“I wonder, Mr. MacLeish, if you realize how unlikable your character J.B. really is?”
The poet seemed to start back in unpleasant surprise at the question asked by a lady sitting in the rear of the Anta Theater off Broadway.
“Why, no. I don’t think that’s the opinion of most people. I certainly don’t think so. Of course, J.B. is supposed to have the characteristics of a typical American businessman. He is successful and has a lot of self-confidence—but I happen to like that particular American characteristic.”
This question was the only discordant note in an otherwise mutually flattering discussion between the author of J.B. and more than a hundred ministers and rabbis who remained after a performance of what has been hailed as the “best play of this or perhaps many seasons.” The clergy were grateful to the management for having supplied them with free tickets, and also complimented by the deference with which Mr. MacLeish greeted their questions and comments. Sitting comfortably on the stage of the theater as if at his desk in his Harvard classroom, the ruddy-faced, white-haired poet had begun the discussion by assuring them that his “own Biblical and theological knowledge was very superficial” as compared with theirs. But he had felt compelled to write J.B. after witnessing the bombing of London during the Second World War. Though the play was obviously based on the Book of Job, it was, MacLeish assured his audience, only like the “type of tin-can structure which is sometimes found erected in the shade of ancient, monumental ruins.” Still, he would be happy if some of the ministers offered their comments on the theological and philosophical themes implied in his play.
After a moment’s hesitation, an elderly man rose to suggest that the solution advanced by the Book of Job to the problem of evil was “that there was no solution.” MacLeish nodded his head in recognition of the wisdom of this idea, adding that he had been influenced in his own thinking by an analysis of Job written by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who suggested that the Book of Job “adumbrated the love-theme of the New Testament.” Some of the rabbis in the audience smiled at their wives, for the gentleman who had provoked this answer was himself named Jung, an Orthodox rabbi.
“With regard to your thought about God being either ‘not good or not God,’” another white-haired gentleman asked, did not Mr. MacLeish “feel himself leaning away from the traditional God-concept?” Again the rabbis looked at each other knowingly. The questioner was Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement, and for many years an advocate of a reformulated “God-concept.” “No,” MacLeish said. He felt that the “creator” God of the Old Testament was particularly meaningful in an atomic age with its imminent possibilities of universal destruction. A moment later, as if mindful of the New Testament section of his audience, the poet added that personally he felt the only ultimate answer to the problems raised by the Book of Job was the idea of “God as love.”
“Of course, my knowledge of Biblical scholarship or theology is very poor,” MacLeish emphasized again, “but then it seems that the scholars themselves are in disagreement—even about the authenticity of the chapter which strikes me as the most important in the book—namely the last chapter.” In this chapter Job is recorded as receiving back his health, and increasing his wealth and number of children far beyond his original condition. It is usually considered as an anti-climax to the main argument in the Book of Job. But Professor MacLeish sees in it the “answer” to the problems posed, namely, the willingness of Job, despite all that has happened, “to begin all over again and affirm life.” This is J.B.’s response to Satan who is, according to MacLeish, an “anti-life” force. Job rejects the invitation of both Satan and his wife to “curse God and die.” Instead, he accepts his wife back and is willing to pick up the threads and go on. Nor is this simply an animal-like type of survival, MacLeish stressed to the listeners. “It involves a choice, and such life affirmation must have as its coefficient love—the affirmation of another person’s worth.” To the extent that the Book of Job has an answer, it is this affirmation of the possibility of life and love despite everything, which is expressed in the conclusion of the book; as J.B.’s wife says, and MacLeish quoted from his own lines:
Blow on the coal of the heart, my darling,
—it’s all the light now. . . .
The candles in the churches are out,
The lights have gone out in the sky,
Blow on the coal of the heart.
A few minutes later the author of the play looked at his watch and said he had to catch a midnight train to Boston.
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On their way out of the theater, the clergymen received mimeographed sheets containing the critics’ reviews of the play, which had not been presented in the daily press because of the New York newspaper strike.
“One of the memorable works of the century, as drama, and as spiritual inquiry,” wrote Brooks Atkinson, drama critic of the New York Times. “. . . The glory of MacLeish’s play is that as in the Book of Job, J.B. does not curse God. When he is reunited with his wife, two humble but valiant people accept the universe, agree to begin life all over again, expecting no justice but unswerving in their devotion to God. The performance is magnificent. . . .” The other reviews were at least as enthusiastic. J.B. was definitely a hit, notwithstanding any feeling about the “unlikability” of its central character, or a reaction on the part of many that the latter half of the play was a letdown after the high tension of the opening.
