SOURCE: Jarrell, Randall. Review of The Fall of the City, by Archibald MacLeish. Sewanee Review 51, no. 2 (April-June 1943): 267-80.

[In the following essay, Jarrell critiques MacLeish's political/allegorical radio play The Fall of the City, finding it riddled with inconsistencies and calling it a “melodramatic oversimplification.”]

Any successful play in verse—in a time when the phrase sounds like an Irish bull—is worth an analysis; and The Fall of the City has been extraordinarily successful. Almost anyone with a radio has heard it, almost anyone with an anthology has read it; even the college textbooks print it, with prefaces calling it a really topical play, one that has both comprehended and predicted the actual history of our times. “Pioneering in a new medium, the verse play for radio, MacLeish foretold the fate of Vienna by eleven months,” one editor writes; “Prague, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris—the play was repeated with tragic variations.” But if this is so, The Fall of the City is exactly what everyone has been wanting—a good poetic drama about contemporary reality; Poetry and Drama and Society, miserably separated for so many ages, have at last been reunited. How has it been done?

The play begins with the “orotund and professional” voice of the Studio Director. After the conventional “Ladies and gentlemen: / This broadcast comes to you from the city,” he rises for a moment into orotund and professional verse, in a passage full of the abstract, glossy, and geographical lyricism that is a MacLeish trademark. He gets back to business with, “For three days the world has watched this city”; through the newspapers and through broadcasts like this one, the audience assumes. Each day, at twelve o'clock, a dead woman has risen from the grave! MacLeish's exclamation point notes how unusual such an event is; that such an event is being broadcast is still more unusual, most hearers will think. It is very easy to believe in broadcasting, fairly easy to believe in dead women rising daily from the grave; but to believe in both at the same time takes the Red Queen. The hearers cannot help distrusting the Studio Director when he tells them, in a conventional Shakespearean passage about omens, that “in a time like ours seemings and portents signify”; that this old-fashioned miracle is a finally important expression of our time, and not merely an expression of the author's liking for a sensational dramatic device.

The announcer takes us away to the city, at “precisely four minutes to twelve,” in order to broadcast the fourth resurrection of the dead woman. (Where was he the second and third times? By the fourth time any real broadcasting company would have made it a regular program with a sponsor.) It is a city more suited to miracles than to microphones: a kind of generalized Aztec town, far away in space, farther away in time; there are temples, pyramids, hawks, kites, water-sellers, peasants, horse-raisers, cattle-herders, priests with knives (stone, I regret to say). The announcer, a country boy from way back, is much impressed with the “enormous crowd” of ten thousand people; in their midst, surrounded with plumed fans, sit the “cabinet ministers”! One can see already that the play is a queer and sometimes unfortunate mixture, a kind of allegory: it exists on two levels, one a literal Aztec level, the other an allegorical topical level. These levels, by their conflict, produce all sorts of surface incongruities and anachronisms; and perhaps, under the surface, they never fuse, but remain contradictory—the reader can judge.

The announcer's description of the exotic city rises into suspense; it is almost noon. The dead woman punctually, miraculously rises; she recites a mannered, consciously archaic, conscientiously vague lyric about death. Then after mechanically repeating a prophecy she does not understand, she trails away in a few elegiac measures. Her prophecy is: “The city of masterless men / Will take a master. / There will be shouting then / Blood after.”

To see all the laws of nature broken, four times running, because a small Aztec city is about to be conquered, may very well seem disproportionate to a modern audience. Shakespeare has these miraculous omens because he and his hearers were sure that the world is made that way, that such things always happen; since we are just as sure of the opposite, a contemporary playwright needs an overwhelmingly good reason for using such miracles, especially if his play is an allegorical representation of modern history. MacLeish has none; he simply wants a sensational exotic device to make his play more impressive, and he feels that the play's sensational and exotic setting, along with the announcer's continual reassurances, will soothe us into belief.

The announcer, still afraid that we may still be doubting, makes another Shakespearean speech on the validity of omens; meanwhile the people, after reiterating fragments of the prophecy, suddenly go to pieces, and run yelling around the square, “milling around us like cattle that smell death.” Before this MacLeish has made the crowd seem very tough and stolid, full of peasants, farmers' wives, armed horse-raisers and cattle-herders who “look at the girls with their eyes hard / And a hard grin and their teeth showing.” Why do they suddenly act like a Girl Scout troop with hysterics? like frightened animals? Because MacLeish makes them act that way throughout the play, no matter what the situation; they are without sense, courage, or any other creditable quality; they respond to everything like complete fools and cowards, are several times compared to animals, and remind you of nothing so much as Hamilton's “great beast.”

