Category: Radio Plays

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On This Day in 1941: Carl Sandburg Talks (to) the People

Well, the castellan is back in his element, which is air, preferably arid. Surely it is not water. I am still drying out—coughing, sneezing, and slowly recovering—from the why-not folly of riding a rollercoaster on a rain-soaked night in Blackpool, England. Listening to the soundwaves of old broadcasts seems a comparatively safer contact with the air—and a more edifying one at that—than having one’s aged bones twirled and one’s addled brains twisted in a series of gravity-defying thrill rides.

Yet while there might have been little instruction in this bathetic experience of fairground gothics, there still was a thought to be distilled thereafter from the confines of my soused cranium. It was the thought of one who stood by in spirit that night, one taking notes while passing through a sea of everyday people; it was a passing thought of one once known as the people’s poet, America’s Carl Sandburg.

A while ago, I asked what a soundscape of Britain might turn out to be, if ever there were such an exhibition devoted to regional noise. The voicescape of the United Kingdom has been quite thoroughly mapped since then, with the BBC’s voices project capturing the diverse accents of the British Isles in hundreds of recordings now online, including a group of Blackpool Romany.

For anyone moving here with memories of Dick Van Dyke Cockney, finding everyday British voices charted like this is a revelation (even though I doubt whether my own German high school English gone Nu Yawk and Wales is represented in this mix). Carl Sandburg, who set out to render and represent the thought and speech of the American every(wo)man in the 1920s and ‘30s, might have embraced such a charting of diction—even though a map like this still calls for the voice of a poet to make it sing and signify. Sandburg attempted just that.

On this day in 1941, when the United States anxiously eyed a United Kingdom at war, Sandburg addressed American radio listeners on the long-running Cavalcade of America program in an effort to celebrate a unified diversity. The play, “Native Land,” opened with words read by actor Burgess Meredith, who reminded all tuning in of the timeliness of the lines to follow:

Monday, September 22, 1941. A number on a calendar, arrived at after a million years of watching the stars, of telling the time of harvest by a shadow foreshortening, and the time of planting by the sun in the equinox. September 22, 1941. We will start at the beginning; for the beginning was the land and the stars moving overhead. And that is today, this week, the land America—a beginning. And the land is what people have made of it, what people are making of it in this fourth week of September. . . .

The ensuing broadcast, which interwove excerpts of Sandburg’s verse with its author’s autobiography, expounded on the thought that a “poet must do a lot of listening before he begins to talk.”

“Where do we get these languages?” Sandburg wondered, as actor’s voiced snippets from everyday speech picked up on the streets of the poet’s home turf, Chicago. Now that the “people in cities had forgotten the old sayings,” they “talked a new lingo,” a vocal vibrancy to which the program was meant to be an anything-but-mute testimonial. The voices of the people were worth preserving, the broadcast suggested. Yet, with war in the offing, a task larger than one to be undertaken by a librarian and curator of sounds was at hand—the preservation of the people itself.

In keeping with the at times sanctimonious patriotics of the DuPont-sponsored Cavalcade program, the broadcast concluded with Sandburg’s appropriation of words from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress (1 December 1862); they were, Sandburg remarked, “Lincoln words for now, for this hour”:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

In his own words compiled and adapted from his 1936 voice-collage The People, Yes, Sandburg insisted in cautious optimism that the “learning and blundering people will live on”:

This old anvil,
the people, yes,
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers. . . .

Today, in our own “stormy present,” the internet has become the new smithy of thought. It is the workshop in which the “old anvil” is sounded anew, where people may “think anew” and speak anew, not only to suit new cases, but to revisit old. Now, I wonder whether my own language is suited to the task to revisit and reacquaint, whether I should not spent more time listening before speaking.

It sure felt comforting to hop on the rollercoaster in Blackpool, just to scream and laugh for a change. Queer and quaint, my verbiage seems ill-chosen at times to communicate my thoughts, to argue my cases old and new. . . . Still, it is my tongue, and I must have it out.

