Inflated Claims
RODMAN, SELDEN
Inflated Claims The Life of Maxwell Anderson By Alfred S. Shivers Stein & Day. 397pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels,"...
...Mio, when at long last he has the men capable of clearing his father's name within his grasp, lets them go...
...A passage in the play gave me an opportunity to clinch my point...
...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" The years when I knew Maxwell Anderson and spent many hours talking with him about verse drama were 1936-37-the years of Winterset and High Tor, his two smash hits in that difficult genre...
...I've lost my taste for revenge," he sighs lamely...
...It lights from within?a white chalice holding fire, a flower in flame...
...Van Dorn's surrender at the conclusion of High Tons even moreabject...
...Yet once the bid reaches $50,000, Van Dorn, prompted by the ghostly Dutchmen who have decided to give up their three-centuries' vigil, sells out...
...They hardly die in pursuit of a dream of human betterment-as, for example, may be said of modern martyrs like Francisco Madero, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, or Claus von Stauffenberg...
...Since I hadn't written any plays at the time, it would have been presumptuous of me to express the reservations I felt about those works...
...I complimented Anderson on the restraint of these lines spoken by a ghostly Dutch intruder: Play now with fire while fire will burn, bend down the bough and eat before the fruit falls...
...Lestthecow-ardly brother of the sweet little girl he's just fallen in love with be implicated in the murderers' conviction...
...But because I'd had several books of verse published, the famous dramatist elected to use me as a sounding board for his Shakespearean iambics, and 1 was brash enough not to pull my punches...
...In contrast (the comparison is forced upon us), there is no " heroic grandeur" exhibited by Mio and the idealist Van Dorn...
...Miriamne: / will take my hands and weave them to a little house, and then you shall keep a dream...
...For there comes a time when the great sun-lit pattern of the earth shakes like an image under water, darkens...
...Can't you see that there's something gruesome in that image...
...It is ironic that Anderson in real life made so much money from this and other plays that he was able to buy up the threatened High Tor area and give it to the state as a park...
...He would have been astonished by Shivers' success in cutting through the veil of reclusive secrecy covering his early life and later journalistic flounderings...
...He would have appreciated his biographer's genuine response to his warmth, generosity and humor...
...Still, within those limitations O'Neill's characters never strike a false note by professing to be more than they are...
...The gentle Anderson, who was already deep into another starring vehicle for our friend Burgess Meredith, smiled indulgently, and asked me whether I was having the same problems with High Tor...
...Mio: Why girl, the transfiguration on the mount was nothing to your face...
...Max," I said, on what was possibly my last visit to his house on South Mountain Road, "forget Homer's Auroraand the Bard...
...But being a tolerant man, he would probably forgive me and hope that time will prove me wrong...
...Not content with that, the biographer calls in a fellow professor to equate Winterset's banal closing lines "with the best of Sophocles and Shakespeare," adding for good measure: "There is certainly nothing in all of O'Neill, that most unquotable of American dramatists despite his prestige, that can come anywhere close to it in originality and heroic grandeur...
...Almost every single study of Anderson's art agrees that with this play he demonstrated his most daring and at the same time most felicitous use of poetic dialogue...
...I told him that the sharpest lines in Winterset, his epilogue to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, were the ones at the beginning of Act III, where he paraphrased-albeit preposterously, coming from the immigrant anarchist's son Mio-t.S...
...Although he would probably not have liked to read about the failure of his first two tragic marriages, he would have been grateful for the just appreciation of his third wife, who saved him from neurosis and depression in the wake of those disasters...
...Finally, Max would not have liked this review, and would like it still less if I suggest that his life turns out to be more interesting than his plays...
...I suggested that Shakespeare was too distant and formidable a model...
...And when his father's traducers prepare to gun the couple down, he justifies his capitulation with "We are two lovers/ here in the night, and we wish to live...
...Eliot's "Gerontian...
...To future ages it will equal the best of O'Neill...
...Anderson is referred to throughout as a "genius" and Winterset as his "masterpiece...
...I picked out passages from Act I that I thought illustrated what I was saying: Mio: -when I first saw you not a half-hour ago, I heard myself saying this is the face that launches ships for me?and if I owned a dream-yes, half a dream?we'd share it...
...I mention all this here because of the extravagant claims Alfred Shivers makes in his biography...
...I can hear Max saying that plays shouldn't offer false hopes, or exalt rebellion for its own sake...
...He would have liked this book about him...
...This was the comedy with an early environmental protection message about a young idealist trying to save the butte overlooking New City, New York's South Mountain Roadand the Tappan Zee from a ruthless trap-rock company...
...there is no unearned emotion in the guilt and anguish their lives force them to reveal...
...Then, however, the spectral lass asks for time: See the dawn points with one purple finger at a star...
...At first he appears willing to risk the loss of his girlfriend by refusing her plea that he stop dreaming and sell his beloved acres to the greedy soilminers for $2,000 and a proper job in town...
...O'Neill's language, admittedly, is rarely more than adequate, and there are no heroes in his plays in the sense of individuals larger than life willing to die for justice or a principle...
...This earth came tumbling down from chaos, fire and rock, and bred up worms, blind worms that sting each other here in the dark...
...dims, and the clearest voices that we know are sunken bells, dead sullen under sea...
...I urged him to read such other contemporaries as Yeats, Cum-mings, Williams, and Auden...
...In the play, it is the fatalism of the last of the local Indians that marks the playwright's philosophy at the curtain: "Nothing is made by men/ but makes, in theend, good ruins...
...But I have no dream...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 20
