The American Characters
Robert Sherwood’s play Idiot’s Delight, set at the brink of an imagined world war, features characters from all over the Western world, representing an array of perspectives. They tend toward stereotype, but Sherwood usually manages to humanize each role. The German doctor, Waldersee, is a good example: stern and nationalistic, he originally bucks the tired generalization during Hitler’s reign that Germans were soulless barbarians, with his hope to improve the world by defeating cancer. By the end, though, under the pressure of the war, he becomes the barbarian stereotype and returns to his homeland to produce nerve gas instead. Mr. and Mrs. Cherry are as gung-ho about duty as cartoon British people tended to be, but Sherwood softens some of the brittleness of their stereotype by making their love deep and fresh and by having Jimmy Cherry be an artist. As Mrs. Cherry puts it, ‘‘We’re both independent,’’ and even thinking that they are spares them from being stereotypical Brits. The Frenchman is hotheaded; the Austrian is resigned; and the Russian woman is mysteriously superior: all of these stretch beyond the functions of their particular characters to stand as representatives of their governments’ attitudes toward war.
With this pattern established, it seems unnecessarily repetitive that the play has two American men, especially when it could so easily have made the social manager of the Hotel Monte Gabrielle a representative of another European nation. Apparently, Harry Van does not tell audiences all that Sherwood thinks they need to know about America’s position in the international situation of the time. Since there are, in fact, two Americans, it seems a safe bet that examining the contrast between them will reveal more of the author’s intent than one could see if there were just one.
The essence of this play, as with all of Sherwood’s pre-World War II writing, is his basic assumption that war is an avoidable mistake that humanity commits again and again, but does not need to. In the ‘‘Postscript’’ to the original publication, Sherwood explains why he does not think war is inevitable, but why, nonetheless, it will probably go on: ‘‘I believe,’’ he writes, ‘‘that the world is populated largely by decent people, and decent people don’t want war.’’ The problem decent people face is that ‘‘they are deluded by their exploiters, who are members of the indecent minority.’’ In the play, both Harry and Don are decent people, but only one seems ripe for exploitation. The defense that Sherwood offers against becoming ‘‘intoxicated by the synthetic spirit of patriotism’’ is to face the fear-mongering political leaders with ‘‘calmness, courage, and ridicule.’’ Harry Van is a model of these qualities, and one senses that, if he were to survive the air raid that comes at the final curtain, he would be immune to the allure of war. Donald Navadel, on the other hand, presents the audience with just the sort of qualities that the purveyors of war can exploit.
Don is the first character that audiences get to know in Idiot’s Delight. In the stage directions at the beginning of the play, he is described as ‘‘a rather precious, youngish American, suitably costumed for winter sports by Saks Fifth Avenue.’’ These facts present Don as an interesting enough character, given his situation. He is a classic ‘‘fish out of water’’ character—a wealthy, young American in the thick of Europe’s twisted political situation at a time when Americans were particularly notorious for their ability to ignore the rest of the world’s troubles. The situation Don is in at the opening curtain could keep an audience’s attention throughout a whole...
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play, but not this play. It turns out, after opening on him, that the play is not about Don at all.
It is worth noting, given the fact that he is on stage so little during the play, that Sherwood supplies Donald Navadel with a compelling back-story and a distinct personality. He draws viewers’ attention in the play’s first few minutes, and then he virtually disappears. When he is there, though, he is loud and aggressive, not at all the image of the successful sportsman that his Saks Fifth Avenue ‘‘costume’’ would belie. ‘‘I’m fed to the teeth, personally,’’ he tells his employer, Pittaluga, after telling the band to ‘‘Get out!’’ and ordering Dumptsy ‘‘Do as you’re told!’’ Without the impending danger of war behind them, his sharp comments might seem to be the cries of a young man of promise who was hired away from a thriving situation to be stuck in a dead-end job. Within the context of war, though, his lack of composure identifies him as a part of the system that keeps international conflict alive.
