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Mr. Robert Emmet Sherwood speaks very slowly. Between the
subject and the predicate of his sentences there ensues
often the charged and prolonged hiatus that separates the
parts of a mystery serial. With these interstitial silences
he holds you like the Ancient Mariner. There is no force
that can accelerate his tempo. In simple dissyllables, where
scope for the retard is limited, he puts in an extra
hazard—for "tinkling," for example, he will say "tink—e—ling;"
for "dangling," "dang—e—ling." The extra syllable cushions
him against impetuosity. The improvised vowel gives him time
and strength to gather his forces for the ultimate
commitment of the completed word. Between his words,
and even between his syllables, there is plenty of time for
personal reverie on the part of his listener. Between
subject and predicate you can start, and often finish, a
conversation with somebody else, and between his sentences
you might read "War and Peace."
"What is that nine feet of gloom you call your brother?"
Noel Coward once inquired of the playwright's sister,
Rosamond Sherwood. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in
the least gloomy about Mr. Sherwood except his habitual
facial expression, which is dour. His silences, like any
vast, still thing, are solemn, but they are often punctuated
with the musketry of a shrewd wit. No sooner are you relaxed
for a comfortable period of attrition than you succumb to a
Blitzkrieg. At a meeting of the Playwrights'
Company,* of which he is a founder and director, one of the
members said he was on tenterhooks as to whether he would
succeed in procuring the services of a certain actor for a
forthcoming production. Another member, with a mania for
definition, wanted to know what tenterhooks were. "They
are," said Mr. Sherwood, "the up—hol—stery of the anx—i—ous
seat." Another time, when a foreign manuscript was under
discussion in which the author's meaning was cloaked in
symbolism and the general tone abstruse, Mr. Sherwood said,
"I—pre—fer—the—plays—of—Rob—ert—Em—met—Sher—wood. H
e—hasn't—got
—much—to—say—but—at—least—he—does—not—try—to—say—any—thing—else."
Again, there was a painful occasion when it devolved upon
Sherwood to convey to a director whom he admired and liked
that circumstances outside his control made it impossible
for the director to continue on the play in question. There
paraded the room in firm adagio a convoy of inexorable
sentences barricading the unfortunate director against
humiliation. "I—haven't," Mr. Sherwood was heard to
pronounce, "the—tem—per—a—ment—o r—the—ex—per—i—ence—to—han—dle—a—sit—u—a—tion—like—this—and—when—it—a—ris—es—I—d
o—not—ask—what—would—Je—sus—do—or—what—would—Abe—Lin—coln—do—but—I—ask—what—would—Gil—bert—Mill—er—do—and—then—I—can—not—do—it."
It is impossible to convey typographically the stately march
of a Sherwood sentence and the attempt will he abandoned
henceforth. Mr. Sherwood's speech is not, as the dashes may
suggest, hesitant. He never hesitates. He never flounders.
He waits, as a glacier waits, and then moves.
Simplicity is the keynote of the Sherwood character.
Recently, at a night club, where he was sitting with Mrs.
Sherwood and some friends, a palmist read his palm. "You are
a very disillusioned man," said the palmist. "You don't
believe in Cupid and you don't believe in Santa Claus." When
the palmist went away and Sherwood was off dancing, Mrs.
Sherwood ventured a dissenting opinion. "I don't suppose in
the whole world," she said, "would you find anyone who
believed so thoroughly in both Cupid and Santa Claus as
Sherwood does." In lighter and less familiar gatherings than
meetings of the Playwrights' Company, Sherwood is apt to
reveal himself as the anxious innocent not quite at ease
among the super-sophisticates. He has a reputation as a
consistent bore at dinner parties. This is no fluke. He has
achieved his reputation honestly, through hard,
conscientious labor. He admits that because of his strenuous
efforts he has come to personify a figure in the famous
cartoon by Charles Dana Gibson—the lonely fellow at the
dinner party, making bread pills in isolation because the
women on either side of him have resorted to their other
partners. At a dinner party on Long Island a few years ago,
Sherwood found himself sitting next to Mrs. Preston Davie,
an ardent Republican, who was writing daily articles for the
Herald Tribune denouncing the New Deal, preëlection
prose which ticked off the days left in which to save the
American way of life. Mrs. Davie turned hopefully to
Sherwood and was confronted by a brisk silence. As her
partner showed no indication of doing anything about it, she
did. "Which," she proposed, "do you think women prefer, Mr.
Sherwood—reliable but dull gentlemen or fascinating cads?"
