It is sadly inept, not to say jejune, to accuse Maxim Gorki's Night
Lodging of "gloom." Gloomy plays there certainly are. Twin Beds was one
of the gloomiest plays I ever saw, and what about a play like She Walked
in Her Sleep? That defunct comedy was as depressing as a six-day bicycle
race. Night Lodging is somber. No one denies that. But to believe that a
somber play must necessarily be a "gloomy" play is like believing that
Christmas must necessarily be unpleasant. It simply isn't true, and to
suppose it is mentally inelastic.
But the trouble is, we are mentally inelastic. We say, Ah yes,
Strindberg, the woman-hater; or Ibsen, the man who bites on granite; or
Gorki, the Big Gloom; when as a matter of fact these artists are simply
human beings who have got beyond the comprehensions of the fifth grade.
This is itself an old story in criticism. Only the story has to be
re-told every time the New York newspaper critics are called upon to
characterize a serious drama. With a regularity as unfailing as the
moon, the New York critics reaffirm their conviction that a play
concerning derelict human beings must of course be squalid, sodden,
high-brow and depressing. It is mentally ruinous to believe and assert
such things, yet their belief and assertion are endemic in the New York
newspapers, like malaria in the jungle or goiter in the Alps.
Mr. Arthur Hopkins's presentation of Night Lodging at the Plymouth
Theatre may or may not be better than the presentation some time ago at
the German theatre. I do not know. I never saw the performance at the
German theatre and I am inclined to distrust the persons to whom the
German theatre is not so much a thing in itself as a stick with which to
whack the American theatre. But, better or worse than the German
performance, Mr. Hopkins's is to the good. It is a strong, firm,
spacious, capable performance, resting not so much on a few pinnacles as
on a general level of excellence. It is presented bravely. Making no
attempt to sweeten the drama to the taste of American critics, it allows
the resolute sincerity of Gorki to penetrate every word and action of
the performance. The result is undoubtedly not Russian, even if every
actor in the cast talks with a semblance of foreignness. But the result
is viable, Russian or not. A sense of human incident and human presence
is quickly secured, and after that there comes a stream of events which
never loses its reality either in force or direction. The impact is
tremendous. Gorki inundates one's consciousness with these human
fortunes and misfortunes of his tenement basement. And while occasional
accents slip awry in the tumult of his creation, the substance of his
story finds one a corroborator--in a way that one simply never
corroborates depression or gloom.
The men and women, who come together in this night lodging of a Russian
city, are of the emancipated kind that one sees on the benches in
Madison Square. They are recruited from the casual worker and the
non-worker, the unemployed and the unemployable, the loafers and the
criminals and the broken and the declasse. On the first evening when one
hears their voices through the murk of the ill-lit basement, one
realizes that their anarchism is bitter. They grate on one another,
sneer at one another, bawl at one another, tell one another to go to
hell. They are earthly pilgrims whose burdens have galled them. They do
not understand or accept their fate. They are full of self-pity. They
are, in a word, one's tired and naked self. But this relaxed and wanton
selfness is projected by a Russian who keeps for his people the
freshness of childhood--a freshness charming in some cases, horrible in
others, but always with a touch of immortality. How they reveal
themselves in this nudity of common poverty! A woman in the corner is
coughing, coughing. She wants air. Her husband does not go to her. His
patience is snapped. In the middle of the room lies a man half recovered
from a drunken brawl. He aches loudly with stale liquor and stale
wounds. In the other corner a youth dreams of his mistress, the wife of
the lodging-house keeper--a mistress from whom he pines to escape. The
"baron" sits in the shadow, telling of his high antecedents, to weary
sarcastic listeners. Elsewhere the broken young actor repeats the
medical verdict that his organism is poisoned with alcohol. "You mean
'organon,'" shouts another. "No, organism. My organism...." And so,
these lives sweep round and round in an eddy of helpless egotism, the
sport of the winds of heaven.
Then arrives a leonine old man, a philosophical patriarchal wanderer.
Quite simply he fits into this life of the basement, but unlike the rest
he is no longer self-centered or self-afflicted. He walks erect in his
anarchism. And gradually the lives of the night lodging group around
him. He sits by the dying woman. He talks of women to the young thief,
and talks of the fine life in rich Siberia that is beckoning to the
young. He stands like an untroubled oak in the gales that toss the
others hither and thither. Lord, he has seen life! And he meets them all
with compassion, a man among children.
He goes. His presence has not prevented the lodging-house keeper's wife
from driving the young man to kill her husband. Nor has it prevented
that flashing devil from mutilating her sister whom the young man really
loves. But though the old man departs he leaves after him a rent of blue
in the clouds that choke these people's lives. One after another the
night lodgers question life afresh under the wanderer's influence. The
tartar's arm is still smashed. The kopecks are still scarce. Nastia is
still helpless. The baron is still reminiscent. The actor is still
alcoholic. But there is aroused in the night lodging the imperishable
dream of happiness, and no one is ready to quench it.
Why is the grave and beautiful play _not_ gloomy? It is not enough to
say that the really gloomy play gives a naturalistic version of life
which the spectator rejects as false. Nor is it enough to say that the
falsity of a sodden play consists not in its shadows or in its discords
but in its absence of the vitamin of beauty. Many plays are denied truth
because their truth is not agreeable. Many plays are denied beauty
simply because their beauty is a stranger. Yet we know that truth or
beauty may be as sable as the night, as icy as the pole, as lonely as a
waterfall in the wilderness. The fact is, gloom is the child of
ingrained ugliness, not the child of accidental, conventional ugliness.
It is the people who think too narrowly of poverty and failure who see
Night Lodging as depressing. It does not fail in beholding life. It is
not poor in sympathy.