which western media produce latter-day broken blossoms of diplomacy. It strikes me as disingenuous or incongruous, at least, that melodramatic Orientalism is deemed politically incorrect while demonizations of Iran and North Korea and the anxieties triggered by Communist China, by a distant Asia or Arabia—a far or middle east—are being propagated by a West that glorifies diversity but relies for its cultural survival and economic supremacy on demonstrations of its vulnerability, on images of threatened borders and threatening barbarians.

Posted on

"Chained" to the Mike: Joan Crawford Goes Live Reluctantly

Well, they come to the remotest of spots, spreading their words—or the word—undaunted by the indifference or hostility with which they are greeted. Jehovah’s Witnesses, I mean. This morning, I’ve been listening for about an hour to two of these travelling preachers, one of whom likened our lack of receptiveness and knowledge to sitting in front of a broken television set. Actually, the two reminded me of radio announcers: hawkers with a mission who come into your home (or as near as you let them) to sell you ideas and convince you to tune in tomorrow—a tomorrow so protracted it might have been conceived by a soap opera writer if it weren’t quite so blissful.

Radio announcers, of course, were being paid for delivering promotional messages they did not compose; and it sufficed for them to feign conviction and enthusiasm in their pushing of ideas, services and products. Rather than turning the dial or twisting the doorknob on those Witnesses and their ill-concealed prejudices, I kept listening to their mythological broadcastings, even though my life at present is so serene that I do not long for another or any hereafter.

We are being sold so many mass-marketed keys to happiness that, when one of them finally fits into the lock, the confounded peddlers and their less-than-satisfied customers importune us to question whether we’ve got the right door. Once achieved, happiness is reduced to a token of stupor or proof of lacking ambition, a mark missed rather than hit. After all, there is business in creating desire and none in realized contentment.

Now, the elusive happily ever after is an illusion often smashed to great effect. The creators of melodrama, the theater of the contested status quo, turned the struggle for a joyous or secure future into a chief generatrix of storylines. The characters of melodrama often seek happiness by looking for something not belonging to them and find it by discovering that what they want is close by, however obscured by conventions or removed from their everyday by the chains of society. In all this strife, melodrama often insists on destiny, on a path chosen not by us, but for us, a path to be discovered instead of forged.

On this day, 27 July, in 1936, Joan Crawford stepped behind the microphone she dreaded to struggle against such conventions—and succumb to others—by recreating her role of Diana (or Dinah) Lovering in Chained, which was adapted for a production of the Lux Radio Theater.

Diane is a secretary of a well-to-do, “middle-aged, but attractive steamship magnate.” She vows to marry him—once his wife consents to set him free. In the meantime, she falls in love with a younger man, played by Crawford’s husband, Franchot Tone, a man who poses a challenge, rather than showering her with affections. There is little excitement in the triangle, a routine love affair in which Crawford is blandly smooth, rather than edgy. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Crawford’s performance is that the actress, reputedly uneasy about speaking live before an invisible audience of millions (as previously mentioned here), displays no audible signs of mike fright.

Setting the scene with an apposite if contrived Hollywood legend, Lux Radio Theater host Cecil B. DeMille explains that Crawford and Tone, whom he had never before met professionally, were meant for each other by virtue of their ancestry. “Their romance, which began in 1933, was more than a courtship,” he suggests. “It was a coincidence which had its beginnings in 1798, when an undecided Corsican named Bonaparte was lighting the fuse that was to explode all Europe and an Irish patriot named Wolfe Tone was enlisting French aide in a revolt against England.” Sure, Ms. Crawford, who married the descendant of said Wolfe Tone, was born Lucille LeSueur; but the “little French girl” was born closer to Paris, Texas, than to the French capital.

Aided by the continuity writers of the Lux Radio Theater, DeMille was able to craft a compelling theme out of such historic strains, even if it meant to strain historic facts in the crafting. For all his vision, though, DeMille was no seer. Between the second and final acts of “Chained,” the famed director introduces Helen Burgess, one of his recent discoveries for the screen. She might have been groomed for stardom, but, as Billips and Pierce remind us in Lux Presents Hollywood, the on-air promotion was futile. The promising starlet died on 7 April 1937, shortly before her twenty-first birthday.

