Dr. McCracken: Makers of Contemporary Thought #5, Playwrights: T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams

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I wonfu'r defnyddio fel firafol o'r marthfod yn prepar colour. Tynac ei hwnnod sicrhau fel hunasol iawn yn m arma ofodio ac mae ni un ni gwyllwch hi'r cig advisors. Hepodio edryd yn ymwasaf competingon i'w efo gael os. Rha faa. Hefyd hwy th hardeg mall yn prydi dod trwy i'w rh trwy'r aenuhauiad fraedddom bod arrow narygidol ac sy-rei un arfyni eu gan rhan This is a quotation, once a very deaf lady had me say something in the pulpit, the first personal pronoun and thought I was talking about myself. And perhaps this is why I drink the martinis almost as fast as I can snatch them from the tray. The moment after the phone has been hung up,

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Dych ddysgol ei oer Obi Feel‌paeth tokorgywr chi dydd a chi callnau hynny. Mae'r fads oes Bioosydd tusbosol ond pawb, coindr i uniau hyn, ywarrddimod n 달 blocki'r ei wnaiforiog i ac doedd mewn niac Fir ymwg. Syli Czynoh ei enablesair o facebookis passage jaid of. Roedd y nisd geniedblwyr i f ticks hwn i gydol. A yna hynoddau ar y broleidan. Mae gwneud cyw美國 i'r jull i»nog. trefod chi semereportu sydd defini o shいい o fretau gone mai gildyn na frobl, a ffrasiad o yo gallawau wedi gallu? Fi beth dydynill hoi a reithen yn y armen, allwch ihrnigo bobanniol, yn gweld gyd yn gallu r差. Co ond dmarwch fyNothing yna fwyr wooch ag rydw wrth ly walk

o'r car amr nhw. Rwyna eu ac edra frynod. Os yna beth arfiol, am fel arf花ir, a wedi'ch Ly ringau, am ei wirinau dod bans yn pafiro micau 但ch am Indians iPhone mynd bynol fel Jan hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon movements Mynd I hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon hon no The question that possibly you have overlooked is, do I sense the wrath of the playwright? Have I any awareness of his compassion? Replying to criticisms of the play, Kat on a hot tin roof, particularly to one made by Dean Fitch out in California,

is the most highly intensely moral work that I have produced and this is what gives it its power. What it says in essence through the character of Big Daddy is this, On the name of His mummy and the tale,

28, the complaint against Williams is that he has no such conscious That he has followed precisely the opposite principle that he is doing more to destroy an old world Then to help build a new one I believe he would say that in plays like pleus o'r tattu Rhong ac help y gael ac dinностiau. Llwchaintono, gaelmat, llol ar Ysrine Dragon.

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Pefệch, hon sut unrhyw ac ac inni yn matflathuau'r乾bylgr. Gydgym ond yn yr unw rhaidwy fydd gwer knobs syal Irish ein creatorllr. Llywod yn muni atir thaol ar gyfer ymριっ ac gymddwn eisiau gwirionedd. Mae'r fel cyfrolf mae'r sillaeth oedaint GRßT Mae'r cad наш gy女 Senau WhE It's over. WhE it's over here. Thank you. What's was promised after awful hopes? Should I have dánd a toast to this? our garbage dump. Symbolism you would think would be very readily understood. All the action takes place in a city square.

On one side of the square there is a proprietor full of hot tea contempt for all who come into his view. On the other side is a flop house, a pawn shop and a house of prostitution. The city are interminable deserts and unsurpassable mountains. Really, isn't it too difficult to see what Williams is driving at? He's holding up the mirror to life. It may be life in the raw but for millions. Life is raw. It may be only a segment of life but it is a segment great numbers of people have come to think about life as a trap. It may be a trap in which they're caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. It may be caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. It may be caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. It may be caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. It may be caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. It may be caught. It may be caught.

It may be caught. The little man who is the big man potentially and who is craving, who is seeking what Thomas Paine called his proper rank. It may be caught.

It may be caught. Well, now I turn to a playwright of a very different sort, a phenomenon in the theatre, and a vote Christian. He is a highly controversial subject, he has fierce antagonists as well as devoted adherents. But even the sharpest of his critics would not be disposed to deny that he himself is an outstanding literary critic that he is a very great poet and dramatist, maybe that his prestige has passed its peak.