Don is prey for the purveyors of war because he takes himself seriously. His pride is wounded because he does not like the situation he works in and he feels that someone must be to blame. He immodestly refers to his own career as ‘‘conspicuously successful’’; by contrast, he calls the place where he works an ‘‘obscure tavern’’ and ‘‘a deadly, boring dump.’’ His indignation is the kind that drives people to wars to defend their national honor; his anger is exactly the kind of fuel that the world expected to ignite in Europe in 1936.
Harry Van, on the other hand, exudes the kind of self-control that Sherwood clearly admired. He is not presented as having a superior personality, as a model of the sort of person who could eventually lead the world to peace. He seems like an ordinary, slightly bright man, who has been made wise by the circumstances of his life, so that he takes nothing for granted. Sherwood introduces Harry as an ‘‘American vaudevillian promoter, press agent, book-agent, crooner, hoofer, barker or shill, who has undertaken all sorts of jobs in his time, all of them capitalizing on his power of salesmanship and none of them entirely honest.’’ In the course of the play, Harry describes a few of his former careers, ranging from the dangerously dishonest selling of useless medicine to the winking dishonesty of participating in a phony mind-reading act to the self-dishonesty of playing background music for silent films when he is actually an accomplished classical performer.
It is Harry’s dishonesty that makes him able to accept human weakness. He is capable of falling in love with Irene, the only character in the play more insincere than himself. He is, in fact, able to put up with the foibles and pretentions and self-deceit of anyone he meets at the Hotel Monte Gabriele. Audiences come to know the background stories of these characters because Harry Van is always there, ready to let them talk without passing judgment. As Mrs. Cherry tells him at the start of act 2, ‘‘I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have you here in this hotel.’’
In his later scenes, it is even more obvious that Don Navadel, the professional winter sportsman, is too intolerant to stand up to the social forces leading toward war. This becomes particularly clear in the scenes that Don and Harry share, where their different temperaments can be easily compared. When Achille Weber, the arms manufacturer, has been introduced, Don is dead serious and ‘‘impressed,’’ whereas Harry hardly notices the impressive man because he is fascinated with the mysterious woman, Irene. In an earlier scene, Don is particularly impatient with Harry: ‘‘It may be difficult for you to understand, Mr. Van,’’ he tells the man who is fifteen or twenty years his senior, ‘‘but we happen to be on the brink of a frightful calamity.’’ Harry responds blithely that the Italians would not start a worldwide conflict because they are ‘‘far too roI mantic.’’ When Harry brings up the idea of putting on a show at the hotel, he works his way into it by asking Don his job description, likening it to ‘‘a sort of Y. M. C. A. secretary’’; Don’s reactions in this conversation grow from ‘‘impatient’’ to ‘‘simply furious,’’ according to the stage directions.
Harry Van is, because of his optimism, a model for the virtues that Sherwood believes are needed to resist the temptations of war—as he outlines in an often-quoted speech. In taking advantage of ‘‘suckers,’’ he has experienced their faith: ‘‘Faith in peace on earth and good will to men—and faith that ‘Muma,’ ‘Muma’ the three-legged girl, really has got three legs.’’ Instead of making him more cynical, humanity’s ability to constantly come up with more faith has given Harry his own sort of faith— ‘‘It has made me sure that no matter how much the meek may be bulldozed or gypped they will eventually inherit the earth.’’ His faith is the source of the ‘‘coolness, courage and ridicule’’ that Sherwood prescribes, keeping Harry detached from the mounting fear and anger that draws the others, and their respective nations, to war.
The differences between the two Americans in this play become clearest at the end. Don concludes his employment at the Hotel Monte Gabriele with the line, ‘‘What a relief it is to be out of this foul place!,’’ as he launches into a description of the Frenchman’s execution. After that, he passes through the play to show a devotion to punctuality. ‘‘Four o’clock. Correct!’’ he answers when Harry asks the train departure time, and later Don appears, shouts, ‘‘We can’t wait another instant!,’’ and goes. Harry leaves the security of a train to Geneva and steps right into the war zone, fully aware of what he faces. Don is anxious to get on the move; Harry, staying with danger all around him, is calm.
