THE ESCHATOLOGICAL VISION OF
ROBERT E. SHERWOOD
Carroll C. Conklin III
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
August 1977
Approved by Doctoral Committee
Advisor Department of English
Graduate College Representative 11
ABSTRACT
A survey of the relatively small body of criticism dealing with the works of Robert E. Sherwood indicates that, while most of Sherwood’s critics see him as general ly constructing his plays around theses of contemporary importance, there is a consensus that more often than not Sherwood failed to clearly express his philosophical or ethical message. Though the pacifism of the early plays and the militarism of the later ones has been duly noted, no one has yet uncovered the enduring concern of
Robert Sherwood that inspired his best work and gives a sense of unity to the entire Sherwood canon.
The purpose of this study is to define this hitherto unexamined theme central to the works of Robert Sherwood, that being an ultimate concern for the eschatological state of modem man. Beginning with The Road to Rome, Robert Sherwood’s plays depict a microcosm threatened with annihilation, an end that promises to be complete and irrevocable. References to the coming hour of doom occur repeatedly in the speeches of his characters, and in nearly all of the plays can be found situations or events characteristic of either primitive or Western eschatologi cal myths. One chapter is devoted to explaining the nature of 111
eschatology as understood in the context of this study,
especially with regard to distinguishing between popular
and philosophical eschatology and defining eschatological
awareness. In subsequent chapters, this study examines
individually the plays, novel, and prose writings of
Robert Sherwood to identify the eschatological elements present in the work and to determine the contribution of each work toward the development of Sherwood's own escha tological awareness. In the early plays, instances of eschatological awareness occur without clear relation.
In Reunion in Vienna, The Petrified Forest, and Idiot's
Delight, the playwright depicts a modern world in a state of physical and moral degeneration that can be saved only through a cosmic regeneration. In his two best-known plays,
Abe Lincoln in Illinois and There Shall Be No Night, this study finds the fullest expression of Sherwood’s escha tological vision, one which includes speculation on the nature of the "golden age" that inevitably follows the day of doom in eschatological myth.
This study concludes that Robert Sherwood's works reveal a growing awareness of the nature and meaning of doom for this century and relate a personal quest to dis cover the proper place for the individual in light of modern eschatological realities. lv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page INTRODUCTION 1
ESCHATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL AWARENESS 8
Popular and Philosophical Eschatology 8
Escape from Time in Primitive and
Western Eschatologies 11
Eschatological Awareness 24 Eschatological Occurrences in the Twentieth Century 28
THE ROAD TO DOOM: INTIMATIONS OF LAST THINGS
IN THE EARLY WORKS 33
The Question of Consistency 33 Probing the Human Equation 40
Eschatology Without Direction 60
A WORLD IN NEED OF RENEWAL:
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL NECESSITY 73
Renewal in Vienna 73 The Discovery of Meaning After a Long
Journey Through a World Spent 94 Last Resort at the Border of Eschaton 108
TRACING THE GROWTH OF ESCHATOLOGICAL AWARENESS:
ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS 130 V
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CONFRONTATION AND ITS
NIGHTLESS AFTER 152
THE LAST OF LAST THINGS: REFLECTIONS ON
AN ATEMPORAL MIRROR 174
BIBLIOGRAPHY 186 1
Introduction
Long before his death in 1955» Robert Emmet Sherwood had, in the words of his biographer, John Mason Brown,
"earned his place among the eminent.Harvard graduate, survivor of the First World War, one of America's first film critics, novelist, Hollywood scenarist, political speechwriter, federal administrator, historian, playwright- all these he could claim as accomplishments. Above all, during the last years of his life, he was acknowledged as one of America’s most distinguished men of letters and as one of this century's major American dramatists. An obit uary tribute by Maxwell Anderson celebrated Robert Sherwood as a writer of lasting importance: "Idiot *s Delight, Abe
Lincoln in Illinois, and There Shall Be No Night are written with such wit, wisdom, humor and virtuousity in stagecraft that they put Sherwood in a class by himself among American playwrights."2
Far from being, as it might seem, merely the over- zealous reaction of a single admiring friend, this kind of extravagant praise for Sherwood was typical, even into the 1960s, of those who wrote about the man or his work.
^•John Mason Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, 1896-1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 19^5), P. 9.
^Maxwell Anderson, "Robert Sherwood," Theatre Arts, 40 (February 1955)» 87. 2
Harrison Smith in another prose elegy "bitterly" lamented
the passing of such a "protean genius"j "There are few men of letters of this country and this generation to whom we owe so much."3 In an unpublished doctoral dis sertation, Paul Charles Harris's analysis of the major
Sherwood plays concluded "that Robert Sherwood should be considered as a major American dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century."^ In a collection of plays that included Idiot's Delight, Joseph Mersand pre dicted that Sherwood's "substantial heritage of work, principally in the drama, • • . should earn him a perman ent position in American letters."3 Even as late as 1966, eleven years after his death and more than a quarter century after his last major drama, his critical standing was still relatively high, as evidenced by Jean Gould's conclusion that "Robert Sherwood's contributions to drama tic literature are large, and his position as a play wright-citizen is close to the top."^
Yet within the last ten years, Robert Sherwood's critical reputation has fallen below these predictions.
^Harrison Smith, "Robert E. Sherwood," Saturday Review, 38 (November 26, 1955)» 24.
^Paul Charles Harris, Jr., "The Relation of Dramatic Structure to the Ideas in Robert E. Sherwood's Dramatic Works," Diss. Stanford 1959» p. 313»
5joseph Mersand, ed., Three Dramas of American Realism (New York* Washington Square, 19^7), p. 10»
^JeanGo&lda Modern American Playwrights (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966), p. 117. 3 In short, he has been quietly ignored. The published editions of his plays are all out of print. The appear ance of a full-length (though unfinished) biography in
1965 and 1970 by John Mason Brown has prompted no new critical interest in Sherwood. Since 1970» there have been no publications concerned specifically with Sherwood's oeuvre. His name is mentioned only in histories of the
American theater as a figure of some significance in its development. Hardly considered a dramatist of enduring power by anyone today, Robert Sherwood’s critical recep tion has shrunk from an awe for a "protean genius" to a literary apathy toward an obscure historical personality.
Tacit acceptance of John Mason Brown's opinion that
Robert Sherwood serves primarily as a "mirror to his times" has done much to leave him stranded in his historical milieu and perhaps provides the best explanation for the dearth of critical attention the Sherwood canon, once so highly regarded, has received. That Sherwood was an artist specifically of and for his time seems to be the fundamental assumption behind the only book-length cri tical works on Sherwood. In Robert E. Sherwood, R. Baird Shuman acknowledges both Sherwood's limitations as a playwright and the fact that "despite the eminence which
Sherwood gained during his lifetime , there are few critics who would call him a truly great figure in Araer- 4
ican theater."7 Yet Shuman credits Sherwood as an accom
plished playwright who at one time made a significant
contribution to American theater: ”His plays, for the
most part works which demonstrate a high degree of com
petence, reflect his warm humanity and his genuine concern
for mankind. American theater is stronger because Robert
Emmet Sherwood was integrally a part of it during the crucial years in its struggle toward identity.”®
In Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist, Walter J Meserve sees Sherwood’s chief accomplishments in drama as
manipulating audiences and refining "hokum": "As well
as any of his contemporaries and better than most, he
knew the theatrical tricks which would bring laughter and applause. People wanted to be entertained, and he
gave them the hokum that he loved and the spectacle that
he did so well, at the same time providing simple messages that were effective in the theater.Meserve finds most
of the plays to be interesting but rarely profound: "For
those who look for a meaningful analysis of man in drama,
the plays of O’Neill, Anderson, Barry, Wilder and even
7r. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. 58 (New York: Twayne, 1964), pp. 142-143.
®Shuman, p, 146.
^Walter J. Meserve, Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist, Pegasus American Authors, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (New York: Pegasus, 1970)» p. 222. 5 Saroyan must be considered. But not the works of Sherwood."10
To Meserve, Sherwood's plays reflect the thinking of an idealist and romantic who could address himself comfortably only to the simplest and most general kinds of ideas, intellectually and tempermentally "incapable of dealing effectively with man's essential problems."H Meserve finally comes to regard Sherwood as "a very successful dramatist whose plays had been perceptively created for the moment, of the moment,"12 but who, as an artist, bears little other than historical significance for the present.
While Professor Meserve's study seems almost to dis miss the possibility of any serious consideration of Sherwood as a penetrating and provocative artist outside his own era, another observation from the same book points to a hitherto unexamined theme in Sherwood's work, one arising from what Meserve sees as the dual motivation not only behind the plays but behind most of Sherwood’s endeavors outside dramas He states simply that "Fear and hope were twin forces which prompted a good part of his life activity."13
What was it that Robert Sherwood feared? Meserve answers this question early in his book: "Idealistically and
l^Meserve, p. 222.
UMeserve, pp. 14-15.
12Meserve, p. 213.
^Me serve, p. 221. 6 emotionally, he loved mankind and feared for its sur vival. It is not an exaggeration to say that Robert
Sherwood was personally horrified by the threat of des truction not just of himself but of his world. He con stantly saw in the foreboding social and political events of his time an importance that stretched beyond the moment.
Throughout the 1930s, he perceived the rising military strength of Japan and Germany as a threat not simply to the United States but to civilization? when he first heard of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he wrote in his diary« "This is the world's worst day since Munich. . • • All the horrors of the Apocalypse are with us now."15 it must surely be more than coincidence that Robert Sherwood's best and commercially most successful plays were written and produced between 1931 and 1940, when the collapse of society seemed imminent, either through economic turmoil or world war. And yet, though Sherwood considered himself personally involved in the problems of his time, his vision was never solipsistic; it was responsibly cosmic.
What threatened an individual likewise threatened a world? the loss of one good man was the first step in the loss of all. It is the contention of this study that the vision
l^Me serve, p. 15.
l^Brown, p. 41. 7 of Robert Sherwood is thus essentially an eschatological one and that almost all his plays to some degree seek answers and solutions to the questions and dilemmas posed by the imminence of the doomsday, by the awareness of the presence of the "last things." The "hope" mentioned by Meserve as the "twin motivation" to fear is then an eschatological hope, a faith that the "last things" will not literally be the end but the beginning of something new. Sherwood was aware of the reality of doom, but was rarely a victim of despair. He was, according to John
Mason Brown, "an optimist at heart, not unthinking and often inundated by gloom but still an optimist."16
The great popularity of such plays as The Petrified
Forest, Idiot's Delight, There Shall Be No Night, and even to some extent Abe Lincoln in Illinois was certainly due largely to their timeliness. It would be difficult to deny that Sherwood had his finger on the public pulse and wrote with a keen understanding of the fears and values of his audience. But more importantly, the vision of
Robert Sherwood extends beyond the events and attitudes of the 1920s and 1930s and aims toward a breadth of eschatological, and thereby cosmic and timeless, proportions.
16 Brown, p. 52. 8
Eschatology and Eschatological Awareness
Eschatology is a theological term first used by
German high critics in the nineteenth century. In this century, it has become an increasingly important theo logical and philosophical concern with regard to the question of the ultimate destiny of each human life. Yet the term eschatology has taken on meanings as various as those who have used it. Before beginning to speak of the eschatological nature of Robert Sherwood's writings, it is necessary for this study to define certain escha tological concepts as they pertain to the modem world and one of its playwrights.
I. Popular and Philosophical Eschatology
The term eschatology has referred traditionally to that branch of fundamental theology concerned with the sequence and meaning of events that surround the end of the world. The primary function of such a doc trine, the prominent examples of which are to be found in Judaism and Christianity, has been to warn those elected to receive such knowledge of the predetermined destruction of this temporal existence and to proclaim and celebrate the timeless, divine kingdom to be initiated in its place. As an established doctrine of inevitable events, eschatology has thus served to frighten pagans, admonish 9 backsliders, and bolster the religious commitment of the
suffering faithful with the hopeful expectation of a
future eternity imbued with material and spiritual bles sings.
Yet this traditional conception of eschatology has become inadequate in that it ignores the importance of both secular and personal eschatological situations and regards eschatology as a tool for proselytism and not as a perceptual activity born from the human (and not necessarily ecclesiastical) dilemma of living with the idea of doom. Such a limited consideration of the end of the world leads to what may be called "popular eschatology," the use of an established eschatological doctrine as an evangelical device most conspicuous in our own time as it is applied on Sunday morning's tele vision crusades. It appeals not to an intellectual con cern for the present and future state of humanity but to personal anxieties over the conditions of the present and fears for an unknown future which collectively have inspired most of the great eschatological-millennial movements of the past. Popular eschatology, which actually involves little more than attaching contemporary facts to eschatological symbols in order to prove the imminence of the Day of Judgement, finally offers nothing more than a reasonable excuse for righteousness.
This study, while examining certain aspects of 10 the doctrines used in popular eschatology, is primarily concerned with the nature of what will be distinguished as "philosophical eschatology," the process of recognizing in each event the possibility of an extrinsic meaning derived from the knowledge that the end of that event is inevitable. In the broadest sense, meaning is the meaning of eschatology; the nature of meaning in light of the doomsday is the only truly eschatological concern.
More than a set doctrine of future events to be regarded as a series of symbolic signposts annunciating the "last things" of the cosmos as an historical reality fixed at the culmination of discernible time, philosophical eschatology encompasses all aspects of the search for meaning in every chronological event by determining the relation of each event to eschaton, the day of doom.
Neither limited to conforming to the established doctrine of a specific religion nor compelled to concentrate on areas normally regarded as exclusively "religious," philosophical eschatology is free to investigate the significance of any eschatological activity that provides meaning for a particular ecclesiastical or secular body. Under the heading of philosophical eschatology can be included investigation into such areas as the philosophy of history and the idea of progress, the nature of time, the limits of human conception, the source of hope, and the significance of certain universal characteristics 11 of eschatological doctrine such as the idea of the great
cosmic catastrophe, the return of the dead and the reign
of a mighty hero from the past, the emergence of the
millennial golden age after eschaton, and others. When
the term eschatology is used in the remainder of this
study, it will refer to philosophical rather than popular
eschatology. Seen as a vital activity rather than vapid
dogma, eschatology takes on the aspect of a universal
concern important to any race or time that desires to
know something about itself in light of its own end.
II. Escape from Time in Primitive and Western Eschatologies
The various eschatological myths and doctrines in the world can be said to be built on a simple pattern of destruction and regeneration, each requiring the other: destruction of the world must take place before the world can be regenerated, and complete regeneration is necessary if the destruction is to have any meaning.
Rudolf Bultmann is one of many to recognize that the concept of eschatological catastrophe is part of the mythic heritage of numerous cultures: "Myths about the end of the world are found among many peoples—of the destruction of the world by water or fire or by some other catastrophe. It may be left undecided whether all these myths spring from the same kind of thinking, and whether natural catastrophes created in primitive peoples 12 the impression of the end of the world.”1 Mircea Eliade
concurs that "Myths of cosmic catastrophe are extremely widespread,"2 but he sees the presence of an eschatological
system of belief among primitive peoples as the result
of something other than their having noticed environ
mental cataclysms. He finds in primitive eschatology
an awareness that the cosmos periodically requires renewal
through its own destruction, out of the chaos of which
will come a re-creations "Eschatology is only the pre figuration of a cosmogony to come. But every eschatology
insists on this facts the New Creation cannot take place
before this world is abolished once and for all. There
is no question of regenerating what has degenerated: nothing will serve but to destroy the old world so that it can be re-created in toto."3 what generates this
belief is a longing in primitive man to return to "the
initial perfection" that was present at the original
creation, an "obsession with the bliss of beginnings £thatj demands the destruction of all that has existed—
•^■Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternitys History and Eschatology (New Yorks Harper & Brothers, 1957)» P« 23.
^Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask, World Perspectives, 31 (New Yorks Harper & Row, I963), p. 54.
3Eliade, p, 52. 13 and hence has degenerated—since the beginning of the world.Through an orgiastic, "New Year" ritual, a village or tribe is able to found a new millennium that, automatically free from the social restrictions that previously were necessary because the old cosmos had degenerated, promises the freedom and happiness that are associated with the paradisiacal state.
While Eliade's observations pertain primarily to primitive, agricultural societies, the basic patterns and motives are similar to those found in the eschato logies of Western cultures. The idea that the world will end not with a whimper but a bang that is not lit erally the "last thing" but serves as the necessary prelude to a better existence is central to Judaic and
Christian eschatology and to the two most significant secular eschatological movements of this century, Na tional Socialism in Germany and Soviet Marxism. The differences between the eschatological myths of the primitive peoples referred to by Bultmann and Eliade and those of the West stem not so much from technolo gical distinctions in societies as from the way time is perceived and measured. When eschaton is scheduled to occur or has occurred and what it means or is to
Eliade, p. 52 14 mean are determined largely, by whether a society sees
time as cyclical or linear.
According to Eliade, one of the most important
functions of myth and myth-based ritual is to provide
man with a means of escape from the bonds of "profane
time" and to allow him to experience the blissful freedom
of illo tempore, the "sacred time." For modern as well
as primitive man, "there is always the struggle against Time, the hope to be freed from the weight of ’dead Time,' of the Time that crushes and kills."5 Among the primi
tives, "an opening into the Great Time, a periodic re
entry into Time primordial,is brought about by a periodic
return to a state of social chaos. He cites one particular
example that occurred on the "cargo-cult" island Espirito
Santo in Oceania where a prophet named Tsek proclaimed
the immediate end of this world in the wake of a new millennium. Tsek ordered the people of the island to
shed their clothes and possessions, to live in communes and engage in orgiastic rituals, and to do no more work but to wait for the return of the dead from America bearing gifts and food:
What Tsek announces in his message is in fact the
^Eliade, p. 193»
^Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries : The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Harvill Press, 19^0), p. 3^» 15 imminent restoration of Paradise on Earth. Man
will no longer work; they will have no need for
tools, domestic animals or possessions. Once the
old order is abolished the laws, rules and taboos
will lose their reason. ■ The prohibitions and
customs sanctioned by tradition will give place
to sexual liberty, to orgy. For, in human society,
it is sexual life that is subject to the strictest
taboos and constraints. To be free from laws,
prohibitions and customs, is to rediscover pri mordial liberty and blessedness, the state which
preceded the present human condition, in fact the paradisaical state.7
In many primitive cultures, this type of millennial initiation is to some degree repeated regularly, often yearly, as a symbolic manifestation of the myth of cosmic renewal. The eschaton depicted in this kind of myth has already occurred and can be considered final only with respect to the state of the world that preceded its "rather, it was the end of one human race, followed by the appearance of another.The eschaton is remembered
^Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne s Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J. M. Cohen (New Yorks Sheed and Ward, 1965), p• 127.
^Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 5^« 16 as a natural catastrophe, frequently a flood, of cosmic proportion. The present is seen as part of an escha tological eternity measured in seasonal cycles that con tinually bring man back to a point where, in tribal ritual, eschaton is emulated and a social chaos reigns that tem porarily abolishes "profane time" and returns all men to a state of "beginnings." Thus whatever takes place in the present is part of a continuing millennial cycle where the degree to which it remains a paradisiacal state is relative to the extent to which "profane time" has encroached upon a millennium that will continue without termination. A subsequent eschaton is beyond expectation; in fact, Eliade claims that "myths referring to an end to come are curiously scarce among primitives."9 The importance of this kind of eschatological activity, according to Eliade, is that it shows primitive man that the "origin" of things is "movable."10 Primitive man is not permanently exiled from original bliss because of "profane time." Through a temporary return to chaos that has as its pro totype the great eschaton of the past, he fulfills "the desire to recover the distant past, the blissful period of the ’beginnings,'" which to Eliade is representative
^Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 55.
lOEliade, Myth and Reality, p. 52. 17 of the "desire to rediscover the intensity with which one experienced or knew something for the first time ."H
In doing so, he tames time; it shrinks from being an oppressive eternity to become part of an eschatological, and thereby perceivable, cycle.
If time is understood as linear rather than cyclical, as it is in the West, the eschaton moves from the prehis toric past to a place in the post-historic future, and the fundamental eschatological activity changes from one of communal, nihilistic ritual to one of personal, teleological hope. Though they share the primitive desire for a return to a perfect beginning, Eliade finds the linear eschatological doctrines of Judaism and Christianity to be "innovative" in that the "End^of the World will occur only once, just as the cosmogony occurred only once. The Cosmos that will reappear after the catastrophe will be the same Cosmos that God created at the beginning of Time, but purified, regenerated, restored to its ori ginal glory."12 History may record instances of smaller catastrophes of the nature of eschaton such as the Biblical
Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; but the great, final consummation of the world will not occur
^Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 193»
^2Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 64. 18
until the end of time, and its effects will be permanent.
Natural catastrophes may play a part in the end,
but more often eschaton is depicted in terms of war,
especially one carried out with ghastly, supernatural devices of destruction which will guarantee the absolute
annihilation of every thing. The eschaton is often
apocalyptic in that it will finally reconcile a struggle
of world proportions that has existed since the beginning
of timé (e.g., the moral conflict between God and Satan;
the economic war between the proletariat and the bour
geoisie), and is brought about not as a natural consequence
of physical conditions (such as the natural degeneration of the world) but as the result of conscious will, either human or divine, working at a pre-destined moment unknow able in terms of present knowledge. Frequently the first
sign of eschaton is the return from the dead of a great hero from the past who will lead the elect during eschaton and reign in the paradise that follows it. The paradise to follow eschaton is imagined as free from all worldly conflicts. Much like the primitive conception of the millennium, it promises unaccustomed freedom and happiness in an existence where distinctions between human and divine are erased: "Through and behind the variety of cultural idioms in which it may be expres sed, the millennium points to a condition of being in which humans become free movers, in which there are no 19 obligations, in which all earthly desires are satisfied
and therefore expunged. The new earth merges into a new heaven."13
Like the primitive eschatologies, one derived from
a linear assumption of history should provide a means of
escape from the claustrophobic uncertainty of an endless,
meaningless passing of time. Eliade sees the need to
escape "profane time" as having become less urgent in the
modern world than it is in primitive cultures and even
"wonders whether the day will come when this desire to
transcend one’s own time—personal, historical time— and be submerged in a 'strange* time, whether ecstatic or imaginary, will be completely rooted out."!^ But by no means have we today entirely lost a sense of longing
for bliss as it was known in an earlier time. The current popular phrase "Getting back to basics," a fondness for anything "nostalgic," and the worship of ecology that is related to the traditional American respect for the "myth of the garden" and the idea of the "noble savage" all seem to suggest that this technological culture has not yet "given up the old dream of finding contemporary men still living in an Earthly Paradise."^-5 There is a difference,
13Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities, Pavilion Series, Social Anthro- pology (New York: Schocken, 1969)» P« 165»
1^Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 192.
^Eliade, Myths, Dreams, p. 42, 20
however, in when this return to the state of beginning
can take place, a difference dependent on how one measures
"profane time." Whereas in the primitive mind the world
is renewed through regularly repeating rituals that mirror
the original eschaton, in the West time is viewed as a
continuing sequence of unique events with no discernible
pattern and thus no escape from time.
This is where eschatological hope works for the
Western man in the same way the ritual of the New Year
aids the primitive. The eschatological writers of this
century agree on at least one point: the events recorded as history, the concept of progress, and the passing of
time are all meaningless without belief in eschaton as
an inevitable reality that will not only obliterate the
world as we know it, making the millennium possible, but
in itself will reveal the meaning of all facets of time
and space. Once eschaton is accepted as an unavoidable
fact, it is possible to see in every moment of time an importance relative to its end, whereby time is humbled in the sense that it too is subservient to a greater
cosmic goal. As with the primitive, the Western idea of eschaton
is described as the end of an old time and the beginning of a new one. The primitive eschaton has initiated an eternity of cyclical time where periodically a return to the "sacred time" of the beginning ends one cycle 21
and begins another. But in the Western sense of eschaton,
all time has stopped in the millennium; the eschaton
marks the absolute end of time. Awareness of this atemporal
condition is what gives modern man the ability to free
himself from his own "profane" time; it shows him the
true nature of time by revealing the possibility of "sacred"
time lessness.
