SOURCE: Mason, Jeffrey D. “Maxwell Anderson's Dramatic Theory and Key Largo.” North Dakota Quarterly 48, no. 3 (summer 1980): 38-52.

Much of the scholarship written on Maxwell Anderson's plays has concentrated on the fact that many of them were written in verse. This tendency is not surprising; Anderson produced the largest body of American verse drama in the twentieth century. It is surprising, however, that the scholars who write about Anderson's dramatic theory have veered away from the verse issue in favor of the structure and purpose of drama.

Arthur M. Sampley makes a short reference to “The Essence of Tragedy” and goes on to distill Anderson's theory from his plays, rather than from his essays. Randall J. Buchanan writes a clear explanation of Anderson's system, breaking it down into twenty-five rules, but touches on the verse issue only to explain Anderson's belief in the supremacy of poetic tragedy over other dramatic forms and its alienation from practical purpose. Mabel Driscoll Bailey goes a bit further and explains Anderson's preference for verse over prose. Allan G. Halline writes a very good synthesis of the essays that were later published as Off Broadway, but uses no other primary source material, none being readily available in 1944. Alfred S. Shivers, writing in 1976, apparently made use of the collection of Anderson papers at the University of Texas at Austin, but devoted only five pages of his book exclusively to Anderson's theory.¹

There is, therefore, a gap between those who write about the plays and those who write about the theory. The former concentrate on the verse while the latter do not. It is true that Anderson's formal essays do not say much specifically about the use of verse in drama, but now that his letters have been published by Laurence G. Avery, it is possible to say a little more about his specific values in the writing of dramatic poetry.² Many critics have complained that Anderson sacrifices theme, character and structure to the poetry in his plays. To further narrow the gap between those who write about his plays and those who write about his theory, I shall present a fresh synthesis of Anderson's dramatic theory, including details on the writing of verse, and establishing that Anderson intended his verse to serve theme, character and structure, instead of taking precedence over them.

What is the purpose of the drama? To understand Anderson's answer to the question, it is necessary to know that he felt himself to be living in an age that had lost its faith. He was highly aware that the generation of the twenties felt that all rules had been cracked by the war and shattered by the heyday of prosperity that followed. There was no more morality, no more right and wrong, and, as a result, no reason for anything, including man's existence. As early as 1921, Anderson cried out that poetry must convey belief:

If anybody wants to write poetry in this decade, he should try to put on paper a glimpse of the midnight we face, the intellectual anarchy which leaves no reason for continued existence save the rush of blood in our veins that will not be denied.³

This longing for purpose led him, during the thirties, to articulate a view of the theatre as a focus of faith.

… the theatre at its best is a religious affirmation, an age-old rite restating and reassuring man's belief in his own destiny and his ultimate hope. … [The theatre's faith] is a faith in evolution, in the reaching and climb of men toward distant goals, glimpsed but never seen, perhaps never seen, perhaps never achieved, or achieved only to be passed impatiently on the way to a more distant horizon.⁴

He saw contemporary theatre as the Greeks saw theirs, as a temple devoted to the excellence of man. He believed that “the theatre is a religious institution devoted entirely to the exaltation of the spirit of man.”⁵ His faith in that temple is at least as old as Don Quixote—a blind, joyous acceptance of the beauty and glory of the quest. Man, as Goethe said, must continue to strive, and in that striving is Anderson's belief. He saw little value in the achievement of a goal, but much in the attempt. Man must aspire towards a god-like state, but it would no longer be god-like if he reached it.

The theatre, then, is a reaction against contemporary despair and unrewarding reason, a temple of affirmation. The drama attempts to make a statement on what is good in man. Reacting against the irritating pragmatism of the twenties, Anderson maintained that good and evil must be judged on moral, not practical, grounds. He insisted that any good play necessarily takes a point of view, either promoting or attacking a system of moral standards:

… the theatre is the central artistic symbol of the struggle of good and evil within men. Its teaching is that the struggle is eternal and unremitting … evil is what takes man back toward the beast … good is what urges him up toward the god.⁶

There are at least two possible attitudes towards Anderson's statement on the role of drama and theatre (terms he uses almost interchangeably). One is to view him as a reactionary who yearns for the beliefs and aesthetics of previous centuries. Another is to interpret him as one who wished to remake his own era, who refused to accept the nothingness exemplified in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine. In an essay written for The Freeman in 1920, Anderson traced the growing confusion in contemporary drama to an increasingly classless society and the loss of state religion and unquestioning patriotism.⁷ He condemned cynicism and loss of faith and called for a new theatre to grow out of the times rather than revert to old forms. Whether Anderson's theory succeeds in creating something new is questionable, but at least he did not originally intend to be a reactionary. While his belief in the theatre as temple may sound idealistic, he did insist that it was not the theatre's task to provide solutions to problems, but to provide hope and a positive moral climate.