A few days after this meeting with the clergy, Professor MacLeish was still concerned wtih the ending of his play. He indicated as much to a large audience which had gathered to hear him in a New Jersey temple. “I’ll have to leave precisely at 9:15 P.M.,” the author warned a nervous committee which had arranged his lecture, “in order to see a change that is being tried in the last scene.”
The committee agreed to release him on time, and introduced the poet to the several hundred people, some of whom had come from New York. Everyone listened with rapt attention while MacLeish described his play and offered some comments like those which he had delivered to the clergymen. On this evening the distinguished poet found it more difficult to repress his enthusiasm not only for his own work but for some other things. The audience was assured that MacLeish had not come to plug his play, since “You probably couldn’t get tickets now even if you wanted them—though I hope you will at least manage to enter the theater and see the absolutely magnificent setting by Boris Aronson.” The poet generously attributed the success of his play to the “team” presenting it on Broadway. Raymond Massey, he said with a smile, had been playing Lincoln so long that he was just right for the role of God. And Christopher Plummer was easily “the greatest actor alive.” The poet went on in this superlative mood to praise some of the “greatest lines of all literature,” namely the 38th chapter of Job, whose opening verse he quoted: “Who is this that darkeneth wisdom without counsel. . . .” Later the poet offered another of the “greatest lines and thoughts ever written” from one of the “greatest poets,” W. B. Yeats: life really begins when you know it to be a tragedy! “I hope that even if you don’t like poetry,” MacLeish suggested in his best classroom style, “you will pick up a volume of W. B. Yeats.”
As an extra tidbit, MacLeish gave his audience a preview of some letters which were part of an exchange between him and “the greatest living” stage director, “Gadge” Kazan. The letters were soon to appear in Esquire, which MacLeish felt was “far superior to the quarterly magazines.” He quoted some lines from Kazan’s memos to himself on the play, including one noting that the play illustrated the “glory of man.”
After several questions, the poet told his audience that he had to return in time to catch some changes in the last scene of the play, which he and Kazan were trying to “fix up.” The fact is, however, that even after these changes had been made, there still remained viewers of J.B. who found its ending “disappointing” and its central character “unlikable.” The question is whether the “letdown” which so many feel at the end of the play is inherent in the Jobian tragedy as written in the Bible, or only inherent in MacLeish’s interpretation of that difficult and most serious of books.
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Of course, MacLeish does not claim that the characters of J.B. accurately represent the dramatis personae of the Biblical book. J.B.’s comforters are a psychoanalyst, a priest, and a leftist, all rather schematically portrayed, who have no connection at all with the comforters of the original Job; they are introduced with the remark that “each generation has its own comforters.” And the American businessman J.B. is of course markedly different from the pastoral man of Uz. But MacLeish does mean to have his protagonists confront the same basic issues which were faced in the Book of Job. According to MacLeish, the greatness of J.B. “. . . is not only that he refuses to curse God and die”; he is supposed to demonstrate a “faith” in God and His goodness which disaster and the evidence of life cannot shake. Above all, J.B.—and according to MacLeish the Book of Job—would turn us to “love” as the only way of facing the “insoluble” problem presented in both the Biblical book and the play.
Now this “love” theme of MacLeish brings to mind a little noticed and somewhat strange fact about the Book of Job: it is one of the few books in the Bible which does not even mention the word “love.” It is not difficult to understand why the absence of “love” in the Book of Job should so often go unnoticed. Most religious texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the books of the Bible, conjoin the words “fear” and “love” in describing the relation which ought to exist between God and man. The interpreters of religious tradition frequently explain why both words are important. They represent basically opposite movements in the man-God relationship. Fear or awe emphasizes the omnipotent and transcendent qualities of God, love assures man that God, despite His transcendent power, will not abandon the righteous who fulfill his Law. Fear emphasizes the sense of separation and distance. Love brings together. Only an assumption that God loves, or is at least compassionately interested in man, opens the way for men to ask the infinite God to “compress” himself and allow his actions to be judged by man’s understanding of justice and mercy. This, perhaps, is the thought implied in the midrash describing God as creating the world according to the “architectural plan of the Torah”—that is, voluntarily subjecting His acts to moral standards as man understands morality. Without such self-limitation, as the theologians call it, it is impossible to even speak of a transcendent God in terms of “good” or “great,” since all his qualities transcend our finite understanding.