One modern eschatological writer who is much con
cerned with the nature of time before and after eschaton is Nicolas Berdyaev. Whereas Eliade finds in the pri mitive mind a dual aspect to time, Berdyaev defines three temporal realities: cosmic, historical, and existential time. "Cosmic time is calculated by mathematics on the basis of movement around the sun, calendars and clocks are dependent on it, and it is symbolized by the circle.
Cosmic time is the basis for primitive eschatology; each cycle, while joined to the period before and after it, is completely independent, freed from other cycles by the ritualistic return to chaos that marks its end and beginning, related as an event in time only to the ori ginal eschatological creation of this world and its time. By seeing a relation between these cosmic cycles, Western man finds himself living also in historical time, "His-
l^Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, trans.,R. M. French (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), p. 206. 22
torical time is, so to speak, placed within cosmic time
and it also can be reckoned mathematically in decades,
centuries and millenia, but every event in it is unre
peatable, Historical time is symbolized by a line which
stretches out forward into the future, towards what is new."1?
We measure the passage of our existence through
cosmic and historical time. At the moment of eschaton, however, both these methods of measuring time become
obsolete because time, like every other condition in the world, is abolished. This of course makes imagining the millennium impossible in terms of time as we know
it. "One cannot think of the end of history either as happening within the limits of our vitiated time, as an event that belongs to this world, or as taking place outside historical time, as an event which belongs to the next world. The end is the conquest of both cosmic time and historical time. There will be no more time.
This is not an end in time but an end of time."AO
Berdyaev describes this post-eschaton condition as existential time, which, he says, "depends upon intensity
^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 206.
18 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles, 19^9), p. 197. 23 of experience, upon suffering and joy."19 The nature of
existential time is best described as an ecstasy which
can be experienced in this world only during an act of
intense creative expression, for it can be experienced
only in relation to itself ("Those who are happy do not watch the clock.”20) t and its intensity cannot be remem
bered. Berdyaev says that in fact existential time is not a future condition but exists now and is the source
of cosmic and historical time, which are degenerated forms of it»; At the moment of eschaton, all events occur in existential time, with "no distinction between the future and the past, between the end and the beginning."21
Every experience will be intense and timeless. Until eschaton, the idea of existential time can free man from time because it "is evidence of the fact that time is in man, and not man in time, and that time depends upon changes in man."22 por Berdyaev as well as for Eliade, the true purpose of an eschatology is to provide man with meanings that will free him from the spiritual lockstep of unfathomable eternity. Berdyaev finds in all escha tologies a vision of paradise born from the same dreams
^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 206.
20Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 206.
2^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, pp. 206-207.
22Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 206. 24 "the dream of a being who has been wounded by time and who longs to make his way out of time."23 This is the dream
of a being who, tired of existing in a world of unique
and meaningless objects, wishes, through an awareness of
eschaton. to enter into a world of teleological subjectiveness.
III. Eschatological Awareness
Imagine a large room with four walls and no windows, no way to see or hear what lies on the other side of the
walls. In each wall is a door that only opens out. You
are not alone in the room; it is crowded with people milling around just like you. Occasionally someone goes through one of the doors either out of accident or cur-
iousity or simply from a weariness of staying in the same room. Even some of your family and friends have passed through one of the doors, but none have ever returned, nor is there any real evidence that anyone in the room has been contacted by someone who has left. Though there are many people who are willing to tell you what lies beyond the walls, you have no way of knowing for certain whether they are right or wrong. Hanging from the ceiling of this enormous, crowded room is a gigantic clock which is always running and always keeps perfect time. On youf left wrist is your father's watch, which he gave you before he passed through
23gerdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 239* 25 the door. It does not run as well for you as it did for
him, and you are continually resetting it according to
the great clock, whose hands revolve into seconds, minutes, and hours without end.
A great many things happen to other people in the room when you are a witness, and sometimes something even happens to you. When these things happen, either to you or to someone else, there is always someone nearby who is willing to tell you what happened as he or she saw it and what it must mean. Either you believe what you hear or you are skeptical. If you are skeptical, you move on wishing you could believe. If you believe what you have been told, eventually something will happen that will not coincide with what you remember being told, and then you become skeptical.
You continue wandering around the room without knowing why. Then in one moment you decide to see what lies on the other side of the walls. You leave your father's watch with someone you have enjoyed knowing, someone who probably asks you not to go. You open the door and leave the room, and, in doing so, you have par ticipated in an eschatological experience. This is an attempt to illustrate an existence that, until the last moment, is committed without an escha tological awareness. In spite of the things that can happen to one, it is an existence without meaning? meaning 26
is possible only when there is a telos, a goal that defines
the direction of a series of actions. In spite of the
clock and the watch, there is no real time; an existence
without direction is endless no matter how the moments
are measured. When the eschatological moment is realized,
the watch is left behind; a measured moment is replaced
by an experienced one. This is what Berdyaev means by
existential time. It is always present, but is realized
only in a moment of eschatological transformation, when
one existence is sacrificed for the chance to experience another. Eschatological awareness is the realization that nothing can go on forever—nor should it—and that the eschaton does not lie somewhere in the distant future— for what is the future but an imaginary projection of this temporal present—but that it always exists in a timeless now. This is the point behind Berdyaev's state ment that "time depends upon changes in man," for at every moment, whether or not one is aware of it, escha tological meaning is at hand: "The eschatological outlook is not limited to the prospect of an indefinable end of the world, it embraces in its view every moment of life. At each moment of one's living, what is needed is to put an end to the old world and to begin the new."2^
Eschatological hope involves more than merely waiting
^^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 254. 27 for the events that constitute the Weltgericht. If one
could see beyond the wall and be certain beforehand what
lies on the other side, such waiting might be justified.
Eschaton would have no real meaning except in the future.
One could conceivably live as if eschaton were a unique
event that in all probability would not occur in this lifetime. But this kind of reasoning amounts to popular
eschatology reversed. The door of exit is always available;
eschaton is an eternal, not simply future, reality: it
always is, was, and will be. In the words of Werner Elert, the power of eschaton derives from the fact that it "bind|sj[ us now."2^
Eschaton also binds us because of its mysterious nature. It confronts us with a situation that demands a dependence on hope rather than empirical knowledge.
No one knows precisely what is beyond it. The only descriptions we have (e.g., the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Daniel, the New Testament Revelation of John) are camouflaged in a prophetic language whose cryptic symbols tell us only that it is an existence different from this one. We cannot even be certain that they are eye-witness reports or that they are totally accurate.
The only fact of which we can be certain is that everything
2^Wemer Elert, Last Things, ed. Rudolph F. Norden, trans. Martin Bertram (St. Louis: Concordia, 1974), p. 13» 28
must come to an end and anything can be ended now. Escha
tological hope is what fortifies at the moment one passes
through the door; it is the belief that the risk will
be worthwhile. Eschatological awareness is the realiza tion that risk, when directed toward a search for meaning,
is the only thing in this world that is worthwhile.
IV. Eschatological Occurrences in the Twentieth Century
The social manifestation of eschatological awareness can be found in the various millennial movements that have occurred throughout the history of Western civili zation and particularly in the doctrines of the two most recent movements, Marxism and Nazism. Reflecting the basic eschatological pattern of the threat of chaotic destruction followed by the promise of a golden age, these movements are the result of eschatological awareness converted through mass fear into social action.
In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn finds three phases to the millenarian pattern of events. First, a society becomes susceptible to dissolution into chaos as its social and moral framework prove increasingly inadequate: "Whether in the Middle Ages or in the twentieth century, revolutionary chiliasm has flourished only where the normal, familiar pattern of life has already undergone a disruption so severe as to seem irremediable. When a way of living which has long been taken for granted 29 is called in question, invalidated or simply rendered
impracticable, a situation of peculiar strain is created. "z;D
This strain accumulates gradually, usually coming hardest
for the lower strata of society, until one major catas
trophe, a famine or plague or great war, completely throws the society into chaos.2? The second phase begins as chaos is temporarily stemmed by "the appearance of a messianic leader preaching the doctrine of the final struggle and the coming of the new age jjvhoJ can produce remarkable reactions—and that irrespective of whether the leader is a sincere fanatic or an imposter or a mix ture of both."28 The third phase is one of order brought about by the leader's appealing to the inflated sense of mass paranoia with a dream of future paradise and with the divulgence of a scapegoat that is wiped out ruthlessly
"not simply in order to safeguard or further specific interests but also—and above all—in an effort to clear the way for the Millennium."^
This is the manner in which Marxism and Nazism became political realities in this century. Both were initiated partly as a result of national devastation
^Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium; (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1957)» pp. 310-311.
2?Cohn, pp. 312-313.
28Cohn, p. 312.
29cohn, p. 310. 30
in World War I, both were founded and guided by charismatic
leaders, and both succeeded at the expense of scapegoats
(the Romanoff and Kerensky governments and the Jews).
Both movements featured characteristics prominent in traditional eschatological doctrine: "The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ’Aryan race' or the ’proletariat’) against the hosts of evil (be they Jews or the bourgeoisie'); a dispensation in which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consumption—these ancient imaginings are with us still."31 During the first decades following Christ's life, there was apparently an intense feeling of eschatological awareness in the form of ardent chiliasm among early
Christians. The books of the New Testament were written with an expectation of Christ's immediate return and the commencement of Armageddon. As time passed without the divine reappearance, the Christian church put less emphasis on preparedness for the Day of Judgement and began to teach a doctrine of progressive justification and salvation through purgatory and heaven. The question of eschatolo gical justice in this world was superceded by a striving
3^-Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 183« 31 for a supernatural paradise earned through righteous
action and belief. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
the idea of participating in a movement urged by the
implication of eschatological doom was revived only to
instigate millennial movements such as the Crusades.
Gradually eschatology degenerated from a question
of purpose in life to a tired doctrine exploited for the
purposes of popular eschatology. But as the rigid feudal structure of the Middle Ages gave way to the comparatively
amorphous social condition of the modern world, the social stability that inhibited serious consideration of escha
tological questions disappeared in the wake of revolutionary
conditions that bore an undeniably eschatological nature.
The Inquisition, the French Revolution, Napoleon's con
quest of most of Europe, the 1848 unrest, World War I,
the Bolshevik Revolution—all at some time were accepted
as the arrival of Armageddon and for good reason: the
basic eschatological pattern can be found in almost any revolutionary situation. "Lawrence jeered at Archdeacon
Charles for calling the Kaiser Antichrist, but Josef
Pieper, in our own day, is less likely to be scorned
for saying many have been called Antichrist because many have indeed been Antichrist, or types of him, so that Nazism is a ’milder preliminary form of the state of
Antichrist,' and so is any other tyranny. And even here we can see that the older, sharply predictive apocalypse, 32 with its precise identifications, has been blurred: eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present at every moment, the types always relevant."32
In any age there occur events of such nature and magnitude that they take on the characteristics of eschaton and thereby inspire in thinking men an eschatological awareness. Having experienced first-hand the twentieth century’s "war to end all wars," it should not be surprising that Robert E. Sherwood displays in his works such a solemn eschatological awareness as well as a passionate desire to reveal to others the nature of man in relation to eschaton.
32prank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Bryn Mawr Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 196?), p. 26. 33
The Road to Doom: Intimations of
Last Things in the Early Works
Instances of Robert Sherwood's interest in escha tological problems can be found in his earliest plays,
The Road to Rome, The Queen's Husband, and Waterloo Bridge, and in his only novel, The Virtuous Knight. While none of these early works can be said to hold a commanding position in American literature or even within the Sherwood canon, each indicates to some degree the philosophical direction that was more fully expressed later in plays such as The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and There Shall Be No Bight. In each of these early works the threat of doom is conspicuously present, providing at least a background against which the actions of the characters may be evaluated.
I. The Question of Consistency If there can be said to be a single critical question that has most often been asked of Robert Sherwood's dramas, it is the question of whether or not the body of Sherwood's work reveals a growing, consistent development in his thinking. From the beginning of his dramatic career, Robert Sherwood’s plays identified him as a devout pacifist.
Sherwood himself encouraged this notion, emphasizing that the "message" of The Road to Rome, his first Broadway 34
success, was a call for peace: "When I wrote 'The Road to Rome' I didn't know what sort of playwright I might be, provided I might be a playwright at all. So I tried
in it every style of dramaturgy—high comedy, low comedy, melodrama, romance (both sacred and profane), hard-boiled realism, beautiful writing—and, of course, I inserted a 'message.' That message was that I was opposed to war."l His strongest pacifist statement was delivered in dramatic form as Idiot's Delight in 1936, a play he called both "representative of its author"2 and "certainly an anti-war play."3
Then in 1940 came what appeared to be a complete reversal. In contrast to the Hannibal of The Road to
Rome who in discovering himself converted from a warrior to a man of peace, Sherwood presented in There Shall Be
No Night Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen, who discovered in the course of the play that he could no longer live as a man of peace and ultimately embraced, however reluctantly, the noble cause that would lead his son and himself to warriors deaths. If Sherwood was not aware of the transformation he had undergone at the time he was writing There Shall
^Robert E. Sherwood, "Preface," in There Shall Be No Night (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), pp, xii-xiii. 2 Sherwood, p. xxi.
^Sherwood, p. xxii. 35 Be No Night, its first performance drew reactions that demanded an explanation for the apparent inconsistency:
After the first performance of "There Shall
Be No Night" in Providence, Rhode Island, on March
29, 1940, a young man, a stranger, came up to me
and said, "You certainly have changed your point
of view since 'Idiot's Delight.'" There was a
distinct note of accusation in his voice. This was the first of many similar and many less tem
perate accusations which this play has provoked. Having identified myself time and again in the
past as a pacifist, I had now become a "Warmonger."
It is a strange fact that many people who
can bear with equanimity all sorts of assaults
upon their moral character or their personal habits
are goaded into indignant counter-attack when they
are charged with inconsistency. "I don't mind being called a black-hearted villain, an enemy
of society. In fact, I might even be flattered
by such distinction. But—by God—I’ll fight any man who dares to imply that I have been untrue to myself."^
Though he tried to make light of it here, this accusation of inconsistency, which by implication ques-
^Sherwood, p. ix. 36
tioned his integrity as a dramatist, certainly bothered
Sherwood. He composed the preface to the published version of There Shall Be No Night as an apology intended to define what seemed to him a logical, consistent de velopment in his thinking from The Road to Rome on: "I want to say that 'There Shall Be No Night' is not a denial of 'Idiot’s Delight': it is a sequel. I realize that there is an appreciable difference between what I have written and what I have tried to write. But I shall deal in this Preface with my motives, and the nature of the experiences that impelled them."5
Because critics must remain understandably skeptical regarding an author's "motives," especially those realized in afterthought, this preface has done nothing to stem the questions about consistency. How could the dogmatic pacifism that inspired the plays from The Road to Rome to Idiot *s Delight be abandoned so suddenly in There
Shall Be No Night, a propagandistic exercise intended in part by Sherwood's own admission to promote the idea of war’s necessity as ardently as the earlier plays condemned war for its futility? How can two such anti thetical propositions be reconciled? And if no acceptable explanation is possible, what does this intellectual metamorphosis say about the kind of mind capable of such
c •^Sherwood, pp. ix-x. y? a radical shift in values?
Thus far, no convincing explanation correspondent
to what Sherwood proposed in his preface has been offered.
Most often his change of heart has been accepted by critics
as extreme but probably justifiable in light of the poli
tical events of the time. The question of consistency
might well be reversed: on the eve of World War II,
how could any responsible person aware of the situation
in Europe remain a pacifist? The answer, as history
has shown, is that the responsible person, or nation,
cannot remain isolated. Robert Sherwood’s change of
heart was not unique? he was, as usual, only slightly
ahead of American public opinion. He was surely, as
John Mason Brown called him, a "mirror to his times."
A pacifist in the 1920s when, in agreement with America’s
"lost generation" of disillusioned intellectuals, Sherwood
believed that he had been betrayed by the causes that drew
him and the rest of America into the First World War, he then became militaristic in the late 1930s when, like others in the American intellectual community, he con cluded that American participation in another war was a
moral as well as political inevitability. He was just as surely, in Walter Meserve’s words, a "reluctant moralist'
he accepted the necessity of American intervention in
Europe only when he could no longer believe in isolationism
he championed war because he could no longer deny its 38 ineluctability.
But accepting an inconsistency does not explain
it, and quick conversions tend to induce distrust. There
Shall Be No Night is not an extension of the same attitude that motivated The Road to Rome; it flatly rejects pacifism as a viable course of action and demands, at both intel lectual and emotional levels, what Sherwood previously claimed to abhor in any situation. If one belief, from all appearances passionately adherred to for nearly two decades, can be dropped in the anxiety of a great crisis, a second, opposite belief can be replaced just as easily by a third, and so on, and eventually we must come to the realization that what we have is a man of strong, but not particularly deep, convictions. Assuming that the question of war or peace is the most important question
Sherwood confronts in his work, one has to wonder if he was such a man, if what lay at his core was nothing more than a shallow extension of the protean world around him. But it is the thesis of this study that the problem of choosing between war and peace is not, as it has most often been assumed, the central concern of Robert Sherwood's works. Peace and war, though historical realities, are only temporal conditions, minor considerations in contrast to the problem of determining the meaning of an individual life in relation to eschaton. The theme that consistently 39 remains at the center of Robert Sherwood's work and develops as he matures as an artist is one of eschatological awareness, the problem of how an individual will react as he becomes aware of the inevitable doom of his world.
The choice between war and peace may well have to be made along the road to doom that all men share, but it is only one of many eschatological choices.
War and peace and any decisions they provoke are merely elements in history and are therefore insignificant in themselves; they must be measured against the "last things": "For history depends for its meaning and reality upon that which is other than history. The real, inward, and eternal meaning, striving for expression in the course of history, is completely expressed in the eschaton, which is unique and unlike any other event, because it is final."® Robert Sherwood's works, beginning with
The Road to Rome, are dramas of the individual search for meaning staged against the backdrop of the eschatological absolute. The choice Hannibal has to make in The Road to Rome is not between pacifism and imperialism, but between meaning and meaninglessness. The "human equation" which Amytis introduces to him is, of necessity, an eschatological one.
®C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and its Development Three Lectures with an Appendix on Eschatology and History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935). p. 83. 40 II. Probing the Human Equation
If one is looking for textual evidence of escha
tology in Robert Sherwood's plays, the first act of The
Road to Rome provides a good example of an eschatological
situation. At the beginning of the play we are informed that "Rome faces a great crisis"?: the renowned Cartha
ginian warrior Hannibal, who "has spread destruction
wherever he has gone"(p. 35)» has emerged as a definite,
though still distant, "menace to . . . Roman civiliza-. . tion"(p. 3^). Then the news is delivered that despite
tremendous obstacles Hannibal has routed the Roman legions at Cannae and is about to march unimpeded into Rome.
The once-speculative day of doom has arrived? the Roman citizens have no doubt that their city is about to be destroyed. The Roman general Scipio is the first to announce both the enemy’s presence ("Hannibal is at the gates of Rome."-p. 49) and the imminence of Rome’s an nihilation ("Our army has been defeated. Hannibal has marched to Rome. He will occupy the city at any moment."-p.51)•
The reaction of Fabius, the newly-appointed dictator of Rome, is one of almost complete resignation: Hannibal's victory at Cannae "means death to us all—thè end of
^Robert Emmet Sherwood, The Road to Rome (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 15» All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 41
everything for Rome"(p. 52). Utterly convinced that
"Rome is doomed"(p. 56), Fabius plans no further defense
of the city, feeling desperate and offended by what he considers an unjust fates "I can't face this calamity,
Scipio. Somehow it doesn't seem right. The gods know we’ve done nothing to deserve this"(p. 60).
The only character in the first act who is not convinced that a state of eschaton is imminent is Amytis, the wife of Fabius. The daughter of an Athenian mother and a Roman father, she is a free spirit conspicuously out of step with a Roman society dedicated to progress and right moral living. Fabia, mother-in-law to Amytis, can barely abide her at the beginning of the first act and in the wake of eschaton, when social restraints threaten to dissolve and no longer need be observed, she openly vents her hostility toward the lascivious foreigner her son married:
FABIA (coming forward)
At last I have an excuse to tell you what
I think of you. I've tried to see the best in
you, because you were my son's wife. But there
is no best in you. You, who were honored with the love of a good man, have thrown it aside,
flippantly. You have put on the airs of a goddess,
and displayed the morals • • • 42 FABIUS
Mother!
FABIA
I hate you—I hate you—and I’m glad that
the clean streets of Rome are not to be soiled
by your vile blood, (pp. 57-58)
Amytis perplexes her husband nearly to the extent that she infuriates his mother. Fabius is "incredulous" at her desire to see Oedipus Rex (which a horrified Fabia
Calls "Probably one of the coarsest plays ever written!"-p. 29) he is embarrassed by her "stimulating" wardrobe and by her failure "to.'set a good example in all desirable vir tues" such as respectability, modesty, economy, devotion to duty, reverence, and chastity(p. 33), and he is appalled by her lack of interest in public affairs. When Fabius announces his new appointment as dictator, "Isn’t that nice"(p. 23) is her only reaction; then he is shocked to learn that she knows nothing of Hannibal:
AMYTIS
Now, please don’t ask me to keep track of
our wars, or just who our enemies happen to be
at the moment. With one war after another—-and
sometimes two or three wars at a time —I can't follow them. The mental effort is too great. 43 FABIUS
Perhaps you’d take a more lively interest
if Hannibal marched into Rome, with his army of
Africans and Spaniards and Gauls. How would you
like to see this house burned down about you, and
and your loved ones slaughtered before your eyes?
AMYTIS
It might serve to break the monotony of life
in Rome. (pp. 25-26)
Amytis cannot bring herself to take her husband seriously in either his accomplishments or his fears because she cannot take his Rome seriously, cannot accept the stifling social restrictions to which her husband and mother-in-law subscribe. But she dislikes life in
Rome most because it does not afford its citizens the opportunity for introspection. Fabius, like the rest of the Romans, is lost in the cause of unexamined progress of advance that has direction (that being imperialism) but no recognizable telos. Amytis is bored with Rome because its "well-organized community life" will not permit a search for individual meanings "That’s just it. Rome is too busily engaged in the great work of expanding to think about such trivial matters as happiness or even contentment. If we could only stop being suc cessful for a change—if we could only lose a war, now 44 and then, just for the sake of variety . . • " (p. 27) and for the sake of meaning, to stop and evaluate whether
“the great work of expanding" is worth the personal sacrifices it demands.
When Hannibal arrives at Rome's outskirts and the city is forced to question its telos and the meaning of its end ("What is this terrible thing the gods have done to us, Scipio—to us who have made our sacrifices regularly in the temple and have spared no effort to show our gratitude for past favors. I can't understand it."-p. 53)»
Amytis is the only character who believes Rome still has a future, that it will somehow escape what for the moment appears to be immediate doom. In part, she is still being flippant with her dead-serious neighbors, to whom she says just before leaving the city that all is not as hopeless as it seems:
AMYTIS Well, I must be off for the sea coast, to
spend a quiet holiday with my mother. I hope to
find you all here when I get back. FABIUS
Amytist How can you be so callous? AMYTIS
Can you blame me for being cheerful"in the
face of danger? You might try it yourself? If 45 Hannibal should march into Rome, and find you all
laughing, he might forget what he came for and join
in the merriment. (p. 62)
But her confidence in Rome’s future goes beyond her inability to take the Romans seriously, even when their situation actually appears to be grave. When Varius., a slave with whose longing to escape Rome Amytis can sympathize, suggests that a Carthaginian victory would free himself and his mistress, Amytis cools his hope by predicting that the Carthaginians rather than the Romans are doomed: "Rome can't be beaten—not yet. There's an air of destiny about this place, an intimation of empire—and it can't be subdued"(p. 46). While the rest of Rome is lost in the midst of a hysteria ("There is no telling what horrors the people may commit in their mad ness, "-p. 6l) brought on by the fact that the populace was not prepared for eschaton, Amytis is cracking jokes and poking fun at a doom that can and will be avoided. Fabius offers his wife the honor of dying liebestodally beside him; not having to die, she declines the offer and, in doing so, is branded a traitor to Rome by Fabia.