This question was right up Sherwood's alley. He marshalled
his facts for the reply, scanned minutely the long galleries
of his acquaintanceship in both camps, drew careful
parallels in his mind, shrewdly picked John Barrymore as the
type of fascinating cad, hit on someone who might epitomize
the sensible male citizen, and then, feeling himself finally
ready, he took careful aim and prepared to return the shot.
"Well," he began, and turned to Mrs. Davie, but when his
suspensive pause after the "Well" had spent itself, he was
horrified to see that Mrs. Davie had gone. She was no longer
with him. Lonely, she had edged into the conversation on the
other side and Sherwood was left high and dry with his
parallels hanging.
In London, at dinner in Adelphi Terrace, Bernard Shaw, the
host, was discoursing with wonderful fluency on the main
currents of nineteenth-century liberalism. Sherwood ate away
abstractedly, happily willing to
live and let live. Suddenly, to his horror, he felt the
attention of the table focussed on him. Shaw had reached the
end of his peroration and wanted an opinion from America. He
was trying to pin Sherwood down. "Don't you agree, Mr.
Sherwood?" Shaw asked point-blank. It was a moment for an
epigram, for a riposte, for a neat retort. Nothing occurred
to Sherwood but blanket acquiescence. He murmured, "I
certainly do," and swallowed some of the food he had been
quietly enjoying. No one heard his remark and Sherwood was
grateful. But Mr. Shaw was insistent. America must be heard!
"What did you say, Mr. Sherwood?" he inquired. Sherwood's
first sensation was panic; this was replaced by reassurance.
"Thank God, I've got another chance," he thought, saying
nothing. With the attention of two dozen of England's
sharpest intellectuals converging upon him, he looked once
more into his mind and found there nothing more than he had
found the first time. At last he spoke. "I said, 'I
certainly do.'" Slaked, Mr. Shaw returned to his
lucubrations.
Sherwood is one of the greatest literary earners of all
time, although, as with any highly paid worker in the
present period, there is a vast difference between what he
earns and what actually gets into his bank account. The
prices his plays have brought from the movies are fabulous:
$110,000 for "The Petrified Forest," $85,000 for "Reunion in
Vienna," $135,000 for "Idiot's Delight," and $225,000, plus
a share in the picture royalties, for "Abe Lincoln in
Illinois." The theatrical producers' and playbroker's share
absorbs roughly half of this income, and Sherwood's federal
and state taxes in recent years have amounted to around
$100,000 annually. The sale of a play like "Abe Lincoln in
Illinois" for $225,000 thus means that the playwright
receives about $115,000, and, since this sum puts him into
the upper-income brackets, he pays roughly $9,000 of the
$115,000 to the state and $43,000 more to the federal
government. Bernard Shaw and George S. Kaufman, with their
long careers of successes, have probably outstripped
Sherwood in total earnings, but Sherwood has undoubtedly
made more money in any one of the last ten years than Ibsen
did in his entire life. He gives a good deal of it away; in
the year before the opening of the controversial "There
Shall Be No Night," he had contributed something over
$20,000 to various charitable organizations, and all the
royalties on the new play thus far have been made over to
the American Red Cross and the Finnish relief fund.
The year 1935 was a wonder year for Sherwood. He finished
"The Petrified Forest" and left New York for London, where
he made the immensely successful adaptation of Jacques
Deval's "Tovarich." He had been divorced from his first
wife, the former Mary Brandon, the year before. He went to
Budapest to marry his present wife, the former Madeline
Hurlock, of Federalsburg, Maryland, who had just been
divorced from Marc Connelly in Riga, a Baltic Reno. The
happy couple went at once to London, and Sherwood got to
work, with Rene Clair, on the motion picture "The Ghost Goes
West." He followed the perturbed spirit of that pleasant
film to New York, where he worked on "Pride and Prejudice"
for Max Gordon and wrote "Idiot's Delight" for Alfred Lunt
and Lynn Fontanne. The somewhat vertiginous transitions of
this period were the outward manifestation of a very
profound inner one. He turned his back on the nostalgias of
Vienna and St. Petersburg and looked at his own time.
Sherwood feels that his career began with "The Petrified
Forest." But though he may believe that the integration
between what he is and his work, which was to find
completion in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" and "There Shall Be
No Night," began with "The Petrified Forest," that
integration really began with "Acropolis," which was
produced unsuccessfully in London in 1933. He wrote this
play immediately after reading "Mein Kampf" and it was
intended to illustrate the incursion of totalitarianism
(Sparta) on an intellectually free city-state (Athens).
