expanding american theatre history || "no one innocent": lowell, brecht, and "benito...

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"No one innocent": Lowell, Brecht, and "Benito Cereno"Author(s): Ann WalshSource: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 15, No. 1,Expanding American Theatre History (Spring, 2009), pp. 45-60Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University ofDebrecen CAHSStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274455 .

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"No one innocent": Lowell, Brecht, and Benito Cereno*

Ann Walsh

ft/errs

In the summer of 1961, Robert Lowell began his adaptation of Melville's Benito Cereno , which with Endecott and the Red Cross and My Kinsman Major Molineux comprises the dramatic trilogy The Old Glory. The plays were

completed the following year and November 1964 saw the work premiered at the American Place Theatre in New York, and the publication of The Old Glory in book form.1 Even before he began to write, Lowell had a vision of the Cereno adaptation as a critique of the racial turmoil coming to the boil in the America of the early sixties; a letter to William Meredith in March 1960 describes the proposed adaptation as an engagement with "what's

happening now, wrong blazing into holocaust, no one innocent" (letters 360).2

The play's relevance to the racial tensions of mid-century America was not lost on its critical audience and readers: George Ralph describes Benito Cereno as "one of the few really significant statements about race to have been made in the theatre recently" (155); Ruby Cohn points out Lowell's deployment of the past "to appeal to our present conscience" (288). Other critics responded to the dramatic technique of the poet-turned- playwright. Alexander Laing, while regretting the play's anachronisms and its distance from its two sources, could still applaud the "resdess

experimentation" (105) of Lowell's first foray into drama. Laing's emphasis on the experimental nature of the play is at odds with Marjorie Perloffs view in 1986 that "the characteristically 'literary' production of The Old Glory in 1964 only makes clear how far removed [Lowell] was from the

experimentation then taking place in the other arts" (104). It is noteworthy that Perloff s comment appears in an article about the poetry of Lowell and Berryman, for it is in a letter to John Berryman dated March 1962 that Lowell describes his dramatic adaptations in terms that will preoccupy this paper: the poet writes "[the plays] are rather Brechtian and different in tone and meaning from their sources" ( Tetters 400). Lowell's alignment of Old

Excerpts from an unpublished draft manuscript of the adaptation to Benito Cereno by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2009 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Robert Lowell Estate.

Hungarian journal of English and American Studies 15.1. 2009. Copyright © 2009 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.



Glory within a Brechtian model has not been pursued by the trilogy's critics. In fact, Brecht is mentioned in critical analyses of these works largely in terms of negative identification: Cohn, for example, writes of "Endecott": "Patriotism is never a simple matter of pounds and pence as in Brecht's

plays" (282), and Ralph suggests of Cereno that "we do not tend to 'judge' the characters in the sense that this might be desired by a playwright such as Brecht" (158). I intend to pursue a Brechtian reading of several aspects of Benito Cereno that have been a consistent source of critical puzzlement and to offer an assessment of Lowell's play as epic theatre that takes a didactic course in its observation of established social attitudes and the actions

consequent on those attitudes. As an historical drama, the play operates at an objective remove from the imminent racial holocaust upon which it comments; the historical context, moreover, is deliberately expanded beyond the terms of its Melvillean source, in a meditation on the complex roots of American racial conflict.

Most obviously, the status of Benito Cereno as an adaptation has Brechtian parallels; like the German dramatist, Lowell repeatedly found

inspiration in the work of others, not only in his dramatic adaptations, but also in his translations and revisions of his own work. M. L. Rosenthal, in an article otherwise affirming the worth of The Old Glory , concedes that as

adaptor of his source texts, Lowell "has violated the integrity of his originals and . . . repossessed (them) by treating them as his subjects" (418) - a charge, as the critic mentions, commonly levelled at Lowell's translated poetry. Brecht's socialist convictions precluded considerations of authorial

ownership and in his repossession and reworking of extant classical works, the American poet's textual politics can be seen to resonate with those of the German dramatist. The attitude is openly articulated in Lowell's interview with Goddard Lieberson for a recorded version of Cereno in 1965

during which he responds to a comment about the differences between the

play and its source: "It doesn't concern me how much is Melville and how much is Lowell" (Lieberson 110). The story and its adaptation have many points of dissimilarity, of which the most striking is the altered resolution of the drama, a change flagged in the first moments of the opening scene. Melville's description, in the first page of Benito Cereno , of the grey and ominous Chilean coasdine, notes the "shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come" (53). Even as the curtain rises, Lowell offers a less shadowy portent in his stage directions by placing on the deck of the New England ship "to one side, a polished coal-black cannon" (119), an intimation of approaching violence from a specifically American source.4

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The cannon's location on the deck of the President Adams presages the violent denouement of the play's closing moment, when the simplistic and idealistic Delano shoots six bullets into the body of Babu, the African slave. Lowell's melodramatic climax ignores the resolution achieved in Melville's novella, in which Delano escorts the San Domingo back to her Chilean home

port and thence to Lima, where a judicial process orders the execution of Babu.

