I

Writing in his well known work, Principles of Criticism, Dr. I. A. Richards gives expression to the idea that Tragedy avoids the suppressions and subterfuges by which human beings are tempted to avoid bewildering issues: “Suppressions and sublimations alike are devices by which we endeavour to avoid issues which might bewilder us. The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us to live for a moment without them.” When faced with crucial issues the human mind is ever wandering in search of what Dr. Richards terms ‘compensatory heaven.’ It follows hence that true tragedy is possible only when the ‘hero’ faces the test and, in so doing, he achieves a transfiguration, or he feels a ‘sense of repose’ in the midst of suffering and agony. This is what Maxwell Anderson meant when he explained that the tragic personality “must learn through suffering” and “in a tragedy he suffers death itself as a consequence of his fault or his attempt to correct it, but before he dies he has become a nobler person, because of his recognition of his fault, and the consequent alteration of his course of action.”

In other words, Anderson sought in Tragedy, a definite type of ‘affirmation’, that man experiences a spiritual awakening in the midst of his struggle with the forces which beset him. But Charles I. Glicksberg, writing in his stimulating book, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century feels that “Maxwell Anderson, fails to show us how this idealistic imperative can be incorporated within the dialectic of the tragic vision, which portrays the battle man wages, al he pushes ahead towards the goal of self-transcendence against nameless, enigmatic powers in a chaotic cosmos that has no concern for his destiny.” Faith in some ultimate goal or revelation does not animate, most probably, the tragic hero in his actions. Rather he feels within himself a new response to the situation undreamt of, the surprising revelation of hidden resources,–spiritual, mental and physical. Therefore there cannot be any search for faith, for the ‘absurd’ in the Kierkegaardian sense. That is to say, the suffering of the tragic hero is to fulfil some unknown purpose of God, as in the case of Job. But we in India are brought up in this sense of the’ absurd’, “that the Eternal Truth has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born, has grown up, and so forth…..” The tragic hero suitable to the conditions of the modern world is not born in the Greek sense, the sense that ‘if your name is Antigone, you know what fate awaits you.’ He is in Hemingway’s direct statement, a person who has had no time to learn the rules of the game: “You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught on that. Stay around and they would kill you.”

Against this ‘affirmation’ there is the argument put forward by Prof. George Steiner that in the modern world, there is the ‘death of Tragedy’, the inability to achieve a tragic vision and the equal inability to get it embodied in an artistic form. “Since Shakespeare and Racine, the tragic voice in drama is blurred or still”,–this seems to be the conviction of most critics, let alone Prof. Steiner, those who argued against the attempts to create a poetic drama for the modern world. Most modern writers of poetic drama unfortunately took refuge in the world of old myths to discover a satisfactory vehicle for presenting the pattern of human suffering. But the reality in Tragedy is that the hero cannot fall back on any established pattern of experience when he is confronted by disaster. Maxwell Anderson caught this idea and he has not gone back to any basic myth. He evolved his own formula of poetic tragedy consisting of three steps–‘victory in defeat’, ‘recognition of his fault’ by the tragic hero, and ‘affirmation’ of the moral values underlying existence:

i) ‘Victory’–“The theme of tragedy has always been victory in defeat, a man’s conquest of himself in the face of annihilation, a spiritual awakening or regeneration of the hero….”

ii) ‘Recognition’–“In a tragedy he (the hero) suffers death itself as a consequence of his fault or his attempt to correct it, but before he dies he has become a nobler person because of his recognition of his fault and the consequent alteration of his course of action….”

iii) ‘Affirmation’–“….The theatre at its best is a religious affirmation, an age-old rite restating and reassuring man’s belief in his own destiny and his ultimate hope.”

So in Anderson’s conception of Tragedy, it is a drama offering ‘a kind of religious affirmation of the ideals of the human race.’

Strangely enough, Anderson’s approach to Tragedy is nearer to that of Albert Camus in the sense that he recognises the human being as the only reality, particularly in his fight to establish better values. Of course, he did not say categorically as Camus did that ‘a great modern form of the tragic must and will be born.’ There is this difference between Camus and Anderson that the former was more concerned with, in the words of Raymond Williams, ‘the general condition of a people reducing or destroying itself because it is not conscious of its true condition’, whereas Anderson, with the discovery, by the individual, of hidden reserves of moral power. Anderson contributed his own share to the growth of a poetic tragedy of ‘affirmation’, as against the tragedy of creeping despair bred by mere adoption of ‘archetypal patterns’ of suffering from the Greeks and the Hebrews, and that based on the ‘absurdist’ approach of the Existentialists.