The first step in creating this religious celebration, the drama, is to establish a structure. Anderson looked back to Aristotle's Poetics, saying that “the ‘recognition scene’ [is] the most important point in any dramatic structure.”⁸

A play should lead up to and away from a central crisis, and this crisis should consist in a discovery by the leading character which has an indelible effect on his thought and emotion and completely alters his course of action.⁹

The discovery scene, then, is the keystone of the play. All the action must lead up to it and away from it. The discovery must be central to the action of the play. Anderson felt this scene to be so important that he specified its location in the structure: at the end of the second act in a three-act play, and at the end of the third act in a five-act play, or perhaps a little later.¹⁰

In a structure built on a discovery by the protagonist, the concept of character is highly important. Anderson insisted that the drama should take place between people, not ideas, and that the stress and tension in the discovery scene come from the characters acting in a given situation, not from the situation itself. The play, if it is to develop its conviction out of a moral conflict, must build its conflict in its characters:

Look well to the emotional stress at the end of the second act, and take care that this stress emerges from the characters in the situation, not the situation alone.¹¹

Again and again, he emphasized that it is the human action that is primary, and that all external elements—ideas, situations and particulars—are secondary. The story is created by the conflict of good and evil within the protagonist.

Anderson had a good deal to say about the nature of his hero—and he recommended that there be one hero.¹² First, the hero must be exceptional or extraordinary in some way. He need not be a “great” man—he might be exceptional in that he is somehow cut off from greatness, like Willy Loman. There must be something about him that will catch the audience's attention, something that sets him off from other people.

Second, the hero must have an Aristotelian tragic flaw. Without this flaw, there could be no discovery scene, no subsequent improvement in the hero's character, no affirmation of good, and no play.

He must learn through suffering. In a tragedy he discovers death itself as a consequence of his fault or his attempt to correct it, but before he dies he has become a nobler person because of his recognition of his fault and the consequent alteration of his course of action.¹³

The flaw leads the hero to his crucial discovery, to his dilemma between good and evil, and to his ultimate moral growth.

Third, the hero may be good or evil. If he is good, he must somehow triumph in the end. If he is evil, he must go down in defeat and recognize his defeat when it comes. Anderson dated himself by setting up considerably different values for men and women. A good man, he said, is one of “positive character” who holds to a conviction. A bad man is a coward who refuses to fight for his beliefs. A good woman shows passionate fidelity, while a bad woman does not, but shows “an inclination toward the Cressid.”¹⁴ Anderson implies that the man believes in a conviction and the woman believes in the man.

Armed with his convictions, the Andersonian hero sallies forth on a mission whose nature reflects Anderson's belief in the quest as an end in itself.

Nothing better is asked of any stage hero than this—that he take up what arms he has against what enemies assail him and come out of the battle with his morale intact.¹⁵

It is not necessary that he vanquish his enemies, but that his beliefs survive the battle. The fight is its own justification.

To Anderson, then, structure rests on character. The action and pattern of the drama depend on the beliefs and weaknesses of the hero in a given situation. This is not new in dramatic theory, but in understanding Anderson it is useful to know that he re-affirmed his belief in these old principles.

If structure rest upon character, where does language fit in? In 1937, Anderson wrote that “poetic tragedy has always been the highest aim of theatre.”¹⁶ Yet Anderson did not believe that the purely poetic aspect of the tragedy—the verse itself—should take precedence over meaning, character and structure. He believed that every aspect of the play should further the point of view and that the language or poetry should remain subordinate to structure, plot development and character development.¹⁷

Play structure is much more important than playwriting, even in a poetic play. … The more beauty and ornament your style carries the sturdier must be the skeleton of plot and thinking underneath. Spend three times the effort planning your play which you will require to write it.¹⁸

In a letter to Helen Deutsch concerning Robert Newman's play, Ghost Town, Anderson complained that “individual lines often have a haunting quality but unfortunately they don't always forward the plot or develop the characters.”¹⁹

Anderson believed that poetry must serve the character, the plot and the structure—not the other way around. Mere beauty is not enough, and the fancier the style, the stronger must be the structure. Anderson established a clear statement that character and structure are closer to the matter of the play, and that the writing rests on the surface that they provide. The language cannot support the play; it is only the play's outer appearance.