Draft versions of the play demonstrate Lowell's specific efforts to find a satisfactory conclusion to the adaptation. The first of two extant drafts of the final scene sees Delano raise his pistol to Babu, as in the

published play, and proclaim "I hold your future," as he shoots the slave. The scene immediately gives way to an epilogue in which a visibly aged Delano, attended by a servant, "now clearly Babu"5 visits the dying Cereno in a short flashback. Delano leaves the stage and Babu ends the play with his short soliloquy, delivered exactly as in the published version. The draft thus allows Babu to reappear after execution and to hold sole possession of the stage as he announces the play's conclusion, "This is the end." A later draft of the epilogue shows the dramatist continuing to grapple with his

presentation of the resurrected slave; the captain is now attended by a black servant to be played by "the same actor as Babu and looking much like Babu"6; this servant again closes the play with Babu's soliloquy. Although both draft versions see Delano briefly visit Cereno on his death bed in the monastery of Mount Agonia, Lowell's consistent impulse is clearly to omit from his adaptation the lengthy details of the court depositions, based on Amaso Delano's original narrative, with which Melville concludes his story. The twentieth-century audience's attention is to be fixed on the American

aspects of the tale; Cereno and the dying Spanish empire have become less pertinent than Delano and the infant American empire. This helps account for the published play's omission of Cereno's death; the dramatization's concluding focus rests exclusively on Delano's execution of the slave, and the American's admission of their shared and ominous future.

Lowell's recorded views on dramatic structure become relevant to a consideration of his attempt to construct a satisfactory conclusion for the Melville adaptation. In an interview in 1965, the poet confesses that his original plan to adapt Cereno for operatic performance was abandoned because "in a libretto, the plot is all-important, not the language, while what I was interested in was the plot plus language" (Lieberson 110). Three years later, he elucidates further to Richard Gilman: "I find fragments more interesting usually than whole plays. Plots are boring anyway. We all hate

47



the sort of thing where one thing leads to another and everything is drawn

tight" (Gilman 120). Lowell's purposeful truncation of the Melvillean plot represents in Brechtian terms an "eyes on the course" (Brecht 37) rather than an "eyes on the finish" approach. In its adapted resolution, the dramatized Cereno deliberately averts its eyes from the possibility of any definitive "finish" - the play's end announces the beginning of America's violent future. In this attribute, it conforms with Brecht's epic theatre, a model characterized by its innovative exposition of "narrative" in place of the "plot" of conventional drama, where, as Lowell puts it, "one thing leads to another and everything is drawn tight."

Further fragmentation of the original plot is achieved by an inserted scene with no counterpart in the novel in the shape of the dramatic entertainment that, midway through the play, Babu presents to Delano. In this particular innovation, Lowell complicates the triangular relationship between actor, author, and audience by the superimposition of a separate triangle of connections, where Delano becomes the audience and by implication, Babu is both author and participating actor. The slave's role here is interesting on several counts - he proffers his tableaux unsolicited, as if he were master of the ship (which of course he is): "Let me show you our litde entertainment" (155). Through the device of this play-within-the- play, the black slave thus becomes momentarily a Hamlet-figure, showing Delano/Claudius a series of scenes that play on racial stereotypes of blackness and whiteness.7 If, as Jerome Mazzaro claims, Babu's pageant may be read as "the history of the Blacks from slavery to freedom" (149), Delano, unlike Claudius, remains oblivious both to this significance and, as an American, to his personal complicity with that history. The captain's only comment "Well, that wasn't much! / I suppose Shakespeare started that

way" (160) reinforces the Hamlet analogy and highlights Delano's

incomprehension of what he has been shown. The play-within-the-play also operates on another level. Between

scenes, Babu comments to Delano, his audience, that "[w]e have to do what we can / we are just beginners at acting. / This next one will be better"

