[In the following essay, Sickels tracks MacLeish's use of the Christian theme of the Fortunate Fall in his poetry, especially in Songs for Eve and the verse play J. B.]

I

Archibald MacLeish first treated the myth of the lost Paradise in the verse play Nobodaddy, which appeared in 1926. Though the fact that it was never reprinted argues that he came to consider this play unsatisfactory either in idea or in technique, it is a revealing expression of his mood in the mid-twenties, serving in particular as a companion piece to The Pot of Earth, written in the same period, in which he uses the pagan myth of the dying and resurrected fertility god to question the meaning of a girl's life absorbed and snuffed out in service to survival of the race. In the Foreword to Nobodaddy MacLeish says that he is using the myth not as metaphor but solely as a dramatic presentation of the plight of human consciousness in an indifferent universe, without anthropological implications.¹ It is hard, however, to see how this use differs from metaphor, or from the reinterpretation of myth widely practiced from time immemorial. At all events, Nobodaddy, though not to be taken as identical with Yahweh, is here the nature god, aloof and incomprehensible, the Fall is alienation from him through aroused human self-consciousness (as in Songs for Eve twenty-eight years later, Eve is not Eve until she has eaten the apple), and the rebellion of Cain is the assertion of human integrity against the amoral nature worship of Abel.

Though these ideas are echoed in various guises throughout his career, MacLeish did not again use the myth of the lost Paradise until the fifties, when it became implicit in This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters (1953) and explicit in Songs for Eve (1954). In This Music the Earthly Paradise is an island in the Antilles, where the winds of time and change are stilled and the innocent moon is supernaturally haunting and beautiful. The primitive Indians could live here, with reefs and sharks as “angels at the gate,”² in a timeless innocence as in the primordial paradise of worldwide primitive ritual—in illo tempore, to use Mircea Eliade's felicitous phrase. But civilized men and women, represented by the visiting English and Americans of the play, must always find their fulfilment at some other time, some other place, never where they are, never just now—and not for long in the innocence and beauty of Paradise. By implication, they are creatures of the Fall.

All this, and much more, becomes comparatively explicit the following year in Songs for Eve. In the exquisite lyrics of the title sequence of this book, the tragic loneliness and rebellion of Nobodaddy and the muted acceptance of This Music give way to a mood close to exultation: we pass from timeless innocence through the Fall into space-time and on to contact with eternity: shall we recognize the ancient sequence of innocence, fall, and redemption? It is MacLeish's own version of the Fortunate Fall.

The symbols of this version of the paradise myth are, most of them, hoary with age and protean in meaning. There is the green tree, the tree of life which bears the apple of knowledge: one remembers not only the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, but Yggdrasil and all the sacred trees at the Center or Navel of the World ascending, which the shaman of archaic cultures may be translated in spirit to Paradise in illo tempore. In Songs for Eve the spirit of the green tree would seem to be the nature god of Nobodaddy, against which (or Whom) Eve-Adam rebels, asserting human individuality and reaching, as is said in Genesis 3:22 (“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”), toward the condition of a god.

But to MacLeish's Eve there is no “sin” in the Fall:

The Fall! she said—
From earth to God!
Give thanks, said she, for branch, for bole,
For Eve who found the grace to fall
From Adam, browsing animal,
Into the soaring of the soul!(3)

For there is also the symbol of the dry tree. The dry tree, often in the form of a cross, is another ubiquitous and many-faceted symbol. The association of tree and cross seems, in fact, to be archetypal, as does the shift from nature's green to man's contrived, often ritualistic, dryness—substitution of a pole for a living tree to mark the sacred World Navel, the synonymous use of “tree” and “cross” in Christian hymnology, such modern instances as the associated imagery of tree and cross in Melville's heretical philosophy.⁴ In Songs for Eve the dry tree is surely, among other things, a Christ symbol; but it carries meanings beyond, if not contrary to, orthodox Christian doctrine. It recalls the widespread pre-Christian savior myths: the dying and resurrected fertility god, the divine god or goddess who in many archaic myths sacrifices himself or herself for man's sake, the king or king's son ritually killed that the people may thrive—the ordeal of Joseph Campbell's “hero with a thousand faces,” the most famous of which, aside from that of the Christ, is that of Prometheus. Thus the dry tree stands, on the one hand, for human accomplishment and aspiration: “All to this my sons are born: / To hew and shape and raise that tree …” (No. 25, p. 27); and on the other hand, as cross, for the terrible suffering and moral evil which are the inevitable consequences of the Fall, and for the redemptive quality of some of the achievement and some of the suffering. Insofar as there is reference to Jesus of Nazareth, he is the symbol of the best in mankind. It is interesting to note that the radio script on the Passion which MacLeish wrote in the forties is entitled not the Son of God but The Son of Man.⁵