II

Even when he was concerned with historical themes, Anderson kept his ‘affirmist’ view that the human being, faced with disaster, makes the discovery of some hidden resource, which enables him to triumph, though outwardly annihilated. From the twenties he was seized with the problems which face the individual, especially social injustice. Even in the war-play, What Price Glory?, the Shavian trend in Anderson is in the forefront, debunking the glory of war. He has not much respect for those who manage the affairs on earth, whether the politics of peace or that of war. In Gods of Lightning (1928), Anderson has given us a representative character–Suvorin who expresses the cynicism which his creator has carried as a burden on his poetic consciousness:

“I have learned that you know nothing–that you learn nothing! Uplifters, you are, reformers, dreamers, thinking to take over the earth….The world is old and it is owned by men who are hard. Do you think you can win against them by a strike? Let us change the government you say. Oh! they own this government you have, I tell you. There is no government–there are only brigands in power who fight for more power. It has always been so. It will always be so. Till you die! Till we all die! Till there is no earth! (Act One)

In Anderson’s pattern for Tragedy, the individual is placed in a general atmosphere of degradation and utter selfishness and crime, but he or she discovers, in the midst of the general chaos of moral values, something which sustains the hold on life. This pattern is again available in Elizabeth the Queen with the spotlight on the ill-fated lover of the Queen, the Earl of Essex. Essex discovers that he has heeded the promptings of his consciousness when he rose in revolt against the Queen, and this makes him bold enough to face the consequence:

It is something in myself that has made me do this, Not Cecil,–not anyone. No one but myself. The rest is all excuse….(Act. II, Sc. 3)

The Queen on the other hand has to live down her love for the rebel before she can assert herself as the sovereign, doing injustice to her womanly nature. Tragedy lies in the choice the individual has made, which may not advance personal happiness, but which is dictated by the necessities of the situation.

The question of choice is again posed in another play of this magnificent Tudor reign. Mary Stuart of Scotland has to face the mighty Tudor Queen, using normal means,–her beauty and rhetoric, against the craft and doggedness of the latter. Elizabeth’s well-known consciousness of her unattractive features drives her to make her choice of not marrying but ruling. “A queen who marries is no queen, a woman who marries is a puppet.”

Anderson reached the most convincing expression for his tragic view in a play which is not set in historical situations but in the conditions of the thirties in Winterset (1935). Even for a play of contemporary significance, Anderson preferred verse as the vehicle, because he held the view that “prose is the language of information and poetry the language of emotion” and that ‘the best prose in the world is inferior on the stage to the poetry in the theatre.’ He had arrived at certain ethical conclusions which he found were contrary to contemporary practices as, for example, the view that men who are fed by their government will soon be driven down to the status of slaves or just cattle. Like all other serious dramatists, he also believed that ‘the theatre is a serious religious institution devoted entirely to the exaltation of the spirit of man.’ The spiritual regeneration of man must be the realizable aim of the poetic tragedy:

“….the theatre at its best is a religious affirmation, an age-old rite restating and reassuring man’s belief in his own destiny and his ultimate hope….”

From historical themes, out of which most poets have created plays, Anderson turned his attention to contemporary themes in the great tragedies, Winterset and Key Largo, the former dealing with the sensational Sacco-Vanzetti gangster-cum-political trial of the twenties. His view of the play was not that it should be built round a contemporary problem, the naturalist formula of a slice of life, but as Prof. J. W. Krutch has commented, it should “reveal what the ordinary experiences of life leave hidden, to bring within the charmed circle of poetry and tragedy, aspects of human existence which had remained mere prose until the poet had treated them.”