Crawford, meanwhile, kept returning to the microphone, relieved, no doubt, when the era of live radio drama came to an end in the late 1940s.

Posted on

Dark of Day: "Danger" and the Drama Invisible

Well, it was a scorcher of a day—the first I experienced here in temperate Wales. The unexpected heat brings back memories of my many summers in New York City and will prepare me for my return to the asphalt jungle this August. Moving to rural Wales from that bustling metropolis took more of an adjustment than adding a few layers of clothing; but anyone ready to weave life according to E. M. Forster’s motto “Only connect,” which is not a bad motto to live by, there is the comfort of that web of relations that, however remote or isolated you might believe yourself to be, will place you smack in the middle of the world, like a spider resting in the assurance that flies are bound to drop in, by and by.

Here is one such moment in the web in which I find myself. You might have to stretch your antennae a bit to get caught up in it.

Picture this: New York City, on this day, 18 July, in 1936. It’s the premiere of The Columbia Workshop, the most experimental and innovative of all the radio dramatic series produced during the so-called “golden age” of old-time radio. For that first broadcast, the Workshop revived what is generally considered to be the first original play for radio: The Comedy of Danger, by British playwright-novelist Richard Hughes, better known for A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), an adventure story that has been ranked among the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.

Danger is a sort of Poseidon Adventure staged in utter darkness; a spectacular melodrama of disaster involving three people about to drown in a collapsed coal mine. It is a scenario mined for the theater of the mind, evoked by sounds and silence alone. Danger was first produced by the BBC on 15 January 1924, but was still a novelty act when the Workshop chose it for its inaugural broadcast more than twelve years later. Back in 1924, US radio had no use for such theatricals, Hughes remarked in an article about “The Birth of Radio Drama”:

A few months [after the BBC production], finding myself in New York, I tried to interest American radio authorities in the newborn child.  Their response is curious when you consider how very popular radio plays were later to become in the States.  They stood me good luncheons; they listened politely; but then they rejected the whole idea.  That sort of thing might be possible in England, they explained, where broadcasting was a monopoly and a few crackpot highbrows in the racket could impose what they liked on a suffering public.  But the American setup was different: it was competitive, so it had to be popular, and it stood to reason that plays you couldn’t see could never be popular.  Yet it was not very long before these specially written “blind” plays (my own “Comedy of Danger” among them) began to be heard in America, and on the European continent as well.

Other than creating a situation in which the characters are as much bereft of sight as the audience, Danger has no artistic merit. It purports to be philosophical about death; but the fifteen minutes allotted for this piece of melodramatic hokum are hardly time enough to probe deeply, and much of the dialogue is ho-hum or altogether laughable.

What makes this seemingly generic if radiogenic play more personally meaningful to me is that it was written by a Brit of Welsh parentage, by a man who chose to live in a Welsh castle, and who chose, for this, his first dramatic piece for radio, a story set not far from the very hills where I found myself after these long years of writing in New York City about American radio drama. Is it a coincidence that I came home to the birthplace of radio drama?

“Goodness knows!” exclaims one of the trapped visitors,

I’d expect anything of a country likes Wales! They’ve got a climate like the flood and a language like the Tower of Babel, and then they go and lure us into the bowels of the earth and turn the lights off! Wretched, incompetent—their houses are full of cockroaches—Ugh!

In the background, Welsh miners face their fears by singing “Aberystwyth”—the name of the town near which I now reside. The Welsh, of course, are known for their oral tradition, for their singing and poetry recitals; their most famous poet is Dylan Thomas, author of the best know of all radio plays, “Under Milkwood.” It is here that American radio drama is still being thought of and written about: Rundfunk und Hörspiel in den USA 1930-1950 (1992), for instance, by fellow German Eckhard Breitinger, was written here, as was Terror on the Air, by Richard J. Hand, published in 2006. It is here, in Wales, that I started communicating with radio dramatist Norman Corwin; and it is here that, after a short break from my journal, I will continue my visits to the theater of the mind.

Yes, it is a web all right, even though I am not sure whether it was woven by or for me. I am merely discovering connections that, upon reflection, are plain to see and comforting to behold.