But MacLeish's Fall, though fortunate and even triumphant, is not Milton's: it is fortunate because without it man is a mere animal, not because it made way through incalculable guilt and suffering for a Savior who died for the elect. MacLeish's redemption is in all human good achievement, and in the very yearning for the infinite which caused the Fall. For man's awakening to the consciousness of his freedom to choose between good and evil, while exiling him from Paradise, really does light in him a spark of the divine. Thus the dry tree seems to stand, finally, for escape from space-time, for the mysterious rapport with eternity felt by man. Eve feels it even on “that Eden night”—

I heard beyond that tree a tree
Stir in silence over me

(No. 1, p. 3)

—and heard space and time ring out and chime. Later she prophesies that when the “apple tree” has gone the dry tree will still “swing and sway” (No. 25, p. 27).

Green tree,
Time's tree,
Mystery.
.....Dry tree,
Man's tree,
Eternity.

(No. 27, p. 30)

Our journey is from “tree to tree,”

And what's between,
Eve said,
Our lives mean.

(No. 2, p. 4)

Thus, as in earlier poems since the war, notably Actfive, it is man alone, the human being of flesh and bone, who will construct the dry tree, “And on it bear eternity” (No. 25, p. 27). Eve lay, she asserts, with no swan or bull or shower of gold—with no “ghost”—but with a man (Nos. 12, 18, p. 14, 20):

Adam, Adam, there are none
Enter flesh but flesh and bone.

(No. 13, p. 15)

And yet, there is the mystery of an apparent third in generation, the something in flesh and bone which somehow reaches beyond the “greenwood tree” under which it is born. A whole sequence of poems (Nos. 11-19) explores this riddle. Possibly we can get no closer to MacLeish's tentative solution than these lines from another poem in the same volume:

Eternity is what our wanderers gather,
Image by image, out of time—the cut
Branch that flowers in the bowl. Our Father,
Thou who ever shalt be, the poor body
Dying in every ditch hath borne Thee, Father.(6)

“Out of time”: the symbol or motif of space-time pervades this whole volume. It is a concept MacLeish had been meditating on since the early twenties. Here it lies at the core of his thought and furnishes his most striking terms of expression.

One more interesting angle of the symbolism may be noted, especially as it is to a certain extent carried over to J. B. That is what might be called the androgynous element in this treatment of these myths. In some archaic mythologies the earlier gods are androgynous; Adam himself was at one time conceived as an androgynous being, and there are traces of androgyny in such deities as Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and Cybele—since “Every beginning is made in the wholeness of being.”⁷ Later there is wide belief in a divine marriage (hierogamy), as between Heaven and Earth, the Sky Father and the Earth Mother. In Western mythologies, including the Christian, the divine Earth Mother becomes a mortal woman, and only the male element is of the gods.⁸ But as early as The Pot of Earth (1925) MacLeish had put the question “What am I?” into the mouth of a woman, and his Eve, still perhaps the Earth Mother, takes the initiative in seeking awareness and finds Adam, aspiring as he is, no more divine than herself: it is a true hierogamy of our symbolical First Ancestors.