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On This Day in 1940: Burns and Allen Are Regretfully Un(G)able

Reflexivity in art is like a comb-over—a self-conscious cover-up that only draws attention to itself. Like the follicle-challenged pate, a reflexive work of art betrays a failure of growth, the inability of an existing but sickly lingering form to rejuvenate itself. It is generally believed to be a post-modernism affliction; but American radio comedy suggests that it was an airborne disease.

It is hardly surprising, considering that commercial radio went out of its way to sidestep modernism. Elitism paired with experimentation simply spelled bad business for broadcasting. One way of ignoring the modernist movement was stagnancy, a retreat into Victorianisms comforting to bourgeois audiences, sponsors, and network executives alike. Another means of circumventing modernism, ideally suited to comedy, was to acknowledge, tongue-in-cheek, the limitations of the broadcast medium, to dwell on everything radio artists were unable to do.

In short, working in radio required a choice between old hat and obvious comb-over; anything to keep artists from letting their hair down. Take George Burns and Gracie Allen, for instance, who, on this day in 1940, gleefully overdosed on the postmodern formula.

On 16 September 1940, listeners to the Spam-sponsored George Burns and Gracie Allen Show learned that George was in trouble with his sponsors, who were “at a board meeting discussing [his] option.” The new season was off to a shaky start. Intruding on the show in the spirit of reflexivity, the program’s soundman offered his assistance, claiming to having once been a Shakespearean actor. After some quarreling with the powers behind the scenes—acted out in an on-the-phone monologue—a threatened George is forced to book a guest star to boost ratings.

The smaller the numbers, the bigger the star, industry wisdom dictated. Apparently, the numbers added up to a major headache, since George and Gracie were called upon to fetch just about the biggest male lead in Hollywood—none other than Clark Gable. Gable was currently starring opposite Spencer Tracy, , and Hedy Lamarr in the box-office smash Boom Town, which got plenty of on-air promotion from the comedy couple that night. That Gable was virtually a radio no-show—a fact mentioned by Burns and known to listeners—complicated matters considerably.

What made them still worse was the task of adapting the scenario of Boom Town, which, as George and Gracie drove home with a truckload of atrocious puns, would never get past the customs of radio’s overeager censors. They couldn’t convey the “hustle and bustle” of Boom Town, since a bustle was never to be mentioned on the air; and they couldn’t say that “sacks of TNT were lying in an angle” because they had to leave out the . . . “sacks angle.”

I guess you get the picture—but George and Gracie sure didn’t. Nor did they get Gable. They hired a sound-alike instead; but even he didn’t manage to go Gable. He did some mediocre impersonations of Lionel Barrymore and Ronald Colman instead, while Gable was assigned a non-speaking part in a hospital sketch that went nowhere. So, at their reflexive worst, George and Gracie never got their show started that night, at least not until Gracie got them both out of this self-conscious mess by attempting to sing a tune.

Hey, if you ain’t got it, flaunt it!

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Agatha Christie and Mutual: The Case of the Airlifted Detective

Well, my gray cells had little to do with it, mes amis. Once again, coming up with the facts merely required some amateur sleuthing inside the ever-widening web. Both Agatha Christie (the Dame who gave birth to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple) and the Mutual Broadcasting System (the network that delivered The Lone Ranger and The Shadow) came into being on 15 September, albeit decades apart. It was in the stars that the two would team up some day, but the meeting itself proved a not altogether fortuitous one.

Christie, whose Mousetrap opened in 1952 and just won’t shut, is still the most widely known exponent of the British whodunit. Her novels, particularly those involving her two most celebrated detectives—Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot—are frequently adapted for television. Such page-to-screen transfers rarely turn out to my satisfaction. A cleverly convoluted whodunit is best enjoyed at one’s own leisure, allowing ample time for the careful consideration of clues and an occasional consultation of one’s own roster of likely suspects.

Dramatizations dictate the duration of this experience, turning the reader-detective into a mere observer of the fictional one at work. Sure, there are pause and rewind buttons to be touched if one is not pressed for time or pressured by fellow viewers; but technological gadgetry gets in the way of the pleasures derived from being absorbed in the chase for the culprit. This was hardly the only problem mystery lovers faced when Hercule Poirot was airlifted to America back in 1945.

