The Nay Sayers

The Theatre of Revolt.
by Robert Brustein.
Atlantic-Little, Brown. 435 pp. $7.50.

There was once a man who planned to write a history of England from 1066 to the present, to be entitled “The Age of Transition.” At first sight Robert Brustein's book seems much the same kind of enterprise. What dramatic performance, other than a religious ritual or an official public ceremony, could not at a pinch be described as belonging to the Theater of Revolt? And what is the point of an extended comparison between “revolts” as dissimilar as those of Chekhov and Strindberg, Pirandello and Shaw? Would “revolt” be the first word, in fact, which anyone would think of applying to the Chekhovian sense of waste or the Pirandellian preoccupation with masks, if he were not wedded to the notion already? But Mr. Brustein is far too shrewd not to foresee such objections, and far too agile to let himself be trapped by his own title. He keeps his central concept flexible enough to allow for the main individual differences between his eight chosen dramatists, without going to the other extreme and refining it out of existence with riders and qualifications.

Before the Theater of Revolt, says Mr. Brustein, there was a Theater of Communion. He is rather uneasy with this latter idea, and drops it after his opening chapter, since almost from the very beginnings of secular drama individual writers have shown signs of unrest. In the tragedies of Shakespeare, for instance, there can already be heard what Mr. Brustein terms, none too happily, “an existential groan.” But it is only since the 19th century that dramatists have taken as their starting point the rebellious or pessimistic conclusions toward which their predecessors struggled slowly and painfully. The Theater of Revolt is the offspring of Romanticism, and since Ibsen all truly significant drama has been built on the romantic poet's non serviam, the absolute rejection of received opinion and established authority. The revolt comes in three phases, labeled by Mr. Brustein messianic, social, and existential: the first is essentially a quarrel with God, the second with the bourgeois order, the third with the human condition. But the first and the third clearly have a good deal in common, while the second is only of artistic value if it leads on to the third. The dramatist who offers remedies and consolations, or puts forward a constructive political program, is betraying his gifts. Brecht must be prized away from Marx, Shaw stripped of Shavianism, Ibsen's social dramas seen as a necessary but regrettable detour before he was able to resume the messianic rebellion of Brand in the more mature form of his final plays. O'Neill only begins to be interesting when the Iceman cometh and he sheds his last illusions; Strindberg's religious period is redeemed by his continuing anxiety and doubt. Mr. Brustein's most positive term of praise is “negative.” The only physician we should trust is the one who pronounces our disease incurable; all we can ask is that by breaking the news resolutely he gives us the courage to endure.

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This is a plausible view of the case, backed up with considerable learning and insight. Taken one by one, Mr. Brustein's judgments usually strike me as accurate and well-founded. Yet the book as a whole somehow fails to convince: what ought to be a manifesto has too much of the air of a twice-told tale. Mr. Brustein's publishers compare it, as publishers will, with Axel's Castle, but a more obvious comparison would be with The Playwright as Thinker, which covers a good deal of the same ground. With Eric Bentley, however, it was largely new ground; but what was once fresh and exciting has now become fairly predictable. Not that Mr. Brustein merely parrots Bentley, of course; he has a mind of his own, and over some authors—Shaw, O'Neill—he takes a quite different line. But the general effect is much less novel and unorthodox than his tone implies. On the contrary, there is something rather reassuring about the way in which the old familiar tags keep coming round. Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, we murmur cheerfully; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The trouble is that Mr. Brustein has set his sights too low. For much of the time his invisible antagonist appears to be a not-very-bright student—with an inordinate admiration for Arthur Miller—who needs to have everything banged into his head a dozen times. As a result, Mr. Brustein's manner tends to be short, sharp, and schoolmasterish, and he takes very little for granted. “Many of these works belong to that genre which we now call Expressionism.” “Richard M. Ohmann, in Shaw: The Style and the Man, demonstrates, through a study of Shavian style, that the author often cultivates outrage for its own sake.” This last is from a chapter which elsewhere contains subtle comments on Shaw's “secret aestheticism” and on the fluid, dreamlike structure of Heartbreak House. Scattered throughout the book, indeed, there are many excellent isolated remarks. But unfortunately Mr. Brustein never allows himself to wander for long; he feels obliged to keep coming back to his basic points and hammering them home relentlessly.