II

J. B. is the Man of the Fall. Since Sarah—in a notable departure from the original myth—partakes of the ordeal and the resolution, the play J. B., like Songs for Eve, has its androgynous aspect, so that in the end we can perhaps even speak of J. B.-Sarah as of Eve-Adam. But J. B., the modern Job, holds the center of the stage. He is, of course, the contemporary Man of the Fall, seen here as a successful and conventionally religious American. MacLeish wanted him played as an individual, not as Everyman,⁹ but nothing in the play or in anything the author has said about it would indicate that this method of presentation is more than an effort to make the symbolism more telling and immediate. The tragic hero is always both individual and symbol. And his ordeal and the way he meets it constitute one profound assertion of the Fortunate Fall.

Man falls up to God; he becomes “as one of us,” i.e., of the gods. He reaches for the infinite beyond space-time. This is the hubris of the Greeks, the spiritual pride of the Christians. It is man's glory and his doom. And in this tension, or dialectic, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine, tragedy is born. The true tragic hero is doomed by his very strength and aspiration, his reach for the apple of self-knowledge, his flaw of some forbidden excess; or he is a strong and noble victim of external consequences of the Fall, who, like the more active hero, asserts human dignity by his steadfast confrontation of his doom. Thus tragedy finds its symbol in the dry tree, both as achievement and as cross.

The Book of Job, long recognized as the only drama in the Bible, has been convincingly rearranged by Horace M. Kallen as a Greek tragedy.¹⁰ MacLeish and many of his critics have thought of the modern Job of J. B. as tragedy. Though Kallen deleted the so-called happy ending, generally admitted to be by a second (or third) hand, he need not have done so out of respect to Greek practice. MacLeish's special purpose was, as we shall see, served by his decision to keep a suggestion of this less lethal ending. Either way, we may present J. B. as a tragic hero in Aristotelian terms. He is thrown down from high estate to low. He learns through suffering. His flaw is a modern type of hubris rampant in the theoretically Christian West (especially, perhaps, in our own country): a smug and arrogant assumption that “the God of Galaxies” is a special friend and patron of his,¹¹ which involves the further assumption that he understands the Universe. His recognition—made more explicit at Kazan's suggestion in the play as produced than in the book—is his realization that he cannot depend on God or the Cosmos for justice, but must depend instead upon his human integrity to face whatever comes, and that he must find his values not in material prosperity but in love. His tragic strength is that he learns to accept an inscrutable destiny without despair, even as Sarah in the end cannot take her own advice to “curse God and die.” Thus they face life again, taking up the burden of the dry tree.

Of course J. B. comes to his resolution as to his ordeal not as an antique Greek—or Hebrew—but as a contemporary man of the West in our terrifying age. MacLeish tells us that the idea of the play came to him amid bomb-ruins during World War II and grew out of the whole burden of horror and guilt in our violent age: an age in which the image of a Father-God has faded for so many, as it has for MacLeish, into the abyss of sky with its unanswering stars above the circus tent of the world; an age in which men search, in literature and life, as J. B. searches, for their individual guilt—in Camus's The Fall, in Kafka's The Trial, in T. S. Eliot's retreat to the concept of Original Sin. So J. B.'s experience is not quite Job's experience, nor are his recognition and resolution quite Job's either, apt as is the essence of the metaphor to our predicament. What then is the metaphysical meaning of this play?

First, perhaps, it is a meaning akin to that of Melville's White Whale: at the core of life is ambiguity. Both the Godmask and the Satanmask are ambiguous. There are dignity and beauty in the Godmask and compassion in the Satanmask. If the Godmask stands for faith and order and the old and comfortable Father-image killed and grieved for in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), the Satanmask stands for the rebellion inherent in the Fortunate Fall, the humane rebellion of Prometheus and the proud rebellion of Milton's Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost.¹² If the Satanmask stands for despair in the face of suffering, the Godmask stands for tyrannous authority and unearned disaster. Neither Mr. Zuss nor Nickles wins a complete victory. But Zuss is essentially affirmation of life and Nickles denial of life, and to that extent, with all his ambiguities, Mr. Zuss comes out better than Nickles. Of course the concept of Satan as the Spirit That Says No is centuries old. It is interesting to note, however, the contemporary twist MacLeish has given his Satan: originally both Zuss and Nickles were old men, but in the play as produced Nickles becomes a “mixed-up kid,” a beatnik, with an existentialist outlook close to the nihilism of Sartre. In his most lost and rebellious moods MacLeish has never been a nihilist.