(158), an ironic reference to the desperation that impelled the mutiny and to the ongoing charade on board the Spanish vessel. The slave's admission carries a further pertinence in its emphasis on the simulated nature of the tableaux, rebutting any pretence that the enacted pieces are taking place in

reality. Both Babu's overt signal to start the entertainment and the striking of the gong establish a sense of Brechtian alienation: Delano, and the theatre audience watching him as Babu's audience, are made aware that this

48



theatrical staging is artificial. The slave clearly demonstrates the lack of a fourth wall when in a moment of heavy-handed irony, he introduces Delano to the black Madonna: "I present something your Majesty has never seen / a white man who doesn't believe in taking liberties" (159). Here Babu's theatrical presentation openly involves its spectator in the scene, implicating Delano in the process of social enquiry at work in the tableaux.

Other aspects of this scene reverberate clearly with Brecht's criteria for epic theatre. The tableau scenes proceed as montage, without any coherent plot, in self-contained cameos that make no pretence at linear

development, and present images - the Spanish sailor dipping white dolls into black tar, the black Madonna and baby with the white St. Joseph - that

challenge racial attitudes underpinning both the slave trade and subsequent civic endorsement of racial discrimination. Delano, as audience, and the theatre audience that watches him in that part, are not prompted to

empathize with the characters depicted; Babu's production provokes an exercise of reason (what's this all about?) rather than feeling (I recognize the emotion portrayed here). In their interrogation of established racial certainties - what does it mean if the Madonna is black or if the dolls

change color? - Babu's theatrical vignettes carry an instructive potential for Delano that he signally fails to exploit. The American makes no effort to

untangle the rope-knot thrown to him by a Spanish sailor in another

breaching of the fourth wall, but allows Babu to retrieve it, with the comment "Let's move on. Your entertainment / is rather lacking in invention, Babu" (1 58).8 W. D. Snodgrass was at the opening night of Cereno at the American Place on 1 November 1964, applauding the drama's

aspiration to "levels of response that most of our plays dream not of' (10). The critic's commentary on the play-within-the-play misses its pivotal role in the framing drama's development and yet inadvertently highlights its

crystallization of key Brechtian concepts:

These "entertainments," I suspect, may not adequately advance the play. From almost the beginning, the audience has known what happened aboard the Spanish ship. The hints given by the "entertainments" do not yield that sort of excitement; neither do they inform us why Babu wants to give clues and hints, nor why Delano won't understand what we have long known. (10)

In Brechtian terms, the point of the entertainment is not to inform the audience why Babu wants to convey the message he does, but to offer an

49



environment where Babu may demonstrate his potential for directive

agency, an attribute that his blackness automatically denies him in a regime of racial oppression. The scene's aim is not to provide insights as to why Delano cannot comprehend what he sees, but merely to reinforce for the theatre audience the American captain's continuous inability to understand that in this environment, the slave is not only autonomous but is now the slave-master. Babu's play-within-the-play carries therefore an instructive rather than an informative potential for the theatre audience, in its

opportunity to observe that as spectator of this Brechtian piece, Delano does not engage with what he sees and refuses to respond as "an individual, capable of thinking and of reasoning, of making judgments even in the theatre" (Brecht 79). Brecht's emphasis on theatre as a didactic resource resonates doubly with this scene; Babu's short pageant represents a

learning-play (Lehrstuck) within a learning-play, offering the audience of the

framing Lehrsttick the opportunity to observe and learn from Delano's failure to observe and learn from his exposure to theatrical instruction. For in the Brechtian model, it is the spectator who must ask "what" and

"why" - (what would I have done in those circumstances and why?) - and then to translate that insight into an awareness of its implications for issues of contemporary society. In 1936, with Germany in the grip of Nazism, the exiled Brecht writes that "in setting up new artistic principles and working out new methods of representation, we must start with the compelling demands of a changing epoch; the necessity and possibility of remodeling society loom ahead" (98). As America appeared to tear herself apart in the racial turmoil of the early sixties, Lowell's Cereno attempts to confront its audience with hard questions about the realities of racial hierarchy in American society.

