reconciliation of the self with an African diasporic historical past. In its own way, it also marks the longer fiction of Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Annie John charts the growth of an angry, alienated and exceptionally bright girl, who wryly refers to herself and her friends as ‘descendants of slaves’, from the ages of ten to seventeen. Growing up in Antigua, she is about to embark for England at the end of the novel, to study nursing: not because she loves that country, or desires that particular career, but because she needs to reject all boundaries of family and island. In Lucy, a similarly acerbic character, now aged nineteen, arrives in the United States from Antigua in 1967, just after the island has received its independence from Great Britain. Working as an au pair for a white family in New York City, she finds herself, as she puts it, wrapped ‘in the mantle of a servant’. But her position, her origins in what she calls ‘the fringes of the world’, and, not least, her keenly ironic intelligence enable her to cast a cold eye over the generic American household she enters (Kincaid stresses the point by supplying no family name). Observing a supposedly ideal American family from close up, she becomes a witness to its destructive tensions and divisions. Eventually, she leaves her job as au pair; her commitment to her fashioning of herself, she feels, requires her to reject that life, just as, earlier, she had felt compelled to abandon an ‘ancestral past’ rooted in the ‘foul deed’ of slavery. Selfhood is now seen as a process, the self as contingent, constantly negotiable; and Lucy prepares to pursue that process in the fluid, multicultural terrain of New York City, the ultimate metropolis. Lucy ends with Lucy beginning to write her story in her diary, opening with her full name, Lucy Josephine Potter. It is an apt expression of her newfound desire to take possession of her own being, to trace its evolution as she passes through different contexts, different cultures. ‘I understood that I was inventing myself,’ she asserts. That is her task, and her need, as she now sees it. Which is a task that links her, as Kincaid must know, with many other travellers to and sojourners in the New World. Even in her resistance to the orthodoxies of America, and cultural orthodoxies of any particular kind, Lucy is making a very American choice.

Realism and its Discontents

Confronting the real, stretching the realistic in drama

The New York City in which Lucy decides to make her way is not just the ultimate metropolis. For many years it has been the theatrical capital of America. Until around the end of the 1950s, it was even more localized than that. One street in particular, Broadway, was synonymous with the American theatre; and that street, together with the side streets intersecting it, dominated the theatrical activity of the nation. The fifteen years following the Second World War were, arguably, the high point of the Broadway theatre. During this period, not only were the late and posthumous plays of Eugene O’Neill produced there. The greatest plays of the two

other greatest American playwrights, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, appeared on Broadway. Influential directors like Elia Kazan (1909– ) practised their craft in distinguished productions. The Method school of acting was introduced and developed. Not only that, the major achievements of the Broadway musical appeared. Prior to the 1940s, the most notable musical was probably Show Boat (1927) because it took up serious themes, including miscegenation, without trivializing or sentimentalizing them. The music was by Jerome Kern (1895–1945). The lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960), whose career charts the rise of the musical in the 1940s and 1950s. After working with Kern, then Lorenz Hart (1895–1943), Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers (1902–79). The result was Oklahoma! (1943), the first musical to use dance as an integral part of the plot and a powerful celebration of the mainstream values of the American West. It was followed by other successes: Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Flower Drum Song (1958) and The Sound of Music (1959). Even after Hammerstein’s death, the success continued for his collaborator, Rodgers, when he teamed up with Stephen Sondheim (1930– ) and also went on to write musicals by himself. Besides working with Kern, Hart and Rodgers, Hammerstein collaborated with George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) and Moss Hart. The most remarkable outcome of this collaboration was Pal Joey (1940), based on a series of sketches by John O’Hara about a seedy nightclub operator. Between them, Hammerstein, Rodgers and the various people they teamed up with from time to time turned the musical into a characteristically American art form, a medium for serious entertainment and, sometimes, for revealing the nation to itself.

As far as drama is concerned, what is remarkable about the work produced when Broadway was at its height is its roots in domestic realism. This was not, however, a limitation, since the finest American dramatists of the period used realism as a means of exploring fundamental issues. Method acting helped to expand the potential of realism here. With its emphasis on exploring the subtext, the emotional drama lurking beneath the most mundane situations and talk, it encouraged emotional adventure. The function and capacity of domestic realism could be expanded, as a result, to reveal the dread – the fear of, and occasional triumph over, disaster – that hovered below the surfaces of the everyday. As it happens, the careers and styles of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams are exemplary. Those careers reveal certain parallels. Both playwrights followed initial failure with a second play that established a reputation and particular dramatic territory. Both produced, in a third play, the finest of their career. Both went on to write some of the finest plays of the 1950s, and ended the period of their greatest achievement in the early 1960s. Their styles, however, reveal radical differences. Miller, for instance, used realism to explore wider moral and political issues, whereas Williams was more interested in deploying it to explore emotional and psychological forces. Miller concentrated on the ordinary person put under extraordinary pressure by his or her society, to be destroyed or survive. Williams, on the other hand, focused on misfits: extraordinary people trying to bear up against the ordinary pressures of life. For Miller, the orbit of attention was formed by what he called

‘the Common Man’. ‘It matters not at all whether a modern play concerns itself with a grocer or a president,’ he once declared, ‘if the intensity of the hero’s commitment to his cause is less than the maximum possible.’ To pursue this, he fashioned an idiom that replicated both the clarity and the misperceptions of the vernacular: the direct poetry of the street that, sometimes, people use to conceal the truth from themselves. For Williams, what mattered was the common humanity that connects the uncommon, the outsider to the rest of us, the aberrant to the average. And to dramatize that, he devised a language that, at its best, was subtly poetic, rhythmic and emotional. These two major dramatists in effect measured the diverse potential of domestic realism: stretched out, when necessary, to incorporate borrowings from other forms and styles, notably symbolism and expressionism. They also mapped out the terrain that most subsequent American dramatists have occupied. Apart from a brief period in the 1960s and just after, when many playwrights struck out towards improvisation and more radical experiment, it is the dramatic land of Miller or Williams that most continue to inhabit. The domestic setting and some form of realistic speech – both of which, in Miller’s and Williams’s hands, became rich and variable instruments – have continued to dominate the American stage.

The first play by Arthur Miller (1915– ) to reach Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after only four performances. His second, All My Sons (1947), however, achieved success and introduced certain themes that would dominate his work: the pursuit of success and public approbation enshrined in the American dream, social and familial tension and the conflict between competing moralities, the economic and political system as a final cause of the problems and passionate misconceptions Miller’s characters have to endure. The central character, Joe Keller, sold faulty airplane parts to the government during the war. Believing that he did what was necessary to support his family, he does not recognize his responsibility for the consequent death of several pilots: that is, until the discovery that his son killed himself in shame prompts him to see the higher moral obligation announced in the title of the play. Characteristically, Miller explores the past and its impact on the present, and the fundamental issues of moral and social responsibility, through a dramatization of family conflict. The story of the play is told entirely in domestic terms; and at its fictional centre is the question of whether Joe’s surviving son, Chris, should marry the fiancée of his dead brother. Equally characteristically, Miller encourages us to pity Joe rather than damn him for his misrecognition. All My Sons may, finally, endorse the declaration made by Chris: that ‘there’s a universe outside and you’re responsible to it’. But it shows that Joe’s failure to recognize this is a fault of society rather than his own. And it lays the fundamental blame squarely on a system that would force a man to choose between competing imperatives of family and society, his sons and all his sons.

With Death of a Salesman (1949), unquestionably his finest play, Miller endowed similar issues and problems with a tragic dimension. It relates the story of a representative American, Willy Loman: an ordinary man, as his surname punningly indicates, but one whose choices and their consequences spell out the darker,

destructive side of the national dream. A salesman who, after thirty-five years on the road, has never achieved the rewards and recognition for which he had hoped, Willy is driven to despair by his failure in a system that seems to him to guarantee success. Measuring his worth by the volume of his sales – Miller never lets us know what Willy sells because, essentially, he is selling himself – Willy obsessively withdraws from the crises and disappointments of the present into memories of the past and into imaginary conversations with his brother Ben, his symbol of success. Death of a Salesman is, in a sense, a memory play, for which a working title was ‘The Inside of his Head’. And everything here is seen double, as Willy sees it and as it is: a point sounded in the initial stage description of Willy’s ‘fragile-seeming home’. ‘An air of the dream clings to the place,’ we are told, ‘a dream rising out of reality.’ This is also a tale of domestic realism in which Miller uses elements of expressionism and symbolism to transmute the story into a tragedy. The dialogue is realistic vernacular: the idiom of a society that pursues images, illusion rather than fact, tawdry dreams rather than terrible reality. But the ‘exploded house’ in cross-section that appears in act one and supplies the setting for most of the play prepares us for a revelatory intimacy. We, the audience, are drawn into the family combustion, the crisis in the Loman household. We are drawn into the collapsing consciousness of Willy, in particular, into the past as an explanation of the present. And with the help of a rich tapestry of symbols (the symbols of success and successful father-figures that haunt Willy, for instance), we are invited to see this drama as the tragic crisis of a society as well as that of one unremarkable but representative man.