Listeners tuning in to the premier broadcast (22 February 1945) were greeted with the following promise:

From the thrill-packed pages of Agatha Christie’s unforgettable stories of corpses, clues and crime, Mutual now brings you, complete with bowler hat and brave mustache, your favorite detective, Hercule Poirot, starring Harold Huber, in “The Case of the Careless Victim.”

The Poirot impersonated by Huber, a character actor who had screen-tested his affected French accent in Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo, was far removed from the “unforgettable”—and very British—stories conceived by Christie. Indeed, this Poirot, sent overseas for a series of “American adventures,” was nothing but an impostor. And the very authority who was called upon to offer her endorsement, the famed authoress herself, acknowledged as much in her peculiar shortwaved message from London:

I feel that this is an occasion that would have appealed to Hercule Poirot. He would have done justice to the inauguration of this radio program, and he might even have made it seem something of an international event. However, as he’s heavily engaged on an investigation, about which you will hear in due course, I must, as one of his oldest friends, deputize for him. The great man has his little foibles, but really, I have the greatest affection for him. And it is a source of continuing satisfaction to me that there has been such a generous response to his appearance on my books, and I hope that his new career on the radio will make many new friends for him among a wider public.

So, who then was being washed onto America’s shores if the great detective was engaged elsewhere? As I put it in Etherized Victorians, Christie’s preface attempted at once to sanction the broadcast fraud and to distinguish such ersatz from the authentic portrait only the artist friend of the “great man” himself could render. It was a case of careless writing—but listeners to the spurious, anonymously penned misadventures that followed refused to be victimised.

Suffice it to say that the series died quickly, quietly, and largely unlamented, whereas the happily separated partners in crime—Mutual and Christie—continued their respective careers for decades to come.

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On This Day in 1942: Tyrone Power Slips Out to War on a Bar of Soap

In the days before television and video, Americans who felt like taking home a movie tuned in Monday nights to CBS radio and took in the Lux Radio Theatre, a lavishly produced and highly popular dramatic program on which Hollywood stars performed in audio versions of motion pictures old and new. The Lux listeners did not expect political drama or social commentary, but an hour of romance, gossip, and soap commercials. On 14 September 1942, however, as the Lux Radio Theatre returned from its customary summer hiatus to raise the curtain on its eighth season, the audience was greeted by host Cecil B. DeMille (pictured here with Loretta Young and Fred MacMurray) with the following announcement:

“Once more it is opening night in the Lux Radio Theatre; but a new kind of opening night. Without benefit of searchlights or brightly lit marquees. Like Broadway’s White Way, Hollywood Boulevard’s Neon Lane is dimmed out for the duration.”

There was a war on—and the producers of radio entertainment were learning how to carve a handgun out of soap and to turn bubbles into ammunition. Not to offend the war-weary, the famed producer-director quickly added: “But there’s no dim-out on glamour and adventure inside the Lux Radio Theatre tonight.”

The play presented live that evening was “This Above All,” a wartime melodrama based on the 1941 movie and novel of the same title. The “first great love story to come out of this war,” DeMille declared, it’s “what the critics call an important drama and what the public calls great entertainment.” Sure, it was “the story of two people. A man and a woman from different worlds. One reared in poverty in the slums of London [dashing Tyrone Power, mind you], the other a child of England’s aristocracy [Barbara Stanwyck, miscast in the Joan Fontaine part].” But it was “also a story of England today, an England in which social barriers are forgotten in the united effort of all her people to fight this war.” Above all, it was the story of radio propaganda itself.

“This Above All” begins with war news, brought, via radio, into the home of the class-conscious Cathaways. “Well there’s one good thing about the wireless,” remarks the haughty aunt of heroine Prudence Cathaway. “You can always turn it off.” Prudence is tired of such talk and ashamed of her family’s high-toned isolationism: “When you talk I seem to hear words oozing through the holes of a moth-eaten sofa,” she tells her shocked elders. “I’m in 1940 and you’re in 1880. Your kind of thinking is more dangerous to us than Hitler is.”