Tenred is one of the very few major modern writers who has any religion, and we can trace his spiritual odyssey in his work. Like the work of Aldous Huxley, it is in large-measure autobiographical, and he has given us every reason for believing that this is so. His early poems written prior to, and also just after his conversion to Christianity, like so many of his contemporaries, like Kamu and his juniors, he has dealt with the meaninglessness of modern life, with its rootlessness, its aimlessness, its triviality. Take precious Mr. Proofok, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I care to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. Take his account of a metropolis like London and New York, and its effect on people who live and work in it. Here is a place of disaffection, time before and time after. In a dim light, only a flicker, this is the tube, this is the subway, only a flicker over the strained, time-ridden faces, distracted from distraction by distraction, filled with fancies and empty of meaning. Schubent, tumid apathy with no concentration, Maine and, you've seen it in the subway, Maine and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind that blows before and after time, wind in and out of unwholesome lungs.

Or take his epitaph on our fashionable suburbs, written prophetically, written in the style of Amos, written before the nuclear threat, a cry from the north, from the west and from the south, when thousands travel daily to the time-cap city, all of these men are engaged with time as we are. The time-cap city where my word is unspoken, in the land of lobelias and tennis flannels, the rabbit shall burrow, and the thorns revisit the nettles shall flourish on the gravel courts, and the wind shall say, here, where decent, godless people, their only monument, the ash-falt roads, and a thousand lost golf balls.

The titles of the major works of this period are as significant as the titles of Aldous Huxley's novels. The Waste Land, a poem presenting man, if you please, has fallen, his society rotten at the core and crumbling, his pleasures corrupt, his spirit dead, his direst need. Spiritual rebirth, the hollow men, a poem picturing contemporary civilization as hollow, stuffed, like the guys, which little boys burn on bonfire night, a picture of desolation with nothing to suggest hope. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. All through this period, Elliot was putting to himself the question, where, how shall I find the spiritual power necessary to face up to and deal with myself as hollow as empty?

And with my world, as without sense and meaning, and we begin to find him grooping his way to an answer in the poem that he calls ash wednesday. He's already not only making for the church, but for the high church, Lord, I am not worthy. Lord, I am not worthy, but speak the word only. Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood, teach us how much of this is the art of living, teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still, our peace in his will, and let my cry come unto thee. And then with the play murder in the cathedral, Elliot began to present to an astonished, western world, his central Christian convictions.

Murder in the cathedral is not just the portrayal of a churchman, Beckett, who stood up for his conscience against odds, a Protestant and an English martyr. It's this study of a man who subjugated his individual will to the will of God, who was a martyr in spirit as well as in body. As Beckett puts it in the play in his Christmas Day Salmon, the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr. By contrast with cat on a hot tin roof, imagine a theater thronged with people as the glass school hamburger was when I first saw murder in the cathedral for a play whose theme is the subjugation of the will of man to the will of God. Elliot finds it awfully difficult to translate his Christian convictions through the medium of the stage into contemporary life.

If the preacher's problem is communication and it is, the playwright's problem is even more of that of communication. In London in 1956, I went to see a revival of the play, the family reunion, and at the interval, the man sitting next to me, I got a seat at the last moment and was wedged between people who were there in groups, the man sitting next to me said, why compose poems and write plays as if they were crossword puzzles. We were still arguing about that when the curtain went up for the next act, and towards the end of the play that we were witnessing the family reunion, the leading character says about his decision to go somewhere on the other side of despair. I would explain, but you would none of you believe it. If you believed it, you still would not understand. Those lines prompted me to take a side long glance at my neighbour, and he made a gesture as though to say, didn't I tell you?

What's the fellow driving at? This is the thought that comes to the mind as you watch him struggling on the stage. You ask yourself reading, Elliot, does he hesitate to speak out from the fear of being misunderstood? Does he feel communication is actually impossible that to two different people, the same words never have sufficiently similar meanings for adequate satisfactory communication to take place? If you have read him and are impatient with his obscurity, take into account the fact that his life has been one long struggle, one long endeavor to be understood, to communicate without watering down, without vulgarising the convictions he has to express the convictions he has found it hard to win. In one of his poems, he offers this piece of autobiography. So here I am. In the middleweight, having had 20 years, 20 years largely wasted, trying every public speaker, every writer can respond to this, trying to learn to use words.

And every attempt, say for me, every Tuesday morning, every attempt is a holy new start and a different kind of failure because one has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say. Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it, and so each venture is a new beginning. Here's a phrase for you, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mass of imprecision of feeling undisciplined squads of emotion. Looking at some of my sermons, that last line might not be without relevance, undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is what one has to work at, and here he is attempting to explain the reason for obscurity. Now with that in mind, may I ask you to consider with me just very briefly the family reunion, the play I watched at its revival in 1956. And if you're going to say the theme is abnormal, dreadfully abnormal, will you please think about MacBeth? How that moves, and yet how utterly abnormal it ham. When I was invited for the first time to breach and riverside, on the Saturday afternoon I went to see Morris Evans in Julius Caesar. I'll never forget the effect of the play on two youngsters who were just behind me, especially towards the end when one man after another goes down. Those boys were just in their element. I reckoned they hadn't quite appreciated that Shakespeare had all that gore in it.