Good American that he is, Willy believes that success is his birthright. ‘And that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country,’ he declares, ‘that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked.’ He can never give up this belief, or its corollary: that, in the land of opportunity that is America, failure can only be the fault of the individual. Despite his glimmering, growing sense of separation from the success ethic, he still judges himself in its terms. As Miller himself has put it, Willy is ‘constantly haunted by the hollowness of all he had placed his faith in’, but nevertheless, at the end, he stakes ‘his very life on the ultimate assertion’ of that faith: not least because, in terms of belief, he has nowhere else to go. His wife Linda watches helplessly as he tears himself apart. All she can do is care and ask others to care: ‘attention,’ she declares, ‘attention must be finally paid to such a person.’ His son Happy can only surrender to the same ethic. ‘He had a good dream,’ he says of his father at the end. ‘It’s the only dream you can have – to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.’ Willy’s other son Biff, though, is different. Biff senses that he does not want what the world calls success. But, unfortunately, he cannot articulate, or properly know, what he does want. ‘I don’t know – what I’m supposed to want,’ he confesses. All he can say to Willy, in a desperate declaration of personal love and social resistance, is, ‘Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!’ ‘Pop, I’m nothing,’ he then adds, ‘I’m just what I am, that’s all.’ Listening to Biff, Willy learns the value of love. Tragically, and typically, however, he then translates love into the only

values he knows, the values of a salesman. What he gives Biff in return is the gift of himself, or rather his worth as an economic unit, a social commodity. Willy kills himself so that his family can have the insurance money and Biff, he hopes, can get a new start in life. ‘He had the wrong dreams, All, all, wrong,’ Biff observes of his father, as he stands beside his graveside. That was the tragedy of Willy Loman, and of that he was tormentingly, tremulously aware. And, Miller makes it clear, it was and is the tragedy of a society as well.

The challenge that Willy Loman never quite meets, to know and name himself, is also the challenge that confronts John Proctor, the central character in The Crucible (1953), and Eddie Carbone, the protagonist in A View from the Bridge (1955; revised 1956). As in Death of a Salesman, too, that challenge is a personal one rooted in a social landscape: people in Miller’s plays, and especially the earlier ones, are compelled to confront themselves, and make the choices that define their lives, in terms that are determined by their history and their society. Eddie Carbone cannot meet the challenge. A Sicilian American longshoreman, Eddie is consumed with a love for his niece Catherine that approaches the incestuous. When Catherine falls in love with a cousin smuggled into the country, Eddie is driven to violate one of the taboos of his culture by reporting the illegal immigrant to the authorities. Equating the loss of honour with loss of name, he dies denying his guilt: ‘I want my name!’ he cries out, as he tries to recover his self-respect by seizing it, by violence. John Proctor does meet the challenge, however. Written at the height of the hysteria whipped up by the Un-American Activities Committee, The Crucible explores issues of personal conscience and social suppression through the dramatic analogy of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials. With the help of this analogy, Miller, who was himself a victim of the Committee, touches on all the consequences of McCarthyism: the exploitation of legitimate cultural fears, conspiracy theories and social hysteria, the oppression of the innocent and the manipulation of power, the complicity of ordinary citizens and public officials in a pernicious, paranoid social process that appears to take on an irresistible life of its own. When John Proctor’s wife is named as a witch by a young woman, Abigail, with whom he has had an adulterous liaison, he attempts to expose the accuser. This, however, leads to his own arrest. Tempted to save his skin by confessing, he decides that honour requires his death. He has been drawn into examining his life by the accusations levelled at him; and he recognizes that, while innocent of witchcraft, he has other responsibilities to answer for. His confession of adultery with Abigail initiates an intense spiritual revaluation of himself. This leads, in turn, to the belief that even his execution for witchcraft would be unearned, since he is guilty while those he would be dying with are truly innocent. John confesses because he believes himself too ridden with guilt to die with honour. He recants, however, out of a sense of responsibility to the innocents he is to die with, and to himself. The demand that his signed confession be displayed in public is one that he feels compelled, ultimately, to resist. It would steal innocence from the truly innocent: ‘I blacken all of them when this is nailed to the church the very day they hang for silence!’ John declares. And it would steal from him, however guilty, his own core of being, his fundamental

sense of his worth; or, as he sees and puts it, his name. ‘How may I live without my name,’ John asks his accusers. ‘I’ve given you my soul; leave me my name!’

After an absence of eight years from the New York stage, Miller returned in 1964 with After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. This was followed by The Price, in 1968, and

The Creation of the World and Other Business, in 1972. The plays of this period are very different in terms of subject matter. After the Fall is a semi-autobiographical drama, based on Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe; Incident at Vichy deals with Nazi persecution of the Jews. In The Price, two brothers meet after the death of their father to arrange the sale of his furniture. In The Creation of the World, a serio-comic rewriting of the story of Adam and Eve, Adam must struggle to find a capacity for goodness and moral responsibility in himself to guide Eve towards forgiveness and Cain towards repentance. All of them, however, are marked by a shift from the social to the personal. Whatever the subject and setting, the focus is on individual experience and, in particular, the problem of individual guilt. So, in After the Fall, the central character Quentin prepares for his third marriage with the fear that his past history does not make him deserving of happiness. Talking to the audience about the past, then moving back to join in past events as he recollects them, Quentin is plagued with guilt over his failures and betrayals. He recalls, for instance, the neurotic demands made by his second wife Maggie, summed up in her insistent, ‘Love me, and do what I tell you. And stop arguing.’ He recognizes the demands as impossible, yet he feels guilty for not having met them. What he comes to realize, finally, is that the defects for which he blames himself are part of the human condition. As human beings, he, and we, must accept and forgive our imperfections, and then build for the future on the basis of that acceptance. We need ‘to know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed’, Quentin concludes; ‘not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall’.

The personal resonance of plays like After the Fall has been sustained in some of Miller’s later works. Elegy for a Lady (1982), for example, is an elegant and ambiguous exploration of love. A man enters a shop to buy a gift for his dying lover; the proprietress of the shop attempts to help him make a choice and seems gradually to take on the character, the persona of the dying woman. Some Kind of Love Story (1982), in a similarly intense, intimate way, investigates the strange relationship between a private detective and a prostitute he has been questioning about a murder over the years. I Can’t Remember Anything (1987) again concentrates on a couple, this time an elderly one, to dramatize the pleasures and the pains of old age. A few other later dramas return, however, to the social emphasis of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. The Archbishop’s Calling (1977), for example, uses the setting of an unnamed East European country to consider the political and moral responsibilities of the artist. It is not clear to an American writer visiting the country if he is genuinely interested in the plight of the people he is visiting, or simply using them for his writing. It is not clear, either, if the two European writers he meets are spies or simply complicit in the suppression and constant surveillance that scar their country, where even the most innocent

conversation loses its innocence because it might be overheard. Even more memorably, The American Clock (1986) returns to Miller’s earlier dramatic explorations of the national democratic experiment. An epic history of the Depression of the 1930s, in both personal and public terms, the play focuses on the memories of two survivors. One, called Les Baum, dwells on the domestic: the decline of his middleclass Jewish family into poverty. The other, a financier named Arthur Robertson, concentrates on the social: his survival, thanks to his ability to anticipate the economic crash. Together, though, the recollections of the two men register an abiding faith in the ability of the American nation to repair and redefine itself. What the Depression did ultimately, Miller suggests, was strengthen and affirm democracy, to give Americans back their belief in themselves. ‘She was so like the country,’ Baum observes of his mother; ‘money obsessed her but what she really longed for was some kind of height where she could stand and see out and around and breathe in the air of her own free life.’ That catches perfectly the critical faith in America that characterizes all Miller’s best work, as well as its intimate blend of the domestic and the political, family and history. So does Baum’s next remark about the woman he loved and now sees as representative: ‘With all her defeats she believed to the end that the world was meant to be better.’

For Tennessee Williams (1911–83), too, the world was meant to be better; however, he and many of his characters believed that it had little chance of ever being so. ‘I write from my own tensions,’ Williams once observed. ‘For me, this is a form of therapy.’ And those tensions drove him towards a series of intensely poetic examinations of the injured spirit: the private pains and passions of lonely individuals for whom the task of living in the world is almost unendurable. ‘We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life!’ the main character, Val Xavier, in Orpheus Descending (1957) declares. ‘What does anyone wait for? For something to happen, for anything to happen, to make things make more sense.’ Waiting, and living in the meantime, so many of Williams’s protagonists are concerned with nameless fears and insecurities – and with desperate desires, grasping at anything to numb them, to offer distraction from the pain. Williams called his fragile, deeply wounded characters ‘the fugitive kind’. ‘It appears to me, sometimes,’ he explained, ‘that there are only two kinds of people who live outside what e. e. cummings has defined as “this socalled world of ours” – the artists and the insane.’ Williams added that, of course, ‘there are those who are not practising artists and those who have not been committed to asylums’ but who have, nevertheless, ‘enough of one or both magical elements, lunacy and vision’ to see into the dark heart of things, to sense the raw, cold, frightening nature of life. And he made those people, often leading ordinary, unheroic lives but far from ordinary otherwise, the core subject of his plays.

