Category: Radio Plays

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“Isn’t she nice?”: Laraine Day (1913-2007) on the Air

Well, the first thing I thought of when I heard about the passing of screen actress Laraine Day on 10 November 2007 was this remark by Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in Foreign Correspondent (1940): “I would have liked to have a bigger star.” He could not have been faced with a brighter one. Best known in the 1940s for her recurring role of nurse Mary Lamont in a series of Dr. Kildare movies, Day (seen left in a picture taken from my copy of the 3-9 January 1942 issue of Movie-Radio Guide) was as bright as her name suggested. There seemed to be no edge from which to push to her into more ambitious performances. She was just so darn nice . . . at least until she was forced to give back that pretty Locket.

In The Locket (1946), Day’s cheerful personality is being cleverly exploited to make audiences wonder whether her character, Nancy, is really as charming and uncomplicated as she seems. “She is nice,” a woman attending Nancy’s wedding observes. “She’s lucky,” another guest replies. “If you’re nice, you have to be lucky,” the first one counters, only to be dealt with the riposte that “[i]f you’re lucky, you can afford to be nice.”

Nancy can afford to be nice, however little happiness being a good girl managed to get her as a child; but is she just Mrs. Lucky to have landed such a well-to-do husband, or has her not being quite so nice something to do with it? The Locket, in which Day stars opposite Robert Mitchum, Brian Aherne, and Gene Raymond, is Hitchcock’s Marnie without the sex angle. It is a dark, labyrinthine thriller that casts welcome shadows on the brightness of Ms. Day.

Before making her frequent US television appearances, hosting her own program, Daydreaming with Laraine (1951), and starring in a number of Lux Video Theater productions, Day was heard on the Lux Radio Theater in recreations of her screen roles in Mr. Lucky (1943) and Bride by Mistake (1944). She was also cast in a number of original radio plays produced by the Cavalcade of America (such as in “The Camels Are Coming,” opposite her Foreign Correspondent co-star Joel McCrea).

On Biography in Sound, Day let listeners in on the home life of her husband, Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, with whom she also appeared on Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show (4 February 1951), in which Day’s clean image was contrasted with that of her irascible husband:

Bankhead: Well, I must say, Laraine, that being the wife of a stormy baseball manager doesn’t seem to have changed you very much.  You still have that fresh, lovely, scrubbed look.

Day: Why shouldn’t I look scrubbed? Every time we have an argument, Leo sends me to the showers.

Considering that Day’s projected identity resembles an ad for toilet soap, it is not surprising that she made several return visits to the Lux Radio Theater. Introduced as “ever lovely” by Mr. DeMille, Day enjoyed a rather more interesting vehicle than her own comedies in the mystery “The Unguarded Hour” (4 December 1944).

In that adaptation for radio (of a movie based on a stage drama that itself was an adaptation), Day plays a valiant wife who tries to protect her husband from a scandal of which he is unaware. His words, uttered by co-star Robert Montgomery, capture what is the Laraine Day persona:

How do you think I came to worship you? Because you’re so pretty? Because you win large silver cups jumping horses or play good bridge? No, darling.  You have what’s called quality.  It’s kindness, it’s generosity, that makes all the rest of us feel just a little shoddy.

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Napoleon Solo Dynamite: Robert Vaughn “Behind the Iron Curtain”

Well, it wasn’t exactly the Summer of Love, back in 1968, when American film and television actor Robert Vaughn, then known to millions of Americans as “Napoleon Solo” came to Czechoslovakia to play a Nazi officer in The Bridge at Remagen. Four decades later, Vaughn got the opportunity to share his experience in Tracy Spottiswoode’s radio play “Solo Behind the Curtain.” The play aired last Monday on BBC Radio 4.

Now, Spottiswoode told me about “Solo” some 18 months ago when we sat in the kitchen of her Cardiff home (as mentioned here, in passing); by now, I had almost given up on ever getting to hear it, especially since I have visited Prague in the meantime and dined at the Cafe Europa on Wenceslas Square, where Vaughn enjoys a cool drink and the warmth of late spring as the play opens.

