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The Emmet family from which Robert Emmet Sherwood is
descended on his mother's side was Protestant but infected
fiercely by the cause of Irish freedom, an infection which
has obsessed a long line of fervent English Protestants. The
first Emmet in America, Thomas Addis Emmet, was an older
brother of the Irish martyr Robert Emmet, who managed to
utter, before he was executed by the English, the
declamatory sentence "When my country takes her place among
the nations of the earth, then and not until then let my
epitaph be written."
Thomas Addis Emmet was a considerable personage in his own
right. He was exiled to America in 1803, and once here he
made a great reputation for himself as a lawyer, in one
instance fighting a case against the great Daniel Webster,
who said of him after the trial, "The erudition, talents,
and eloquence of the Irish bar have made their appearance in
America in the person of Thomas Addis Emmet." The
intertwinings of the Emmets are baffling to an outsider;
members of the family themselves, when asked about the
relationships within the clan, get a bewildered and
terrified look in their eyes. It is an immensely exfoliated
family, studded with celebrated names in medicine, in law,
in art, and in science. The playwright's uncle, William
LeRoy Emmet, is one of the great engineers of the world. He
is an Edison medallist and the successor of Steinmetz in the
General Electric Company. At seventy, he was retired
on a pension but got restless and is now back in
Schenectady, working on a mercury boiler which he thinks
will completely outmode the conventional steam boiler. He
spends part of his time in Schenectady and the rest with his
sister, Robert Sherwood's mother, in her apartment on East
Seventy-second Street. In Mrs. Sherwood's dining room are
portraits of the original Emmets, one painted by Allan
Ramsay, who was a court painter to George III. The
resemblance between Robert Sherwood and these Emmets is
striking. They were very tall and had prominent, dark
eyebrows. The Emmet girls run to painting and sculpture; for
five generations there has been at least one artist among
them, down to one of the playwright's nieces, who is a
sculptor.
The passion which in the nineteenth century the Emmets felt
against England Sherwood now feels against dictatorship and
injustice anywhere. He is a fiercely militant liberal. He
hates murder, persecution, and censorship, not only when
they are committed by Nazis but also when they are committed
by Utopians. He is an impassioned New Dealer and a fanatical
devotee of Franklin D. Roosevelt, enthusiasms not shared by
all the other Sherwoods and Emmets. Recently the film
version of "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" was shown at the White
House. Arthur Murray Sherwood, Robert's brother, who is a
determined Republican, unpleasantly asked Robert to bring
him back a souvenir from the White House when he went there
to dine. "What would you like?" asked Robert. "His scalp?"
At lunch one day in town, Sherwood was approached by a close
relative of a former occupant of the White House, a
distinguished Republican. The man greeted Sherwood very
cordially but got a frigid reception. He hung about for a
moment or two, making a few stabs at conversation. There is
nothing so lonely as a Sherwood silence. The Republican
tried to dent it, to win from Sherwood some ray of human
warmth. He failed, and made a lame exit. When he was finally
gone it was pointed out to Sherwood that he had not
overwhelmed the poor man with cordiality. Sherwood said,
with his usual thoughtful deliberation, "I was at a dinner
party with him the other night and I didn't like the way he
talked about Franklin Roosevelt." Republican candidates for
President will have to be very careful what they say in
front of Sherwood.
The author of the atlas of plays called "The Road to Rome,"
"Waterloo Bridge," "Reunion in Vienna," "Idiot's Delight,"
"Abe Lincoln in Illinois," and "There Shall Be No Night" was
born in New Rochelle on April 4, 1896. His mother, the
former Rosina Emmet, is a distinguished painter whom
Who's Who lists as a medal-winner in Paris, Chicago,
Buffalo, and St. Louis. The Neysa McMein of her day, she was
the most popular illustrator in Harper's Bazaar and
other magazines of the time. When, in 1922, Robert Sherwood
married his first wife, Mary Brandon, who came from Indiana,
the bride's grandmother was in ecstasy; she said she was so
happy that her granddaughter was going to marry the son of
the woman who drew all the romantic illustrations in her own
youth.
