Nick Jacobson '35, Playwright

NINE years ago a young graduate of the College read some of his poems at a movable feast in the living room of the Poet in Residence, Dick Eberhart '26. One was concerned with problems confronting the first man on earth. Afterward I heard Nick Jacobson '35 muttering: that wasn't how it was, at all. I told him to write his own poem about Adam, if he felt so upset about it; and he did. It came out in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Winter 1959-60. I suspect it of being one of the great comic recreations of orthodox legend - or, if you like, of orthodox truth. A sample:

But you can't tell him nothing. He knows it all. Like I say, he means well but he's a meddler and he's careless. He could have made that woman so she wouldn't bite no apple.

Nick (who uses his middle name Biel for his writings) has published a few other poems. He could stand among the acknowledged poets of his generation, but that is not what he wants. He holds in lonely devotion to an even more anguished career: the drama.

One dilemma of the serious dramatist was hinted at the other day by an eminent critic who said that movies have become much more interesting than plays. He was lamenting the Broadway syndrome of crass musical comedies and gimmick adaptations of prior well-known works of prose, with no leeway for new concepts. Even the nearby half-heaven, "Off Broadway," has been pushing creative younger playwrights into the church basements and warehouse lofts of "Off Off Broadway," where the author's share of the gate is zero.

Like a number of other American writers, Nick Jacobson '35 has turned to Paris in search of a context conducive to basic adventuring in the arts that used to find their criteria of success on Broadway and in Hollywood. For steady employment he dubs English words to the lip movements in French films. He tells me that mere translation, in itself the despair of good poets, is a simple art by comparison with the additional considerations of sibilants, aspirates, labials, muscular over-emphasis, that plague every dubbing job. How badly it can be done is known to anyone who has sat through an average dubbed film.

Betweenwhiles Nick writes and rewrites his own plays. A short one was used two or three years ago for an experiment in bilingual production at the Gaston-Baty-Montparnasse Theatre. The same actors appeared under different directors successively in the English and French versions - The Attic/Le Grenier. As a consequence the actor Raymond Bussieres asked to make his own acting version of a full-length play that is Nick's own favorite - The Good Summer'sWork. It is scheduled for production next season by Pierre Frank.

My occasion for these lines is the publication of another play, Gone for a Soldier in the British drama journal, GambitInternational, No. 10, to which Nick has also contributed an assessment of two recently produced plays by Aimé Cesaire, the playwright-politician of Martinique. Gone for a Soldier is the second play in a Civil War trilogy that began with Soundon the Goose, first produced at the Adams Memorial Theater, Williams College, in December 1950. Later productions include one at Columbia University's Brander Matthews Theater, in 1953, and one at the White Barn Theater at Westport, Connecticut. I note the latter at this point because the actor and director Frank Silvera, who staged it, has just taken an option to produce it again in Los Angeles.

Over the last few years, the academic theater has been assuming a role which may soon become the primary one in revitalizing American drama. The largely economic inability of Broadway to risk experiment has driven many serious playwrights into the slop-bucket of TV for reasonable recompense and artistic dissolution; a few others have turned to the theaters of the universities for salvation. But to call plays to the notice of academic directors has been the great problem. Traditionally, new plays have achieved publication only after a theater has been rented for their production. The new play has had to remain as a tacit secret in the keeping of the author's agent, sometimes for a decade or more, to be shown to a sequence of possible producers. Academic tryouts have been happy accidents. Two or three specializing publishers of plays have aimed their output at the high school and women's club market primarily. Academic quarterlies have tended to offer closet drama; but recently, in addition to one or two independent journals such as Gambit International, the publication of provocative original plays has become the business of The Tulane Drama Review and a few others. New Stage, published at Purdue, printed Nick's Sound on the Goose in its Winter 1963-64 issue.

It may have been the proper destiny of the dramatist in our day to force himself upon the technical media where money lies in green heaps, and corruption may not be inevitable. I think of too many cases of the warping of fine young talents I have watched from their beginnings, and am grateful for the exceptional artist like Nick who will not compromise, who will labor to make someone else's mediocre work better rather than write anything mediocre of his own to order. The price of this integrity has been a scattery sort of recognition where the quality has merited much more.