Though she seems entirely frivolous at the beginning of the play, Amytis is the only character who responds sensibly to eschaton, and her response is clearly in the voice of Robert Sherwood the pacifist: "I maybe a 46
traitor to Rome, but I am not a traitor to my own con
victions. I didn't start this war. I've never given
it my support or encouragement. I have no axe to grind
with Hannibal. Why should I sacrifice my life merely
because the Roman army has failed to subdue a weaker
enemy?"(p. 59). Amytis can no more accept death without
reason than she could earlier abide a life without meaning.
As she is about to flee to safety, she in turn offers
Fabius the only thing of value in the moments just before
the actuality of eschaton» hope.
FABIUS (tremulously)
Good-bye, Amytis. I’m afraid I shall never
see you again. AMYTIS
Don't say that, Fabius. Hannibal hasn’t
conquered Rome yet. There is still hope.
FABIUS Hope is a poor defense against the Numidian
cavalry. AMYTIS It's the only defense you have, isn't it? FABIUS
Yes, I suppose so. We're doomed. (p. 63)
The concept of doom Fabius can now too easily com prehend; it is a fact as inevitable as the dawn ("Hannibal 47 will attack before morningt"-p. 61). Hope (and this situation calls for eschatological hope, the faith that sustains until the eschaton is realized) is an ethereal thing, the actuality of which cannot be proven, the pre sence of which cannot be known through fact. Fabius and the other Romans are so ill-prepared for Hannibal because they are capable of understanding only what they can see directly before them. The possibility of Hannibal triumphing was unthinkable earlier ("No, we haven't exactly conquered Hannibal as yet. But he's on the run."-p. 24); the reception of hope is impossible now, and a mind, in capable of hope is incapable of achieving an eschatological vision: "Eschatology as a science is therefore not possible in the Greek sense, nor yet in the sense of modern ex perimental science, but only as a knowledge of history in terms of hope, and to that extent as a knowledge of history and of the historic character of truth."8 Escha tological hope demands an imaginative projection of oneself out of the windowless cell of temporal progress so that the actions of the moment can be evaluated in relation to all moments, which find their consummation in eschaton. The spirited Amytis can understand the
$Jürgen MoItmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Jämes W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), P» 41. 48
idea of hope because she believes in the possibility
of a meaningful end to things; because he has been lost
in a life without meaning, Fabius must reject his wife's
tidings and face a doom without hope and a death void
of ulterior significance. When Amytis makes a similar
offer to Hannibal at the end of Act II, the hope of
meaningfulness is accepted.
The tone of the last two acts is different from
that of the first. Now in the Carthaginian camp, each
word is spoken with the expectation of triumph rather than
doom. Yet in essence the second and third acts are no
less eschatological than the first. In Act I we find the microcosm threatened with annihilation, a situation
that will recur in later Sherwood plays, most importantly
The Petrified Forest, Idiot's Delight, and There Shall
Be No Night. In Acts II and III we find Robert Sherwood,
through the character of Hannibal, grappling with the
problem of eschatological awareness, a confrontation that will provide the thematic base for his work after
Reunion in Vienna. Evidence from the play would suggest that Hannibal is the character in The Road to Rome with whom Sherwood most identifies. In the preface to the published edition,
Sherwood confesses that the play "was inspired by an unashamedly juvenile hero-worship for Hannibal"(p. xli).
His description of Hannibal is practically a self-portrait: 49 "Hannibal is tall, thin, dark—quiet and surprisingly
unemphatic in his speech—rather diffident in his man
ners" (p. 85). Hannibal’s struggle to come to a comfor
table understanding of eschatological realities is to be Robert Sherwood's struggle, as the plays written
over the next thirteen years bear witness.
The real value of an eschatology, according to
Nicolas Berdyaev, is that, in initiating man to the
eternal presence of existential time, it frees him from
a meaningless existence in a world crowded with unique,
separate objects that bear no relation to him: "From
the philosophical point of view the end of the world
and history is above all the triumph over objectiveness,
that is to say triumph over the world of alienation,
necessity, impersonality, and hostility. It is the
formation of a world of objects which is the source of all the misfortunes of man."9 History written or
read without an eschatological perspective is merely a
record of these meaningless objects: "History has a meaning only if it is going to come to an end: its hav
ing a meaning depends upon its not going on for ever. History has no immanent meaning? it has only a transcen dent meaning."^
^Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, p. 197«
^Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, p. I69. 50
Hannibal at the beginning of Act II wearily exists
in a world ruled by objectiveness. His past, that part
of him which exists only as history, has no meaning be
cause no end can be projected for it. The war was started
by an ancestor; though he was raised to carry on his
family's warrior tradition ("His childhood was filled with the talk of battles in which his father had butchered
thousands of Romans; the forces of death and destruction
constituted his heritage."-p. xiv), this Punic War means
no more to him ("The destruction of Rome will be in the
nature of a harmless diversion."-p. 86) than we have seen
that it does to Amytis. Though the Carthaginian troops
are excited by the prospect that Rome's destruction will
allow them to return triumphantly to their homes and
families, Hannibal is skeptical as to whether the Cartha ginian government will ever let his military service ends "It's not as bad as all that, Hasdrubal. I do care whether we win or lose. I suppose it's the only thing
I have to care about in the whole world. • • • But—if we win a victory, that's that. We have to go on to the next battle, then the next, and the next, until we've finished the war. Then we go home to Carthage and start looking for another"(p. 88). Then Amytis, caught wandering too near the Cartha ginian camp with her two slaves Meta and Varius, is brought before Hannibal's younger brother Mago and is 51 accused of being a spy. She is still imperturbable; the
fact that she will be executed as a spy strikes her as
little more than a nuisances "If only I'd stayed in
Rome, I should have been acclaimed a heroine by my husband
and Scipio and all those stuffy old Senators. Now, I
must sacrifice my life and get no credit for it"(p. 96).
Her execution is stayed by Hannibal's curiousity and be
cause he has "so few opportunities for polite conversation
in the army”(p. 110). Then in the way of a final re quest, she asks Hannibal,"Why have you done it?"(p. 112).
Hannibal tries to avoid the question ("I should think that my reasons would be fairly obvious. I came here to destroy Rome. Isn't that reason enough?"-p. 112), but Amytis refuses to be satisfied by evasions. Her persistence finally draws from him the confession that he has long been uncertain about the motives and meaning of his accomplishments:
HANNIBAL
Perhaps I can't explain my actions. AMYTIS
You don't even know yourself? HANNIBAL
That question of yours disturbed me a little.
. , . I've asked myself that same thing so many
t ime s• 52 AMYTIS
I rather imagined that you had.
HANNIBAL
• . • When we came to the last line of moun
tains, and saw Italy spread out at our feet, I
asked myself that same question. * • • I've never
been able to find an answer. I've watched our men
slaughted the Romans in one terrible bettle after
another. Through all these years, I’ve seen nothing
but death—death—and I’ve never been able to find
an answer. (pp. 114-116)
Long before his encounter with Amytis, Hannibal was troubled by the possibility that all he had done was meaningless. "If the historical process is regarded as endless, history is deprived of meaning.This is Hannibal's dilemma. Amytis's questions demand that Hannibal evaluate all he has done, and, in doing so, he is forced to recognize that which he has tried to ignore during the campaign: that his life has been "deprived of meaning." Yet Amytis is there not just to trouble him? she also has a solution:
■^Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, p. 168, 53 AMYTIS
Yes—mago is a man. You, of course, are
a god. . . • Perhaps some day you’ll discover that
you're a man, too, Hannibal—and not ashamed to
weaken. . . . Perhaps, some day, you'll realize
that there's a thing called the human equation.
It's so much more beautiful than war. HANNIBAL
The human equation does not interest me. AMYTIS
Because you don't know what it is. If you
could ever find it, you'd know that all your con
quests—all your glory—are only whispers in the infinite stillness of time—that Rome is no more
than a tiny speck on the face of eternity—that
the gods are the false images of the unimaginative
. . . and then you'll wish that all you've done
could be undone. HANNIBAL
Where can I find this human equation? (pp. 132-133)
What does Amytis, and Robert Sherwood, mean by the human equation? While Sherwood never attempts to clarify the term, it is likely that he used the word in the literal sense of a statement of equality. In the human equation, there is one constant, that being a human 5b life, and a variable of unspecified quantity. To realize
that there exists such a thing as the human equation is to
ask what is equivalent to a human life; it is to place a value on a human life, to ask what it is worth, to find
a meaning for it that justifies its existence. The human equation implies the active search for that particular meaning which in replacing the variable—that part of
life that is recognized as mysterious and, without further
searching, unfathomable—satisfies the equation, i.e., gives reason and meaning to living, thereby bringing a man happiness by freeing him from a world of unrelated objects and events. Thus far Hannibal has found neither contentment in his accomplishments nor freedom from what has been and, if he destroys Rome, will be expected of him. He has been troubled by doubts, but thus far has avoided the human equation. He has sacrificed personal happiness for a self-will dedicated to the political ambitions of Carthage, and now, no longer able to deny the judgement carried in the human equation, he must admit that the sacrifices have not been equal to the end that will result from it (i.e., the destruction of Rome and who knows how many other Mediterranean rivals in the future).
According to Berdyaev, history has shown, in the fact that all great empires perish, that political conquest alone is neither a satisfactory nor enduring end to 55 human life: "Man ranks his self-will higher than his
happiness. The will to power and the will to impose
unity upon the world by force, goad and torment man.
Men torment themselves and others with the illusory aims of historical might and majesty."3-2 This is what Han
nibal realizes at the end of Act II, having been goaded
for years by Carthage’s ambition to "impose unity upon
the world." The human equation demands introspection,
something Hannibal could not permit himself while he
was ruled by "the illusory aims of historical might."
As Act II closes, Hannibal denies these aims in throwing
down his sword and embracing Amytis. The conquest of Rome has been abandoned for one that will satisfy the
human equation: the conquest of Amytis and her disturbing
questions, the elevation of his own significance out of
the chaos of historical objectiveness.
In Act III comes the confrontation between the two
men in Amytis's life and what they represent: Fabius and Hannibal; Rome and Carthage; destiny and freedom; the sterile dedication to conquest and the fertile pre ference for peace; and, most importantly, a meaningless existence and the human equation, the possibility of eschatological meaning ignored and accepted. The pos sibility of eschatological awareness, the chance to
■^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, pp. 208-209. 5^ partake in existential time and thereby see the events
that constitute historical time in their proper perspective,
lies latent in any crisis, which "throws up the question
of the historic future. For when the whole existing
situation is in a state of crisis, it becomes obvious that the future can no longer arise automatically out
of the past, that it can no longer be the natural repe
tition and continuation of the past, but that something new must be found in it."13 Fabius never realizes this,
and Hannibal does. The crisis that Fabius and the other
Romans face—their own destruction—passes without any noticeable effect on them? unaware that the evening
Amytis spent with Hannibal was responsible for his "change of heart" and Rome's salvation, Fabius at the play's end continues to preach the sanctity of "high moral purpose":
"Virtue, my dear, is the one perfect defense against all the evil forces on this earth"(p. 177). Hannibal's crisis of having to face the human equation transforms him from a slave of history to the master of existential time. After meeting Fabius early in the last act, the Romans having come with the intention of bluffing the
Carthaginian general into retreating, Hannibal momentar ily slips back into his historical mentality and decides
13MoItmann, p. 233 57 again that he must march on Romes "I came to conquer
Rome. Anything short of that is failure"(p. 164).
Amytis attempts to persuade him that his mission in
Italy is a more personal one:
AMYTIS
Are you sure of that? Are you sure that
you didn't come all this way to find your own
soul? HANNIBAL
My soul doesn't matter, Amytis. I myself
amount to nothing. All of us amount to nothing.
... We stand aside and watch ourselves parade
by! We're proud of the brave manner in which we
step forward, and of the nobility of our bearing,
and the sparkle of divine fire that is in our
eyes—and actually we have no more idea of where
we're going, no more choice in the matter, than so many drops of water in a flowing river. AMYTIS
Yes, and at the end of that river is an endless sea of things that are passed. It is
called history. When you reach that sea, other
drops of water may murmur respectfully,"Here comes
Hannibal, the conqueror of Rome." But you won't
care. You'll only be thankful for the interludes 58
that you have known—the moments when you drifted
from the main current and found peace and contentment
in the deep, quiet pools. (pp. 164-165)
"Finding one's soul" is the act of completing
the human equation. Hannibal's training as a soldier
has taught him to avoid the human equation, and he tries
to again by professing that "All of us amount to nothing,"
that all beings exist without autonomy or distinction,
like "so many drops of water in a flowing river." This
attitude is the symptom of someone who recognizes only
the world of objectiveness. But Amytis, who lives ac
cording to the human equation, sees two worlds: the world of objectiveness that ends in "an endless sea of
things" called history, and a world of meaning brought
to life by the awareness of eschaton that is gained when one experiences the immeasurable instances of ex
istential time, "the moments when you drifted from the main current and found peace and contentment in the deep, quiet pools." Living simply to be part of history
is unsatisfying ("But you won't care."). What satisfies is the knowledge of the fact of eschaton, "which is not history but the pure realization of those values which our empirical life in time partly affirms and partly seems to deny."1^ Eschaton is not the result of history,
14Dodd, p. 84 59 but the fulfillment of all possibilities offered in
historical time. Eschaton exists regardless of the
course of history; what has gone before within the win
dowless room has no bearing on the unknowable conditions
that exist beyond the walls. All of Hannibal's actions up to The Road to Rome have been dictated to him not by the daughter of Baal but by history, particularly the history of his family's and his city's hatred for Rome.
Now, on the verge of his own eschaton, Hannibal renounces his obligation to history by destroying before the Romans the record of his campaigns "It is now no longer a document of any importance whatever. The exploits of
Hannibal's magnificent army will live only as long as our own memory survives. That's the end of the story, gentlemen"(p. 175)» Fabius is startled by Hannibal's action: "Hannibal—you've destroyed a chapter of His tory" (p. 175)» To Fabius, who has failed in his crisis to gain any sense of an eschatological awareness, history alone is still of value. Hannibal replies: "What dif ference does it make?"(p. 175)» History—which cannot tell him why he is in the windowless room, which can not tell him what lies on the other side of the walls— has no longer any true meaning in itself for Hannibal.
His future after turning from Rome remains unclear; his life as a warrior is still without a final telos.
But where once he believed that the deaths would never 60
end, now he knows that they can end, that a final goal
to history and to the works of his own life is a possi
bility because he has momentarily experienced eschaton,
because he has passed through the door into another ex
istence where personal meaning might lie. Having probed
the human equation, he has arrived at an eschatological
awareness.
III. Eschatology Without Direction In the preface to The Road to Rome, Robert Sherwood
sketches the life of Hannibal before and after the time
of the play. He reports that from Hannibal's retreat
from Rome,"his record, thereafter, is one of discour agement and final defeat"(p. xxxii), as he wanders around
Italy and North Africa for thirty years before perishing
"in inglorious obscurity—a man who had lived a magnifi cently eventful life, and had lived it utterly in vain"(p. xxxv).
If indeed, as the play seems to show, Hannibal found
significant personal meaning outside Rome, then Sherwood
in the preface is saying that such knowledge does not lead to success with regard to history, in the eyes of which such a life is lived "in vain." (The preface was written by Robert Sherwood the historian, obviously a different sort of creature than the Robert Sherwood who would fabricate an Amytis capable of asking the kind of questions which tend to coax a ruthless general into 61
mercy.) Much like his childhood idol, Robert Sherwood,
as he leaves Rome behind, wanders uncertainly in his
next plays, considered by most critics to be his weakest
efforts. Their handling of eschatological problems, the
primary concern of this study, is likewise without clear
direction. The doomsday situation is present, though not as formidable as that of the first act of The Road
to Rome, and choices are made by characters that reflect
some degree of eschatological awareness, though no search for meaning seems as urgent as that of Hannibal.
In The Queen's Husband (1928), doom is present
in the form of a revolution in Act II which threatens the lives of the royal family and, in doing so, motivates
King Eric's transformation from a quiet, obedient, slightly eccentric husband of the queen to the forceful, competent ruler he appears to have become by the play's conclusion.
Midway through Act I, Princess Anne, thus far the play's most sensible character, informs the king of the possible danger to the royal family: "If you ask me, they're tired of us now. You heard what Northrup said about all those reds—there are swarms of them, all plotting to get rid of us and set up a republic or a soviet or something. Can't you see that the old order has changed— that we're no longer wanted? We'd all of us better go before the revolution starts. Remember what happened 62 in Russia."15 What happened in Russia was this century's
best example of an eschatological-millennial movement:
the old Czarist order was violently overthrown and replaced
after a period of chaos by the Bolshevik age, marked by
the return of an exiled hero, Lenin, and promising security and prosperity for all. While at this point in the play her father seems too dim-witted to be seriously concerned about anything except playing checkers with the servants,
Anne's warning proves to be prophetic. Act II takes place in the palace during the first hours of the revolution. It is in this act that the king first begins to assert his powers as a man and as a monarch in stopping the skirmish. His attitude toward the revolution changes as he takes the threat seriously and acts consciously first to bring about a cease-fire and then to eliminate the government officials, General
Northrup and Lord Birten, who are responsible for the oppression that stirred the people of this mythical and anonymous kingdom to revolt. Anne's attitude toward the revolution also changes as she begins to see it not as a threat but as a mercifully destructive force that can free her from her arranged marriage to Prince
William of Greek and permit her to marry the commoner
^Robert Emmet Sherwood, The Queen's Husband (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), p. 51» All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 63 she loves and to live with him in their own post-eschaton
"paradise” free from the responsibilities of the nobility.
But afraid for her father's life, Anne chooses not to escape when she has the opportunity. When the cease-fire
is effected, she is trapped again by her royal commitment to Prince William. Then she learns from her father that at the wedding she can expect a "red demonstration" that could well mean their deaths. This she accepts not as a threat but as the entrance of divine providence to spare her through her destruction:
KING
It would be worse than the revolution. We'd
probably be blown to bits—all of us—including
our royal guests. ANNE
It's the hand of God! KING
What did you say? ANNE
I said it's the hand of God! He's answering
my prayers. Yes, I've prayed. I've tried everything.
I prayed to God to strike me dead rather than force me into this degrading marriage. (p. 147)
Beyond this extent there is little in The Queen's
Husband that is significantly eschatological. As in 6b The Road to Rome, the threatening doom is in the end a
false one: by ridding his cabinet of Northrup and Birten,
the king ends all threats of further revolt and, as it
is within his power as ruler, spares Anne by marrying
her to Freddie. But as with The Road to Rome, The Queen's
Husband ends not with the feeling that all’s well but
that all’s well only for the time being. Hannibal's
decision, while it spares Rome temporarily, leads to his
own downfall and cannot prevent Rome's eventual demise.
In The Queen's Husband, though the king seems finally
to be in command at the end of the play, there is a hint
that such is not the case. The directions to the king's
final exit read: "The KING goes out, bravely, but with
a pronounced consciousness of impending doom"(p. 190).
Without elaborating as to what this "pronounced conscious ness" involves, Robert Sherwood is at least intimating
the need to keep one eye on the ever-imminent "last things." The eschatological concerns of Waterloo Bridge and The Virtuous Knight are as minor as the works them selves. As in The Road to Rome and The Queen's Husband, these two works are set in places and times that bear definite eschatological natures, but Sherwood ignores the possibilities inherent in these situations in contrast to the way the doomsday backgrounds of The Road to Rome and The Queen's Husband are exploited as means through 65
which the eschatological awareness of certain characters
can be developed.
The action of Waterloo Bridge takes place in London z' during the First World War. In the preface the author
depicts the London of this time, with which he was per
sonally acquainted, as a city on the verge of collapse
and virtually drained of hope: "Men and women still
said, as a matter of course, that this or that would
’win the war’; but it was difficult to find any one who
believed, in his heart, that the war would ever be won;
the utmost that could be hoped for it was that some day,
somehow, it would be finished.At the time of the
play, recentjievents suggested that the finish could only
be a disastrous one: "But then the color of the prospect had changed. The United States, after its preliminary
flourishes, contributed nothing but stalemates; most of the Americans who appeared in the war zone were not
soldiers but congressmen on journeys of inspection. The counter-revolution in Russia brought technical peace to the eastern front, and Hindenburg was rushing his divisions westward. The Italian army collapsed miserably and was now regarded as a defunct factor in the Allied
^Robert Emmet Sherwood, Waterloo Bridge: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. xii. All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 66
forces. There were ugly rumors, emphatically denied
but alarmingly persistent, of a disastrous mutiny in
the French Army"(pp. xii-xiii). Add to all this the
fact that on every clear evening German planes and dirgibles indiscriminately drop bombs, and what we
have is a city in the grip of doom, where every ac
tion necessarily takes on an eschatological signifi
cance. But Sherwood chooses not to exploit this sit
uation» his romance between reluctant prostitute Myra
and reluctant soldier Roy could just as easily take place in New York or Omaha as in London. Only passing reference is made to the war: prostitutes complaining about how the war has hurt business; Myra scolding Roy for raising the blind during a blackout. According to
John Mason Brown, "Sherwood had realized before its Boston tryout that ^Waterloo Bridge J ’would require an enormous amount of "strengthening" as it was palpably frail and insufficient,'"!? but he was unable to improve it before it opened in New York for a run of only sixty- four performances.!®
The eschatological possibilities of Sherwood’s only novel, The Virtuous Knight, are likewise relatively untouched. The novel relates the adventures of a young
!?Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, p. 24-9.
!®Brown, p. 387. 67 English nobleman named Martin who joins Richard the
Lion-Hearted on the Second Crusade. It is significant that, as in The Road to Rome, Sherwood chooses for the setting of his first and only venture into extended fiction an historical event of an eschatological nature.
The crusades constituted the most important millennial movements of the Middle Ages, which in many instances featured a revival of eschatological interest and mil lennial hopei "Offering so much solace of a kind which the official teaching of the medieval Church withheld, this eschatology came to experience a powerful and enduring fascination. Generation after generation was seized at least intermittently by a tense expectation of some sudden, miraculous event in which the world would be utterly transformed, some prodigious final struggle between the hosts of Christ and the hosts of Antichrist through which history would attain its fulfilment and justification."3^ The crusades were seen by many of the Christian participants as "the first act in that final battle which—as already in the eschatological phantasies [sicj of the Jews and early Christians— was to culminate in the smiting of the Prince of Evil himself."20
l^Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. xiii.
20Cohn, p. 59. 68
This aspect of the crusades can be found early in The Virtuous Knight when Martin hears a bishop ad monishing some peasants into joining the cause:
The Bishop would shout: "Who is it who seized
and defiled the True Cross? The Infidel! Who
is it who has outraged Christian woman and com
mitted them to lives of shame in vile seraglios
and made eunuchs of Christian men? The Infidel!
Who is it who has spat on the tomb of our Lord
and Savior? The Infidel! Who is it who even
now is arming himself to conquer the Christian
world, to invade our fair Christian lands, to destroy our homes, to butcher our children, to
reduce to slavery or put to cruel death all
those who worship our father's God? The Infidel!
I warn you, my friends-*?we may deem ourselves
secure in this distant realm of England, We may believe, in our folly, that the sea protects
us from our pagan foes. But God is prepared to
punish us for our false smugness if we fail to do His bidding. He will cause the sea to part, even as He did for the children of Israel. He
will allow the brown beast of Islam to reach
our shores and to visit on us the sword of ven
geance. He will deliver up our men to torture, 69 our wives and sisters and daughters to whoredom, our children to slavery.2!