But of course Zuss and Nickles are only actors, symbols of God and Satan as men have conceived them. They know they are puppets of the high gods (of “them” who want the Job-play played). Whenever Mr. Zuss and Nickles hesitate, the Distant Voice prompts them, commands them to go on. Once the circus tent opens upward, revealing the unanswering sky of “The End of the World” (1925), The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), and Actfive (1948), from which the great Voice issues—not with answers but with commands. And of course the Voice finally silences J. B.'s questions in the tremendous words of The Book of Job—ambiguous words: words of beauty and power, but scarcely of justice or love. This stupendous conception, as borrowed by MacLeish, is an overwhelming climax not only to the author's yearning questioning as in that recurrent figure of the unanswering night, but also to the symbol of the nature god in Nobodaddy and Songs for Eve: the Mystery beyond our knowing, the enormous Cosmic Ambiguity from which we are estranged by the Fall.

This is the terrifying experience of the Numinous, the Mysterium Tremendum, so marvelously analyzed by Rudolph Otto. J. B., like Job, is not answered by the Voice; he is only silenced. “He is brought,” MacLeish himself has told us, “not to know but to see.”¹³ To see: to be overwhelmed by the awful perception of the “Wholly Other,” the Cosmic Power and Mystery beyond reach of human thought.

Herbert Weiner, in the essay on the play previously referred to, asserts that J. B. does not have this experience. I believe that he does have it, or at least a large part of it. Otto discriminates five elements in the experience of the Numen: in the Tremendum awfulness, overpoweringness, and energy or urgency; in the Mysterium the “wholly other” and fascination. Surely J. B. feels the awfulness, the overwhelming power, and the urgent energy speaking in the Voice. His insistence on his own integrity implies the “wholly other,” reinforcing the author's sustained assertion of human personality in tragic or wistful alienation from the Mystery but somehow bearing it within:

Flesh and bone have wonder done
And wonder, bone and flesh are One.(14)

But the fifth element, fascination, is another matter. “The mystery,” Otto says, is, for him who has this experience, “not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him,” and to which he ascribes all human values, including “love, mercy, pity, comfort” in absoluteness and completeness.¹⁵ The result is worship, the worship of the All, either at the expense of human individuality and moral judgment, as in the East, or at the expense of ignoring the contradiction between the concept of an all-powerful, all-good Creator and the state of His creation, as in the West. MacLeish has always been an unreconstructed Westerner in his insistence on moral values and the integrity of the individual; and the comfort of the Western God has been denied him by the advance of science and the terrors of a violent age. Wherefore J. B. repents of expecting to know, of connecting guilt with cosmic justice; but he does not worship. He will accept the alienation, the expulsion from Eden and the mystery of the green tree, the terror and the glory of the Fall. He will believe, like Eve-Adam, in the dignity of “flesh and bone”; he will believe in man, as MacLeish once admonished a wartime audience to believe, “out of pride.”¹⁶

And out of love. Some critics have thought that the love with which J. B. and Sarah turn to each other at the end of the play is merely sentimental-romantic sexual love. But the marriage of J. B. and Sarah, like that of Adam and Eve, is surely symbolic—the hierogamy or sacred marriage in humanistic terms. In the play as first published, it is Sarah who first speaks of human love as comfort for lost faith:

Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out. …(17)

At Kazan's insistence the lines were transferred to J. B. in the acting version—a mistake, it seems to me, since it denies the feminine principle an active part in the solution of the common problem. At all events, MacLeish clearly meant “love” to embrace not only spouse and children but all suffering humanity—and perhaps God as well.

