Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (9 page)

Freud's view of homeostasis, whereby the human brain works constantly to ward off all stimuli, this depiction of urban life is a meditation on how one copes with stimuli, how anyone actually deals with suffering. Predictably enough, Sonny posits suffering as the origin of music, as the "etiology" of the blues; less predictably, I think, he implies that
all
life choices—becoming a musician, taking heroin, having a family life, being a teacher—are just so many strategies for containing hurt, staying alive: " 'No, there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like
you'
" (25). Not only is every life a dance of or around pain, but it is also an act of domestication, of yoking suffering into personal style.

This brief, spare tale becomes outright majestic as it gathers together its threads and motifs in the final pages where, at long last, we encounter Sonny's blues. We realize—much the way Ken Burns's fine documentary onjazz has made us realize—that the blues are pain and suffering set to music, transformed into music. We are now approaching dead center as we witness the cathartic moment, the making of music:

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (31)

Even though Baldwin is talking about the blues, it would be hard to find a richer and nobler definition of art itself. I think it crucial to measure how broad and capacious, how shockingly inclusive this concept of art

is. All too often, one thinks of the tortured artist as giving expression to his or her private demons. It is fair to say that the narrator has had exactly this view of his brother Sonny. Such a view is facile in every sense: it construes the making of art as little more than opening up one's mouth and unloading; it is also facile in its move to "personalize" artistic expression as narrowly confessional. Baldwin blows this concept right out of the water. Making music is a cosmic event, on the order of a reverse hurricane where you tame nature's chaos. You don't just emote or emit; there is indeed an explosion, but you shape its very elements into song: "the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air" (29).

Yes, it is personal, just as lion taming is personal, just as being Pros-pero and commanding the elements is personal; and all you have, to pull off this miracle of transmutation, is a modest piece of metal: "I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own" (30). Ralph Ellison described Louis Armstrong's quotidian miraculous achievement in similar fashion: "Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound." Making music is akin to Genesis, has parallels with God putting breath into Adam, returns us to the oldest Greek concepts of soul as inspiriting breath. Personal? Yes, in the sense that Prometheus' theft of fire from the gods was personal, but also altruistic, a gift for all of us, a gift that can claim the very life of the giver.

But the story's climax has even more grandeur than this. Listening to Sonny play the blues, the narrator realizes that not only Sonny's life is now filling the air, but that "that life contained so many others" (31). Listening to Sonny's blues is a very pure form of catharsis, in just the pharmaceutical and social senses that Aristotle meant when he used the term to describe the effect of tragedy: a purging of the soul, an opening of the closed self into something larger. And, so, the narrator takes the awesome measure of these blues, the generosity of art that tells our collective

story, that brings at last out into language and life the buried history of
our hurt:

He had made it his: that long line of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it. I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. (32)

Now it all comes together. Sonny's blues resurrects the ghosts of the family's and community's past, but not in any spectral sense; on the contrary, one fuses with one's loved ones, feels their pain, feels the calvary some suffered (the stones of the road they walked on), recovers one's own walled-off, living dead (the father's brother, the dead Grace), repossesses the emotional plenitude of one's existence, extended long back into time and space, preceding even one's birth. The story began with a newspaper notation, and it closes with the music of the soul, a music that is built of, and out of, suffering. Sonny's blues are a scream that goes through the house, not strident but soulful, gathering together all the injuries time has wrought, weaving together the affective plaint of the entire family, forcing open the enclosures of silence and repression that have been constructed, turning it all into restorative art. Art positions us finally in that larger homeland of feeling, which constitutes the true parameters of any life, even though no geographer or biographer is likely to take its hidden measure.

Reading "Sonny's Blues" transforms you, for a moment, via the imagination, into a citizen of Harlem, just as Blake's "London" plunges you, momentarily, into the London of 1794. Art moves us into places we have never been. It can also bring back our dead haunts. In 1963 I was a student in Berlin, and I was standing only a few feet from John F.

Kennedy that spring when he spoke at the Free University. He also spoke at the Rathaus, and he uttered the famous words that call to mind the impact of Blake and Baldwin, words that still resonate: "
Ich
bin ein Berliner"
("I am a Berliner"). Kennedy was not a poet or novelist, but his magical phrase captured something of the solidarity and transcendence of art: a vision of the larger family, that larger commonwealth Emerson had in mind, in which the silhouette of the individual is merged into, fleshed out into something communal. The world heard Kennedy's words then—that is why he said them—and we are, of course, treated to them again and again on TV replays, in election years, or at moments of political nostalgia.

When I hear them, however, I feel a complex cluster of emotions: a never-to-be-repeated bond with a charismatic leader, and also a rumbling of time and space as 1963 Berlin—with its war-torn look, its still bombed-out buildings, its resdess theaters and brilliant museums, its edginess as incendiary political fault line, its brand-new Wall dividing East and West, its interminable arctic winter, its setting for me in terms of my brand-new marriage, my brand-new pondering of Jewishness and Germanness, my brand-new immersion into German literature, my sense of adventure and endless open free years in front of me—reappears. All this comes back into my life, reminding me that I too, in a sense quite different from Kennedy, can say,
"ich bin ein Berliner."
That city of 1963 no longer exists: the dazzling new modern German capital now coming into existence as Europe's confident crown jewel has nothing in common with die grungy, anxious, fissured place where I then lived. Likewise, London today has little resemblance to the place of chimney sweeps, soldiers, and harlots memorialized by Blake in 1794. Not even Baldwin's Harlem of half a century ago has remained the same. And the "me" that heard Kennedy announce himself a Berliner in 1963 has also been dead for some time now, about as long as Kennedy has been dead. And yet, on some subliminal but vital level, the words of Blake and Baldwin and Kennedy
move
me, in every sense of the word, emotionally and geographically and temporally, into other realms and other selves.