Anderson provided notes on the nature of that language. He began with the premise that the language of the stage does not and should not follow the language of life.

The language of the stage, if it is to be worth listening to, does not follow the language of life, but sets the pace for it. … A great play cannot deal with ordinary people speaking commonplaces … the half-mumbled monosyllables of the average commuter hurrying with his toast in order to make a train.²⁰

Stage language, then, has no obligation to measure up—or down—to the values of everyday language. There is no need for art to imitate life. Anderson said, “If anything can be done to steer our theatre away from realism and toward poetry I'm for it.”²¹

Anderson then made a choice between poetry and prose. He felt that prose was “the language of information and poetry the language of emotion.”²² Prose breaks down under the strain of extreme emotion, which is why all great dramas were written in verse. Anderson dismissed Synge, O'Casey, O'Neill and Shaw as being second-rate compared to Sophocles and Shakespeare—a juxtaposition far too dangerous and complicated to defend.²³

Yet Anderson prized poetry neither for its beauty nor just for its emotional capacities, but for its ability to communicate. In 1918, before he began writing plays, he wrote that poetry should communicate clearly and directly in the tradition of Chaucer, Browning and Byron, without “any glamour of age, distance or exotic custom.”²⁴ This last is interesting in view of his later belief that poetic tragedy had to have considerable distance from its audience, but the basic idea of poetry as communication remains. He later wrote that “verse should communicate just as directly and more forcefully than the prose [emphasis added].”²⁵

Anderson believed that this stage verse should be written in iambic pentameter. He disliked free verse, believing that it sounded like over-written prose to an audience who could not be expected to know how it was laid out on the page and, therefore, know it to be poetry.

The use of iambic pentameter for the stage is certainly no accident. It has been found by trial and error to combine the maximum of intensity and elevation with a minimum of artificiality in the theatre. Verse which calls attention to itself detracts from actuality in representation. It might be assumed off-hand that modern free or “sprung” verse would avoid this difficulty, but in practice this form is the most artificial of all on stage. Since it is impossible to decide where a line begins or ends without reference to the manuscript, free verse gives an impression from the stage of involved and highflown prose.²⁶

Anderson wrote his plays in verse in hope of giving them “intensity,” “elevation” and “actuality.” He admitted that he did not know why iambic pentameter worked the best, but he felt it to be true.

Then he thought about the nature of the verse.

Avoid the imitation of verse mannerisms from another age, avoid archaisms, save rarely for historical color. Write the living language, even though in verse; try for limpidity, clarity of meaning and, above all, accuracy of metaphor. The accurate metaphor, instantly recognizable, is the test of good poetry for the stage. Use words carefully. Remember that every word you write is magnified by ten diameters when spoken on the stage.²⁷

Communication, then, is still the first value. Anderson wanted clear verse written in the language of its time, using imagery that would strike an immediate response in the ear of the listener.

The paradox in Anderson's poetic theory is that, despite his love for “the living language,” he believed that poetic tragedy could not be written about contemporary times. He disproved his own axiom, of course, and wrote Winterset and Key Largo. But he believed them to be experiments.

… poetic tragedy [has] never been written about its own place and time … Winterset is largely in verse, and treats a contemporary tragic theme, which makes it more of an experiment than could wish, for the great masters themselves never tried to make tragic poetry out of the stuff of their own times. To do so is to attempt to establish a new convention, one that may prove impossible of acceptance …²⁸

In summary, then, Anderson believed that the language of a play serves character, meaning and structure. Stage language does not need to stay true to realism. The purpose of stage language is to communicate directly, clearly and forcefully, and since drama deals with crisis and verse handles emotion better than prose, plays should be written in verse. Furthermore, in all the history of theatre, all great plays have been written in verse. Stage verse should be written in iambic pentameter, combining elevation with clarity and maintaining intensity throughout. Metaphor has primary importance as long as it communicates.

The last element in Anderson's dramatic theory is the relationship of the dramatist to his audience and to posterity. He had, essentially, two ideas on the subject. First, the audience—not the dramatist—sets the moral standards for the stage and decides what will be seen there. Second, the only true test of a play's value is its durability through time.

Although Anderson admitted that moral values may change, he believed that “the audience will always insist that the alteration in the hero be for the better,” and that the dramatist must heed his audience's insistences.²⁹ It is the people who set the lead, not the dramatist, and it is a democratic process, with the audience casting their “votes” by either coming to the play or staying away. Anderson could never, in a life of changing politics, accept the idea of one man, no matter what his beliefs, telling others what to do. He preferred that each man make his own decisions except when trying to speak for society. In that case—the case of the dramatist—he must listen to what society has to say for itself.