The chief defect of the play, in my judgment, is that the all-embracing quality of this love is not made unmistakable. The theme is suggested, to be sure, by the compassion of the Second Messenger (as well as of the Satanmask) and by the terrible, obviously contemporary, things which happen not only to J. B. and Sarah but to multitudes as human as they are, and in particular by the chorus of women in the bombed town. Two changes were made in the acting version which help to broaden the conception of love: much of the loving badinage between man and wife was deleted, and the women (in expanded scenes) try to comfort J. B., so that he tells the comfortless Comforters that they “gave their misery to keep me warm.”¹⁸ Yet one could wish that the symbolism had been made clearer. It is hard to understand how MacLeish of all people—with his long record of “public speech” and public service, and with his confession that the play originated in the indiscriminate horrors of World War II—could have failed to make love of fellow-man fully articulate in this play. For the theme is implicit throughout most of his work, in both prose and verse, and even occasionally explicit, as in the poem “Pole Star,” originally written for the depression “year 1933,” and in the ending of Actfive (1948), wherein man, “beneath the moon alone,” can

          know the void vast night above
And know the night below and dare
Endure and love.(19)

By the early fifties love has become integral in his poetic theory:

Know the world by heart
Or never know it!
Let the pedant stand apart—
Nothing he can name will show it:
Also him of intellectual art.
None know it
Till they know the world by heart.
Take heart then, poet!(20)

In J. B., then, the “coal of the heart” is lit by a love that is both eros and agape.

Agape is the untranslatable Greek word rendered in Corinthians as charity; it carries, we are told, some of the feeling of the Hebrew lovingkindness. It is an all-embracing love, from the self toward all other selves, and, in theological discussion, from the self toward God. I believe that, rightly understood, the love of J. B. is agape in the latter sense also. It is possible to love without understanding or moral approbation. And God the Cosmic Mystery is from an existential standpoint life itself—not mere biological survival, but beauty as well as ugliness, joy as well as pain, strength and wisdom gained through experience, perhaps most fully through the experience of suffering. Sarah cannot find a way out because of the beauty and promise of a branch of forsythia among the ruins. J. B. steadfastly refuses to curse God and die. For suicide is treason against life.²¹ And there is always hope, for others if not for the self—the boils will heal, the beloved will return—and life will go on. Wisdom in these matters may come with age:

Now at sixty what I see,
Although the world is worse by far,
Stops my heart in ecstasy.
God, the wonders that there are!(22)

Not only courage is needed, but love. “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,” MacLeish quotes Yeats as saying. Because man can “live his truth” but not speak it, he goes on, “love becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question. Love, in reason's terms, answers nothing. … What love does is to affirm.”²³ In an article in the Christian Century, MacLeish goes further than he seems to go in the play, beyond humanism toward a more nearly traditional conception of God: “It is a poet's question which brings me to my text, the most difficult and the most urgent of all poet's questions in a time like this, the question of the belief in life—which is also and inevitably the question of the belief in the meaning, the justice, of the universe—which, in its ultimate terms, is the question of the belief in God.” “Love creates,” he says further on; “Love creates even God.” And again: “It is in man's love that God exists and triumphs: in man's love that life is beautiful: in man's love that the world's injustice is resolved. To hold together in one thought those terrible opposites of good and evil which struggle in the world is to be capable of life, and only love will hold them so.”²⁴

Yet MacLeish calls himself “a man committed to no creed,”²⁵ and it is not entirely clear why he should have felt called upon to defend his conception to ministers and rabbis and the readers of the Christian Century. It is possible to interpret J. B. in purely humanistic terms. Even in the exegesis we may perceive more metaphor than doctrine. Love, he says, creates God; compare the quotation above (from Songs for Eve) which ends “the poor body … hath borne Thee, Father.” “If we reject the absolutes of Newton as of Aquinas,” says Herbert J. Muller, “we perforce talk in metaphor.”²⁶ Surely this is true of poets. Even such neo-orthodox theologians as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr sometimes write as though they conceived of God as metaphor of Reality.²⁷ Humanists, who eschew absolutes and respect the Cosmic Mystery, sometimes speak of God, Who, in Muller's words, “At the very least … remains the most immense and splendid of all metaphors.”²⁸ And if the metaphor stands for Reality, for Life in all its fullness, it can be loved.

In these poems of the Fortunate Fall the symbol at the core of the metaphor is first the green tree, then the Distant Voice. The Fall is alienation by assertion of human personality. The redemption is through the dry tree: through suffering and love.

