The Mugwump Saint
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Mugwump Saint There are two principal meanings for the good old American noun "mugwump,' the root syllables of which are corrupted from the tongue of the...
...I loved the law and deplored the Constitution.' And suddenly, outrageously, he is somehow pleading for himself: "For the sake of my nation, I long to be admitted into the caucus of saints...
...In Plays for a New Theater (Playbook 2), also containing plays by Corrado Alvaro, Yvan Goll, John Hawkes and Boris Vian (New Directions, 320 pp., $6...
...But he composes his speech, anyway, before a full-length mirror: "In re Gulla Buford, Negro, versus God Almighty, [writing] Previous failures enhance success...
...Not a Broadway or off-Broadway producer's, for sure...
...The blood flows into his eyes...
...In our age there is no peace which is not honorable...
...Longfellow...
...Hivnor perhaps indulges these divagations, which are always entertaining and not always needed for the plot...
...The scenes leap from North to South and even into the outer space of Purgatory: Hivnor's backdrops are mythical as well as historical, and his method subsumes comedy, farce, fantasy, a minstrel show (he calls it an "antiminstrel") with a jazz band, in the guise of a party caucus, and what looks like a skit on Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner...
...He manages to' heave the desk out of the floor, screws and all, but Brooks, "an expert fiogger," "scores hits until the cane breaks30 or 40 strokes in all...
...The second is more general and has to do with a politician who, out of feelings of superiority or orneriness, refuses to toe the party line on given issues...
...He is accosted by Sumner, whom he at first takes for the devil...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Mugwump Saint There are two principal meanings for the good old American noun "mugwump,' the root syllables of which are corrupted from the tongue of the Massachusetts Algonquins: moqki (great) and omp (man...
...Oedipus, and also a Samson who assists in pulling down the temple of slavery, Sumner becomes his counterpart in the final third of the play...
...Sumner unhappily tells him that "no American has yet been let into heaven...
...Sumner then appoints himself advocate for Gulla's entry to celestial residence, a prophetic, if accidental, comment on the open housing provision of the current Accommodations Bill...
...First, he is compared with Hercules, then with the old Oedipus at Colonus: He undergoes rounds of suffering, including a trial by fire when his spine is cauterized with red-hot cones-Sumner's spine is surely the outstanding feature of his body-and is, at last, "sacred even to his enemies...
...Could such a windbag be considered a great man...
...among his improprieties, he has married the woman who was probably his mother...
...Hivnor must know that nothing looks funnier in a theater than a full-tilt belaboring of a pompous man...
...He is given in part-payment to a Northern architect, a specialist in Greek and Roman revivals, who restores the Doric portico of the house of a Virginia colonel and makes a woman of the Colonel's ugly daughter...
...He takes what may be a too-respectful view of the auditorium's capacity to grasp complicated subplots and its familiarity with the flux of the last century...
...cries Sumner as he ponders the magnitude of his task...
...Since Charles Sumner died 10 years before Blaine's candidacy, and since he was Senator from Massachusetts and likely to throw unexpected, unsparing attacks at party colleagues, he meets the second definition more than halfway...
...Hivnor, in fact, is building the repetition of this incident into a tragic conclusion, the humiliation of Sumner through ingratitude...
...The whole play with its admixture of colloquialism, formal rhetoric and flamboyant, luxuriant writing, its fluidity between narration and dialogue, its unselfconscious poetry, some of it running to free verse, its characters that give themselves away in a couple of sentences, veers into irresistible disquisitions that mock the dominant American tradition of a hard-put thesis slammed against its audience's prejudices...
...But the play contains more, much more, than a portrait and a plea on Sumner's behalf...
...Smile at gallery...
...In the last scene Sumner winds up his case for Gulla by reciting some of his own contradictory qualifications: "I stood for peace and conducted a great war...
...If Gulla is a young (and comic...
...Expect applause " The play proceeds to the freeing of Gulla, before the Civil War...
...It is the stuff of farce and the climax of the standard commedia dell'arte scenario...
...Yet a spectator who begins, as he must, to grin as Sumner is deflated, will end by dreading every blow of the cane and, I would bet, wincing in sympathy...
...To Hivnor it is the nation, not the state, the stew, not the melting pot that matters...
...The characters, who include Julia Ward Howe, Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, a host of people of Hivnor's own invention, and David Locke's Petroleum V. Nasby, are liable to glide without warning out of their scenes and into private meditation...