In a nod to Vaughn’s most famous role, “Solo” comes on like a 1960s spy thriller, with suave Vaughn feeling “pretty sure” that he was “being followed. In those days, there was nothing surprising in that. An American in an Iron Curtain country, during the Cold War. It would have been unusual not to be followed. What was surprising, though, was just how pretty she was.”

Her name is Pepsi (wonderfully portrayed by Serbian actress Vesna Stanojevic), and she is used to being called “bubbly.” Perhaps it is her blood (Pepsi’s father was American communist who, in a moment of nostalgia, named his daughter after the soft drink he could no longer enjoy in his wife’s homeland of Czechoslovakia). The smart if malapropism prone young woman, who serves as the crew’s interpreter, is proud of her country’s relative freedom, but eager to leave with the Americans as those freedoms are being crushed.

Vaughn is an excellent narrator, as his father Walter had been, back in the mid-1940s, when he narrated wartime propaganda plays like “Assignment USA” for the series Words at War, aside from appearing on thriller programs like Murder at Midnight and Gangbusters.

Unlike his father, Vaughn was busy exposing propaganda, rather than delivering it. During the time of the filming, he was at work on his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. As you will hear, it very nearly got lost as a peaceful spring gave way to a bloody summer.

His is not the voice of a 35-year-old, to be sure; but Vaughn draws you into his story all the same as he recreates his experience shooting in Czechoslovakia . . . until the shooting began in the streets. In August 1968, a short period of reformed communism under Alexander Dubček, known as the Prague Spring, came to an end as Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Not that Vaughn was ready to say U.N.C.L.E. and get stranded in a country hostile to the west in general and a film crew in particular, engaged as it was in firing explosives and blowing up things to restage a war for maximum box office impact.

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Halloweaned from Image Horror

Montague was hoping for a feast as I carved the pumpkin, next to which he condescended to pose for me here. Much to his disappointment, none of his tricks could get a treat out of me. The treats this evening are going to be for the ear, delivered to those who are willing to lend one in exchange for the promise of goose bumps, up-and-down-your-spine shivers, or a state of unease and lingering disquietude. “Did Freddy Kruger Slay Cocteau?” I once asked. I am inclined to think that pictures numb us more quickly than the exposure to sound and silence, and the protean apparitions they conjure, millionfold, in the minds of those who dare to wear a blindfold.

This would be the night to lay your eyes to rest (unless you are already equipped for the trial, like Edward Arnold’s non-sighted detective in Eyes in the Night, which I screened yesterday) and accept the invitation to pass through the Creaking Door into the Inner Sanctum of sonic Terror, a world in The Shadow of doubt and Suspicion removed from the image hell of the in-your-face horrors with which we, jumpy enough at the very mention of “terrorism,” are wont to make ourselves jump these days. You know, the kind of boo! that so quickly turns into the blech! of boredom and disgust. So, Quiet, Please, and Lights Out, everybody. It is time to step into the vault . . .

Mind you, many found their way back into that Black Castle. In this age of podcasting and streaming, the thrill of listening to ghost stories and dramatized tales of terror is once again being experienced by a vast audience, a ratings-defying, multicultural multitude impossible to track down. Anyone anywhere can listen now; and, apparently, quite a few folks do. As of this writing, episodes of The Shadow have been downloaded nearly 225,000 times from the Internet Archives. To be sure, that is a fraction of the original weekly audience for this long-running episodic thriller program (previously discussed here), but a sizeable fraction nonetheless.

“How a thirty-something academic in the valleys of Wales acquired so much knowledge of American old-time radio begins to shape up as the makings of a new Mysterious Traveler script,” remarked the aforementioned radio thriller writer David Kogan. Now, Kogan could have been describing me, who, as a thirty-something academic, moved from the broadcasting metropolis of New York City to this Wild West of Britain. He was, in fact, describing Richard J. Hand, whose Terror on the Air! (2006) I am perusing this Hallowe’en.

I was curious to discover which radio thrillers Hand gave his “thumbs up” and which ones got the finger (there is no mention of Edith Meiser’s Sherlock Holmes thrillers, for instance). Predictably, Howard Koch’s previously discussed adaptation of The War of the Worlds) features prominently. If I were in New York City on 3 November, I would certainly return to the Partners & Crime bookstore in Greenwich Village (last visited here), where this seminal and resonant shockumentary is being recreated in the make-believe studio of W-WOW!. Surely, few American radio plays have surpassed the thrills elicited by that infamous Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast from 30 October 1938.