Anderson's conception of the audience extends into the future. He said that “endurance … is the only test of excellence.”³⁰ In 1937, after most of his successful plays had been written, he wrote that “I've not yet written one [play] that I think will endure the test of time—and that's what I want to do.”³¹

It is important to the understanding (if not the application) of Anderson's theory to know that he held his principles to be discoveries, not inventions, developed by observing the plays that had succeeded throughout the ages. His theory, then, is an attempt to articulate just what it is that posterity will approve.

Throughout his career, he tried to compromise between his vision of his art and the demands of his audience as represented by the commercial theatre of Broadway. The compromise ended badly, as he related in 1956:

If you give [verse] to [society], you have to trick them or force it down their throats … My verse is disintegrating into prose, under the pressure of the public. They'd rather listen to prose.³²

The test of a dramatic theory is its application. Rather than examine each of Anderson's twenty-eight published full-length plays, I shall offer an interpretation of Key Largo, using Anderson's theory as a starting point and comparing the methods he recommended to those he actually used.³³

Anderson sets up the essential question of Key Largo in the Prologue: should a man die for his beliefs even if they face destruction? King feels that a lost cause isn't worth sacrifice, and he tries to lead his friends to safety. Victor admits that the fight for freedom isn't clean or clearly drawn, but he insists that man must have belief, particularly because a scientific age has robbed man of God. Since there is no God, each man must be his own God and set his own standards and ideals. Victor chooses to die for his ideals so he will not have to live with the realization that men do give up. By dying, he proves to himself that there is godhead in man and that the spirit can conquer force.

Victor demonstrates the state of mind that King achieves only near the end of the play, and the play is King's movement towards that state. As he reveals the action, Anderson constructs a set of circumstances and characters that drives King to making a crucial, final decision between safety and honor. His two alternatives become aligned with earth and sky, rat and God, mind and spirit, reason and belief—evil and good.

Although Anderson considered ideas to be highly important, he believed that the conflict of a play should develop between people instead of ideas. During Act One, Anderson arranges his characters in a delicate balance between good and evil. On the side of good stand d'Alcala and Alegre, the family of Victor. With them are Osceola and John Horn, the Seminoles who are running to the Everglades. On the side of evil stand Murillo and Sheriff Gash, supported by Murillo's gang.

D'Alcala is blind only in common terms. Through his acute hearing and his understanding of men, he sees the events of the play more clearly than anyone else. He is a man of honor, a man who gave first his eyes and then his only son for the hope of freedom in his country. He is also a visionary, articulating the Andersonian image of man reaching out of the mud towards the stars.

Alegre d'Alcala is the classic Andersonian woman. She has no convictions of her own; she merely adheres to those held by her men: d'Alcala, Victor and King. At the crisis of the play, she tells King that she cannot help him decide what to do, that only he can choose. Her role is to choose a man and to believe in him. Her name, in Spanish, means “joyful,” and it is this in her that draws Corky, Murillo and King.

Like d'Alcala and Alegre, the Indians are men of fierce beliefs and the courage to act on their convictions. Since Gash is their adversary and since he is so firmly entrenched on the side of evil, the Indians are, by reflection, on the side of good. Their values are d'Alcala's values: freedom, respect and honor. Just as King finished telling d'Alcala and Alegre that he survived the war by fighting with the Insurgents, Osceola appears to take on a difficult commission from d'Alcala to pay the debt he owes. From the first, the Indians are men who fulfill their responsibilities. In addition, their oppression by the local law recalls the oppression of Spain by Franco. Again Anderson places them firmly on the side of good.

Murillo is the leader of the opposition, the ultimate figure of evil in the play. Before he even appears, we learn that his gang has nicknamed him “Mussolini,” using the war as a metaphor for the situation at the inn and equating Murillo with one of the worst of the fascists. Murillo is necessary to the structure of the play; he ties together all the other “evil” characters and balances d'Alcala, who unites the “good” characters. While d'Alcala would help others, Murillo lives only for himself, dropping his accomplices when he no longer needs them and murdering or disgracing anyone who obstructs him. Murillo, in contrast to d'Alcala's keen perceptions, knows only what he can control or prove. He is amazed at the old man's accurate description of the murder and he completely misunderstands Alegre when she tells him that nothing he wants will ever come to him. He cannot see beyond the real world. He sees his money, his women and his power; he does not know the meaning of contentment or idealism. He is the rational man taken down to the lowest possible level, a living warning to King.

