'The Hairy Ape' and the FBI
DIGGINS, JOHN PATRICK
Culture Watching 'THE HAIRY APE' AND THE FBI By John Patrick Diggins Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, now appearing in New York's Selwyn Theater, was first performed at a turning point in...
...As the camera zooms in on a sneering O'Neill (JackNicholson) and the playwright begins to ridicule the Russian Revolution for being an affair of "intellectuals" who claim to know what workers want, the audience I was a part of broke into cheers, as though someone had finally seen through the illusion that would bewitch the best of minds...
...Culture Watching 'THE HAIRY APE' AND THE FBI By John Patrick Diggins Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, now appearing in New York's Selwyn Theater, was first performed at a turning point in modern intellectual and political history...
...The whole notion of "false consciousness," which the Left saw as the sickness of the bourgeoisie alone, O'Neill saw as the plague of the proletariat as well...
...The central figure of The Emperor Jones is a negro, this seeming to be a favorite theme of ?'Neil's [sic...
...by Czechplaywright Karel Capek], which has lately been adopted by the radical fraternity...
...As a struggling young writer, he befriended anarchists and feminists and supported the causes of the working class...
...But in the play the wealthy leisure class promenades down New York's Fifth Avenue completely incognizant of Yank's pathetic presence...
...Telling the story of John Reed—who went on to write Ten Days That Shook the World, a paean to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution—takes more than a snappy punchline...
...For the first time in modern history, many radical intellectuals who had lived by challenging authority succumbed to it...
...That same year the Hungarian Marxistphilosopher Georg Lukácspublished History and Class Consciousness, a text that eventually became a bible to the New Left rebels of the '60s generation...
...V I. Lenin had issued his 21 demands to radicals everywhere in the world, declaring that all Communists must submit to the dictates of Moscow's Comintern...
...When word got out that All God's Chillun Got Wings featured interracial marriage, the Georgia Ku Klux Klan threatened the life of his infant son...
...O'Neill had been thinking about his script for The Hairy Ape at a time when much of the Greenwich Village Left had gone bananas over Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Jack, tell us what the war is all about," Reed is asked at aposh dinnerparty...
...in the end, it is the slaves, bondsmen and laborers who will win the struggle for recognition...
...and then sits down...
...In addition to being America's only playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature O'Neill was modern theater's first multiculturalist, bringing to the stage characters from all walks of life, giving sympathetic treatment to different races, classes and genders...
...Neither Lukács nor the many contemporary academic intellectuals who write of the working class have had much direct experience laboring on and in ships, docks, mines and factories...
...Later, Louise Bryan (Diane Keaton) asks O'Neill to help her join her lover Reed in Russia...
...Dere ain't nothin' foither...
...O'Neill dashed off a boldly scribbled letter in which he told the Klan what it could do with its threat...
...But the playwright saw the promise of socialism as tragic, since it is based on impossible premises— among them, that it is the mission of the working class to redeem the world from the bottom up, and to do so by (as the philosopher Lukács put it) "negating" the power of the ruling class as the workers achieve freedom and recognition...
...Lukács' book, as preposterous as it was pernicious, sought to prove that the proletariat found its political fulfillment in Lenin's Party dictatorship, and that workers alone are capable of achieving the class consciousness necessary to the dissolution of bourgeois society...
...His character "Yank" in The Hairy Ape is sure of himself precisely because he lives where intellectuals tell us social consciousness springs forth: "I'm at de bottom, get me...
...Lukács' book had been influenced by that Hegelian black magic...
...The playwright's friend John Reed, the journalist and political activist, had died in Russia of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin...
...O'Neill, by contrast, did ship out on tramp steamers as an able-bodied seaman, labored in mines in Honduras, and hung out in working-class taverns with names like "Hell Hole...
...Set in the era of the First World War, the movie suggests how ideologies die of their own lies...
...O'Neill's play questions not just Marx's faith in the proletariat rising to consciousness but Hegel's faith in power relations that somehow dialectically reverse themselves...
...Does The Hairy Ape, as the FBI charged, "easily lend itself to radical propaganda...
...It was the early 1920s...
...But in the film, director Beatty comes close to losing the audience with his heroic attempt to recount the complex rivalries involved in organizing the American Communist Party...
...I happened to have seen Reds in Orange County, California, one of the most conservative regions in the country...
...Had he followed party lines and produced a play with "inferential grounds for radical theories," as the FBI put it, he would have written a different script...
...John Patrick Diggins a past NL contributor, is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and author of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy...
...But as the play progresses, Yank regresses, losing all confidence and sense of identity, and the other workers, stoking the engines that power the cruise ships of affluent society, know only the meaning of their own powerlessness...
...I'm de end...
...After mentioning other plays, the memorandum continues: "The Hairy Ape could easily lend itself to radical propaganda, and it is somewhat surprising that it has not already been used for this purpose.' The report continues with a warning about the play: "It possesses more inferential grounds for radical theories than R. U.R...
...O'Neill knew life at the bottom, and in the play the struggle for recognition goes unrecognized...
...In the early '20s the FBI kept a file on him...
...In this instance the playwright may be wiser than the philosopher...
...Yank assumed that he was society's life force, the co-agency of the steel, coal and turbines that move the industrial world...
...Yet the applauded O'Neill was by no means conservative...
...I'm de start...
...I start somep'n and the woild moves...
...In Hegel's scenario, the master class can only consume and waste while the working classes produce and create...
...Rising from his chair, the handsome Beatty, dressed in black tie, utters the single word "Profits...
...When the play moved from Greenwich Village, where it opened, up to Broadway, the New York Police Department tried to close down the theater...
...Reflecting on The Hairy Ape, I am reminded of two short scenes in the 1981 film Reds, in which Warren Beatty plays John Reed...
...It was such a struggle that drove Yank to leave his ship and try to seek revenge on a society that dubbed him a "hairy" Neanderthal...
Vol. 80 • April 1997 • No. 6