Epic Theatre envisages that drama's potential for social insights is accessible through an anti-Aristotelian, anti-cathartic model where spectator empathy is not aroused by the dramatic situation or its characters. One of the ways in which such detachment (V erfremdung) may be achieved is

through the dramatization of familiar incidents, of which he stipulates "historical incidents would be the most immediately suitable" (56). Lowell's

impulse to interrogate contemporary American racial tensions through his

adaptation of the slave ship narrative (here bear in mind that Melville's novella was based on a historical event) thus conforms to an established Brechtian approach. From the historical distance of a century and a half, the

spectator is positioned at a remove sufficient to observe dispassionately and to learn from the incident depicted. The play's deployment of history has

50



been much discussed since its first performance, when Ralph applauded its incursion into "America's past as a means of understanding her present" (155). Other commentators have devoted some attention to the parallels between Miller's The Crucible - Albert E. Stone points out the plays' superficial similarity as "historical melodrama . . . (dramatizing) isolated

episodes freighted with violence and passion and bearing a persistently contemporary significance" (147). The historical grounding of Lowell's Cereno operates at a particular level, as the adaptation inserts specific historical references to imply that American racial oppression - and America's response to her awareness of this oppression - operates in a

repetitive cycle of ambivalence and political passivity. Brecht proposes that historical drama must work to demonstrate that "historical conditions . . . are created and maintained by men" (190), while Lowell steers his

adaptation to identify the way in which human contrivance was responsible not only for the slave trade as depicted in Cereno , but also for the politically sustained racism of modern America. A salient feature of this aspect of the

play is Lowell's utilization of the New England identity of the American captain and his ship to establish a perspective on slavery and racial

oppression as a national rather than a regional issue. The importance of the play's historical context is established by the

emphasis placed on its timing: Lowell specifies the date as "our

Independence Day" (152) of a year "about 1800" (119). The action of Melville's novel occurs on 17 August 1799, altered in turn from Delano's historical account of 1805. Jerome Mazzaro suggests that Melville's timing reflects the novelist's wish "to situate the incidents in a century of revolution" (132); Lowell, it will be seen, manipulates the date of the events in his adaptation in order to introduce particular historical figures into the context of the action. The identification of the American ship in the

opening stage directions reveals an alteration not unrelated to the date of the action, for if Melville's Delano is captain of the Bachelors Delight , Lowell renames his American vessel the President Adams" These substitutions are

accompanied by several references, without precedent in Melville's text, in the discussion between Delano and his first-mate to the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson and his predecessor, John Adams. Jefferson's inauguration occurred on 4 March 1800 and the adaptation's alteration in timing thus facilitates its introduction of the American political backdrop of these events. Although Delano, as befits a Massachusetts man, admits that "the better man ran second!"(121), the New England captain pointedly and repeatedly champions the newly-elected President. Perkins, on the other

51



hand, is an Adams supporter: "I'd feel a lot safer in this unprotected place / if we'd elected Mr. Adams instead of Mr. Jefferson" (121).

10

The play's injected references to Adams and Jefferson represent more than a political backdrop to its action, for the checkered relationship between the second and third presidents of the United States has ramifications acutely pertinent to this discussion of Cereno , the slave trade and ongoing American racial history.11 Main players in the Revolutionary War and the early republic, both men died, by an amazing but not unfitting coincidence, on 4 July 1826; the day on which, less coincidentally, the President Adams encounters Cereno's San Domingo. At first glance, Lowell's inserted and repeated references to Jefferson and Adams, a duo described

by their contemporary Benjamin Rush as "the North and South Poles of the American Revolution" (qtd. in Ellis, American Sphinx 285), seems, in terms of the play's focus on slavery, to represent a simple binary opposition. Adams, the farmer's son from Massachusetts, and Jefferson, the Virginian landowner, fall into naturally opposing categories with regard to the American experience of slavery. The Jefferson plantations at Albemarle

County and Bedford and the ambitious and endless construction project at Monticello were all manned by slaves and six months after his death, 130 black slaves were sold as part of the former President's estate in an unsuccessful attempt to clear the debts of a long and extravagant life. But as a younger man, Jefferson was notable politically for belonging, in Ellis's words, to "the vanguard that insisted upon the incompatibility of slavery with the principles on which the American republic was founded" (172). In

support of this claim, Ellis cites the Virginian's first draft of the Declaration of Independence, with its passage impugning George III of England for the establishment of slavery in the infant American colonies; he also draws attention to Jefferson's proposals in the early 1780s for a ban on further slave trading, an embargo on slavery in the western territories, and the

fixing of a date after which black children could no longer be born into

slavery. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, Jefferson admits belief that America's continuing involvement with slavery could only end in a bloodbath, in which right could not be on the side of the white slaveholders. "The Almighty" he writes portentously "has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a conflict" (qtd. in Ellis, American