The Bishop uses the threat of Doom as well as the
call to religious service in a holy war to stir the
peasants into volunteering. At first Martin, having already been disillusioned by bishops, is skeptical
of these motives. But before long he too sees the ap proaching conflict as an eschatological one: "As Martin watched them, swarming over the frost-bitten land, he knew that this was no ordinary war that could call forth such masses of diversified men; this was the Apocalyptic
Armageddon, that would result in either the extermination of mankind or the enforcement forever of peace on earth"(p, 95).
Then, as the crusade progresses—stumblingly at best, due mostly to Richard's procrastination, his amorous peccadilloes, and his indifference to his troops’ suf fering—Martin learns that the real end of the crusade lies in the satisfaction of Richard's gargantuan ego rather than the culmination of Christian history, that its eschatological trappings hide a design that is secular and temporal. One crisis after another reveals to Martin the hypocrisy and futility of this or any other crusade
21 Robert Emmet Sherwood, The Virtuous Knight (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 193!)» PP« 88-89» All further references to this novel will be by page numbers to this edition. 70 motivated by transcendent ideals built on worldly desires.
Arriving in Acre ahead of Richard’s force, he finds the last Christian stronghold from the First Crusade barely surviving the daily Saracen onslaught: "It is the Arma geddon, sir knight. We with our own eyes have seen the red horsemen riding through the blackness above the towers of Acre, and with our own ears we have heard the anguished voices of the dead, crying, ‘How long, 0 Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on earth?'"(pp. 191-192). At Acre,
Martin witnesses death and holocaust of apocalyptic pro portions and wonders if what he has seen has had any meaning: "God had struck, as He always did. God had paid His terrible wages. But had He delivered them to the one who had earned them, or was he performing another of His subtle mysteries and allowing the real sinners to pay themselves?"(p. 182). Yet these intimations of eschaton are little more than picture-postcards of the crusades used to dress up a tale of adventure and to give it the proper atmos phere. Sherwood's main concern throughout the novel seems to be to provide plenty of daring escapes, to debunk history, or at least the romance that springs from it, and to throw enough obstacles in the way of Martin to insure that he remains a virgin until the last page. The novel’s English title, Unending Crusade, is an indication 71 that its primary interest will not be in the "last things."
Though Martin's life is threatened repeatedly, there is
little doubt, in his mind or the reader's, that in each
instance he is not facing the end but will somehow survive.
At the end of nearly four hundred pages of adventures,
Martin finds himself in a grove with an ungrateful girl named Lysirra, for whom he has risked everything to save her from Saracen whoredom. While she sleeps beside him, he ponders the meaning of his life and finds, contrary to the adolescent expectations he began with, that his life has had no meaning. Though virtuous with women throughout the novel, he has been intimate with eschaton— has witnessed the gruesome deaths of his two closest friends, the engineer Cimon and his worldly servant Hugh— and yet has gained so sense of an eschatological awareness himself.
What we have in Martin is a Hannibal before Rome; dimly aware that something like eschaton must exist, he has yet to meet an Amytis who will introduce him to the human equation. He still has crises ahead of him that will prepare him for that confrontation, and so does Robert Sherwood. While inexplicably drawn to building his fictions around situations that carry the seeds of doom, Robert Sherwood has only begun to measure the meaning of the "last things." While a part of him is attracted to the idea of doom and the ultimate finality 72 of things, at this point in his career he has yet to shape anything personally meaningful from these inti mations of eschaton. though he is, in fact, on the verge of doing so. More and more as he enters the 1930s,
Sherwood shows us in his plays that he is turning from the imaginary pasts of Rome and Acre and concentrating on the present, a time of economic upheaval and intellectual insecurity, a time that he hears crying out for escha tological remedies. Even as he was finishing The Vir tuous Knight, Sherwood was working on a new play called
Reunion in Vienna, in which, for the first time, escha tological concerns would begin to take on a growing sig nificance in a contemporary setting. 73
A World in Need of Renewal:
The Eschatological Necessity
Each of the three dramas to be examined in this chapter and grouped here under the subtitle "The Escha tological Necessity" dramatizes a characteristic essen tial to any eschatological myth: the world fallen from the perfect state of its blissful beginnings and now languishing in need of urgent and total regeneration. Whereas the intimations of eschaton are scattered and without clear relation in the plays immediately following
The Road to Rome, the eschatological concerns expressed in Reunion in Vienna, The Petrified Forest, and Idiot's
Delight reveal a growing awareness of the eschatological nature of Sherwood's own time, an awareness that would find its fructification at the end of the 1930s in his two best-known plays, Abe Lincoln in Illinois and There
Shall Be No Night.
I. Renewal in Vienna In many respects, Reunion in Vienna marks a turning point in Robert Sherwood's career as a dramatist. Finding it difficult to repeat the success he had achieved with The Road to Rome, he attempted in turn domestic drama
(the unpublished The Love Nest). imperial farce (The Queen's Husband), regional/social satire (This Is New York), 7^ unabashed sentimental melodrama (Waterloo Bridge), and even an adventure novel (The Virtuous Knight). Of the plays, The Queen's Husband survived the longest on Broadway at 125 performances, almost as long as the other three plays combined but less than a third of the total of 392 Broadway performances of The Road to Rome.! Thus the commercial success alone of Reunion in Vienna was most welcome after a frustrating four-year period of theatrically meagre accomplishments. But a more significant change, specifically in the choice of setting and in Sherwood's tone, can be noted. Reunion in Vienna was the first Sherwood play to effectively incorporate a contemporary milieu, and, though a comedy, the play bore a degree of seriousness previously missing in his work. By 1931 Robert Sherwood the dramatist no longer felt the need to examine his world from the metaphorical distance of an imaginary Rome drawn from an historical one or from an anonymous island kingdom as in The Queen's Husband. (As a novice novelist, however, he fell back on this crutch, needing the objective distance of the medieval crusades to write in The Virtuous Knight a romance whose hero is plagued with an inclination toward disillusionment that would qualify him for immediate mem bership in "The Lost Generation".) Waterloo Bridge and
!Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, p. 387. 75 This Is New York are early attempts by Sherwood to draw
from his own experiences? yet neither play succeeds
completely. Waterloo Bridge lapses into sentimentality,
and This Is New York, while born from a genuine concern
on Sherwood’s part for the national reputation of his
beloved Broadway, intends nothing more than social satire
springing from the differences in what constitutes proper
conduct for the Midwesterner and for the New Yorker,
essentially a Rome/Amytis conflict without the threat of
doom. In both plays, the meaning of whatever personal
experiences inspired them is lost somewhere in the desire to provide amusing entertainment. While he was always
interested in entertaining, Robert Sherwood in Reunion
in Vienna and the plays that follow it also sought to leave
audiences with a deeper, more serious "message," as he
was unafraid to call it. He was disappointed, though not necessarily surprised, that both audiences and critics
failed to catch the serious overtones of Reunion in Vienna: "I knew before I wrote the play—before I had any notion
that it might be superficially amusing—that it would contain a number of things that its audience would over
look; and I still know this, now that the play has become a highly popular frivol, 'thin as cellophane,' as one of the more favorable notices described it. In short,
I had and have a high opinion of the body of Reunion
in Vienna—an opinion which was not fortified despite 76 the pleasant noise of the box-office smash."2 Yet he
was not discouraged by the failure of the play to com
municate the serious concern that inspired it. From this
point on his plays were to be essentially serious (no
longer willing or perhaps capable of creating lighter
amusement, his only comedy in the 1930s after Reunion
in Vienna was an adaptation of Jacques Duval’s Tovarich).
He had come to see his role as a popular entertainer usurped by another calling, to forecast and forewarn
of a vaguely imminent doom, and he did so first by de
picting a world in need of eschatological renewal.
Reunion in Vienna opens "late in the afternoon of August 18th, 1930”-) in the home of Dr. Anton Krug,
one of Vienna's foremost psychiatrists. We find the
doctor's wife, Elena, taking inventory of the cleaned
laundry that has just been delivered. Elena is the first
indication that this Vienna is somewhat in decline in relation to an earlier period of glory, though she is not at first aware of this. In his description of Elena,
Sherwood tells us that "There is no doubt that she is
2Brown, p. 276.
^Robert Emmet Sherwood, Reunion in Vienna: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 7. All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 77 a lady of fashion—was born so, indeed—though she is
now wearing a severely simple apron smock and appearing
as a model of brisk, housewifely competence"(p. 9).
Once a member of the Hapsburg court and mistress to Arch
duke Rudolf Maxmillian but with the fading of Hapsburg
values now resigned to a life of serving as wife to a
great man, Elena has become a domestic accountant of
drawers and socks, and surprisingly she seems totally content with this transformation, expressing complete
trust in her husband’s powers. She unhesitatingly urges
Use, one of her husband's students, to reveal her problems to Anton and thereby find release from any anxiety, as
she once did: "You must tell him all about it. He'll analyze your emotional reactions, as he analyzed mine. I needed his treatment—(she looks at ANTON; there is an exchange of understanding between them)—a great deal
of it. He cured me--and I delivered myself, body and mind, to the new god. (She puts her hand on ANTON's shoulder)" (p. 38). Her apparently total acceptance of the change in her life and in life throughout Vienna since the overthrow of the Hapsburg dynasty is shared in varying degrees by Anton's two proteges, Emil and Use. Emil is firmly convinced that the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the conclusion of the First World War was an eschaton that brought about a genuine "golden age," now 78 a decade old, where reigns the almost divine presence
of rational science in the person of Anton Krug and other
psychiatrists: "He teaches us the gospel of the better
life—-the life that is seen through the eyes of the
biologist's microscope and in the changing colors of
the chemist's test tube. He teaches us that the forward
progress of man must be regulated by the statistician's inexorable curve, and not by the encyclicals of priests
or the ukases of kings. He teaches us to banish from
the world all false fear of God—to know Him, and recog nize Him only as a measurable force in cosmic technology.
He teaches us to look into ourselves—our bodies, our minds—and not to the vague hills of mysticism, for the knowledge that will set us free"(pp. 25-26). Bliss in the form of freedom from disease and anxiety are present now, courtesy of the Great War and the revelations of science that have made the values of the previous age obsolete:
EMIL
Why—hardly more than ten years ago we were living under conditions of mediaevalism. ELENA
Ten tears Î EMIL
When I look at the decaying relics of the 79 old order, the gaunt, empty palace of the Hapsburgs,
and the silly monuments they erected to their own
glory—I bless the war and the revolution that
delivered us from the tyranny of ignorance. EIENA
And what do you say when you look at me? ILSE
At you, Frau Krug? What possible connection
has that . . . EIENA
I'm one of the relics of the middle ages,
of ten years ago. (p. 27)
Try as she might, Elena cannot ignore who she was before the war. Unlike Emil, she is burdened by the memory of a world—for her, a much more glamorous world—• that existed previous to 1914. Nor does Use completely share Emil's confidence in this new eras
ELENA
Aren't you content to take my husband's word
for it that the world has improved? EMIL
I ask for no other assurance. I need none. ELENA I know. But—(to ILSE)—I gather that you're
not so sure. 80
ILSE (tremulous)
The trouble is—I'm not sure of myself. ELENA
Oh? ILSE
I—I had an experience. (pp. 31-32)
The experience referred to is an encounter the previous summer in Nice with Rudolf Maxmillian. Through him, Use has had a glimpse of a past age imbued with gallantry, charm, and a recklessness uninhibited by consequences; she has encountered a man and an age for whom happiness is a spontaneous experience and not a scientifically defined behavioral condition. The encounter has made Use uncertain about her convictions, her de dication to the worship of the gospel of Anton Krug, resulting in a confusion with which Elena, in her own doubts which become more evident as the first act pro gresses, can sympathize:
ELENA (to ILSE)
I gather that you considered the experience not entirely disagreeable. ILSE
I can't decide what I think about it.
• • • 81
ILSE (to ELENA)
Oh—then you knew him. ... Oh—then I've
said something awful. EMIL
Yest
ELENA
No, my dear. It wasn't awful at all. I
enjoyed every word of it. (pp. 35-36)
Use's story about Rudolf has naturally brightened
an otherwise dreary morning of sock-counting for Elena. It is her first, though fleeting, return to a time when
life was more pleasant, but it marks the beginning of
Elena's renewal from wife into woman.
In primitive cultures, myth, especially eschatological
myth, serves a purpose beyond literary entertaining.
According to Mircea Eliade, myth provides a prehistoric
record of an earlier age when more perfect beings in
habited a more perfect world: "Myth narrates a sacred
history; it relates an event that took place in primordial
time, the fabled time of 'beginnings.' In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings,
a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island,
a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution.Through certain rituals, this perfect
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 5» 82
state present only in the eschaton that marked the beginning
of time can be regained, and the world, having degenerated from the perfect state as is the natural process of things, can be totally renewed. In modern society, we still cling to certain rituals that have their foundation in the eschatological pattern of degeneration and renewal.
We still celebrate the coming of a new year with civilized orgy and a regular ritual of parades, pageants, and pigskin rites. We also seek a renewal of sorts in a ritual called reunion, where near-strangers gather to celebrate a more glorious past. The idea of perfection at the beginning "is an idea capable of being indefinitely reinterpreted and incorporated into an endless variety of religious conceptions."5 Whether or not a specific reunion qualifies as a "religious conception" depends on the seriousness with which the ritual is undertaken by the participants and how badly their world needs regeneration. What must have disappointed Robert Sherwood was that his audience failed to grasp that Elena's world was theirs and that it desperately needed renewal. As Emil and Use depart, some of Elena's old friends,
Frau Lucher, Count and Countess Von Stainz, and Povoromo
(Poffy) arrive at the Krug home to invite Elena to a reunion of former members of the Hapsburg court who are
^Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 51« 83 gathering specifically to celebrate the hundredth an niversary of the birth of Franz Joseph I. In her hus band's presence, Elena denies any wish to attend the reunion, though Anton Krug suspects that a secret fear prevents her from wanting to see her old friends s
ANTON
If they're old friends of yours, I can't
see any reason why you should refuse them. ...
Unless • . . ELENA
Unless what? ANTON
Unless there might be disagreeable associations.
ELENA (with surprising vehemence )
Of course there are disagreeable associations!
The Count and Countess Von Stainz are dreadful
people. They were two of the worst of the court
toadies.
ANTON
And Frau Lucher—what's wrong with her? ELENA I hate her! I hate the sight of her hotel! (pp. 42-43)
When Anton has gone, Elena greets her friends 84
warmly, and we learn that, in contrast to Emil’s fervent
affirmation, there exists another view of life in Vienna
after eschaton, the view that sees only a Vienna in
decline. The Countess, after ten years of exile in
England as a seamstress, finds little comfort in returning:
"And I give you my word, when we arrived here this morning,
and drove through the streets, we wept—we literally
wept—to see that our beloved Vienna is undergoing its
last, gruesome agonies"(p. 50)» Frau Lucher, the hostess of the reunion, has little hope that the party will be worth attending, due mostly to the impoverished state
of those who might arrive: "Strictly between ourselves,
I don't think you'll be missing much if you don't come"
(pp. 51-52). Even Poffy fears that "this celebration
will be nothing more than a gathering of broken-down
old outcasts like myself—with no one to give us animation,
no one to give us the illusion of youth"(p. 59). For those
who once ruled in a Vienna that was the political and cultural center of a vast empire, the last ten years
have been a nightmare, one which they hope this reunion
can regenerate into an earlier dream of animation and youth, even if only for an evening. At Anton's urging,
Elena finally agrees to attend ("Now I'm beginning to think that it might be great fun."-p. 58) until she learns that Rudolf Maxmillian intends to make an appearance. Afraid to face her own past, Elena scolds her old friends 85 for falling victim to an addictive sentimentality: "That’s
just it! You're trying to live on something that doesn't
exist. That's why you're all so degraded and spent.
That's why you have to drug yourselves with such infantile
pretence as this reunion. Wallowing in sentiment!
Weeping into your heer!"(p. 62). Yet she finally agrees
to attend at her husband's coaxing to learn if the present
is indeed a golden age in relation to the time of her youth, to "cut that cord"(p. 68) that still binds her
to the past.
The reunion in Act II succeeds temporarily in trans
porting Elena and her friends back into the past, the
lost time of perfect beginning. Rudolf indeed arrives
in secret (the present government apparently having
forbidden him from returning to Vienna under threat of death), is at first as disappointed in the state of things as were the others ("I find the whole aspect of this place depressing."-p. 91). and speaks of the city as "hopelessly defunct" in relation to the life it enjoyed earlier: "It is like a corpse that twitches with the reflexes of life—a gruesome spectacle. I don't envy you Lucher, having to abide here among the ruins"(p. 91). Yet, even risking death, he had to return, like the others, to be renewed. When he confronts Elena, his first thoughts are amorous, as if their ten-year separation has never taken place; her first reaction to him is one 86
of polite analysis, the result of having lived for a
decade in the midst of sciences
ELENA
I was thinking of what ten years have failed
to do to you. RUDOLF
I chose to remain as I was. ELENA
Ten years of exile, and humiliation, and
poverty, haven't shaken in you the conviction that Franz Josef is still reigning in Schttnbrunn.
RUDOLF
No—I admit that I have occasional qualms.
There are moments when I suspect that the Hapsburgs
are not what they once were. But when I see you,
my eternally beloved, and realize that you have
had the pride to preserve your figure against the
day of my return-then I know that there has been
no revolution. (p. 122)
They flirt, sip champagne, and reminisce about a time when they were younger and unburdened by worldly responsibilities, when they remained innocent in spite of whatever they might have dones "Oh God, what beauti ful times!"(p. 134). Rudolf swears his eternal (most appropriate here in a ritual where "profane" time no 87 longer exists) love to her ("You were, you are and ever
will be the one passion of my life."-p. 135) and begs her to bed, but cannot ultimately woo her. Fighting
him off, Elena nearly succumbs to a passion she has
not experienced for ten years ("Yes! I want them to
see that I haven't changed, that there are some things that never change."-p. l4l), but she has been too infected
by her husband's scientific mind to abandon the present
completely. While the others have gladly allowed them
selves to be transported into the "sacred time" where
responsibility is replaced by the bliss that renews ("I give them both happiness! • . • Happiness—and love! • * .
May the night last forever! . . . This is the most en chanting moment of my life. ... It is the same Vienna— the same exquisite Vienna."-p. 142), while Rudolf awaits a final consummation with the past, Elena escapes through a back window and returns home. In the preface to the published edition of the play, Robert Sherwood with Homeric simplicity states his theme: "This play is another demonstration of the escape mechanism in operation"(p. vii). The need to escape in the modern age is unique, according to Sherwood, because of an unprecedented consciousness of the degenerate state of the world after the First World War: "Looking about him, {the common manj sees a shell-torn No Man's
Land, filled with barbed-wire entanglements and stench 88
and uncertainty. If it is not actual chaos, it is a
convincing counterfeit thereof. Before him is black
doubt, punctured by brief flashes of ominous light,
whose revelations are not comforting. Behind him is
nothing but the ghastly wreckage of burned bridges"(p. vii)
Sherwood charts two traditional avenues of escape which he designates Superstition and Rationalism, the former
a blind leap into panacean illusion, the latter a blind
groping into what is forever beyond understanding and thus probably harmful, yet always buoyed by the expec
tation of paradise earned: "The worst of it is that man had been so full of hope. He had complete confidence
in the age of reason, the age of the neutralization of nature"(p. ix). It is between these two dubious routes that Elena must choose.
It is Anton Krug's belief that any problem can be solved through science, any anxiety overcome by a dose of rational analysis: "In his deep voice is the resonance of assurance"(p. 10). In Act I he is treating a woman from Pennsylvania who suffers from the "usual" trouble: "Another frustration! For twenty years she's been measuring her poor husband in terms of her first love—the one that got away. . . . "(p. 28). Anton's prescription? "She must find her first lover, and have a good look at him as he is now. He's a manufacturer of dental supplies. I think she'll be cured"(p. 29). 89 He is, of course, applying the same treatment to Elena
at the end of the first act when he convinces her that
she should attend the reunion, convinced that her memories will be rendered foolish in the face of reality. When
Elena returns home, she immediately quarrels with Anton, who realizes that the "cure" has not been effective, a truth he at first tries to avoids "She's tired, that's all"(p. 156). Then Rudolf, who followed Elena, arrives for the climactic confrontation he has been awaiting over romance and status, Rudolf having been usurped of both Elena and his position in Viennese society by Dr.
Krug. Yet this is in fact not the real confrontation that the play has been building toward. The battle be tween Rudolf and Anton--first one of wits, then nearly one of fisticuffs—becomes more amusing as the shouting becomes louder:
ANTON
Get out! RUDOLF
Oh--I'm disappointed in you, Herr Doctor. I thought you were one who had conquered all the baser emotions. But now I see that you are just
a husband--no better than the rest of them. ANTON
Unless you go of your own accord, I shall
f 90 attempt to put you out—and I believe I shall succeed. RUDOLF
I'm sure you can. But not without making a ridiculous spectacle of yourself.
ANTON (taking off his glasses)
Then I shall not delay the process. (He now starts to take off his coat. Observing this. RUDOLF starts to take off his coat, turning to
ELENA, as he does so.) RUDOLF
There, Elena! I have exposed him before your eyes. This colossus of the intellect, this triumph of civilization, is behaving like a vin dictive ape. ANTON
Get out! RUDOLF
I have to warn you that I'm not going to fight fair. ANTON
You’d better not watch this, Elena. ELENA
Nothing could induce me to leave now! (She sits down on the bench before the fire-place.)
I've just realized that I’ve been waiting for this 91 moment for years. RUDOLF
That’s right. Stay where you are. When
I've had enough I'll call to you and you can drag
him off me. (He picks up a small, modernistic
statue from the bookcase and brandishes it.)
Come on, Herr Professor. It's for you to begin
the brawl. . . . (pp. 176-177)
Sherwood cannot mean the central confrontation of this play to be between two middle-aged buffoons rushing hesitantly into a brawl over a lady oft-known to both. If such were the case, this would be simply an amusing comedy with no ideas of any importance and nothing of significance resolved by the "battle" (no blows are struck and Anton eventually pulls bureaucratic strings that allow Rudolf to return to exile unharmed).
Such is surely not the case, as this has been Elena's play from the opening scene. The ultimate confrontation is between Elena and two facets of her life: her past and her present. At different times in the play she has sought to escape one by means of the other, but she is never fully content with either alone. When she is a wife, she is excited and disturbed by the memory of her life as Rudolf's mistress; when she is offered the opportunity to again play the role of mistress, she 92 retreats to the safety of connubiality. But by the
third act, nothing can induce her to leave; she momentarily
has no desire to escape. Just before the battle heats
up, Rudolf mockingly says: "Your husband represents
the sublimity of the intellectual, and I the quintessence
of the emotional. You know—between us, just about there — (he. points to a spot on the carpet)—there ought
to be found the perfect man"(p. 162). For years Elena has been waiting for the moment when she would realize the emergence of herself—her whole self—in the presence of the "perfect man," a being possible only in the strug gle between her past and present. By the end of the play, she more than any other character has undergone a true renewal, is freed of all frustrations and guilts. She has entered a personal "golden age" in a post-eschaton era, the primary characteristic of which is freedom.
Free to love whom she wants without guilt, free to indulge
Anton's father at breakfast without regard to any arbi trary responsibility, free to admit to Old Krug that she has never had more fun(p. 205), she has, at least for the present, achieved a happiness independent of the "poor world"(p. 196) to which Rudolf must return and of the world of neuroses in which Anton is now at best a fallen god. The end is ambiguous, lacking an undeniable sense of reconciliation, as it must be, because every renewal 93 in this world must necessarily be followed by another
period of degeneration. Pressed to specify the outcome
for Elena and Anton, Sherwood found he could not: "I*m
forced to confess that I don't know what happens after
the final curtain. I do know that she has yielded her
self freely and without fear or compunction to the Arch
duke, and that she is all the better for the experience--
but the ultimate results of this provide a problem which
it would take several more plays to settle, and I'm not going to attempt to write them."® But in terms of his eschatological vision, Robert Sherwood did write them.