Furthermore, it is ultimately “love” to which the Judeo-Christian tradition turns for an explanation of why an infinite God should take pains with finite man, and why man should bless God and follow His directions even when there is no commensurate response—“To serve God not for reward, but out of love.” It is only love which can explain a willing acceptance of suffering—“even as a child loves his parent, or a parent his child, regardless of questions of justice.” And what else but love could evoke the pathetic quotation from Job offered by a Spanish Jewish exile who after persecution and shipwreck buries his last child on a desert isle and rises to say: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” It is love and not fear of God which is finally invoked by Rabbi Akiba when he replies to his pupils who are horrified at seeing him tortured to death: “Blessed am I Akiba, that I can now fulfill the commandment to love God with all my soul—that is, by giving Him my soul.” And it is of course love that is finally evoked to explain the act of innocent suffering which is at the heart of the Christian faith.
It is not surprising then that MacLeish should turn to love in explaining Job. But why then does the play J.B. with all its “affirmation of life” and “blowing on the coal of the heart” seem to have less of an “answer” than the inarticulate surrender in the Biblical Book of Job which has no mention of love.
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Actually, the arguments of the Book of Job appear surprising when placed beside the kind of interpretation offered by a play like J.B. For example, it is not only “love” which is conspicuously absent in the Biblical story, but even the notion of “faith” which so many read into the text, thinking that it should be there. True, there are many admissions in the Book of Job of man’s limited powers of knowledge, but it is also recognized by all the characters that man can depend on nothing but his limited facilities of perception in coming to any conclusions. No one in the Book of Job cries out “Just believe” in spite of what your mind and eye see or don’t see. In the debate between the Biblical Job and his friends, all parties accept the fact that the argument for the existence of a moral order in the universe must be based on our direct or indirect experience, and not on some “leap of faith.” There is no question of “faith” in God the Creator of the world, whose power transcends man’s imagination. The only question is whether this awful, powerful God is interested in running His creation according to principles which man recognizes as just and good. By a variety of arguments, Job’s comforters try to prove that the world is under a moral law, and that Job’s suffering is therefore deserved. Job claims that his sufferings and what he can see of suffering in the world would prove the contrary. The evil suffered by man has no relation to his guilt. And Job refuses to perjure himself—“I will keep my integrity.” This he does, only laying his finger upon his lips in silent submission to an awesome fact—that a God who is transcendent and all-powerful cannot be spoken of or questioned in terms of justice or injustice, in fact cannot be “judged” by any of man’s limited standards.
The amazing thing about the Book of Job is that it pictures God as accepting Job’s refusal to admit a moral law in the universe in preference to the Orthodox view of his comforters. “My wrath is hurled against thee and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right as My servant Job hath.”
It is the “defenders” of God who refuse to accept the full implications of God’s omnipotence, and refuse to realize that a transcendental God makes silly all man’s discussions about His goodness and justice. Job is the only one who finally “girds up his loins” and faces the full implications of God’s awesome transcendence. In this sense, it is not “man’s glory” that is being exalted in the Book of Job, but man’s infinite littleness before overwhelming power. The solution, to the extent that there is a solution to the questions raised by Job and his friends about the suffering of the innocent, is given in the 38th chapter. “I uttered that I understand not; things too wonderful to me, which I knew not. . . . I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
The awful meaning signified by an infinite God, namely that He is beyond any of man’s questions, was until now a matter of secondary knowledge—“the hearing of the ear”—but now God’s infinite power and transcendence is known by a vivid personal experience. Before this religious experience all questions are crushed and dissolved. The experience spoken of here is what Rudolf Otto calls the “numinous”—the experience of the “mysterium tremendum.” To the extent that the Book of Job offers a solution, it is this experience of “seeing” God.
