Radio Plays – Page 4 – Harry Heuser

27th Aug 2009

Crosstown Stitch: Embroidering on a Favorite Subject

“Salut au monde!” That is a greeting the narrator of Norman Corwin’s “New York: A Tapestry for Radio” extended to the never quite statistically average American listener—anybody tuning in to the nationally broadcast play cycle Columbia Presents Corwin back during World War II. And that is how I, returned again to my old yet ever changing neighborhood in uptown Manhattan, am reaching out to the potentially even more multifarious roamers of the World Wide Web.

Why Salut, though? Why go for the highfalutin when something lowbrow like hiya would do? After all, French is not among the languages most closely associated with the Big Pomme. Sure, there is that French lady who greeted the multitudes who came across the big pond to get a bite out of it; but only because she’s made of copper doesn’t make her a coined phrase.

Corwin was not going for the definitive—the single, representative tongue with which to tie up an argument only to contradict it. Symbolic of the promises and failures of the Versailles treaty, the imported salutation is part of a pattern designed for a sonic romancing of immigration central, where nations become nabes and the world’s people are “living side by side so effortlessly, no one calls it peace”—a cosmopolitan locale to which nothing could be more foreign than the homogenous or the homo-logos.

As LeRoy Bannerman describes it, Corwin’s voice collage
advocated world unity, exemplified in the polyglot harmony of New York’s people. It possessed threads taut with the strain of war and the urgency of an all-out effort, symptoms of concern that greatly colored Corwin’s work with tints of patriotism.

The colors in Corwin’s fabric—that crowd-pleasing fabrication of Gotham (what do you call it? Gothamer)—are red, white and blue all right; but when Corwin waves the flag, he does not make difference stand out like a blot on Old Glory. Corwin’s aural tapestry is rich in the variations that the theme demands, distinguished by the “speakers of the foreign and the ancient tongues,” the “conjoined creeds—the Jew, the Christian, the Mohammedan.”

The speech is American, which is to say that it is not exclusively, let alone officially, English or any variation thereof. “Do not mistrust [folks] because of their accent,” the narrator cautions those who stand their ground by calling it common, “for we ourselves might be incomprehensible in Oxford.” The Queen’s English ain’t the English of Queens, New York.

“The people of the city are the main design,” the narrator insists. Seemingly random utterances by speakers nameless to the audience constitute the “individual threads” of an intricately woven fabric whose pattern, unlike the grid formed by the city’s streets, cannot be visually apprehended. “How can you tell, from Seat No. 5 on the plane from Pittsburgh, what goes on here?” Nor can it be comprehended by the unaided ear—at least not by anyone well out of earshot. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, the way to arrive at the design is microphonic, not macroscopic.

The narrator invites “Americans on this wave length” to follow the threads of “interwoven hopes” by “listening acutely” to the peoples of New York City, be they from “German Yorkville” or the “outlying Latin quarters.” Their voices are brought into a meaningful relation through the aid of the radio, of which the main speaker as receiver, amplifier and transmitter is an abstraction.

At the moment—and being in it—it is easy to lose sight of the wireless, even as I walk past Radio City. I feel no need for a hearing aid or a translator. I am a part of a grand, Whitmanesque design, which is both spoken and understood.

28th Jun 200913th Nov 2023

The “crazy coon” and the “highvoiced fag”: Jello and the Language of Revolution

Language is to me one of the main pulls of the no longer popular, be it American radio comedy of the 1940s or the serial novels of the Victorian era. That is to say, the absence of the kind of language we refer to as “language” whenever we caution or implore others to mind theirs. Mind you, all manner of “language” escapes me in moments of physical or mental anguish; but, once I hit the keyboard, whatever hit me or made me hit the roof is being subjected to a process of Wordsworthian revision. You know, “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

If the revisions come off, what remains of the anger or hurt that prompted me to write has yet the kind of medium rare severity that renders expressed thought neither raw nor bloodless. No matter how many words have been crossed out, the recollection still gets across whatever made me cross in the first place, and that without my being double-crossed by lexical recklessness.

Writing with restraint is not a matter of adopting certain mannerisms to avoid being plain ill-mannered. Obscurity is hardly preferable to obscenity. The trick is to create worthwhile friction without resorting to diction unworthy of the cause—without using the kind of words that just rub others the wrong way. I was certainly rubbed so when, researching old-time radio, I brushed up on Amiri Baraka’s Jello (1970), no doubt the angriest piece of prose ever to be written about the American comedian Jack Benny (seen here, dressing up as Charley’s Aunt).

