The Cross of Redemption (8 page)

The younger American writers, then, to whom we shall, one day, be most indebted—and I shall name no names, make no prophecies—are precisely those writers who are compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are. The loneliness of those cities described in Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved. And those panaceas and formulas which have so spectacularly failed Dos Passos have also failed this country, and the world. The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable
human isolation—we will never establish human communities—until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.

We will never understand what motivates Chinese or Cuban peasants until we ask ourselves who
we
are, and what we are doing in this lonely place. Faulkner’s South, and grandfather’s slaves, have vanished: the sun will never look on them again. The curtain has come down forever on Gatsby’s career: there will be no more Gatsbys. And the green hills of Africa have come out of the past, and out of the imagination, into the present, the troubling world.

Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.

One must be willing—indeed, one must be anxious—to locate, precisely, that American morality of which we boast. And one must be willing to ask oneself what the Indian thinks of this morality, what the Cuban or the Chinese thinks of it, what the Negro thinks of it. Our own record must be read. And, finally, the air of this time and place is so heavy with rhetoric, so thick with soothing lies, that one must really do great violence to language, one must somehow disrupt the comforting beat, in order to be heard. Obviously, one must dismiss any hopes one may ever have had of winning a popularity contest. And one must take upon oneself the right to be entirely wrong—and accept penalties, for penalties there will certainly be, even here.

“We work in the dark,” said Henry James, “we do what we can, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” This madness, thank heaven, is still at work among us here, and it will bring, inexorably, to the light at last the truth about our despairing young, our bewildered lovers, our defeated junkies, our demoralized young executives, our psychiatrists, and politicians, cities, towns, suburbs, and interracial housing projects. There is a thread which unites them all, and which unites every one of us. We have been both searching and evading the terms of this union for many generations.

·      ·     ·

We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. However immoral or subversive this may sound to some, it is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new. He must remember, however powerful the many who would rather forget, that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.

What the writer is always trying to do is utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be. Thus Dostoevsky, in
The Possessed
, used a small provincial town in order to dramatize the spiritual state of Russia. His particulars were not very attractive, but he did not invent them, he simply used what there was. Our particulars are not very attractive, either, but we must use them. They will not go away because we pretend that they are not there.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

(1962)

I
HAVE BORROWED
Kazan’s director’s notes for
Sweet Bird of Youth
, from its first rehearsal to opening night. When I think back now to those five or six weeks of steadily mounting chaos, those desolate, work-lit stages, the makeshift props, the cardboard-tasting coffee, knocking steam pipes, the New York and, subsequently, the Philadelphia chill, I think of Gerry Page. In my mind’s eye, she is standing perfectly still, upstage left, under the gloom and glare of the work light, intently watching Kazan mime a bit of business for the other actors. And she always seemed to me to be like that—terribly quiet and shy, but always watching.

The first days of rehearsal are always an utter shambles, at least in the memory; so, for that matter, are the last days; but, luckily for the theater, one’s memory of intolerable nervous strain ends almost as soon as the strain does. I watched Kazan, who presumably knew what he was going to do with this improbable and disparate collection of actors. I certainly could tell nothing from the actors. They slouched or lurched or strode about, holding on to their books as though they were infants and looking as though they wondered what the hell they were doing here in this tiny, drafty theater, of all places. I was much too terrified of them all, of the mystic forces almost visibly clashing above their poor, doomed heads, to
do more than mutter the briefest of “good morning”s and “good night”s—which, in those first days, was probably just as well. I was especially afraid of Gerry because, to tell the truth, I was afraid
for
her. I simply could not imagine her as the aging, desperately predatory, and somehow majestic ex–movie queen that Tennessee Williams had created. And he had written it, as always, somewhat larger and more livid than life. How was this open-faced, quiet midwestern-type girl going to make herself believe in this creation? Or make
us
believe it? My sense of doom was strengthened when I overheard someone whisper one day, “She’s much too young for the part.” I thought so, too—and insufficiently elegant.

As we all now know, I could not possibly have been more wrong. But now I find it nearly impossible to re-create my view of the steps which led to this transformation. The most crucial steps, of course, did not take place in my view at all, and I suppose that all I really saw were the results of a process which had begun long before rehearsals started. She must have had a very definite sense of the part and how to play it, for, as I now reconstruct those first days, she seemed watchfully and patiently waiting to put her conception to the test.