Between these five plays—"Acropolis," "The Petrified
Forest," "Idiot's Delight," "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," and
"There Shall Be No Night"—there may be traced a creative
blood transfusion. Lines and ideas which Sherwood dropped
out of one he used in another, and some of the speeches that
were not littered by Pericles in "Acropolis" appeared in the
last letter written by the
Finnish Dr. Valkonen to his wife in "There Shall Be No
Night."
Mr. Sherwood’s working method is peculiar. He will sometimes
carry an idea around in his head for several years, thinking
about it, turning it over in his mind, resolving its
difficulties, without making a single note. When he reaches
a point of cerebral saturation he sits down and writes the
play, sometimes in a phenomenally brief time. When he works,
he works day and night. He suffers from a terribly painful
ailment in the sinus region, charmingly named tic
douloureux. That sobriquet appears to be an
understatement. Doctors say that it is one of the most
agonizing afflictions known to man. Sherwood has been all
over Europe and America to see doctors for this ailment. The
attacks come infrequently, sometimes once a year, but when
they come, they are violent; still, if he has an idea for a
play, he works through them. His speed is a subject for
amused comment among the members of the Playwrights'
Company. At the regular Thursday meetings of the group
someone will usually ask whether Sherwood wrote a play the
night before. At a meeting last winter, Sherwood
shamefacedly made an announcement. He was supposed to have
been rewriting "Acropolis" for Lunt and Fontanne. He looked
guiltily at his colleagues and there filtered from him a
confession in slow motion. "I haven't been rewriting
'Acropolis' at all. I finished a new play. I got the idea
just after Christmas. The scene is in Finland." The meeting
at which he made this admission took place on February 1,
1940, which means that he had written the play in five
weeks. He had got the idea from a broadcast from Finland on
Christmas Day. Maxwell Anderson said, "You are quite right,
Bob, not to have told us. Writing is a vice which should be
practiced in secret."
This vice Sherwood practices in town. He doesn't go to the
country to write. The silence distracts him. He likes the
hum and the excitement of the city. He likes night clubs,
parties, and social life, and is famous for his solo singing
and dancing in the homes of his friends. One specialty is in
great demand—his rendition of "When the Red, Red, Robin
Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along." This he sings with a solemn
intensity and dances in a style which he calls his
impression of Fred Astaire. For this act he puts on an opera
hat and uses a smart ebony walking stick.
Sherwood does not feel it necessary to go to a place to
write about it. He wrote "The Road to Rome" without ever
going to Rome, "Acropolis" though he has never been in
Greece, "The Petrified Forest" without seeing Arizona, and
"There Shall Be No Night" witout a visit to Finland. He
travels a great deal, however, and two winters ago spent
some time in South America; his friends think he may very
well be carrying around in his head an idea or two he picked
up there. In his contemporary political plays, he seems to
have a knack of ominous prophecy. Two days before "Idiot's
Delight" opened in Washington, D. C., in 1936, Hitler
occupied the Rhineland, and the weekend before it opened in
London in 1938, the Germans walked into Austria. One London
paper said, "This play must have been written over the
weekend."
In 1927, Sherwood thought out "The Road to Rome," his first
play and a great success, in taxicabs going from one movie
to another while he was motion-picture editor of the old
Life. The actual writing took him three weeks and the
first draft was the one that was put into rehearsal and on
the stage. In Reno, where, in 1934, he spent the customary
six weeks, he took a drive one day with his lawyer, Lester
Summerfield. Sherwood was struck by the paradox of the
perpetual sluicing through this primeval Nevada valley of
the thick, sedimentary stream of decadent urban society.
Summerfield also had become aware of this in the course of
his practice in Reno, and Sherwood and he talked it over at
some length. Sherwood knew instantly that he wanted to write
a play about it. He asked Summerfield if he could fix him up
with an office. The lawyer could. The next morning Sherwood
left the Riverside Hotel, went to the office, and began to
write his play. He reached the point at which his hero asks,
"Where does this road lead to?" He walked across the street
to a gas station, got an automobile road map, and went back
to his office and spread it out before him. With his finger,
he traced a line on the map from Reno to Truckee,
California. At Truckee, on the map, beside a little arrow he
saw a notation, "This way to the Petrified Forest." He had
his hero's destination and the title to the play. This is
how it came to pass that when he was asked once what he did
during his six weeks in Reno, Sherwood was able to reply,
"Well, I
wrote 'The Petrified Forest.' I finished it in four weeks
and sent it to New York, but the last two weeks were awful
boring."