Sphinx 102). The paradoxes of Jefferson's recorded position on slavery reflect the extent to which he was personally compromised in this regard, confronted for his entire life with "the moral chasm between what he knew to be right and what he could not do without" (171). Lowell takes several

52



opportunities in his Cereno to highlight the contradictions and ambivalences of Jefferson's position on slavery. Although Delano dismisses as "Federalist

bilge" the boatswain's reference to the Virginian's much publicized relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings, he claims in the same breath that the mixed-race offspring of the plantations were not to be deplored: "The more the better! That's the quickest way / to raise the blacks to our level . . . . / I told you, Mr. Jefferson is a gentleman and an American" (122). To Babu's provocative suggestion that "[w]e've heard that Jefferson, the

King of your Republic / would like to free his slaves" (175), an overt allusion to the President's recorded gestures towards eventual emancipation, Delano's response is telling:

Jefferson has read too many books, boy, but you can trust him. He's a gentleman and an American! He's not lifting a finger to free his slaves. (175)

Through the figure of Jefferson, Lowell consistently suggests that the

identity of the American gentleman is inextricably grounded in his involvement with slavery.12

This perspective is relevant in a consideration of John Adams, the New Englander, who never personally owned a slave and often expressed his abhorrence of the institution, writing, for example, to Willian Tudor in November 1819 that "(n]egro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude" (qtd. in Ellis, Founding Brothers 240). Lowell's decision to rename the New

England sealing ship after the President from Quincy could therefore be

regarded as an opportunity to offer contextual allusion to the natural divide about the institution of slavery that existed between the "North and South Poles" of the emerging nation.13 The historical facts however suggest that a

description in such polar oppositions must oversimplify the case. In 1790, for example, when a Quaker petition for the abolition of slavery was

presented at the Upper House, John Adams, "though an outspoken enemy of slavery . . . concurred from his perch as presiding officer of the Senate when that body refused to permit the Quaker petitions to be heard" (112). Further light is thrown on Adams's attitude to emancipation in a letter written thirty years later as part of the correspondence that blossomed in his renewed friendship with Jefferson:

Slavery in this country I have seen hanging over like a black cloud for half a century. I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching

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and countermarching in the air, shining in Armor. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object. I must leave it to you. 1 will vote for forcing no measure against your judgements, (qtd. in Ellis, American Sphinx 319; emphasis added)14

As Ellis convincingly argues, Adams is voicing here a central tenet of the

revolutionary generation's approach to the issue: that in the face of the South's unilateral direct involvement in slavery, northern states and statesmen would defer to southern interests in the matter. "The real

revolutionary legacy on the slavery question," Ellis claims, "was not a belief in emancipation but rather a common commitment to delay and a common trust that northerners would not interfere with southern leadership in

effecting gradual policy of emancipation" (31 9). 15 The introduction of

Adams and Jefferson as historico-contextual figures in Lowell's adaptation of Benito Cereno does not offer a simple opposition between Northern

emancipation and Southern slavery, but rather a glimpse of the ambivalences underpinning both sides of this debate amongst the

revolutionary generation. The play's inserted emphasis on Adams and

Jefferson affords its audience the opportunity to reflect on the contextual factors contributing to America's racial history, and in the Brechtian sense, to stimulate an awareness of how events are shaped by human action or human inertia. Brecht insists that dramatic representation of history must

depict historical conditions as a consequence of human contrivance rather than the agency of "mysterious Powers (in the background)" (190). The Cereno adaptation's repeated references to the second and third Presidents

prompt the recognition of the complicated political considerations at work in the post-revolutionary nation's attitude toward slavery.

The relevance of the play's inserted Adams/Jefferson opposition is

heightened in the form of a second oppositional pairing in the dramatized Cereno , representing another innovative aspect of the play absent from its Melville source. One of the most significant changes in the adaptation is the introduction of a second American character, Perkins, a boatswain from

Duxbury, Massachusetts, a younger relative of his captain. Lowell admits of

Perkins, "I got the trick of the confidant, a character in whom the hero confides" (Lieberson 110), but Perkins serves a purpose beyond that of confidant. He fulfils a particular function in the adaptation; namely, that his

presence allows Delano to voice information vital to the action that in the

story is articulated by its omniscient narrator. This, in turn, contributes to

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Delano's characterization - his descriptive passages are heavily weighted with simile, as where he looks through his telescope and reports:

I see an ocean undulating in long scoops of swells it's set like the beheaded French Queen's high wig the sleek surface is like waved lead cooled and pressed in the smelter's mould . . . This gray boat foreshadows something wrong