Having joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Prudence meets and falls in love with a private who, confused about the aims of the war, decides to desert. She gives a passionate speech about why England is worth fighting for, but is unable to sway her war-torn lover. On the run from the military police, the deserter is exposed to several speeches about duty and faith, but is ultimately converted by the experience of rescuing some of his fellow citizens during an air raid. He realizes what he could not quite see when told of it by the aristocratic Prudence, his superiors, and a priest: he is one of millions drawn together in the common cause that make commoners out of all.

The Lux broadcast underscores this message by reminding listeners that Rosalind Russell was going to entertain the troops and that she, having just filmed a romance about a “girl flyer in the pre-war Pacific,” might “even tour the Pacific in reality.” That stars were real folks—and that radio brought all folks together was further driven home in DeMille’s curtain call:

“And now ladies and gentlemen, I must to tell you that this is the last time we’ll be able to have Tyrone Power in the Lux Radio Theatre for months or perhaps years to come. He’s made a contract with Uncle Sam; and within the few two weeks, he’ll report to the United States Marine Corps as Private Tyrone Power.” Thundering applause from the studio audience follows.

The conflicting or, at least, competing aims of selling soap, promoting Hollywood, and delivering propaganda may have resulted in a confusion of disingenuousness at odds with the Shakespearean motto referenced in the title of that night’s story and read by Prudence to her lover:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Somehow, though, the long-running Lux program escaped a wartime identity crisis and, on that night, managed to tell a compelling story justifying its own existence.

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On This Day in 1938: The Mercury Players “dismember Caesar”

“Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers,” Brutus implores his co-conspirators prior to the assassination of Julius Caesar. This line might have served as a motto for the Mercury Players when Orson Welles and company decided to adapt their stage success Julius Caesar for radio. They needed to butcher Shakespeare’s play, or at least trim it down considerably; and they were making such a sacrifice to accommodate a larger audience—millions who might not have had the opportunity to take in a production of such a play in their rural communities. It was the butchery of high art and a sacrifice to lowly commerce.

“O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar!” Brutus (played by Welles), exclaimed. “But, alas,

Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully.
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.

The 11 September 1938 broadcast of Julius Caesar is remarkable for several reason. To begin with, it offered an alternative to the not always inspired programming of the commerce and common denominator oriented networks. And not only was the radio-readied production an ingenious exercise in adaptation but a poignant and timely commentary on the crisis in Europe that was about to plunge the world into war.

11 September 1938 was certainly no less innocent than the day we now commemorate as 9/11. “This is the history of a political assassination,” we are told about the story of Julius Caesar, a “dictator for life” upon whom were bestowed “honors” that “seemed to exceed the limits of ordinary human ambition.” As in the Mercury stage production, the radio adaptation dropped the togas to lay bare the urgency of Shakespeare’s drama, a play that was at once a revenge fantasy and a call to reason. Could a people under the rule of a despot be expected to rise against their leader? Could the forceful removal of such a ruler bring about a new and better world?

To drive home that the broadcast was not an invitation to a literary soiree but a call for a political debate, the Mercury Theater on the Air drew upon the services of H. V. Kaltenborn as a narrator. Kaltenborn was among the most prominent and respected radio commentators of his day. What he uttered was news, not ancient history; and it was certainly not highbrow hooey. His commentary, based upon Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (the source for Shakespeare’s play) but sounding thoroughly contemporary, helped to bridge the gaps in this considerably abridged script, which was acted out by the chief players original cast (Welles as Brutus, Martin Gabel as Cassius, George Coulouris as Antony, and Joseph Holland as Caesar). Kaltenborn assumed a role well suited to Shakespearean theater, which relied on eloquent words rather than elaborate stagecraft to relate its stories.

“How many ages hence” Cassius remarks shortly after the assassination, “Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” In the Mercury Theater on the Air production, these lines are uttered by Brutus, Welles’s ego being comparable to that of Caesar. Yet, rather than playing the ham and exulting the hoped-for glories of the crime—“peace, freedom, and liberty”—Welles’s Brutus is subdued and plaintive, adding a question mark to the lines. After all, the very “peace, freedom, and liberty” of the West was at stake if fascism continued to spread in Europe and threaten the world. A voice like that of the noble, thoughtful conspirator Brutus might not be heard in future “states unborn” or “accents yet unknown.”