Jello was penned at a time when many Americans who grew up listening to Benny retreated into nostalgia rather than face, accept, let alone support the radical cultural changes proposed or, some felt, threatened by the civil rights movement. Baraka confronted this longing for the so-called good old days with a farce in which Benny’s much put upon valet Rochester refuses the services the public had long—and largely unquestioningly—come to expect of the well-loved character.

What ensues is a riot—albeit not one of laughs—as Baraka’s “postuncletom” Rochester lashes out at his former master-employer and insists on forcefully taking the money out of which he believes to have been cheated during the past thirty-five years (according to Baraka’s rewriting of broadcasting history). Having found that “loot” in a bag of Jello, Rochester leaves Benny, Mary Livingstone, and Benny regular Dennis Day to their “horrible lives!”—piled up on the floor like the corpses in a Jacobean revenge tragedy.

The plot of Jello is older than its message—the call to rise against the forces that made, made tame or threaten to unmake us; and the only startling aspect of Baraka’s play is the aggressive tone in which that message is delivered, delivered, to be sure, to none but those already alive and receptive to his rallying call.

“No, Mary,” Baraka’s version of Benny insists, “this is not the script. This is reality. Rochester is some kind of crazy nigger now. He’s changed. He wants everything.” The language alone signals that we are well beyond the grasp of the titular sponsor, beyond the code adopted in the summer of 1939 by the National Association of Broadcasters, according to which “no language of doubtful propriety” was to pass the lips of anyone on the air.

As is the case in all attempts at policing language, the underlying thought—the unsaid yet upheld—might be more dubious still; and when Baraka picks up the word “nigger,” he gives expression to a hostility that could not be voiced but was played out in and reinforced by many of the networks’ offerings. Indefensible, however, is his use of equally virulent language like “stupid little queen” and “highvoiced fag” when referring to tenor Dennis Day or “radio-dikey,” as applied to Mary Livingstone. Staging revolution, Baraka is upstaged by revulsion. He has mistaken the virulent for the virile.

In those days and to such a mind, “fag” was just about the most savage term in which to couch one’s rejection of the unproductive and the non-reproductive alike. It was a monstrous word demonstrative of the fear of emasculation. It is that fear—and that word—with which power and dignity was being stripped from those whose struggle for equality was just beginning during the days following the Stonewall Riots of 28 June 1969, from those whose fight was impeded by a fear greater and deeper even than racism.

Now, I’m no slandered tenor; but I have been affronted long enough by such verbiage to be tossing vitriol into the blogosphere, to be venting my anger or frustration in linguistically puerile acts of retaliation. If I pick up those words from the dust under which they are not quite buried, I do so to fling them back at anyone using them, whether mindlessly or with design—but especially at those who inflict suffering in the fight to end their own. Our protests and protestations would be more persuasive by far if only we paid heed to the words we should strike first.

9th Jun 200931st Jul 2021

“. . . just born to do it”: A Baby Crier’s Audition

“Ziss is mine shtory, ja? Zo, bleeze, vill you be stumm and let me finish,” Tante Ilse burst out in her inimitable take on the English language. When she got that way, she’d assault her adopted tongue like an ill-tempered schnauzer tears at a bunch of newly arrived letters. If you were quick enough, you could just gather the pieces and make out the message intended. Tante Ilse was becoming a little impatient with me. Okay, so I was the impatient one. My finger kept hovering over the red button, and I was anxious to get the tape rolling again. Recording her story was a project that had been going on for several weeks already, ever since I found out that Ilse Hiss, my dear old, bratwurst and sauerkraut-loving great-aunt had a past in show business. Strictly speaking, it was the no-show business. Yes, Tante Ilse had once been a voice on the radio, even though hers wasn’t much of a speaking part. She had been a professional baby crier. A baby crier! Who among those of us not old enough to remember tuning in to the Barbours of One Man’s Family had ever heard of such a bewildering offspring of the dramatic arts!

I just had to ask; and even though I didn’t have to twist her arm to get the whole story, Tante Ilse refused to reminisce about her radio days in any way straightforward or logical; least of all, chronological. I still didn’t quite understand how she had gotten into radio in the first place. “And by crying!” I marveled, “How did you even know there was a market for it?”