Murillo's associates are even lower than Murillo, lacking his ability to command and act on his own initiative. They are parasites, feeding off the passing tourists, and they have no respect for themselves or for anyone else. Killarney, Murillo's girl friend of the moment, provides a contrast to Alegre. She has no faith in her man and deserts him capriciously, while Alegre holds on to her love for King even after he tells her of his disgrace in Spain.

Gash appears on the side of evil immediately, coming to look for the martyred Victor and refusing to help d'Alcala get rid of the squatting gamblers. It is no surprise to find a sheriff cast as a villain in an Anderson play; he never sympathized with official law and government. As early as What Price Glory?, Quirt and Flagg ridicule established authority. In the plays based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case (Gods of the Lightning and Winterset) the official machinery of justice is too rigid to be right, an idea used again in Lost in the Stars. Anderson condemned government in several plays, most notably Knickerbocker Holiday. The alignment of Gash on the side of evil is part of a pattern.

Into this carefully balanced structure drops King McCloud. The conflict outside of him, between the other characters, reflects the conflict inside of him that began on Hill 4. He begins the play as a confident, almost swaggering man, shifting his conversation easily from the death of a friend to the food he is carrying. He firmly believes that self-preservation is the highest value, and that no war is truly fought for ideals. King's problem is a less extreme version of Murillo's: he sees only the form of a struggle, not the content. Victor sees through the outer guise of the war into the essential conflict, finds it worthy of sacrifice, and dies for it. King understands none of it. Yet when he stands on Hill 4 after Franco has massacred his friends, his spirit and his mind begin to quarrel. His mind tells him that survival is the highest aim, superseding any ideals, but his spirit begins to argue for Victor's decision to die. When he appears on Key Largo in Act One, he is caught in the middle of the situation in both a personal and a private sense.

King's centrality in the conflict is the last of a series of factors that make him a proper, Andersonian protagonist. Anderson required that his hero be exceptional. King was the leader of the men who went from America to fight in Spain, and he was the only one to choose life over sacrifice. In each respect he stands apart from the others, even though he leaves Spain alienated from greatness. Back in America, King is a pariah, absolutely alone as he wanders the Eastern seaboard. The families of his comrades reject him just as d'Alcala rejects him. Alegre loves him but cannot tell him, so he is completely cut off, alone. He hangs in the middle as the only man in the play who is uncertain. No other character in the play holds any doubt as to where his destiny lies, whether it is for good or evil. Only King faces the agony of decision.

Anderson required that his protagonist have a tragic flaw. King's flaw is his mind, the troublesome product of the new, rational age that wants to find certain answers to all questions. To Anderson, man's highest goal is to stretch towards belief. King is incapable of that quest because his mind keeps telling him that it's useless to try, that it's better to settle for mere existence. To Anderson, looking for faith in a time of cynicism, the man who thinks too much would be perfectly flawed.

Given his over-rationality as his flaw, the discovery scene for King must be the scene at the end of Act One, where he tries to face down Murillo rationally and loses to Murillo's brute courage. It is here that King realizes that he has nothing he thought he had, not even the ability to master a punk like Murillo. He touches bottom, bereft of all his support, and begins Act Two almost purified by the vision of emptiness in himself that he has faced.

Yet the discovery scene lacks impact because it is only the last in a series of discoveries King has made. The first came slowly as he realized that the Loyalist cause in Spain was hollow and its ideals were compromised. The second came during the Prologue when the men in his battalion declined to follow his example. The third came as he watched Franco's army approach and he decided to return to his friends. The fourth came when he realized that he must join Franco's army to stay alive. The fifth grew slowly out of the expressions on the faces of the families of his dead friends. The sixth came with d'Alcala's refusal to touch his hand in welcome. When King faces Murillo, tries his rational approach and fails, it is only the last prop that is knocked out from under him, the last of many. True, it is the lowest point in King's fall to loss of faith and self-confidence, but because the fall takes place gradually over such a long period of time, it is no surprise to the audience and probably not much of a surprise to King himself. It is too logical an event from King's point of view, and is not so much a discovery as a confirmation of a long-held suspicion.

Anderson described his concept of the discovery scene in Aristotelian terms, recalling such plays as Oedipus Rex. In Oedipus, even though the body of evidence accumulates around the protagonist, he refuses to see where it leads and refuses to admit the growing possibility of disaster. When the truth is finally forced upon him, his recognition of reality is a shattering earthquake. The tension builds throughout the play up to that moment and falls off rapidly from it.