Source: David Kelly, Critical essay on Idiot’s Delight, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.
Sherwood’s Universal Microcosms
Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings wrote What Price Glory? in 1924 and concluded it with the words, ‘‘What a lot of goddam fools it takes to make a war.’’ Twelve years later, when news of the Spanish Civil War and of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia occupied the headlines, and when Hitler was rattling his saber ominously over his neighbors in eastern Europe, Robert Sherwood presented audiences with Idiot’s Delight which reflected the growing anti-war sentiment in the United States in the mid-1930’s. Sherwood’s message is somewhat different from that of Anderson and Stallings. In the postscript to his play he writes, ‘‘. . . let me express here the conviction that those who shrug and say, ‘War is inevitable,’ are false prophets. I believe that the world is populated largely by decent people, and decent people don’t want war. Nor do they make war. They fight and die, to be sure—but that is because they have been deluded by their exploiters, who are members of the indecent minority.’’ This sentiment represents a mellowing from the attitude expressed implicitly in The Petrified Forest in the characterization of the blood-thirsty Legionnaires, who have ‘‘fought to make the world safe for democracy,’’ who love to shoot and kill, and who care little whether they are shooting at the just or the unjust.
It is clear that the sentiment in Idiot’s Delight is that human conflict is largely the fault of those who make it possible, in this specific case, the munitions manufacturer, Achilles Weber. His Russian mistress, Irene, realizes this fact; and, when war finally erupts, she cries out to Weber: ‘‘All this great, wonderful death and destruction, everywhere. And you promoted it!’’ But Weber, who whimsically declines to take all the credit, retorts: ‘‘. . . But don’t forget to do honor to Him—up there—who put fear into man. I am the humble instrument of His divine will.’’ And again Weber declines to accept the full responsibility for his part in bringing about conflict when he asks Irene, ‘‘. . . who are the greater criminals—those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them, and use them?’’ The question of responsibility, of course, is the compelling question of the age, and it recurs in such works as Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson, Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and a host of other plays of the 1930’s and ’40’s. By shifting responsibility, the foul deed can be done, yet everyone involved can be exonerated. The ‘‘indecent minority’’ is a minority of faceless buck-passers.
One of the major points of Idiot’s Delight had been made ten years earlier in The Road to Rome, when Amytis deflated Hannibal after he had stated that he had been motivated in his conquests by the voice of his god, Ba-al, and she had replied: ‘‘That wasn’t the voice of Ba-al, Hannibal. That was the voice of the shopkeepers of Carthage, who are afraid that Rome will interfere with their trade. . . . Hatred, greed, envy, and the passionate desire for revenge—those are the high ideals that inspire you soldiers, Roman and Carthaginian alike.’’ In Idiot’s Delight, Ba-al is dead, and the ancient god of the Hebrews has been reduced to a ‘‘. . . poor, lonely old soul. Sitting up in heaven, with nothing to do, but play solitaire. Poor, dear God. Playing Idiot’s Delight. The game that never means anything, and never ends.’’ This is the God of a skeptical age, and this is life in Spenglerian terms or in terms of the philosophy of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land or in The Hollow Men, where life does end, but with a whimper rather than a bang.
Harold Clurman has called the sentiment which led Sherwood to write Idiot’s Delight cogent. He has very astutely and perceptively noted that the play ‘‘. . . echoes the American fear of and profound estrangement from the facts of European intrigue which led to war,’’ and he supports this contention by reminding readers that Sherwood’s French pacifist, Quillery, is cast as a Radical-Socialist who venerated Lenin; but, in reality, the Radical-Socialists of pre-war France were the small businessmen who hated Lenin. But Clurman praises the play for giving ‘‘. . . us an inkling of the moral climate in our country’’ during this period of crisis. Clurman also makes the point that during this time ‘‘. . . the attitude of our dramatists, generally speaking, was fundamentally moral rather than, as some are now inclined to believe, political.’’
