Arts and Letters

During the thirty-six years between 1923 and 1959 Maxwell Anderson wrote and produced approximately that many plays. Many of them were successful; all of them were serious. No playwright of his time was more devoted to the theatre than the author of Saturday's Children, Elizabeth the Queen, Both Your Houses, High Tor, Key Largo, Eve of St. Mark, Barefoot in Athens, and Winterset. Before any of these came What Price Glory?, done in collaboration with Laurence Stallings in 1924; and the year before that, High Desert, a failure but a distinguished one, written in verse—an innovation for those days—and dealing with a tragedy set in North Dakota, where Anderson had spent a portion of his youth. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1888; he studied at the University of North Dakota, and later at Leland Stanford University; he taught school; he worked on newspapers in the West and the Middle West; and then in 1918, at the invitation of Alvin Johnson, he came to New York to write for the New Republic. In New York he also wrote for the Globe and the World, and helped to found The Measure, a magazine devoted entirely to poetry. Thus he was thirty-five before he entered the theatre; but once there, he proved to be one of its most faithful and dedicated members.

He won many honors—the Pulitzer Prize for Both Your Houses, and the Award of the Drama Critics Circle for Winterset and High Tor—and in 1938, together with Robert Sherwood, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman, and Sidney Howard, he formed The Playwrights' Company, for which he wrote several of his finest works. When he was given The Gold Medal for Drama in 1954, John Mason Brown, presenting it to him in the name of the Institute, pointed out that he was a "career playwright," not an "occasional playwright;" that is to say, he was a dramatist who never relaxed his effort or his ambition, because every one of his days was spent in the service of the stage. Mr. Brown said too that all of Anderson's plays, both the failures and the successes, were "the works of a brave man, unwilling to be bound by Broadway's standards, passionate in his devotion to freedom, no less passionate in his resolve to write as he chooses, and animated by a vision of the theatre singular in its dignity and beauty." He wanted plays that "lifted from the ground," and that followed the human spirit wherever it flew, no matter into what tormented regions where truth battled with untruth. Robert Sherwood, nominating him for membership in this Academy in 1955, spoke in the same vein of Anderson's "endless courage in his adventurous experimentation with new forms…. He has considered the theatre as a forum, in the classical sense, for the discussion of political and social as well as aesthetic ideas." None of his plays was a tract; but Winterset, like Gods of the Lightning before it, dealt powerfully with injustice, as the plays he wrote during World War II were eloquent against tyranny in its current form, the form of Fascism. All forms of totalitarianism he hated with his whole heart. He called them "political patent medicines." Yet the atmosphere in which he viewed them was the atmosphere of tragedy, which he thought deeply about. One of his most valuable books is a critical one, The Essence of Tragedy, wherein the emphasis is upon illumination rather than disaster. "Men," he said, "are better than they think they are." But for him it was plain that tragedy is the best teacher of this.

I wish I could claim that I had been one of Maxwell Anderson's close friends. The fact is that I scarcely knew him before he began to attend meetings of the Academy in this very room, where he always sat by himself and listened with great intentness to whatever was discussed. When he spoke, which he seldom did, it was with complete seriousness, as if he took the affairs of the Academy to be of genuine importance, and worthy of his best thought. He impressed me too by his modesty, even by his shyness; nor was he given to small talk. Eventually he revealed a plan he had been conceiving: a plan for an annual prize, comparable in value and prestige to the Nobel Prize, which the Academy and the Institute would bestow upon some artist of their choice. He was encouraged to investigate the possibilities of this, and before he died he had discussed the matter with foundations which might subsidize such an award. The question is where he left it; but I should like to read some sentences from a letter he wrote me early in January of this year, after he had engaged in one of those discussions. The subject of the sentences is something else altogether. "How I envy you," he said, "those bits of verse that seem to flame up from you—and from time to time get into magazines! In my experience there's no elation like that of getting a poem on paper. It doesn't come to me often lately. Many happy returns of it—and Happy New Year. Yours, Max." Suddenly I felt that I knew Max after all, and knew him well. His reserve—and mine—had been broken through, and I understood why others had spoken of his kindness, of his unobtrusive generosity, of his intimate interest in persons with whom, perhaps only by chance, he had come in contact.

Two months later he was dead, and I was asked to speak at his funeral along with Robert Anderson and Marc Connelly. Remembering his letter, I reread the book of poems, You Who Have Dreams, which he had published in 1925. I was overwhelmed by the evidence this book contained that "loneliness," as I said the next day, was for him in his deepest thought "the secret of existence." The volume is an exquisite study of the state to which every individual somehow knows he is doomed, though few have considered it as seriously as Max did. Witness these two epigrams toward the close of the book. The first is called, significantly, "Alone":

You think that you are near me, little one—lying on my shoulder, comforted. But there is a gulf between us two, alas, and between all others, deeper and darker than the abyss that holds the evening from the morning star.

The second is called "The Bayonet":

Do not struggle, dear friend, O do not try to rise. See, the shaft is broken sharp off in your breast; wait a little; lie still and wait for the surgeon while I put this water to your lips. O dear friend, be quiet; your hands are bleeding from the edge.

I read these and other poems at the funeral, and said not only that Max was a poet first and last but that loneliness had been the subject he knew best. I was afraid I might be wrong; but reassurance came the next day from his son Quentin, my colleague at Columbia, who wrote me: "I suppose it was really there to see all along—the tie, that is, between my father's wide and unwearied concern for people and his sense of the lone and often desperate quality of individual lives…. The little volume of verse, published at 37, really carried the burden of meaning that he tried all his life to enforce." Since then I have heard men say that Maxwell Anderson had few close friends; the one he loved and respected most was Robert Sherwood; but for the most part he was hard to know. Somehow I doubt this. He probably thought himself that he had no gift for friendship, a thing he prized so highly that his standards for it were difficult to meet. But it was in him all the while. His tribute to Robert Sherwood, read here in May, 1956, was written in free verse, and two of its lines went thus:

The earth is now altered.
The city is emptier and colder.

His own death adds meaning to those lines, at the same time that it reminds us of one who in his own heart and mind was full and warm.