It all began in Robinson Hall back in 1932 with Nick's Words Music and Dancing. Budd Schulberg '36 directed the next one, Pebbleman's Revenge, in which Maurice Rapf '35 played Saint Peter. At about this time Nick confronted a basic need of his nature: to work with the soil. He transferred to the Massachusetts State College's Stockbridge School of Agriculture from which he failed to graduate because he refused to take a required course in Business English. In 1938 he bought a farm in Norwich, five miles from Dartmouth, and there he raised cattle and asparagus, children and plays, until his move to Paris in 1962. His seriousness as a farmer was impressed upon me when I once tried to buy a load of his manure for my own spinach patch. Outraged but forgiving, he gently instructed `me: everything derived from the soil should go back into the same soil. From that period, one more note on playwrights' income: Nick reminds me in a letter that my son David '62, aged eight or nine, paid him 25 cents for a special reading of the one-act Tragedy of Mrs.Jones. "He said it was worth it and I have respected and loved him for his appreciation."

Nick's more serious one-act, The Patient Spinner, was included on a Theatre Guild bill in 1946, winning a place in The Best One Act Plays volume of that year one of eleven selected. A fulllength play about the occupation of Germany, Winners and Losers, was produced soon afterward off Broadway. Reviews were mixed. Sound on the Goose followed. The fact that it has had no major production, which I think it still deserves as much as ever, may have been related to the squalid idiocies of the earlier Senator McCarthy. It is a play concerned with the higher law. The situation is based in the dilemma confronting defeated refugees from the European revolutions of mid-century who on the 4th of July, 1857, enter a town where the Erie Canal intersects the Underground Railway. Newcomers to a land of freedom whose laws they wish to respect find themselves involved with other refugees, whom the Fugitive Slave Law would require them to surrender to the Federal Marshals.

I have no room here for an adequate discussion of Nick's newly published work, which in this form has been on his agent's desk since 1960. He writes, "The play had by then reached a point where I could do very little on it without production," - the good craftsman's recognition that extensive rewriting is always required during rehearsals. Gone for aSoldier marks a sharp shift in method within its intended trilogy. Sound on theGoose is an austere tragedy, involving in the classic tradition the downfall of a famous hero whose eminence has not been in fact his own, but rather the reflection of his incorruptible wife's sustaining virtue. In Gone for a Soldier devices of outright melodrama are deliberately used to pass judgment upon the corruption of slave-holding plantation society. Yet the sharp contrast of vice and virtue is lacking. This raises problems which ordinary melodrama does not have to confront.

The action begins in disputed ground in South Carolina with the repelling of a charge of Negro troops by Confederates under the command of General Andrew Devenett whose son is badly wounded. It jumps a year or so to reveal the Devenett plantation invested by Yankees with whom the still-ailing Lieutenant Devenett is having to deal to save something from the threatened division of his property among emancipated slaves. His father is concealed in a nearby forest. Young Andrew's fiancee Felice Inabinay acts as their go-between. The fact emerges that Sergeant Bomberra Canodon, a Union soldier, is General Devenett's bastard by a slave girl, and thus under new law may be heir to the plantation. The play is concerned centrally with symbolism in the relationship of the half-brothers. Its problem, whether as drama or as melodrama, is that it has no indubitable focal protagonist. Sergeant Canodon is a pawn to new circumstance; he is too seldom at center stage to dominate the action. His white half-brother, who is forced into reconsideration of his heritage and reaches a measure of redemption at the end, ought to emerge as the chief character when his role is rewritten for an actual player in rehearsals.

There is no doubt that General Devenett is the villain. He disintegrates as a coward, a deserter, seducer of his disabled son's fiancee, ineffectual thief. He seeks finally to abandon the pregnant Felice and to murder his mulatto son. I do not doubt that the peculiar institution produced even more loathsome scoundrels. The trouble with him here is that he is not an effective character in a play because he is too weak to be an antagonist. A villain, to dominate a play that has no dominant hero, must be a strong sinner, taking a cue from Richard III. If Nick wants his play to endure as a major comment upon slaveholding society in the American south, General Devenett may keep all his corruptions, but should be allowed some complexity, perhaps even personal bravery. When production makes the occasion for a revised version of Gone for a Soldier I shall be curious to see whether the General or his son, the lieutenant, has captured top billing.

Nick Jacobson in Paris