Posted on

On This Day in 1945: An "Undecided Molecule" Becomes a Matter of Radio Activity

Well, if I said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Maybe I should say it a thousand times more and keep on saying it. Recently, the British equivalent of the destructive piece of ill equipment now installed at the White House managed to revive what might very well put an end to civilization: nuclear energy. As I looked across the fields at the green hills of Wales, some of which vistas are spoiled by clusters of wind farms, I thought what I would do if an atomic power station were to rise there. I don’t suppose leaving behind the deceptive serenity that is our garden (pictured above) would be forceful enough a statement, since moving would not bring about any change for the environment that is going to suffer at the greedy hands of narrow minds who think that today’s economy is more important than the ecology of tomorrow.

I can and will get passionate about nuclear energy, and, in this one matter, I accept neither counter-argument nor levity. That is why I fail to get much of enjoyment out of “The Undecided Molecule,” a “rhymed fantasy concerning dangerous developments among the elements” that was presented on US radio on this day, 17 July, in 1945. With a cast including Groucho Marx, Vincent Price, and Sylvia Sidney, it was given a lavish production by Columbia Presents Corwin under the direction of its author, Norman Corwin—the very man who just a few days ago offered me further advice regarding my writings about old-time radio.

“The Undecided Molecule” is a courtroom drama, of sorts. At the center of it is X, the titular molecule charged with endangering the universe by failing to find its place in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms. At the suggestion of the Defense, the representatives of each kingdom are called forward to assist X in making up its mind.

Now, the play is a charming piece of nonsense, nonsense of the kind made meaningful and literarily respectable by Victorian poet Edward Lear. To call it utter “nonsense,” in short, does not in any way belittle such joyful wordplay. And yet, I feel that Corwin’s play is belittling a matter of life and death. To do so was not his intention, as he assures readers of one of his anthologies of radio plays, in which the script of “The Undecided Molecule” was published.

“The atomic bomb was several weeks east of Hiroshima when this was first broadcast,” Corwin pointed out; “so it wasn’t that which got me writing about Mr. X.” Yet the testing of such nuclear might in New Mexico was already a thing of the past when the play went on the radioactive air. However they were conceived or intended, these cheerful lines are burdened by a history of destruction:

Oh, dear! Oh, dear!
The cosmic alarm!
Which means, I fear,
Some woeful harm
Is afoot or awing
In the universe.
Some deplorable thing,
Some active curse
Like a falling sky
Or a new star-cluster,
Been banged up by
A cluster-buster.

Thus cries Corwin’s Vice President in Charge of Physiochemistry when the alarm is sounded that the order of the universe has been disturbed. It is a wake-up call that might be suggesting

[. . .] a dried-up sea
Or another Ice Age for a spell,
Or maybe it’s only a freezing hell.
On the other hand it might possibly be
That Hitler is alive and well.

Hitler, of course, was good and dead. Two months earlier, Corwin had invited Americans to dance around his grave. It was in this atmosphere of relief that the Atomic Age was welcomed and the trifle of Uranium comically exploited. Soon after, this new instrument of horror and psycho-terror would inaugurate the cold war with a blast some believed could end all wars. How disillusioned many who fought the Second World War must have felt when they realized that there was no end to destruction, the preparation, prevention and clean up of which is such lucrative business. I was reminded of this last night, watching the post-war drama The Best Years of Our Lives. I am reminded of it now, as I look out into the fields, in awe of molested molecules that might decide our future or what there is of it.

In “The Undecided Molecule,” things turn out all right for the kingdoms of nature; but the matter is rather too heavy to be made light of in this way. With nuclear trouble mounting, it seems dangerous to make a molehill out of a molecule.

Posted on

Old-time Radio Primer: K Stands for Knowledge

Well, I don’t know. About my last poll, I mean. With this survey, the responses to which are captured below, I wanted to raise questions about the ways in which the mass media reflect our everyday lives or fail to do so. Can we rely on the media to represent—to talk to and tell of—those who are exposed to them? Will future generations watch archive footage of Big Brother or Desperate Housewives in order to learn about life in America during these early years of the 21st century? To what extent can popular culture serve as a time capsule by means of which scholars yet unborn might presume to enter our minds and mine our psyche?