In Key Largo, however, the discovery scene is not a cataclysm of Oedipal proportions, and the action does not fall away. Instead, the play builds in pace and tension to a second discovery scene as King, Alegre and d'Alcala await the return of the sheriff in Act Two. At that point, King must adhere to his rationality and love of survival—a system of belief already discredited by Murillo—or sacrifice himself for the Indians. If he chooses the first alternative the Indians will die. If he chooses the second, he will die. The crisis is well-constructed as the inevitable result of the given set of characters in the given set of circumstances. All the important relationships and factors—Alegre's love for King, the gamblers' oppression of d'Alcala, Gash's deal with Murillo, and the catalytic position of the Indians—have brought King to this urgent decision.

At the end of the play, the resolution of the crisis, Anderson betrays a value he never stated in his letters and essays—theatricality. Once the Indians were free, King could simply have submitted to Gash's arrest and felt fairly secure that Murillo would have left the Keys. Instead, he stages the situation that induces Hunk to shoot him. It is certainly the more theatrically interesting choice. It is justifiable in terms of realism: King may have wanted to be absolutely certain that Murillo would be out of Alegre's way. More important, it is justifiable in the context of the play's meaning: King had to demonstrate conclusively his willingness to die for an ideal.

The movement of the play builds strongly to King's crisis, and it gives the play a solid foundation. Yet it does not follow Anderson's stated intention. Whether we accept the King/Murillo scene as the discovery scene or the King/Alegre/d'Alcala scene as the discovery scene, there remains the one we did not choose, one of similar importance. The earlier scene pinpoints King's complete loss of psychological support and starts his search for guidelines in his life; the later scene shows the moment in which he finally finds what he seeks. The structure is solid, but it is not what Anderson intended.

Floating on the top of all this character and structure is Anderson's use of language. At two points in the play, he uses extended prose sections, first at the beginning of the Prologue and then for the gambling scene in Act One. In both cases, the action is expository and the material in the character relationships stands at a relatively low point of tension. In the Prologue, Anderson shifts out of prose and into verse just at the point where the discussion of the Spanish Civil War broadens from details about local politics into Victor's rhetoric about the fight for freedom. In the gambling scene, the prose seems to be an echo of the Shakespearean technique of using prose for characters and scenes of less elevation than in the rest of the play.

In examining Anderson's use of verse, it is apparent that his desire to communicate as directly and as clearly as he could in prose may have undermined his facility with the medium. This verse does communicate as easily as prose; in fact, it is often difficult to separate it from prose. Consider one of Gash's early speeches:

The reason I asked, there's something on the books
about a charge against him, maybe two years
or so ago—giving aid or sheltering
a fellow from a road gang. That's why I came in.
But the boy's dead?

Rendered into prose, the passage looks like this:

The reason I asked, there's something on the books about a charge against him, maybe two years or so ago—giving aid or sheltering a fellow from a road gang. That's why I came in. But the boy's dead?

It is possible, of course, to re-write any blank verse into prose paragraphs, but Anderson's verse seems to make the shift far too easily with too little loss. What, then, makes Anderson's verse stand up as verse?

It was his intention to write in iambic pentameter. Although he does, occasionally, write an entire speech in formal iambic pentameter, the vast bulk of the play is written in a loose pentameter with five irregular stresses, sometimes four or six, and frequently with extra syllables in a line. …

This is perfect iambic pentameter (even though it depends on an elided pronunciation of the word “toward”) and d'Alcala's speech sounds all the more special for it.

In general, however, Anderson follows his pattern of five stresses to a line, sometimes varying it with four or six. He uses this technique with few exceptions. An alternate method is the sharing of lines between characters, as in this section:

GASH:
They were? When?
MURILLO:
Not half an hour ago
Here, near the turn.
GASH:
Now, look, boy, it all hangs
on this—if it's accurate.
MURILLO:
Hell, Corky saw them!

(Act Two, p. 97)

Anderson does not space out shared lines as I have done here, but he clearly intends that these are not short, unequal lines, but pieces of longer ones. The effect is to chop up the verse, speed up the pace and increase the tension in the scene.

Sometimes Anderson uses a short line and does not finish it, giving the feeling of silence or pause. He applies this method most notably in the Prologue, when King tells the men the news of the retreat, and in Act Two, as d'Alcala explains to King the endless, cyclical journey of man towards heaven. Here the shorter lines not only create pauses, they divide d'Alcala's speech into verses:

Over and over again the human race
climbs up out of the mud, and looks around,
and finds that it's alone here; and the knowledge
hits it like a blight—and down it goes
into the mud again.
Over and over again we have a hope
and make a religion of it—and follow it up
till we're out on the topmost limb of the tallest tree
alone with our stars—and we don't dare to be there,
and climb back down again.