“The metaphor still struggles in the stone,” MacLeish wrote in 1952, and exhorted the poets:

Turn round into the actual air:
Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!(29)

Throughout his career MacLeish has himself been seeking the metaphor by which to give meaning to the modern age. Of late, like so many contemporaries, he has sought the larger metaphor of myth. Nothing he has written has been more moving or more meaningful than the proud humanism of Songs for Eve and the tragic reconciliation of J. B.

Notes

1. Nobodaddy: A Play (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), Foreword, unpaged.

2. This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 7.

3. Songs for Eve (Boston, 1954), No. 8, “The Fall!,” p. 10.

4. See James Baird, Ishmael (Baltimore, 1956), pp. 299 ff.

5. Typed radio script in New York Public Library, dated “194—.” This was an experiment long antedating J. B. in using Biblical words as text.

6. “The Infinite Reason,” pp. 35-36.

7. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London, [1960]), p. 175.

8. This sex discrimination, which contrasts with Oriental myth, is noted in W. B. Yeats's “Ribh Denounces Patrick”: “An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man— / Recall that masculine Trinity …” (Collected Poems, New York, 1955, p. 283). Jung concludes his book Answer to Job (trans. R. F. C. Hull, New York, 1960 [1952]) with a chapter defending on psychological grounds the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

9. MacLeish to Elia Kazan, in “The Staging of a Play,” Esquire, LI, 144-58 (May, 1959), 156. Later references to Kazan's part in the revision are also from this source.

10. The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York, [1959]).

11. Herbert Weiner reports that, when MacLeish met questioners, mostly rabbis and ministers, after the New York opening of J. B., a woman surprised him by asking if he knew how “unlikable” J. B. is (“Job on Broadway: MacLeish's Man and the Bible's,” Commentary, XXVII, 153-158, Feb., 1959). The phrase “the God of Galaxies” is from Mark Van Doren's poem of this title, Selected Poems (New York, [1954]), pp. 213-214. The presumption of a Christian—J. B. considers himself a Christian—who expects special providences is denounced by Reinhold Niebuhr as undeserving of moral support (Beyond Tragedy, quoted in Major Voices in American Theology, ed. D. W. Soper, Philadelphia, [1953], p. 41).

12. Jung has called Satan “the godfather of man as a spiritual being” (Answer to Job, p. 51). So he is, in both Songs for Eve and J. B.: leading Eve-Adam to knowledge of good and evil, enforcing on J. B.-Sarah realization that this knowledge cannot be applied to the Numen.

13. “About a Trespass on a Monument,” New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958, Sec. II, Pt. 2, p. 7.

14. Songs for Eve, No. 13, p. 15.

15. The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York, [1917]), p. 31.

16. “Humanism and the Belief in Man,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXIV, 76 (Nov., 1944).

17. J. B.: A Play in Verse (Boston, [1958]), p. 153.

18. Text of the final acting version, Theatre Arts, XLIV, 33-64 (Feb., 1960), 58.

19. Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston, [1952]), pp. 99-101, 369.

20. “Theory of Poetry,” Songs for Eve, p. 37 (quoted entire). This is an interesting shift of emphasis from “Ars Poetica” (“A poem should not mean / But be”), from Streets in the Moon, 1926 (Collected Poems, p. 41).

21. “The Treason Crime,” Collected Poems, p. 136 (from Actfive, 1948).

22. “With Age Wisdom,” Songs for Eve, p. 42.

23. “Trespass on a Monument,” p. 7.

24. “The Book of Job,” Christian Century, LXXVI 419, 422 (April 8, 1959).

25. “About a Trespass on a Monument,” p. 7.

26. Science and Criticism: The Humanistic Tradition in Contemporary Thought (New Haven, 1943), p. 242.

27. In The Courage to Be (New Haven, [1952]), p. 190, Tillich even writes of a “God above God” for those who cannot believe in the God of theism but who, taking “the anxiety of meaninglessness” upon themselves, still have the “courage to be.”

28. Muller, p. 269.

29. “Hypocrite Auteur,” Collected Poems, p. 175.