John Whiting and the Theme of Self-Destruction

JOHN WHITING AND THE THEME OF SELF-DESTRUCTION ON JUNE 16, 1963, the British dramatist John Whiting died in a London hospital of cancer at the age of forty-five. The event aroused little interest in the British press beyond a fairly bland obituary in The Times and a sad, personal one by a former Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts colleague, Walter Lucas, in the British Drama League publication Drama.1 In this country, The New York Times reported his death in a merely routine manner. This lack of concern at his death, and what it might mean for the English-speaking drama, is hardly to be wondered at considering how little attention his work had received from critics in either country. Until the production of The Devils by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1961, reviewers had been unanimous in damning his plays; Harold Hobson's review of Saint's Day in The Sunday Times [London ] for September 9, 1951, was matched for its hysterical savagery only by Ivor Brown's comments in The Observer. Until The Devils, none of his four plays enjoyed a long run. Yet Saint's Day received a £700 award in the Festival of Britain Drama Contest, and when it was attacked, Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook sprang to its defense in the correspondence columns of The Times. In fact, among British theater people Whiting has been something of a legend as a writer with a tremendous talent for providing theatrical impactalthough the chief argument brought against him by the reviewers was his coldness, his literary obscurity, his failure to establish communication with audiences, and his excessive addiction to complex symbolism. In this country, he has remained almost entirely unknown: The Devils has been the only one of his plays to receive a major production (at the Arena Theatre in Washington, D. C., late in 1963), and the only critical study of his work that I have been able to track down is Jacqueline Hoefer's "Pinter and Whiting: Two Attitudes Towards the Alienated Artist" (Modern Drama, February, 1962). Probably the reason for this neglect is that although Whiting began writing for the theater at a time when England desperately needed new playwrights, he remained outside the so-called "new movement" in either its Wesker-Osborne or its Pinter branches. He had no allegiance to a social, political, or religious point of view, and he was 1 Drama, New Series (Autumn, 1963), No. 70, pp. 38-39. (134) 1965 JOHN WHITING 135 explicitly opposed to "committed" writing, on the grounds that art is ineffectual as propaganda. The only engagement he recognized was a personal and humanistic one: the commitment should be by art, not through it. What this means, perhaps, is that he felt too strong a commitment to art as art to use it for ulterior purposes-though he was just as adamant in condemning the idea of art for the sake of art alone. His concern was simply that the artist should not be so involved with nonartistic interests that he loses his artistic integrity and independence. At least I assume that this is what he had in mind when in an interview with Tom Milne for the magazine Encore he cited approvingly Aldous Huxley's statement "that the nearest he had ever been able to define his own position as a writer was that of a gangster who lives on society, but beyond it, on the edge of it."2 When he was asked how he proposed to set about writing the master· piece that he hoped to produce, he said: "By becoming more scepti. cal, and less enthusiastic; by not marching anywhere; by reserving love for women, and not spreading it thinly over the whole of humanity ; by not going to the Royal Court Theatre; by detesting sim· plicity more than I do, if that is possible; by travel; by pleasure; by total rejection of the knitted woollen morality preached by Mr. W, X, Y, and Z; by investigation and, I suppose it will have to be so, by work."3 Despite his wish for theatrical success, he would not compromise with his art or ally himself...