(Act Two, p. 114)

Nowhere else in the play does Anderson use verse as consciously or as successfully. The hypnotic repetition of the first and last lines of each verse give the speech the qualities of a song or a lament. The moment is well-chosen; this speech is the clearest exposition of Anderson's vision of man.

But this is an exception. For most of the play, Anderson stays true to his loose pentameter, and it is almost the only poetic characteristic of his use of language. He wisely decides against using rhymes, but neither does he use alliteration or assonance to pull his poetry together. He avoids using language that will jar his audience, and the result is a fairly common vocabulary. The only poetic tool audible in his verse is the meter, and it is too irregular to provide more of a pattern than well-written prose might offer.

Anderson has caught himself in his own dilemma. In his effort to write verse that would communicate directly without startling his audience, he has emasculated his poetry. On the one hand, he believes that the language of the stage should lead the language of life, but on the other hand, he wants real, believable characters that communicate clearly. He cannot go both ways.

The dramatist did, however, state that the use of metaphor was highly important in stage verse. While his images are not always metaphors, he uses them adeptly to clarify the ideas and the characters in the play.

The two major images in the play are “rat” and “sky,” stretching between them the fabric of the conflict that pulls at King. From the beginning, the men in the Prologue who choose to die are associated with the moon and the sky. Victor begins the scene sitting on the top of a hill, near the stars, singing a song about the moon to the night sky. He recalls how King talked to them under the skylight of a room at home, and mourns the emptiness of the sky since the scientists decided that there was no God. The Prologue finishes with Monte pointing out to the others how much the Spanish mountains resemble the mountains of the moon. These are the men who chose to die, to die for their ideals, and they are of the sky and the moonlight. The image of the sky returns later as King and d'Alcala argue over the destiny of man in Act Two.

King's name works with this image and increases the tension surrounding his character. He is King McCloud—King of the clouds—King of the sky—King of heaven. If he is not God, he is at least a fallen angel, the boy, says Alegre, who died in Spain. He died because he lost his faith and fell from heaven to root about in the mud. King's feeling of demonic possession is supported by this image of the fallen angel, the man who has lost his true place in the world.

Instead of striving towards heaven, King has fallen among the rats. He introduces the rat image in the Prologue, when he compares the armies in the war to rats without justice or idealism, only despair. Later, d'Alcala calls the enemies of Spain rats, saying that they eat the dead meat from the bones of the fallen nation. The rat image reaches its peak in Act Two, after King has been defeated by Murillo. King compares himself and Murillo's cohorts to rats in a maze, beating their heads against answers that had always been right before but are now wrong. The rat ties in with Anderson's dislike of science and rationality. King is the man whose mind betrays him, traps him into saving his life when he should commit himself to an ideal and die for it. During his confrontation with Murillo at the end of Act One, he insults the gambler's intelligence, calling him a fool and comparing him to a snake or a child. Yet he loses. His rat-rationality fails him.

The image of the rat in the maze is crucial to King's understanding of himself. Until Murillo faces him down, he believes in the ability of his mind to keep him out of trouble. After his defeat, he realizes that he has accepted formulae for beliefs. A rat, then, is a man trapped by his assumptions and by his rational self, cut off from belief. Anderson further demeans the image, comparing such men to worms, rabbits, ferrets, fish in the mud and “belly-foot beasts” (Act Two, p. 113).

Among these major, structural images, Anderson sprinkles other metaphors to clarify meanings at various points in the play. When King finishes passing out the food to the men, he sits down to rip out the labels in his uniform. “Label” becomes synonymous with “identity,” but only outward, external identity. The men in the Prologue argue over Spanish politics, hurling political labels back and forth until they become meaningless. When King appears on Key Largo, the gamblers see his uniform and believe him to be a law officer. D'Alcala, talking to the gamblers in Act Two, stubbornly insist that “Murillo” is only what they call their leader, reminding us that they have nicknamed him “Mussolini.” Names and labels, says Anderson, are untrustworthy. A man is not necessarily what he names himself.

Anderson also uses imagery to create mental pictures. When King relates his odyssey to Alegre in Act One, he recalls the elms, piers and sea-tides of New England, and the slashed pines and buzzards of the South. When he explains his loneliness, he describes how he avoids other men in the nearly-empty Sunday-morning streets by staring into his reflection in store windows. Waking from his dream in Act Two, he compares the safety of the Everglades to peaceful, nesting white birds.