Of course, the Mercury Players also had to deal with the limits of liberty and freedom at home—and on the air. In a climate controlled by advertisers and the FCC, a climate that did not allow for overt political commentary, the Mercury Theater on the Air production of Julius Caesar war remarkably bold and as cunningly executed as Caesar’s assassination. To the “common eye” (or ear), Brutus insists, “We shall be purgers, not murderers.” The Mercury Players’ butchery of lines and characters was a worthwhile sacrifice . . .

Could a people under the rule of a despot be expected to rise against their leader? Could the forceful removal of such a ruler bring about a new and better world? Surely the crisis in the Middle East raised similar questions—but when was the last time CBS television presented a play like Julius Caesar?

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On This Day in 1933: An Old Pro(boscis) Turns to Radio

As the folks over at the History Channel reminded me, the Schnozz got his first whiff of the airwaves on 10 September 1933. A replacement for fellow vaudevillian Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante headlined the Chase and Sanborn Hour for several weeks, then returned as host the following spring. Having already appeared in about a dozen films (including The Phantom President, costarring Claudette Colbert and George M. Cohan, pictured right, with Durante center stage), the radio newcomer was further cross-promoted in MGM’s Meet the Baron, in which he stars opposite “Baron Munchhausen” (comedian Jack Pearl), one of the most popular radio personalities of the day. By the end of 1934, Durante was a household name; and when the musical Anything Goes opened that November, Cole Porter certified the comedian’s fame with these lines from “You’re the Top”:

You’re a rose,
You’re Inferno’s Dante,
You’re the nose
On the great Durante.

To be sure, “You’re the Top” proved more durable than the “great Durante.”  Still, at that time, the Schnozz was at the top of his game; and those with a proboscis for show business—Billy Rose and the Texas Oil Company—decided to take him to the Big Top. As I discuss in “Etherized Victorians,” my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, the growing influence and commercial appeal of network radio led to the development of big-budgeted programs that, to encourage repeat listening, were becoming more tightly structured than the loosely formatted musical-variety programs.

After the success of NBC’s Maxwell House Coffee-sponsored Show Boat, a musical comedy-drama serial was believed to be the ticket. The Texaco financed Jumbo Fire Chief Program (1935-36) was one of the most extravagant serials to go on the air. It was broadcast live on Tuesday evenings from New York’s 4500-seat Hippodrome, the site of Billy Rose’s production of Jumbo, a star vehicle for the Broadway experienced Durante.

With a book by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, a score by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, and a large orchestra conducted by Adolph Deutsch—assets the radio announcer did not fail to point out—the nostalgic Jumbo romanticized the empires of show business that talent consuming Depression-era radio—including programs like Jumbo Fire Chief Program—raided and all but razed.

“However dark the clouds,” press agent “Brainy” Bowers (Durante) insists in the premier broadcast (29 October 1935), “people can always pay fifty cents for a peek at the pomp and glitter of old Roman days. The circus—what a spectacle, what a gold mine!” The series’ central story line (of a tax-burdened circus struggling to survive) suggested otherwise—and even though radio listeners did not have to pay as much as a nickel to take in the big show, the program fizzled and the whole venture failed to pay off for either Billy Rose or Texaco.

What struck me when I first listened to the program was that the audience inside the Hippodrome was asked not to applaud so as not to interfere with the broadcast. Soon, of course, such background noises of approval were understood to be an asset (they still reverberate today on the laugh tracks of sitcoms). But all that hadn’t quite been worked out yet when the Schnozz took to the soundstage. Imagine, there stood Durante before a crowd of thousands—and not one among them was to give him a hand . . .

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On This Day in 1943: Silent Screen Legend Dies on the Air

Some thirty years after making her debut in silent movies, Lillian Gish became all voice when, on 9 September 1943, she appeared before the mind’s eye of listeners to CBS’s thriller anthology Suspense. Gish’s performance in the play “Marry for Murder” was announced as one of the “rare radio appearances” by a star who “occupied a unique place in the affections of moviegoers ever since the screen first became of age.” Together with her sister Dorothy (left, in a picture taken from Billips and Pierce’s informative Lux Presents Hollywood), Gish had twice performed on the then new and ambitious Lux Radio Theatre, assuming the part of Jo in “Little Women” (21 April 1935) and recreating one of her most famous silent screen roles in “Way Down East” (25 November 1935)—but that had been years ago in the early days of network drama.