Robert's father, Arthur Murray Sherwood, was a successful
investment broker with a craze for the theatre. Though he
belonged to the Brook, Century, and Knickerbocker Clubs, his
great desire was to get into the Lambs, and he finally made
it. He never missed a Gambol and George M. Cohan was his
god. Not long ago, after the Yankee-Doodle Boy had been
engaged by the Playwrights' Company to star in the late
Sidney Howard's last play (a production which was
subsequently postponed until next fall), Sherwood ran into
Cohan and one of Cohan's friends at the Plaza. Cohan
introduced his companion to Sherwood with the remark "This
is Robert Emmet Sherwood, my new boss." Sherwood then told
Cohan of his father's adoration of him and said, "How happy
he would have been if he could have lived to see the day
when you referred to me as your boss!"
The elder Sherwood had played leading roles in the Hasty
Pudding Club shows at Harvard and had founded the Harvard
Lampoon. In the Lampoon's offices today is a gold
plaque on which is inscribed, "Presented by Arthur Murray
Sherwood, first President." Mr. Sherwood wanted to go on the
stage when he left Harvard but was advised not to on account
of his height. He was almost as tall as his son is now,
which is six feet seven inches.
Sherwood's paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Wilson
Sherwood, was a well-known writer. She was the Emily
Post of her day. One of her
books, called "Here & There & Everywhere: Reminiscences," a
kind of guide to polite society, introduces you to Victor
Emmanuel of Italy and Empress Eugénic
of France, and tells you about the palaces that kings have
built in Bavaria, feudal châteaux on the Loire, and the
salons of Bernhardt, Coquelin, Lord Houghton, and the Duc
d'Aumale.
As an infant, Sherwood seems to have been a chore. He was
secretive and shy, and he had a mind and a code of his own.
Once he was discovered in a room in which his bedridden
grandmother was ensconced in a wheelchair. The child was
manipulating a fishing pole, to the end of which was
attached a piece of string neatly tied around a live beetle.
With this beetle he was gently caressing his grandmother's
face at long range. She was doing her best to dodge and was
calling out feebly from time to time, half in laughter and
half in fear. To a horrified inquiry about what he was
doing, he replied calmly, "I'm tickling up Grandma." He had
a strong color sense, inherited supposedly from his painter
mother. This color sense sometimes came into sharp conflict
with his mother's. One time he painted bright yellow every
white object in his mother's dressing room, including her
shoes. Once Bobby was sent to stay with his grandfather
while his mother and his sister Cynthia went to Germany. His
grandfather's house boasted one flush toilet, of which the
grandfather was extremely proud. Bobby, sensing this pride
and wishing to humble it, dropped the entire contents of his
Noah's ark into the bowl. The unhappy grandfather sent for
the plumber who had made the installation and raged against
him for his inefficiency. The plumber worked for a time and
then faced the irate houseowner defiantly. "This is
perfectly all right, Mr. Emmet," he said. "It's a good
closet, but it won't pass elephants." For months the
apoplectic grandfather kept fishing up assorted yaks and
rhinoceroses. His days on earth were appreciably shortened
by this visit of his grandson. It was also hard on the boy,
who remarked, when he got back to his parents, "I'm
thoroughly sick of Grandpa."
There is even a record in the playwright's very early days
of a fling at arson. To get a rest from him, his mother sent
him to Milton Academy. Study didn't interest Bobby very
much. He preferred his own interests and on several
occasions he was warned that his marks were not too
flattering. One day the school building containing these
marks burst into flames and Bobby and his elder brother,
Phil, worked like heroes to extinguish the fire. They did
their work well. When he was congratulated on his exertions
by his brother, Bob said casually, "By the way, I started
it." No motive could he forced from the secretive child
beyond the fact that he wanted a little diversion.
The Sherwoods spent their summers at Lake Champlain. Bobby
was a passionate showman and wrote plays for the children
around the village to put on. His sister Rosamond complained
that after she learned her part in the script, Bobby would
take all her good lines and put them in his own part before
the performance. He was always enormously optimistic about
the attendance at his plays, an optimism which was not
justified until very much later. He would have dozens of
campstools put up for his entertainments, which were usually
attended by his mother and one or two other people from the
house.