This constant harping on the distinction between negative artistic rebellion and affirmative philosophical doctrine is not so much wrong as unhelpful; it leaves Mr. Brustein with less than he might otherwise have had to say. A play with a “positive” message like A Doll's House is brushed aside; a play based on nihilistic assumptions like In the Jungle of Cities is simply described in outline, as though its artistic virtues were self-evident. In a way the drama which Mr. Brustein demands is as didactic as that of the humanitarian booster whom he despises; he tends to look for a statement about life (i.e., that it's no good) rather than a vision of life in which good and evil interlock. But the theater of revolt, like any other, is a theater of conflict, in which guilt contends with defiance, the liberator is a potential tyrant, and the destroyer is also a master-builder—like Milton's Satan, the architect of Hell. The “pure” rebel, if he existed, would be an undramatic figure.

It would be unfair to suggest that Mr. Brustein doesn't see all this and often say so. He is excellent on the contradictions which animate Ibsen, clear-sighted about the neurotic conflicts which drive Strindberg. But as the book develops he slides more and more into extolling the negative, life-denying attitude for its own sake, as an end in itself. He starts treating the partial truths of art as though they were total truths about society. “In Brecht's world, as in our own, there are no more authentic heroes,” he remarks while discussing Mother Courage. Luckily this isn't true (the bit about our own world), and to suggest that it is can only diminish a masterpiece by raising awkward questions about what Brecht was doing writing an anti-war play in 1939 anyway. What may be true, on the other hand, is that over the past century or so the artist has grown steadily less capable of dealing with heroic themes. But instead of exploring the complicated reasons why this might be so, Mr. Brustein is content to fall back on the facile rhetoric of the mass-society-monger:

. . . while Rousseau, Ibsen and Nietzsche all anticipate Shaw's dissatisfaction with reality, none of them are [sic] moved to “save the race” through whole-hearted identification with the community, perhaps because they realize that the state which promises life has served, through mass culture, mass conformity and mass wars, to degrade, dehumanize, and take life away.

This is the cant of the age; it depends on running together mass culture, mass conformity, and mass wars as though they were all really the same thing, and it results in Mr. Brustein's closing chapter on Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet, who “may well go down as the dramatic artist who presided over the disintegration of the West.” The West isn't disintegrating and Genet, for all his powerful gifts, isn't a writer of that stature. As for the cult of Artaud, it puts me in mind of a saying of Max Beerbohm: “How I wish I could keep up with the leaders of modern thought as they pass by into oblivion.” A philistine reaction, no doubt; there are some important lessons to be learned from Artaud about the ritualistic aspects of drama. But they are mixed up with a mass of imbecility, and to take him as solemnly as Mr. Brustein does scarcely seems compatible with, say, an unqualified admiration for the humanity of Chekhov.

Perhaps what is wrong with The Theatre of Revolt is that it isn't fanatical enough. Mr. Brustein's tone belies his message; he doesn't write like a man challenging the gods, but like a methodical, meticulous professor. And instead of uttering existential groans, he is constantly acknowledging how indebted he is to so-and-so's perceptive study of such-and-such. He has few erratic opinions (apart from a baffling idea that “America is one of the few countries in history to have no socially approved outlets for the wilder instincts”), and he suffers from many of the very virtues which he deplores: he is orderly, fair-minded, urbane. But because he has adopted such a stark thesis, what he has produced is a glorified textbook. A pity, because his best passages—such as the warm appreciations of The Cherry Orchard and A Long Day's Journey into Night—are much finer than that would suggest. They are also, interestingly enough, the sections of the book to which the doctrine of a Theater of Revolt seems least relevant.