Also mentioned by Hand are the Mercury productions of “Dracula” and “The Hitch-Hiker,” as are radio melodrama anthologies like Creeps by Night, The Hermit’s Cave and Alonzo Deen Cole’s pioneering Witch’s Tale. Making the bloody cut as well is “It Happened” (11 May 1938), one of my favorites among Arch Oboler’s Lights Out offerings, starring Mercedes MacCambridge as a schoolgirl rather too eager to delve into the mysteries of Paris. Hand calls it a “fast-moving play” that combines elements of the “crime thriller” with “Gothic horror,” a play that is “melodramatic in plot but modernist in technique.”

Now, despite leaping at the opportunity of witnessing the “State Executioner” in a soundstaging at the Museum of Radio and Television in New York some years ago, I am no Oboler enthusiast, as I made clear in Etherized Victorians; but “It Happens” is largely devoid of Oboleric pretensions. Dragging listeners Grand Guignolens volens into the sewers of their dirty minds, and there is no mind dirtier than a receptive one, it creates indelible images without having to show—or shower us with—buckets of blood. “Pleasant dreams . . . hmmmmm?”

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Radio Is . . . a "Popular Corpse"

Well, you know you’re in trouble when you are asked to find a missing dame who “collects epitaphs.” On this day, 30 October, in 1948, radio detective Michael Shayne was hired to find such a dame. Could he be featuring prominently in that album of headstone headlines before this case is solved? His assignment that Saturday evening was “The Case of the Popular Corpse.” Back then, Shayne was portrayed by Jeff Chandler, who, at that time, was also cast opposite the aforementioned Eve Arden in the radio sitcom Our Miss Brooks. His film career would not take off until the early 1950s; and, like many Hollywood hopefuls, the man who came to Tinseltown as Ira Gossel kept afloat on the airwaves, playing frequently in the Lux Radio Theater and stepping behind the microphone to please audiences of Suspense, Escape, and assorted P. I. candy tossed on the air to catch the ear of an increasingly fickle audience.

In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I might investigate the “Popular Corpse,” intrigued by its New Orleans setting and curious about a program I have not as yet given any consideration, serious or otherwise. Turns out, I have been misled, more so than our hapless investigator. “The Popular Corpse” is executed routinely if competently, leaving no ghostly trail in the graveyard of your mind.

“Bei Mir Bist Du Shayne”? Not quite. The sounds of fisticuffs, the rants of an irate gardener, a nocturnal chase in a cemetery, and whatever goes for tough talk in the air-conditioned atmosphere of radio dramatics—not much to make sense or simulate the senses. “You’d better read a book,” commented critic Harriet Van Horne on the state of the radio thriller anno 1948: “I think I’ll take my mystery neat—out of a book—rather than give an ear to the half-hour blood baths common to radio.”

The title of this Michael Shayne episode, scripted by Robert Ryf, is an apt metaphor for the medium itself, for commercial radio, the talent it consumed, and the moribund condition in which it was left well before the end of the 1950s. By the late 1940s, radio thrillers, which rarely equalled, let alone surpassed “The War of the Worlds” (broadcast on this day in 1938), were not necessarily a skeleton in the closet of a motion picture star; but it seems that actors, producers, and audiences alike could not wait to bury them when television began to stomp on the grave of the imagination that radio had kept alive all those years.

That said, The New Adventures of Michael Shayne came to American ears for a decade (from 1944 to 1953); on television, the detective met his demise after a single season (1960-61). Perhaps, looks can kill faster, especially if Jeff Chandler is out of the picture . . .

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Next Stop, Proud Valley

How odd, I thought, when I heard myself saying that, instead of screening our customary late night movie, I would retire early because . . . I had a film to catch. The Fflics festival (announced a few weeks ago) got underway today here in Wales and we have tickets for three of the screenings tomorrow. The first film on our agenda, Proud Valley (1940), starring Paul Robeson, will be shown at 10 AM. Robeson’s Welsh connections were still unknown to me when first I posted his picture here; but I have been looking forward to an occasion to explore this bond of brotherhood for quite some time now.