Like his father, Robert Sherwood went to Harvard. Like him,
he also became president of the Lampoon and prominent
in the Hasty Pudding Club shows. For the Hasty Pudding Club,
Sherwood wrote his first play, "Barnum Was Right," and it
was through his editorship of the Lampoon that he got
his first job in New York. Every year the Lampoon put
out a burlesque number of some popular magazine, and while
Sherwood was editor he produced a parody issue of Vanity
Fair. This later got him a job on the original. In the
meantime, however, America entered the World War and
Sherwood quit college, a year before he would have
graduated, to go to war. Unable to get into the American
Army or Navy because of his height, he went to Montreal and
enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He joined a
Highland regiment, but didn't know what it was until the
kilts were flung at him. It was the Canadian Black Watch
Regiment, an affiliate of the famous Scottish organization.
In one of his first letters home he wrote to his mother, "By
no stress of the imagination can I be called an attractive
fellow in kilts, but at least I can say that I am imposing."
Mrs. Sherwood has a photograph of him in kilts, taken when
he was in New York on furlough. The head is clear, but the
legs are shadowy. Mrs. Sherwood complained about this
to the photographer, who said, "Yes, it's kind of muddy
below, but we found it difficult to focus the whole of him."
Sherwood was gassed in the action at Vimy Ridge and sent to
an emergency hospital. On his return to the front, he was
shot in both legs. He wrote to his mother that when he
looked down and found his hose dyed with New Rochelle's
bluest blood, he flung away his gun and ran as fast as his
legs could carry him in a direction directly opposite to
that prescribed by Marshal Foch. Actually, he was carried
off the field unconscious and woke up in a hospital bed in
Amiens. His heart was found to be affected and he was in a
hospital in England until January, 1919. He kept writing
facetious letters home, and the first his parents knew of
his true condition was when they got a routine letter from
an association which visited hospitals and wrote to parents
letting them know how their children were. Sherwood hated
the war, the physical discomfort, the filth and the rats. He
was a thoroughly incompetent soldier, and when he found
himself in the hospital he prayed that the war might end
before he got out.
When he came home, Sherwood's doctors told him that he
couldn't live very long, or at least that he couldn't do
very much, on account of his heart. He has never had any
trouble with it since and pays no attention to it. Faced for
the first time in his life with the problem of making a
living, Sherwood got a job on Vanity Fair. He was
general handyman around the office. When Ina Claire had to
be photographed by Baron de Meyer, Sherwood arranged the
appointment. When there was some muddiness in a piece by G.
K. Chesterton or an inactive passage in a piece by Grantland
Rice on golf, Sherwood fixed it up. During one summer when
the regular man was on vacation, he wrote "What the
Best-Dressed Man Will Wear." He filled the column with
extraordinary sartorial speculations: "On dit that
peg-topped pants and cloth-top shoes are coming back; also
that the best-dressed man's next year's waistcoats will
glitter darkly with cut jade." For the unsuspecting male
subscribers he devised costumes that would have startled
Vincente Minnelli—all to test his theory that no one ever
read the column. No matter how far he went, no one ever
protested the fantasies of Sherwood's daydreams until the
editor of the column came back from his vacation, fuming.
Finally, Dorothy Parker, a member of the staff, was fired
for writing unfavorable theatrical reviews and Sherwood and
Robert Benchley, another editorial worker, quit in sympathy.
They were perhaps the earliest fellow-travellers and wore
red discharge chevrons afterward for a while.