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Now it is precisely this dimension of experience which is absent in MacLeish’s J.B. From the first to the last scene, all the characters in the play fail to convey anything of the religiosity which is supposed to pervade their lives. The references to God are as artificial and external as the masks which Raymond Massey and Christopher Plummer assume to play their roles. J.B.’s professions of faith are of a kind with the confidence expressed by a business tycoon in the reliability of his latest IBM machine. Toward the end of the play J.B. utters the lines from Job about “seeing” God, but no one, including the actors, audience, or, apparently, the playwright, is convinced that this seeing God has any real meaning for the thought development of the play. Nor is this “seeing” of God the same as the bits of poetic marveling about the intricacy of the universe which MacLeish’s pen places alongside the magnificent lines of the Bible. And the religious experience of a “mysterium tremendum” is not a poetic appreciation of the wonders of creation. Since this religious experience is not in any sense a real element in J.B., the play must go on to try for a different climax and “solution.” MacLeish is unwilling to leave Job’s questions crushed before the numinous inscrutability of God: this experience of the numinous has no such convincing meaning for MacLeish as it had for Job.
The solution which MacLeish advances, even while declaring that there is no solution, is the “affirmation of life and love,” for which, indeed, he claims to find grounds in the last chapter of the Bible Job. There is perhaps something fresh about MacLeish’s effort to find meaning in lines which most scholars have considered to be a rather formal addition to the Job drama. The friends and family who bring a bit of money or a gift of property are, MacLeish reminds us, better comforters than those bringing abstract theological arguments. It may be that the description of Job’s later life, when he possesses more children and more property than ever, does point up his willingness to “pick up the strings again and go on.” But the impulse to survive and build again after tragedy is a rather basic drive; we may ask whether it really must be accompanied, as MacLeish says, by the “coefficient of love.”
On the other hand, MacLeish has every right as a poet to read love into the Book of Job even though it is conspicuously absent. As I have already suggested, it is the love theme to which the Judeo-Christian tradition finally turns in its effort to understand the problem of innocent suffering. But love as understood by this religious tradition is not the “love” MacLeish speaks of. The first deals with the relation between man and God, the second between man and man. Not that these dimensions of experience are necessarily separate from each other. On the contrary, in the Judeo-Christian tradition the claim is usually made that they must go together. This is the thought of Hillel and Akiba—that the way to loving God is through love of man. But we can also find, within the same tradition, a claim that the fullest relation with God involves a disengagement from human love. More than Judaism, Christianity has suggested that human attachments can interfere with a full man-God love relation—“He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” But even Judaism does not blur the two-dimensional religious-human love relation into a purely secular horizontal relationship. This is precisely what MacLeish does. The play begins by posing the great vertical questions—the relation between man and God—and concludes with answers that have very little to do with the connection between man and God. The problem posed by Job in the Bible is not one of human relations, or whether we can derive some warmth and meaning in life from “blowing on the coal” of the human heart. Job wants to know whether there is heart as well as power in the universe. This is an important question to man—even to non-religious man—and J.B. achieves tremendous opening force when it brings us to ask it. Hence the disappointment when this question is resolved or flattened into a secular solution no different from the usual receipt for happiness offered in any number of best-seller psychological “comforters” of our age. Perhaps the real reason why J.B. leaves one disappointed is that it is essentially a secular play treating religious problems.
Not that secular praise of love and life-affirmation is a slight thing. It may even be the only meaningful answer available to us in a secular age, more meaningful than calls to “see” God. There is nothing ignoble about a secular answer—unless it pretends to be more—and J.B. does. Even through the tinny loudspeaker conveying the Biblical text, we catch the flavor of the dread numinous that struck Job dumb. For a moment we confront the most awesome questions of existence. Then we are offered an answer so incommensurate as to be a non sequitur.
Why in the world should J.B. go on blessing God? We can understand why Job should prostrate himself before a personal religious vision of God’s numinous power (incidentally, even Job does not bless God finally—he only stops questioning Him). We can understand why the great lovers of God may bless their “wounds of love.” But why should a person whose basic love experience is confined to the level of human relation go on blessing God after all that has happened to him? There is something insensitive, even fatuous, in such blessing. Even Satan seems more “likable” and more sensitive to the horrors of an immoral universe than a man who offers blessings which do not emerge either out of the dissolving awe, or the scalding love, of God.
This is the problem of the last scene in the play, which cannot be “fixed up” by any changes in lines. The questions which Job asks, and which J.B. also claims to ask, call for an accounting between man and God. They cannot be resolved by advice to “blow on the coal” of the human heart. If there is no divine heart, then there would seem to be more “glory” in the man who, if not cursing, at least refuses to bless.
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