At noon, we are going to emerge from the mineshafts of Proud Valley (also known as The Tunnel) to take in the propaganda film The Silent Village (1943), a recreation of the aforementioned Lidice massacre on Welsh soil. I am equipped with Eduard Stehlík’s account of the 1942 raid on the Czech village, a book I discovered a few weeks ago on a tour of the Jewish Quarter in Prague.

What follows is a detour to Hollywood with Bette Davis as a teacher in a Welsh mining town in The Corn Is Green (1945), based on a play by Welsh actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams. I wonder whether I will be able to spot radio actors John Dehner and Rhoda Williams (whom I once met during an old-time radio convention in Newark) in a cast that is all over the map and as authentic as the one headed by Olivia de Havilland in the 12 June 1950 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of Corn, in which Ms. Williams may also be heard.

In between these courses of acetate treats we might just manage to grab a bite to eat and perhaps get a chance to chat with our friend, silent movie composer and radio playwright Neil Brand, who will accompany Maurice Elvey’s long-lost Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) at the festival on Saturday evening.

As much as I am looking forward to a day at the pictures, I hope the antemeridian screenings won’t render my cinematic experience an academic one, let alone a series of barely suppressed yawns. Then again, I can count on Mr. Robeson to stir me with his rendition of “Deep River” . . .

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Hit and Run: Allan Stevenson (1918-2007)

You have probably never heard of Allan Stevenson, the dead man whose voice is now in my ear. I am quite used to hearing the dead speak. Listening to recordings of old radio melodramas is not unlike attending a séance in which the voices of the departed are being made audible by means of a powerful medium. Mr. Stevenson, though, has not long been what is generally thought of as permanently silent. He walked among the living only a few hours ago, an old man, propped up by a cane and blind in one eye. I may have passed him by on one of my many walks downtown to nearby Hunter College or on my way to see a friend who lived in Stevenson’s neighborhood on East 72nd Street. Absorbed in thoughts, I am often dead to those around me, which is why I feel compelled to lend an ear, however belatedly.

According to an indifferently penned article in the New York Daily News, the retired actor who had performed on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s long-running Anne of the Thousand Days starring Rex Harrison (1948-49) and the Phil Silvers success Do Re Mi (1960-62), was killed at 2:36 AM by a hit-and-run driver while trying to cross First Avenue in an attempt to get a cup of coffee, a last friendly gesture to a doorman on his block.

Playing in the theater of the mind some six decades earlier, Stevenson was faced with many perilous situations on both sides of the law; and some of his lives were spent before the conclusion of a thirty-minute broadcast. He had supporting roles on programs like Crime Fighters, a dramatic series promising listeners “master manhunters to match master criminals,” and John Steele, Adventurer. In an episode of the latter, Stevenson played a crooked jockey who has his hopes for a life on Easy Street dashed after riding “The Long Shot” (18 April 1950). It is the story of a man “trapped in the bitterness of the past and [put] face to face with the future,” a man who “learned too late that no one can live alone.”

On NBC’s Radio City Playhouse, best known for staging what would later turn into the Academy Awards behemoth All About Eve (as discussed here), Stevenson was cast in the Runyonesque “Betrayal” (30 August 1948) and, more prominently, in the murder mystery “The Wine of Oropalo” (18 December 1949), in which he played the victim of a deadly manipulation.

In Top Secret, a series of World War II espionage thrillers written and directed by Radio City Playhouse producer Harry W. Junkin, Stevenson was twice cast opposite “gorgeous Ilona Massey” (previously mentioned here). In “The Unknown Mission” (30 July 1950), he played a French baron of considerable wealth and charm whom Massey’s glamorous spy is called upon to eliminate.

“I wish we had proof that he is an enemy agent,” she sighs, “It is hard for a woman, without knowing why, to murder.” The hit-noblewoman seems ideally equipped to carry out the assignment. After all, the young Frenchman has “only one weakness,” she is told. “Women.” His grace, however, is well prepared for the attack. He, too, has murder on his mind; until, that is, he permits himself to wonder whether she might care for him. The two assassins find it impossible to follow their respective orders . . . but the duke’s days are numbered all the same.