The Glass Menagerie (1945) was the first drama to announce Williams’s voice and vision: his project of stretching ordinary domestic realism to explore extremes of sensibility and experience. The domestic setting of the play is transformed by being filtered through reminiscence. ‘The play is memory,’ Tom Wingfield, the narrator, announces at the beginning. ‘Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it

is sentimental, it is not realistic.’ ‘Yes, I have tricks in my pocket . . . But I am the very opposite of a stage magician,’ Tom explains. ‘He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’ Williams deploys evocative language, elusive symbolism and sly, suggestive glimpses into processes of thought and emotion that are too ephemeral, too evanescent to be analysed or explained. And all of this is to describe this truth, which circulates around Tom’s memories of his family, living in genteel poverty in St Louis during the Depression. Tom recalls his life with his mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle who clings persistently to glamorous illusions about her past, and with his sister Laura, a crippled, painfully shy young woman whose intensely private world is centred on a treasured collection of small glass animals. He recollects how he ached to leave home, but how his mother insisted he first supply a man to care for Laura in his absence. In a series of impressionistic scenes, intimate remembrances of things past, Tom conjures up for us how he brought a visitor to the house, ‘an emissary from a world that we were somehow set apart from’, and how the visit ended in disaster. And he remembers how he finally left home, never to return. Williams presents the Wingfield family as unable to function in reality, in this ‘socalled world of ours’. But this seems more of a virtue than a weakness: the alternative space or place they inhabit seems as special and seductive as the world of glass animals that gives the play its title. Driven by guilt over his desertion of his mother and sister, too, Tom comes to realize this. ‘Oh, Laura, Laura,’ Tom cries to his lost sister, ‘I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!’ He is doomed to relive the past and to recognize that that is where, if anywhere, the emotional truth resides: a truth he has betrayed.

The intensely heightened realism, the poetic impressionism of feeling and method that characterize The Glass Menagerie mark all of Williams’s finest work. They are there, above all, in his finest play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Set in New Orleans, the plot is devastatingly simple. Blanche Dubois visits her sister Stella and finds her married to what she calls an ‘animal’, the crude, intensely physical Stanley Kowalski. Another faded Southern belle, Blanche has come ‘to the last stop at the end of the line’, as the director of the first Broadway production of the play, Elia Kazan, put it. This is her last chance. She struggles for control of Stella with Stanley. She also struggles for a new life, a new romance with Stanley’s friend Mitch. She fails. After a violent and sexual confrontation with Stanley, she is defeated and broken. And the play ends with Blanche being taken off to the asylum and Stella and Stanley still together. Williams explained once that the idea for the play came from a time when he himself was living in New Orleans. Near where he lived ran ‘two streetcars, one named DESIRE and the other named CEMETERY’. For him, the ‘undiscourageable progress’ of the two seemed to have ‘some symbolic bearing’, to express the opposing fundamentals of experience. And they are certainly the tensions that threaten to tear Blanche apart. Blanche Dubois is torn between death and its opposite desire, ‘the long parade to the graveyard’ as she calls it and the desperate longing to live and perhaps love. Torn and driven within, she is also driven into a wrenching, searing conflict with Stanley. Resisting death, reaching

out to desire, she engages in mortal combat with her brother-in-law for somewhere to be, somewhere where things might just make more sense. She ‘tries to make a place for herself ’, as Kazan put it. But there is no place for her.

A Streetcar Named Desire has the elemental force of a struggle for survival. It begins when Blanche invades the space occupied by Stanley and Stella. It lasts for the duration of a primitive fight for that space between Blanche and Stanley. It ends with Blanche’s defeat and departure. So it signals a fundamental need that humans share with all animals: the need to secure territory. Building on this foundation, however, Williams weaves a complex tapestry of oppositions, as he describes the conflicting, contesting personalities of Blanche and Stanley. In a series of eleven tight cinematic scenes, he uses every resource of theatrical language to tell us what, essentially, this man and woman are, and mean. Blanche is a Southern lady in a world that has no use for ladies. Her need is to find protection, to secure her image of herself in the gaze of the, mostly male, other. So her need for flattery (‘How do I look?’), her pursuit of romance and illusion; so, also, the power and pathos of her famous closing line, addressed to the man who takes her to the asylum: ‘Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ Endowed with an evocative idiom, a theatricality of gesture and behaviour, Blanche stands, as it were, for illusion, idealism, culture, purity, love, the romance of the past. As her name intimates, she is associated with whiteness, the virgin of the zodiac with soft colours and soft lights: ‘I can’t stand a naked light bulb,’ she declares as she puts up an ‘adorable little coloured paper lantern’, ‘any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.’ But, equally, she stands for ‘lies’, falsehood, fantasy and weakness: it is this, after all, that makes her vulnerable. ‘I’ve been on to you from the start!’ Stanley triumphantly declares just before the brutal climax of the play. ‘Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes!’

That is a typical remark. Stanley is as tough and terse in words as he is in action. He believes that, as he puts it, you have ‘to hold front position in this rat-race’ and, to do that, you have to have pluck and luck. His faith is in the facts, in prosaic reality rather than poetic idealism and illusion. His allegiance is to the rawly physical, the sexual rather than the spiritual. ‘Animal Joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and attitudes,’ we are told in the stage directions. ‘Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women . . . Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life.’ Associated with vivid colours, violent action, the goat of the zodiac and the strutting cockerel of folktale, he has next to no interest in the past. His commitment is to the present and the future, and what he can make out of them. ‘We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!’ Stanley says to Blanche immediately before he rapes her. It is a remark typical of the play, in its mix of brutality and mystery, suggesting, as it does, that these two antagonists are strangely fascinated with each other and with their antagonism. The ‘date’ with each other, the conflict that is at the heart of A Streetcar Named Desire, operates on so many levels and carries with it so many intimations. It is a fairytale, of beauty and the beast. It is a social history, of a declining old world and an emergent new one, translated into sexual terms. It is

a mythic contest between the material and the moral, the ‘female’ principle and the ‘male’. It is also a perversely, painfully human tale of tension between two richly individualized characters. With its multiple levels of meaning and inflection, all of them founded on a raw base of feeling and longing, A Streetcar Named Desire is a play that is constantly available to the discovery of fresh nuances. It is also a play that leaves its audiences torn: between regret and recognition of necessity, the ineluctable nature of both reality and illusion, facts and lies, the material and ideal – above all, perhaps, between pity and fear as we contemplate the fate of Blanche Dubois.

Williams was only to approach the achievement of A Streetcar Named Desire in one or two of his later plays. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) is a powerful play with a dual narrative. Big Daddy Pollitt, a Mississippi landowner, has to decide who should inherit his estate. Practical considerations clearly favour his sensible, reliable son Gooper; emotion and empathy draw him towards his childless and tortured son Brick. Brick and his wife Maggie, the ‘cat’ of the title, have in turn to find some way of living together. Both narratives gravitate towards the discovery of emotional truth: the need to know and accept oneself. Big Daddy decides in favour of Brick, his natural heir and spiritual mirror – however warped that mirror may be. Brick and Maggie start to face the facts about themselves and their relationship. The facts may not be pleasant, far from it, but they offer the chance of real survival: ‘I don’t know why people have to pretend to be good,’ Maggie declares, ‘nobody’s good . . . but I’m honest! . . . I’m alive. Maggie the cat is – alive!’ By contrast, The Night of the Iguana (1961) has a minimal plot. Weaving together very different characters, Williams does, however, explore his chosen theme of waiting for meaning, watching out for emotional rescue with a characteristic mix of realism and poetic sensibility. This is not, unfortunately, the case with many of his other plays. Some, like The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Period of Adjustment (1960), are simply minor comedies. Others, such as Suddenly Last Summer (1958), stray into a sensationalism unanchored in emotional reality, the raw, intimate feeling that secures his best work. Still others, among them Summer and Smoke (1968), Camino Real (1953), Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), suffer from an excess of symbolism, an overplus of heavily signposted meaning that swamps and obscures what Williams was always best at: the stories of lonely, frightened people wondering how on earth they can endure the pain of life.

Plagued by alcoholism, drugs and depressive illness in his later years, Williams never completely lost his touch. Even in the most disappointing work, there are moments of corrosive pathos that recall the writer at his best. So, in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), there is an extraordinary speech in which the speaker compares human beings to ‘kittens or puppies’. No matter how ‘secure in the house of their master’ ‘a pair of kittens or puppies’ may seem during the day, the speaker observes, ‘at night, when they sleep, they don’t seem sure of their owner’s care for them’. They ‘draw close together, they curl up against each other’. ‘We’re all of us living in a house we’re not used to,’ the speaker concludes. ‘We have to creep close to each other and give those gentle little nudges . . . before we

can slip into – sleep and – rest for the next day’s – playtime.’ Moments like this, however, tend to exist in a vacuum. Williams himself seemed to sense the decline in his own powers, as he compulsively rewrote material in a desperate attempt to make it work. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, for instance, was revised no fewer than three times. He also began to use his plays as confessionals. In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) includes an artist suffering a mental and aesthetic breakdown, while, in Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), Williams used F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as barely disguised projections of his own sense of falling off and failure. ‘The losses accumulated in my heart, the disenchantments steadily increased,’ Williams has his version of F. Scott Fitzgerald declare. ‘Wouldn’t accept it. Romantics won’t, you know . . . I went back to the world of vision which was my only true home.’ Williams was blessed, or cursed, with an acute sense of the abyss and a compassionate complicity with those who hurtle into it. In his finest work he could dramatize that sense in a way that made the ordinary seem extraordinary, the domestic mythic, and that infused the mundane particulars of life with a sensual mystery. The fact that he could not sustain the level of intensity that characterizes A Streetcar Named Desire is not, perhaps, remarkable. The fact that he could achieve it at all, there and in a few other plays, is. Indeed, it is little short of miraculous. And it makes him one of the two or three greatest American dramatists.

