The Plays That Were Never Written

Being Some Rough Notes for a Chapter on Forsworn Intentions

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

EVERY once in a while the English department of some university casts off scrofulously a volume that deals gravely with the modern drama. Sprinkled throughout its pages or marshalled formidably in its crushing appendices, you will find due reference made to all the plays that have been produced by the Messrs. Galsworthy, Shaw, O'Neill and all the other successfully articulate folk of yesterday and today. Generous account is taken even of the mute, regretful plays which are known only in the library and have yet to be acted on the stage anywhere in the world. But in these solemn and literal resumes, you will look in vain for one chapter. In none of them will you find the chapter on the tragedies that most stimulate the imagination, on the comedies most iridescent with scenes of mingled tears and laughter. In none will you read any record of-the plays that have never been written at all.

SUCH a chapter could speak only generally of the masterpieces of dramatic art which all newspapermen rather have it in mind to write. They could refer only vaguely to the scenes that have taken momentary shape in the smoke of some dingy rathskeller near Park Row, and then dissolved never to be seen again. Or of those which have hovered for an instant in the air while the cub reporter was half listening to the dreary routine of testimony in nightcourt. With apologies to the ancient apothegm about the baton of the Marshal of France, it might truly be said that every fledgling Richard Harding Davis arrives in Park Row with the manuscript of the great American play in his battered suitcase. Fourteen years ago, in an article published in Success, Franklin P. Adams wrote the following paragraph:

"If you were a newspaper man and had written or were anxious to write a play or a musical comedy libretto—but that is tautological. There are only two newspaper men in the world who never have written an alleged play and intend never to write one. They are Henry L. Mencken and Glenmore Davis and they are so proud of the distinction that they have formed the Association of Newspapermen W h o-Never-Have-Written-and-Expect-Never-to-Write-a-Play."

In the afterknowledge of 1924, one can picture the moving scene that must have occurred when the faithful Davis was obliged sorrowfully to accept the resignation of the rest of the membership. For Mencken long ago fell by the way. Sundry managers have had the exquisite pleasure of declining to touch with a tenfoot pole the play called "Heliogabalus" which he has since written, with George Jean Nathan.

AND while it is still true that nearly every newspaperman in New York intends to write a play someday, Mr. Adams might have added and might still add that only one in a hundred will ever get so much as his first scene on paper. 'The reporter, trained (or, rather, habituated) to write at full speed while the presses yawn and the clock hand races toward edition time, finds out at last that he cannot, or at least docs not, write under any less vehement pressure. And since a play needs all the foresight and patience of architecture, his plans for it arc daily pushed aside until the project stands among the accumulated litter of forsworn intentions which all of us mean to carry out during that miraculous year we delude ourselves into thinking we arc going to take off some time for just such magnificent purposes.

But the greater part, by far, of the chapter on the unwritten plays need not be thus general at all. It can be as specific as you like with names and dates and places and even titles culled from the letters and diaries that have escaped the flames. Any reader addicted to biography could fish up some data out of his memory. There should, for instance, be the play called No Thoroughfare which Charles Dickens was bent on writing with Wilkie Collins. But that was in the days before literary pirates had been swept from the seas. The first instalment of the novel on which Dickens meant to base the play had not been available in the Boston bookstalls for more than a week, before the story, the idea and the title had been calmly stolen and produced.

There should also be some account of a play called The Predecessor which the late Joseph Conrad meant to write with Stephen Crane and never did. We know that this was to be a candid melodrama with one scene on a ranch at the foot of the Rockies and another on a boundless plain at sunset with the man and the woman standing by their dead ponies after a furious ride. Another Crane play was one about which he and Clyde Fitch talked endlessly. It was to have a Civil War background, but it was never written because Crane, according to Thomas Beer, could find no place in it for a "love interest" and Fitch, oddly enough, could not imagine a play without one.