A week later, Stevenson was again heard on the program in an episode titled “Disaster in London” (6 August 1950), this time portraying a British intelligence agent who is to assist the baroness to thwart enemy plans to poison and kill the entire population of the metropolis. As is made plain to the listener in one of those Shakespearean asides so effective in audio drama, the Englishman is a traitor, himself involved in the chemical warfare plot.

After learning that recordings of his private conversations bespeak his double-agency, this son of a false hero breaks down to disclose his less-than-ideological motives. “There is no dignity left for you but silence,” the traitor’s mother remarks, only to demand an explanation for her son’s actions.

Programs like Top Secret seem an unworthy memorial to an actor who may have hoped for a rather more distinguished career in the theater. And yet, it is the indignity of his death that calls for an outcry, a voice to expose the infamy of his silent killing . . .

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From Here . . . to Eternity: Deborah Kerr (1921-2007)

It was only two weeks ago that I celebrated her 86th birthday and caught up with her early career by watching Major Barbara (1941). Today, the world learned about the death of Deborah Kerr, who passed away on 16 October 2007 after a long illness. While her name is on everyone’s tongue, I am going to keep her voice in my ear, listening to some of her radio performances of the late 1940s and early to mid-1950s, a busy time in the life of the British actress gone Hollywood. “I just wasn’t destined to be a homebody,” Kerr told the readers of The Fan’s Own Film Annual back in 1960, providing her British audience with a glimpse of her peripatetic existence, her life in Hollywood, the challenges of ploughing “through the jungle on an adventurous safari” (for King Solomon’s Mines, shot in Africa), or going on a coast-to-coast tour (thirty-five weeks, forty cities) to play Laura Reynolds in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, having starred in its successful Broadway run, which began on her 32nd birthday in 1953.

Yes, Kerr’s life was “one long round of packing luggage and then more or less living out of it for anywhere from four to fourteen months at a stretch.” Yet, through the wonders of the wireless, she still managed to enter the homes of millions of Americans who tuned to Jack Benny, the Screen Guild Theater, or the Hollywood Star Playhouse.

Now, I have never had the chance to see Kerr on stage, where she appeared, for instance, in a West End revival of Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green, the film version of which (starring Bette Davis) I am going to catch at the Fflics film festival here in Aberystwyth next week. To me, radio, not film, is the next best thing to the theater. True, Kerr made her US radio debut at a time when live performances gave way to taped ones; but, even when its sounds are canned, radio still has the kind of intimacy not achieved on celluloid, no matter how small the image you are watching on your personal computer or television set.

Beginning in 1947, the year she moved from Britain to Hollywood, Kerr appeared on a number of popular or prestigious radio programs. Even though she is better known for starring in a film based on a sensational bestseller that, like few others, attacked the radio industry of the late 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s previously mentioned The Hucksters, Kerr did go on the air, contaminated as it was, to promote her films and meet her audience.

In 1947, 1951 and 1952, she stepped onto the soundstage of the Lux Radio Theatre, starring in “Vacation from Marriage,” an adaptation of Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers, in which she had starred opposite Robert Donat back in 1945. For Lux, Kerr also reprised her roles in Edward, My Son (1949) and King Solomon’s Mines (1950).

As previously mentioned, Kerr played the title role in the NBC University Theater an adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (3 April 1949). She went on Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show to recreate a scene from The Women (17 December 1950), and was heard on the long-running Suspense program in a thriller titled “The Lady Pamela” (31 March 1952).

Just what or who was “The Lady Pamela”? Not your Richardsonian heroine, to be sure. The name conjures Silver Spoon romances; but the spoons all end up in the lady’s pockets. Shamela’s more like it. Written by the prolific radio playwright Antony Ellis, the play opens as Pamela Barnes lays her eyes on a tiara, browsing in a New York antique shop that is promptly held up.