Between them, Williams and Miller, together with the later O’Neill, dominated the American stage for more than a decade after the Second World War. There were other new dramatists: among them, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Anderson (1917– ), whose Tea and Sympathy (1953) was an enormous success, and Paddy Chayefsky (1923–81), who established a reputation with such plays as Middle of the Night (1956) before departing for Hollywood to become a screenwriter. But the only playwright of the period who came even close to the triumvirate of Williams, Miller and O’Neill – and that was not very close at all – was William Inge (1913– 73). Inge received help and encouragement from Williams; and, like his mentor, he wrote about scared, lonely people – who feel, as one of his characters puts it in Bus Stop (1955), ‘left out in the cold’. But none of his plays has the exotic poetry, or the Gothicism, of Williams’s work. Plays like Come Back, Little Sheba (1950),

Picnic (1953), Bus Stop and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) depict, simply and with quiet sympathy, the lives of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Even their dreams have only a muted romanticism to them. And, while they may enjoy moments of happiness, what most of Inge’s characters have to learn is the peace, the quietude of resignation: a gentle, shrugging acceptance of their own mediocrity and the littleness of their lives. So, in Come Back, Little Sheba, the failed dreams and lost romance of a married couple are emblematized for them, and us, in the loss of their dog, little Sheba, who gives the play its title. At one point the husband, Doc, is driven to recall and record all their losses and disappointments, all the things the couple hoped for and never had. ‘But we don’t have any of those things,’ he concludes. ‘So what! We gotta keep on living, don’t we? I can’t stop just ’cause I made a few mistakes. I gotta keep goin’. . . somehow.’

Inge enjoyed his last commercial success in the late 1950s. By that time, the dominance of Broadway was being challenged. Alternative theatre was appearing in New York City, first ‘Off-Broadway’ as it was called, and then, when ‘OffBroadway’ came to acquire respectability and status, ‘Off Off-Broadway’. New theatres and theatre companies were also developing in other parts of the country. With these new theatres, too, came new forms of organization and financing: theatres as non-profit corporations, support from private foundations, repertory companies and the sale of tickets for an entire season. By the 1980s, up to ten times as many new American plays were being produced outside Broadway as on; and the expanded theatrical arena inevitably encouraged a degree of experiment. Some new dramatists and companies, at least, challenged domestic realism. Especially in the 1960s, but even beyond that, a significant experimental theatre developed. Companies like the Performance Group and the Open Theatre in New York, the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis, the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles and the Living Theatre transplanted to Europe: all moved away from a drama that was authorand text-based. They turned to improvisation, using a text only as a departure point, to mime, dance and ritual. And they deployed techniques like ‘transformation’, in which actors would suddenly switch roles or even plays, or make some other radical alteration in the fictive reality they were creating. This was a theatre of change, process. And, quite apart from the very particularized forms of theatrical experiment that it produced, it was to have a significant impact on a much wider range of American drama. American playwrights, most of them, never surrendered their allegiance to domestic realism. But, even more than before, they were encouraged to expand and embellish it, to push it to new frontiers.

Among those dramatists who took advantage of the new opportunities for improvisation and experiment during this period were Jean-Claude van Italie (1936– ), John Guare (1938– ), Jack Gelber (1932– ) and Arthur Kopit (1937– ). Born in Belgium but raised in the United States from the age of four, van Italie became playwright in residence with the Open Theatre in the 1960s. His work with the group includes America Hurrah (1966) and The Serpent (1968). Both plays are determinately anti-realistic, using disconnected scenes, improvised responses, mime, ritual and stylized movement to explore national and Biblical themes. Similarly resistant to the constraints of realism are The House of Blue Leaves (1971) by Guare and The Connection (1952) by Gelber. In the Guare play, slapstick farce mixes with pathos and a series of bizarre events invokes a strange medley of characters that include a deaf starlet, an insane bomber, three nuns and the Pope. In The Connection, in turn, Gelber imitates the random, shapeless existence of the heroin addicts who form his subject in the free-form movement of his play. And the improvised, chaotic character of the addicts’ lives meets its response in the presence on stage of jazz musicians, who break into music at apparently random moments in the action. Arthur Kopit achieved fame with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1962). The absurd title is matched by the absurdist action of the play, in which the fabulously wealthy mamma of the title travels the world with the dead body of her husband, a talking fish, two giant

Venus fly-traps and a son whom she insists on calling by whatever name first comes to mind. There is, however, a serious point buried in Kopit’s play, about the eccentric strategies people use to protect themselves from a fundamentally hostile, terrifying world. And the seriousness at the heart of the absurdism is even more noticeable in Kopit’s other main success, Indians (1968). Here, Kopit uses the bizarrely symbolic figure of ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, and his travelling Wild West show, to explore American mythmaking, the way the nation has habitually suppressed knowledge of its past by transforming the actual into the apocryphal, moral guilt into mythical innocence.

Of the many dramatists who discovered the freedom first to experiment outside Broadway, the most notable are Edward Albee (1928– ), Sam Shepard (1943– ) and, to a lesser extent, Lanford Wilson (1937– ) and David Mamet (1947– ). The first play by Edward Albee to be produced, first in Berlin in 1959, then in New York in 1960, The Zoo Story, introduced many of his obsessive themes: alienation, the human need for and terror of contact, a nameless existential fear that seems to haunt all but especially modern life. The Zoo Story is basically an extended monologue by a young New Yorker so lost and alienated that he feels any contact, however painful or impermanent, would be a relief. ‘A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING,’ he declares. ‘If not with people . . . SOMETHING.’ He lights on a very ordinary man in the park as his first attempt at contact. He cannot move the man enough, however, by simply telling him his story. So, desperate for some tangible proof of himself and his ability to impinge on another, he starts a knife fight, impales himself on the blade of his opponent, and dies giving thanks for the proof he believes he has now received. ‘I came unto you,’ the young New Yorker declares, ‘and you have comforted me.’ Two plays that followed this, The Death of Bessie Smith (1961) and The American Dream (1961), give a more specifically American edge to Albee’s explorations of human anxiety and alienation. In The Death of Bessie Smith, the suggestion is clearly that it is precisely the rage and resentment that alienation provokes which find their issue, and the illusion of release, in racism. The American Dream, as its title implies, takes a broader canvas. Absurdist in many of its dramatic strategies, it combines this with a devastating analysis of national values. The typical American family in this play – an emasculated Daddy, abrasive Mommy and cynical Grandma – are empty, evacuated of feeling by the American dream of success. Their comical abuses of language reflect and express their abuse of life, their disconnection from real human emotion. And they find their natural heir in an equally anonymous Young Man who appears at the end of the play confessing that, since one traumatic moment in his past, ‘I no longer have the capacity to feel anything’.

The success of The American Dream enabled Albee to move to Broadway. There, in 1962, his best and most well-received play was produced: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Set in a small New England college, it depicts the events of one night of passionate conflict and purgation. And, unlike Albee’s earlier work, it gravitates towards domestic realism. To be more exact, this is domestic realism edged with a fiery poeticism. In this, as well as its portrait of characters who find everyday life

emotionally exhausting, almost unendurable, it recalls the work of Tennessee Williams: a debt that Albee slyly acknowledges through brief allusions to A Streetcar Named Desire. George, a history professor, and his wife Martha bring a young colleague and his nervous wife back from a party. They involve the younger couple in a torrent of argument and abuse that appears to be a nightly ritual. After a second act that Albee has called ‘Walpurgisnacht’, when the pain and purgation are pushed to the limit, comes the ‘Exorcism’ of act three. The imaginary son that George and Martha have created, as some kind of sustenance and defence against the existential dread that haunts their lives, is declared dead by Martha. The couple acknowledge their illusions, and end the play facing an unknown future with a courage that comes from admitting their fear but not turning back, not trying to hide. To the question of who is afraid of Virginia Woolf – that is, afraid of all the despair and insecurity of modern life, and especially modern American life – the answer is that George and Martha are. But so is everybody. At least, George and Martha know they are, and know now even more fiercely than before. In that knowledge there is at least a measure of redemption.

What is curious about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, in the light of Albee’s subsequent development, is the way the play ultimately forces us to see George and Martha’s immersion in life as strangely heroic. For them, as for the young protagonist of The Zoo Story, if it resists, if it hurts, it is real. Life, it seems to them and the action seems to suggest, is painful, unbearably difficult for those committed to living rather than evading it. The passion of that perception, however, a passion that consequently fires up the story of George and Martha, is precisely what is lacking from most of Albee’s later work. Many of the later plays explore familiar themes. Tiny Alice (1964), for example, explores the absurd but inescapable nature of faith, illusion. A Delicate Balance (1966) dramatizes human defence systems, how social and family rituals, even argument and aberrant behaviour, act as temporary stays against confusion, a way of shoring up the psyche against dread. Box (1968) and Quotations from Chairman Mao (1968) dwell on the banality of human relationships in America. The Lady from Dubuque (1980) presents dying, and the despair consequent on the knowledge of it, as a necessary adjunct of living. But none of these plays has the verve, the sometimes bitter vitality that characterises the early work. It is too abstracted, too intent on presenting an intellectual argument rather than a dramatic action. It lacks the urgent sense of need that drives, say, The Zoo Story, the absurdist rage of The American Dream or the verbal and emotional fervour of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Albee began by adventures into style encouraged Off-Broadway. Moving to Broadway, he moved into a form of realism, simultaneously domestic and poetic, that gave him his greatest success. Since then, he appears to have lost his way. Whatever dramatic language he chose in his earlier work, it was always the language of passion, a corrosive anxiety and anger. That language does not appear to be with him, or is perhaps not even what he wants, any more.

Sam Shepard saw his first play performed Off Off-Broadway in 1964: Cowboys. Between then and 1975 he wrote more than twenty-five more. They include Icarus’s

Mother (1965), La Tourista (1966), Operation Sidewinder (1970), Mad Dog Blues (1971), The Tooth of Crime (1972), Action (1974) and Geography of a Horse Dreamer

(1974). Most of them are notable for radical shifts of character, tone and even dramatic medium – shifting suddenly from, say, expressionism to realism to allegory

– for jazz-like rhythms of action and speeches that resemble jazz riffs. Rarely linear, logical or consistent, they habitually use settings and symbolism in which cowboys collide with monsters, rock mythology is mixed with religion and folklore, and the America of small farms and wide open spaces, fast cars and jukeboxes is invaded by magic and the supernatural. Certain themes recur, and were to become characteristic of Shepard’s work. Action, for example, begins with the remark, ‘I’m looking forward to my life’; it ends with ‘I had no idea what the world was. I had no idea how I got there or why or who did it. I had no references for this.’ Midway, one character observes, ‘You act yourself out’. And that spells it out: in a random, crazy world, without arbiters or guides, human beings tend and in fact have to experiment with identity. Icarus’s Mother puts a further spin on this: that acting out, engaging in fictions, can be dangerous, seducing those who act in this way into a destructive escape from reality. The reality that Shepard intimates we must never try to escape from is not a narrowly materialistic, mundane one. The failure to acknowledge magic as a vital element in the world is another insistent theme, pulsating like a drumbeat through such plays as La Tourista and Mad Dog Blues. In La Tourista, in particular, that failure is seen as a characteristically American one. In American culture, the action suggests, alienation from the spiritual is endemic and indelibly linked to alienation from the past. What we see here is an American in Mexico forced to confront his own mortality, his own inhumanity: compared to the native traditions he encounters, he is, he finds, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, and a spiritual pauper. America, according to all these early plays, is heading in the wrong direction: away from the power of mystery to the power of the material. And nowhere is this clearer than in the best of them, The Tooth of Crime.

At the core of The Tooth of Crime is a mythic contest between Hoss, an ageing rock star, and Crow, a young newcomer with a new style. Typically of the work of this period, Shepard deploys a kaleidoscope of images, as his characters use a fasttalking, sharp-shooting range of styles in an attempt to impose alternative realities on each other. Hoss is a gypsy loner, a Mafia godfather, a boxing champion, the old pro; Crow is a teen gang leader, a lonely hit-man, the challenger, the new kid on the block. Above all, though, Hoss is a man with a history and roots, simultaneously enriched and weakened by his accomplishments and his knowledge of his art. Crow, on the other hand, is a boy with no knowledge beyond his own limited experience, no sense of commitment to any community or communal inheritance, with the strength and freedom that his own alienation and amorality bring. Hoss is the past, Crow is the future; given that, the outcome of the contest between them is inevitable. All Hoss can do, finally, to reaffirm his identity, is kill himself with a stylishness, a grace under pressure, that Crow can only envy. To an extent, the antagonists here are hip versions of Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski in

A Streetcar Named Desire. In this play, though, the victor is irredeemably crude, raw, empty; Crow has none of the latent vulnerability of Stanley (a vulnerability that, of course, helps drive him to brutality in the end). The future is seen as a decisive drift away from everything that, in the past, defined not only culture but also community and even humanity.

Not long after writing The Tooth of Crime, Shepard moved away from the disjunctive narrative rhythms and rapid tonal shifts of his earlier work. He remained committed to a theatre of extremes, emotional and actorly: the stage directions for his 1983 drama Fool for Love, for instance, insist that ‘This play is to be performed relentlessly without a break’. But his style gravitated closer to domestic realism, the dynamics of the familiar and obsessive intimacy. Bizarre events and brutal emotional violence still occurred, but there were no longer such radical shifts in language and form. This alteration of style was announced in Curse of the Starving Class (1977), the first play in a trilogy exploring the relationship of Americans to their land, family and history; the other two are A Buried Child (1979), probably his finest play to date, and True West (1980). In Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard uses the experiences of a family over two days to explore the national hunger. Everyone, it seems, is taught by American culture to feel incomplete without the endless chain of commodities the institutions of capitalism produce. Starvation is the natural condition of this family, and Americans generally, because they are stimulated to wants, to experience a need, that can never really be satisfied. Another family in A Buried Child supplies an even more powerful emblem for the corruption of the American spirit. The child that supplies the title of the play is the product of an incestuous union whom the family have killed and buried. Clearly, what Shepard is rehearsing here, personifying in this family, is what he sees as a general national compulsion to bury the past, to conceal guilt and deny responsibility: to rewrite history so as to retain the illusion of innocence. The process is not irreversible, the play intimates. In the final scene, the father of the buried child enters with its exhumed body in his arms. As he does so, the offstage voice of the mother of the family announces a miraculous abundance of vegetables springing up on a farm that, up until then, had been a wasteland. ‘I’ve never seen such corn,’ she declares. ‘Tall as a man already . . . It’s like a paradise out there.’ The resurrection of the family, and by implication America, is possible, it seems. All it needs is courage to face and embrace the past, to recover the best and recognize the worst. With that, it will again be ‘paradise out there’.

The power of A Buried Child, and of so many of Shepard’s plays in his mature style, stems from his weaving together of the domestic and the mythic, volcanic emotions and vast landscapes. His people are the stuff of raw experience and legend, barely able to contain immeasurable emotions within measurable frames of flesh and bone. So, in True West, Shepard explores a uniquely American myth, perhaps the defining one of the continent, through the intensely claustrophobic tale of two brothers writing a script. The script is about a chase: one man pursuing another across the country in a drive for vengeance without a definite start or finish. Gradually, the two brothers become the two men in the script. The real and

the fictional, the story of the play and the story in the play, coalesce; and this answers the question slyly posed in the play’s title. The myth of America is its reality, Shepard suggests, the dream of the West is the true West. What dream and truth, myth and reality both involve, in turn, is the immensity of human feeling and setting: drives and desires that sweep through men and women like a whirlwind, mysteries that move, only partly hidden, through the vastnesses of the world that surrounds them. In Fool for Love, for instance, the two central characters are lovers, half-brother and sister, who cannot live apart or together. They are victims and agents of a passion that is like an elemental force; lurching from one extreme to another, tenderness is inseparable from violence for them, and love from hate. The motel on the margins of the desert where the passion is acted out translates their condition into material terms. It is, like each of them, each of their bodies, a small, frail enclosure in the middle of an empty immensity, which can barely contain the elements careering within it. To be human, it seems for Shepard both here and in all his work, is to be in the eye of the storm: a fragile structure in and through which powers both material and magical circulate, caught in a turbulence that has no measurable beginning or end.

Like Albee and Shepard, Lanford Wilson used the freedom of the theatre outside Broadway to find a style. With him, however, the experimentation tended to be less radical. In early plays like Balm of Gilead (1965), he experimented with theatrical versions of cinematic effects, such as freezing the action, deploying slow motion during death scenes, background music and choric voiceover. In some of this early work, like The Hot l Baltimore (1973) and The Mound Builders (1975), he also developed his dramatic skill with overlapping narratives, simultaneous conversations and fluid time flow to develop what were to become favourite themes. So, The Hot l Baltimore – set in a residential hotel the seediness of which is suggested by the title, a neon sign with the letter ‘e’ burned out – invites the audience to consider the necessity of illusion, the human need for community (even as rundown a community as the one in the hotel), and, perhaps above all, America’s betrayal of its past. ‘Baltimore used to be one of the most beautiful cities in America,’ a character observes. ‘Every city in America used to be one of the most beautiful cities in America,’ comes the reply. And, in The Mound Builders, set at an archaeological dig near an ancient Indian site, the human need to build monuments – mounds, cities, plays – to create the illusion of permanence gives a quiet pathos and irony to the action. Later plays, like 5th of July (1978) and Angels Fall (1982), build on Wilson’s ability to explore the complex relations of a group, using a wry lyricism, drifting conversations and what may seem like a meandering plot. They also develop his perception that life is to be endured, occasionally enjoyed, but never conquered. ‘The only good thing that comes from these silly emergencies,’ concludes one character after the crisis has passed in Angels Fall, ‘these rehearsals for the end of the world, is that it make us get our act together.’