Suddenly the First Messenger staggers in; helped over to the cabinet ministers, he gives a couple of perfunctory ritual pants, and speaks—not a few gasping sentences, but an energetic and rhetorical two pages. He has run day and night, all the way from the ocean (presumably he was on bad terms with the broadcasting company). The bouncy two-stress lines, like unrhymed Skeltonics; the Anglo-Saxon alliteration (“He was violent in his vessel: / He was steering in her stern: / He was watching in her waist: / He was peering in her prow …”); the mannered archaic parallelism; the primitive syntax (“East over sea-cross has / All taken / Every country …”); make one think of Hengist and Horsa carrying a message to Garcia, and lend the messenger a charming but slightly Mother Goose-ish air; his method is one of simple exaggeration. He warns that a mighty conqueror has landed, after overcoming all the lands east of the sea. Those he conquers lead lives of unbelievable shame and degradation; nevertheless, says the messenger, many or all of you will welcome him. Why? The messenger doesn't say. We know all about Fascism, so we are prepared to believe that some of the people will welcome him; but dramatically, in terms of the play, not of its topical application, the welcome is quite unmotivated—we have to assume, as MacLeish does, that the people of the city have some sort of tropism toward slavery and degradation.

How do the people take this additional bad news? with additional hysterics? Their response is exactly the opposite: not one speaks, not one moves; they stand there like docile animals, patiently waiting for the ministers to tell them what to do and what to think. A minister comes from the “huddle” (notice the weight of this word) on the platform; and this First Orator makes a long, highly rhetorical speech. (There is no dialogue in the whole play—nothing but long speeches, songs, the announcer's descriptions, and choppy phrases from the crowd.) His oration is full of vulgar and specious effectiveness, inflated generalities, plays on words, childish logic-chopping, mechanical and repetitive antitheses and analogies. MacLeish wants the speech to sound entirely false and unsympathetic to his own audience; it does; but he makes most of it so obviously pompous and empty that the crowd in the square could not have been fooled by it either. MacLeish, out to discredit the orator and his position, the crowd and its response, has none of the objectivity or breath of sympathy of the true dramatist, and consequently gives the orator none of the genuinely effective things he might have said. The people are, of course, entirely won over by the speech; forgetting the Dead Woman and the Conqueror, they shout with joy, sit down and eat their lunches (wrapped in corn-shucks), play on flutes—the children and old men begin to dance. What could the Orator have said to reassure them so completely? to make them act like complacent fools?

He has made them a speech about pacifism, about passive resistance. These Aztecs, with their spears and bows, their human sacrifices, their generals in feather mantles, absolutely eat up a speech that would embarrass the most confirmed pacifist. This is false on the literal Aztec level of the play, quite as false on its allegorical topical level: when countries have been threatened by Fascist conquerors, their governments have not made empty pacifist appeals—it would not have worked either with their own people or with the Fascists. This minister is made a wordy demagogue, Hitler's idea of a parliamentary orator. The first half of his speech consists of inflated variations on They that take the sword shall perish by the sword. Then he asserts that doing nothing will conquer the conqueror; that the snickers of road-menders, the titters of laundresses, the coarse guffaws of chambermaids will make the conqueror “sweat in his uniform foolishly. / He will disappear: no one hear of him!” He says that “scorn conquers,” mentions reason and truth, and concludes with a thoroughly disgraceful and thoroughly unlikely peroration: “Words … win!”

MacLeish shows contempt for the Orator even more drastically by having the announcer, at the climax of the speech, break in with a Fitzpatrick Traveltalk description of the scene. This immense discourtesy (it would be as plausible for an announcer to interrupt one of Roosevelt's speeches with a description of Washington) shows the audience, as forcibly as a blow, that the minister is not even worth listening to; that his empty talk is less important than a travelogue's local color. And the empty romantic exoticism of the description shows the critic, just as forcibly, how completely MacLeish has managed to dodge the whole problem of representing contemporary reality; how much he values these gaudy properties for their own sake.

The people's little fair is broken up by the arrival of the Second Messenger, as panting, exhausted, and long-winded as the first. “Stand by: we're edging in,” says the announcer, reminding his hearers as sharply as possible, with the cliché, of the incongruity between the radio and this horse-less (and, presumably, signal-drum-less and signal-fire-less) culture of the Messenger. The conqueror is coming fast, warns the Messenger; “No man opposing him / Still grows his glory.” It seems that the Conqueror has a straw-man, a bloody and hateful figure of horror, whom he sets up and fights with “at every road-corner”; and the alien people everywhere, overwhelmed by his prowess, bring him flowers and gold, sing songs to him, hold his hands and feel his thighs, worship him and are conquered. (This odd method of conquest is quite incomprehensible on the literal Aztec level of the play—the reader can make sense of it only if he knows that it represents the Fascist use of anti-Semitism.) This great conqueror is already crossing the mountains.