As it turns out, the “Lady” was in on the robbery. A tough, no-nonsense crook, she takes $500 out of the cut of her partner in crime for slapping her rather too realistically during the holdup. The police are soon on her case and “Lady Pamela” lands in the slammer; but the loot remains missing. Released nearly three years later, she returns to New York in search of the stolen goods and the guys who got away with it.

Always the “Lady,” the “first thing [she] did was to get [her] hair done,” to restore the old front. She meets a charming if hardly perfect stranger, one Mr. Wylie, who promises to assist her in finding her former collaborator—for a price:

Pamela: In other words, before you tell me where he is, I have to agree to help you kill him.  Is that the idea?

Wylie: If you want your dough.  That’s the idea.

Pamela: I want my dough, Mr. Wylie.  Where is he?

“You’re quite a girl,” Wylie tells her, after she reveals to him that she was the mastermind behind the robbery. “And are you ‘quite a boy’?” she asks, before she slaps him, too. “You are much too emancipated,” she is told by the one who got away, now a “very top dog in black market,” whom she tracks down in London and confronts over cocktails. “I think I would have killed him there,” she confides in the audience, the play being written in the first person. “If I had had a gun, or a knife, I would have killed him.” Would she? You bet!

Billed as a “dramatic report,” “The Lady Pamela” is a sly playing against type for the generally dignified and often reserved Kerr, who gets her chance to play an American, rather than a British version, of a dame. It is Anna gone Warner Bros., a heroine stripping her period costumes and sipping her Long Island Ice Tea without sympathy. Only on the wireless, folks—Kerr like you’ve never seen her . . .

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Mad Gardener Songs

It is almost time to step into the classroom again and put my PhD to public service. I am scheduled to teach a series of writing courses at the local university this fall (Writing for the Ear, Writing for the Web, and Effective Academic Writing); and, looking through my files while preparing for them, I came across a little snippet of light verse, written in imitation of Lewis Carroll’s “The Mad Gardener’s Song.” I penned it some years back as a caveat to students of my poetry class, suggesting to eager explicators how not to treat poetry, how to let a work live and grow on you rather than cut it down to whatever size matches the reader’s intellect.

In the teaching of literature, the heart is often a more neglected organ than the ear; and in an effort to make sense of everything, we often take leave of our sensibility. As the aforementioned poet and radio dramatist Archibald MacLeish put it, “A poem must not mean/ But be.” It is an approach to art, rather than an attack on it.

Now, where does this leave the reader? Surely a poem must not simply be; it simply cannot be if it were not for the reader who brings it into being by tending to it like a gardener. After all, you cannot just leave an imaginary landscape be, let alone leave alone; you have to give it a chance to flourish before you try to yield the kinds of fruits that, according to the sensible if insensate mind, are just the stuff for good term paper.

I doubt this can happen in silent study or with an eye on the footnotes. It is our breath that brings words to life, which is why I read poetry and much else of literature aloud, feeling its rhythm and hearing it speak through me, in my voice. Call me mad, but if you tend to the imaginary landscape of poetry, you might as well sing.

It has been a while since last I expressed myself in light verse; so, without further rationalizing, hear my “Song”:

They thought they smelled ripe oranges
that teased them, “Follow me!”
They looked instead and found it was
the odd apostrophe.
“We’re proud we know what’s what,” they said,
“And move on happily.”

They thought they heard a waterfall
that shook them with its roar.
They looked instead and found it was
a plain old metaphor.
“We’re thrilled we figured that,” they said,
“Our ears were getting sore.”

They thought they felt a leaf of grass
that dared to disagree.
They looked instead and found it was
pathetic fallacy.
“We’re pleased we got that straight,” they said,
“A mere formality.”

They thought they tasted cakes and jam
that compromised their fast.
They looked instead and found they were
allusions to things past.
“We’re glad to ‘ve cleared that up,” they said,
“It all makes sense at last.”

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Automatons on the Go; or, Are You R?

Well, I have walked across the cobble-stoned, statue-lined Charles Bridge, among the tilted tombstones in the Jewish Cemetery, and up and down the steps of opera houses, museums, and watchtowers. Yet can I truly say that I have come to know Prague? After all, I had little contact with its people—apart from those going through the motions of vending tickets or opening doors—and have no grasp on their language. Exploring a city per pedes is not necessarily a first-hand experience. So, I am continuing my tour of Prague and make up for my lack of Czech encounters by resorting to the supposedly second-hand experience of reading.