Sherwood was now absolutely broke, and could expect little
help from his family. His father's business and health had
failed a couple of years earlier, and his mother was helping
to support the rest of the family by professional portrait
painting. While Sherwood was wondering what to do next, he
was summoned by the Hasty Pudding Club to Boston to
supervise the production of his play, "Barnum Was Right,"
which had been called off on account of the war. Every
member of the cast had enlisted and many had been killed or
wounded. Sherwood lived in Cambridge because he had credit
at the clubs. He would eat in one club till he was posted
and then go to another till the same thing happened. At this
time, Neal O'Hara of the Boston Post got him a job as
feature writer on that paper. Some educator had tossed off a
statement in an interview that in his opinion marriage was
more likely to be successful when the participants had had
previous sexual experience. The editor thought a feminine
point of view on this might be interesting, and Sherwood was
sent to probe the Dean of Women at Boston University on this
delicate subject. The Dean of Women was curt and
noncommittal. What she said was colorless. Sherwood managed,
however, to pep it up. Magnanimously he gave the Dean credit
for his own views, which were expansive and forward-looking.
A Ben Hechtian jazzing up of a serious interview with a
well-known female pundit was the last thing the editor
expected from the austere Sherwood, and he rushed the
heterodox opinion into type. However, before the paper went
to press, he was seized by some skeptical intuition and, to
make sure, he sent the galleys to the Dean. The Dean was
definitely ungrateful for the liberality of outlook imputed
to her by the visionary Sherwood and he again found himself
suddenly without a job. His journalistic career had lasted
two days.
Sherwood came back to New York and got a job on the old
Life through one of its editors, the late E. S. Martin,
who had been a classmate of Sherwood's father at Harvard.
Life was actually an outgrowth of the Lampoon.
Robert Benchley joined Life and Dorothy Parker became
a regular contributor the same week. For ten years,
Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley worked first
for Vanity Fair and then on Life, arriving and
leaving both publications within a few days of each other.
At a dinner a few years ago, George S. Kaufman asked a
cryptic question. "Do you realize," he asked, "that there
sits at this table the founder of a form of journalism?" He
was not referring to Arthur Brisbane but to Sherwood, who in
1920 had started a column of movie criticism in Life.
He began this job when he was twenty-four years old.
By the time he was twenty-seven, he was called the dean of
motion-picture critics. He was not only among the first to
write critical reviews of pictures; he actually applied to
Cecil B. De Mille the term "bore." Sometimes he reviewed one
picture five times. He was the regular critic of Life,
he wrote for a newspaper syndicate, for the New York
Herald, for Photoplay, and for McCall's.
McCall's paid him as much as $250 to
$300 for a motion-picture review and the other publications
paid fairly well. It was in 1924 that he was made editor of
Life and he kept writing pieces when he could, yet by
1926 he was $14,000 in debt. It occurred to him to write a
play. He wrote "The Road to Rome" in odd moments between
editorial and critical duties. He offered it to Gilbert
Miller, who rejected it with the remark "I don't even like
first-rate Shaw." It was produced by Brady &
Wiman. One of the reviewers said, "This play is filled with
all the humor which the author has evidently been holding
out on the magazines." Starring Jane Cowl and Philip
Merivale, it was an enormous success. Not long ago, when
Sherwood made a slighting remark about "The Road to Rome,"
someone asked him why he was so hard on his first hit.
"Because," he answered, "it employs the cheapest sort of
device—making historical characters use modern slang."
In spite of the success of this play, Sherwood kept on
working on Life until he was fired, which came about
in 1928 because he refused to treat prohibition or Herbert
Hoover with respect in the pages of the magazine. He
confesses to an acute antipathy to quitting jobs. This
conservatism is in marked contrast to the reaction of
success on other people and is somehow curiously
characteristic of Sherwood. After "What Price Glory?"
Maxwell Anderson went berserk, bought a cane, and walked
down Forty-second Street twirling it. Elmer Rice, after his
first success, got married. Marc Connelly bought an
Inverness cape. Moss Hart went to Cartier's, where he
surfeited himself with ingenious gadgets made of gold. But
not Sherwood. He bought no canes. He went along
monotonously, holding every movie critic's job he possibly
could, and besides that taking on the literary editorship of
Scribner's. His next theatrical effort was the
dramatization of Ring Lardner's story "The Love Nest." He
made a mess of it and the play failed. Then he wrote "The
Queen's Husband" almost immediately. This was not
particularly successful on Broadway but it has proved one of
the most popular plays on record for little theatres and
amateurs. A play may be an immense success on Broadway but
have small appeal for amateurs. They have special demands:
enough people in the cast to provide everybody in the group
a chance, and yet not too many; parts that can give
everybody involved the illusion that he is doing pretty
well. In fact, the play must be something like the game of
golf. "The Queen's Husband" somehow meets these
requirements.