“Ach, der market. Dat vas just a little Hungarian delicatessen, a block away. Right over there, where zey built zat, zat shkyshcratcher. Pfui! I did most of my grocery shopping zere. When it vas a market, of course. You would have loffed dat shtore!” As exasperating as such detours could be, attempting to get Tante Ilse back on track by explaining just what I meant by “market” would have been the worst thing to do at that moment. Besides, in a roundabout fashion, Tante Ilse appeared to have gotten to the beginning at last, when, to my great surprise and still greater relief, she added: “And dat’s where it all shtarted.”

It was back in the mid-1940s, shortly after the end of the war. Tante Ilse had long found out that the sidewalks of Manhattan were not paved with precious metal; she had been pounding them long enough. Her brother Heini (my grandfather) had disappeared somewhere, leaving her to fend for herself, sowing, cleaning, taking whatever job she could find. Yorkville was a German enclave then; but Tante Ilse did not want to be reminded of the Heimat and was suspicious of those among her neighbors still proud to be the sprout of a Kraut. Her pride and her principles kept her from borrowing as much as a cup of sugar.

Things might have been worse if it hadn’t been for the housing shortage and the My-Sister-Eileen deal she had going on with a typist who moved into the room vacated by Opa Heini; except that this particular Eileen was no relation and paid handsomely for her share of Tante Ilse’s place. Incidentally, that share eventually became my room when I arrived in New York in the 1980s, when I followed the “Auswanderer,” the expatriates in my family.

Unfortunately, the typist also took work home; and the noise she made on that old Adler of hers often drove Tante Ilse to distraction—and straight out of her quarters. Now, before you say I’m getting to be even worse than my periphrastic relative, let me point out that, on that fateful evening, the noises produced on the old Adler precipitated my great-aunt right to the spot where it all began. The Hungarian market, where Tante Ilse had come to splurge on a bunch of grapes. “Craips. And zour ones, too!” she chuckled. So I pressed the red button and off she went.

She must have been pretty cranky when she got down to Németh’s deli, what with the crowded walk-up, the summer heat, and the noisy typewriter. A bawling tyke was all she needed as she waited in line to pay for her purchase (and to hear whether there was any news about Mrs. Németh’s boy, a Private First Class not yet returned from Europe). Sure enough, there was just such a noisemaker in store for her. It was Mrs. Webber’s youngest, rather too young, some whispered, to make recently discharged Mr. Webber a proud father. Apparently, even the issue was beginning to cry foul.

Matters weren’t helped any when Tante Ilse tried to restore serenity by offering Webber (or not) Junior one of those sour berries. “You never heard zuch bawling,” she insisted, covering her ears as if, nearly half a century on, there still lingered the threat of a reverb in the old neighborhood.

So, what did Tante Ilse do? She leaned over the baby carriage, grinned none too endearingly, and hollered right back. To the surprise of everyone in the store, including her own, she aped the little imp so perfectly that even the mocked one shut up and listened in awe. “Den, der whole shtore was shtill. Nobody could belieff it. Vair vas dat zound coming vrom? Den, dey all looked at me. Vas I a freak or a hero? Dat I don’t know.”

“Move over Baby Snooks,” I added, “The world’s oldest toddler was born.” I had hoped that the radio reference would encourage her to tell me just how that audition led to a career in broadcasting. “I had a talent, alleright; but vat vas I going to do viz it?” I knew my cue and stopped the recording. I had to wait for the next installment; and Tante Ilse, unlike network radio, followed a most erratic schedule . . .

If you visch, I mean, wish, you may listen to my own reading of Tante Ilse’s story here.

1st Jun 20092nd Mar 2025

Manus Manum . . . Love It: Lever Brothers Get Their Hands on Those Nine Out of Ten

“Ladies and gentlemen. We have grand news for you tonight, for the Lux Radio Theater has moved to Hollywood. And here we are in a theater of our very own. The Lux Radio Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, in the motion picture capital of the world. The curtain rises.”

Going up with great fanfare on this day, 1 June, in 1936, that curtain, made of words and music for the listening multitude in homes across the United States, revealed more than a stage. It showed how an established if stuffy venue for the recycling of Broadway plays could be transformed into a spectacular new showcase for the allied talents at work in motion pictures, network radio, and advertisement.

Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable at the premiere of the revamped *Lux Radio Theate*r program

“Frankly, I was skeptical when the announcement first reached this office,” Radio Guide’s executive vice-president and general manager Curtis Mitchell declared not long after the Hollywood premiere. The program was “an old production as radio shows go,” Mitchell remarked, one that was “rich with the respect and honors” it had garnered during its first two years on the air. Why meddle with an established formula?

Mitchell’s misgivings were soon allayed. The newly refurbished Lux Radio Theater had not been on the air for more than two weeks; and Radio Guide already rewarded it with a “Medal of Merit”—given, so the magazine argued, “because its sponsors had the courage to make a daring move” that, in turn, had “increased the enjoyment of radio listeners.” There’s nothing like a new wrinkle to shake the impression of starchiness.

“I cannot help but feel,” Mitchell continued, that the “two recent performances emanating from Hollywood have lifted it in a new elevation in public esteem. Personally, listening to these famous actors under the direction of Cecil De Mille, all of them broadcasting almost from their own front yards, gave me a new thrill.”

That DeMille had, in fact, no hand in the production did little to diminish the thrill. An open secret rather than a bald lie, the phony title was part of an elaborate illusion. The veteran producer-director brought prestige to the format, attracted an audience with promises of behind-the-scenes tidbits, and sold a lot of soap flakes throughout his tenure; and even if the act wouldn’t wash, he could always rely on the continuity writers to supply the hogwash.

As DeMille reminded listeners on that inaugural broadcast (and as I mentioned on a previous occasion), Lux had “been a household word in the DeMille family for 870 years,” his family crest bearing the motto “Lux tua vita mea.” Oh, Lever Brother!

Perhaps the motto should have been “Manus manum lavat.” After all, that is what the Lux Radio Theater demonstrated most forcibly. In the Lux Radio Theater, one hand washed the other, with a bar of toilet soap always within reach. As I put it in Etherised Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject of radio plays, it

was in its mediation between the ordinary and the supreme that a middlebrow program like Lux served to promote network programming as a commercially effective and culturally sophisticated hub for consumers, sponsors, and related entertainment industries.

With DeMille as nominal producer and Academy Award-winner Louis Silver as musical director, the new productions came at a considerable cost for the sponsor: some $300 a minute, as reported in another issue of Radio Guide for the week ending 1 August 1937. Of the $17,500 spent on “The Legionnaire and the Lady,” the first Hollywood production, $5000 went to Marlene Dietrich, while co-star Clark Gable received $3,500. Those were tidy sums back the, especially considering that the two leads had not even shown up for rehearsals.

The investment paid off; a single Monday night broadcast reportedly attracted as many listeners as flocked to America’s movie theaters on the remaining days of the week. As DeMille put it in his introduction to the first Hollywood broadcast, the audience of the Lux Radio Theater was “greater than any four walls could encompass.” Besides, the auditorium from which the broadcasts emanated was already crowded with luminaries.

“I see a lot of familiar faces,” DeMille was expected to convince those sitting at home: “There’s Joan Blondell, Gary Cooper (he stars in my next picture, The Plainsman), Stuart Erwin and his lovely wife June Collier.”

Also present were Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and Franchot Tone. “And I, I think I see Freddie March,” DeMille added in a rather unsuccessful attempt at faking an ad lib. While there is ample room for doubt that any “nine out of ten” of those stars named actually used Lux, as the slogan alleged, they sure made use of the Lux Radio Theater. It was an excellent promotional platform, a soapbox of giant proportions.

A visit to the Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight

As I was reminded on a trip to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight last year, Lever Brothers had always been adroit at mixing their business with other people’s pleasure. Long before the Leverhulmes went west to hitch their wagon on one Hollywood star or another, they had disproved the Wildean maxim that the greatest art is to conceal art and that art, for art’s sake, must be useless.

It is owing to the advertising agents in charge of the Lever account that even the long frowned upon “commercial” did no longer seem quite such a dirty word.