You had the right to remain silent, dear

In the late 1930s, she had twice been a panelist on the celebrity quiz program Information, Please and was later to act in a number of dramatic anthologies and variety programs, including Arthur Hopkins Presents and the Theater Guild on the Air. In a medium that demanded and devoured talent daily, her isolated guest spots had been few and far between. Even more rare had been her roles in film after the demise of her mute métier (Top Man, her fourth sound film, was to open in the US a few days after the “Marry for Murder” broadcast); so, the sounding of a silent screen belle must have remained somewhat of a novelty act to many American listeners. Unfortunately, the evening’s entertainment had little of the grace and passion of Miss Gish’s celebrated on-screen histrionics.

Heard again tonight on the WRVO Playhouse, “Marry for Murder” is a routine affair, an is-she-or-ain’t-she thriller that requires little guess work from the audience and yields even fewer surprises. It is a story told too often—and often better, too—on Suspense. Still, the tone of Ray Collins’s narrative and the ominous sounds of the fog horn add some slight intrigue to the Way Down East yarn of recent widow and newlywed Letty Hawthorne, “a frightened, neurotic creature who seemed destined to be a perfect victim” for her domineering husband.  Living rather close to “Philomel Cottage” or taking more than a page out of “The Diary of Sophronia Winters,” aren’t they?

The story is told from the perspective of Letty’s friend Phil (Collins), an attorney who was called upon to assist in drawing up a new will for Letty’s husband Mark. When Letty expresses herself anxious to compose a will as well, Phil—a lover of whodunits—speculates whether Mark might not have urged his wife to do so in order to do her in and get her dough. Heard through a filter, Letty’s words “but if I’m found dead” repeat in Phil’s ear until he is convinced of Mark’s villainous intentions. That is, until . . .

Since the three-character play opens with the announcement that Letty is dead, the directions the plot could take are rather limited (unless we are to distrust Phil’s narrative altogether). Radio thrillers often suffer from simplifications, restrictions demanded not only by the lack of time allotted to each play in a medium catering to commerce but by the difficulties aural drama poses for an audience that struggles to take in complex information when playing a puzzle by ear.

“Marry for Murder” might still have been an intriguing character study, like those starring the formidable Agnes Moorehead. Ms. Gish, alas, overdoes the contrast between mousy and monstrous, and her line readings are not always assured. Her Letty here bears little resemblance to her haunted namesake in The Wind (1928), her final silent. Now, I won’t stoop to saying that the actress was a Gish out of water—but she was not quite in her element here. Let’s see whether I can manage to dig up a more satisfying anniversary tomorrow . . .

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“We interrupt this broadcast”; or, How to Be Away

Well, as I’ve been casting it broadly in the previous three posts, I’m off on a weeklong visit to Madrid. Sure, I could have taken my laptop along with me to continue my journal while away; or I might have taken a mobile phone to send messages and images (like the one here, of this morning’s glorious Welsh sunrise) on the go. Instead, I decided to leave both computer and phone at home and to sign off for the duration.

The privilege of being away appears to be one of the disappearing pleasures of privacy. It is a concept no longer readily grasped by those born in the cellular, wireless, and instant-message age. Perhaps that is why the television series Lost has become such a success (surely it is not the writing): to be unavailable to the world is now thought of as a loss tantamount to being shipwrecked. Treat yourself to a retreat some time. Avail yourself of a chance at being unavailable.  Experience the abandon of abandoning your everyday.  To have something to write home about . . . and keep it.

You don’t have to get all Piano Manly about your getaway. Just tell those you care about that you’re out of town or country and enjoy the freedom of being incommunicado. Tell the world to get lost, then shroud yourself in silence.  As long as there is someone or something worth coming back for, eventually . . .

