At the same time, any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, “I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.”
It seemed to me after my first experiences that the theatre was the most pragmatic of all art media. The first question of ordinary producers is: “Will it get across on Broadway?” The merit of a play is a secondary consideration and they shy from any play whose formula has not been proved a number of times.
The Member of the Wedding is unconventional because it is not a literal kind of play. It is an inward play and the conflicts are inward conflicts. The antagonist is not personified, but is a human condition of life; the sense of moral isolation. In this respect, The Member of the Wedding has an affinity with classical plays—which we are not used to in the modern theatre where the protagonist and antagonist are present in palpable conflict on the stage. The play has other abstract values; it is concerned with the weight of time, the hazard of human existence, bolts of chance. The reaction of the characters to these abstract phenomena projects the movement of the play. Some observers who failed to apprehend this modus operandi felt the play to be fragmentary because they did not account for this aesthetic concept.
This design was intuitive. Each creative work is determined by its own chemistry; the artist can only precipitate the inherent reactions if he approached the work subjectively. I must say I did not realize the proper dimensions of this play, the values of the unseen qualities involved, until the work had taken on its own life. An uncanny aspect of creation is that the artist approaches his destiny (or the destiny of his work) circuitously and only when the chemistry is sufficiently advanced does he realize the dimension of his work. I know that was my experience in writing The Member of the Wedding.
I foresaw that this play had also another problem as a lyric tragicomedy. The funniness and the grief are often co-existent in a single line and I did not know how an audience would respond to this. But Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon de Wilde, under the superb direction of Harold Clurman, brought to their fugue-like parts a dazzling precision and harmony.
Some observers have wondered if any drama as unconventional as this should be called a play. I cannot comment on that. I only know that The Member of the Wedding is a vision that a number of artists have realized with fidelity and love.
Playwright Tells of Pangs
I AM writing this from a hotel room in Princeton. Now that “The Square Root of Wonderful” is in production and the script is in order, I think back to the time when I first started this play. That was almost three years ago.
Saint Subber called me on the telephone and asked to come to Nyack to see me. Being involved with other work, I was not too hospitable. But the year before, I had written a seedling version of a play which I knew was not too good and with a great deal of diffidence, showed it to him. He too knew that it was not good but could see the promise and asked me to work on it. I said I would think it over and call him the next day.
In the night, I suddenly saw the opening scene. Saint came to Nyack the following day and the play that had withered, began to flourish. But it was to take about three years to fulfill itself and many a time, Saint and I would quarrel and cuss each other out. I talked about a whip-carrying guard in a salt mine, but still the play had hold of me and he had faith.
I am drawn to the theatre because it is one of the most strict forms of art. Don’t think I am passing esthetic judgments, but to me a play is like a fugue, the first theme is announced, then developed and finally resolved.
“The Member of the Wedding” was like a cameo—“The Square Root of Wonderful” is a larger play, but the rules of my esthetic sense are the same. The theme of “The Square Root of Wonderful” is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin; as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and the love, which is the square root of wonderful.
It is not seemly to belly-ache about the problems of play writing, but I remember one dismal afternoon in spring, when the snow lay porous and melting on the road. Saint took me out to a beautiful French restaurant, but we hardly touched the good food or drank the wine. Knowing that the play we had then was not the square root of wonderful, we sat defeated and desolate.
Then we drove back to Nyack without saying a word. The next day I started again, putting a different emphasis on the characters involved, but the weights changed so radically that I realized that this was not what I wanted either.
One of the main problems was to handle tragedy and comedy almost simultaneously. If there is a funny scene or love scene in the face of sickness or ruin, it is offensive unless it is handled with the proper emotional progression. But those two elements had to be there, and after that second evolution, I started the next and almost final version.
Now I sit in this hotel making those picayune last-minute changes which are irritating but so important when they are magnified on stage. I have learned from years of writing that you write out of abundance and strength, and deadlines are a hindrance. But in the theatre deadlines are necessary and often the abundance and strength flickers, but the author works on. As Tennessee Williams once told me: “It takes a tough old bird to work in the theatre.”