PERKINS. It does, Sir They don't know how to sail her. (123)

Delano describes the sea in figurative terms; it is Perkins, the

uncompromising realist, who offers a mariner's assessment of the scene, a

quality demonstrated by the younger officer throughout the play, as he

adopts a logical approach to the mystery of the San Domingo that contrasts

positively with the naivety of his captain's response. There is a parallel contrast in the positions adopted by the two

Americans regarding the issue of slavery. While watching Babu in attendance on Cereno in the Spanish captains' cabin, Melville's omniscient narrator marvels at the slave's "smooth tact ... in this employment, with a marvellous, noiseless, gliding briskness" (93).

16 Lowell transposes the

passage into Delano's mouth: "There's something in a Negro, something / that makes him fit to have around your person . . . / What tact Babu had! What noiseless, gliding briskness!" (167) The audience will not be surprised by the American captain's admiration of Babu's servility, as he has already clearly demonstrated his ambivalence about slavery: "In the North, we don't have slaves and want them; / Mr. Jefferson has them and fears them"(124), and "They do things better / in the South and South America / trust in return for trust!"(141). Melville injects his characterization of Delano with a discernible tincture of racism, for "like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs" (93); Lowell expands this aspect of the New Englander's character to depict undisguised American enthusiasm for slavery far north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Slavery's attractions for Delano may be contrasted with the stance taken on the issue by his boatswain; Perkins expresses a markedly different moral vision from his captain in recognizing a Northern collusion with the slave trade: "Sir, you are forgetting that / New England seamanship brought them their slaves" (141). The reminder reiterates the younger

55



officer's earlier uncompromising response to Delano's prevarication on the

topic: "I don't believe in slavery, Sir" (125). Lowell's Cereno thus presents two New Englanders with contrasting positions on slavery, the boatswain's character created to offer a foil for Delano, whose articulated moral ambivalence will culminate in the execution of Babu. As in the case of the

Adams/Jefferson opposition, however, the Doppelganger construct

represented by the figures of the captain and first officer does not operate on such simple terms. For Perkins's clear moral vision does not extend to a

consequent moral reaction to what he sees on the San Domingo. Unlike Delano, he can see beyond the charade of the mutineers - "This Babu. I don't trust him" (134) - but his stated position on slavery does not prompt any serious consideration of the fate of the Spanish vessel's cargo. When at the play's end, he begs Delano to spare the slave's life, his wording is

significant: "Let him surrender. Let him surrender. / We want to save someone" (194). At this juncture, Babu is waving a white handkerchief at the armed captain, but Perkins's plea "we want to save someone" is

curiously imprecise; in ignoring the slave's gesture of surrender, it does not address the ethical dilemma of the moment and makes no allowance that Babu's savage mutiny might represent a justifiable response to his incarceration on the slave ship.

The play's pairing of Perkins and Delano resonates with the parallel figures of Adams and Jefferson and offers a glimpse of the multi-layered permutations constituting America's response to the dilemma of slavery. Delano, the champion of Jefferson, takes an openly ambivalent view of the institution; Perkins, the follower of Adams, is unequivocal in his opposition. Yet in the course of the play, Perkins shows that while his opposition to

slavery may be earnest in the abstract, his position, not unlike that of Adams, does not translate into corresponding ethical action. If Delano

represents a kind of Northern devotee, admiring the slave system from a distance, Perkins offers another view of the Northern position, of

opposition to slavery without any real impetus to act on that conviction. In its account of the post-revolutionary dawn of the republic, then, the play depicts every level of American experience as complicit in some degree with the system of institutionalized slavery. The historical moment of the

meeting between the President Adams and the San Domingo , Lowell suggests, is already characterized by a strain of American racism, overt and covert, that resonates clearly with his indictment - "no one innocent" - of the racial violence of the 1960s. This aspect of the play taps direcdy into the Brechtian roots of its genesis, in its recognition of history's potential to

56



reflect on the present to achieve the greater aim of "transforming society and abolishing exploitation" (Brecht 269).

