Robert E. Sherwood by Baird R. Shuman (review)

124 MODERN DRAMA May that there is nothing left elsewhere? Emmett Parker's announced book on Camus as a journalist may contribute greatly to our understanding of Camus' intellectual career. LAURENT LeSAGE The Pennsylvania State University ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, by Baird R. Shuman, Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, 1964, 160 pp. Price $3.50. Mr. Shuman's study of the plays of Robert Emmet Sherwood is a very useful handbook which analyzes in some detail his successful major plays as well as his failures. It contains a bibliography of his plays, miscellaneous works, and his many articles in periodicals. There is also an index and a critical bibliog· raphy of the secondary source material including some unpublished doctoral dissertations that have direct bearing on Sherwood's development as a dramatist of ideas. There is very little mention of some important aspects of his career as a writer and journalist. Only passing mention is made of tlIe fact tlIat he was one of the first really perceptive American motion picture critics and was the author of many screen plays; there is nothing of his friendships and professional associations in t.he literary and theater world; little is written of his career in Washington during tlIe war when he lived at the White House and wrote some of President Roosevelt's "fireside chats." All of tlIis will be dealt witlI, no doubt, by John Mason Brown in his long awaited biography of Sherwood. What Shuman does with some tlIoroughness is to examine Sherwood's develop. ment as a dramatist from the tremendous success of his first professionally pro· duced play, through the next plays which were consistently failures, through tlIe unprecedented success of his next five plays and to tlIe important failures of his last two productions. This means tlIat he traces, as otlIer critics have done, tlIe theme of pacificism and a protagonist'S relation to tlIe meaningless violence of war which occurs directly or indirectly in all of his dramatic work. In fact, Mr. Shuman's first chapter on tlIe plays is called "Alpha and Omega" and compares Sherwood's first success The Road to Rome with his last, post· humously produced failure, Small War on Murray Hill. Not only tlIe tlIeme but also the plot of these two plays is identical: botlI are historical plays in which a charming and clever woman engages in a flirtation with an invading general in order to persuade him to re·evaluate his plan for the conquest of her country. Subsequently, Shuman treats the intervening plays in tlIree chapters beginning witlI what he calls "Sherwood's universal microcosm." In these plays Shuman feels tlIat the autlIor was deliberately creating little worlds in which he could reveal "representative social types." This is certainly true of a play like The Petrified Forest wherein Sherwood examined some of tlIe wanderers of T. S. Eliot's waste· land; the protagonist even says he shares Eliot's fear of what modern science has made of tlIe modern world. However, Idiot's Delight, which is included in this chapter, might more log· ically have been included in tlIe next chapter, "Of Men and their Wars." For in tlIis play in 1936 Sherwood predicted with frightening accuracy the holocaust that was to begin in 1939. It is true he uses a resort hotel near the borders of France, Italy, and Switzerland where many refugees are gathered, but he is prinmrily interested in tlIe effect of the coming war on these refugees. In particular, tlIe problem facing many of tlIe characters considered in tlIis clIapter is tlIat of the one·time ·pacificist who realizes that he must forego non- 1966 BOOK REVIEWS 125 violence for what Mr. Shuman calls "conditional pacificism." This is certainly the problem confronting Lincoln in what will probably be the most durable of these plays, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois (1938). Sherwood's Lincoln is a lonely, peace-loving man who gradually realizes that it is his tragic destiny to lead his country into the worst of all wars, a civil war. Similarly, Dr. Valkonen in There Shall Be No Night (1940) realizes that peace and freedom are two very different things. Dr. Valkonen (and Sherwood) are fond...