This, of course, is a disputed point, and Casper H. Nannes presents a case for Idiot’s Delight as political drama in Politics in the American Drama, in which he claims, quite validly, that Sherwood’s anti-war bias reached its peak in Idiot’s Delight.’’ Actually Sherwood’s stand in regard to war is much easier to understand and to accept as a moral rather than as a political stand. Surely the attitude which he is working toward in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and which he finally achieves in his propagandistic There Shall Be No Night is a moral stand. The fact that both of these plays are closer temporally to audiences than was a play such as The Road to Rome can easily mislead them into seeing the more immediate political implications of what Sherwood is saying than the moral implications. However, it is clear, especially in the case of There Shall Be No Night, that had the play been fundamentally political rather than moral, Sherwood could not in good conscience have rewritten it in 1943 and changed the nationality of the chief contending parties in the action from Finnish to Greek. And those critics who castigated him for ‘‘dumping the Finns’’ were obviously insensitive to the underlying purpose of this play, and perhaps of all of his plays which dealt with the problem of war.
Sherwood managed to put more tension into Idiot’s Delight than he was able to achieve in many of his other plays. The uncertainty that the people assembled in the Italian pensione will be permitted to cross the border into Switzerland pervades the play and causes the characters to show tension in their various ways. The tension is enhanced by the sounding of air raid sirens, and it reaches a peak with the execution of Quillery. However, John Mason Brown understates a very important point when he writes that ‘‘The tension in Europe added to the tension of Idiot’s Delight.’’ The play capitalized on this tension increasingly at every performance. It opened in New York two days after Italy had invaded Ethiopia; it opened in London less than a week after Hitler’s forces had marched into Austria. It played amid constant international tensions, and even its most successful revival came in 1951 at a time when an undeclared war was being fought at great cost of human life in Korea.
Sherwood had to exercise considerable control to make Idiot’s Delight as serious a play as he did. More than any other Sherwood drama, this play has a message. It was written with great intensity, indeed with such great intensity that its author wrote on one occasion until well past midnight, went to bed, but couldn’t stand not knowing the outcome of the second act; so he arose again at three and continued writing until dawn. The play, which was written and presented to the Lunts in a period of two weeks, was not entirely ready for Broadway in its original form. Sherwood had once said, ‘‘The trouble with me is that I start off with a big message and end with nothing but good entertainment,’’ and Idiot’s Delight is an especially apt case in point. At one of the early rehearsals, Lawrence Langner pointed out that the play seemed too light for its very serious content. This was a thoughtful observation for at this point, as Langner notes, the play ‘‘. . . had drifted perilously between the delightful story of a group of chorus girls lost in Italy, and the more serious implications of the oncoming war.’’
Lynn Fontanne, as well as Alfred Lunt and Robert Sherwood, agreed with Langner’s analysis; and, after considerable pondering, Miss Fontanne suggested that Sherwood write into the play a significant scene for her—she played Irene—and Achilles Weber, the munitions baron. Sherwood did so, and the play took on a more serious tone, even though this increased seriousness was attained through means which did not detract from the play’s initial humor and pleasing pace. Also, the irony of the play was increased by this change; and, through the increased irony, Weber’s personality was projected more fully to the audience. His unchivalrous abandonment of Irene, an abandonment to almost certain death, is directly attributable to the fact that Irene expresses pacifist sentiments. The munitions manufacturer will tolerate no threat to his commercial interests in the form of such sentiments; by abandoning Irene, he shows himself unmistakably to be a man with no fundamental loyalties. One might compare Weber to Robert Murray in Small War on Murray Hill; Murray shows similar tendencies, although his personality in Sherwood’s later play is just sketched in, whereas Achilles Weber is a more fully realized character in Idiot’s Delight.
The microcosm which Sherwood creates in Idiot’s Delight is suggestive of a diminutive Magic Mountain, translated into American terms. The characterization is of the utmost importance in Sherwood’s play, just as it is in Mann’s novel, for each character is a broad representative of a specific Weltanschauung; each speaks for a large class.