The revelation of pervasive American collusion with slavery from the establishment of the union carries a message of no little significance for the audience confronted with Benito Cereno in 1964. By that date, America had witnessed the violent consequences of the Civil Rights demonstrations at Birmingham, Alabama, where police used "mass arrests, billyclubs, dogs and firehoses against the demonstrators, many of whom were children"

(Klinkner and Smith 264). 17 If the Birmingham images of civic brutality

resonate with the figure of Delano in dress uniform shooting the unarmed Babu, other aspects of the events of 1963-64 are also relevant to Lowell's Benito Cereno. The violence emanating from Birmingham spread not only across the south in Maryland, Florida, and Tennessee, but to the northern cities of Sacramento, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, where residential segregation over decades had established a pattern of black economic deprivation in what Klinkner and Smith term "a Northern, de facto version of Jim Crow" (116). Babu's ironic comment to Delano, "the United States must be a paradise for people like Babu . . . / The United States must be heaven" (147), refers as clearly to the urban ghettoes of the industrialized North as to the segregationalist stronghold of the South. It is his awareness of the race issue as a national rather than regional problem that prompts Lowell, as a Northern liberal, to identify its roots in the

founding of the union; in Benito Cereno , the poet-playwright asks America to confront the nation's collective responsibility for her history of slavery, and for her perpetuation of institutionalized racism.

The play's shocking climax sends its audience from the theatre confronted with a specific aspect of that responsibility. Delano, as has been noted by several sources, is able to shoot Babu repeatedly because he is

using a revolver that, in 1800, had yet to be invented. The Colt repeating gun is an anachronism that breaches for an instant the Brechtian historicization of the play's setting, emphasizing directly the reflection on the present moment of 1964 offered by Babu's death and by the

disproportionate violence of the American's action. E>en as he fires the first bullet, Delano announces to the slave, and to the audience, "This is your future" ( The Old Glory 194); that American future to which the cannon of the President Adams was already pointing in 1800 and which seemed, in the 1960s, to have already arrived. The play's final moment thus represents the culmination of its Brechtian impulse to portray social models in the context of their causal relationships, in order to open the possibility for

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social change. Lowell testifies in November 1964 that "the terrible injustice, in the past and in the present, of the American treatment of the Negro is of the greatest urgency to me as a man and a writer" {Village Voice 4). His

adaptation of Benito Cereno translates the poet's personal recognition of this

injustice into a dramatic exposition of the resultant abyss facing the American nation.

Independent Scholar Cork, Ireland

Notes This article arises from research carried out during a Visiting Fellowship to the

Houghton Library, Harvard University, for which I would like to offer grateful acknowledgment. 1 Jonathan Miller, director of the first production of Old Glory , eventually decided that rehearsal difficulties with hndecott precluded an attempt at public performance; the trilogy's premiere therefore staged only Major Mo lineux and Benito Cereno.

2 Lowell's adaptation of XSenito Cereno was originally planned as a collaborative venture with Meredith, prompted by a Ford Foundation grant for the operatic stage in March 1 960. Lowell had been re-reading Tales from the Pia%%a and recognized the potential of Cereno for an operatic interpretation; in a letter to Meredith at the announcement of the grant, he describes the story as "already more opera than novel, the big scenes, the shrouded master, the shaving, then the recurrent disappearing Spanish sailors" (letters 360). Neither the proposed libretto nor the anticipated collaboration with Meredith came to anything, but the summer of 1961 saw Lowell working in a frenzy of activity on a dramatic version of the novel. Cereno was the first play completed of The Old Glory trilogy, which was written in reverse order of its historical timing and of its proposed staging.

3 Lowell incorporates this image into Delano's initial response to the stricken San Domingo: "This gray boat foreshadows something wrong" (123).

4 The inserted cannon carries further resonances for the adaptation: Melville's poem "The Swamp Angel" uses the image of a black slave as a metaphor for the Parrott gun used in the siege of Charleston. Lowell's focus on Melville's poetry during the genesis of Cereno is on record; he writes to Nicholas Nabokov in August 1963 "All morning I have been reading Herman Melville's Civil War poems. His great mind is half-smothered in the somewhat mouldy poetic style of the time, but that only makes him the more real and truly part of the past" (letters 432).

5 bMs Am 1905 (2320), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 6bMs Am 1905 (2323), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 7 Lowell derives Babu's tableaux from three separate images/ scenes in the novel:

the sailor with the tar-pot (80-81), the enigmatic knotter (85), and the nursing mother and child (82).

8 In Melville's story, the sailor is more directive, telling Delano: "Undo, cut it, quick" (85). Note also that in November 1819, John Adams, in a circumspective tone typical of their correspondence on the subject, uses a similar metaphor for slavery in a

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letter to Thomas Jefferson: "I hope that some good-natured way or other will be found to untie this very intricate knot" (Ellis, Founding Brothers 240).