He had provided a glimpse of the world in degeneration and showed one individual who had successfully escaped from its debilitating effects. That Elena could manage any escape at all was a hopeful sign that meaning could still be found in a world plagued with chaos or its
"convincing counterfeit." But in Sherwood's own mind there must still have lurked an uncertainty as to how she or anyone could effect such an escape with permanent benefits. He would need at least two more plays in which he would examine without the promise of any definite conclusions the kinds of escape and renewal possible in a world drifting ever-degenerately toward eschaton.
®Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, p. 279. 94
II. The Discovery of Meaning After a Long Journey
Through a World Spent
In The Petrified Forest, as in Reunion in Vienna
before and Idiot's Delight after it, Robert Sherwood
depicts the degenerating world of his time with a micro-
cosmic cross-section of humanity gathered out of the
desperation of the moment. His primary concern seems
to be to discover through the relationships of these characters what precisely is responsible for the degen
erate state of the world and what if anything an individual
can do to promote some degree of regeneration. The par
ticular individual in The Petrified Forest for whom the
desperate moment will yield the greatest awareness is
Alan Squier, aimless wanderer about whom there is "something
• • • that brings to mind the ugly word 'condemned. A hungry Alan Squier stumbles into the Black Mesa
Filling Station and Bar-B-Q midway through the first
act. "Shabby and dusty" but with "an afterglow of elegance"
(p. 30), he is a wanderer without clear destinations
"My plans have been uncertain"(p. 32). His chief attri butes are a kind of masochistic charm enhanced by an over-worked sense of self-pity, the best manners, and a latent death-wish ("I had a vague idea that I'd like
^Robert Emmet Sherwood, The Petrified Forest (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), P* 30« All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 95 to see the Pacific Ocean, and perhaps drown in it."-p. 33),
all of which cannot help but attract the curiousity,
sympathy and infatuation of a young girl like Gabby
Maple, daughter of the proprietor, who reads Villon and has dedicated her life to the dream of leaving the desert and returning to France, "where there's something beautiful to look at, and wine, and dancing in the streets"
(p. 4-9). Squier's accomplishments number two: "a novel about the bleak, glacier-stripped hills of . . . [hisj native New England"(p. 50)» and a career as a gigolo, which in fact amounts to nothing more glamorous than an eight-year marriage to his ex-publisher's ex-wife:
She had faith in me, and she had the chance to
display it, because her husband was very generous
in the financial settlement. I suppose he had
faith in me, too. She saw in me a major artist,
profound, but inarticulate. She believed that
all I needed was background, and she gave it to
me—with southern exposure and a fine view of
the Mediterranean. That was considered the thing to do in the period that followed Scott Fitzgerald. For eight years I reclined there, on the Riviera, on my background—and I waited for the major artist
to step forth and say something of enduring im portance. He preferred to remain inarticulate. (p. 51) 96 After leaving his wife ("at her suggestion"), Squier began to travel ("I decided to go forth and
discover America."-p. 51), and ended here at the end of the world, the Arizona desert. Following his auto
biography, Gabby asks a question not unprecedented among
Sherwood heroines ("What were you looking for?") which
Squier finds as difficult to answer as did Hannibal in
The Road to Rome: "Well—that’s rather hard to say.
I-I suppose I’ve been looking for something to believe in. I've been hoping to find something that's worth living for--and dying for"(p. 52). The groping search for personal, fulfilling meaning within the bounds of a world that seems to embrace only the impalpable hollow of nothingness; the problem of uncovering a teleological awareness in a climate of existential chaos that swallows up all possibilities of cause and effect: Hannibal's awareness of these "human equations" saved Rome at the expense of his own glory; Alan Squier's initiation into the awareness of these dilemmas will free Gabby at the expense of fulfilling his own doom. The parallels between Hannibal and Alan Squier transcend their coincidental predicament of having been thrust by a woman’s innocent question into an eschatological situation for which they are ill-prepared due to a lack of teleological anticipation, and the differences in their personalities and in the conditions of their worlds speak to the degeneration of the modern world Sherwood first mentions directly in the preface to Reunion in
Vienna. From Hannibal, the fearsome Carthaginian warrior biding his time within the trembling afternoon umbra of the grandeur that was Rome, we have descended to Alan
Squier, would-be artist, gigolo, and martyr, whimpering in the shadows of the Petrified Forest. But just as
Hannibal possessed a keen understanding of his world— understood that his turning from Rome would eventually spell disaster not only for himself but for Carthage—
Squier understands his. Hannibal's world was one of battle and courage; Alan Squier's world is one of neurosis and deaths
SQUIER
I don't know anything. You see—the trouble
with me is, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm
one of the intellectuals. GABBY
That means you've got brains. I can see
you have. SQUIER
Yes—brains without purpose. Noise without
sound. Shape without substance. Have you ever
read The Hollow Men? (She shakes her head.) Don't. It’s discouraging because it's true. It refers 98
to the intellectuals, who thought they’d conquered
Nature. They damned it up, and used its waters
to irrigate the wastelands. They built stream
lined monstrosities to penetrate its resistance. They wrapped it up in cellophane and sold it to
drugstores. They were so certain they had it sub
dued. And now—do you realize what it is that
is causing world chaos? GABBY No. SQUIER
Well, I'm probably the only living person
who can tell you. . . . It's nature hitting back.
Not with the old weapons--floods, plagues, holocausts.
We can neutralize them. She’s fighting back with
strange instruments called neuroses. She's de
liberately inflicting mankind with the jitters.
Nature is proving that she can't be beaten—not
by the likes of us. She's taking the world away
from the intellectuals and giving it back to the
apes. (pp. 62-63)
As a modern prophet of doom, Alan Squier in his apocalyptic vision has revealed to Gabby, whom he comes to see as the future's only hope, two of the conditions that signify a degenerate world and a need for eschaton. 99 The first is the failure of science to find a telos
("Yes—brains without purpose"), and the second is the psychological epidemic that has inflicted the modern world. All intellectual pursuits, including science and medicine, have led mankind to a state of chaos because they have failed to define a unified end. The idea of progress is necessarily eschatological in that without a directing end it is meaningless: "Progress must have a final goal and in that respect it is eschatological."®
Squier is the best example of intellect without an end, his talents wasted by his own inability to define a suitable telos:
GABBY
Where are you going from here, Alan? SQUIER
That depends on where this road leads. GABBY
It leads to the petrified forest. SQUIER
What’s that? GABBY
Oh—just a lot of dead old trees in the desert, that have turned to stone.
^Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 20?. 100
SQUIER
The petrified forest! A suitable haven for
me. Perhaps that's what I'm destined for--to make
an interesting fossil for future study. Homo Semi-
Americanus—a specimen of the in-between age. (pp. 64-65)
Nicolas Berdyaev, who professed to have little pat
ience with the idea of moral retribution beyond this life,
said that "Hell is not eternity at all but endless duration in time."9 Eternity is a timelessness that can be achieved
only in the moment of the eschaton, when temporal reality
is no more. Far worse is the "endless duration in time"
that repeatedly nags at those who lack an eschatological
awareness and carry with them the inarticulated dream
of escaping time. This is Alan Squier's dream, as his
fascination with the concept of the Petrified Forest reveals: to become a fossil, dead to the consciousness of time, free from the meaninglessness of the modern world, the "in-between age," which separates a past it no longer understands from the future it is afraid to comprehend.
If only the intellectual man could somehow act and change this, there could be hope for his future. But he cannot act; Alan Squier has already atrophied into stone. The
^Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945), p. 269« 101
intellect has not proved to be omnipotent as once hoped,
and the accumulated failures of science have left the
twentieth century man (here epitomized in Alan Squier)
afraid to dare to imagine an end to what he has done.
What is worse, unable to bring about the needed eschaton,
that which would cleanse him of his failures and renew
his world, a garden turned to rock and desert, he finds
that nature is doing the job, destroying the old world
from within by using "instruments" that will rob man of the very quality which makes him uniques his intellect.
Neuroses will do the work of "repair, renewal, and re establishment"!® that will doom Alan Squier, the dreamer
who longs for the death that brings an end to time, and
Duke Mantee, the realist who does not.
Robert Sherwood clearly intends a sympathy between
Alan Squier and Duke Mantee; at the gangster's entrance
at the end of the first act, Sherwood states that "There
is, about him, one quality of resemblance to ALAN SQUIER: he too is unmistakably condemned"(p. 88). And Duke, like
Squier, shares certain similarities with Hannibal. Like Hannibal, his reputation for ruthless and wanton murder precedes his actual appearance ("I was just talking to
Roy Greeley and he says in town they're all certain that
Mantee outfit is headed here. Look! They got the whole
!®Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, p, 14-5. 102
story here in The Post. Oklahoma City Massacre! Six
killed—four wounded—two not expected to live."-p. 34),
and he has proven to be an excellent "warrior" and stra
tegist, having thus far eluded police in three states.
Duke Mantee is one side of Hannibal, the warrior who
drove the Carthaginian army over the Alps to destroy
Rome at any cost, while Squier is the Hannibal who watched
his soldiers die and asked for reasons.
The significance of the relationship between the
characters Alan Squier, Duke Mantee, and Hannibal is
twofold. First, the situation of the restless wanderer who eventually must admit to himself that the time for determining a definite destination has come is a fit metaphor for a man arriving at the moment of eschatological awareness and will be used again by Sherwood in the shapes of Abe Lincoln and of Morey Vinion in The Rugged Path.
But what is more significant is that Alan Squier and
Duke Mantee are essentially fragments of Hannibal, the wanderer dissected into two equal parts so that he might be better examined. Just as Rudolf Maxmillian says in Reunion in Vienna that between himself and Anton Krug lies the "perfect" man, the destinies of Duke Mantee and Alan Squier are consummated in their mutual presence, and for Squier especially life acquires the meaning he has been seeking only with the help of Duke Mantee.
As the second act begins, Duke and his gang have 103 been at the restaurant for over half an hour waiting for word from Doris, Duke’s girl. Squier has been drinking and "is by now slightly tight, and is to become more so,
imperceptible degrees, as the Act proceeds"(p, 99); he needs the whiskey to fortify him for the moment he knows he will have to face before Duke departs. Earlier at
Duke’s arrival he confesses to having "a feeling of Destiny closing in"(p. 93) and reveals that he has received a portent of sorts foretelling the imminent end of his wanderings: "I looked up at the sky and the stars seemed to be reproving me, mocking me. They were pointing the way to that gleaming sign, and saying, 'There’s the end of your tether! You thought you could escape it, and skip off to the Phoenix Biltmore. But we know better.'
That's what the stars told me, and perhaps they know that carnage is imminent, and that I'm due to be among the fallen. . . . It's a fascinating thought"(p. 93). That he finds the idea of his own destruction "fascinating" rather than frightening should not come as a surprise to anyone with an understanding of eschatology. Death is the eschaton of each human existence, the predictable end, the event that guarantees that existence has meaning:
"Death is the most profound and significant fact of life, raising the least of mortals above the mean common places of life. The fact of death alone gives true depth to the question as to the meaning of life. Life in this 104
world has meaning just because there is death; if there
were no death in our world, life would be meaningless. The meaning is bound up in the end."!! When Squier earlier professed a desire a find something "worth dying for," he was pleading for an opportunity to determine his own meaning. The finality of death not only pro mises the possibility of meaning in life; it insures that life must have meaning because there can be only one end, one true escape mechanism, a single exit:
"Physical death is the final and complete loss of earthly existence. We lack the power to salvage anything which might survive it. Nor does our earthly course repeat itself. Life proceeds neither in circles nor in spirals, but it moves straight ahead. It has but one single exit before it."!2 Alan Squier's life thus far has been an aimless quest for that which is worth dying for, that which is worth the loss of everything, and only now, under the influence of rye whiskey and the desperate situation he is part of, is he able to understand that the eschaton of death is an inevitable rather than probable reality. He tries to share his revelation with the one person at Black Mesa who understands death, Duke Mantee:
!Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, p. 249.
!2Werner Elert, Last Things, p. 20. SQUIER
You'd better come with me, Duke. I'm planning
to be buried in the Petrified Forest. I’ve been
evolving a theory about that that would interest
you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that’s
been shot out from under us. It's the world of
outmoded ideas. Platonism—patriotism--Christianity-
Romance—the economics of Adam Smith—they're all
so many dead stumps in the desert. That's where
I belong—and so do you, Duke. For you're the
last great apostle of rugged individualism. Aren't
you? DUKE
Maybe you're right, pal. (pp. 113-114)
Squier, the intellectual, and Duke Mantee, the rugged individualist, the man of action, the modern descendent of the folk-hero bandits of the mythology of the American West, are but two facets of a world wearied by time and in need of renewal, "the graveyard of civilization." Duke Mantee, however, remains an anachronistic dinosaur who has never been touched by the human equation, who lives without doubts because
Doris, his Amytis, never arrives to ask, "Why?" He understands the significance of death having always lived just beyond its grasp ("Life, not in its weak- 106 ness but in its strength, intensity and superabundance, is closely connected with death."13), but for him it has only personal significance; the idea of extinction means nothing to him. Squier is more concerned with cosmic eschaton; he will find an acceptable meaning to his own life if his death contributes to the regeneration of the world ("One well-directed bullet will accomplish that. And it will gain a measure of reflected glory for him who fired it and him who stopped it."-p. 132).
For this regeneration, he turns to Gabby:
SQUIER (to GRAMP)
That lovely girl—that granddaughter of yours—do you know what she is? No—you don't.
You haven’t the remotest idea. GRAMP
What is she? SQUIER
She's the future. She's the renewal of
vitality—and courage—and aspiration—all the strength that has gone out of you. Hell—I can't say what she is—but she's essential to me, and the whole damned country, and the whole miserable
world. (p. 137)
^Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, p. 254. 107
Gabby, in her spirit, in her enthusiasm for beauty, and in her ability to remain unaffected by the presence
of the Petrified Forest, carries in her Alan Squier's
hope that the threat of extinction for his world can
be overcome, that the regeneration will result from a
new awareness in man and not from the crippling impotence
imposed upon man by a nature weary of time and failures.
This hope sustains him until his doom, which provides for him the meaning and freedom he was unable to find when he was wandering a withered world: "They were right,
Gabrielle. ... I mean the stars. I had come all this
way—to find a reason . . . Oh,—if people only had guts
enough, they'd always find . . ."(p. 172). He never says what they would find, perhaps because Sherwood
himself is not yet sure, anymore than he is sure enough
of Duke Mantee's destiny to say exactly where and how
he will meet his doom. He will have to reassemble Alan
Squier and Duke Mantee in the shape of Abe Lincoln before he can say for certain what the wanderer will find at the moment of eschaton. But surely one thing Alan Squier finds in the moment just before his death is freedom: "The end is perceived and accepted not as a fated doom, but as freedom; and it is the discovery of personality and freedom in the concrete universality of spiritual 108 existence."14 For Squier the transformation of the
world has already begun, and he has played an active,
meaningful part in it. Having taken an action designed
to give the world a real hope for change, he has added
meaning to the world as he sees it and has freed him
self, spiritually and physically, from his wandering. But what of Duke Mantee, Gabby, and the other
characters at the Black Mesa? As in Reunion in Vienna,
Sherwood leaves the personal destinies of his surviving characters unexplained. Even more, he gives no sign that any of the other characters have understood why
Squier chose to die. We can only be certain that the
doom that threatened them throughout Duke's stay was
real, and it was their escape from it that was temporary.
The world has not been regenerated, and there can be
little real faith in Gabby’s successfully undertaking
the mission.
III. Last Resort at the Border of Eschaton A number of different influences played on Robert
Sherwood to produce Idiot's Delight late in 1935. Alfred Lunt, hoping to extract from Sherwood another vehicle as successful as Reunion in Vienna had been for Lynn Fontanne and himself, suggested an idea for a comedy
^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 233. 109 set "in Budapest this time—say a Chicago punk on his
way to Budapest to put in those slot machines or a former
'barker' now managing a troop of midgets—who meets the
elegant Hungarian fakiress between a couple of hot violins
& a zimbalum. Easy! Bobby, you could do it on your
ear. ••15 A similar idea had come to Sherwood earlier in
1933 while returning to the United States from England: "I ran into my old friend, Harry Carr, of the Los Angeles
Times. He had been on a trip around the world and he said that the supreme hotspot was Harbin, Manchuria.
He described the hotel there and the dramatic mixture
of nationalities, including always, some beautiful, phony
White Russian girl who was formerly a Grand Duchess (the
supply of Grand Duchesses must have been unlimited).
All the people there were continuously looking up into
the skies for the bombers that would herald the start
of the Second World War, which would begin, presumably,
between the Soviet Union and Japan. So I decided to write a play about that hotel in Harbin, but I could not work it out until the summer of 1935 when I was at the Club Arizona in Budapest and saw battered-looking American chorus girls doing an act. . . . Those girls provided the line on which the whole play could be strung. I moved the hotel from Harbin to the Italian Alps."3-^
3-5john Mason Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, p. 325.
16 Brown, pp. 325-326 110
More and more Robert Sherwood had become a watcher
of international headlines, and the pacifist/isolationist attitude that his own suffering as a result of the First
World War had taught him was the only way a truly civi
lized man should think was slowly giving way to the
growing belief that responsibility on occasion demands
the abeyance of temporarily impractical ideals. His
reading of three books in particular, the pacifist Mars
His Idiot by H. M. Tomlinson, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and John Gunther's Inside Europe,17 convinced
him that the European situation was regrettably accel
erating to a point where all consequences would be drastic
and irrevocable. But the final significant influence,
the catalyst that converted these elements into a work
of art, must have been the development of Robert Sherwood's
eschatological awareness. Having been forced to admit
in Reunion in Vienna and The Petrified Forest that the world was dying spiritually and desperately needed some sort of renewal, Sherwood realized through his anti-war
tragicomedy that degeneration was destined to reach a point where it could go no farther, that an eschaton in the shape of an all-consuming Armageddon was inevitable.
Idiot's Delight bears witness to the arrival of the moment of doom for a wasted world, a doom against which
!?Brown, p, 336. Ill
all "escape mechanisms" are useless, and seeks to define
for the first time the place and duty of the individual
at the moment of eschaton.
The play begins on an afternoon "in any imminent year"l® at the Hotel Monte Gabriele in the mountains
of Northern Italy overlooking an Italian air base and
the borders of Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Bavaria.
An argument early in the first act between Pittaluga, the hotel's proprietor, and Don Navadel, an American
hired as social director who was expected to bring with
him rich American tourists, reveals that the political
uncertainty in Europe has drastically curtailed business ("Did I know what was going to happen? Am I the king
of Europe?"-p. 9) and is gradually fueling a combustible
tension between internationals:
DON
You are the proprietor of this obscure tavern.
You're presumably responsible for the fact that
it's a deadly, boring dump! PITTALUGA
Yes! And I engaged you because I thought you had friends—rich friends—and they would come
l®Robert Emmet Sherwood, Idiot' s Delight (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), p. viii. All further references to this play will be by page numbers to this edition. 112
here after you instead of St. Moritx, and Muerrin,
and Chamonix. And where are your friends? What
am I paying you for? To countermand my orders
and tell me you are fed . . . (pp. 9-10)
Pittaluga is interrupted by the screaming of air
raid sirens. The bickering inside the hotel between
an Italian and an American is a specimen of what is taking place outside. With Italy on the verge of war
with France, the roar of planes from the nearby airstrip
is frequent and air raid drills routine. But the threat
of war, which has thus far been responsible for the hotel's vacancy, suddenly will assemble an international community to fill it. Differing widely in age, nationality, and desires, the temporary guests of the hotel Monte
Gabriele share one common characteristic: they all profess to be something they are not. The social mask, the fraud of acting in a manner one expects others to expect, and the necessity of adopting the mask so fer vently that the real self is lost are all obligatory exercises in a degenerating world, the lie being the most effective escape mechanism in that it frees an individual from any responsibility for the way things are. Each of these everymen holed up for little more than a day in a resort overlooking everywhere proves to be some sort of con-man, selling a false self that 113 repudiates the true condition of the world. But as
Idiot's Delight shows, the con is rendered useless at
the moment of eschaton, when one can be fortified only
by the realization of what must be and the hope for
something better after.
As they first arrive at the hotel, the frontiers
into Switzerland and Austria being closed until "Rome makes its decision between friend and foe”(p. 13), the new guests are naturally irritated and even angered by the inconvenience of their not being allowed to leave
Italy. Then, as they talk, we find that the major source of irritation for them is the fact that they are being detained as the result of a situation that otherwise would hold no significance for them. Each is above becoming wholly involved in the petty squabbles between nations. Dr. Waldersee claims to be a misanthropic scientist with neither political nor nationalistic affil iation: "Fascism has nothing to do with it. I am a scientist. I am a servant of the whole damn stupid human race. If you delay me any longer here, my exper iments will be ruined. Can't you appreciate that? I must get my rats at once to the laboratory in Zurich, or all my months and years of research will have gone for nothing"(p. 14). Mr. and Mrs. Cherry, "a pleasant young English couple in the first flush of their honey moon" (p. 14), are just hoping to find a "quiet" place 114 away from everyone else where they can enjoy a blissful respite from responsibility: "God forbid that we should spoil everything by being sensible! This is an occasion for pure and beautiful foolishness. So don't irritate me by any further mention of work"(p. 31). Harry Van,
"a wan, thoughtful, lonely American vaudevillian promoter, press agent, crooner, hoofer, barker or shill, who has undertaken all sorts of jobs in his time, all of them capitalizing his powers of salesmanship, and none of them entirely honest"(p. 19), arrives with his troupe of exotic dancers concerned only with reaching Geneva to fulfill a booking. He has no conception of how near his world is to catastrophe:
DON
Haven't you been reading the papers? HARRY
In Bulgaria and Jugo-Slavia? (He looks
around at the girls, who laugh.) No. DON
It may be difficult for you to understand, Mr. Van, but we happen to be on the brink of a
frightful calamity. HARRY
What? DON
We 're on the verge of War. 115
HARRY
You mean--that business in Africa? DON
Far more serious than that! World war!
All of them! HARRY
No lie! You mean—it'll be started by people
like that? (Points after the CAPTAIN.) Italians?
DON
Yes. They've reached the breaking point. HARRY
I don't believe it. I don't believe that
people like that would take on the job of licking
the world. They're too romantic. (pp. 27-28)
Don, who has been lured to this resort by Pitta luga 's exaggerated promises and has realized too late that Monte Gabriele will never be a St. Moritz, is more of a realist than any other character in the play at this point. He tries to impress Harry with the revel ation that what they are about to face is not a brief skirmish between two nations but a war of cosmic pro portions involving not two countries but "All of them," an Armageddon from which none may escape. Harry does not listen. For him, any crisis can be smoothed over 116
with a joke ("It's a funny kind of situation, isn't
it? • . • All this stopping of trains . . . and orders
from Rome and we are on the threshold of calamity."-p. 34).
Incapable of conceiving real calamity, Harry is at once and always intellectually blinded and spiritually sustained by his absolute belief in the one product he is constantly
selling: an accomodatingly optimistic faith in man's ability to somehow overcome anything.