The Dark Brilliance of Edward Albee
THIS SUMMER I spent part of my vacation with Edward Albee at Water Island, a small community on Fire Island. I had already loved his work, so with this vacation I was well prepared to love him as a person. He is gentle and dignified, and his personality reflects his enormous talents. A great lover of nature, he would walk for miles on the beach. At night he would point out the stars to me. When I think about Edward I always think about stars and starlight.
Other evenings he would read aloud. He read Happy Days by Samuel Beckett out loud. In preparation for the long reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, we had an early supper. Edward cooked a magnificent supper for us. (He’s a grand cook.)
Another evening he read aloud the first act of The Ballad of the Sad Café, and I was thrilled by it. He is adapting The Ballad of the Sad Café for his next play.
Edward started writing plays only four years ago. Before that he had written poetry, which surely is the best way for a serious writer to begin. His marvelous poems have been set to music by William Flanagan. His plays, The Zoo Story, The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith, have been performed Off Broadway, and like a comet in the sky they reached the whole world. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is his first Broadway production. This play, as luminous as the stars, is about the destruction of a dream. It has the passion of a Greek drama although the setting is in an Eastern college town. It shows malicious humiliation and love and tenderness and bitterness. It has in it compassion, the wildest humor and the dark brilliance that, to me, is peculiar to the genius of Edward Albee.
POEMS
The Mortgaged Heart
The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,
Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim
The lover’s senses, the mortgaged heart.
Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain
And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise.
Endure each summons once, and once again;
Experience multiplied by two—the duty recognized.
Instruct the quivering spirit, instant nerve
To schizophrenic master serve,
Or like a homeless Doppelgänger
Blind love might wander.
The mortgage of the dead is known.
Prepare the cherished wreath, the garland door.
But the secluded ash, the humble bone—
Do the dead know?
When We Are Lost
When we are lost what image tells?
/> Nothing resembles nothing. Yet nothing
Is not blank. It is configured Hell:
Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,
Demanding furniture. All unrelated
And with air between.
The terror. Is it of Space, of Time?
Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?
To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
The Dual Angel
A Meditation on Origin and Choice
INCANTATION TO LUCIFER
Angel disarmed, lay down your cunning, finally tell
The currents, stops and altitudes between Heaven and Hell.
Or were the scalding stars too loud for your celestial velleities,
The everlasting zones of emptiness uncanny to your imperious hand?
Did you admit the shocks and shuttles of the circumstance,
And were the aeons ever sinister
Or were they just vulgar as a marathon dance?
Did you keep camping all through chaos
Comparing colors of infinity to neon lights?
Forever were you inconsolable during the downward flight
Spurning the comfort of affinity and rose, the rest of sunset, clarity,
Avoiding rainbows in that desperate clash against the stars?
Your tearless wizardry soon caught the rhyme
Of universe, the planetary chimes, atomic quandary.
It took you only a zone or two to riddle
The top-secret density relating Space to Time.
Did once your hurtling senses turn
To paradise that you had robbed and spurned?
Did you once wonder, one time weep?
As earth nears, turn again defaulting eyes to paradise,
Defaulting eyes, turn once again
With the presentiment of further bliss
Before you shudder with the first and final kiss.
HYMEN, O HYMEN
It was the time when the newest star was inchoate
And there were only revolving seas and land still malleable.
There was no garden at that time—but there was God.
For when the sun burst God chose the minority side of firmament
And settled on earth to study an experiment.
We know nothing of that meeting, nothing at all
Only the protean firelight fearful on the wall.
Since we only know it happened it’s anybody’s guess
How abdicated angel asked for and found God’s rest.
Ecce, the emperor of velocity and glare
The splendor from his awful odyssey, his starlit hair
Landed on a rim of ocean, striding to shore
The radiant grace and arrogance before
The blue-veined instep faltered and slowly dimmed the pirate eyes.
Ecce, the quailing emperor against a violet sea and the primeval skies.
Behold this homage to a majesty almost impossible to explain
For after the heavenly holdup God was left rather plain.
Deliberate and unadorned, but after all what need
Of scepter had the hand that hewed the Universe?
And ruler of infinity has little use for speed.
His visage black with wind and sun, almighty hand vibrant with strife
Feeling in blank mysterious seas the secret miracle of life.