Through his friendship with the late Sidney Howard, Sherwood
became interested in the theatre in its relation to the
community as an element of civic and national culture.
Sherwood and Howard met first in the Life office.
Howard had worked on Life and Sherwood got his desk
when Howard quit. The friendship between the two men was
instantaneous. They were in close contact from the day they
met until Howard's death last August. Both men had fought in
the World War—Howard as an aviator—and both had their first
great public success within a few years of each other.
Sherwood always envied Howard his physical courage, because
he himself was contemptuous of his own lack of it.
The trend toward active unionism was beginning to infect
dramatists and screen writers as early as the middle
nineteen-twenties. In New York, the playwrights had banded
themselves together and in the nineteen-thirties they began
to fight grimly for their grievances against the managers.
In 1935, Sidney Howard became the president of the
Dramatists' Guild; Sherwood, the secretary. This
organization is always engaged in immense and complicated
negotiations, which the average member cannot follow and
doesn't know much about. One concrete thing which the
Dramatists' Guild has accomplished is a more favorable
division of money from the sale of plays to the movies.
Formerly the playwrights and the managers divided the
proceeds equally. Now the playwright gets sixty per cent,
the manager forty per cent. This is something that a
non-legalistic participant in the Dramatists' Guild meetings
can understand, but the Guild is involved constantly in the
formation of various "plans," which are sometimes completely
worked out in every detail but are never employed. These
activities occupy the playwrights when they are not working
on plays and exercise their suppressed desires for
statesmanship. For instance, there is a plan called the
Wharton-Wilk Plan. Mr. Wharton is a well-known lawyer and
Mr. Wilk is the representative of Warner Brothers. The
Wharton-Wilk Plan is like the Schleswig-Holstein Question,
of which it was said that only three people had ever
understood it; that one was dead, another insane, and the
third
had forgotten it. The Wharton-Wilk Plan was fought over
bitterly for a long time in the Dramatists' Guild meetings.
It has something to do with allowing film companies to
finance plays without getting complete control over the film
rights. After several years of bitter controversy, the plan
was finally adopted by the Guild in its entirety. Having
been adopted, it has never been used and no one seems to
like it.
Sherwood succeeded Sidney Howard to the privilege of
presiding over the Guild's debates. He calls himself the
Coolidge among the Dramatists' Guild presidents because he
never said anything and never did anything about anything,
leaving a Hooverlike heritage for his successor, Elmer Rice.
It was on November 23, 1937, that Sherwood presided for the
first time at a Dramatists' Guild meeting. There were
present George S. Kaufman, Maxwell Anderson, Rachel
Crothers, Sidney Howard, Albert Maltz, George Sklar, Leopold
Atlas, Melvin Levy, Moss Hart, Elmer Rice, Jules Eckert
Goodman, Arthur Richman, George Middleton, Philip Dunning,
Owen Davis, and Lillian Hellman. It was a terrible ordeal
for Sherwood. Discussion at a Dramatists' Guild meeting
never burbles, it rages. At this particular meeting there
wasn't much in the way of results. The Wharton-Wilk Plan was
momentarily stymied. It had to wait for a long time yet
before it could be perfected so that it would fail to
function. After the meeting was over, Sherwood rode down in
the elevator with Elmer Rice and Maxwell Anderson. They
repaired to a bar for a glass of sherry. It was pure
accident that Sherwood happened to ride with these two
instead of any of the others. Over their drinks that day the
idea of a playwrights' producing company was worked out.
Sherwood had tried it once before with Sidney Howard,
Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and Laurence
Stallings, but the idea had foundered at the last moment
because just as they were about to make plans for the coming
season, Stallings said he was going to Africa and therefore
couldn't come to the next meeting. Sherwood now told
Anderson and Rice that he had just delivered to his typist
the text of a new play and that he was willing to throw in
this play as the nucleus of a kitty to which all three men
would eventually contribute. That play was "Abe Lincoln in
Illinois" and it began the Playwrights' Company's season for
1938-1939.