Related recording

“The Legionnaire and the Lady,” Lux Radio Theater (1 June 1936)

Related blog entries

“Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry”

Tyrone Power Slips Out to War on a Bar of Soap”

“After Twenty Years of Pushing Stars and Peddling Soap, a Hollywood Institution Closes Down”

27th May 20098th Nov 2023

Tonight at 8:30 (or Whenever It’s Convenient)

“You can’t do without it. Supposing you wanna hear Jack Benny, see? But you can’t be at home at that hour. So you tell the maid to turn the radio on when Jack Benny comes on, and this automatically goes on with the radio. . . .” That is how big shot Howard Wagner goes on about his new wire recorder—shortly before giving his old employee the ax. The employee is Willy Loman, the scene from Death of a Salesman. It is one of the references that came as a surprise to me yesterday morning when I reread the play I thought I was done with by the time I left college. At the time he wrote this Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, Miller had not long gotten out of the radio game and was rejoicing in his newfound artistic freedom; so he gives the speech—and the speech recording device—to the bad guy. Having previously gone on record to dismiss radio as commercial and corrupt, Miller now suggested how the medium was about to get worse—that is, farther removed from live theater, from the immediate, the communal, and the relevant.

This “wonderful machine”—for which Mr. Wagner is ready let go of “all [his] hobbies”—is a metaphor for the selfishness of a society that was moving so fast, it could not even give the time of day to its most beloved entertainers—let alone a tired old man like Willy Loman. If Mr. Benny wanted to talk to Howard Wagner, he, like everyone else, had to wait for the hour appointed to him by the big noise.

“You can come home at twelve o’clock, one o’clock, any time you like, and you get yourself a Coke and sit yourself down, throw the switch, and there’s Jack Benny’s program in the middle of the night!”—all for “only a hundred and a half,” an amount for which Willy Loman is willing to work for three weeks and a half.

For decades to come, it was the industry that benefitted most from this new recording technology. Bing Crosby could walk into the studio when it suited his own schedule, rather than having to be there for the public who sat by the radio, as of old, to hear his program go on the air. Nowadays, the Willy Lomans are in charge of scheduling, of making time for whoever vies for their attention.

I would not go so far as to say that I “can’t do without” the latest recording software. It sure makes it easier for me to enjoy more of what I enjoy, though. The BBC’s iPlayer has greatly changed my listening habits and increased the number of plays, documentaries, and musical selections I take in. Currently, I am listening to “The Better Half,” a cheeky if dated sex comedy by Noel Coward. Written and performed in 1922, the unpublished one-acter about “modern” marriage (in the traditional sense we can’t seem to get past) was not staged again until 2007. Earlier this week, it had its br oadcast debut on BBC Radio 4.

Okay, so the leading lady is not Gertrude Lawrence (star of radio’s Revlon Revue back in 1943)—but at least I won’t have to listen to Mr. Wagner’s precious offspring (“Listen to that kid whistle”) while begging for a moment of his time. After all, most of us don’t get the impression that, as Noel Coward puts it in “This is a Changing World” (with which the radio adaptation of “The Better Half” opens), “[t]ime is your tenderest friend.” So, it feels good to push a few buttons and get the better of it . . .

26th May 20096th Nov 2021

“I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!”

Occasionally, people who think of me as some sort of authority approach me with questions of a literary nature. When that happens, I suddenly remember that I am Dr. Heuser, BS, MA, PhD, something that you tend to forget when you spend most of your afternoons in the company of a small dog whose passive vocabulary is limited to words like “want,” “basket,” or—a testament to my cleaning skills and the joys of country living—“spider.” So, I was eager to be of service when a young friend of mine from New England, where I have what you might call a surrogate family, asked me whether I could give her a few pointers on her latest English assignment.

The assignment, as she described it to me, was to compare one of the characters in Death of a Salesman to somebody she knows. I hope she did not think of contacting me because she had me in mind for the title role and expected me to prove her right by confessing that I’ve been feeling an awful lot like Willy Loman lately. I haven’t. Now, Biff, on the other hand . . .

I first read Death of a Salesman when I was an undergraduate in New York City in the early 1990s, at about the time that my term paper burdened friend was born. Back then, the play confirmed what I had expected all along: that things would not get easier growing older, that, even though the years of our protracted adolescence may well be the worst years of our lives, no matter how we romanticize them later on, there might never come a period of calm, certainty, or happiness. The regrets, though, might be mounting.

That I never revisited the Lomans was, heretofore, not among my regrets. As a matter of fact, I took a dislike to Arthur Miller in the intervening years, ever since I discovered that he was somewhat of a traitor. That is to say he was a reluctant radio playwright who, once he achieved success in the theater, professed to have hated the medium that got him started, the bastard medium that became the subject of my dissertation.