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“A symmetry of unborn generations”: A Guernica for Radio

One of the many attractions of Madrid I will make sure not to miss is Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the most famous 20th-century painting in the Reina Sofía collection. A report from the commonplace-turned-combat zone, Guernica is a piece of anti-totalitarian propaganda commemorating the world’s first civilians-targeting air attack: the 26 April 1937 raid on the busy market town of Gernika-Lumo, masterminded by General Franco and carried out by the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany.

Holding up to the sky my copy of Corwin’s play “They Fly Through the Air,” signed by its author

For a long time, the painting was kept out of Spain and was mostly on display at the MoMA in New York City, where, during the Vietnam War, it became a site for vigils held by members of the peace movement, one of whom went so far as to deface it with red spray paint. It was Picasso’s wish that Guernica be returned to his homeland only after the reestablishment of democratic rule. A swiftly executed and brutally manipulative commentary on modern warfare, it invites comparisons to the three best-known American verse plays for radio, Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid,” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Murder of Lidice,” and Norman Corwin’s “They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease.”

MacLeish’s “Air Raid,” in contrast to Picasso’s painting, overtly implicates the civilian population, including his radio listeners, castigating them for their supposed ignorance and inertia. As in “The Fall of the City,” MacLeish attacks those falling rather than sentimentalizing their plight. His are bold performances, but his cruel warning turns listeners eager for news into silent partners of war who are asked to “stand by” as they tune in while women and children, refusing to heed warnings of an impending blitz, are being attacked and annihilated:

You who fish the fathoms of the night
With poles on roof-tops and long loops of wire
Those of you who driving from some visit
Finger the button on the dashboard dial
Until the metal trembles like a medium in a trance
And tells you what is happening in France
Or China or in Spain or some such country
You have one thought tonight and only one:
Will there be war? Has war come?
Is Europe burning from the Tiber to the Somme?
You think you hear the sudden double thudding of the drum
You don’t though . . .

Not now . . .

But what your ears will hear with in the hour
No one living in this world would try to tell you.
We take you there to wait it for yourselves.
Stand by: we’ll try to take you through. . . .

Millay’s “Murder of Lidice” recalls the innocent lives of those slain by Richard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in Lidice. Artistically, the play is indefensible and shockingly inept in its bathos. In Millay’s Grand Guignol of Nazi terror, Heydrich the Hangman, whom the villagers have assassinated, is heard, from the beyond, planning his revenge:

He howls for a bucket of bubbly blood—
It may be man’s or it may be of woman,
But it has to be hot, and it must be human!
Oh, many’s the sweet warm throat he’ll suck.

In “They Fly Through the Air,” Corwin’s narrator goes in search of a language appropriate to the negotiation of art and propaganda. As I point out in Etherized Victorians, the play is a response to the perversion of poetic diction by the fascist cause. Viewed from above, Mussolini reportedly remarked, exploding bombs had the beauty of a “rose unfolding.” Throughout the play, metaphors are at war with plain speech, both in the service of motivating the masses:

What words can compass glories such as we have seen today?
Our language beats against its limitations [. . .].

Our rhythms jangle at the very start.
Our similes concede defeat,
For there is nothing that can be compared to that which lies beyond compare.
You see? We are reduced already to tautologies.
It’s awe does that.
The wonder of it all has set us stammering.

What is the language of war? How does it differ from the idiom of peace? And how shall war—often furious but not always futile—be rendered, recorded, and remembered in words or images? When I look at Guernica this week, I will ask myself these questions. Quite possibly, I will shiver when exposing it to the limitations of my shrinking lexicon.

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Flinging the Book: Archibald MacLeish, the Airwaves, and the Anniversary of Atahuallpa’s Death

Archibald MacLeish (right) with (from left to right) Orson Welles, Betty Garde, and Ray Collins in rehearsal for Air Raid (1938)

Well, I thought I’d better carry on with my Spanish lessons, having discovered, upon leafing through the travel guides, that I am not merely linguistically challenged but culturally ignorant as well.