The formation of the Playwrights' Company Mr. Sherwood
considers to
be the most important event of his professional life. He had
cherished the idea for years. The animus which inspired his
great ancestor, Robert Emmet, against the English has, in
the case of his descendant, been sublimated into a
resentment against the managers. The plan of a playwrights'
producing company, so often projected and so universally
called chimerical, for the moment seems to be practical. The
group has just finished its second season, has produced
eight plays by five playwrights, and has in its treasury,
with all debts paid, over a quarter of a million dollars. So
far the prima-donna differences and the temperamental
clashes which it was confidently predicted would wreck any
such association between writing men have failed to
materialize. Once, in fact, a play which was doing very
little business and which the author himself suggested be
closed was kept running by his colleagues at great cost on
the chance that things might improve. This was not
businesslike. The morning after a play by one of its members
opens, the playwrights gather, sum up the notices, plan an
advertising campaign, and console or congratulate the
author, as the case may require. To comfort a colleague for
a captious press one morning after an opening, Sherwood
quoted by heart a prominent critic who had written of
"Reunion in Vienna" that "it is a trifling, inconsequential
bit of fluff but far and away the best play Mr. Sherwood has
ever written."
Sherwood is also interested in a scheme for bringing the
American theatre to the American people whether the American
people insist on it or not. The idea is to start a series of
companies to do good plays from the contemporary and the
classical repertory, to play two weeks in New York and then
to tour a circuit all over the United States. This would
make possible a run of a hundred weeks. There would have
to be enough companies in existence to keep the New York
theatre going for a full season. Sherwood is now engaged in
the task of raising $300,000 to put the plan into effect.
One night at a dinner party at the George S. Kaufmans',
there was a discussion about the failure of the theatre to
reflect important and pressing problems of contemporary
life. Mrs. George Backer, wife of the publisher of the New
York Post, remarked that there were vital experiments
going on in the life of the city to which no writers paid
any attention. Someone said "For instance?" and Mrs. Backer
spoke of B. Charney Vladeck and his municipal housing
project, then under way, on Madison and Jackson Streets.
Sherwood expressed a desire to meet Vladeck. A day or so
later Mrs. Backer took him to a meeting of the City Council,
of which Vladeck was a member, and the three went to see the
Vladeck project. Sherwood was greatly impressed by Vladeck
and his work, and the two men became friends and
corresponded. Sherwood was just about to answer an
appreciative letter from Vladeck on the first performance of
"Abe Lincoln in Illinois" when he read in the newspapers of
his death.
It is characteristic and significant that at the end of his
notes in the published version of "Abe Lincoln in Illinois,"
after having quoted from the classical authorities, Sherwood
chose as his climactic quotation a few lines from an article
by B. Charney Vladeck published in the Locomotive
Engineers' Journal. It says in part:
One of my first and most memorable lessons in
Americanization was Lincoln's Gettysburg address. When I
read it and reread it and learned it by heart, struck by
its noble clearness and sweeping faith in America, I
felt as if the whole past of this country had been lit
up by a row of warm and beautiful lights; as if some
unknown friend had taken me by the, hand on a dark and
uncertain road, saying gently: "Don't doubt and don't
despair. This country has a soul and a purpose and, if
you so wish, you may love it without regrets."
Sherwood's comment on this follows:
This was written by the late B. Charney Vladeck shortly
after he first came to this country, a Jewish refugee
from oppression in Tsarist Russia. Vladeck had been a
member of the Bolshevist Party, had voted at the meeting
which had elected Lenin their leader and had served in
prison for his revolutionary activities. He then
emigrated to America, a man whose heart was filled with
bitterness—and he learned here that those illusive
words, liberty and equality, may have profound meaning.
. . . Here, in these glowing words from one who had
been a deeply skeptical alien, is the essence of what we
like to call "Americanization" but which is actually
just what Lincoln meant it to be: liberation.