From the late 1930s to the mid-1940s—when radio dramatics were at the peak of their influence on American culture—Miller made a decent living writing for the Columbia Workshop and Cavalcade of America. He wasn’t toiling away for the Hummerts or writing advertising copy. And even though the Workshop was a sustaining program—that is, one not controlled by advertising—he went on dismissing radio as a tool for the hucksters. It was a popular view shortly after the war.

Miller was not just father to Willy Loman; he was also one of his sons. Working in commercial radio, he might have seen himself as an adjunct—the product of—salesmanship, until he finally managed to make a name for himself by writing for the stage. The technique of Death, though, is clearly indebted to his years in radio, to the ways in which aural play can take you right inside the head and heart of a person, unencumbered by walls, by exteriors, by physicality. There are only voices—and the only dimension is that of time. Not that Miller ever gave credit to radio for that.

Anyway, faced with my friend’s assignment, I did the only responsible thing I could think of and reread Miller’s play. By the time I reached the “Requiem,” I was in tears. Even though he did not take great pride in his career—a career he did not choose—there was a lot of Willy Loman in my father, right down to the extramarital affair, the self-deception, the suicide attempts, and the loss of his son’s respect.

Like most hard-working folks, my father could not cope with the suspicion that he was what Biff calls “a dime a dozen”—though he was a childhood hero to me. He got stuck in a line of work that exhausted him, driven by a desire to be “well liked” and anxious to display such tokens of middle-class achievement as are generally read as signs of success. His legacy, likewise, was a disappointment. I turned out to be Biff—privileged to reject the “phony dream” (“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be?”), to be my own kind of failure and make some kind of virtue of it. What I have not yet dealt with is the role I might have played in my father’s early death, whether or not my loss of respect for him contributed to the loss of respect he had for himself.

I don’t suppose my words were any great help to my young friend, let alone a reassurance. There was one thing I told her that I would like her to remember, though: “whatever you write, write what you really feel. Anything else is a waste of time—for you and your reader.” Clearly, I was not speaking as an academic, to whom every argument is a sales pitch and every paper an opportunity for self-promotion. Else I might have suggested that she align herself with one of the minor, female characters in Death—“Strudel” to Biff’s brother—to point up the chauvinism of Miller’s world and defy its marginalization of her sex.

22nd May 200917th Nov 2023

” . . . the way of all flesh, material or imaginary”: Conan Doyle at 150

“Had Holmes never existed I could not have done more, though he may perhaps have stood a little in the way of the recognition of my more serious literary work.” That is how Arthur Conan Doyle, not long before his own death in 1930, announced to his readers that he would put an end to his most robust brainchild, the by now all but immortal Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the figure continues to overshadow every aspect of Dr. Doyle’s career, literary or otherwise. Perhaps, “upstage” is a more precise way of putting it, considering that the venerable sleuth was to enjoy such success in American and British radio drama from the early 1930s to the present day.

“One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination,” Doyle assuaged those among his readers who found it difficult to accept that Holmes’s departure was merely “the way of all flesh.”

To be sure, the earlier incident at the Reichenbach Falls suggested that Holmes was impervious to threats of character assassination, that he could reappear, time and again, in the reminiscences of Doctor Watson. Still, Doyle’s intention to do away with Holmes so early in the detective’s literary career had been no mere publicity stunt. Rather than feeling obliged to supply the public with the puzzles they craved, the author felt that his “energies should not be directed too much into one channel.”

One of the lesser-known alternative channels considered by Doyle has just been reopened for inspection. Today, 22 May, on the 150th anniversary of Doyle’s birth in 1859, BBC Radio Scotland aired “Vote for Conan Doyle!” a biographical sketch “specially commissioned” to mark the occasion. In it, writer and Holmes expert Bert Coules relates how, in 1900, Doyle embarked on a career in politics. He decided to stand for parliament; but the devotees of Sherlock Holmes would not stand for it.

Coules’s play opens right where Doyle had first intended to wash his hands of Holmes—at the Reichenbach Falls. No matter how sincere Doyle was in improving the Empire’s image and the plight of the British’s troops during the Second Boer War, the push hardly met with the approval of the reading public. “How could you!” “How dare you!” “You brute!” the public protested.

Although it was not this perceived case of filicide that did him in, Doyle proved unsuccessful in his campaign—and that despite support from Dr. Bell, who served as an inspiration for Holmes. After his defeat, Doyle “bowed to the inevitable—and back the man came.”