Harry Van is the prototypical ‘‘hoofer’’ and is virtually a master of ceremonies in the play. He represents American views much more fully than does the other male American in the play, Don Navadel. Van has a marked feeling of loyalty to his girls, but he also has a feeling of loyalty to Irene, the phony Russian countess, because he is convinced that he spent the night with her once in Kansas City, but even more so because she apparently remembers that they spent the night together and has some sentiment about it. Harry is the peacemaker, but this writer feels—with Grenville Vernon who reviewed the play for Commonweal—that Harry is artistically false. His chief function in much of the play is that of pace-setter. Harry denounces war, but he never really presents any significant arguments for doing so. He is statically pacifistic in his presentation. Further, his heroic action in coming back to the pensione to die with Irene is not convincing. He has not, like Alan Squier, shown a death wish. His death does not lead to anything greater. He is representative of meaningless action, as is the French pacifist, Quillery.
Harry Van’s philosophy is never really expressed clearly. The closest he comes to expressing any sort of idealogical stand is in the first act when he says to Dr. Waldersee, ‘‘All my life . . . I’ve been selling phoney goods to people of meagre intelligence and great faith. You’d think that would make me contemptuous of the human race, wouldn’t you? But—on the contrary—it has given me faith. It has made me sure that no matter how much the meek may be bulldozed or gypped they will eventually inherit the earth.’’ The thinking in this passage is so confused and inconsistent that one can scarcely generalize about Harry’s philosophy from it; yet this is typical of Harry’s more serious utterances.
Quillery is often somewhat less than convincing in much the same way that Harry Van is. Having attempted to be a citizen of the world, Quillery very suddenly becomes a Frenchman again when war is declared. He is opinionated and dogmatic, but very insecure psychologically. He has fuzzy notions of how to bring about a better world, and he becomes an immature social boor when he begins to expand his hazy theories. He feels that the strongest force in the world is ‘‘. . . the mature intelligence of the workers of the world! There is one antidote for war—Revolution!’’
Quillery is used to point the finger unquestionably at Achilles Weber. Having reached a frenzied state of anti-war sentiment, he tells Cherry, the Englishman, that Weber ‘‘. . . can give you all the war news. Because he made it. . . He has been organizing the arms industry. Munitions. To kill French babies. And English babies.’’ In the following scene, Irene is to become even more graphic in describing the horror of what Weber is making possible when she speaks of what the war will be like: A young woman ‘‘. . . lying in a cellar that has been wrecked by an air raid, and her firm young breasts are all mixed up with the bowels of a dismembered policeman, and the embryo from her womb is splattered against the face of a dead bishop.’’ As Irene’s pacifism grows, it seems that she would be more appealing to Quillery than to Harry Van; and Sherwood might indeed have added credibility to the play had he spared Quillery rather than having him executed by the Fascisti. Had Quillery returned to the pensione to remain with Irene, the action would have been as convincing as was Boze’s action in The Petrified Forest when he risked his life and grabbed Mantee’s gun.
In many respects Quillery is suggestive of Boze. He is utterly lacking in objectivity and is very egocentric. He is a master of the hollow insult, as Boze was. His speech to Dr. Waldersee exemplifies this quality: ‘‘The eminent Dr. Hugo Waldersee. A wearer of the sacred swastika. Down with the Communists! Off with their heads! So that the world may be safe for the Nazi murderers.’’ He then turns on the British couple, the Cherrys, and insults them by saying, ‘‘And now we hear the voice of England! The great, well-fed, pious hypocrite! The grabber— the exploiter—the immaculate butcher! It was you forced this war, because miserable little Italy dared to drag its black shirt across your trail of Empire.’’