It was in a small cafe in the Little Quarter below Prague Castle that I entered the world of Karel Čapek (1890-1938), whose bust (pictured here) I later spotted at the National Museum. I had just purchased Toward the Radical Center, a collection of Čapek’s writings in an English translation, works including the once tremendously popular R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a play that enjoyed a successful Broadway run in 1922-23 and was more than once produced on US radio. It was one of his shorter pieces, though, that served as an introduction and makes me want to read more of Čapek’s prose, reduced as I am to the second-handedness that is translation.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether Čapek indeed “seems totally Czech,” as aforementioned (radio) playwright Arthur Miller remarked in the foreword to the book. If Mr. Miller’s impressions are anything to go by, I wish I had met and talked to some of his country(wo)men.

Čapek found the wonder in the everyday, the miracle in the mundane. Sure, he wrote fantastic stories and futuristic plays; but his shorter works tell us about the thoughts of his cat, the life of his vacuum cleaner, the common cold. He had “Praise” for “Clumsy People” through whose mishaps inanimate objects come to life and as the result of whose ineptitude the civilized world came into being through the division of labor and the creation of specialists (and robots) it made necessary.

It is to Čapek, or rather his brother and collaborator Josef, that we owe the word “robot,” an early model of which, the Golem, was created in Prague’s Jewish Quarter, later ones (pictured above) being displayed at the city’s Toy Museum. In our approach to travel, we can be rather mechanical; we seem automated rather than animated. So, after long walks on stone, concrete, and cement—among hundreds of travelers seeing the same sights, following the same guide book, and taking the same snapshots—I can finally put my feet up and listen more closely to the heart of Czech culture.

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" . . . a natural for pictures": Tomáš Masaryk (1850-1937)

Statue of Tomáš Masaryk at Národní muzeum, Prague

I did not exactly come well informed. To Prague, I mean, and about it. Until recently, if truth must out, I had never heard of the founding father of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk. Still, when I spotted it yesterday on the cover of the Prager Zeitung, a German weekly published in the Czech capital I am currently visiting, the name looked awfully familiar. I had just come across it in a novel. A satire on 1930s Hollywood, of all places. Yes, Masaryk’s name is being tossed about in Budd Schulberg’s aforementioned What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), whose narrator, East Coast journalist Al Manheim, goes West after having been recruited for the movies:

I got a good job, the best I ever had [. . .].  After Masaryk died, it struck me that the story of his life ought to be a natural for pictures.  His ties with American democracy gave it special significance for us, and with Mussolini shooting off his big guns in Ethiopia and Hitler his big mouth in Germany, an anti-fascist picture seemed like a good idea.

Now, despite his enthusiasm, shared by an understanding and intelligent producer, the picture never materializes.  He had been warned by an ambitious, opportunist colleague, the eponymous Sammy, that “anti-fascist stuff ha[d]n’t got a prayer.  It’s lousy for the English market. A producer who just got back told me that at lunch the other day.  England doesn’t want to get Hitler and Mussolini sore.”

Today, 14 September 2007, marks the 70th anniversary of his death in 1937. And once again, the former president of former Czechoslovakia is being fondly recalled, his name dropped left and right after years during which it was being dropped altogether from public discourse.

Would there be a market for a Masaryk picture today? As if to insist on it, the old statesman popped up unexpectedly yesterday at a museum devoted to natural history, where I got to take his picture. His politician son, Jan Masaryk, got a bit closer to moving images when he became a voice-over artist of sorts, narrating a film inspired by the Schweik stories of Prague-born humorist Jaroslav Hašek. Jan Masaryk, too, celebrates an anniversary today: he was born on 14 September in 1886.

Somehow, these encounters and reencounters convinced me that it is pretty much impossible to read anything entirely irrelevant. No matter how much we insist on the boundaries of time and space, no matter how strong the walls behind which we seek to escape the present or shelves the past, there are bound to be reverberations to be sensed by all but the most insensitive ear, echoes waiting to be traced to their origins, to be recalled to life in our minds . . .