The question of representation through media is of interest to anyone who, in some aspect of his or her existence, is not or cannot conform with the norms propagated and enforced by them. To anyone, in short. We all have qualities that, we sense, marginalize us, be it a particular of our physical being, our mentality, or our upbringing. Whether simplistic or symbolic, popular culture cannot reflect all that renders us distinctive. It is apt to alienate us at times, to create moments in which we do not feel that we are being considered or addressed, moments in which we resent being inaccurately depicted or altogether ignored.

Such instances do not merely affirm our individuality; they make apparent that those creating popular culture have a vested interest in shaping us in their image. Yet to demand that media be more sensitive to our differences may result in their leveling, an insistence on universality that makes popular culture even more generic. Political correctness, which is largely the invention of litigious societies, accomplishes no less.

However bland its offerings may strike those whose senses have been dulled by long exposure to pictures that leave little to the imagination, radio in the pre-television age (the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s) was not nearly as concerned about offending minorities as television is today. It was indifferent to millions whom sponsors did not consider relevant, either because those millions were unlikely to become potential consumers of the products advertised or because their business was not deemed desirable as it clashed with the image in light of which advertisers wanted goods and services to be received.

It does not follow, however, that we cannot glean knowledge about American life from recordings of soap operas, comedy programs, and thrillers. The soap operas of the 1930s may drive home anxieties about the depression; 1940s radio comedies will tell you much about life on the homefront; and the thrillers of the 1950s create more or less readily translatable scenarios of fear, prejudice and hatred during the McCarthy era.

Propaganda and advertising, it is true, were meant to trigger anticipated reactions, even though the reactions of those tuning in can never be entirely predicted, which, in turn, can make the most generic program highly personal to anyone listening. Yet there is nothing intrinsic in the recording of such programs that gives us access to those very personal responses. The theater of the mind is still open to us today; but how about the mind of anyone else staging productions in this legendary venue?

Faced with the challenge of tracing real lives in presumably faceless escapism, it might help to conceive of popular culture not so much as a reflector of everyday life but as its generator; not, to modify the old and meaningful analogy, as a shallow reflecting pool, but as a radiating sun. Programs create their audiences, in a real and literal sense. And while not all minds are quite so cooperative, the sun of these broadcasts nonetheless captures the shadows of those who were cast or outcast by this light.

Instead of listening for echoes of those who once sat before their receivers, we might discover them in the act of reception. All it takes is the imagination and empathy of today’s listeners to turn indistinct outlines into responsive minds as distinctive as we believe our own to be. To consider chiefly as occasions to determine, dream of or deride otherness (as historic, nostalgic, or camp) diminishes the opportunity of reading with an understanding ear.

This is by no means my last word on the subject of radio as a depot of cultural knowledge or a dispenser of knowledge about culture. As these contradictory reflections suggest, I don’t have any definitive answers to the question I posed; if ever I develop them, I hope to have the humility to become suspicious of my simplifying mind. As always, I prefer to keep circulating ideas rather than put a full stop to the inquiry.

Posted on

Bringing It Home: Arch Oboler’s "Visitor from Hades"

There will be seven of us tonight. For the first time since I moved into the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills (back in the autumn of 2004), these walls and the hedge surrounding the garden will encircle something approaching a crowd. Unless, of course, one subscribes to the view that three suffice to form such a gathering, an adage suggesting that any two people enjoying each other’s company will find a third party to be an intrusion on their happiness—or their private misery. The American melodramatist Arch Oboler played around with this idea in “The Visitor from Hades,” a thriller broadcast on this day, 13 July, in 1943.

“The Visitor from Hades,” which is no comment on the reception of that noted (and, some think, notorious) world leader during his stopover in Germany today, tells the story of a married couple who are less than embracing of each other. They have quarrelled too much in quarters too close not to be visited by doubts about their relationship. On the day Mr. Oboler chose to dramatize, the two are ready to murder one another, or at least threaten as much in their fierce argument.

Now, you might expect that some such attempt will be made in the course of the play. Whether to clarify positions or simply to captivate its audience, relies on violent confrontations, on concrete manifestations of differences that, in many a radio thriller, were settled with guns—the implement eight out of ten sound effect artists recommend. Okay, so I made up that piece of statistic; but firearms sure were popular in dramas depending entirely on sound—on speech, noise, and silent intervals just long enough to make you wonder who among the duelling debaters went down and who might have succeeded in making this most definite of statements.