But her preternatural coolness, in this forest of knitted brows, left me stupefied then. It was almost as though, with her wedding day upon her and the bridegroom drawing nearer by the second, she yet lingered, in some hideously compromising position, with another boy. “Oh,” she said to me one afternoon, “so-and-so is such a
worry
bird.” So-and-so had vanished, as did nearly all the actors when they were not needed, gloomily, to study his part.
Her
book was closed, in her lap. “Perhaps I
ought
to study,” she said, with a smile—a smile meant, probably, to wipe the bewildered and reproving look off my face—“but…” and her voice tinkled helplessly into silence. I felt that she had put me down as another worry bird.

On the other hand, she was watching everything Kazan was doing up there on the stage with the other actors. During the entire blocking-out period, she impressed me tremendously with her speed and concentration, but I got no hint of what she would do with the part; and whereas Kazan gave me increasingly precise notes for the other actors, the clipboard is strikingly sparse when it comes to instructions for Gerry Page. Moreover, most of the notes for Gerry are extremely laconic. For instance, “Tell Gerry she’s inaudible” or “Tell Gerry I can’t see her face.” There is scarcely ever on the clipboard any suggestion of what she should be thinking or feeling on this or that movement, on this or that line; and the reason is that her role was worked out in an extremely direct, knock-down-and-drag-out
way, and she never needed to be told anything twice. There was very little left for the clipboard by the time she and Kazan got through hammering away at a scene until it began to take the shape they wanted. Tiny little explosions occurred all along the way, illuminating, at first, not so much what Gerry was doing with the part as the treacherous difficulty of the part itself. It is difficult because this grotesque creature, the Princess, is always standing a little outside herself and commenting, with extreme distaste, on whatever she is doing. It is on this affliction that her precarious dignity depends. The first hint I caught of this was when Gerry, preparing, rather wearily, to listen to her beach-boy lover’s
^*
discourse, sits down at her wardrobe trunk, picks up her mirror, looks into it, and puts it down again. It was electrifying. It was terribly funny. It was terribly sad. And I also remember her achievement of that moment when the boy finishes his monologue and turns to her, saying, “Princess, will you help me?” And she holds out her arms, incurably predatory even as she is incurably lonely, but, also, at that moment, very beautiful and moving, because for that moment, if only in her own mind, she is both wife and mother and has again a human value for someone in the world.

Acting is (for me, anyway) one of the most mysterious of all the arts—mysterious because the instrument, the actor himself, without changing at all, undergoes such inexplicable transformations before one’s eyes. I think that this sustained and steady tension between the real and the make-believe is healthy for the soul: it forces one to examine reality again. Seeing Gerry around the studio, or on television, had never caused me, really, to look at her, to wonder about her—and by “wonder” I don’t mean the currently prevalent zoological sniffing which lacks even the primary virtue of curiosity—or, for that matter, to listen to her. I saw a girl who was enormously
sympathique
, not strikingly pretty, with a rather light, agreeable voice. That’s all I saw. How in the world, then, did this girl manage to turn herself into a ruined and desperate harridan, with a voice that made one jump and with a face into which had somehow been burned the defeats, indignities, and agonies of a long and intolerable lifetime? I know that, technically and theatrically speaking, there are a great many answers to this question, although I also know that no one has ever really answered it. And when the same question confronts us, in life, in time, the answers are even more desperately makeshift. My point, anyway, is that all I saw of
Gerry is all that most of us, wandering in our grisly isolation through this world, ever see of any other person. Whoever forces this terrible truth once more on our attention has also helped us to bear it and to that extent, at least, has lessened it. It is a small light brought into a vast darkness—but a small light, considering, especially, what everyone is searching for, may be quite enough. As for the light which Gerry holds, may it burn long.

(1962)

·      ·     ·

P
EOPLE BOUGHT
Another Country
in considerably larger numbers than I imagined they would. I suppose this must have something to do with the fact that many more people than are willing to admit it lead lives not at all unlike the lives of the people in my book. I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire—Miles Davis and Ray Charles—but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in their very different ways, sing a kind
of universal blues, they speak of something far beyond their charts, graphs, statistics, they are telling us something about what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them, but compassion. And perhaps this is the place for me to say that I really do not, at the very bottom of my own mind, compare myself to other writers. I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound. I am not an intellectual, not in the dreary sense that word is used today, and do not want to be: I am aiming at what Henry James called “perception at the pitch of passion.”

(1962)

I
REALLY DON’T LIKE WORDS
like “artist” or “integrity” or “courage” or “nobility.” I have a kind of distrust of all those words because I don’t really know what they mean, any more than I really know what such words as “democracy” or “peace” or “peace-loving” or “warlike” or “integration” mean. And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.