The family reunion Harry is obsessed with the idea that he pushed his wife off the deck of a liner into the sea. The consciousness of guilt has followed him in the shape of the furies. Elliott, who's a classicist, calls them the humanities. There isn't time to stop to talk about the humanities. Harry flies from the furies all over the world, but he cannot elude them. And at last he returns to his home, hoping to find a sanctuary there to last the furies catch up with him even at home, among his state-old uncles and aunts. There's one, Agatha, principal of a woman's college, who was a girl who was in love with his father. She tells Harry that just before he was born, his father had actually planned to do away with his mother.

Here is the origin of the family cuss which has haunted Harry. He begins to see that it is useless to flee from the furies. The very place in which he had hoped to get away from them is more than any other the place where they always have been. Not only so, he sees that it is needless as well as useless to try to escape, they have to be met and faced. This is the message in play after play. The furies have to be met and faced. This is where Eliot is saying the same thing as Jung. And lo and behold, when Harry meets and faces them, they are no longer terrible. They are quote, the bright angels. So what happens, he is ready now, to leave home again, to go wherever they may lead him, even though following them may mean hardship and self-sacrifice, worship in the desert. It is thirst by the way as in Sart and Camel. So in Eliot, constant reference to thirst.

Oh, everyone that thirsteth come ye to the waters. The master of us all, I thirst. In the desert thirst and deprivation, a stormy sanctuary and a primitive altar, the heat of the sun and the icy night, a care over the lives of humble people, the lessen of ignorance of incurable diseases. Many interpretations have been offered of the family reunion as many interpretations have been offered of hamlet. One of them being that obliges us to think of what the theologians mean by originals in. But what I ask you to notice is the parallel with murder in the cathedral, the subjugation of the individual will, to a higher will. And then the family reunion was followed by the cocktail party. And when it was produced here in New York, it drew from intelligent auditors puzzled admiration.

What was Eliot seeking to convey? It brings together a motley collection of characters. One, a psychiatrist talking like a priest. I reckon a good many psychiatrists nowadays talk like a priest. Have opportunities to talk that priests don't have. Seeking to readjust the lives of a husband and wife and their lovers because the husband or the wife has a lover. Another character in the play, a superficial type. Eliot makes short shifts of him. He goes off to make movies. Another of the central character, Celia Coppostone, who has made two discoveries. First that everybody is lonely, everybody. And second that she is a sinner. Preaches are often criticised for talking about sin. The theatre is full of it, you know.

The novelists are constantly at it, so are the psychologists. We are probably saying less about it than these others. She has recognised that she is a sinner. That second discovery leads her to choose the way of Harry in the family reunion and of Beckett in murder in the cathedral. The unworthiness in herself, which she sees in the world, as other people are not unlike her. Impels have to enact of renunciation to a subjugation of her individual will to a higher will. And she goes off just you think of that first night in New York and of the people who are usually at first nights. When they watched all this sun folding on the stage, she goes off to nurse African natives, dying of a pestilence and during an insurrection. Eliot spares the audience nothing, she's captured. And she's crucified. It's near an ant hill that she's crucified and the insects swarm over and devour her body as she dies.

She seems to me to be saying she gains herself by losing herself, by giving herself away beyond the meaningless she finds meaning at last. Now for want of time I shall bypass the confidential clock to make a unnecessarily brief comment on Eliot's latest play, The Elder Statesman, produced in 1958, then subsequently in London, but so far as I know not yet produced one Broadway. I wonder whether it has much of a chance on Broadway, might of a chance off Broadway, be wonderful if we could have the chance in our drama theatre. No complaint can be made of obscurity this time. Eliot's again working with a very familiar theme, Lord Claverton retires from public life, apparently in a blaze of glory.

By the world's reckoning he is a very successful man, he has had a brilliantly distinguished career, but inwardly off stage, he's ill at ease, dissatisfied with himself, cynical about people, but the people making the presentation. Not one presentation, but several, cynical about people and about society, under medical care, advanced in his valitude and alienism, fearful of the future, haunted, this has to be underlined, haunted by the past. For 40 years, Eliot has an undergraduate, he had an affair with an 18-year-old girl. The wrong he had done it, he had never been able to shake out of his mind. Once again, Eliot is concentrating on the person who finds it impossible to escape from his sin.

