PUTTING IT IN WRITING, Play-acting, "George Washington Slept Here"

Life of the Jesuit writer-to-be, 1952-54 . . .

It was the Sterling, Illinois, native Paul Allen who encouraged writing for publication.  Easy-going in manner but assertive, he later became rector at Milford.  He clearly enjoyed his work and us.  His English classes were idiosyncratic exercises in reading and writing.  I don’t remember them for any depth of learning, nor did I do especially well in them or feel successful. 

But he emphasized the need to be concrete, partly out of concern for our airy-nonsense proclivities as young men immured in abstraction.   Our meditations on Jesus may have called imagination into play.  But we were full of our goals and aspirations, and in much danger of boring people with generalities.  He urged us to be sensible, that is, use our senses, telling what we saw, heard, etc.  We did exercises in that. 

Years later I heard from a fellow newsman of the fiction writer Richard Sullivan, a favorite in those days, having his students do this at Notre Dame, even to describing the palms of their hands.   Paul Allen made so much of this that Ed Hartman, blessed with a finer mind than he and not the down-home boy that Paul was, felt obliged at one point in his Demosthenes class to make the point that we depended on abstraction to make our points; there was more to life and thought than sense impressions.  It was a well-aimed corrective. 

But Allen’s pushing us to get published was also well aimed.  I took his advice and sent things out and sold them.  My first check was for $8.  It arrived from Franciscan Message, one of dozens of small Catholic publications that thrived in the ‘50s.    I wrote about Salazar, dictator of Portugal, as an example of enlightened leadership.  As I told Chicago Reader columnist Michael Miner, forty-some years later, I wrote about Salazar knowing nothing about him, only what I picked up in an encyclopedia or a few articles in other magazines.  But I could tell it intelligibly to an editor, who was glad to have my 1,000 or so words.  It was the launching of a career, my friends.

It might not have happened if Paul Allen had not talked up the idea, or at least not soon.  He instructed us in the mechanics, as to include self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE), identify oneself briefly and clearly, etc., and telling us to keep it simple.  I heard it later as the KISS rule, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Seen this way, it was the only kissing we were allowed, except for the crucifix on Good Friday.  

This sending out of “fact articles” became a nice also-ran to my pursuit of language and languages.  The joy of sale was not to be compared to spiritual consolation of a great meditation.  But this spiritual consolation was happening less and less as the sometimes happy mists of novitiate prayer receded.  I was losing my novitiate fervor, turning it in for something else, yet to be determined.

ON THE BOARDS   Meanwhile, there was play-acting.  We did one-night stands for “the community”—novices, brothers, faculty, fellow juniors.  I played an energetic juror in a hubbub.  Told to murmur “rhubarb” over and over as one of a group making indistinguishable murmuring, I gave it all I had, and my “rhubarb” was overly distinguishable.  Still, I was in there trying, and Ludwig Stiller, from a small Indiana town and eventually of Nepal as a missionary, liked my energy and cast me in a corny one-acter about a hard-of-hearing man, “What’s That You Say?” 

The play began with me on the stage, alone, saying nothing, trying to catch a fly.   There didn’t have to be a real fly, I realized early into rehearsals.  Where would we get one we could train?  There may have been some sound-effect buzzing, I don’t recall, like the shaking of metal foil for a thunder effect later for “George Washington Slept Here.”  There certainly was some high-level histrionics on-stage by me, as I held forth for two minutes, running about with much gesticulation and silent-film-style grimace. 

Dear Reader, they liked me, offering up heartfelt laughter.  At that moment, it was push me out the door and send me to Improv Theater; I was ready.   But of course, hours later I was at my desk on my knees, the sun not yet risen, declaring my nothingness before God. 

Besides, there were the studies.   In fact, I would consider my fellow Jesuits now and then, wondering how they seemed so at ease, when for various reasons I felt so often so ill at ease.  That contradicts what I said about juniorate as happy place, but the love of study was going hand in hand with young manhood, which has its discomforts wherever encountered.  In any case, we were learning how to get along without various distractions. 

Ours was the healthy life.   Learning how to live without drink, the young man’s favorite prescription for ennui, we also had to mix our once robust prayer life with study.  Some prayed at expense of study, Ed Hartman once implied.  One who had set the mark for intensity of fervor as a novice as a junior stayed in chapel after breakfast faithfully until 7:55, five minutes to study time, supplementing his pre-breakfast hour and forty-five minutes of meditation, mass, and post-mass thanksgiving.   But he also got his studies done, even if you could have balanced an egg on his head while he prayed. 

A remarkable guy he was, one of our three or four Lithuanians who had escaped the communists.  He eventually left the society as a priest and established himself as a PhD. psychological counselor, remaining a priest in good standing, I assume under an exiled Lithuanian bishop.  All in all, an estimable man.  

The rest of us made it to our desks by eight o’clock.  And all of us, as far as I could see, made the transition from novice learning spiritual ropes to junior learning language.  We did Sophocles, as I noted.  I emoted with all my heart (in Greek, of course), as if the Olympian god I addressed were listening as carefully as I believed ours did in real life.   

THE DIRECTOR   When the assignment came to direct the St. Stanislaus Day play, I plunged in.  I picked Charley Law (also, later, of Nepal) as my helper and got absorbed in books about dramatics.  I’d never heard of Stanislavski, the great dramatics teacher, until I began plowing through whatever the juniorate library contained.  I had to learn all about casting, running rehearsals, picking a play in the first place from scratch, on my own, no one to tell me what to do.  Willie Ryan directed me to various sources.  He was more or less moderator of it all, but from a distance.   

This was typical, actually.  For my practice teaching credit in the summer before my first year of “regency,” I had an experienced Jesuit look in on my first two sessions—it was a repeater class (for flunks) in Latin—and that was it.  I just taught the rest on my own.  Other instances there were of a sort of benign indifference on superiors’ part.  It was low-key governance throughout.   Preparing to direct the play, I had the summer to get ready.  We had our French classes and little else in juniorate summers, with time for reading novels and the like.  I took on the “Best Plays” volumes from the 20s and later, finally choosing “George Washington Slept Here,” a true chestnut that looked like fun and permitted our bending the gender of female roles. 

It was froth, Willie Ryan told me on the day after our performance.  He meant no putdown in that, and I felt none.   Al Kezys, the Lithuanian whom I had helped to learn English and who later made his mark as a distinguished art photographer in Chicago, ran the stage crew.  Here was a guy whose idea of recreation was to change the work he was doing.  To the task, which he also had to learn from scratch, he brought energy and direction.  Charley and I did the casting.   

Rehearsals were for me an exercise in telling a lot of people what to do.  One of our leads observed that I was cheap with compliments.  Charley told me I’d been too hard on one guy who was slow in getting the hang of his part.  This was learning how to do things with a little help from one’s friends.  If superiors had butted out, peers did their bit to educate each other.  

The whole thing came off in our auditorium with, guess what? a full house, none of whom had anything better to do and most of whom had no say about being there in the first place but were still a great audience.  For competition we had neither newspaper nor radio nor movies.  Nor television, whose golden-age, live-audience years coincided in part with ours as juniors.  Juniors had the Jesuit-run weekly, America, in the library, and Vital Speeches, at that time a weekly, which was not a bad way to keep up, if I had cared about it.  Thumbing through America, I went always to book, play, and movie reviews in the back.

Coming up, Debating Joe McCarthy, walks in the woods, getting along . . .