Mr. Sherwood is fond of offices for playwriting. He wrote
"Reunion in Vienna" in 1931 in the office building of his
publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, on Fifth Avenue. He had
had the idea for the play since 1929. That year he went
abroad for the first time after the war. "The Road to Rome"
was playing in Vienna and he was invited to see it. He was
taken to Sacher's Restaurant and met old lady Sacher
herself. She told him of a special room upstairs where she
gave parties for broken-down aristocrats. He went up and
looked in on one of these parties, and he saw at once the
pathos of these discarded and indigent semi-royalties,
moving about in a shadow play of vanished grandeur. At the
time he was writing his one novel, "The Virtuous Knight."
This was a story of the Third Crusade and was conspicuously
unsuccessful. Sherwood found the publication of a novel tame
compared with the immediacy and excitement of putting on a
play. It was the difference between reading a review on the
morning after and a few leisurely paragraphs under the
heading "Other Books." He wrote two more plays, "Waterloo
Bridge" and "This Is New York," but all the time he was
thinking of that upstairs room in Sacher's. As soon as he
finished these plays, he wrote "Reunion in Vienna," in about
three weeks. This was played by Lunt and Fontaine and was an
immense success in New York and in London. In the second act
of this play, the wife of a prominent psychoanalyst, who had
been in love in the old days with the Archduke Rudolf
Maximilian, meets him again in the upstairs room at Sacher's.
The former Duke, now a taxi-driver in Nice, is febrile and
epileptic. He comes to the party and sees his ex-mistress
again after many years. He remembers that she has left him
to marry a doctor, and as a greeting he slaps her violently
in the face. This slap precedes their kiss of passionate
reunion. The business of the face-slapping has been
attributed to the inspiration of Alfred Lunt, but Mr. Lunt
will tell you, with considerable wonder in his voice, that
Mr. Sherwood invented it. "That piece of business was in the
script," says Mr. Lunt. "Think of his knowing that—that
shy man!"
Sherwood carried around with him for two years the idea for
"Idiot's Delight." During this time he travelled all over
Europe. Once, in Budapest, he went into the Arizona Night
Club and saw there an American cabaret troupe. He talked to
the leader of the troupe, a hoofer, and got the idea for
Harry Van. For the life of him, though, he couldn't see who
the woman would be and how he would get her into the play.
Finally he visualized her as the phony-Russian mistress of a
munitions maker, a girl who had once slept with Van in a
hotel in Omaha. Having got that, he was set, and in the
apartment in which he was then living in New York he went to
work. When he gets started on a play, Sherwood is seized
with a spectator's anxiety to find out what is going to
happen and his impatience to know drives him sometimes to
extraordinary exertions. When he was writing "Idiot's
Delight," he worked one night until one o'clock. Then he
went to bed, but he couldn't stand being left in suspense,
so he got up at three and finished the second act by dawn.
He wrote the entire script in two weeks and handed it to the
Lunts.
In 1932, after an extended period in Hollywood, during which
he had found himself growing fond of private swimming pools,
butlers, and back-yard tennis courts, Sherwood bought a farm
at Great Enton, Surrey, England, and determined to spend his
summers there, it being six thousand miles from California.
The place has no swimming pool, no butler, and no tennis
court. Besides a cook and a pair of maids, the servant staff
consists of a fearless but ineffectual carpenter whose time
is occupied almost entirely in crawling over the roof and
hammering at it. It seldom leaks in the same place twice,
but it always leaks somewhere. The Sherwoods have gone to
Great Enton every summer for some years past, and Mary,
Sherwood's daughter by his first marriage, has spent her
school vacations with them. This summer the house is
occupied by refugee children from London.
Should you, last summer, have revived at Great Enton the
day-with-Thomas-Hardy manner, you would have found your host
at ten-o'clock breakfast, deep in the Times. You
would have been left with the Daily Mail, which
informs you that Sir Stafford Cripps has heckled the Prime
Minister keenly the day before about the transfer to Germany
of Czech gold. (Remote
crisis, June, 1939!) You inquire of your host what is the
attitude of the Times leader about Sir Stafford. If
you do not get a prompt reply to your query, it is not
because your host is rude; it is simply because he is not
reading about Sir Stafford Cripps but studying the long,
scholarly articles in the Times on yesterday's races.