9 Lowell also inserts a change in the play's setting from Chile as Melville's story to the coast of Trinidad. Mazzaro discusses this substitution as part of the play's focus on American imperialism (134).

10 The Adams Presidency was notable for its expansion of the US naval fleet as a vital strand of national security for the infant nation; for most of his first term, Jefferson deployed a section of this naval force to the Mediterranean in a concerted campaign against North African pirates and, in the interests of fiscal rectitude, moved a significant proportion of the remaining fleet into dry dock.

11 Recent historical accounts of the Adams/Jefferson relationship that have been useful for this study include: Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000), and Passionate Sage: The Character and legacy of]ohn Adams (2001), as well as David McCullough's John Adams (2001).

12 Ellis notes the late twentieth century's increasing scholarly focus on the more problematic aspects of Jefferson's career including, but not confined to, his involvement with slavery. The historian identifies the 1960s as the moment when the revisionist tide began to turn in Jeffersonian scholarship, so that "having once [been] the symbol of all that was right in America, Jefferson had become the touchstone for much that was wrong". Lowell's emphasis on the Virginian in Cereno thus participates in an academic interrogation of the third president already evolving at the time of the play's conception. See Ellis, American Sphinx , 17.

13 Mazzaro speculates that Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administration of Jefferson may have been a historical resource for Lowell's Cereno' an inserted passage of the adaptation suggests that the Diary of John Adams may have been a contributing historical text. Delano's anecdote of a conversation with a Frenchwoman is a loose adaptation of a similar historical encounter in Paris noted by Adams in 1778. See The Old Glory, 175-76, and McCullough, 189.

14 The correspondence between Adams and Jefferson after their reconciliation in 1812 was marked by a mutual avoidance of the issue of slavery. It arose in this letter of February 1821 as a result of the national debate ensuing from the proposed Missouri Compromise. 15 Political collusion with slavery included constitutional protections - such as the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave constitutional clause - acceded to by the northern states in return for economic concessions.

16 Leslie Fiedler reads this piece as Melville's voice "adding on his own behalf - in a tone less ironical than one would expect" (401).

17 Lowell finished writing Cereno in 1962 and the play was first performed in November 1964, completed, though not staged, before Birmingham and its consequences. Of its prophetic aspects, the poet told A1 Alvarez in 1966: "1 think that what 1 have written is almost tame compared to what has happened, but 1 made it rather worse at the time" (Alvarez 126).

Works Cited Alvarez, A. " A Poet Talks about Making History into Theater." Meyers 124-

28.

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Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Metheun, 1964.

Cohn, Ruby. Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1971. Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York:

Vintage, 1996. . Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Vintage, 2000. . Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams. New York:

Norton, 2001 Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Penguin, 1984. Gilman. Richard. "Life Offers No Neat Conclusions." Meyers 119-23. Klinkner, Philip A., and Rogers M. Smith. The Unsteady March: The Rise and

Decline of Racial Equality in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Laing, Alexander. "The Knack of Doing Double Duty." Rev. of Old Glory. The Nation 24 Jan. 1966: 103-05.

Lieberson, Goddard. "An Interview with the Author." Meyers 109-11. Lowell, Robert. The Letters of Robert Lowell. Ed. Saskia Hamilton. New York:

Farrer, 2005. . The Old Glory. New York: Farrer, 1965. . "Mr. Lowell Rebuts." Village Voice 19 Nov. 1964: 4. Mazzaro, Jerome. "Robert Lowell's 'Benito Cereno.'" Modern Poetry Studies

4.2 (1973): 129-58.

McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. London: Folio, 1967.

Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. Ann Arbor: U of

Michigan P, 1988. Perloff, Marjorie.

" Poetes Maudits of the Genteel Tradition: Lowell and

Berryman." Stephen Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, eds. Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 1986. 99-116.

Ralph, George. "History and Prophecy in 'Benito Cereno.'" Educational Theater Journal 22.2 (May 1970): 155-60.

Rosenthal, M. L. "Blood and Plunder." Spectator 30 Sept. 1966: 418.

Snodgrass, W. D. "In Praise of Robert Lowell." New York Review of Books (3 Dec. 1964): 8-10.

Stone, Albert E. "A New Version of American Innocence: Robert Lowell's 'Benito Cereno.'" Stephen Gould Axelrod, ed. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 137-48.

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expanding american theatre history || "no one innocent": lowell, brecht, and "benito...

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