HARRY
I've remained an optimist because I'm es sentially a student of human nature. You {^Doctor WalderseeJ dissect corpses and rats and similar
unpleasant things. Well—it has been my job to
dissect suckers! I've probed into the souls of
some of the God-damnedest specimens. And what
have I found? Now, don't sneer at me, Doctor—
but above everything else I've found Faith. Faith
in peace on earth and good will to men—and faith
that "Muma," "Muma" the three-legged girl, really
has got three legs. All my life, Doctor, I've been selling phoney goods to people of meagre intelligence and great faith. You'd think that would make me contemptuous of the human race,
wouldn't you? But—on the contrary—it has given
me Faith. It has made me sure that no matter 117
how much the meek may be bulldozed or gypped they
will eventually inherit the earth, (pp. 60-61)
Three other temporary guests, Quillery, Achille
Weber, and Irene, offer three of the most persuasive cons. Quillery, a young Frenchman whose tendency toward cynicism ("The situation is funny. There is always something essentially laughable in the thought of a lunatic asylum."-p. 35) is tempered only by his Marxist idealism, openly advocates an international workers’ revolution: "But there is a force more potent than all the bombing planes and submarines and tanks. And that is the mature intelligence of the workers of the world!
There is one antidote for war—Revolution! And the cause of Revolution gains steadily in strength"(p. 41). He claims to have no nationality due to his Marxist convictions
"I have no nationality. ... I was born in France.
And I love my home. Perhaps if I had raised pigs—like my father, and all his fathers, back to the time when
Caesar's Roman legions came--perhaps if I had done that,
I should have been a Frenchman, as they were. But I went to work in a factory—and machinery is international" (pp. 38-39)» His con is the promise of hope against devastation through intellectual detachment.
The last two arrivals are Weber and his mistress,
"beautiful, heavily and smartly furred in the Russian 118 manner ... a model of worldly wisdom, chic, and care
fully applied graciousness"(pp. 46-47), the mysterious
Irene. Both have successfully insulated themselves from the world, Weber the munitions manufacturer secure in
the knowledge that his having supplied sufficient weapons
to both sides will insure peace ("There will be no war.
They’re all much too well prepared for it."-p. 51), Irene, despite her worldly wisdom, content to trust her paramour
("There, you see! They will not fight. They are all
too much afraid of each other."-p. 51) with the same faith she expects from those who are willing to listen to the web of lies she constantly spins about her past.
As the first act comes to a close with rumors flying concerning a state of war between Italy and France,
Irene is among the first to abandon the lies and false faiths that have held together her life and a world long over-due for regeneration ("to WEBER, and straight at him:
’But I thought they were too well prepared, Achille.
Has there been some mistake somewhere?’"-p. 65), while
Harry Van continues to play the optimist: "Nevertheless,
Doctor, I remain an optimist. (He. looks at IRENE.) let doubt prevail throughout this night—with dawn will come again the light of truth!"(p. 67). In Act II the guests make one last attempt at pre serving their masks, try one last time to con themselves into believing that the world is other than it seems. 119 The Cherrys begin the act absorbed in one another and hopeful ("I suppose nothing really will happen."-p. 71); by the end of the act they are disillusioned and weary:
CHERRY
Let's dance, my sweet. MRS. CHERRY
I can't bear to, Jimmy. CHERRY
I think we should, MRS. CHERRY
Very well, darling. (p. 117)
The reason for the deflation of their passion is
Quillery, the self-proclaimed citizen of the world whose intellectual designs are overwhelmed by his sudden pat riotism. Fearing the truth of rumors of an attack on
Paris by Italian bombers, his humiliation and anger as a Frenchman speak through him to attack the facades of the other guests. He exposes Weber as the architect of Armageddon:
He has been organizing the arms industry. Munitions. To kill French babies. And English babies. France and Italy at war. England joins France. Germany
joins Italy. And that will drag in the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire and the United States. 120
In every part of the world, the good desire of
men for peace and decency is undermined by the
dynamite of jingoism. And it needs only one
spark, set off anywhere by one egomaniac, to
send it all up in one final, fatal explosion.
Then love becomes hatred, courage becomes terror,
hope becomes despair. But—it will all be very
nice for Achille Weber. Because he is a master of the one real League of Nations—The League of
Schneider Creusot, and Krupp, and Skoda, and
Vickers and Dupont, The League of Death! (pp. 79-80)
He uncovers in Doctor Waldersee a German patriot in the guise of a scientists
QUILLERY
Yes! The eminent Dr. Hugo Waldersee. A
wearer of the sacred swastika. Down with the
Communists! Off with their heads! So that the
world may be safe for the Nazi murderers. DOCTOR
So that Germany may be safe from its oppressors! It is the same with all of you—Englishmen, French
men, Marxists—you manage to forget that Germany,
too, has a right to live! (p. 80)
Then Quillery accuses the English, including Cherry, 121
of promoting the war for imperialistic purposes: "It
was you forced this war, because miserable little Italy
dared to drag its black shirt across your trail of Em
pire. What do you care if civilization goes to pieces—
as long as you have your dinner—and your dinner jacket!"
(p. 82). Don Navadel is finally able to pacify Quillery and extracts suitable apologies from him. Harry Van, promising there will be no "vulgarity"(p. 88), offers to perform with his girls to break the tension of the moment and to allow everyone to momentarily forget the unpleasant truths Quillery has brought to light. But the performance is interrupted by Quillery, who returns having heard confirmation of what he had feared: "For the love of God—listen to me! While you sit here eating and drinking, to-night, Italian planes dropped twenty thousand kilos of bombs on Paris, God knows how many they killed. God knows how much life and beauty is forever destroyed! And you sit here, drinking, laughing with them—the murderers. (Points to the flyers, who ask each other, in Italian, what the hell he is talking about.) They did it! It was their planes, from that field down there. Assassins!"(pp. 113-114). Unable to restrain this outburst, Quillery invites arrest and execution and is carried out by the Italian officers while he shouts, "Vive la France!"(p. 117). From this moment on, all lies are useless, having been exposed 122 undeniably for the harmful cons they are. The optimistic attitude that prevailed at the beginning of the act has been replaced by a weary despair. Old trooper Harry
Van cannot go on with the shows "No, pal. The act is cold. (To the orchestra leader. ) Give us some music,
Signor. (The orchestra starts playing.) Let dancing become general"(p. 119).
The second scene of Act II, in which all this action takes place, begins at eleven o’clock; it is now midnight as Quillery is dragged away, time for everyone to remove their masks. Behind Quillery's mask we have found the face of a French patriot. Behind the charming mask of the Italian Captain we now find the face of a killer. Behind the Cherry' masks are the drawn faces of a couple tired of false passion. Achille Weber slips upstairs so his real face will not be seen. The face of Harry Van shows fatigue from a lifetime of false optimism and the frustration of a con-man who realizes the only sucker he ever really duped was himself. He asks for a dance with Irene, who has purposely avoided him all day, and now she accepts. She unmasked earlier before Weber while at the same time privately unmasking him, and she is now about to do the same before Harry
Van. Irene's primary con is her own past. She is al ways ready to relate the story of some dramatic escape, 123 either out of Russia or by parachute into a jungle: "Well,
I have made several escapes. I am always making escapes,
Achille"(p. 104). In each story she is trying to escape the reality of a world in need of regeneration, and she comes to realize this as the play progresses. Seeing
Harry Van again reminds her of what she really was once, and perhaps she is embarrassed by what she has become.
She tries to hide her true identity from Harry, but finally realizes that she cannot. Aware that she can no longer fool Harry, she finds too that she can no longer con herself into accepting the life Weber offers her, and she breaks with Weber by showing him the one thing he refuses to acknowledge: his real self.
Before the performance by Harry Van and his girls that ends with Quillery’s violent overture to eschaton,
Irene congratulates Weber privately for "All this great, wonderful death and destruction everywhere. And you promoted it!"(p. 103). Weber congenially refuses to take all the credit and reminds her that he is "but the humble instrument of His divine will" (p. 103). Irene pities Him: "Poor, lonely old soul. Sitting up in heaven, with nothing to do, but play solitaire. Poor, dear God. Playing Idiot’s Delight. The game that never means anything, and never ends"(pp. 103-104). Irene’s god is an eternal being deprived of the hope of eschaton, that which culminates and justifies. Her god is an 124
image of her own existence. Because she lives behind the facade of an imagined past, she can achieve true communication with no one and knows she can accomplish nothing by herself; what she has she has earned with lies. Unlike Weber, whose decisions shake the world, she is locked into playing a meaningless, endless game until this moment, when she drops the cards, the suits of lies that allow her to continue the game, and ends it in a moment of truth:
So I amuse myself by studying the faces of the
people I see. Just ordinary, casual, dull peo
ple. (She is speaking in a tone that is sweetly
sadistic.) That young English couple, for instance.
I was watching them during dinner, sitting there,
close together, holding hands, and rubbing their
knees under the table. And I saw him in his nice,
smart, British uniform, shooting a little pistol at a huge tank. And the tank rolls over him.
And his fine strong body, that was so full of the
capacity for ecstasy, is a mass of mashed flesh and bones—a smear of purple blood—like a stepped- on snail. But before the moment of death, he con
soles himself by thinking, "Thank God she is safe!
She is bearing the child I gave her, and he will
live to see a better world." (She walks behind 125 WEBER and leans over his shoulder.) But I know
where she is. She is lying in the cellar that
has been wrecked by an air raid, and her firm
young breasts are all mixed up with the bowels
of a dismembered policeman, and the embryo from
her womb is splattered against the face of a
dead bishop. That is the kind of thought with
which I amuse myself, Achille. And it makes me
so proud to think that I am so close to you—
who make all this possible. (pp. 104-105)
The only omnipotent being in this sullied world
is Monsieur Weber, the creator of death and the panderer
of illusions. Because of his spiritual narcotics and her own weakness, Irene has been "shut off from the world ... a contented prisoner in . . . [his] ivory tower" (p. 106), but will be no more. Weber senses that she has freed herself and offers her one more illusion, that the real evil is the "illusion of power," the real villains those who crave the "instruments of death" he manufactures: "I assure you, Irene—for such little people the deadliest weapons are the most merciful"(pp. 107 108). Before Irene can reply, the other guests begin to gather for the performance, after which comes her answer when she rejects Weber and the death he peddles to dance with the optimistic salesman. 126 Later in the evening, Harry and Irene reveal to
each other who and what they really are. Harry is at
first the salesman again, and as such he feels no qualms
about Weber's profession: "I make it a point never to
criticize anybody else's racket" (p. 121). In this guise
he is, according to Irene, the typical American, "an
ingenuous, sentimental idealist"(p. 123), who is capable
of liking anyone when business dictates. Then Irene's
probing uncovers a Harry Van who does know what condition
the world is in and who must bear part of the respon
sibility: "I'm sorry if I've hurt your feelings about
Mr. Weber, but he just happens to be a specimen of the
one percent that I don't like"(p. 125). At this moment Harry begins to recognize Irene. She denies having known him, but her denials only convince him of her identity:
"Everything fits together perfectly now. The name—the
face—the voice—Chaliapin for a teacher! Certainly
it's you! And it's no good shaking your head and looking amazed! No matter how much you may lie, you can't deny the fact that you slept with me in the Governor Bryan
Hotel in Omaha in the fall of 1925. All right—go ahead and laugh. That blonde hair had me fooled for a while— but now I know it's just as phoney as the bayonet wounds, and the parachute jumps into the jungle"(pp. 132-133)»
Weber beckons Irene and she goes to bed without admitting her identity, but she leaves Harry with no doubt as to 127
who she was and is.
Act III takes place during the next afternoon.
Quillery has been executed, the bombing of Paris has
been confirmed, and the hotel is doomed; "The French
know all about this air base, and they'll be over any
minute with their bombs"(p. 149). There is, however,
good news: the guests will be permitted to take the
train into Switzerland. Under the shadow of eschaton, everyone is eager to depart and, more importantly, leave
behind their "cons". As a consequence of his colloquy
with Irene the night before, Harry admits that he is
not a performer and retires from the act: "From now
on, I shall devote myself to the purely creative end of
the act, and, of course, the negotiation of contracts"
(p. 147). Convinced that his fortune will not be made
in a run-down hotel in Italy, Don Navadel will return
to California (p. 149). The Cherrys have ceased to pur
sue "winter sports" and will return to England to help
"make the world a decent place for heroes to live in"
(p. 153), i.e., to assist in the cosmic regeneration. Doctor Waldersee will abandon his search for a cure for cancer and return to Germany, offering his services "for what they are worth. . . . For I know all the tricks of death!"(p. 161). When an irregularity develops over
Irene's passport, Weber declines to interfere: "I should of course wait over, Irene. But you know how dangerous 128
it is for me to delay my return to France by so much
as one day. I have been in touch with our agents.
The premier is demanding that production be doubled—
trebled—at once"(p. I65). Irene quietly accepts the
situation, believing the omnipotent Achille Weber re
sponsible: "He has decided that I shall remain here
and his decisions are final!"(p. 168).
Irene, who has seen the truth, relaxes because
she knows she is about to confront eschaton, from which no one can escape. The coming war will spare no one, not even Achille Weber or Harry Van, who, having realized
this, returns to join Irene. After admitting that she
is the same Irene he knew ten years before in Omaha, they plan a new act that each knows will never be performed.
They exchange vows of love as the bombing begins, and at the final curtain they are singing "Onward, Christian
Soldiers" amid "Demolition—bombs, gas-bombs, airplanes shrapne1, machine guns"(p. 187).
After so many warnings and threats and intimations of eschaton, Robert Sherwood has finally brought us to the day of doom. In the Postscript, R. E. S. tries to deny the vision his play demands: that of a world so lost to degeneration that it cannot be repaired but must be made over new. He would like to think that an aware ness of the social principles expounded in the Sermon on the Mount and the memory of the First World War "can 129 be strong enough to resist the forces which would drive
us back into the confusion and the darkness and the filth
of No Man’s Land"(p. 190), but his play shows that his
artistic instincts know otherwise. To deny as a dramatist the actuality of eschaton would be to deny the direction of all his previous work. Slowly but gradually, Robert
Sherwood has found the courage to understand that eschaton
is more than an abstract and ultimately unfulfilled threat passing without significant consequence over a smug Rome;
it is a recurring inevitability, a real presence in his world and his time, one that will not tolerate being ignored, a presence dictated not by the arbitrary whim of ulterior forces but by the state of a world that craves renewal. Having presented eschaton as a certainty,
Robert Sherwood finds himself faced with the task of describing what role an individual can and must play in the eschatological moment. To begin, he will chart the course of what essentially is his own expanding awareness through the character of Abraham Lincoln. 130
Tracing the Growth of Eschatological Awareness:
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
Abe Lincoln in Illinois was not only Robert Sherwood's most popular drama and his greatest commercial success, but it has remained the work for which he is best known and, as such, should prove to play a significant role in the development of his eschatological vision. There can be little doubt that, as a boy, Robert Sherwood worshipped the American myth of Abraham Lincoln and, as a man, closely identified with the tall, gaunt, gentle pacifist from Illinois who, like Sherwood, was forced by events beyond his control to accept the fact that war was a political, though no less undesirable, necessity and preferable to worse alternatives, i.e., slavery in i860, the Nazi menace in the late 1930s. While he was only beginning to shift allegiance from pacifism to militarism during the writing of Abe Lincoln in Illinois,
Sherwood's choice of Lincoln and Lincoln's historical predicament as the basis for a new play indicates where his affection was leaning both politically and with regard to his eschatological vision. In essence, Abe Lincoln in Illinois capsulizes in twelve scenes the growth of Sherwood's own understanding of the nature and meaning of the "last things," from a vague consciousness of en croaching instances of doom to a confirmed recognition 131 of the fallen state of the world to a fresh cognizance of his own place amid the inexorable onrush of events toward a final consummation.
The intimations of eschaton begin in the first scene. The young Abe Lincoln is studying with Mentor Graham, "a sharp but patient schoolteacher."3- In the midst of their discussion of human and grammatical "moods,"
Mentor Graham hands Abe a nearby newspaper and asks him to read a portion of a speech delivered in the Senate by Daniel Webster. Abe reads in a monotone until Mentor
Graham admonishes him to read with more feeling: "Imagine that .you 're making the speech before the Senate, with the fate of your country at stake. Put your own life into itt"(p. 5). Though occasionally stumbling over pronunciation, Abe takes the suggestion seriously, "reading slowly, gravely":
While the Union lasts we have high prospects
spread out before us and our children. Beyond that, I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant
that in my day, at least, the curtain may not rise.
When my eyes shall be turned to behold for
^-Robert Emmet Sherwood, Abe Lincoln in Illinois : A Play in Twelve Scenes (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 19Î1 ),p. 3• All further references to this play and its postscript will be by page numbers to this edition. 132
the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see
him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments
of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered,
discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil
feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal
blood! (p. 6)
After finishing Webster's stirring call for the preservation of "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"(p. ?), Abe has been impressed by the words but has to ask, "What was he talking about?"(p. 7).
With an economy unprecedented in his work, Robert Sherwood has up to this point not only introduced the play's central character but has also given us the kernal of the plot, which is essentially the development of Abraham
Lincoln from a naive, feckless, even sometimes foolish young man into the stuff that fathers legends. Even more, in this speech that pictures a world on the brink of doom, a world which at first reading perplexes Abe, Sherwood indicates that this development is to be in the direction of an eschatological awareness, for Abe Lincoln in Illi nois and the play that immediately follows it, There
Shall Be No Night, provide the fullest expression of
Robert Sherwood's eschatological vision. The imminent presence of the eschatological confrontation lies at the center of both works, which record by degrees the 133 extent to which that impending confrontation elicits from certain characters that awareness of the nature of eschaton which gives meaning to the quest for meaning.
Webster's speech is a warning against eschaton; it is the natural fear of doom that one clings to when one is devoid of eschatological awareness. It is a longing for a return to the state of original bliss (that demo cratic paradise envisioned by the Founding Fathers) by some route other than destruction/regeneration. It is the wish that eschaton can be avoided, a wish springing from the inability to perceive another bliss after escha ton, a wish shared by Abe Lincoln through most of the play and one which he learns to overcome.
After Mentor Graham briefly explains the political implications of Webster's speech, their conversation shifts to Abe’s current situation. Though personally admired by the community, Abe has proven to be a poor businessman due mostly to his partner's drinking the store's profits and partly to his own lack of business sense and confidence: "I guess I'm my father's own son. Give me a steady job, and I'll fail at it"(p. 8). Another of Sherwood's "wanderer" characters, Abe is considering leaving New Salem after the store closes, having been, like Alan Squier in The Petrified Forest, an aimless traveler for much of his life: "My family have always been movers, shifting about, never knowing what they 134 were looking for, and whatever it was, never finding it" (p. 9). But what weighs heaviest on Abe’s mind is the idea of death: "I've had to £think a lot about death], because it has always seemed to be so close to me—always—as far back as I can remember"(p. 11). In some vague way, Abe Lincoln is drawn to the idea of death and doom, almost obsessed with it, in spite of his fear of death. This fact is reinforced by the end of the first scene, where Abe reads from John Keats's
"On Death" ("How strange it is that man on earth should roam,/ And lead a life of woe, but not forsake/ His rugged path--nor dare he view alone/ His future doom-- which is but to awake."-p. 13), and finds with some excitement a sympathetic voice: "That sure is good,
Mentor. It's fineI"(p. 13)«
Scene Two takes place in the Rutledge Tavern some months later. Now the postmaster, Abe is courageous in standing up to local bully Jack Armstrong but shows
"a marked shyness in his attitude"(p. 25) toward Ann Rutledge. Despite the bankruptcy that has forced him to take the postmaster's position, Abe is still liked by the citizens of New Salem to the extent that they encourage him to run for the State Assembly(p. 31). Abe quickly declines; his nature is to avoid confronta tion, his political leanings are "all toward staying out"(p. 35). Yet the spirit of revolution is in the 135 air, and the time is ripening for the appearance of a
man of action: ABE
Say, Bowling! It says here that there was
a riot in Lyons, France. (He reads.) "A mob of men, deprived of employment when textile factories
installed the new sewing machines, re-enacted
scenes of the Reign of Terror in the streets of
this prosperous industrial center. The mobs were
suppressed only when the military forces of His
French Majesty took a firm hand. The rioters carried
banners inscribed with the incendiary words, 'We
will live working or die fighting!’" (ABE looks at the group at the right. ) That's Revolution!
BOWLING
Maybe, but it's a long way off from New
Salem. (pp. 30-31)
This is the spirit of denial, of putting off es chaton, the spirit of Daniel Webster so popular among
the citizens of New Salem of which Abe is the embodiment and thus the most likely choice to represent them at
the state government. What none of them, including Abe,
can see is that the eschaton of violent political re volution is not "a long way off from New Salem" but lurks
in the background of current events: Ninian Edwards 136
earlier remarks that the ubiquitous element of lawless
ness can be found "in the capital of our nation, and
everywhere else, these days"(p. 30), and political events
motivated by the slavery controversy are building toward
what Daniel Webster has prophesied, the destruction of
the Union, now approximately a quarter century away.
Because none of them, Abe in particular, can at
this point envision the consummate eschaton, there is
no one willing to venture any serious assertion or definite
action, outward manifestations of an eschatological
awareness. Eschatological awareness permits an indi
vidual to act in such a way as to risk the state of the
present because the individual knows that the conditions
of the present will pass not merely to a future present
but to the ultimate end of all things: "Human life must
be risked if it would be won. It must expend itself
if it would gain firmness and future. If, however, we
are thus to risk expending ourselves, then we need a horizon of expectation which makes the expending meaning
ful—and moreover,—a horizon of expectation, which em braces the realms and areas in which and for which the work we do in our self-expending is to take place."2 Such a horizon is still beyond Abe Lincoln's grasp, and when he finally agrees to run for the State Assembly, his
2Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 337. 137 decision is motivated by his infatuation for Ann Rutledge rather than any serious sense of his own destiny:
ANN
Abel Where are you going? ABE
I'm going to find Bowling Green and tell
him a good joke. (He grins. He is standing in
the doorway.) ANN
A joke? What about? ABE
I’m going to tell him that I’m a candidate
for the assembly of the State of Illinois. (He
goes. ) (p. 50)
One year later, in Scene Three, Abe has accomplished nothing as a representative ("He has just been sitting there—drawing his three dollars a day—and taking no apparent interest in the proceedings."-p. 54) and will soon resign his seat over Ann’s death. Once again, Abe feels that the course of his life has been altered by the sudden appearance of death, which saps not only life but any reason for living:
I used to think it was better to be alone. I
was always most contented when I was alone. I
had queer notions that if you got too close to 138 people, you could see the truth about them, that behind the surface, they’re all insane, and they could see the same in you. And then—when I saw her, I knew there could be beauty and purity in people—like the purity you sometimes see in the sky at night. When I took hold of her hand, and held it, all fear, all doubt, went out of me.
I believed in God. I’d have been glad to work for her until I die, to get for her everything out of life that she wanted. If she thought I could do it, then I could. That was my belief.
. . . And then I had to stand there, as helpless as a twig in a whirlpool; I had to stand there and watch her die. And her father and mother were there, too, praying to God for her soul.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord! That's what they kept on saying. But I couldn't pray with them. I couldn't give any devotion to one who has the power of death, and uses it. (He has stood up, and is speaking with more passion.) I'm making a poor exhibition of myself—and I'm sorry— but—
I can't stand it. I can't live with myself any longer. I've got to die and be with her again, or I'll go crazy! (pp. 6O-6l) 139 What we have here is an Abe Lincoln who wants to
escape the role of aimless wanderer in a meaningless
world, but has employed the wrong "escape mechanism."
Believing that he had found meaning in his love for
Ann Rutledge, he is now bewildered to have lost it so
easily. Nicolas Berdyaev says such a predicament is
the result of a failure to realize that any meaning to be derived from the moments of one's life must have as
its source an end that stands outside phenomenal events,
which lead to, but in themselves cannot encompass, an
end revealed only in existential time: "Man as a noumenon
is at the beginning and as a noumenon he is at the end,
but he lives out his destiny in the phenomenal world.