A good part of Mr. Sherwood's summer is spent in reading
about what horses won the day before and in deciding on what
horses he is going to bet today. It is quite an elaborate
ritual. After he has recovered from yesterday's bad news in
the Times, he calculates how much he has lost and how
much he is prepared to bet today. To place the bets, he has
to wait for the midday Standard, which comes in just
about when he has finished analyzing the Times'
racing news. The Standard helps him decide on his
choices, and then he goes to the telephone to place the bets
with his brokers. He has two. It is the correct thing in
England, when you are what is known as "making investments,"
to use an assumed name, and Sherwood masquerades under two:
Captain Sherwit and Old Savoy.
He comes back from the phone faintly apologetic but already
basking in a sense of opulence, happy in the knowledge that
he won't know until tomorrow how much he has lost. For a
while conversation may become less specialized: the visit of
Mr. Strang to Moscow, the royal visit to America (pinwheels
of hope, June, 1939!). The guest inquires whether it is his
host's habit to do any writing in the morning. "Not here,"
it is explained to him. "In other places, yes, the morning
is fine, but not here." Mrs. Sherwood, who presides over the
activities at Great Enton with a kind of acidulated and
deflationary charm, generally disdains any part in these
sordid race-track speculations, but one day she announced
that she had happened by chance to look over the entries in
the Times and had discovered there a horse whose
appeal she found to be irresistible. Sherwood thinks that
this was by virtue of her marriage to him; the name of the
horse was Old Monotonous. She insisted that her husband bet
ten shillings each way on this horse for her. Mr. Sherwood
complied. The horse failed to run in the money, but every
time he ran, right up to the outbreak of the second World
War, Mrs. Sherwood doggedly backed him. In spite of his
consistent record of defeat, Mrs. Sherwood's faith in Old
Monotonous remained undimmed and he became a kind of family
mascot. Mr. Sherwood's daughter, Mary, became infected also
by the strange appeal of this steady loser and she followed
his career with the fanatical enthusiasm characteristic of
the devotees of lost causes. In time, Old Monotonous, the
equine Bryan, became more than a mascot He became a symbol.
In their many letters to each other, Mrs. Sherwood and Mary
Sherwood have come to refer to their husband and father as
Old Monotonous.
By lunchtime the racing news has been assimilated and the
Sherwood budget readjusted. Mr. Sherwood then turns to
aviation. He repairs to his hangar, a sort of substantial
play shed, where the Sherwoods sometimes give amateur
theatricals. In even ranks, with chromium wings gleaming in
the sun and multicolored bodies beautifully painted, starred
and crossed and circled, rests Sherwood's flotilla, waiting
for its master to animate it. A new plane has arrived from
London. Icarus takes it out of its cardboard crate to
assemble it. On its side is painted "Phoebus." "This is a
marvellous specimen, one of the best made, and costs six
guineas," he says, holding it in his hand. Laboriously
Sherwood takes out the sturdy oil-paper wings. He loses a
pin, which necessitates a careful search of the floor. Be
pricks his finger as he finds the pin, but is undaunted. He
works till the machine is completed, a shipshape Lilliputian
air raider. "Come," says the aviator firmly. You follow him
to a height back of the house, where there is a smooth
stretch of lawn, and there you are permitted to assist at a
maiden flight. There is an interval of tension and the new
plane is off, sailing steadily over the pleasant Surrey
landscape. The rangy pilot hurries after it, looking up
anxiously to follow the trajectory of the Phoebus. He
disappears in a clump of oak trees.
Not far from the Sherwood's
place is the house where George Eliot lived. It is a country
which old residents in the neighborhood find greatly changed
and faintly suburbanized, but which, in the golden summer
weather of June, 1939 —a season described by the English as
"the sweet of the year"—in that last dreaming interval, the
American visitor could still find tranquil and
lovely. Possibly the author of "Abe Lincoln in Illinois,"
painfully adjusting a strut or a propeller, is assailed by
some idea that eventually will be materialized for audiences
in New York by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, but there is
no visible evidence of it. There are letters telling the
grosses at the Plymouth Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street
and trips to London to see actors for the late Sidney
Howard's forthcoming play, which Sherwood is handling as Mr.
Howard's executor. During that last summer of 1939, in the
intervals between dart-throwing and rummy, the visitors talk
discursively of Hitler and wonder how the Russian
rapprochement with Germany is getting on. By air, Great
Enton is about two hours from the Tempelhof airfield in
Berlin. Will it happen and when? But the midday Standard
arrives. Mrs. Sherwood cuts flowers in the sun-filled,
droning garden and on the telephone Old Monotonous transmits
his latest hunches to his brokers in London.
(This is the first of two articles on Mr. Sherwood. The
second will appear next week.)
*The Playwrights' Company consists of Mr. Sherwood, Maxwell
Anderson, Elmer Rice, and the author of this article. |