David Mamet first achieved success with The Duck Variations (1972) and Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). They introduced his characteristic style. This is not so much the vernacular, or the idiom of an actual subculture, as an intensely poetic

instrument. Repetition, intensification, a shared jargon and rhythm: all are used by the characters to create the feeling of a club, a closed world, with its own games, its own secret signs and codes. These two early plays also introduced Mamet’s obsessive interest in how people use language, not just as a communicative tool but to give the truth of fiction, the illusion of substance and significance, to their lives. In the thirty-one short scenes of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, for instance, the separate idioms, the separate realities or fictions (the two terms seem interchangeable in Mamet’s work), of a self-proclaimed swinger and a feminist collide. Both in their different ways afraid of sex, the two manage to break up the healthy sexual relationship of another couple. They do this not because what they separately say to the couple to persuade them is right, but because they manage to make it sound right. Sounding right is similarly important to the characters in American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), two plays which also take us into the dark heart, the selling of America. In American Buffalo, some minor criminals planning a robbery use a language that combines the mannerly and the vulgar, the precious and the obscene. Bumbling and incompetent as they prove to be, their shared jargon, reminiscent of the stylized talk of the characters in the stories of Damon Runyan (1884–1946), nevertheless gives them bravura, the confidence to believe in themselves.

Glengarry Glen Ross turns from robbers planning a robbery to salesmen planning a sale. Mamet makes the one seem in no way morally superior to the other. The salesmen are selling tracts of land in Florida; and the Scottish lilt of the title refers to the fantasy names given to what are worthless pieces of real estate, virtual swamp. The distinction of the play lies precisely in its revaluation of the desperate faith, the perverse resourcefulness of the salesmen. To earn a living, they have to combine the cynicism appropriate to their fraudulent trade with a belief in their skill, the power and value of their virtuoso sales techniques. Their language tells their story. It is the story of a group, a club of men for whom ‘a great sale’ is the fiction that gives false meaning to their lives. So, in its own way, the play is as devastating a critique of the American myth of success, selling yourself, as Death of a Salesman. Mamet has continued to explore characters who create a local habitation and a name for themselves out of fast talk, shared slang and smart conversation. Speed-the-Plow (1988) is set in Hollywood, with its flattery and fake intimacy, and it has many of its creator’s familiar trademarks: language as a substitute for meaning, selling as a mask for substance, the special status of those deemed to be in the club, the game. Mamet has also sustained his interest in those moments when different word systems and worlds collide. His controversial play Oleander (1992) deals with the issue of sexual harassment in the story of a female student who denounces a university professor. Whether she has a legitimate grievance or is working with her ‘group’ to achieve a kind of ethical cleansing, or whether there is an intriguing mix of both at work here, is never made clear. The audience is left in suspension, to debate. And, in a way, this is how the typical Mamet play always leaves us. All his characters are not so much liars as accomplished fantasists, who use the wiles of words, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, to suspend

disbelief in the fantasies they inhabit. As such, they offer a comment not just on their own subcultures but on American culture generally. One thing it is not difficult to believe, in fact, is that Mamet is commenting not just on the fictions of a particular group but on the collective fictions, the myths of his country.

Other dramatists have used the theatre even more openly than Mamet to interrogate the myths of the country. Especially during the Vietnam War, there was a flowering of drama that offered a sometimes savage critique of American culture. Apart from several plays mentioned earlier, such as America Hurrah and Indians, these included Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? by Terrence McNally (1939– ),

That Championship Season (1972) by Jason Miller (1939– ) and Kennedy’s Children

(1973) by Robert Patrick (1940– ). But the dramatist who caught most powerfully the destructive consequences of the Vietnam conflict, in particular, was David Rabe (1940– ). Rabe spent two years in the army in Vietnam; and that experience feeds into his three most successful and effective plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971) and Streamers (1976). Each play addresses the brutalizing effects of war, on the individual and on the national psyche, in a different way. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel describes the transformation of a sad, helpless young man into a soldier and then into a dead body. In this ironic Bildungsroman, the hero does not grow up; he simply hurtles, in eager innocence and ignorance, towards a random and pointless death. Sticks and Bones brings the war to the home front, contrasting a blinded Vietnam veteran, consumed with guilt and the horrors he has witnessed, with his family, who cannot begin to understand what has happened to him. By naming the various members of the family after a popular American television series, Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky, Rabe suggests its typicality. And it is typical too, Rabe intimates, in its stubborn, eventually violent refusal to accept the truth. In the end, rather than come to terms with their son and the obscenities he has experienced, they kill him. Set in an army camp in the United States, Streamers is more sympathetic and indirect in its approach. The characters are young soldiers awaiting their postings, among them two African Americans and a homosexual. The war in Vietnam is scarcely mentioned, but it does not have to be; it hangs over the characters as the imminent fate of some, or possibly every one, of them. And that fate is marked out in the title: ‘streamers’, we learn, is army slang for a parachute that does not open, billowing out uselessly above a man as he plunges to an inevitable death.

Like Mamet, Wilson, Shepard and Albee, Rabe has enjoyed intermittent success in and outside the commercial theatre. The success of Neil Simon (1927– ), however, has been unstoppable and continuous. His first successful play, Come Blow Your Horn, appeared on Broadway in 1961. It was followed by a steady stream of hit comedies, at a rate of almost one a year: among them, Barefoot in the Park

(1963), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968) and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971). The structure of these comedies generally involves a collision of opposites: odd couples yoked humorously together who sometimes achieve reconciliation, and sometimes do not. This supplies the basis or pretext for a quickfire succession of jokes, comic conflicts and misunderstandings. The sometimes

formulaic nature of the humour may be one reason for Simon’s success, but so is his familiarity with his usual dramatic setting, in middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road New York. In some of his later work Simon has moved into a more serious, if sentimental, mode, drawing on his own experiences. Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) tells the story of a young man not unlike the youthful author, growing up in New York during the Depression. Biloxi Blues (1985) takes the young man into basic training in the army; Broadway Bound (1986), in turn, takes up his story just after the Second World War, when he has become an aspiring comic writer. Comic and inclined to gentle sentiment as they are, these plays show a new interest in developing character, and in relating that development to more general social and cultural change. In the portrait of the family of the young man, too, they reveal an understanding of the warmth and dynamics of domestic life, particularly lower-class Jewish life, that recalls the work of Clifford Odets. Like the work of Odets, as well, is the sympathy these plays show for the dignity of the poor. As one character in Brighton Beach Memories puts it, ‘For people like us, sometimes the only thing we really own is our dignity’.

While Simon has continued to see his plays produced on Broadway, one result of the exponential growth in other theatrical arenas in America has been the increase in the production of plays by writers from previously marginalized groups. Notable here is the emergence of many women playwrights, including Marsha Norman (1947– ), Wendy Wasserstein (1950– ) and Beth Henley (1952– ). Norman saw her first play, Getting Out (1977), produced in Louisville, Kentucky; other, later plays include Circus Valentine (1979) and The Hold-Up (1980). But it is ’night, Mother (1982) that has brought her her greatest success so far. At the centre of the play is a woman in her forties, Jessie Cates, who tells her mother that she plans to commit suicide. Resisting every attempt her mother makes to dissuade her, she outlines her reasons for killing herself. ‘I’m just not having a very good time,’ she explains, ‘and I don’t have any reason to think it’ll get anything but worse.’ ’night, Mother is not so much about the ethics of suicide as about the right of the individual to control her own destiny. After forty or so years, Jessie is taking control of her life. ‘It’s all I really have that belongs to me and I’m going to say what happens to it,’ she says. Her mother can finally do no more than acknowledge her right to make her decision: ‘Forgive me,’ she declares, ‘I thought you were mine.’ In all this, ’night, Mother is very much in the American grain. Very much in the Southern grain, by contrast, are the plays of Beth Henley, her most notable being Crimes of the Heart (1979) and The Miss Firecracker Contest (1981). The women who dominate her work offer persuasive variations on the Southern grotesque. Simultaneously feisty and fantastic, bold and bizarre, they tend to see life askew and respond to events in a quirky way that hardly distinguishes between the serious and the trivial. Their quirkiness turns out to be a survival technique, however. ‘But, Babe, we’ve just got to learn how to get through these real bad days here,’ one woman in Crimes of the Heart explains, ‘I mean, it’s getting to be a thing in our family.’ And their oddness, their often freakish humour, is clearly how they learn to get through.

Survival is also an issue at the heart of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein. In

Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic? (1983) and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), Wasserstein takes as her subject her own generation of women, shaped by the feminist aspirations of the 1970s. Uncommon Women, for example, explores the lives of a group of ambitious young women in an exclusive college. They receive ambiguous messages about their destiny from their teachers, their family and society. Told that ‘today all fields are open to women’, they are nevertheless also advised that they can achieve what they want ‘without loss of gaiety, charm or femininity’ – and offered courses in gracious domestic living. Confused by these messages, they pursue different destinies none of which seems entirely satisfactory or fulfilling. One woman retreats into dreams of an ideal mate, another into mindless domesticity; one becomes a professional, but still feels suppressed and thwarted – ‘Just once it would be nice to wake up with nothing to prove,’ she confesses. In a concluding section some six years after the main action, these ‘uncommon women’ are still trying to find ways of achieving and expressing their uncommonness, their difference from the norm prescribed for previous generations of women. Nothing has really been resolved. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t really been happy for some time,’ the main character, Heidi Holland, in The Heidi Chronicles admits, ‘It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded.’ That is a shared feeling among female characters in these plays: confusion, irresolution, the sense of an immeasurable gap between aspiration and achievement – what they want and what their society, and even their loved ones, tell them they can get. Despite that, these characters at some elemental level reveal an indestructible optimism: the belief that, as Heidi Holland puts it, ‘maybe, just maybe, things will be a little better’. Woven through the dramatic texture of The Heidi Chronicles, and its predecessors, is a sustained if muted belief in the possible, a realization of a proper role for women, if not now, then in the next generation.

It was not until the late 1960s that another minority group was able openly to dramatize issues of identity. Up until then, a homosexual playwright like Tennessee Williams had to explore his homosexuality, if he wished to do so, by stealth and indirection. From one perspective, for example, Blanche Dubois can be seen as a mask, a convenient, concealed means of expressing what it feels like to be different from the moral majority. With plays like The Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley (1945– ), however, the subject of male or female homosexuality came directly to be addressed. The Boys in the Band, although it suffers from a tendency to conform to the stereotype of the anguished, self-hating gay, was one of the first commercially successful plays to deal with its gay characters not only openly but with considerable sympathy. Other, later dramas that deal with the homosexual community and focus on homosexuals, and made their way into the mainstream theatre, include As Is (1985) by William M. Hoffman (1935– ) and The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry Kramer (1935– ). Above all, there is The Torch Song Trilogy (1981) by Harvey Fierstein (1954– ). In three plays originally written and produced separately, Fierstein here uses a dramatic persona, Arnold Beckoff, to

consider the evolution of homosexuals to social acceptance and, more important, acceptance of themselves. A deft blend of autobiography, comedy, domestic realism and social naturalism, the trilogy concludes with Beckoff mourning the loss of his lover and partner. By now, he has discovered that, in his own way, he is as ‘normal’

– if that is the right word – as everyone else: wanting a home, a loving partnership, the right to mourn his loved one openly. By now his mother recognizes this, too, acknowledging that his widowhood is the emotional and moral equivalent of her own, and that his sexual orientation and status have to be honoured.

Apart from some of the African American playwrights discussed earlier, the most notable dramatist from the racially marginalized minorities is, without doubt, David Henry Hwang (1957– ). His first play, F.O.B. (1978), deals with the cultural conflict between those of Chinese origin born in America and those ‘fresh off the boat’, newly arrived immigrants. It was followed by Family Devotion (1981), which explores a similar theme, The Dance and the Railroad (1981), based on a strike in 1867 by Chinese workers on a railroad, Sound and Beauty (1983), consisting of two one-act plays, and Rich Relations (1986). Hwang consistently received support from the Public Theatre of New York, under the direction of Joseph Papp (1921– 91). His early plays met with varying fortunes, but in 1988 Hwang achieved major success with M. Butterfly. The play was inspired by a 1986 newspaper account of a bizarre relationship. A French diplomat, on trial for espionage, was revealed to have had a twenty-six-year relationship with someone he believed to be a Chinese woman, whereas in fact ‘she’ was not only a spy but also a man. From this story, Hwang got his idea for what he called ‘a deconstructivist Madame Butterfly’ addressing a complex web of racial and sexual issues. The basic arc of the play, as Hwang has explained it in an Afterword, is simple. ‘The Frenchman fantasises that he is Pinkerton and his lover Butterfly,’ Hwang has said. ‘By the end of the piece, he realises that it is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped in love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton.’ What expands and enriches that arc, though, is Hwang’s understanding of how issues of race and gender, cultural and imperial politics, intersect here; how the tragic blindness of the Frenchman involves multiple levels of misrecognition. Hwang has the Chinese lover Song allude to those levels in his courtroom testimony after the two are finally caught. ‘As soon as a Western man comes in contact with the East – he’s already confused,’ Song points out. ‘The West thinks of itself as masculine – big guns, big industry, big money – so the East is feminine – weak, delicate, poor.’ For Hwang, as for Song, the tale of the French diplomat and his lover is not so extraordinary, given what the author calls ‘the degree of misunderstanding between men and women and also between East and West’. ‘Her mouth says no but her eyes say yes,’ as Song sardonically puts it; ‘The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated.’

In M. Butterfly, Hwang offers a powerful metaphor for the way men misperceive women and the West misperceives the East. The events of the play coincide with the period of the Vietnam War, alluded to several times, which gives them a further resonance and contemporary relevance. The metaphor is powerful because

it is dramatic. None of this would have worked, of course, if Hwang had not fashioned a passionate, compelling action that, besides being strong on insight, is a sad, strange kind of love story. René Gallimard, the Frenchman blinded to reality by his needs, his consuming desire not to see the truth, is a character who inspires sympathy as well as stupefaction – and simple wonder at what sightless fools mortals can be. Song, in turn, besides being given to what the judge at his trial caustically terms ‘armchair political theory’, is a man caught up in his own fantasies about women. The reason that he makes what Gallimard calls ‘the Perfect Woman’ is precisely that he knows what men intend by that phrase, what they and he want. ‘There is a vision of the Orient that I have,’ Gallimard eventually confesses, ‘Of . . . women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man.’ Challenged with veritable fact, Gallimard will not surrender that vision. ‘I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy,’ he announces. ‘I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else – simply falls short.’ For Gallimard, ‘death with honour is better than life’. That, in his case, means killing himself with the declaration, ‘My name is René Gallimard

– also known as Madame Butterfly’. It is a strange kind of honour that compels him to become his own fantasy. It measures just how far men see themselves and their needs in women, how far the West projects its will to power and domination on to the East. But it, and the suicide it leads to, measures those things in terms that combine analysis with awe, pity for the predicament of Gallimard with fear over the deeper sources, the larger consequences, of his error. This is a genuine tragedy and, on one level, a genuinely American one.

New Journalists and dirty realists

Realism is a notoriously slippery term, but it is true to say that the realistic approach, allied to the domestic setting, has been the staple of the American theatre. In prose writing, fictional and non-fictional, it also became the weapon, in particular, of those who came to be known as the New Journalists. In fact, according to the man who has seen himself as the chief publicist and cheerleader for the New Journalism, Tom Wolfe (1931– ), realism is now, or should be, the emotional and moral core of all serious writing. ‘The introduction of realism into literature by people like Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett’, Wolfe has insisted, ‘was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology.’ ‘The genius of any writer – . . . in fiction or nonfiction –’, Wolfe has argued, ‘will be severely handicapped if he cannot master, or if he abandons, the techniques of realism.’ Wolfe’s specific argument here has been with those American writers who, as he sees it, have ignored their primary obligation, to catch the manners and comment on the morals of their times, and who have instead gone after the strange gods of fantasy and absurdism, myth, fable and magic. Too many writers, in his view, have abandoned ‘the whole business of “the way we live now” ’ and sought to produce ‘novels of ideas, Freudian novels, surrealistic novels . . . Kafkaesque novels . . . the catatonic novel or the novel of immobility’. Other, earlier writers, Wolfe has pointed

out, were proud to see themselves as the chroniclers of their society; but too many writers now give the appearance of having only ‘fable, myth, and the sacred office to think about’ – to be a chronicler, to give a brief abstract of their times, is evidently ‘a menial role’. For Wolfe, the counterrevolutionary movement, a return to the imperatives of social realism, began in the early 1960s, with the appearance of articles and books that explored non-fictional subjects, events and characters symptomatic of their times, using some of the classic strategies of realist fiction. The main exponents of this new way of writing, registering the rich social fabric of contemporary America, were, he suggested, him, of course, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, and Truman Capote (1924–84).

According to Wolfe, the good New Journalist should stick to the facts as far as he can, the ones he has gathered as a reporter. But in retelling those facts, he avails himself of certain novelistic devices: techniques that have helped give the realistic novel its unique power – what, Wolfe says, is ‘variously known as its immediacy’, its ‘concrete quality’, its ‘emotional involvement’, its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing’ quality. These techniques, as Wolfe describes them, are essentially four. First, what is required is an extensive use of dialogue: so the New Journalist needs to be a skilful interviewer and a careful recorder. Second, what is needed is a scrupulously detailed and exact recording of the everyday gestures, habits, manners of people, their styles of clothing, furniture and so on. Third, there needs to be a careful arrangement of the narrative, scene by scene. Finally, the New Journalist should deploy a consistent narrative point of view, so that the reader can see things just as the reporter saw them and be drawn into them just as he or she was. Curiously, this formula does not precisely inform Wolfe’s own non-fiction. He has published many collections of essays commenting on contemporary American culture, from its popular heroes to its alternative lifestyles. The collections include The KandyKolored Tangerine-Flame Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), The Painted Word (1975), about the pretensions of the art world, and The Right Stuff (1979), about the US astronauts, ‘gods for a day’. But, as the titles of many of these collections suggest, what most of his essays are notable for is their wit, bravura and high-octane prose: a baroque pop style that offers a sardonic reflection of, and comment on, their subjects. Wolfe is, above all, a satirist or jet-set sociologist, intent on making sly fun of the shiny surfaces and strutting heroes of his culture. His prescription for the New Journalism does not really fit his own non-fiction; still less does it fit the immense Swiftian satire of his novels The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998). Rather, it fits perfectly some of the work of Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song) and Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album), and the later writing of Truman Capote, above all

In Cold Blood (1966).

Capote had already acquired a reputation before he published In Cold Blood, with books such as Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic tale about a homosexually inclined boy groping towards maturity, The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), about a light-hearted, freewheeling, romantic playgirl

living in New York City. In Cold Blood was something different, however. It was based on fact. In 1959, two ex-convicts, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, broke into the isolated farmhouse of a respectable family called the Clutters, tied up the four family members who were there, then killed them. All they got, for loot, was between forty and fifty dollars. Having learned about the brutal incident, Capote worked on and off for five years, interviewing friends and family, surviving members and detectives investigating the murders. Then, once Smith and Hickock were caught, Capote got to know them as well, talking to them during the trial, after their conviction and right up until the time of their execution in 1965. Out of the mass of material he accumulated, Capote then produced what he called his ‘NonFiction Novel’. His aim in writing it, he explained, was simple. He wanted to make the cold fact of the murder understandable. By implication, he wanted to make the violence characteristic of contemporary society understandable. And the best way he could do this, he felt, was by presenting that cold fact in the context of other facts: above all, by avoiding anything not derived from observation, interview and record. Capote tries to avoid commentary in the book; he also seeks to eschew analysis, social or psychological, simply presenting what he has seen or heard. He does, however, permit himself use of the four novelistic devices Wolfe prescribed for the New Journalism. In particular, the entire narrative is carefully structured scene by scene, section by section. The first section, for instance, leads slowly up to the killing, building tension by cutting between the Clutter family and Smith and Hickock driving towards them. The second concentrates on the search for the killers, the third describes them after their arrest and during their trial; and the fourth, final section brings them to death row and eventual execution.

Using this narrative arrangement, Capote avoids sensationalism. For example, the actual murders are only described in the third section, through the recollection and confessions of the murderers; there is no attempt made to step outside of this, in some kind of voyeuristic, melodramatic way. What he avoids, though, is less important than what he gains. In Cold Blood takes violence out of the backwoods and the city – their usual sites in American fiction – and into the heartland. In doing so, it vividly juxtaposes the contrasts and contradictions of American life. The dream and the nightmare, the everyday and the aberrant, American normalcy and its dark underbelly: these opposites are all powerfully registered thanks to Capote’s method of presentation. More than that, they come together in direct conflict in the central event of the book. Capote cannot, of course, entirely absent himself in terms of sympathy from the narrative. He was clearly drawn to one of the murderers, the misfit Perry Smith, and it shows. He was also a stranger to the kind of middle American tastes and habits the Clutters embodied, and that occasionally shows too. But this is a book that works because, most of the time, it is coolly dispassionate. Capote captures, with a cold but uncynical eye, the bleak emptiness of life on the vast wheat plains of Kansas, that area of the Midwest where the Clutters lived and worked. With equal dispassion, he catches the quiet desperation of Smith and Hickock, as they wander across the country in search of a job or, more often, in search of someone to rob and perhaps kill. There is no

explanation supplied for the killing. ‘The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning,’ we are told at one point. ‘Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered.’ Things happen, people suffer; those who make them suffer must suffer in turn. That is the closest In Cold Blood, wedded to the cult of the fact, comes to a judgement. Otherwise, it is left to the reader to see the violence as random, gratuitous, meaningless – and, to that extent, peculiarly typical of America and, in particular, the contemporary American scene.

The prose style of In Cold Blood is one of scrupulous meanness. Capote was to use it again, with conspicuously less success, in later books like Music for Chameleons (1980), a collection of pieces, and his unfinished novel Answered Prayers (1986). It is also a style that is favoured by those writers known as dirty realists. They include Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Anne Phillips, at least in their early work, Larry Brown (1945– ) and Harry Crews (1935– ). What these writers honour and articulate are the lives of the working poor: people who have to sell their labour, or even their bodies, to live and who might, at any time, lose everything including the basic dignities that make human beings human. ‘This is America, where money’s more serious than death.’ That remark, coined by Harry Crews, could act as an epigraph to the work of many of the dirty realists. For that matter, it could act as an epigraph to the work of the first and finest of them, Raymond Carver (1938–88). During his lifetime, Carver published several collections of short stories, among them Will You Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1984) and Where I’m Calling From (1988). Terse and toughly graceful, these stories sometimes recall the work of Hemingway in the way the writer uses omission, the spaces between the words to catch evanescent, elusive feelings. They also resemble the early short stories of Hemingway, in particular, in their quiet stoicism, their allegiance to the concrete, their cleaving to the stark surfaces and simple rituals of everyday life. What is remarkable about Carver’s stories is the way they can combine weariness with wonder, an acknowledgement of the sheer grind and cruelty of life, especially for the poor, with the occasional moment of relief, revelation, the awareness of possibility. So, in a story called ‘A Small, Good Thing’, a small boy is killed in a road accident just before his birthday. The cake ordered for the birthday celebration is, naturally enough, not picked up by the parents. The baker, not knowing the reason, is outraged, and starts making a series of abusive phone calls. Confronted by the angry, heartbroken parents at his bakery, all he can say is, ‘I’m just a baker’, ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can.’ And a little more: he can offer them some freshly baked rolls. ‘Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,’ he tells the mother and father of the dead boy. It is not much, next to nothing in a dark world, but it is not nothing. The three sit together in the clean, well-lighted place of the bakery, eating and talking. And the parents, the story concludes, ‘did not think of leaving’.

Realism slips into stylistic minimalism in the work of Carver and the dirty realists. In A Fan’s Notes (1968) by Frederick Exley (1929–92), a book reflecting the disturbances of a life of divorce, alcoholism and recurrent mental illness, it

slithers into autobiography. In Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) by Hubert Selby, Jr (1928– ), a vivid, sometimes obscene account of the violence and corruption of contemporary urban life, it slides into Gothic documentary. It has often been the style of choice for writers specializing in a particular milieu, trying to capture the way not all but certain particular Americans live now. So, J. F. Powers (1917–99) has used it to record the Catholic parish world (Morte D’Urban [1962] ), Alison Lurie, Randall Jarrell (Pictures from an Institution [1954] ) and Howard Nemerov (The Homecoming Game [1957] ) have all deployed it to describe life on the university campus. And James Gould Cozzens (1903–78) employed it to explore the worlds of the military (Guard of Honour [1948] and law (By Love Possessed [1957] ). It also remains an invaluable form or style for examining political or cultural conflict. Peter Matthiessen (1927– ), for instance, has used it in At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) to chart the invasion of more primitive, natural environments by the destructive forces of supposedly civilized cultures. And Paul Theroux (1941– ) has found it useful in his portraits in fiction (Saint Jack [1973], Mosquito Coast [1982] ) and non-fiction (The Great Railway Bazaar [1975], Sailing Through China [1984] ) of the often abrasive encounters between old worlds and new. Outside of certain genre reading, though, such as the detective story, the thriller and the police procedural, the area where it has had most conspicuous impact in recent times is in the various accounts, in fictional or non-fictional terms, of the war in Vietnam.

Certain of the best of these accounts in fiction circulate around memories of the Vietnam War: In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason, Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips, The Floatplane Notebooks (1988) by Clyde Edgerton (1946– ), Ray (1980) by Barry Hannah (1942– ), whose protagonist, a Vietnam veteran, appears to live by the maxim, ‘It is terribly, excruciatingly difficult to be at peace when all our history is war’. Others are devoted to the combat zone. The military experience of Tim O’Brien (1946– ), for instance, has been the material of most of his novels, especially in the three most notable, thinly fictionalized ones. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) is a series of linked sketches; The Things They Carried (1990) explores the futility of searching for the truth about what happens, or why, in war; Going for Cacciato (1978) stretches into magic realism as it follows a breakaway group of soldiers marching across Asia to Paris. O’Brien has also explored the legacy of the Vietnam past as it haunts the American present, in Northern Lights (1975) and In the Lake of the Woods (1994). So, in very different terms, have Robert Olen Butler (1945– ) and Robert Stone (1937– ). Butler, who served in the American army in Vietnam as a Vietnamese linguist, produced in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1997) a collection of tales about Vietnamese Americans that capture the fluid world they navigate, caught between the memories of the Asia they have left and the mysteries of America they now encounter. In Dog Soldiers (1974), a story about drug dealing from Vietnam to California, Stone brought the Vietnam War to the home front. It is one of several fictions in which he has used the adventure story format to explore what he sees as the ineradicable American inclination towards violence. Others