Sometimes, Anderson's use of language gets him into trouble. King's line to Murillo about his “ophidian mind” (Act One, p. 72) would probably bewilder most audiences. Sometimes the language is simply awkward, as in this speech of Alegre's:

But we're so constructed,
what with our antique conscience, and whatever
makes us blush, that we can't prevaricate
without a sense of fear.

(Act One, p. 33)

Also jarring is Corky's line to Alegre, “Listen, Winsome, will you do me a favor?” (Act One, p. 36). Anderson has tried so hard to give his characters common vocabularies that words like ophidian, prevaricate and winsome come as a jolt.

Yet the structural imagery remains sound. The final image that ties the play together is the gamblers' roulette game. Some win and some lose, just as in love, war and life. The men in the Prologue argue over what it is to win, and whether a man must stay alive to win. Murillo tells Alegre that winning and losing are the same with women as with nations. King dies claiming victory, reminding us that Victor—“the winner”—also died for unselfish ideals. Through it all spins the roulette wheel, a wheel that does not stop randomly. A man can control his winning and losing; he does have a choice between the sky and the rats.

In general, Anderson has followed his own precepts in the writing of Key Largo. He chooses his protagonist well and molds him carefully into a well-structured situation. He brings him to a point at which he must decide, forever, between science and faith, and brings him out of the crisis on the side of good. The weakness in the structure (besides the second discovery scene) is that everything is too neatly laid out. Everyone, even King, sees the decision coming throughout the entire play, so the sense of climax is dulled. The line between good and evil is drawn boldly with none of the uncertainty or ambiguity that is common and probably appropriate to contemporary drama. Finally, the language does serve the structure and the characters, just as Anderson intended it should. The imagery bolsters the meaning of the play. But Anderson has proved that the requirements he made on his own verse simply cannot be followed without taking risks with their restrictions.

Notes

1. Arthur M. Sampley, “Theory and Practice in Maxwell Anderson's Poetic Tragedies,” College English, 5 (1944), 412-418. Randall J. Buchanan, “A Playwright's Progress,” North Dakota Quarterly, 38 (1970 Winter), 60-74. Mabel Driscoll Bailey, Maxwell Anderson: The Playwright as Prophet (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957). Allan G. Halline, “Maxwell Anderson's Dramatic Theory,” American Literature, 16 (1944), 63-81. Alfred S. Shivers, Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 31-35.

2. Laurence G. Avery, Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson 1912-1958 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).

3. Maxwell Anderson, “A Note on Modern Poetry,” New Republic 22 June 1921, 113.

4. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” in Off Broadway: Essays About the Theatre (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1947), 66.

5. Anderson, “Off Broadway,” in Off Broadway, 28.

6. Ibid., 28, 33-34.

7. Anderson, “The Revolution and the Drama,” The Freeman, July 14, 1920, 425-426.

8. Anderson, “To Margery Bailey,” in Avery, Dramatist, 58.

9. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 59.

10. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 60.

11. Anderson, “To Margery Bailey,” in Avery, Dramatist, 58.

12. Anderson, “To Robert E. Sherwood,” in Avery, Dramatist, 247.

13. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 61.

14. Anderson, “Off Broadway,” 26.

15. Ibid., 29.

16. Anderson, “To Ray Lyman Wilbur,” in Avery, Dramatist, 64.

17. Anderson, “To Helen Deutsch,” in ibid., 64.

18. Anderson, “To Margery Bailey,” in ibid., 58.

19. Anderson, “To Helen Deutsch,” in ibid., 79.

20. Anderson, “I Meant it To,” New York World 23 Oct. 1923, 11.

21. Anderson, “To Margery Bailey,” in Avery, Dramatist, 54.

22. Anderson, “Poetry in the Theatre,” in Off Broadway, p. 50.

23. Ibid.

24. Anderson, “One Future for American Poetry,” The Dial, May 31, 1919, 568-69.

25. Anderson, “To Laurence Moore,” in Avery, Dramatist, 80.

26. Anderson, “To Hazel A. Reynolds,” in ibid., 59-60.

27. Anderson, “To Margery Bailey,” in ibid., 58.

28. Anderson, “Poetry in the Theatre,” 53-54.

29. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 62.

30. Anderson, “Poetry in the Theatre,” 54.

31. Anderson, “To John Mason Brown,” in Avery, Dramatist, 61.

32. Anderson, “Anderson Memoir,” in ibid., 315-16.

33. Anderson, Key Largo (Washington, D.C.: Anderson House, 1939), 30. All further references to this work appear in the text.