Then, too, there was The World and the Door which O. Henry may never seriously have intended to write but the elaborately convincing scenario for which he found convenient as a means of extracting advance royalties from the eager but skeptical George C. Tyler. It was on moneys paid in response to O. Henry's solemn promise to write The World and the Door that he was enabled to come to New York and indulge in the final carouse which preceded his death.

And, to suggest just one more instance, it was equally characteristic of Paul Verlaine that he should have spent the last twenty years of his frowsy life in the fruitless but almost daily meditation on the great importance of his writing a play. To be sure he did so far exert himself on one occasion as to write a one-act morsel called Les U us et Les A litres and this was produced one evening at a performance given as a benefit for Verlaine and the needy Gauguin. But, as so often happens with benefit performances, the expenses ran away with the takings, and after the excitement was over Verlaine's share came to only 100 francs, which he spent in a single night of revelry with his newly-found Philomène. Thus a dramatic fragment given for only one performance and yielding no more than the price of a single debauch was all there was left to show for a lifetime spent in fully meaning to write a play.

OF course the chapter on the unwritten plays is only part of a larger phenomenon of literature—the singular, outstanding fact that the one occupation most distasteful to the true writer is writing. Indeed it could probably be demonstrated that the finer the book, the more reluctant was its production. Perhaps the actor champs at the bit until he has his audience before him. The painter may begrudge every hour that is not spent with a palette in one hand and a brush in the other. The surgeon may itch to feel the chill of the knife against his expert fingers. But the writer has to drag himself to his paper.

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The rarer the fancy it is in him to spin, the richer the mind it is his business to empty, the more vagrant is likely to be the disposition of that mind and the more truant the thoughts which, with the paper lying white and accusing there on the table, will stray rather to the open window and jaunt mutinously down the road. If such immortals as Penrod and Willie Baxter and Florence Atwater have finally become part of the American scene, it is only because Booth Tarkington has shut the window each morning and taken a mighty vow that he would not look through it until he had spent so many hours at his desk. And the magnificent tapestry of The Old Wives' Tale was woven only after its resisting author had made a compact with himself to write so many hundred words a day before he would feel free to step into the garden and smell the morning air.

The most reluctant of them all was O. Henry of whose stories it could doubtless be truly said that he never enjoyed writing a single one. Indeed he would reach the point of putting words on paper only when he had wheedled so much advance payment from his editors that he could not extract another penny. Each of the stories was thus tossed to his ravening creditors as the children were thrown to the wolves in the legend of the Russian sled. When he could see the gleaming fangs of his landlord and the red eyes of his butcher glowing like angry coals in the darkness, he would go at last to the barest and least distracting of his sundry retreats. He would place a resolute chair in front of a business-like table. He would arrange a neat pile of white paper in the middle of that table. He would sharpen a half dozen pencils and lay them beside the paper. Then, when everything was thus ineluctably prepared, he would suddenly reach for his hat, wander out onto the jostling footways of Bagdad and be seen no more that day.

There must have been a little something of O. Henry in Shakespeare or the most completely expressed of all his characters would not have been Hamlet. There is probably a little something of O. Henry in every writer from Mr. Tarkington in the highest to the youngest cub on the prowl in New York today. Each one of them who has a story to write will, before he puts down the first word, begin work by cleaning his desk with fantastic care, sorting out old letters and even calling up to inquire anxiously about something in which he is not really interested at all, such as the health, say, of Aunt Matilda.

It is a truancy which whitens the temples of magazine editors before their time and makes them feel sometimes that they are but sheep dogs nipping at evasive ankles in the herd of talent. And because the writing even of a Samuel Shipman drama involves something of the thinking through that makes a good chess player, it is the kind of writing which is most persistently deferred. Wherefore you may guess that the best plays are those which have never been written at all. That that is true you might suspect when you see with what a pang of recognition all writing chaps wince while Augustus Thomas tells his story of the actor who was always going to write a play. His pathway among the lodging houses of Manhattan could be traced by the sheets of paper left behind in the table drawer of each room he occupied. For each sheet bore evidence of his having started to work again and again. And each time he got no further than this brave beginning: Act One, Scene One: A Ruined Garden.