Tag: Carlton E. Morse

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“There [still] ain’t no sense to nothin’”: A Wayward Text Comes Home

“Home at last,” I could almost hear myself sigh as, out of the narrow slit in our front door, I yanked the packet arriving today.  Bearing my name, as few pieces of mail of any consequence or sustenance do nowadays, it contained the volume Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama, to which I had been invited a few years ago to contribute a chapter.  The book was published in July 2021 by Ohio State University, a press renowned for its contribution to the evolving discourse on narratology.  

The titular neologism suggests that an engagement with aural storytelling is proposed as one way of broadening a field that has enriched the interpretation not only of literature but also of visual culture.  Whether such aural storytelling should be subsumed under the rubric ‘radio drama’ is something I debated in my study Immaterial Culture, for which I settled on the term ‘radio play,’ as, I argued, the fictions written for radio production and transmission are hybrids whose potentialities remained underexplored and whose contribution to the arts underappreciated in part due to the alignment of such plays with works for stage and screen.  Nor am I sure that, by adding the prefix, “audionarratology” will be regarded as a subgroup of narratology – which would defeat the purpose of broadening said field.

To the question what “Lessons” may be learned from plays for radio, or from our playing with them, the quotation that serves as title of my essay provides a serviceable response: “There ain’t no sense to nothin.”  The line is uttered by one of the characters in I Love a Mystery, the thriller serial I discuss – and it is expressive of the bewilderment I felt when first I entered the world created in the 1930s and 1940s by the US American playwright-producer Carlton E. Morse.  My cumbersome subtitle is meant to suggest how I responded to the task of making sense not only of the play but also of the field in which I was asked to position it: “Serial Storytelling, Radio-Consciousness and the Gothic of Audition.”

By labelling ‘gothic’ not simply the play but my experience of it, I aim to bring to academic discourse my feeling of unease, a sense of misgivings about explaining away what drew me in to begin with, the lack of vocabulary with which adequately to describe my experience of listening, the anxiety of having to theorise within the uncertain boundaries of a discourse that I sought to broaden instead of delimiting.

Throughout my experience with radio plays of the so-called golden age, I felt that, playing recording or streaming play, I had to audition belatedly for a position of listener but that I could never hear the plays as they were intended to be taken in – serially, via radio – during those days before the supremacy of television, the medium that shaped my childhood.

In the essay, I try to communicate what it feels like not knowing – not knowing the solution to a mystery, not quite knowing my place vis-à-vis the culture in which the play was produced or the research culture in which thriller programs such as I Love a Mystery are subjected to some theory and much neglect.  Instead of analysing a play, I ended up examining myself as a queer, English-as-second-language listener estranged from radio and alien to the everyday of my grandparent’s generation – never mind that my German grandfather fought on the Axis side while the US home front stayed tuned to news from the frontlines as much as it tuned in to thrillers and comedies that were hardly considered worthy of being paraded as the so-called forefront of modernism.  So, a measure of guilt enters into the mix of emotions with which I struggle to approach or sell such cultural products academically.

The resulting chapter is proposed as a muddle, not as a model – although its self-consciousness may be an encouragement to some who are struggling to straddle the line between their searching, uncertain selves and the construct of a scholarly identity.  Its failings and idiosyncrasies are no strategic efforts to fit in by playing the misfit or refitting the scene – they are proposed as candid reflection of my mystification.  

They also bespeak the fact that the essay, unfinished or not fully realised though it may seem, was a quarter century in the making.  It started out by twisting the dial of my stereo receiver and happening on Max Schmid’s ear-opening program The Golden Age of Radio on WBAI, New York, agonising whether to turn my newly discovered hobby into the subject of academic study, enrolling in David H. Richter’s course “The Rise of the Gothic” at CUNY, and by responding to the essay brief by exploring gothic radio plays and radio adaptations of Gothic literature.

Once I had decided to abandon my Victorian studies in favor of old-time radio, the essay was revised to become a chapter of my PhD study Etherized Victorians.  It was revisited but removed from Immaterial Culture as an outlier – the only longer reading of a play not based on a published script – during the process of negotiating the space allotted by the publisher.  It had a lingering if non-too-visible presence on my online journal broadcastellan as an experiment in interactive blogging, and it now appears in a volume devoted to a subject of which I had no concept when I started out all those years ago.