Sherwood feels a burning indignation against those he
considers callous and insensitive to the struggle in Europe,
against those who seem to him indifferent to its outcome and
unaware of its immense importance for us. He does not make a
habit of writing letters to the papers, but after Colonel
Lindbergh's first radio speech, in which the Colonel said,
"We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife,"
Sherwood wrote a letter to Time in which he said that
the Colonel's simile was an insult to the medical
profession. He went on:
If surgeons were truly impersonal (or, one might say,
truly neutral) they would not heed the calls of distress
from suffering humanity when they themselves were
otherwise engaged in watching the ticker, or playing
bridge, or writing thoughtful treatises on the insanity
of their fellowmen. They would not go to the
considerable trouble and risk of using their knives to
remove the malignant growths in the body of
civilization. They would always find comfortable refuge
behind that ancient question, "Am I my brother's
keeper?" What Colonel Lindbergh should have said is, "We
must be as impersonal as the professional mourner, who
doesn't lament the seriousness of the plague, or the
number of fatalities, as long as it helps his own
business."
For writing "There Shall Be No Night," Sherwood has been on
one side attacked as a warmonger, on the other hailed as a
great patriot. Sherwood does not believe in democracy
passively, nor does he hate Fascism passively. It is as
inconceivable that he would say "I hate Hitler, but—"
as that he would say "I love democracy, but—." The
"but" in either case, he believes, is a conduit
admitting all sorts of poisons. He believes that permanent
world peace can be achieved by a union of democracies, some
such union as is described by Clarence Streit in "Union
Now." Last September, when Hitler (who, unfortunately, had
never seen "Idiot's Delight") gave the order for the bombers
to take off, Sherwood felt certain that everything he
believed in, the faith in the Bill of Rights and in the
ideal of world citizenship that he had got from his study of
Abraham Lincoln, was violently threatened. What should he do
to defend his beliefs? Again and again he had the impulse to
go to Montreal and enlist as he had done in 1917, but he was
stopped by the thought that he would probably be put in a
censorship job in the Intelligence, and that wearing a
uniform in some office would be only a form of escapism. He
came to
believe that his obligation lay here in his own country and
that the best way he could fulfill it would be to write a
play which would express what he felt. He didn't know what
the play would be about, or where it would be laid, until
the invasion of Finland, which seemed to offer a sharp
definition of the issue.
Sherwood feels that the present war began when the
combination of Woodrow Wilson's tactlessness and the
blindness of Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Borah, and other
isolationists forced us to declare the policy that our World
War dead had died in vain and that we would take no further
interest in the international task of keeping the peace. We
handed Europe over to the bankrupt statesmanship of such men
as Baldwin and Chamberlain and Laval, who in the last
analysis, Sherwood thinks, gave Hitler his power. In spite
of all that, Sherwood remains an incorrigible optimist. He
has a faith in the ultimate triumph of the democratic
principle, a faith which he expresses in "There Shall Be No
Night," and which has been described by at least one critic
as "whistling in the dark."
In his valedictory address to the Dramatists' Guild, made
when he retired from its presidency in 1939, Sherwood had
this to say:
One of the greatest virtues of the American Theatre is
that it has never been strictly national. Upholding the
best principles of the people whom it represents, it is
unlimited by the fetishes of chauvinism, sectionalism,
racism. . . . We are writers, and we are living in an
age when powers of communication have achieved fabulous
importance. . . . There is a new and decisive force in
the human race, more powerful than all the tyrants. It
is the force of massed thought—thought which has been
provoked by words, strongly spoken. Words which may
originate in the mind of someone in this room may be
brought to people of all kinds and kindreds who are
hungry for them, who may be stimulated by them to a new
faith in the brotherhood of life, who may, for all any
of us can tell, be saved by them.
So far, words have not kept pace with the guns. Words have
not stopped invasion or organized murder, but they may
still, and as a counter-attack Sherwood's words in "There
Shall Be No Night" seem to be doing their part.
(This is the second of two articles on Mr.
Sherwood.) |