 According to one guidebook (admittedly, a someone dated volume), the citizens of Madrid—the madrileños—have a “lingering suspicion of foreigners” and are reluctant to speak English. Granted, it’s been a while since conquistadors rather than tourists filled Spain’s coffers, but the Spaniards have been known to be somewhat insensitive when it comes to other cultures. There sure is dirt under the old welcome mat.

On this day in 1533, for instance, Francisco Pizarro put an end to the Incan empire by doing away with emperor Atahuallpa. The Incas were not a chirographic people and did not appreciate having the book flung at them—especially not the good book. Intrigued by the thought that the demise of the Inca meant not only the loss of their aureate treasures but of their aural tradition, I flung my travel guides aside and tuned in again to one of the more ambitious if lesser known American radio series of the 1940s, Archibald MacLeish’s American Story.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for his poem Conquistador (1933), MacLeish (above, right, in a photograph reproduced in Irving Settel’s Pictorial History of Radio), was one of the first American writers to take radio seriously and to encourage others to emerge from their ivory towers by broadcasting their choice words to the masses. After all, he remarked in the foreword to The Fall of the City, his first and most significant contribution to the aural arts, “what poet ever lived who was really satisfied with writing the thin little books to lie on the front parlor tables?”

As a Librarian of Congress, MacLeish enjoyed ready access to many an obscure document—and radio offered an opportunity of sharing this wealth of unheard words. Rather than dramatizing scenes from history books, MacLeish wanted to let ancient texts speak for themselves:

To place historical personages in historical situations and then imagine the words they must have spoken to each other is to imitate the historical dramas of the stage at the expense of radio’s unique function and unique opportunity.  Because radio is limited mechanically to sound, and particularly to the sound of speech, radio is capable of a concentration upon the speech itself, the text itself, which can give words a life and a significance they rarely achieve outside the printed page—and which they achieve there only for the most gifted and fortunate readers.

In “The Many Dead,” one of the scripts for the American Story series, MacLeish drew on the writings of Pizarro’s secretary Francisco de Xeres to recount the death of emperor Atahuallpa. In order to convey this sobering story without turning it into sensational melodrama, the poet-historian chose to deliver the “pertinent excerpts” of Xeres’s official account in the somber and matter-of-fact voice of a clerk, a newscaster of his time:

The Governor [Pizarro] asked the Father Friar Vicente if he wished to go and speak to Atahuallpa with an interpreter. He replied that he did wish it, and he advanced with a cross in one hand and the Bible in the other [. . .] and [. . .] thus addressed him: “I am a Priest of God, and I teach Christians the things of God, and in like matter I come to teach you. What I teach is that which God says to us in this Book [. . .].”

Atahuallpa asked for the book that he might look at it, and the priest gave it to him closed. Atahuallpa did not know how to open it, and the Priest was extending his arm to do so, when Atahuallpa, in great anger, gave him a blow on the arm, not wishing that it should be opened [. . .].  Then he opened it himself, and, without any astonishment at the letters and paper, as had been shown by other Indians, he threw it away form him five or six paces . . . .

Then the Governor put on a jacket of cotton, took his sword and dagger, and, with the Spaniards who were with him, entered amongst the Indians most valiantly.
 Then the Governor put on a jacket of cotton, took his sword and dagger, and, with the Spaniards who were with him, entered amongst the Indians most valiantly.

According to Xeres’s account, Pizarro and his men “fearlessly seized” Atahuallpa and the infantry of the Spaniards “made so good an assault” on the fleeing natives that “in a short time most of them were put to the sword.”  Pizarro was said to have protected the emperor from the Spaniards—to give him the benefit of a proper execution—and was slightly wounded as a result.  “It was a very wonderful thing,” the clerk concludes, “to see so great a lord taken prisoner in so short a time [. . .].”

The men with the books have generally proved victorious over the vocal but readily muted thinkers who spread their words without the benefit of the printing press. Atahuallpa, bereft of his voice after rejecting the book, chose death by strangulation. Even MacLeish, as Librarian of Congress, largely failed in his attempt to return written records to the air and revive the breath that gave them life. Who, after all, still listens to his American Story today?

Now, I hear that the madrileños are a noisy, boisterous people; perhaps the powerful, silencing, and not-so-good book instilled them with confidence. . . .