The draft, too, has gone through a long process of negotiation — of editing, cutting and rewriting – at some point of which the frankness of declaring myself to be among the “outsiders” of the discourse did not make the editors’ cut.

So, home the essay has come; but the home has changed, as has its dweller, a student of literature who transmogrified into an art historian with a sideline of aurality, and who now has to contend with tinnitus and hearing loss when listening out for clues to non-visual mysteries and, ever self-conscious, waits for his cue to account for the latest of his botches, or, worse still, to be met with silence.  Estrangement, uncertainty, and the misery of having to account for the state of being mesmerised by mysteries unsolved – such is the gothic of audition.

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The Anarchy of Silence: Being Absent/Absent Being

Well, what does it suggest? My silence, I mean. Is it a sign of indifference or an exercise in difference? Does it bespeak failure or betoken activity elsewhere? Does it spell death, metaphoric or otherwise? Mind you, I have merely extended my customary weekend retreat from the blogosphere for a single day; and, such is the nature or curse of keeping a public journal—of being nobody to anyone—it may have gone virtually unnoticed. My absence, after all, is no more eloquent than your silence. It requires your presence to come into being.

The house is quiet once more. It resounds with absence. After a weekend of entertaining and sight-seeing, of silent film (with our house guest, Neil Brand, accompanying Buster Keaton’s Cops and The General at the local university’s Arts Center) and talks about radio drama in the still of a summer garden halfway up in the Welsh hills, I alone remained behind.

It is quiet, but never quite silent. There is the storm, rain lashing against the pane of the window, winds strong enough to make the walls of my room shiver. There were the shouts of “goal” on the television earlier today, as even I could not keep myself from having a peek at the World Cup goings-on. There were a few phone calls. There was a moment of reflection on the career of director Vincent The Damned Don’t Cry Sherman, who died last Sunday at the age of 99. And then there was my own voice, reading aloud the lines I have been writing. Yes, I have been writing.

As announced, I have begun anew to write a play. I decided upon a ghost story, a story of absence and presence—the very presence of absence. After looking at various scraps, jotted down ideas for radio plays, I kept in mind what I hinted at in my recent remarks about sound effects. I have used a problem in sound as the starting point for aural play. I won’t relate here and now just what the play is about, lest it should not come about after all if thus prematurely released. It will have to suffice that it features a disembodied voice, imagined sounds, and an improbable architecture. Echoes of that tower I mentioned previously.

In all this, the play is hardly experimental. It is a rather plain story; but one that insist on being told on the air, rather than any other medium. It aims at conveying a mood, at casting suspicion on the speakers, a shadow of doubt cast by the sounds and silence they make. Yes, they “make silence.” Too often we think of silence as being nothing, even though we insist on it being golden by virtue of its rarity. It is glorified as much as it is dreaded. It is a malevolent deity that renders us speechless by holding its tongue.

Now, in old-time radio, silence was anathema. It was not deemed golden enough to fill time on the air, time set aside to fill the coffers of the sponsors. It was dreaded, all right; but tunes and talk and sound effects trickery were let loose upon it to assure its sound defeat.

As Charles Addams suggests in the above visualization of the shrieks, shots, and thuds—the sound and the fury—of 1940s radio thrillers, silence was rarely called upon to make that difference, to speak of promises or signal impending doom. It was talked to death and yet survived in my favorite chapter of Carlton E. Morse’s “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a noisy serial thriller that confronted a soldier of fortune with a silent and invisible adversary (which I discussed here at length)). If a speaker confronts an uncertain someone without getting a response, does the silence mean the certain absence of the addressee? Or is it a mark of the listener’s defiance? The anarchy of the unseen unheard!

I am hoping to create such uncertainties in my play—a mystery that depends to some degree on the listener’s picking up of a prominently dangled clew. If it goes unnoticed, the revelation might yield a moment of surprise; if it is perceived by the audience before the character in the play catches on, there may come into being a prolonged thrill of suspense. Radio is the very medium for such turns of the screw.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Nine): Destiny Is an Assigned Seat

Well, the scheduled power outage has been postponed due to regional flooding. I ought to be thankful, I guess, for one of the dreariest, wettest, and stormiest autumns ever to be weathered by the umbrella of a smile. Last night I was tolerably amused watching You’ll Find Out (1940), one of those star-studded Hollywood efforts whose chief purpose was to exploit and ostensibly promote the burgeoning radio industry by supplying listeners with images the mind’s eye could have very well done without. While the headliner of the movie, bandleader Kay Kyser, made my head ache with his bargain basement Harold Lloyd antics, the lavishly produced horror-comedy—co-starring Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff—nonetheless kept me in my seat.

