Off-Canon Pleasures Chibald Macleish’S Radio Play Air Raid (1938)

he inclusion of works in a canonical list creates a large body of exclusi- Tons. But among these neglected works there are not a few that nevertheless Armin Paul Frank are worth reading. Literary worth is not necessarily aesthetic impeccability. A literary work recommends itself by a high degree of artistic achievement with elbowroom for historical importance. The present study focuses on Leo Rosten’s immigration novel The Education of Hyman Kaplan (1937) and Ar- Off-Canon Pleasures chibald MacLeish’s radio play Air Raid (1938). The first is more than the ap- parent compendium of language-based jokes. Read in the context of immi- A Case Study and a Perspective gration policy from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt to F. D. Roosevelt and of Jewish-American humor, it displays Kaplan’s moral and intellectual growth, which extant commentary denies, and exhibits the “interior internationality” of an immigration country. Air Raid is one of the few achieved American radio plays to take a stand on foreign affairs in a context that does not only consist of broadcasting and Picasso’s collage-painting Guernica – the “screaming pic- ture” which MacLeish transposed into the acoustic medium – but also of the historical saturation bombing of the Basque town. Armin Paul Frank Off- Canon Pleasures Canon Off- Frank Paul Armin ISBN: 978-3-941875-95-1 Universitätsverlag Göttingen Universitätsverlag Göttingen Armin Paul Frank Off-Canon Pleasures This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3.0 “by-nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version. erschienen im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2011 Armin Paul Frank Off-Canon Pleasures A Case Study and a Perspective Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2011 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. Address of the Author Armin Paul Frank e-mail: [email protected] This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Online Catalogue of the State and University Library of Goettingen (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). Users of the free online version are invited to read, download and distribute it. Users may also print a small number for educational or private use. However they may not sell print versions of the online book. Satz und Layout: Armin Paul Frank Umschlaggestaltung: Jutta Pabst Titelabbildung: Woman Reading on Top of Ladder © Bettmann/CORBIS © 2011 Universitätsverlag Göttingen http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-941875-95-1 rreface . remember the conversations at the literary parties at which he and I had occasionally met. Here people talked about few books, but the books they talked about were the same: it was like the Middle Ages. Randall Jarrell This is, admittedly, a paradoxical book. It’s meant to be. It is a book of criticism written against an excess of criticism and theory. For I hope to persuade readers to take theory and criticism in small doses and to concentrate on the reading of literary works. I want to recommend in particular books which are out of favor with contemporary theorists, critics, and scholars but are, in my reading experience, at least as great a joy to read as many a canonical one. In the debate over the literary canon in recent decades, the term has sometimes been used as a synonym for corpus, a body of texts. But since the long and con- troversial semantic history of the canon began when an end of cane was first cut in order to serve as a measuring rod, yardstick, or standard, there is always something regulative, something exclusionary about this concept, rightly understood. Besides, it is unnecessary to use the term in order to replace the word corpus, found as it is in every college dictionary. At the same time, there is, of course, no doubt that canons and corpora corre- spond. Canons are instruments to define corpora and, in turn, are supported by them. I submit that different canons can be clarified by examining the ways in which pertinent corpora are interrelated. I offer a brief distinction of canons along these lines in Appendix I. At this point, I only want to suggest that it makes sense to complement if not to replace the term canon by the term visibility. A work becomes visible when it is included in a literary survey which one is likely to consult if one wants to learn what is pertinent or important in a country’s literature. Surveys of this kind are comprehensive anthologies, extensive literary histories, and encyclopedias of literature. Visibility offers a lighter touch than canon. It does not lend itself so easily to lordly gestures. vi It is, of course, true that the idea of visibility originated in response to the debate over the canon, both recent and not so recent. But whereas proponents of a literary canon tend to have their minds set on the selection for which they claim canonical status, I take an interest in the works that were eclipsed by canonization or that have always been in eclipse. For a few hundred literary works selected for canonical purposes, there are, after all, in any substantial literature tens of thou- sands that have constantly been neglected and a few dozen that had once been canonized but were later rejected. It would be arrogant to claim or imply, without reading them anew, that all of them are worthless. Literary worth, as I see it, is not necessarily aesthetic impeccability. It surely is not tantamount to moral probity, social concern, or political correctness. I expect a high degree of artistic achievement with elbowroom for historical importance; but a document even of historical eminence though lacking in imaginative scope and intensity of style would not do. The best historical – religious, cultural, social, political – background does not, in itself, make an achieved literary work. The monograph study at hand presents a perspective on these matters and a supportive case study (Problemaufriss). For this purpose, I tried to find two near- contemporaneous works, a neglected one which never really achieved visibility and one that went into eclipse during the reshuffling of the canon in the last quarter of the twentieth century. They are quite different but turned out to be connected in unexpected ways. I eventually settled on Leo Rosten’s The Education of Hyman Kaplan (1937), pub- lished under the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross, and Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid (1938). The first is much more and much better than the baggy-pants comedy it has been made out to be. It is a modest masterpiece of Jewish-American, Yiddish- English humor in the historical context of the selective policy which governed U.S. immigration between about 1880 and 1920. Set in a night-school for adults where newcomers from different countries struggle with the rudiments of English and Civics, Rosten celebrated a kind of antihero, whose English is abysmal but glori- ously inventive, who is intelligent and competent much beyond the level to which he is held down by his limited command of the American language, who eventually shows a modest improvement of his language competence, who occasionally bests his instructor in linguistic matters, and who rises to a benign, to a humane attitude that transcends the pressures and vicissitudes of the classroom situation. Air Raid is an even rarer bird, a unit radio play somewhat in the style of Irving Reis’s Workshop of the Columbia Broadcasting System. It is a play in which the author took an imaginative stand vis-à-vis the military crises in inter-war Europe and, in particular, those of the middle and later 1930s. The tension – not the sus- pense – governing this play originates in the belief held by the womenfolk of an unidentified small country town somewhere in Europe that the war that is about to erupt will, like all the ones before, by-pass them and leave them unscathed. This conviction is set against the knowledge shared by the male characters that military vii strategy is changing, and a new terror is looming: all out air war. Overleaping the frontiers and front lines, the air force is, by that time, in a position to carry out massive strikes at civilians in order to break a nation’s morale. This is a totally new war aim. The play ends on a true note of tragedy when the women, in their mis- taken belief that the enemy planes will not attack when the pilots recognize women on the ground, rush out into death and mutilation when the planes swerve to bomb and strafe. The two works are linked by the idea of internationality. The international theme of Air Raid is self-evident. A part of the internationality of the Hyman Kap- lan matter was pinpointed when Rosten observed that the classroom at the night- school for immigrants has always reflected the geography of the current international crises. In fact, the clashes, however mitigated, between members of the different national groups over English, Civics, mores, and, on a late occasion, Musso- lini, suggest that there is indeed such a thing as an internal internationality in a country of immigrants such as the United States. In a study of visible works, one can usually rely on a reader’s familiarity with them at least in broad terms.

Load more