Imagine the encounter when the polarities chance
When stars of love and sorrow met Satan’s jeweled glance.
We are told nothing of conception, really nothing at all.
Only the firelit symbols of an antique nurse scary and changing on the wall.
We are told nothing
Of the vibrato of desire remorseless
Until the solar-plexal swinging
Orchestrates to all flesh singing.
Post coitum, omnia tristia sunt.
Sadness, then sleep, the blaze of noon, love’s gladness.
There was no witness of this bridal night
Only azoic seascape and interlocking angels’ might.
So now we speculate with filial wonder,
Fabricate that night of love and ponder
On the quietude of Satan in our Father’s arms:
Velocity stilled, the restful shade.
Satan we can understand—but what was God’s will
That cosmic night before we were made?
The next day He completed His experiment
Found in the seas that atom He willed alive
Nursed in His awesome hand, taught to survive
The shock of creation, watched with His love and care
Astride in ocean and unknowing that Satan’s ocean-skipping eye was there
Envisaging end in the beginning, wrestling with God’s life,
The eye of guile had sliced the atom with Satanic knife.
LOVE AND THE RIND OF TIME
What is Time that man should be so mindful:
The earth is aged 500 thousand millions of years,
Allowing some hundred thousand millions of margin for error
And man evolving a mere half-million years of consciousness, twilight and terror
Only a flicker of eternity divides us from unknowing beast
And how far are we from the fern, the rose, essential yeast?
Indeed in these light aeons how far
From animal to evening star?
Skip time for now and fix the eye upon eternity
Eye gazing backward or forward it is the same
Whether Mozart or short-order cook with an infirmity
Except the illuminations alter their shafts
Except we would rather be Mozart, we want to last as long as possible, to radiate, to sing
Although in eternity it may be the same thing.
In God’s cosmos according to report
Nothing lapses, no gene is lost
After centuries may bustle in the sport
Which will in time command the line.
Those who find it a little harder to live
And therefore live a little harder,
As struggling gene in oceanic plant
Predestine voluntary cells that give
The evolutionary turn to fish, then beast
With multiplying brain that dominates earth’s feasts.
From weed to dinosaur through the peripheries of stars
From furtherest star imperiled on the rind of time,
How long to core of love in human mind?
THE DUAL ANGEL
The world dazed by Satanic glares
Like country children spangled-eyed at county fairs
Seeing no terror in trapeze, kinetic thrill of zones above listening,
And the unheeded shrill of the world lost, rocketing in space,
Despairs of those who are struck down upon Hell’s floor and die—or crawl awhile a little more.
The screams are heard by blasted ears within the radiation zone
And hanging eyes upon a cheek must see the charred and iridescent craze—
Earth orphaned by atom, each man alone.
The furious intellect relating furtherest space to beyondest time,
Exalting abstractions, vaulting the 1 2 3,
Defaulting from the simplest kinship, disjoining man from man,
Seeing across oceans, and stumbling on a grain of sand. Almighty God!
After the half a million years this is the century of decision
Between obscenest suicide and Man’s transfigured vision.
Here are the flowering plant, beast and the dual angel,
The living who struggles with the weight of dead and,
Recognizing victory, surmises radiance in lead.
FATHER, UPON THY IMAGE WE ARE SPANNED
Why are we split u
pon our double nature, how are we planned?
Father, upon what image are we spanned?
Turning helpless in the garden of right and wrong
Mocked by the reversibles of good and evil
Heir of the exile. Lucifer, and brother of Thy universal Son
Who said it is finished when Thy synthesis was just begun.
We suffer the sorrow of separation and division
With a heart that blazes with Christ’s vision:
That though we be deviously natured, dual-planned,
Father, upon Thy image we are spanned.
AVE
Stone Is Not Stone
There was a time when stone was stone
And a face on the street was a finished face.
Between the Thing, myself and God alone
There was an instant symmetry.
Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:
Stone is not stone
And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete
Until in the child’s inchoate face
I recognize your exiled eyes.
The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.
Tonight, this torn room sleeps
Beneath the starlight bent by you.
Saraband
Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth’s fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar