In spite of his undeniable stature at home and abroad, Tennessee Williams has met with slight critical approbation. If not actively contemptuous, the little magazines have been cold. The acceptance of the ephemeral press, admittedly a mixed dish, has been succeeded by querulous denial, irritability, and, more frequently, silence from literary quarters. The reasons are not far to seek.

Mr. Williams has been too successful, and success on Broadway has come to be equated with the slick masquerading of the shoddy. Granted that Eugene O’Neill, too, has had his recent Broadway successes, but we may flatter ourselves that these amount to belated recognition of a “high seriousness” wanting in Tennesse Williams. After all, O’Neill had a tragic sense and a “daemon” (now inflated into myth), while all is negation in Williams. Or so Mr. Krutch would have us believe.

My anthology The Modern Theatre — five volumes in Anchor Books—is made up of plays written between 1830 and 1950. The première of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 has always been considered a landmark, though closer to my own thoughts were Musset, Büchner, and Gogol, all of whom wrote plays in the early eighteen thirties.

That anthology, readers will agree, was not just another bundle of famous plays. On the contrary, justly famous items—and unjustly famous ones—were omitted. Famous authors like O'Casey and Anouilh were represented only by non-famous works. It was an anthology of protest—against the standardization of the repertoire. For our theatres limit their range even more than our orchestras and our museums do. My anthology was issued in the hope of persuading some of them to look at other things, other kinds of things. The volumes serve a purpose even if that hope is vain.

Until the curtain went up on The Madwoman of Chaillot in December 1945, Louis Jouvet, the producer and Giraudoux’ close collaborator since the production of Siegfried (1928), was tortured by uncertainty as to its reception. It was his opening play after a prolonged five-year absence from Paris. There were almost insuperable material difficulties, during this immediately post-war winter, in staging a play which requires some fifty highly fantastic characters to appear on stage. More serious, still, Jouvet suffered from the absence of Giraudoux who had unobtrusively died the year before, leaving his friend alone to select which of the two and sometimes three or more versions of scenes in the play was definitely to be adopted.

But most serious of all, the mood of The Madwoman of Chaillot, its lightness of touch, its colorful fantasy and ease seemed alien to the atmosphere of the day.

When my favorite drama critic, Brooks Atkinson, and my favorite playwright, Arthur Miller, make the same mistakes about politics and playwriting, I can conclude only that Atkinson and Miller, like most people, are very nice guys who don't always appreciate the appeal of evil. In an interview I had with Mr. Miller for the radio series “Ideas and the Theatre,” he stated that he would like to see more right-wingers and even fascists writing for the theatre, to keep the drama a true forum. Approaching the same error from another angle, Mr. Atkinson devotes more than a thousand words in his column of June 22nd (1958) answering the question “why don't you do something about the spate of depressing plays?” without ever seeing any political implications in the topic.

The professional critic, says Jean-Paul Sartre, too often sees literature as a perpetual conversation between Pascal and Montaigne. Like Joan of Arc he has his voices. Across the ages he hears the clamoring of Voltaire and Rousseau, Heine and Madame de Staël, Gide and Malraux. It is an “infernal dialogue” since it leads nowhere. Its purpose is never to make Pascal and Montaigne come alive, but to kill off Gide and Malraux.

This is brilliant and even true. Yet there is another truth. There is a dialogue, equally infernal, which is action and debate. The dialogue to which Sartre refers is most frequently only a monologue in which the critic has substituted his own voice, his own predetermined unifying point of view, for the opposing voices of two contestants. But the dialogue which is pursued within the rigorous confines of a restrictive truth cannot become a monologue.

Pour Lucèrce is Giraudoux’ last play, published posthumously in 1951, produced by the Madeleine Renaud—Jean-Louis Barrault company in Paris in 1953, and slated for Broadway production in an English adaptation by Christopher Fry.

On the face of it, the theme of outraged chastity, hallowed though it is by time, seems an odd dish to set before today’s theatregoers. Rape is not unknown on our stage; but chastity is rarely mentioned nowadays and Tarquin’s ravishing strides had quite subsided when Giraudoux came along with his Lucrèce. It should be noted, however, that he has given with one hand only to take away with the other.