That which we project into the sphere of the external,
and call the end, is the existential experience of contact with the noumenal, and with the noumenal in its conflict with the phenomenal. The experience is not one of de velopment from one stage to another, it is an experience of shock and catastrophe, in personal and historical experience."3 The perception of eschaton, this noumenal montage of ideal and real, cannot be learned like school lessons but must be ascertained through the experience of an event for which the known or accepted laws of this world can provide only inadequate explanations;
3Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 232. 140 a meaning must be sought outside the normal range of
human experiences. The experiences of death and doom have shaken in Abe any faith in beliefs drawn from the
realities of this world; he does not deny the existence
of God, only his allegiance to that belief. In Act I
of this play, which ends with this scene on the night of Ann Rutledge's death, Abe Lincoln has been touched
by intimations of eschaton and affected enough never to be able to settle for a doctrine that denies the
importance of "last things." The intimations are still
without meaning for him, as they were for Sherwood in
his first plays, but an understanding of their meaning
is forthcoming in Act II. Act II begins five years later. Now an attorney,
his youth "buried" with Ann Rutledge(p. 66), Abe is
just becoming aware of the conditions that exist around
him. Though still reluctant to act when action can be
avoided, he nevertheless admits to being appalled by what he has seen of the great evil that fouls his world,
slavery: "I was in the boat coming from Quincy to Alton, and there was a gentleman on board with twelve Negroes. He was shipping them down to Vicksburg for sale—had 'em chained six and six together. Each of them had a
small iron clevis around his waist, and this was chained to the main chain, so that those Negroes were strung together precisely like fish on a trout line. I gathered 141
they were being separated forever from their homes—
mothers, fathers, wives, children—whatever families
the poor creatures had got—going to be whipped into
perpetual slavery, and no questions asked. It was quite
a shocking sight"(p. 68). Though troubled by the restless
state of the nation ("It’s an ugly situation, all right.
It's got: the seeds in it of nothing more than civil war."
-p. 75), Abe is bothered more by his own dilemma of in decision, his opposition to slavery matched by his op
position to war: "But—you talk about civil war—there seems to be one going on inside me all the time"(pp. 79-80).
He finds himself engaged to Mary Todd, a woman driven by
what she believes to be her destiny, to help Abe Lincoln
to the greatness all except Abe expect of him ("I want
the chance to shape a new life, for myself, and for my
husband."-pp. 88-89), but in the next scene breaks the engagement, out of the desperate realization that he
could be trapped forever in time and meaninglessness: "I just feel that I've got to the end of my rope, and
I must let go, and drop--and where I'll land, I don't know, and whether I'll survive the fall, I don't know
that either. . . . But—this I do know: I've got to get out of this thing—I can't go through with it—I've got to have my release!"(p. 96). The destiny which Mary
Todd and others see for him mystifies him: "My own great duty. Everyone feels called upon to remind me 142
of it, but no one can tell me what it is"(p. 105). He
has just realized that he still wandering in that room
where time is measured infinity and existence wants
progress and end. He must take the eschatological step through one of the doors of exit, regardless of where
he finds himself on the other side.
In Robert Sherwood's own words, Scene Seven was
"the most completely fictitious, and the one which presented
the greatest difficulty in writing"(p. 220), requiring
an authorial explanation as a section of the postscript
to the play entitled, "The Substance of 'Abe Lincoln
in Illinois'". Throughout most of this essay, Sherwood
specifies where he was forced to take liberties with
history and adds historical information that he was unable
to incorporate into the play. In the section dealing with the climactic seventh scene, he briefly discusses his intentions as a dramatist and his conclusions as a
Lincolnphile as to the motivations behind Lincoln's
"astonishing metamorphosis, from a man of doubt and indecision—even of indifference—to a man of passionate conviction and decisive action"(p. 220). To Sherwood, the "symbolic" seventh scene crystallizes all the in fluences at work on Lincoln at the moment of his decision— his awareness of the importance of the West, "his feeling of kinship" and responsibility "for those who were to be its first settlers"—"to indicate that Lincoln had 143 at length made up his own mind and the influences that forced him to do it"(p. 223).
"On the prairie, near New Salem," on a "clear, cool, moonlit evening, nearly two .years after the pre ceding scene"(p. 109), Abe Lincoln encounters an old friend, Seth Gale, who is moving his family west to
Oregon, Seth’s son Jimmy has a fever, and Abe is asked to say a prayer for the boy until the doctor arrives.
At first he humbly declines ("I'm afraid I'm not much of a hand at praying."-p, 116), as he did once before at the funeral of his friend, Bowling Green. Seth asks
Abe to join his family on the journey to Oregon, and
Abe declines again, partly from a weariness of "drifting too long"(p. 118), partly from a festering cynicism that has led him to distrust the kind of hope the West has traditionally offered. One of Seth's companions-is a free Negro named Gobey; Abe openly wonders if Gobey will still be free in Oregon, which could yet become a
"slave state":
ABE
Do you think it will be free in Oregon? SETH
Of course it will! It's got to— ABE (bitterly)
Oh no, it hasn't Seth. Not with the politicians M
in Washington selling out the whole West piece
by piece to the slave traders.
SE TH (vehemently)
That territory has got to be free! If this
country ain’t strong enough to protect its citizens
from slavery, then we *11 cut loose from it and
join with Canada. Or, better yet, we’ll make a
new country out there in the far west.
ABE (gravely)
A new country? SETH
Why not? ABE
I was just thinking—old Mentor Graham once
said to me that some day the United States might
be divided into many hostile countries, like
Europe. (p. 119)
For the first time in his life, Abe Lincoln has suddenly glimpsed the "last things," aware now of the real possibility of the consequences of slavery that Webster hinted at with hopeful trepidation. The Webster speech he once read to Mentor Graham now has meaning for him. From his study of the historical Lincoln,
Sherwood had concluded that "it was not the mere fact of slavery which converted Lincoln into the leader of 145 a militant cause: it was the question of its extension.
If he was willing to let the South mind its own business, he was not willing to stand by in silence when it threatened to establish domination in the West"(pp. 222-223).
Sherwood expresses this in the play through a Lincoln who has realized the end of slavery (both what it will lead to and that it can and must be ended). The course of his life has changed with the awareness of what can be done, which means accomplishment, which means an end, a release from wandering that holds the possibility of meaning through an awareness that a human life, like any other phenomenal event, must end, in fact consists of a series of ends. Always waiting for someone to reveal to him his destiny, Abe has awakened to the fact that he is standing in the midst of it. While the final meaning of history exists independently of the movement of history, the movement of history is directly related to, and constantly reveals to those who have realized an eschatological awareness, the telos toward which it aims. Eschatology "is not the doctrine of the end of any pathway in general; it deals with the particular path on which we find ourselves now."^ While the doc trines of popular eschatology are established and rigid, the nature of philosophical eschatology is personal,
Berner Elert, Last Things, p. 13» 146 subjective, and, in its certainty of an end, liberating.
Eschatological awareness is the revelation that "in every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment,"3 that the door of exit is always available, that the meaning of history lives in the "presents" of responsible decisions. Abe Lincoln declares "that I've got to do something, too, to keep you and your kind in the United States of America"(p. 120), and offers a prayer for Seth's son: "Spare him and give him his father's strength—give us all strength. Oh God, to do the work that is before us"(p. 122). The "astonishing metamorphosis" of Abe Lincoln as depicted in Scene Seven is from a wanderer to a man with a mission, a man with work before him, a man no longer driven to resist the doom that promises meaning. As if to further confirm
Abe's change of heart, Sherwood has him return to Mary
Todd in Scene Eight, promising to "devote myself for the rest of my days to trying—to do what is right—as God gives me the power to see what is right"(p. 127).
In the play's last four scenes that comprise Act
III, we are shown how this new awareness provides a soothing calm that sustains Lincoln through his personal and political trials. In Scene Nine, a debate between
Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Abe speaks of the United
^Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity, p. 155« 1^7 States as a nation in need of renewal, a nation fallen
from the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution on which it was founded:
As a nation, we began by declaring, "All men are
created equal." There was no mention of any ex
ceptions to the rule in the Declaration of Inde
pendence. But we now practically read it, "All
men are created equal except Negroes." If we accept this doctrine of race or class discrimination,
what is to stop us from decreeing in the future
that "All men are created equal except Negroes,
foreigners, Catholics, Jews, or—just poor people?"
That is the conclusion towards which the advocates
of slavery are driving us. . . . But—I advise you
to watch out! When you have enslaved any of your
fellow human beings, dehumanized him, denied him
all claim to the dignity of manhood, placed him among the beasts, among the damned, are you quite
sure that the demon you have thus created, will
not turn and rend you? When you begin qualifying
freedom, watch out for the consequences to you8"
(pp. 138-139)
In Scene Ten, as Lincoln is to be offered the
Republican nomination for President, Mary Todd expresses her fear that his gloomy nature will emerge from its 148
repression and cause him to refuse his destiny: "He
had some poem in his mind, about a life of woe, along
a rugged path, that leads to some future doom, and it
has been an obsession with him"(p. 147). But Lincoln,
of course, accepts the nomination, fully aware that his
election would certainly result in civil war. In Scene
Eleven, the announcement of his election is accompanied
by the threat of the Armageddon Webster feared earlier:
"War! Civil war! And he’ll have the whole terrible
responsibility for it—a man who never wanted anything in his life but to be let alone, in peace !"(p, 173).
Scene Twelve is set at the Springfield railroad
station as Lincoln is about to depart for Washington.
Heavily guarded as a result of threats to his life,
Lincoln shows little concern over the possibility of
assassination. Captain Kavanagh, the officer in charge
of protecting the President-elect, complains that he
is nervous because "For three weeks I've been guarding the life of a man who doesn't give a damn what happens to him"(pp. 177-178). This kind of apathy naturally accompanies someone who possesses a true eschatological awareness and thus knows that the eschaton, even that of death, is never the absolute end: "Death is, of course, an end—but an end immediately followed by a new beginning. One dies to the mode of being in order to be able to attain to another. Death constitutes an 149 abrupt change of ontological level, and at the same time a rite of passage, just as birth does, or initiation"®
Though reportedly feeling "Just as gloomy as ever"(p. 179),
Abe Lincoln shows no outward concern for his safety as
he boards the train; his mission has become greater than
the thought of his own preservation. In his farewell
address, Abe acknowledges the threat of the eschaton
of the Civil War ("I now leave, not knowing when or
whether ever I may return. . . . when threats of war
increase in fierceness from day to day. It is a grave
duty which I now face."-p. 182), but his dark vision
is tempered by hope for the eventual return to a "golden age": "Let us live to prove that we can cultivate the
natural world that is about us, and the intellectual
and moral world that is within us, so that we may secure
an individual, social and political prosperity, whose
course shall be forward, and which, while the earth endures,
shall not pass away”(pp. 183-184). Progress, happiness, eternity—Lincoln's words echo the traditional dream of paradise to follow the eschatological confrontation.
As in Idiot's Delight, Sherwood brings us to the moment
of eschaton and there ends the play, but we know from
history that the threat of eschaton is a real one, taking the shape of the American Civil War, and that the threat
®Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp. 237-238. 150
of doom that haunts Lincoln throughout the play will
be fulfilled at the war's end.
While composing Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Robert
Sherwood wrote: "It seems to me there's one fundamental
subject with which I am most concerned—growth. My own
growth, and that of the characters I write about, and the ideas they express."? In Abraham Lincoln, he chose
a character whose growth with regard to an ultimate
eschatological awareness paralleled that of Sherwood as reflected in his dramas before Abe Lincoln in Illinois
and in whom Sherwood found "concentrated and magnified"
"all the contrasted qualities of the human race—the
hopes and fears, the doubts and convictions, the moral
frailty and superhuman endurance, the prescience and
the neuroses, the desire for the escape from reality, and the fundamental, unshakable nobility."® Yet Sherwood's
Illinois everyman could not carry the final word on the
eschatological predicament. Abe Lincoln in the play
is his own microcosm; the other characters are there
to serve as foils to his moods. Still to be examined in Robert Sherwood’s eschatological vision is the true nature of the "golden age," the world after eschaton
only mentioned in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and this
?John Mason Brown, The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, p. 382.
®Brown, p. 370« 151 could not be accomplished through a wanderer, for whom eschaton is a blessed escape from meaninglessness, but through a character with social and family ties, one from whom eschaton extracts the highest price and, con sequently, reveals the greatest meaning. 152
The Eschatological Confrontation and Its
Nightless After
Perhaps as in none of his other dramas, There Shall
Be No Night comes closest to what Robert Sherwood called
in the play's preface "my own essential faith.Its title taken from the New Testament Book of the Revelation
after bearing the manuscript name of simply "Revelation,"
There Shall Be No Night is clearly aimed at exploring
eschatological riddles that for more than a decade have
troubled Sherwood. Conceived in the zeal of a modern
apocalyptic vision, it proves to be a fitting culmination
to the evolving eschatological vision that began with
The Road to Rome. In this play can be found all the foremost elements of an eschatology and eschatological awareness, including speculation on the nature of the existence that follows eschaton, the so-called "golden age," a concept of paradise that finally gives meaning to the eschatological confrontation, but until There
Shall Be No Night is only occasionally mentioned by
Sherwood's characters. Set in Finland on the eve of the Second World War, the play chronicles the last days of the Valkonen family.
^Robert E. Sherwood, There Shall Be No Night (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), p. xxix. All further references to this play and its preface will be by page numbers to this edition. 153 The first scene establishes the degenerate condition of the world. Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen, neurologist, researcher, and recent recipient of a Nobel Prize for giving "mankind a new understanding of the true nature and the causes of mental diseases"(p. 18), has with some embarrassment agreed to speak to America over the radio. Prior to the address, the conversation between Dave Corween, the
American correspondent, and two other members of the
Valkonen family, Uncle Waldemar and Miranda, Kaarlo's
American wife, emphasizes the pitiful state of a Europe on the verge of chaos. They joke about the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations, the organization formed to guarantee peace (pp. 6-7), they lament the Munich agree ment ("I knew it would be a disaster."-p. 10), and then
Miranda directs Dave's attention to the family portraits she has brought from New England:
DAVE
Dr. Valkonen showed me your family portraits. MIRANDA
Oh, did he? Did he tell you his idea—that they represent the whole cycle of modern history? Rugged heroism—that's him'—developing into ruthless
materialism—that's him—and then degenerating
into intellectual impotance and decay—that's
him. (pp. 11-12) 154 Once again Sherwood is portraying an attrite modern world, plagued by the "intellectual impotence” that in earlier plays paralyzed Anton Krug, Alan Squier, and
Doctor Waldersee. This degeneration proves to be the major concern of Kaarlo’s Valkonen’s address:
Dr. Carrel has said, ''For the first time in history,
a crumbling civilization is capable of discerning
the causes of its decay. For the first time it has at its disposal the gigantic strength of science."
And he asks, "Will we utilize this knowledge and
this power?" That's a question far more important
than speculating about the possible results of
the Munich crisis. In fact, behind this question
are the real causes of all the problems we now
must face. . . . Today, the spiritual resistance of [the world'sj people has been lowered to such
an extent that they are willing to discard all
their moral sense, all the essential principles
of justice and civilization. They glorify a theory
of government that is no more than co-ordinated barbarism, under the leadership of a megalomaniac
who belongs in a psychopathic ward rather than a
chancellery. He seeks to create a race of moral
cretins whom science has rendered strong and germless in their bodies, but feeble and servile 155 in their minds. . . . Degeneration! That is the
most terrifying word in the human vocabulary today.
. . . "Know thyself," said the oracle. And after
thousands of years, we still don’t know. Can we
learn before it is too late—before the process
of man's degeneration has been completed and he
is again a witless ape, groping his way back into
the jungle? (pp. 19-22)
Unlike so many of Sherwood's other characters,
Kaarlo Valkonen begins the play with a precognition of the failing state of the world's health, and he is
aware that the remedy involves more than merely settling
current political problems, such as the Munich agreement
attempted. Unafraid to face that "most terrifying word"
degeneration, he neither refuses to consider the awful
consequences of the world's course nor despairs at the
prospects, conceding to inevitability the wasting away of human accomplishments. There is for him still hope for regeneration through what Kaarlo calls "the experience
of the hard way"(p. 22). Jürgen Moltmann has said that what precedes the eschatological moment is "an age of diaspora, of sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacri fice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future."2 It is the awareness of that horizon
2Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 338. 156 that makes self-surrender and sacrifice acceptable.
Though not yet completely aware of it, Kaarlo will
come to find that in recognizing the world's need for
renewal he has embarked upon such a diasporic age, on
the horizon of which sets the possibility of a new
awareness of what man is and can be: "You have heard
it said that the days of exploration are over—that there are no more lost continents—no more Eldorados. But
I promise you that the greatest of all adventures in exploration is still before us—the exploration of man himself—his mind—his spirit—-the thing we call his character—-the quality which has raised him above the beasts"(p. 22). Toward this horizon Kaarlo Valkonen will move and for it make every sacrifice, aware that such sacrifices are not only unavoidable but irrevocably bound to what follows.
What Kaarlo Valkonen is not aware of is when the eschatological confrontation is to take place. The great uncertainty surrounding the time of eschaton results from its atemporal necessity. Because the sacred or existential time of eschaton in no way resem bles the profane or cosmic/historical time of the world, its specific moment cannot be calculated: "The time- scale £f "this worldj is irrelevant to that which has never received embodiment in the forms of time and space, and therefore has no existence in the temporal 15? order."3 The nature of eschaton can be realized only
through a special, usually prophetic, glimpse into that atemporal existence: "Concerning the beginning and end of history there are, however, no human experiences.
... On this point there can be no assertions that are the result of an intellectual investigation of reality.
The beginning and end of human history are conceivable only on acceptance of a pre-philosophically traditional interpretation of reality: they are either 'revealed' or they are inconceivable."^ But the prophetic reports which must be the only source of information clothe "the coming event in forms which do not properly belong to time at all, but to eternity."5 Unaware of the course of history, the prophet concentrates only on the moment of eschaton which, stripped of any historical perspective, stands alone and is eternally present.Thus, while we can know the symbolic nature of eschaton in prophetic terms, we have no hint as to the time of its appearance and must be imminently prepared for the unannounced con frontation: "The man who, without particularly reflecting
3c. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and its De velopments : Three Lectures with an Appendix on Escha- tology and History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935)» p. 82 •
^Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Faber and Faber, 195^)» P* 21.
^Dodd, p. 83.
^Dodd, pp. 81-82. 158 on himself, allows himself to be borne along by the bustle of life, still at times unexpectedly finds him self confronted by an hour which has a special and even an especially questionable connection with his personal future This is why, despite his uncommon understanding of the situation, Kaarlo is slow to realize that the struggle he and Finland and the world are about to face is not just another foolish political squabble, as he first suspects, but the beginning of a new age, the
"hard way" by which he will discover, in himself, the nature of man that distinguishes him from the beast.
In a world degenerated to the edge of chaos, each crisis seems no more significant than the last, and the ten dency is to sit back while this crisis passes on to the next. After the broadcast, Erik Valkonen enters and introduces his parents to Kaatri Alquist, soon to be his finacee. Kaarlo, while proud of Erik, confesses to being "an object of contempt to my own son—because, while I talk, he acts. He has been working on the Man ne rheim Line. ... on the Russian frontier. It's our own little Maginot"(pp. 26-27). Yet he actually thinks Erik's work "silly": "They don't know how to prepare.
7Martin Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, ed. and trans. Maurice S. Friedman (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 192. 159 That’s the trouble. They build those concrete pillboxes,
and tank traps—as if such things could save anybody
when Armageddon comes”(p. 29). In spite of these pre
cautions, no one really expects Armageddon, especially
Kaarlo: "And I can tell you about these Russians: they
love to plot—but they don’t love to fight"(p. 3^).
Content that the state of Europe represents no immediate
threat to them, the Valkonens celebrate Kaarlo’s Nobel
Prize as the first scene ends.
Scene Two takes place on "An evening late in November,
1939”(p, 43), World War II now two months old. The harmony of the Valkonen household that so impressed Dave
Corween in Scene One(p. 31) is gradually eroded by the tension of waiting to hear the worst. Erik, a hereditary
mixture of progressive American optimism and brooding
Scandanavian determinism, tries unsuccessfully to convince
Kaatri that the war will not affect them. While Erik
insists on trusting the motives of the Soviets ("But— they know perfectly well if they attack us it would mean betrayal of the revolution!"-p. 44), Kaatri can believe only what she has seen: the betrayal of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Erik, a wanderer at heart ("I wish I could do work like that. To be able to wander all over the earth—and see things without being a part of them."-p. 40), a younger version of Alan Squier, remains adamant in his ideals, believing himself inviolable 160
by the effete world: "The trouble with old people is—
they remember too much—old wars, old hates. They can't
get those things out of their minds. But we have no such
memories. We're free of such ugly things. If there's
going to be a better future, we're the ones who are
going to make it"(p. b$). Erik's dreams can only momen
tarily free Kaatri from the present situation; she insists
that pleasant dreams about the future are not "all that
matters! . • . There's now. . . . There's this .... There may be war. Next summer may never come to us"(p. 47).
Kaatri's pessimism is shared by Uncle Waldemar,
who sneers at Erik's contention that the ideals of the
Bolshevik Revolution will spare Finland: "All those gentlemen are dead* And the revolution—that's dead,
too. It's embalmed and exposed in a glass coffin in
front of the Kremlin. It is respected—but dead. Now
comes the true disintegration—the end of the world"(p. 49).
The threat of war holds the greatest terror for Miranda.
In the first scene she is merely the dutiful, charming housewife of a great scientist, cast almost from the
same mold as Elena in Reunion in Vienna (both parts, of course, written specifically for the talents of Lynn
Fontanne). As the play progresses, she grows, like Elena,
in reaction to the trials she faces and by the end of the play develops into a person of great understanding and courage. Her first thought on hearing about the 161 war is for the safety of her son, superceding all other
considerations:
MIRANDA
You say someone will have to pay for your
freedom. But who will receive the payment? Not
you, when you're dead.
KAATRI (fiercely)
Don't listen to her, Erik! Don't listen
to her!
MIRANDA (amiably)
Why shouldn’t he listen to me, Kaatri?
KAATRI (with too much vehemence )
Because you're an American. You don't
understand.
MIRANDA (patiently)
I understand one thing, Kaatri. Erik is
my son. I want to save his life. (p. 54)
The argument ceases momentarily as Erik announces that he and Kaatri are to be married. When Kaarlo enters
and hears this, he congratulates his son as heartily as does Miranda and is just as set against Erik's fighting: "I repeat—in forming this heroic resolve to fight- have you used one grain of the intelligence I know you possess?"(p. 61). Another bitter argument follows before the ringing of church bells calls Kaarlo and Miranda 162 to dress for a peace worship to be held that evening.
The scene ends with a supplication from Kaarlo ("0 God, have pity, for that which we have greatly feared has come upon us."-p. 65), who, before switching off the lights, has glimpsed into the first awful moments that foretell doom and has seen the end he feared but hoped, in a moment of doubt, could be avoided.