The modern crusader for Poetic Drama, T. S. Eliot, desired that poetry should be ‘brought into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the theatre.’ In a way that has been the aim of Anderson, though not stated with that clarity which Eliot commands. This is the reason why, at the same time, he does not feel any dislike of the Shavian purpose of ‘the exaltation of man’, though he has a pronounced passion for poetic tragedy:

“….the authors of tragedy offer the largest hope for mankind which I can discern in the great poetry of the earth, a hope that man is greater than his clay, that the spirit of man may rise superior to physical defeat and death. The theme of tragedy has always been victory in defeat, a man’s conquest of himself in the face of annihilation…”

The idea of verse in poetic drama need not be all ‘third voice’–“each prominent character speaking in an individualized rhythm or manner, the verse adapted to his personality.” In Anderson’s poetical plays dealing with contemporary themes–Winterset and Key Largo–the characters speak more animatedly than their origins indicate. But characters who face unusual situations in life are to speak in such a manner that their tragic vision is expressed adequately: “A play is almost always”, Anderson avowed, “an attempt to recapture a vision for the stage.” Prof. Krutch has answered those critics who argued from the naturalist standpoint that characters in a play should speak and behave as they do in real life:

“...the appropriateness or inappropriateness of elevated speech to any character depends not upon his social or intellectual status but upon the success of his creator in endowing him with an intensity of feeling for the expression of which the best of utterance is none too good.”

In Winterset, the young man Mio has a burden laid on him, because his father Romagna, an Italian emigre, has been executed, for no crime of his, but only to cover up that of Trock Estrella and his gang, more to satisfy the animosity towards a left-wing agitator. So the young lad has seen the terrible death of his father and the subsequent demise of his mother and has been leading the life of a road-boy nursing the anger and shame in his heart. After perusing the records of the trial and the criticism of it offered by a college professor, Mio decides on the fatal quest for the truth and tracks down the real criminals. Mio has behind him the faint shadow of the Prince of Denmark in the motive of his life,–revenge for a father wronged and murdered. His search brings him to the very nest where hides Garth Esdras the false witness and the gangster Track Estrella. But when he comes near to exposing the truth, he is in love with Miriamne the sister of Esdras. The Hamlet-Mio parallel runs, to an extent, through the play as a vague misty background, with Mio and Hamlet, Trock and Claudius, Miriamne and Ophelia, old Esdras and Polonius, Garth and Laertes, and Carr and Horatio as the parallel figures. This utilization of an ‘archetypal’ pattern stemming from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, might not have been deliberate on the part of Anderson.

Mio falls a victim to the gangster Trock Estrella, but only after he has discovered an ennobling love in Miriamne whom he takes to be Persephone:

“……Miriamne, if you love

Teach me a treason to what I am and have been till I learn to live like a man! I think I’m waking from a long trauma of hate and fear and death that’s hemmed me from my birth –and glimpse a life to be lived in hope–but it’s young in me yet, I can’t get free, or forgive! But teach me how to live and forget to hate!”

(Winterset. III)

There is the discovery in Mio of something more ennobling, namely love, which binds humanity despite hatred and agony, though it comes when it is too late. He has the gangster and Garth his friend both under his thumb, but lets them escape only to fall a victim to the blind hatred that dominates the world.

There is another interesting aspect in Winterset which has been overlooked by critics of Anderson, the imagery which adds richness to the design of a play. The whole play is overridden by an atmosphere of sickly riverine plague, with the scene in front of the granite banks of the river, may be the Hudson in New York. Over this whole area of hell on earth, presides the gangster Trock who disposes of people even slightly suspected of giving his secrets away. The atmosphere of poverty, sickness, lawlessness and gangsterism, is built up through imagist phrases and lines. Trock has choice phrases of disgust referring to the city, indicating the rottenness inside him and outside in the social environment as well:

“….You roost of punks and gulls...rot out your pasty guts…..these pismires that walk like men….”

Esdras the old Rabbi is aware of the rottenness in contemporary existence, but puts forward a facile morality to cheer up his son Garth, a nervous accomplice of Trock in the hold up for which Romagna died:

“But those whose hearts are cancered drop by drop in small ways, little by little, till they’ve borne all they can bear, and die–those deaths will go unpunished now as always. When we’re young, we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air built on water. There’s no guilt under heaven just as there’s no heaven, till men believe it no earth, till men have seen it, and have a word to say this is the earth” (Act. I., sc. 2.)

Human beings in this industrial world of hectic activity are ‘blind worms that sting each other, here in the dark.’ Imagery is a necessary ingredient in poetic drama, though Mrs. Mabel Bailey holds the opinion that ‘it is not through an examination of the imagery that we can determine whether or not the verse is dramatic poetry.’

Maxwell Anderson, as J. W. Krutch has commented, succeeded in achieving a tragic view of life, ‘at once valid and unmistakably of our own time.’ Had he pondered deeply on many other aspects of contemporary life, as he did in Winterset, he might have succeeded in blending the ‘naturalist’ interest in objective analysis and the subjective aspects of form and feeling.

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