When the The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1927, Doyle dropped the man once more, albeit in a gentler fashion. To assuage loyal followers, he fancied Holmes and Watson in some “humble corner” of the “Valhalla” of British literature. Little did he know that the “fantastic limbo” in which the two were to linger would be that in-between realm of radio, a sphere removed from both stage and page—but nearer than either to the infinite “O” between our ears.

It hardly surprises that, Radio Scotland’s efforts to get out the “Vote for” and let us walk “In the Footsteps of Conan Doyle” aside, most of the programs presumably devoted to Doyle are concerned instead with “The Voice of Sherlock Holmes” and the “Game” that is “Afoot” when thespians like Cedric Hardwicke, John Gielgud, Carleton Hobbs and Clive Merrison approach the original. It is not Doyle’s life that is celebrated in these broadcasts, but Holmes’s afterlife.

True, to the aficionados of Doyle’s fiction, Sherlock Holmes has never been in need of resuscitation. Yet, as Jeffrey Richards remarked in “The Voice” (first aired in 1998),

[r]adio has always been a particularly effective medium for evoking the world of Holmes and Watson. The clatter of horses hoofs on cobbled streets, the howl of the wind on lonely moors, and the sinister creaks and groans of ancient manor houses steeped in history and crime.

The game may be afoot once more when Holmes returns to the screen this year; but, outside the pages that could never quite contain him, it is the “fantastic limbo” of radio that kept the Reichenbach Falls survivor afloat. It is for the aural medium—the Scotland yardstick for fidelity in literary adaptation—that all of his cases have been dramatized and that, in splendid pastiches like “The Abergavenny Murder,” the figure of Sherlock Holmes has remained within earshot all these years.

4th May 20093rd Sep 2024

Cranky Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan Feels So Free

Jumping Jehosophat! It sure feels good to rant about our elected government—some force that, at times, appears to us (or is conveniently conceived of) as an entity we don’t have much to do with, after the fact or fiction of election, besides the imposition of carrying the burden of enduring it, albeit not without whingeing. Back on this day, 4 May, in 1941, the Columbia Broadcasting System allotted time to remind listeners of the Free Company just what it means to have such a right—the liberty to voice one’s views, the “freedom from police persecution.” The play was “Above Suspicion.” The dramatist was to be the renowned author Sherwood Anderson, who had died a few weeks before completing the script. In lieu of the finished work, The Free Company, for its tenth and final broadcast, presented its version of “Above Suspicion” as a tribute to the author.

Starred on the program, in one of his rare radio broadcasts—and perhaps his only dramatic role on the air—was the legendary George M. Cohan (whose statue in Times Square, New York City, and tomb in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, are pictured here). Cohan, who had portrayed Franklin D. Roosevelt in I’d Rather Be Right was playing a character who fondly recalls Grover Cleveland’s second term, but is more to the right when it comes to big government.

The Free Company’s didactic play, set in New York City in the mid-1930s, deals with a complicated family reunion as the German-American wife of one Joe Smith (Cohan) welcomes her teenage nephew, Fritz (natch!), from the old country. Fritz’s American cousin, for one, is excited about the visit. Trudy tells as much to Mary, the young woman her mother hired to prepare for the big day:

Trudy. Mary, I have a cousin.

MARY. Yeah, I know, this Fritz.

TRUDY. Have you a cousin?

MARY. Sure, ten of ‘em.

TRUDY. What are they like?

MARY. All kinds. One’s a bank cashier and one’s in jail.

TRUDY. In jail! What did he do?

MARY. He was a bank cashier, too [. . .].

Make that “executive” and it almost sounds contemporary. In “Above Suspicion,” the American characters are not exactly what the title suggests. That is, they aren’t perfect; yet they are not about to conceal either their past or their positions.

Trudy’s father is critical of the government, much to the perturbation of Fritz, who has been conditioned to obey the State unconditionally:

SMITH. Jumping Jehosophat [chuckles]. Listen, the State’s got nothing to do with folks’s private affairs. Nothing.

FRITZ. Please, Uncle Joe, with all respect. If the State doesn’t control private affairs, how can the State become strong?

SMITH. Oh, it will become strong, all right. You know, sorry, it might become too darn strong, I’ll say. And I also say, let the government mind its own dod-blasted business and I’ll mind mine.