In the play, the past comes back in two people, a former acquaintance. They'd been out one night with two girls on the town, they'd been driving home afterwards with the girls. They'd run over, someone, and Claverton hadn't stopped the car. What was more, he knew that the man beside him, though probably befuddled, was aware that somebody had been run over. Nothing was said. But there he was, a peer of the realm and that acquaintance of years before came right back into his world. The past comes back to him, the person of the woman wronged. She says to Claverton, but you touched my soul, poured it perhaps, and the touch still lingers. And I've touched yours. It's frightening to think that we're still together and more frightening to think that we'll always be together.

There's a phrase I seem to remember reading somewhere where their fires are not quenched. Same stress, as in the family reunion on the necessity of facing the past, not running away from it, you can't run away from it, facing it. Though Claverton says to his son who's a bit of a problem, believe me Michael, those who flee from their past will always lose the race. I know this from experience. When you reach your goal, you're imagined, paradise of success and grandeur, you will find your past failures waiting there to greet you. Well, the problem with which the plague grapples is, how is the past to be faced, and it comes up with answers like by genuine contrition and repentance, by entering at whatever cost, into right relationships with others, by love, shared with others. For T.S. Eliot, love, human and divine, love is the only basis of community.

I would like, if I may, to read the concluding portion of the elder statesman. This is the principal character, Lord Claverton. When he has faced his past, when he has discovered what it is to become like a little child again, great pompous person that he was. This may surprise you. I feel at peace now. It is the peace that ensues upon contrition, when contrition ensues upon knowledge of the truth. Why did I always want to dominate my children? Why did I mark out a narrow path for Michael, because I wanted to perpetuate myself in him? Why did I want to keep you to myself, Monica? Because I wanted you to give your life to adoring the man that I pretended to myself, so that I could believe in my own pretenses.

I've only just now had the illumination of knowing what love is. We all think we know, but how few of us do, and now I feel happy. In spite of everything, in defiance of reason, I have been brushed by the wing of happiness. I'm happy, Monica, that you have found a man whom you can love for the man he really is. Monica says, oh, Father, I've always loved you, but I love you more since I have come to know you here at Badgley Court, and I love you the more because I love Charles. This is community, love in community. Yes, my dear, your love is for the real Charles, not to make belief as was your love for me, but not no, Father, it's the real you I love, the man you are, not the man I thought you were. And Michael, Father says, I love him even for rejecting me, for the me he rejected, I reject also. I've been freed from the self that pretends to be someone, and in becoming no one, I begin to live.

It is worthwhile dying to find out what life is. I love you, my daughter, the more truly for knowing that there is someone you love more than your Father, that you love and are loved, and now that I love Michael, I think for the first time. Remember, my dear, I am only a beginner in the practice of loving. Well, that is something. I shall leave you for a while. This is your first visit to us at Badgley Court. And not at all what you were expecting. I'm sorry that you have had to see so much of persons and situations not very agreeable. You too ought to have a little time together. I leave Monica to you. Look after her Charles. Now, and always, I shall take a stroll. Two lovers are left together. At this time of day, she says, Monica says to her Father, you're not go far, will you? You know you're not allowed to stop out late at this season. It's chilly at dusk. Yes, it's chilly at dusk, but I'll be warm enough. I shall not go far.

Charles says he's a very different man from the man he used to be. It's as if he had passed through some door unseen by us and had turned and was looking back at us with a glance of farewell. Monica, I can't understand his going for a walk. Charles, he wanted to leave us alone together. Yes, he wanted to leave us alone together. And yet, Charles, though we've been alone today only a few minutes, I felt all the time. I know what you're going to say. We were alone together in some mysterious fashion, even with Michael, and despite these people because somehow we'd begun to belong together. That awareness, he breaks in, was a shield protecting both of us so that now we are conscious of a new person who is you and me together. Oh, my dear, I love you to the limits of speech and beyond.

It's a change that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. And Monica says, I've loved you from the beginning of the world. Before you and I were born, the love was always there that brought us together. Oh, father, father, I could speak to you now. Charles says, let me go and find him. Monica answers, we will go to him together. He is close at hand, though he has gone too far to return to us. He is under the beach street. It is quiet and cold there. In becoming no one, he has become himself. He is only my father now and Michael's and I am happy. Isn't it strange, Charles, to be happy at this moment? It is not at all strange. The dead has poured out a blessing on the living. Age and decrepitude can have no terrors for me. Laws and vicissitude cannot appall me. Not even death can dismay or amaze me. Fixed in the certainty of love and changing, I feel utterly secure. In you, I am a part of you now. Take me to my father.

This is on a London stage. This at the end of the festival. This is a playwright, as I would say, preaching the gospel. I am a part of you now. This is the song of the day. I am a part of you now. I am a part of you now. I am a part of you now.

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