“The Visitor from Hades” forgoes such a connubial shootout. The violence is audible, all right; but it is the sound of smashed glass that puts an end to the name calling between Dora and her husband, Sam. In a domestic dispute, anything handy may serve as a missile when remarks seem to miss the mark. Has Dora been hurling something more tangible than insults? Has Sam beaten her to it? Or has some third party, fed up with the bad-neighborly bickering, smashed one of their windows? Perhaps, as is so often the case in the deus-ex-machinations of the melodramatist, the intervening force has been coincidental to this fight. Just what kind of story does this sound tell?

The listener is given some time to speculate about this turn of events, ambiguities that generally make for the most thrilling moments to be enjoyed in the theater of the mind. Two things are certain at this stage in the play: the couple have heard something crash and, as a result of this disruption, have stopped confronting each other. You might say, if such puns are acceptable to you, that they have been soundly defeated. Now, they are forced to face the intruder, the titular “Visitor.”

The two are terrified by his presence. It is a voiceless, soundless presence that prolongs the listener’s sense of uncertainty about what exactly is happening between or to them. The shocking experience of discovering an intruder in their none-too-happy home, the play suggests, is teaching Dora and Sam a lesson about their marriage; confronting the depth of their hatred is helping them to rekindle their love.

I have never been an admirer of Mr. Oboler’s work, partly because he was so immodest about its artistic merits and social significance. Such pretensions aside, he was an efficient craftsman and propagandist whose plays succeeded in the aural medium precisely because they were made for it. ”The Visitor from Hades” is one of Oboler’s smarter performances. It goes beyond the claptrap of many of his sonic potboilers, whether they were written, like this particular piece, for the thriller series Lights Out! or for one of his more sober anthologies of propaganda dramas. Its premise, at least, is perfectly suited to the medium; it is entirely radiogenic in its conjuring up of a menacing presence that is not only invisible but soundless (and as such difficult to contain and conquer).

It is a play in which an idea can take center stage. Despite its perfunctory dialogue and an insistence on doing away with its intriguing ambiguities in a rather graceless and overstated manner, it generates something else besides mere surprises and is more lasting in its effect on the listener’s imagination.

To my mind, however, it also generates some doubt as to the sincerity of its sentiment. After all, it was Oboler who, during those war years, insisted on raising the spectre of hatred and unleashing it in the living rooms of America. It was the hatred toward what might destroy us that Oboler argued to be essential to victory, an approach to wartime propaganda that made him quite a few influential enemies and, according to him, caused the sudden cancellation of one of his play cycles. Oboler counted too much on American’s potential for hatred to be demonstrating the triumph of love.

Posted on

"Much is published": A Silence Surrounding Henry David Thoreau

Sure, his life near Concord, Massachusetts, as he describes it in Walden, was a quiet one. Thoreau “kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the chum, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this.”

There is violence in the phrase. And for once I can sense it. Silence being “broken,” I mean. For the next two months or so, my life will be less quiet than I have come to live and like it of late. There will be old friends visiting in July and September, there will be travels in good company, and there will be reunions in New York and in New England this August. I shall endeavor to keep my journal all the while; but journals like this are so much easier to keep in the monotone and silence of a retiring life, a life which need not be tired or tiresome as long as there are thoughts to be spun from whatever impulses and impressions there are to be got and gathered in the everyday. Such contemplative quiet, which to some might spell disquietude, was experienced by Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this day, 12 July, in 1817.

Yet even in its remoteness, his life was still filled with the “Sounds” to which Thoreau dedicated a chapter of Walden. In it, he argues that, while “confined to books,” we are “in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed.” What he found being made public were the sounds that not only surrounded but defined his everyday. During that first summer at Walden, Thoreau did not read. Instead, he looked, listened, and took in:

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end.

Even then, the drama of the scheduled, orderly life of the city was penetrating the quiet woods, sounds that told of a life governed by the ticking of clocks rather than the time told by the elements and the stirrings of nature:

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s your pay for them! screams the countryman’s whistle; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

The wits writing plays for , who often lent Walt Whitman their ear, very rarely listened to Thoreau, even though a sound effects artist might have appreciated the noise that lent rhythm to Thoreau’s seemingly disorderly existence. Perhaps, his civil disobedience went against the grain of those laboring in a mass medium whose commercial sponsors counted on conformity.