To Fritz, such “radical” talk is “dangerous”; after all, his education is limited to “English, running in gas masks, and the history of [his] country.” He assumes that Mary is a spy and that anyone around him is at risk of persecution. To that, his uncle replies: “Dangerous? Well, I wish it was. The trouble is, nobody pays any attention. By gad, all I hope is that the people wake up before the country is stolen right out from under us, that’s what I hope.”

“Above Suspicion” is a fairly naïve celebration of civil liberties threatened by the ascent of a foreign, hostile nation (rather than by forces from within). Still, it is a worthwhile reminder of what is at stake today. Now that the technology is in place to eavesdrop on private conversations (the British government, most aggressive among the so-called free nations when it comes to spying on the electorate, is set to monitor all online exchanges), we can least afford to be complaisant about any change of government that would exploit the uses of such data to suppress the individual.

“Dictaphones,” Smith laughs off Fritz’s persecution anxieties.

I wish they would some of those dictaphones here. I’d pay all the expenses to have the records sent right straight to the White House. That’s what I’d do. Then they’d know what was going on then. [laughs] They’d get some results then, hey, momma?

These days, no one is “Above Suspicion.” Just don’t blame it on Fritz.

3rd May 200917th Nov 2023

Seems Mr. Corwin Is Here to Stay

Let’s start by setting forth
That it is good to take a swig of fancy every now and then,
A nip or two of wonderment,
To jag the mind.

It’s good to send your thoughts excursioning
Beyond the paved and well-worn alleys of your life
If only as a form of exercise [. . .]

The man who prescribed this “form of exercise” in “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” some seventy years ago, back in April 1939, is producer-director-writer Norman Corwin. Today, he turns 99. Radio’s foremost playwright was forced, however, to take the exercise outside the medium he loved. By the late-1940s, there was no room in US radio for “excursioning,” and a frustrated Corwin advised anyone who wanted to “make a living from radio” to be “mediocre.” The “writer who wants to do the best work in his power, in defiance of formula, I say: Forget radio.”

Corwin insisted that he was writing “neither with cynicism, anger, nor contempt.”

My only emotion is that of sadness for an old friend, now bedridden, who has been kind and generous to many writers, including me. The disease is probably incurable. Radio may well die, as a cultural force, of the after-effects of the childbirth of television. The complications are greed, venality and social irresponsibilities. Its spawn, the half-breed that is neither pictures nor radio but both, is already devouring everything around it, an omniphage chomping steadily into the economy of books, sports, movies and radio itself.

No, Corwin was not about to defect, like radio’s talent, sponsors and audiences, to the rivaling medium of television. Unless its producers were ready to “apply as much money and time to serious experimentation on the level of the old Columbia Workshop,” he would “continue to be more interested in radio, films, and print.” To a dramatist concerned with the play of ideas, television had “neither the full scope and mobility of cinema, the immediacy of the legitimate theatre, nor the powerful suggestibility of radio’s unillustrated spoken word.”

It is of this “suggestibility” that the body of Norman Corwin’s work remains one of the most persuasive illustrations.

30th Apr 2009

Craig’s Other Wife

“April is the cruellest month,” T. S. Eliot wrote (in his opening lines for “The Waste Land”)—“mixing / Memory and desire.” I somehow felt the cruelty of this mixture more keenly this year, being that the seasonal rebirth coincides with activities amounting to more than spring cleaning, a project that triggered memories of a less than happy home and anxieties about moving. The first month of renovating our house in town has passed; and even though another month will go by before our relocation, I am desirous to move on and continue with this journal without mentioning or alluding to our future domicile (pictured) in every post. So, during the month of May, I shall try to refrain from making any references to the place.

Not that the house is done with me yet. It is, to bowdlerize the title of a ghost story by Bulwer-Lytton, the House in the Brain (“Accursed be the house, and restless be the dwellers therein”). Never mind such literary allusions. Onomastics alone suggest that I should dwell on the subject, being that my last name is pronounced H O I Z E R—which sounds just like the German plural for house (Häuser). An architect or real estate agent could not ask for a better one.

To be sure, I have hardly exhausted the subject of moving, building, and dwelling; but whatever it is that I had on my mind shall, for the time being, remain unsaid. After all, as Heidegger reminds me, the word “bauen” [building] derives from “buan, bhu, beo,” and, originally, “bin,” the first person singular of “sein” [to be]. To let is be and move on seems to me the soundest mode of living . . . and the safest way of keeping this journal alive . . .