Male, Female and American Drama

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

Wherein the Sex Motivation Climbs Towards the Rarer Air of Comedy

LATELY, when England gave her chief literary prize to the author of Juno and the Paycock, Lord Asquith loaned most moral glow to the occasion by declaring how wretched the public is with sex plot upon sex plot. Until O'Casey's coming, he implied, the theatre's windpipe had been completely wrapped around by the serpent sex. The stage had composed nothing score of years but ten score hymns to Venus. His Lordship proposed the beginning of a new, quite sexless era.

Here in America, where milleniums are long kept maturing in warehouse bond before they are taken out for sale to the public, we are still enormously beset by the sex play. We have qualms about it, but such qualms as double its value. Our playwrights are too exultant over their comparatively new permission to call a coal shovel a spade to dream of relinquishing it for years to come.

Besides, the American playwright is (at any rate, has always been) an immensely ready opportunist. And he realizes that the present day, out of its effort to make sex abstractly scientific, has made it the more personal and romantic. Normal or aberrational, the lark of uncorseted youth, the habit of lawfully wedlocked middle age, the other side of the scapular of religion, the shrill neigh of perversion, the blame and blithering splendours of prostitution as a fine art . . . every hall-way of love, every family closet of the humour and pity and perilousness of physical desire, has been treated to the pocket flashlights of our modern dramatists. One time out of ten, perhaps, the motto has not been, let there be light, but, let there be light comedy.

WHICH is ultimately just what there ought to be, of course. The Infinite which delegated to us the business of perpetuating our own race also provided us with the comforting right to be merry about it. In lust there is laughter, and, if there were not, there would not be even enough printers and editors alive today to furnish us the smatter of the divorce courts, the chuckles of each breach-of-promise suit, the keyhole to the semi-private life of "Peaches" Browning.

Where Bourdet's The Captive falls short of superlative significance, for instance, is in its harrowing refusal to give its characters the benefit of comedy. To many the tragic sentimentality of M. Bourdet's play must have seemed as false, as gross and windy as, say, a revival of Bertha the Sewing-Machine Girl would seem to Theodore Dreiser.

But The Captive introduces a more or less new subject to the drama. And sentimentality is the safest approach to any new subject. If not the safest, then the first to hand. All situations made or marred by the consequences of human intimacy have gone through this process of stage understanding; have been violently upbraided, overwhelmingly sentimentalized, before they attained that balance which would make them the stuff of fine comedy.

"The root of all laughter," says H. G. Wells, through his latest mouthpiece, William Clissold, "lies in that whim of Fate which in the course of a brief million years or so made of the fiercest and loneliest of animals the most socially involved of all living things." Clissold goes on to add that, in spite of his unappeasable craving for laughter, he never could laugh about "the immense urgency of sex". But that was when he was a boy—and, now that he has grown up to philosopher's age, he can endow this topic of sex with the musings and amusements of true comedy, can realize it as the indefatigible rhythm of the capriccioso of all life.

AMERICAN playwrights are this little boy that William Clissold was. They have grown up to a state of violent wondering, an unhumorous and terrifying period, wherein a curious public permission to say anything they please has goaded them into shouting everything they can remember. They have newly discovered the glories of chalk on a back-fence. But the pictures they draw somehow fail of joy, are the malformations and Freudian grotesques of a still unsuccessfully immoral hand.

For only the unmoral viewpoint—at world's end from the immoral—can show the subject of sex sufficient casual ness, the decency and clearness to put and keep it in its artistic place. Before we shall have achieved anything like the deftness and deliciousness of the Schnitzleriana, we must first have settled within our own selves that bicker between melancholy guffaws and ribald tears, those two vanguards of our ancient righteousness.

Weeping over the sexual sinner must irk him quite as much as chortling at him. Both exercises are escape valves of perplexity. Both are presumptuous prerogatives seized by the major masses of what we like to call normality. Both make sex as a theatrical topic more or less unbearable over here.

CONSIDER those long and docile years wherein all stage heroines were supposed to be little Nuremberg effigies; wherein all marriages constituted, per se, happy endings, and a multitude of sins was condoned by a multitude of virtues; where Magdalens travelled nowhere but on a one-way street to Death, and purity was an unbreakable chinaware. Sometimes, indeed, the fiend did lead the innocent astray—but not very far before ignominy overtook him. Sometimes the poor girl did come into the last act with a rag doll in her arms— but you were always made to feel that the author had put it there as a most moral lesson and not as a natural product of association. There was a seal on every marriage license, then, and a sermon in every foundling.

Emancipation from those blue-eyed days was bound to be a livid business. No adolescent can achieve disbelief in the stork without an eruption of young oaths and cynicisms.

So we passed into that more recent stage where all is gritty and grinning, where Freud bobs in and out in false-face, where young men and maidens commit all the sins. We became hilariously epigrammatic about things that even a Wilde had had to befog with precious sighs. We revelled suddenly in epithets which even a Cambronne keeps for battle-fields, and in motives an Ellis keeps for medical circulation. It was a great and glorious release. We had met sex and it was ours.

Or, rather, we were sex's. For, from now on, we maintained a sort of ignoblesse oblige towards all social relations. The conjunction of male and female had its results, and the author had always to keep his calcium on whatever details of it were overlooked.

No spinster appears now among the dramatis personae without daubs of sexual inhibitions and frustrations all over her. No pastor whose cant is not the lapping of a dammed-up lust. To all the sexes in the audiences all things became sex.

WE are going to get over it. We are already getting over it, precisely as the Restoration drama had its fling and got over it. And then, shall we be back where we started? Back at that scratch of innocence where a kiss on the lips will cause the very footlights to shudder? There are prophets wish-fulfilling enough to tell you so—but don't believe them.

On the contrary, we ought soon to arrive at that blessed and most sensible era where sex is no longer a swollen glory nor a consuming stain, but at last a proportionately sized and patterned and altogether accepted fixture of the landscape of life. If we are wiser, we need not necessarily be sadder about it. We can— and probably shall—know by then that not all attributes and moments of the sex impulse are entertaining, any more than four continuous hours with inexhaustible huckleberry pies are appetizing. We shall have gotten over being gluttons for ravishment.

When we have treated the sex theme to the honours of the incidental, we shall have given it its rightful station on the stage. Because, in the semi-final analysis which is as far as the stage may ever go, sex is a merriment, and merriment is an incidental. Call that a vicious circle, perhaps. It is not half so vicious a one as the sausage-ring of linked bitterness, bawdiness, sensuality, sentimentality, through which, as through a port-hole's rim, we poke our heads and crow how we would be free.

Quite all of a century ago Stendhal listened disappointedly to hear us crow like this. To his dissertations De L'Amour he added a chapter on the state of love in the United States which accused us of too much tranquillity for passion, too much "reasonable habit of mind" for emotions and arts.

Very well, then, these hundred years since Stendhal dismissed us we have spent in growing up to higher things. We have gone in for Buddha's umbilical contemplations, and are at last aware of ourselves, our passions and our parts, our urge to art. But are we any less lower species for the knowledge . . . when the knowledge of that knowledge frightens us into crocodile sentiment?

What, in short, is the use of sex-consciousness to us unless we can have sophisticated pleasure from it? What is the use of permitting yellow tickets to our playwrights until they know how to cling on to the merry-go-round?