SPEAKING OF THE DEVIL
Meyer, Ernest L.
Speaking Of The Devil By ERNEST I MEYER IN an interview reported recently in the newspaper PM, Moss Hart, the playwright, brought up a point that illuminates the dark season through which the...
...Our war-time diagnosis was wrong...
...The list does not even embrace our own domestic problems of reconversion, of growing racial and religious tensions, of industry and labor girding for a show-down battle that may send our economy rocking on its heels...
...The front page in recent months is more alarming than it ever was in the dark days of the war...
...The evil one was hanged in the public square, and the good people walked homeward hugging to themselves happily their officially proven virtue...
...Hart has discovered, that tranquility has vanished...
...THIS discovery is of utmost importance if we are to proceed sanely with a method of treatment divorced from magic and mumbo-jumbo...
...This transitional period is very tough for everyone...
...The time has long passed when we can pretend to attain saintliness and absolution by the simple device of hanging a witch in Salem...
...THE devil is dead, but according to C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times "the unhappy continent of Europe faces one of its bleakest, saddest winters since the chaos of the Thirty Years' War," with 20,000,000 desperate and homeless people milling across last year's battlefields, starvation apd disease dogging their footsteps, and the very young and very old dying in droves...
...This is a very unsettling time for a writer," he remarked...
...Has he forgotten the ordeal of the millions of men at the front lines, the dread scroll of the dead lengthening with each battle won or lost, the tenseness of the civilians at home fearing the messenger with his sheaf of yellow slips...
...Has he failed to remember the nightmare of prisons and concentration camps, of great cities blasted, and of whole populations tunnelled in terror under the flaming skies ? * * * MR: HART has probably not forgotten at all...
...Today, as Mr...
...We rejoiced in that tranquility of spirit which must have been known by the Puritans of an earlier day when they selected from their community some ugly old crone and proclaimed her an authentic witch, an evil one...
...The devil is dead, and the religious intolerance he stood for, but in Europe tens of thousands of homeless Jews battered by years of upheaval and torture are jammed into crowded camps while England and the United States graciously get together and agree to "study" the problem of Palestine, betrayed by empty promises...
...It was the custom to gloss over our own follies and failures, to lay the whole burden of cosmic sin at the foot of the devil, and to believe fatuously that victories at arms can win both wars and wisdom...
...You read the morning papers...
...they have become panoramic...
...The target for our hatred and the origin of our fears has become dispersed and clouded...
...These are but a few of the evils we inherited after the devil was officially interred...
...And yet he is right when he says that these present days are more unsettling than the grim days of the war...
...As an ethical approach to human problems, that system was too slick, just too damned easy...
...In the very least of the nations, down to the humblest citizen, there lies guilt, and sickness, and hope of a cure...
...Those years were sick with a festering smugness...
...Our fears and our apprehensions are no longer centered in a person...
...The world is suffering not from a single ulcer but from a plague of boils...
...You haven't the heart to do an innocuous comedy—a writer with any sensitivity can't...
...We had a single, central target for our hatred and our fear, the devil incarnate...
...For the evil of war was endured with fortitude in the belief and the hope that it would prevent a greater evil: domination of the world by the twin monsters Hitler and Hirohito...
...Speaking Of The Devil By ERNEST I MEYER IN an interview reported recently in the newspaper PM, Moss Hart, the playwright, brought up a point that illuminates the dark season through which the world is now passing...
...These two personified the devil, and in making common cause against the devil we, on the side of the angels, entered an era of spiritual intoxication...
...The official devil of yesterday has been deposed, annihilated, but evil in motley dress and many guises still walks the earth's red acres...
...On the face of it, Hart's notion that the present time is more "tough" than the war years seems utter nonsense...
...The devil is dead, but imperial British shells and bullets mow down soldiers and civilians in Java to crush a native revolt against imperial Dutch exploitation...
...The devil is dead, and the Schrecklichkeit he practised, but in the reconquered areas of Germany and Austria looting and rape flourish as in the days under the Nazi heel, with Yanks and Reds clawing for bloody booty...
...Hart puts it mildly when he says the times are unsettling...
...Hitler is dead, but Hitlerism, we have found to our utter confusion, is hydra-headed...
...And if ever we felt the slightest doubt that the devil did not synthesize every bit of evil rampant on earth, all we had to do was read another official government White Paper to recapture the soothing knowledge of our saintliness...
...We walked giddily the highway of righteousness...
...And yet in a very real sense this era of diffused bewilderment is more hopeful, more healthy than the emotionally stable years of the war...
...We are no longer united in a common cause but disunited in a common confusion...
...If we slide again into another easy formula like "Russia is the root of all evil," we are lost...
...As a writer you can't dismiss the kind of times we live in which happen to be terrible...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 47