Despite this tirade, Quillery tells the Italian officers later in the same scene that ‘‘England and France are fighting for the hopes of mankind.’’ He then launches into the fanatical diatribe which costs him his life. He shouts, ‘‘Down with Fascism! Abbasso Fascismo!’’. He is placed under arrest by the Italians, who have very little choice but to do this, and he shouts, ‘‘Call out the firing squad! Shoot me dead! But do not think you can silence the truth that’s in me.’’ These are brave, stirring words; but they are those of a person who has regressed to adolescence and whose idealism leads to nothing but death without meaning. The role is well depicted and, in itself, is credible. However, the play as a whole would have gained in credibility had Quillery been permitted to live and to fall in love with Irene. The reunion of the pathological patriot with the pathological liar would have been much more satisfying than was the reunion of the goodnatured Harry Van with Irene.
The Cherrys are brought into the play for two reasons. In the first place, they represent the effect of war upon young love—always an appealing theme. But in a broader sense, they represent the English stand in regard to war. They are restrained and calm. They do not like what is going on, but they do not explode into action as might the more volatile French, represented by Quillery. In this regard, Harry Van represents his country, the United States. He shepherds his girls to the frontier, but he returns for personal reasons to stay with Irene. His involvement in the war is unofficial, but morality leads him to take a stand, even though the bases of this morality are personal and private.
Dr. Waldersee, of course, represents the dilemma of the scientist who is essentially dedicated to something far larger than nationalism, but whose blood tie with his country is great enough to divert him from his scientific pursuits for the benefit of mankind to scientific pursuits which will be quite the opposite. In reality, Dr. Waldersee is faced with the same sort of moral dilemma which faced Dr. Valkonen in There Shall Be No Night, and the solution of the conflict, on a moral level at least, is similar in both cases.
Idiot’s Delight amazed audiences because Sherwood not only had foreseen the broad outlines of history, but also had dealt with specifics which were in time to be borne out by developments in international politics. The play continued to have a very definite appeal through the early years of the war; and, when it was revived in 1951, audiences were again to be much in awe of Sherwood’s ability to prognosticate with such accuracy.
The areas in which Idiot’s Delight appealed to audiences are as diverse as the areas in which The Road to Rome made its appeal. Grenville Vernon, writing a second review of the play six weeks after he had first reviewed it, felt that it ‘‘. . . is not all of one piece. It is perhaps even too shrewdly made for popular appeal. It is in its entirety neither comedy, melodrama, musical comedy nor propaganda play. It is by turns all of these . . . there are those who would have wished [Sherwood] had stuck a little closer to artistic unity.’’
The play’s most severe structural flaw is obviously the ending. Bombs are falling, Harry and Irene are in the pensione, certainly doomed. Harry has been playing ‘‘The Ride of the Walküries.’’ Irene asks him if he knows any hymns, and in jazz time he begins to play ‘‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’’ The irony of this is almost too heavy handed; and, for every critic who agreed with Newsweek’s critic in calling the ending ‘‘a stirring bit of theatre,’’ there were dozens who felt, like Grenville Vernon, that it was ‘‘hokum of a peculiarly annoying kind.’’ Sherwood’s intention to represent in Idiot’s Delight ‘‘. . . a compound of bland pessimism and desperate optimism, of chaos and jazz,’’ is achieved in his ending; but the method to achieve it is so jarringly melodramatic that the impact is all but lost.
In Idiot’s Delight, Sherwood’s out-and-out paci- fism is replaced by pessimism. Joseph Wood Krutch has noted that the author’s main contention in this play is that ‘‘. . . men are too emotional and too childish to carry to a successful issue any plan for abolishing war.’’ This is the first step away from the pacifism of Sherwood’s earlier works. In Idiot’s Delight, the author has not turned his back on pacifism, but he is not hopeful that men will be pacific. The thinking in this play leads directly into Abe Lincoln in Illinois and reaches its final culmination in There Shall Be No Night with its ‘‘Yes, but . . .’’ attitude.
Source: R. Baird Shuman, ‘‘Sherwood’s Universal Microcosms,’’ in Robert Emmet Sherwood, College & University Press, 1964, pp. 52–74.