There is another complete shift in the people's behavior; “frantic with anger and plain fear,” they behave like vindictive lunatics. “The mob … crazy with terror” is “boiling around us like mullet that smell shark.” (Before they “milled like cattle.”) “Down with the government!” they shout. “Down with liberal learned minds!” (For pure bathos, for inexcusable incongruity and anachronism, this italicized phrase is hard to beat.) Unless the people are completely inconsistent fools, sure to respond in the worst way to anything, this response to the Second Messenger—fifteen minutes after an exactly opposite response to the First Messenger—is impossible.

The priests interrupt with the second panacea, religion. They are made to seem emotional obscurantists, pure escapists; their arguments are specious and hackneyed; nevertheless, the people immediately fall for them, for the second time forgetting all about the Dead Woman and the Conqueror. The announcer, whom MacLeish makes gullible as a stage Watson, has helped discredit the minister's speech by his vacuous acceptance of it; he receives the priests' speeches with the same enthusiasm, describing the people's response in approving clichés that would, as Wilde puts it, compromise a locomotive. The priests, with drums and songs, promptly move the people to frenzy; the crowd dances to the pyramid, tears the clothes from a girl's “bare breast,” drags her to the altar, and “shrieks” (notice how the orgiastic shrieks influences us against the crowd) in ecstasy. All this is unlikely enough on the literal level of the play—the Aztec priests who cut the hearts from tens of thousands of prisoners are not likely to advise submission to an alien conqueror, a withdrawal from the world of action. On the topical allegorical level of the play this is senseless: no country has met a Fascist attack with hysterical religiosity—it is the last thing that would occur to anybody except a tent-show revivalist or a playwright. MacLeish makes his democracy fall because its people stupidly follow their political leaders when they counsel passive resistance; because its people stupidly follow their religious leaders when they counsel a religious withdrawal; because they stupidly and cravenly forsake their military leaders when they tell them to fight. It is hard to see how anyone could make so bad an analysis accidentally.

But now MacLeish pulls from his Sodom one lonely Lot, a brave, honest, and intelligent man of action. He is—a general! Yes, a tough old general in a feather coat. He rescues the girl, drives the people down from the pyramid, and bawls them out in the most hard-boiled and violent rhetoric the admiring MacLeish can find for him. In a deep voice that drowns the “chatter” of the crowd, he shouts: “You ought to be flogged for your foolishness! / Your grandfathers died to be free / And you—you juggle with freedom! … You thought you could always quibble!” And so on. Those grandfathers have a familiar ring.

The general then makes a speech about freedom (libretto by Dorothy Thompson). All he thinks about is freedom; “there's nothing in this world worse,” he warns them, “than doing the Strong Man's Will.” Generals are famous for feeling that way about democracy and authority, I am told; and for trying to save the rights of the democracies from Fascism, when the people of the democracies want to throw those rights away. Certainly in MacLeish's New Found Land they're famous for it; though I'll bet that, before long, some repressed general breaks up a performance of The Fall of the City by establishing a military dictatorship and successfully defending the city from its conqueror.

The General makes a last appeal to the people to fight and die for their liberties: in other words, to do what the Spanish loyalists, what the Chinese, what half the nations of Europe have done and are doing. But of the people of this democracy—who allegorically stand for The People, who topically stand for the people of our own time—not one even listens to the General, not one fights for his liberty or his life. As always in this play, they scream and run around and around the square in their terror. The square is choked with deserters. We have been told of no troops, of no resistance; their own government has ordered them not to resist; yet MacLeish twice calls the people who flee into the square deserters. The citizens (who behave, from beginning to end, exactly like a mob in Little Orphan Annie) now give up completely, shouting the most frantic, craven, vindictive, or ridiculous sentences. “Opinions and talk! Deliberative walks beneath the ivy and the creepers!” cries one, as men mad with terror will. “He's one man: we are but thousands!” reasons another pessimistic citizen—an emigrant from Through the Looking Glass, no doubt. The people tear off their plumes, make bonfires of their bows, throw away their spears (Aztecs would hardly do this, modern populations would hardly have the arms to throw away); they shout wilder and wilder things: “Freedom's for fools! … Freedom has eaten our strength and corrupted our virtues! … Fools must be mastered! …” They end with the extraordinary, “Chains will be liberty!” The mere prospect of a Conqueror makes the people become the Conquered, servile wretches who deny all their liberties, welcome their degradation in impossible speeches.