EUGENE O'NEILL'S
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY
INTO NIGHT:
FAMILY AS ECOSYSTEM

There is no more obvious check on individual authority, maneuvering room, and hegemony than
family.
Family medicine is a specialty that encourages doctors to consider their patients in an environmental perspective, attentive to the familial genetic factors that crisscross the entire unit, attentive also to the group attitudes, assumptions, and values that contextualize and confer a pattern on individual illness. But we hardly require doctors to tell us that our personal song and dance is inevitably part of a group show, so that our own performance must needs be shaped both by and for that intimate public we were thrust into, and lived with during the formative years of our lives: the family.

Yet, since bodies are bounded by individual skin and since consciousness is so easily taken as solo voice, there is little wonder that the echoing, choral dimension of life tends to be obscured, rarely given its measure (other than as a prison house one seeks to exit). And it is no secret that the ethos of modern American society is individualist to the core, with the family seen (at best) as a launchpad for the children we raise, or seen as relaxing (or infernal) hearth to which the fatigued breadwinners return at the end of the day.

It has been shown statistically how much erosion of family rituals has taken place in recent decades, much of it driven by the youth culture and the media, much of it also driven doubtless by the increased workload and professional tempo of adults themselves, especially at a time when both partners work. Family dinners are largely a thing of the past; even shared meals between spouses are rarer than they used to be. When I occasionally ask my students if they intend to return to the places where they grew up, where their families reside, I am usually met with blank incomprehension. Out of the nest and into the world; go where the jobs are; such thinking is legion, and it does not seem to put a great premium on family.

These are some of the reasons that Eugene O'Neill's play
Long Day's Journey into Night
may strike us initially as dated and sepia-tinted, as the torturous and perhaps melodramatic account of a family of yesteryear. We know that O'Neill wrote it as a reckoning of sorts, not in adversarial terms but as an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, as a statement about facing one's ghosts and demons. I think it deserves special mention in this book because I know of no other text that succeeds so brilliantly and tragically in bringing the familial mesh to life, in showing that the familial mesh
is
one's life. The theatrical medium, with its set of many characters outfitted with voice and feeling, affords O'Neill a capacious form for displaying the astonishingly interactive, virtually incestuous life that all of us lead. Theater, given its cast of characters, is the social art form par excellence, and it is egalitarian in a way that neither poetry nor fiction can be: it grants life to the whole consort, and asks us to see just how porous, how interdependent, how infected, our private "agenda" really is.

O'Neill's play is famously a study of
dependency,
seen overtly in Mary Tyrone's morphine habit, seen covertly in all the Tyrone men's incessant boozing, and seen perhaps most profoundly in the ecological view of life the play presents: each of us lives in others as well as in ourselves; each of us is what he or she is because of others; each word we utter and each feeling we express is irremediably social and collective, infected by others, infecting those same others. In this play that takes place in a summer house, a play that consists of incessant recriminations on the part of each tortured Tyrone against the others and against fate, we see indeed a scream that goes through the house. We see it because O'Neill has fashioned a language of extraordinary modulation and reach, in which the most common words are echoing and prismatic, announcing the continuing—palpable, unstoppable, usurping—life of other people and other times in the existence of the speaker.

The play opens innocuously with James and Mary Tyrone engaged in small talk, and it seems equally innocuous that they discuss their son

Edmund's summer cold. Who hasn't been here before? Soon enough, however, we begin to take the deeper measure and reach of this chitchat, and it seems hardly an exaggeration to say that part of O'Neill's power is in showing that family conversation is little less than a minefield, a terrain that is filled with explosives. James congratulates Mary for looking fat and happy, and we realize he does so
because
he fears she may be on the verge of returning to her drug habit, but of course he does not say so. We quickly sense that Edmund's cold is not a cold, but something more—the annunciatory symptoms of tuberculosis. The mesh this conversation is starts to take on resonance and pith, as we learn that these developments are themselves of long pedigree, inasmuch as Mary has been in asylums before to combat her addiction, inasmuch as Edmund's consumption repeats that of Mary's father, who died of it.

As we factor in these prior realities, we start to hear the special O'Neill music, a music that conveys how prodigiously freighted our tiniest utterances are, how stubbornly the dance of the past scripts our thoughts, our way of seeing the world, and therefore even our smallest moves and statements. And even this formulation is too lame to capture O'Neill's sinuousness, because it leaves out what he shows us of the massive program of defenses and denials that we set into action in order to ward off these tidings from the past; those tidings are brought to life in the present, leading to a spectacular kind of programmatic blindness on the one hand, and a maniacal surveillance system on the other. James Tyrone refuses to speak his fears of his wife's addiction, even as he monitors her every move.