On Stage
SHUB", "DIANA TRILLING, RAYMOND ROSENTHAL, ANATOLE
On STAGE By Diana Trilling Carson McCullers Writes on Love Because Carson McCullers's The Square Root of Wonderful had been announced as a love story, I went to it with some eagerness. Love...
...The character of Phillip Lovejoy is heavily dramatized in Mrs...
...But the tendency is at least worth noting in our reading of Mrs...
...McCullers's imagination, she was entirely lovable as she projected herself from the stage, even when she had to speak the sexual fantasies of a virgin librarian—by all odds my most squirmy moments in the theater since I left high school...
...The last writer to give us traditional love stories was Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, even when A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared Hemingway was already something of an anachronism in our culture because he regarded love as a natural human assumption...
...Much of The Square Root of Wonderful deals with Mother Lovejoy, a Southern lady whose various though highly incoherent viciousness made Phillip into the cruel weakling he is...
...McCullers doesn't explain...
...when Mollie's son is teased by a friend, it is John who makes the proper parental explanation that war is merely an extension of this kind of impulse to humiliate our fellow-creatures...
...She rejects Phillip and Phillip kills himself—but he was a lost soul anyway, unable to work, unable to be a proper father to his son, unable to put his orchards to any use except to make applejack...
...A special word must be said for Martine Bartlett as Loreena Lovejoy, Phillip's spinster sister...
...If Mrs...
...McCullers's excursion into causality is of far less interest than the fact that in The Square Root of Wonderful love is the victim not of society but, so to speak, of itself...
...It flows through his books as strong and clear as the mountain streams which flow through his landscapes, and sexual passion is as integral a part of this stream of feeling as the current in his mountain waters...
...Love and death have always been linked as literary themes...
...Jean Dixon does everything she can, I suppose, to make Mother Lovejoy comprehensible...
...Less expectable, however, is Mrs...
...True, the outcome of love in his novels is death, but this was not Hemingway's invention...
...These are questions which confuse Mrs...
...The acting is good enough, maybe even too good for what the cast has to work with...
...But of at least this much I'm sure: It's not a love story...
...It is only when Mollie is offered the purer love of an architect named John, and John's wholesome sexuality, that she is at last able to save herself and feel, as she says, like an adult...
...Of a non-hero like Phillip, it is apparently still interesting to demonstrate that he chose the wrong mother...
...Love stories seem to be disappearing from our literature, and when a theme disappears from imaginative writing the chances are it is vanishing from life as well...
...John, too, is sufficiently defined: When a door creaks, it is John who goes to fix it...
...There is no politics in The Square Root of Wonderful...
...If she was not entirely credible as she came from Mrs...
...Philip Abbott as John is a pleasant statement of virility under control...
...But it is upon the fact that our political passions can destroy love that he finally bases his condemnation of modern politics...
...It's a story about people who use each other or help each other in the name of love—which, after all, is quite different from love of the kind with which literature has been traditionally concerned...
...William Smithers is commendably unembarrassed in his applej ack - drinking, button - ripping role of a sick genius...
...McCullers, as, indeed, they still a bit confuse whoever it is who writes our laws of mental health...
...this insight is part of his solidity and manliness, even of his good citizenship...
...Perhaps this discrimination of Mrs...
...So few short decades after Hemingway, it isn't our social passions which destroy our natural sexual passions...
...McCullers had in mind when she began it...
...Mollie Lovejoy tells us that what most bothered Phillip in their married life was her lack of a good education...
...It turns out that this sexual susceptibility of Mollie's is her deep guilt, which Phillip plays upon in order to keep her with him so he can live off her vitality...
...But we at least know of Mollie that in choosing togetherness with John instead of passion with Phillip she has chosen the good adult American way and justified herself as Mrs...
...Expectably enough, there is a subsidiary theme to Mrs...
...But the inadequacy of Mrs...
...For that matter, there is no society in the sense of an external force which works upon the lives of the characters...
...McCullers's between common sense and education, or between decency and gift, is not sufficiently emphasized to warrant our accusing The Square Root of Wonderful of throwing its poor weight on the side of anti-distinction...
...Mollie marries John, with whom, we take it, she will go to bed more maturely, only in the evenings...
...What Hemingway adds to the traditional love story is his new awareness of the death-dealing forces of modern political life...
...Of a contemporary hero like John, it can be assumed that he had satisfactory parents...
...McCullers's heroine...
...McCullers's story of modern love—a study in psychological genesis...
...I liked Anne Baxter as Mollie, though her age confused me—even the hardest life in Rockland County shouldn't make a 30-year-old woman look quite so matronly, though I dare say that was part of the virtuous design, like her uncertain hemlines...
...Does it contradict or support the image we are intended to have of Mollie's warm-heartedness and tenderness and general womanly aptitude...
...McCullers's play, and we can't miss its thick pathological point...
...it is a strictly contemporary play...
...In my clinic, Phillip Lovejoy might quite as logically have turned out to be impotent and Loreena a nymphomaniac...
...Why the same mother who produced such a sadistic son produced Phillip's nice, generous spinster sister Loreena, Mrs...
...She had met Phillip Lovejoy when she was only 15 and had immediately succumbed to his sexual power...
...in contrast to Phillip's neglect of his farm, we are offered John's plans for the home to which he will take Mollie and her son, a real house full of sunlight and bathrooms and storage cupboards for the boy's toys...
...after all, she didn't write the play...
...Is Mollie's ardor excessive or just misplaced...
...Mollie Lovejoy is a sweet, warmhearted woman who has been twice married to the same husband, a morbid and unscrupulous writer with a fiercely destructive hold on his wife...
...McCullers's hero as well...
...Just as John thinks of himself simply as a worker of pen and drafting board whereas Phillip thinks of himself as a genius, John understands that Mollie's domestic virtues more than compensate for her lack of a high-class literary vocabulary...
...Our contemporary culture-hero, John is clearly Mrs...
...Now 30 and the mother of his 12-year-old son, she still can't resist his seductions—in the mornings and the afternoons, we are told, as well as in the evenings...
...McCullers's introduction into her play of another aspect of the contemporary problem of love—its connection with art and intellect...
...she talked in cliches, and this was really more than Phillip could endure...
...But John, we see, is not sensitive on this score...
...And neither love nor sex is a natural human assumption so much as an index of maturity, adjustment and general social stability...
...Well, The Square Root of Wonderful is a thoroughly confused little play and I'd be hard pressed to say exactly what Mrs...
...McCullers was undertaking to restore love to the Western world, I wanted to salute her effort...
...Now we have a world in which nature destroys itself, at its source...
...McCullers's play as a cultural document...
...For Hemingway, love actually exists...
...For the first time in history, lovers have parents who rob them of their birthright of feeling...
...Mollie alone, among the three main figures of the piece, dangles a few loose ends...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