You’ll Find Out makes much use of one of radio’s most intriguing technological novelties: the Sonovox. A patented sound effects device, the Sonovox could invest a trombone, a locomotive, or even a few raindrops (in short, anything capable of producing sound) with the power of human speech. Now, if only that deuced infant would speak up and let us know what it’s all about.

I am referring, of course, to the mysterious “Thing” in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” an old-time radio thriller I have been following for nearly two weeks now. On this day, 10 November, in 1949, the “Thing” made itself heard once again, announcing imminent death. When the Martin household’s peculiar baby alarm goes off tonight, another life is being claimed . . . the life of the prime suspect.

It is a thrilling twist in a story that, for two chapters, assumed the guise of a whodunit. In the previous installment, Job Martin, the heretofore good-natured drunk, was exposed as an ill-tempered cynic who showed little affection for his three tormented siblings. His youngest sister, Charity, promises to get a confession out of him, claiming that he was responsible for the murder of the Martin’s chauffeur. She urges Jack Packard, the man hired to investigate the mysterious goings-on, to round up all members of the household in the dining room.

Once they are assembled, Grandmother Martin insists on the observance of the family’s traditional seating arrangements. When the conference is just about to commence, the lights go out; yet no one has been within ten feet of the switch. The “Thing” begins to cry. It is not until the light is being turned on again that a gun goes off and Job is shot through the head.

This is the first murder committed in our presence. We are in the thick of it and, like the three members of the A-1 Detective Agency, left very much in the dark, despite the fact that the Martins and two of their hired investigators were standing right there in a brightly lit room when the shot was fired.

New questions arise: Was Job indeed the murderer of the Martin’s blackmailing hoodlum of a chauffeur? If so, he dodged the electric chair by taking that seat. Was he being silenced by one of his accomplices? If so, he must have been harboring a secret whose revelation is dangerous to another. Or is the “Thing” an otherwordly avenger of the sins committed in the house of Martin, a house doomed to fall?

Say, where were you when the lights went out?

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Loving Mysteries: Between the Martin Mansion and Bleak House

Well, I am still hoping other internet tourists will join me in rediscovering I Love a Mystery beginning this Halloween (see previous post for details). I know, it might seem sacrilegious to ignore the anniversary of that most famous of all Halloween pranks, “The War of the Worlds,” in favor of Carlton E. Morse’s serial thriller. Actually, “The War” was waged on the night before Halloween (30 October 1938), which means that I can listen forward without remorse to reviewing the first installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a neo-gothic mystery starring Mercedes McCambridge (as the tortured Charity Martin) and Tony Randall (as Reggie Yorke, one of the three intrepid investigators, pictured above, who are called upon to examine the Martin’s rotten family tree). So, consider tuning in and coming along for the ride.

In the meantime, I am also looking forward to the new adaptation of Bleak House starring Charles Dance (as Mr. Tulkinghorn) and Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock). It has been nearly ten years since last I read the novel, my favorite among Dickens’s works; so perhaps I won’t notice the liberties taken with the original. Beginning this Thursday on BBC One, the complex melodrama will be played out in fifteen parts, just like Morse’s “Thing.”

Not that the comparisons end there. There are deadly secrets, the proverbial skeletons in the closet, and a curse on both of those decidedly bleak houses, the Martin mansion and Dickens’s eponymous edifice. The overused label “soap opera” has been attached to the BBC production, along with other disclaimers, such as the introduction of new characters; whatever the terminology, serialization and bowdlerization are quite in keeping with Victorian practices.

I might put aside my copy of Don Quixote for the duration and reread Bleak House, now that the days are getting shorter and the winds are a-wuthering, if only to re-encounter the carefree Harold Skimpole and the careworn Richard Carstone, two characters of whom I once fancied myself some kind of composite.

Perhaps I’m someone else among the dramatis personae now; that’s one of the pleasures of rereading. As long as I won’t turn into Mr. Turveydrop. . . . Say, what kind of Dickensian character are you?