The announcer finishes the play with a long and extremely effective narrative. The people wait in breathless terror, minute after minute, until the Conqueror enters, helmed, mailed, “broad as a brass door: a hard hero.” The people “cover their faces with their fingers. They cower before him. / They fall; they sprawl on the stone.” The Conqueror mounts the pyramid, opens his visor; and the announcer whispers, cries out, “There's no one! … The helmet is hollow! … The armor is empty … The push of a stiff pole at the nipple would topple it.”

And the people?

They don't see or they won't see. They are silent …
The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty—
The long labor of liberty ended!
                                                                                                              They lie there!

Suddenly the Conqueror's arm rises, and the people “shout with happiness”; so great is their joy at being slaves, the conquered, that the announcer cries, “You'd say it was they were the conquerors.” The people, “like troops in a victory,” shout out exultantly: “The city of masterless men has found a master. The city has fallen.” The announcer repeats, flatly: “The city has fallen.” And the play ends.

The whole play has systematically discredited the people of the democracy, who are represented as stupid and treacherous cowards, without a single redeeming trait. It has discredited their leaders, who are represented as fatuous word-spinners. The people are conquered not by force, but by their own yearning to be mastered, to throw away their irksome liberties for the satisfying rule of the Strong Man. I have encountered such people before: in Hitler's and Mussolini's speeches. The only brave or intelligent man in the whole democracy is a professional soldier, a Strong Man; because of his rather implausible passion against authority and for “freedom,” he does not take command of the city, but only implores the people to fight—as a result the people are conquered. (If I were a general about to set up a military dictatorship—in order to save people from themselves, of course—I should be able to think of no other play that would so suitably influence the public and my troops.) The author's tone is: “I don't care what you want—you'll be free if I have to make you.” This is the message of the play: the people are cowardly fools who want to be degraded, to be subjugated, to throw away their freedom—we must force them, in some way, to fight for it. The play must surely have reminded many people of Huey Long's remark that Fascism in this country will have an anti-Fascist platform. “The people invent their oppressors”! A man who has spent time interviewing those oppressors for Fortune should know better than that. The oppressors are real; that suit of armor was never empty: it is MacLeish who has invented, not the people. In these last years many millions of these people, over the entire world, have died fighting their oppressors. Say to them that they invented their oppressors, wished to believe in them, wished to be free of their freedom; that they lie there.

If MacLeish put his philosophy in a book, he should call it The World as Will and Nothing But Will. He is an extraordinary case of arrested development, a survival from an almost extinct past; there is something consciously neo-primitive about his eager adoption of the optimistic voluntarism of frontier days, when—with plenty of land, plenty of jobs, and plenty of room on top—plenty of people thought that you can if you think you can; that the world is what we make it; that there's no limit. This is as far as possible from any tragic view of life, from the point of view of any great dramatist—who is, necessarily, a specialist on limits; who knows that the world is, at a given moment, what we find it; who understands well enough to accept, with composure even, the inescapable conditions of existence. MacLeish passionately dislikes any determinism, even an optimistic one; his one response to an inescapable condition is to look strong and deny that it exists. So, in his play, it's the people's fault; they choose to be slaves; they are weak and bad. Burke said that you can't condemn a whole people; I'm sure MacLeish would reply, “Why not?” Why not write a play condemning them? exhorting them to reform, to act just like their grandfathers, to stop quibbling about freedom and fight? MacLeish does not have any sort of religious or philosophical determinism, as most of the great dramatists had; the determinism of character or motivation he neglects—there is not a character in the entire play; and all the economic and social factors that may, in modern plays, furnish a kind of substitute for Fate or Necessity, he has made it his profession to avoid. So there is something curiously partial and shallow and oratorical about the play: it represents a positively political view of life.

As everybody since Aristotle has said, a play must have struggle, conflict, action—and this means more than waving weapons and making violent speeches. There is no real conflict in The Fall of the City. It is a play-by-play account of how an ignorant and cowardly people slide into their ruin, continually hoodwinked by everybody, until the crowning swindle is put over by an empty suit of armor. The city is not taken, it falls. (And we are convinced from the beginning, that it is going to fall; surely God—MacLeish either—doesn't raise women from the grave to tell us lies.) People talk, talk, talk, may even run around and around the square; but no one really does anything—not even the Conqueror. The General, late in the play, attempts to put some conflict into it; and is promptly disregarded. The structure of the play is extraordinarily simple, like a series of arias or recitations; it is extraordinarily unlike the complicated system of stresses and strains that is the structure of a real play.