...Our professional producers are fund-raisers for that collective charity, the formula play with two actors, a bed, and a passing fancy...
...Not Mr...
...No case is ever closed in heaven...
...Perhaps you, a Negro,' Sumner says, "will help free us as we freed you...
...It draws a picture of a riven America, a land debasing and sometimes revitalizing the art, architecture, philosophy, the economic and political institutions it has borrowed from Europe...
...So Gulla comes North, and Sumner reminds the heavenly senate that when Gulla received "that news which made the basilisk Oedipus rip out his eyes, he laughed...
...paperback edition $2.95...
...Oh what hermeneutic can make this coarse tale good...
...Not even Emerson...
...Here is the Virginia Colonel defending Brooks' choice of the cane, as opposed to a horsewhip: "The horsewhip, sir, is an ugly concept...
...Here, standards are sadly different...
...No real horse ever required it...
...Robert Hivnor's play The Assault Upon Charles Sumner* looks straight into Sumner's life and times, gives credence to the strongest arguments that can be marshalled to Sumner's disadvantage, and still proposes him, not merely for greatness, but for political canonization...
...For his language alone Nietzsche or Shaw would have roasted him-and Sumner would doubtless have submitted willingly, fastening himself to a handsome stake, with his arms of course free...
...It ain't been like that...
...The case will be almost impossible to win-it is therefore all the more attractive to Sumner-because Gulla has sinned at least as conscientiously as most other men...
...Sumner gets trapped by his desk...
...For Hivnor discerns the Senator as the arch-foe of slavery and the fount of civil rights for Negroes...
...In addition to the succinct wit and characterization in these few lines, I draw attention to Hivnor's unerring use of the words "concept" and "real...
...But the new jury of our National Endowment for the Arts, chosen to promote plays that are "difficult to do" under commercial conditions, ought not to overlook this work, which Sumner's memory has earned...
...It is for animals, not horses, and Sumner is no animal...
...The original beating is administered by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who takes violent exception to one of Sumner's antislavery speeches and strikes him repeatedly on the head with a goldtopped cane...
...the play is long and intricate...
...So, for that matter, would the publication of his earlier scripts, Too Many Thumbs (University of Minnesota Press, 1949) and The Ticklish Acrobat (in Playbook 1, New Directions, 1956), which have been staged in small playhouses or by university groups...
...Sumner was something of a ridiculous figure, sailing into oratorical frenzies, puffing himself along on a dead-ethical vocabulary ("The true grandeur of nations consists in moral elevation...
...O what reading," Sumner asks himself, "can get this Gulliad the divine imprimatur...
...But publication of The Assault Upon Charles Sumner in France or Germany, and less certainly in Britain, would secure an immediate production for the play and a place for the author in the top rank of dramatists...
...there can be no war that is not dishonorable "), having rehearsed beforehand down to the last fusty arm movement...
...Oh what interpretation can make this rapist an angel...
...He laughed because he was expiating everything Greek and Roman-also Irish, German, Polish and Italian.' The American nation, too, parted from its aristocratic masters, grew by intermarriage, and is now waiting in a kind of purgatory for recognition of its role in the world...
...The event that marks Sumner's life and flesh most cruelly is the assault of the title, which recurs five times in different ways...
...That reckless, wellmeaning New England mugwump, ineffably clumsy in personal relationships, insufferably wholesome, unnecessarily generous, laid his future on the line (as America has done in two world conflicts, and more questionably in such local ones as the present folly in Asia), never allowing that it was possible to lose...
...But even in conversation they follow their own quasiChekhovian lines of thought...
...I commend Charles Sumner into your merciful hands.' Whereupon Gulla Buford, his prot?©g?©, marches up to him, cane in hand, and starts the assault again as the curtain descends...
...The first meaning defines a Republican who would not support James G. Blaine in the 1884 Presidential campaign...
...He is deficient there, sir...
...The story begins with the funeral of Gulla Buford, the last slave in Ohio (Hivnor's home state), who was freed in Virginia in 1860 and died of a cold in Cleveland at "four score and twenty two," his age being "certified by the Acme Insurance Company (Negro controlled).' Gulla immediately lands in the Protestant section of Purgatory, and observes with relief, "I thought I was goin' to heaven and speak French...
Vol. 49 • August 1966 • No. 16