Scene Three continues the disintegration of the
Valkonens and, with them, Finland. The city has been bombed (p. 6?). The gloomiest of the Valkonens, Uncle
Waldemar, wishes he could say something to sheer Miranda, but can testify only to doom: "I can believe in the coming of the Anti-Christ. I can believe in the Apo calypse" (p. 73). Erik leaves for the front after an emotional farewell, and Kaarlo must abandon his research and return to the practice of healing. The Valkonens are visited by two acquaintances from Scene One, an appalled
Dave Corween, who encourages Kaarlo to "go to a country where you can carry on your work"(p. 79), and a German anthropologist named Ziemssen who echoes Dave's advice, boasting that the Russians are pawns of the Nazis ("Com munism is a good laxative to loosen the constricted bowels of democracy."-p. 86), and, before leaving, prophesies a Nazi "golden age": "For the first time since the whole surface of the earth became known, one dynamic race is on the march to occupy that surface and 163
rule it!"(p. 89). Kaarlo feels that he cannot abandon
Finland and, when Miranda refuses to flee alone, he
apologizes for having misled her, and himself, by "living
in a dream--a beautiful, wishful dream. . . . And now—
there is war—and our own son goes to fight—and I wake up to discover that reality itself is a hideous night mare" (p. 99)» Vaguely aware of the "last things" before,
Kaarlo negated that awareness by failing to apply its truths to himself. As a scientist, he had separated himself from the species he was trying to save from degeneration. It took this catastrophe and this moment to realize his place in the degenerating world, to realize that, like Erik earlier, he was absolving himself of all responsibility and cheating himself of the possibility of finding personal meaning in the world he was a part of. Suddenly he sees everything differently:
I am a man working in the apparent security of
a laboratory. I am working on a theory so ten
tative that it may take hundreds of years of research, and generations of workers, to prove it. I am trying to defeat insanity—-degeneration
of the human race.... And then—a band of pyromaniacs enters the building in which I work.
And that building is the world—the whole planet—
not just Finland. They set fire to it. What can 164
I do? Until that fire is put out, there can be
no peace—no freedom from fear—no hope of pro
gress for mankind, (pp, 99-100)
This is the binding power of revealed eschatology: "It shuts the door to human fantasies."® That which
I have called eschatological awareness finally involves more than an acquaintance with the idea that all things end or that the natural condition of earthly existence is one of degeneration; it is the awareness that all human conceptions are perceptual fantasies of convenience that become imposing and even stifling when they are given the illusion of eternity. Eschatological awareness is the admission that nothing in this human existence is positively eternal, that we all exist in burning buildings. Eschatological awareness frees men from the fetters of eternity and makes action possible in what becomes "the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace,"9 Nicolas Berdyaev's world of complete sub jectiveness rather than objectiveness in which one is personally involved with every aspect of living and not merely a wanderer.
®Werner Elert, Last Things, p. 19.
9moItmann, p. 338. 165 In Scenes Four and Five Sherwood reminds us again
of the near-hopeless state of the world, a world seemingly determined to carry out its own destruction. In Scene
Four Miranda meets four men accompanying Dave Corween, each more than willing to tell why he has chosen to fight. In Scene Five, Dave reports over American radio of the holocaust at Viipuri: "Looking at the ruination in Viipuri, I could not help thinking of the despairing prophecies made by H. G. Wells in The Shape of Things to Come. Here was the awful picture of the collapse of our Western civilization, the beginning of the Age of Frustration. Stores and factories, public libraries, museums, movie theatres—hospitals and schools and homes— all reduced to junk heaps"(pp. 130-131). In writing a propaganda play intended to awaken an apathetic Amer ican public, Sherwood has repeatedly incorporated these pictures of doom for the same purpose as that of the anonymous authors of the traditional eschatological myths: as a warning, as a means of awakening the elect from their "fantasies," to show that the Weltgericht is always at hand and decisions can no longer be delayed.
This in part may justify the episodic structure of the play which has bothered some critics.In There Shall Be No Night, Sherwood has completely abandoned "hokum,"
lOWalter J. Meserve, Robert E. Sherwood, pp. 148, 152-153 166
has turned his back on the desire to be entertaining,
and has sought to reveal the eschatological nature of
his time through a chorus of voices crying in a twen
tieth century wilderness, voices of doom shaped for
the theater. An eschatological myth essentially is
nothing more "than a fiction designated to express the reality of teleology within history."3-3- Momentarily unconcerned with building a well-structured drama,
Sherwood in this play becomes a modern Yahwist prophet, proclaiming eschaton with the only tools he has: the theater and a ripened awareness of the "reality of teleology" for his particular era. The only climax that concerns him is the one that takes place after the play in the minds of the audience. In seven scenes
(seven the number signifying the presence of Yahweh and the completion of His work), There Shall Be No Night builds toward a telos not of catharsis but of revelation, emotions stimulated to action rather than purged. There
Shall Be No Night reveals in its first five scenes a world that cannot turn from the eschatological confron tation; the last two scenes show why it should not, why there is reason to hope for something better in the era to follow eschaton. At the end of Scene Five, Miranda, having received
UDodd, p, 82 16? word of Erik’s death at the front, goes to Dave Corween hoping to borrow fifty dollars that she can send with
Kaatri, pregnant and ill, on her voyage to America and the sanctuary of the home of Miranda's parents. Though she will be sorry not to see her grandchild, Miranda is
"desperately anxious to get Kaatri out of the country," and she hopes Dave can understand why: "It means one little link with the future. It gives us the illusion of survival—and perhaps it isn't just an illusion"(p. 140).
To Kaarlo, survival is certainly more than an illusion.
In a "little country schoolhouse in eastern Finland" (p. 141) in Scene Six, Kaarlo Valkonen elicits from the moment of his own doom the hope of a golden age to come.
One of his companions, Frank Olmstead, has been reading one of Kaarlo's books and asks: "Why did you conclude a scientific work with Biblical words [quoted from the Book of the Revelation^—and what do you mean by the true revelation?"
KAARLO (simply)
It's the revealing to us of ourselves—of what we are—and we may be. (Smiles.) Of course—
we can all use the Book of Revelation to substan
tiate our own theories. It's an eternally effective
device. I have heard evangelistic charlatans quote it to prove that if you do not accept their 168
nonsense and pay for it, you will most surely
burn in hell. But there is something profound
in those words I quoted. That unknown Jewish
mystic who wrote that--somehow, unconsciously,
he knew that man will find the true name of God
in his own forehead, in the mysteries of his own
mind. "And there shall be no night." That is
the basis of all the work I have done. (p. 150)
The basis of Kaarlo Valkonen’s work has been re velation, specifically the revelation of what "we may be," and the "last things" are what provide the final con clusion as to what we are. The last things are "an eternally effective device" when employed as popular eschatology, but Kaarlo has sought in them "something profound": "the true name of God," the final meaning of all things, which exists within man to be revealed in the midst of the eschatological confrontation. What follows is nightless, a light of consciousness "just beginning to burn with a healthy flame"(p, I52). What he sees as a result of this eschaton is a period of great awakening fob the human race:
For the first time in history, consciousness is not the privilege of a few secluded philosophers.
It is free for all. For the first time, individual
men are fighting to know themselves. . . . listen! 169 What you hear now—this terrible sound that fills
the earth—it is the death rattle. One may say
easily and dramatically that it is the death rattle
of civilization. But—I choose to believe differently
I believe it is the long deferred death rattle
of the primordial beast. We have within ourselves
the power to conquer bestiality, not with our
muscles and our swords, but with the power of the
light that is in our minds. What a thrilling
challenge this is to all Science! To play its part in the ultimate triumph of evolution. To
help speed the day when man becomes genuinely human,
instead of the synthetic creature—part bogus angel,
part actual brute—that he has imagined himself
in the dark past-- (pp. 153-154)
Kaarlo Valkonen, who is near his untimely death and knows it ("The Russians are only a short distance away. This may be my last lecture."), faces doom, like
Abe Lincoln, unafraid because he carries with him a vision of the golden age that not only will survive him but will result partly from the role he plays in the moment of eschaton. The golden age does not mysteriously swoop down from nowhere to replace the Armageddic destruction.
The founding of the golden age is a part of the escha tological confrontation just as is the devastation of 170
the old world, and it demands human participation: "The
end of the world is a divine-human enterprise, the acti vity and the creative work of man also enters into it,
Man not only endures the end, he also prepares the way for it."^-2 Eschatological hope has been described earlier as that which fortifies during the eschatological con frontation. It is more than a sustaining faith that the survivors of the nightmare of eschaton will be even tually rewarded with bliss. Eschatological hope is the recognition that the "divine-human enterprise" has already begun, that, more than a process of destruction, eschaton is the process of transformation and illumination that makes what follows nightless. As such a process, eschaton can be seen as that which Sherwood earlier called his fundamental concern as an artist: growth. The escha tological myth, even in the form of drama, is the fictive representation of human and social growth where a dark corner is suddenly lighted and what was ends in the realization of what now is and might yet be. But growth being process, where is the end? Can there be a last of last things? There can, but only in the myth of the golden age. Because it is process, growth is always haunted by the feeling of discontent, which constantly goads the individual into yearning for
T2Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 251. 171
further growth and its endless progress, endless process.
Yet even here there is a door of exit: "In his discontent
with the present man turns either to the memory of a
golden age in the past or to the expectation of a golden
age in the future. Man is capable of imagining a better,
a fairer, a more truthful and just life than this un pleasing life."3-3 What the golden age represents is
the condition of absolute awareness, a state where further
growth is impossible. As such, the golden age is the
dwelling place of absolute meaning, the mythical preserve
for values that cannot be contradicted. This is the haven Kaarlo Valkonen, and Robert Sherwood, have long
sought and come closest to finding in the last scene
of There Shall Be No Night. Kaarlo Valkonen’s last words are read by Miranda
in Scene Seven from a letter written just before his death. The letter confirms his belief, refined and strength ened by the events of the last year and tested again in the doom that overshadowed the composition of the letter, that there exists an ultimate meaning to be drawn from human endeavors: "I have always believed in the mystic truth of the resurrection. The great leaders of the mind and the spirit—Socrates, Christ, Lincoln—were all done to death that the full measure of their contri-
13Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, pp. 198-199. 172 bution to human experience might never be lost. Now—the
death of our son is only a fragment in the death of our
country. But Erik and the others who give their lives
are also giving to mankind a symbol—a little symbol,
to be sure, but a clear one—of man's unconquerable
aspiration to dignity and freedom and purity in the
sight of God"(p. 176).
What is the "mystic truth of the resurrection?"
It must be that an ultimate revelation of meaning awaits
every human action and decision; death is not final and
therefore triumphant over progress, but is superceded
by the culminating event for which death is only a pre
paration: "It is only the resurrection of all that have
lived which can impart meaning to the historical process
of the world, a meaning, that is, which is commensurable with the destiny of personality,"3-^ Kaarlo has come
to see death only in terms of what it means. Until the moment of resurrection, that moment when all will be revealed, each man's brush with eschaton in the form of his own death becomes a symbol of humanity's movement toward those conditions which the myth of the golden age embodies: "dignity and freedom and purity in the sight of God" achieved at the price of the eschatological confrontation. Kaarlo’s letter is written to Miranda
l^Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, p. 229. 173 to comfort her. She too has prepared for doom, having
learned to use a rifle in expectation of a Russian in
vasion. The letter seems to have succeeded. At the
play's end, Miranda and Uncle Waldemar quietly and without noticeable anxiety await their doom and, for all they
know, the end of Finland and the world: "There is a
kind of peace in this Finnish-American house"(p. 178).
Unlike that wishful postscript that denies the gloomy forecast of Idiot's Delight, Kaarlo Valkonen's vision of the golden age in the last scenes of There Shall Be No Night is embraced by Sherwood as one of true hope: "I believe every word that Doctor Valkonen utters
in the sixth scene of 'There Shall Be No Night.' I believe that man, in his new-found consciousness, can find the means of his redemption"(p. xxix). While it cannot be estimated what if any real effect the play had in awakening audiences to the coming Armageddon of World War II, it seems fairly certain that in writing the play Robert Sherwood discovered not only a new hope for his civilization but also a new personal mission. He took seriously his own warning that the time for action had arrived and temporarily left Broadway to serve in several capacities in the Roosevelt administration. 174
The Last of Last Things:
Reflections on an Atemporal Mirror
For all intents and purposes, the development of
Robert Sherwood's eschatological vision comes to an end
with the writing of There Shall Be No Night. From 1940
until the end of the Second World War, Sherwood served
first as one of Franklin Roosevelt's speechwriters and
later as director of the overseas branch of the Office
of War Information. Apparently as a government administrator
he found little time for dramatic composition. After the war, his major literary output, consisting of two
plays—The Rugged Path (1945) and Small War on Murray
Hill (1957)—and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Roosevelt
and Hopkins, bears scarcely any relation to the escha
tological concerns that dominated his work as the 1930s progressed. Only in scattered remarks from a few essays written before his death in 1955 can evidence be found that after 1945 Sherwood was still at certain moments troubled by the imminence of eschaton.
Toward the end of The Rugged Path, Morey Vinion, the play's main character and the last of Sherwood's
"wanderers," explains, as he has found himself doing repeatedly throughout the second half of the drama, why he has chosen to risk his life in the Second World War, there being no legal obligation for him to see action 175 because of his age and because his experience as a news
paper editor could have easily earned him a desk job. "No longer impressed by the power of the pen,"l he con
fesses to have found for the first time in his life
satisfying meaning through his having known the men who
have fought and died beside him. Then Dr. Querin, a
Filipino professor of philosophy, asks about the future
after the war, and Morey, despite his newly-acquired
optimism, declines to venture a vision: "I've resigned from the role of prophet."2 From the evidence of his
writings after World War II, this admission seems perfectly
applicable to Robert Sherwood as well. The eschatological
concerns which are so vital to his work before the war are suddenly and inexplicably abandoned after 194-5. The feeling of doom that was an essential part of Sherwood even before The Road to Rome still exists and is occasionally articulated, but it is the fear of a doom no longer linked to a consuming eschaton and its golden age.
Instead he speaks of a doom whose ends are immediate and final, rather than cosmic and eternal, ends political, historical, nuclear.
^Robert E. Sherwood, The Rugged Path, in The Best Plays of 1945-46 and the Year Book of the Drama in America, ed. Burns Mantle (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company "J 1965), p. 337.
2Sherwood, p. 338. 176
In neither The Rugged Path nor Small War on Murray
Hill is there any mention of the "last things." Morey
Vinion's ultimate commitment which will mean his own death in the Philippines is the result of a gradual growth in political rather than eschatological awareness.
Eschaton would for him be an impractical concept; the world can be saved in the present with the correct poli tical decisions and actions. The most meaningful event in his life is the sinking of the Townsend, on which he has served as cook. He carries with him to his death the memory of the camaraderie and the selfless dedication to duty he has witnessed during his service. Morey
Vinion is motivated primarily by his emotions and has little interest in searching for meanings. He can see no golden age and attaches no specific meaning to the fact that he will die soon: "We are all condemned to death, sir. We were born that way."3 The meaning of any event or its consequences can only "be decided by history,"^ which to Morey Vinion is the source and end of the world predicament: "The thing is that history has brought us all to a Great Divide, and every one of us has got to make his own decisions"3 Morey's decision is to fight
3sherwood, p. 338.
^Sherwood, p. 321.
•^Sherwood, p. 326. 17? and die, not because there is hope for a golden age,
but simply because there exists an enemy to be vanquished.
In Small War on Murray Hill, Sherwood returns to
some of the devices that have served him well in the
past: the historical setting (New York City, 1776);
the young wife (Mary Murray) whose sexual wiles detain
a general (Howe) from destroying his enemy (an American
force under General Putnam); the husband (Murray) unable
to appreciate what his wife is and has accomplished; the invading general who, despite failing to destroy
his enemy and thus faced with further battles, is trans
formed and is for the first time content as a result of
his liaison. As has been noted more than once, Small
War on Murray Hill bears a striking resemblance to The
Road to Rome, except that it lacks one feature: the feeling of doom that makes the actions of Amytis, Hannibal, and Fabius all the more pregnant with significance. Small
War on Murray Hill is an attempt to be entertaining without being important. The Murray household is never actually
in danger, nor is Manhattan, nor for that matter are the colonies. There is not even a threat of danger, just flirting motivated by an implied patriotism on Mary’s part. On more than one occasion, General Howe seems to be on the verge of asking what it all means, but before he can get the question out he is given a warm bath or a soft bed or a glass of Madeira and loses sight of 178 anything beyond the moment. He has no real need for an eschatological awareness. Eschaton is a drastic measure, and Sherwood in this play gives no indication that any one 's world is beyond repair.
Where the last remnants of Sherwood’s eschatological vision can be found are in a few magazine articles he wrote between 194-9 and 1955» The Armageddic potential of the atomic age troubled him considerably, and he spoke out fervently for a new dedication to a common sense and mutual good-will among persons and between nations that would stave off a nuclear eschaton beyond which he could see nothing hopeful. The golden age, if it were to come at all, had to be established immediately: "Man may realize his true destiny only in a free world where he may live together with his brothers, as God willed it, at peace."® Afraid that the first bomb in a nuclear war would "be the period at the end of civilization,"? he saw world disarmament as the immediate goal to be adopted by Western nations: "It seems self-evident that all prophecy or speculation concerning the next twenty-five years--or the next millennium—must be entirely dependent upon the ability of our own and other nations to prevent
^Robert E. Sherwood, "Credo," Survey, 8? (March 1951), 118.
?Robert E. Sherwood, "Please Don’t Frighten Us," Atlantic Monthly, 183 (February 1949), 79. 179 calamitous war."® Though he referred to himself as
"a man of doom,"9 he remained optimistic despite "the
dreadful fact . . . that the suitable weapons are there
and available to powerful rulers who have displayed no
antagonism to homicide": "I find it inconceivable that
man is about to destroy himself with the products of his own God-given genius."1° It would seem that up to the time of his own end, Robert Sherwood clung to the hope that something survives even eschaton. What is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of
Robert Sherwood's eschatological vision is that during the early 1950s, when the threat of world-ending nuclear warfare was new and terrifying and imminently real, he produced not one drama of a serious eschatological nature.
In a period seething with the awful consciousness of eschaton, when the "age of diaspora" was called "Cold
War" and the mystic symbols of the Book of Revelation were suddenly revealed to be a prophet's report of the atomic weapons of this age, Robert Sherwood was struggling to finish any one of a number of projects and finally could produce only Small War on Murray Hill, a work absolutely devoid of doom. Why, one might ask, did not,
^Robert E. Sherwood, "There Is No Alternative to Peace," Fortune, 52 (July 1955)» 84.
9Walter J. Meserve, Robert E. Sherwood, p. 212.
TOSherwood, "There Is No Alternative to Peace," p. 85. 180
or could not, this "mirror to his times" dramatize the
eschatological temper of the 1950s as he had that of the
1930s? Was it that as a playwright he had somehow "lost
it" during his hiatus from Broadway, had somehow lost
that artistic magic that makes the creative process
unique and finally indefinable? Or had something happened
to alter the eschatological vision so that it no longer
functioned, so that Sherwood no longer felt compelled to testify to the impending appearance of the last things?
Throughout Robert Sherwood's canon can be found
characters suffering an internal conflict between two not-entirely antithetical but certainly incompatible
aspects of their personalities. This conflict is most pronounced in Abe Lincoln, who speaks of a personal
"civil war," but is evident in several other characters:
Hannibal the warrior against Hannibal the hater of mean
ingless death; Elena the wife against Elena the mistress;
Harry Van the optimist against Harry Van the bewildered realist; Kaarlo Valkonen dreamer against Kaarlo Valkonen seer. At the core of each of these conflicts is Sherwood's own dual nature, a clash between Sherwood the historian and Sherwood the wanderer. The former knows and accepts his place in time, knows and accepts his social and domestic obligations. Only an unforeseen event, a catas trophe from beyond the realm of expectation that rends the historian from the position he has grown accustomed 181
to, can awaken in him what the wanderer already knows:
that no situation is permanent. While the historian
is normally willing to settle only for the answers history
can provide, the wanderer is looking always for something more, something final.
Between these two facets of his own intellect and
personality, Robert Sherwood populates his universe. His
most successful plays are built around the wanderer
character or the character who, like Kaarlo Valkonen,
is driven into wandering as eschaton approaches. The
artist is to be found in the wanderer, the seeker after
something better, and not in the historian, the redactor
of what was and is. It was in giving a voice to the
wanderer that Robert Sherwood found his own artistic
voice. He began the research for and the writing of
The Road to Rome in order to solve a personally intriguing historical riddle: to explain to himself why a boyhood
idol passed up the opportunity to sack Rome. Yet in
order to find an answer, he was forced to abandon history,
solving the riddle under the influence of his creative
rather than historical instincts by fabricating Amytis and converting Hannibal from a warrior into a wanderer.
Unable any longer to completely trust history, unable
to believe that the lessons of yesterday explain and shape
the course of the future, Sherwood finds himself henceforth wandering with Hannibal until he can find a viable escape 182 from this world and a haven suitable for both the wanderer and the historian in himself. Freeing the wanderer from the fetters of history has tapped in Sherwood a creative fount, and the search for a suitable haven will take place where history cannot reach him: in the fictive plane of the drama.
What each of his wanderers seeks is an escape: socially, an escape from a world that in itself promises nothing beyond continued despair; eschatologically, an escape from time and its "endless duration." As the wanderer comes to the realization that escape is finally impossible, he turns to another remedy, teleological hope, finding himself transformed into the prophet of the eschaton and its golden age. In The Road to Rome,
Hannibal effects the first escape—in this case, from the clutching demands of history. In choosing to liberate himself from his historical destiny by refusing to march on Rome, Hannibal condemns himself to thirty more years of wandering, but it is the only choice that carries with it the possibility of growth. One cannot see what the prophet sees, cannot understand the human equation, cannot hope to realize the significance of the last things, until one rejects the responsibilities of history that bind and subdue the creative instincts. One can hope to escape a degenerate and dying world only when one is sanctified from that world's institutions and values, 183 as only a homeless wanderer can be. In Reunion in Vienna,
Sherwood examines the possibility of escaping from the
"No Man's Land" of modern uncertainty by retreating into a blissful past, but the benefits of this escape mechanism appear to be short-lived and its ultimate consequences indeterminable. In The Petrified Forest, he tests the possibility of escaping this burned-out desert of a world through the total commitment of one's life to the building of a better future. Again the rewards are uncertain, and the desert remains. Having failed to find escape from this world in either the memory of the past or the dream of the future, Sherwood divorces himself from time just as he has from history and through a hotel of wanderers projects an end to time.
Idiot's Delight is the final answer to all escapes and the beginning of a new direction in Robert Sherwood's quest for a haven from wandering and history. Set at a location where all people are wanderers denying past and present, it is at once Sherwood's celebration of that degeneration which will make renewal a necessity and his hymn to the death of this world where masks and lies substitute for the truth that is realized at the moment of doom: that escape and renewal are impossible without eschaton. It is a truth that must be faced by both the wanderer and the historian. Abe Lincoln the wanderer and Kaarlo Valkonen, the chronicler of human degeneration, 184
both hope to find the means of avoiding eschaton, but both come to accept its inevitability and are thus rewarded with a vision of the golden age, the haven where growth ends and historian and wanderer dissolve into the "perfect man," a being conceivable in this world only in those special moments when one enters "existential time."
There Shall Be No Night was for Robert Sherwood the last of last things. In that play he gave expression to all the elements of the experience of eschaton, and, in finding a golden age, he furnished a haven that ended the wanderer's travels. Then Robert Sherwood left Broadway to work for the government, not so much out of a sense of patriotic duty as out of artistic necessity, as the rest of his literary career reveals. Having laid the wanderer to rest, he had nothing more to say about eschaton;
There Shall Be No Night had said it all. The wanderer spent, Sherwood had only the historian to fall back on, and his writing after World War II was drawn from an awareness of history without concern for eschatology.
He proved to be an able historian, as Roosevelt and
Hopkins attests; but while it remains a thorough record of the methods and accomplishments of the two most powerful individuals in the American government from
1940-1945, the book speaks only in terms of historical facts analyzed in a hindsight seemingly unaware of eschatological implications. He wrote no eschatological 185 work in the 1950s because in There Shall Be No Night
he had beheld the eschatological vision complete, a
vision whose truths were relevant to any historical situation.
Regarding the growth of his eschatological awareness,
Robert Sherwood could indeed be seen as a "mirror to his
times," but a special kind of mirror. Like the apocal yptic prophet who sees not his place in history but only
the presence of eschaton before him, Sherwood was an atemporal mirror reflecting not only the events and
attitudes of his day but catching in dramatic images the timeless eschatological realities that finally render his world, and ours, meaningful. 186
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