Let me give a simplified structural analysis. The Dead Woman prophesies the fall of the city; the people become frightened. The First Messenger warns them that the Conqueror is coming; the people wait dumbly for advice. The Minister (First Orator) tells them to do nothing; they forget their fears, and dance or eat lunch. The Second Messenger warns them that the Conqueror is nearer; the people become very frightened. The Priests (Second Orators) tell them to be religious; they forget their fears, and dance religiously. The General (who, structurally speaking, combines the functions of Third Messenger and Third Orator) warns them that the Conqueror is upon them, that they must fight; the people go mad with fear. The Conqueror, an empty suit of armor, marches in and raises its arm; the people don't or won't see, and shout with happiness at being conquered. I am not sure what this is the structure of; but it is certainly not the structure of a play.

The Fall of the City exists on two levels: the literal or Aztec level; the allegorical or topical level. Its action is impossible on either of these levels alone: taken as a play about a primitive people, it is absurd; taken as a play about contemporary reality, it is equally absurd. It never really joins these levels at all, but gets along by uneasily and surreptitiously shifting back and forth between the two, in an attempt to evade the difficulties that would be insurmountable if it stuck to either. MacLeish makes his easy equation between a generalized Spanish conquest of an Aztec city, a generalized Fascist conquest of a democracy, only because, as a dramatist, he has no conception of the real forces that operate in either culture: he does not bother to observe or understand how people act, why they act as they do—and so makes them do impossible things, or do possible things for impossible reasons. The one thing a dramatist must understand is motivation; if he does not—and MacLeish does not—his play can have only an external and arbitrary unity, the specious organization of a fallacy. The people of MacLeish's city are fantastically unlike the real Aztecs, the real population of any traditional, agricultural, non-industrialized culture. If a culture is archaic and exotic enough, he seems to think, economic and technological factors stop operating. Who are the people with power in this city? The elected demagogues? Apparently; but the question never occurs to him. There everything happens because of emotions, of will; it is a city of free choice. This horse-less and metal-less city, with its spears and pyramids and cloaks of feathers; the corpse rising from the grave with its prophecy; the priests with their human sacrifice; the empty and all-conquering suit of armor—are these necessary to a play about contemporary political reality, about Fascism? Obviously not. They are gratuitous decorations, employed because they satisfy the author's taste for the romantic, the exotic, the sensational; because he believes that “verse is easily accepted on the stage only where the scene is made remote in time and so artificial to begin with”; because, after Conquistador, they were a familiar machinery that he had already learned to employ effectively; because they made it possible for him to distort or disregard facts, contemporary reality, and to present as real actions that would be plainly false in a contemporary scene; because his point of view is, essentially, as romanticized as his machinery of effect. His play, by accident or design, completely disregards what anyone knows: that Fascism is a highly specialized economic and political manifestation of a late stage of our own particular economic system, capitalism; that it springs from all kinds of real causes, not simply from people's cowardice and stupidity, their shameful longing to be slaves. Since he disregards all the characteristic and essential aspects of our own culture, his explanation of how Fascism operates seems not merely mistaken but childish.

The Fall of the City is false as an interpretation of reality. It is a schematized, arbitrarily one-sided, and melodramatic over-simplification, full of useless sensationalism and exoticism; a black and white political cartoon, plainly at variance with most of the facts. It is also false as an imaginative creation; the world the author creates is internally inconsistent, full of incongruities, anachronisms, arbitrary or impossible behavior; there are no characters, only the blankest of types; the motivation and organization of the play are wholly inadequate. A good deal of it, as a dramatic creation, is impossible, since it can be understood only if it is referred to some contemporary political event, accepted only if we are willing to concede, “All right, since it really happened that way.” We need to suspend not only our disbelief, but our capacity for disbelieving: to open our mouths and shut our eyes and take what the mother bird gives us.

This essay is not intended to be a sympathetic or comprehensive analysis of The Fall of the City; I came to bury it if I could manage to. Let me admit that it is not still-born, as most verse plays are, but has a hump and teeth. I believe that, on a fairly low level, it is an effective play; I have not tried to show why it is effective. I believe that it is a bad play; and I have tried to show why it is bad. But the point of view from which the play is written, the “message” of the play, seems to me far worse than the play itself. A critic, as critic, can say that the poet's analysis seems mistaken, his point of view unfortunate; but, speaking as a private citizen, the critic may want to be a good deal blunter. A philosopher I know once lent a copy of Alice in Wonderland to an old lady; when she returned it he asked, “Well, what did you think of it?” She murmured: “What a lie!”