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By Root 1028 0

avant-gardists who know how to use the modern idiom in the service of the banal. Their authors were all expatriates in the ’twenties—even Mr. Benét, who dates his Americanesque epic “Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1928.” That they are not conscious of any shifting of gears, that they still think of themselves as avant-gardists is just what makes their later works so attractive in a Midcult sense. “Toward the end of the ’twenties I began to lose pleasure in going to the theater,” Mr. Wilder begins the preface to the 1957 edition of Three Plays. He explains that, while Joyce, Proust and Mann still compelled his belief, the theater didn’t, and he continues: “I began to feel that the theater was not only inadequate, it was evasive; it did not wish to draw on its deeper potentialities....It aimed to be soothing. The tragic had no heat; the comic had no bite; the social criticism failed to indict us with responsibility. I began to search for the point where the theater had run off the track, where it had...become a minor art and an inconsequential diversion.” That point, he found, was “the box-set stage,” with its realistic sets and props and its proscenium dividing the actors from the audience. He fixed that, all right, but the plays he mounted on his advanced stage were evasive, soothing, without tragic heat or comic bite and spectacularly without social criticism. The Skin of Our Teeth, for instance, is as vast in theme as Our Town is modest, dealing with the whole history of the human race, but its spirit and its dialogue are equally folksy, and its point, hammered home by the maid, Sabina, is identical: life goes on and, to lapse into the idiom of Sabina’s opposite number in Our Town, there ain’t a thing you can do about it. “This is where you came in,” she says at the final curtain. “We have to go on for ages and ages yet. You go home. The end of this play isn’t written yet. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus! Their heads are full of plans and they’re as confident as the first day they began.” A soft impeachment—but Midcult specializes in soft impeachments. Its cakes are forever eaten, forever intact.

The Skin of Our Teeth was first produced in 1942, at the low point of the war; its message—the adaptability and tenacity of the human race through the most catastrophic events—was a welcome one and was well received. “I think it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis,” writes the author. “It has often been charged with being a bookish fantasia about history, full of rather bloodless schoolmasterish jokes. But to have seen it in Germany soon after the war, in the shattered churches and beerhalls that were serving as theaters, with audiences whose price of admission meant the loss of a meal...it was an experience that was not so cool. I am very proud that this year [1957] it has received a first and overwhelming reception in Warsaw. The play is deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.” Personally, its bookish quality is one of the things I like about the play, and its jokes are often good; in fact, as entertainment The Skin of Our Teeth is excellent, full of charm and ingenuity; its only defect is that whenever it tries to be serious, which is quite often, it is pretentious and embarrassing. I quite believe the author’s statement about its reception in postwar Germany—he enjoys a much greater reputation abroad than here—and I agree that the audiences responded to it because it seemed to speak to them of the historical cataclysm they had just been through. I find this fact, while not unexpected, depressing. The bow to Finnegans Wake is a graceful retrieve of a foul ball batted up in the Saturday Review fifteen years earlier by Messrs. Campbell and Robinson, the authors of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. They hinted at plagiarism, but I think one should rather admire the author’s ability to transmute into Midcult such an impenetrably avant-garde work. There seems to be no limit to this kind of alchemy in reverse, given a certain amount of brass.

XIV

Since 1900 American culture has moved, culturally, in a direction that on the whole