An impersonation of Thoreau was heard, however briefly, in “The Heart and the Fountain,” a radio play about his contemporary, Margaret Fuller. Produced by the Cavalcade of America it was presented on 28 April 1941—at a time when it suited American broadcasters to be quiet about the war in Europe, a time when life on a commune like Brook Farm sounded like escapism,” a Blithedale Romance to blot out thoughts of Blighty.

Getting away from modernity need not be an escape; it can be a chance to come to your senses by subjecting yourself to silence and simplicity—a challenge that, in an age of over-stimulation, may very well drive us out of our narrow minds.

Posted on

Orson and the Count: The Man Cast as The Shadow as the Man Who Cast None

The afternoon couldn’t be any less gloomy. The sky is of a deep blue, the air is fresh, and—until the health hazard that is Tony Blair gets his death wish to turn the West of Britain into a nuclear powerhouse (as if the radioactive Irish Sea weren’t enough of a warning against atomic energy)—a plain and reliable sign that nature, or what remains of it, is still providing an atmosphere in which even those among the ostensibly superior animals may thrive who are least protective of its balance.

Long gone are the days when peril could be apprehended with the naked eye, the days before pesticides made our apples look appealing and generals fought wars with missiles to keep their hands clean. Those were the days when shields and fortresses were things of iron and stone, rather than metaphors for our lack of security. The Middle Ages, in short.

Yet even during those presumably darker days, the invisible was more terrifying than any clear sign of danger, which is how superstitions, sanctioned or otherwise, could capture and enthrall our imagination. The untraceable was always ominous, and clarity suspicious. After all, even if threats eventually manifest themselves, the absence of any such ocular proof of safety or danger is valid only for the moment of looking; it is no insurance against impending peril or against the human failings of sight and oversights.

Every technological means of capturing danger and thereby defusing it gives rise to invisible counterterrors, to elusive weaponry, to secrecy and stealth. No artistic medium was more suited to tapping into those fears of the unseen than radio, the mass medium that, back in 1938, was capable of causing widespread terror by virtue of sound alone.

The man largely responsible for this terror attack—known as “The War of the Worlds”—was an ambitious 23-year-old whose voice was familiar to millions of American as that belonging to Lamont Cranston and his alter ego, The Shadow (introduced here). On this day, 11 July, in 1938, the theatrical Wunderkind took on another, rather more grand and prestigious radio project by mounting his Mercury Theater on the air.

Lurking underneath the cloak of artistic pretensions was the melodramatic excess that had made The Shadow such a radio triumph—the ghastly and lurid that generated chills more pleasant than any news from Europe, darkening in the shadow of fascism. The opening attraction of the now legendary Mercury Theater on the Air was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which, during those days, was not yet the academically respectable narrative it today, despite Welles’s insistence that it could be found in “every representative library of classic English narratives.”

The Mercury‘s “Dracula” (recently podcast, with an excellent introduction by Jim Widner) is unabashed blood and thunder. And, despite its toning down of the novel’s overt sexuality and its counterbalancing installation of an intellectual woman like Mina Harker (played by Shadow sidekick Agnes Moorehead), this adaptation for radio is more in keeping with the original novel than any filmic adaptation. Tearing down the house with neo-Gothic hooey, Welles and fellow adaptor John Houseman retain some of the structure of Stoker’s novel, a story assembled from various manuscripts, gathered by those who join forces to make sure that Dracula is out for the count.

Like the novel, the radio adaptation emphasizes the use of modern technology (train and typewriter, telegram and phonograph) as weapons against an ancient curse, a past insisting on making its presence felt. It is a past so present that, ultimately, it can only be conquered by forces as old as itself: the solidarity of individuals rising against a despotic power and the reassuring solidity of a piece of wood driven through a heart of darkness.

The Mercury‘s “Dracula,” like its subsequent production of “The War of the Worlds” (discussed here), may be read as a comment on fascisms: the rallying of western democracy against the threat of a blood-sucking dictator to the east of them. It is a comforting romance, this triumph of unity—and of radio as a unifying force. Yet, as those under the influence of that instrument of are often unaware, the prominent figures casting shadows in our midst—more ingratiating and integrated than the lonesome Count—can be much more difficult to hold accountable, discount or counter.