the coward’s hand
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur Laurents Home of the Brave / New York,
Belasco Theatre, 1945; published as Home of the Brave (New York: Random
House, 1946)
Arthur Laurent’s first play, Home of the Brave,* is the story of a
young soldier, Peter Coen, part of an engineering division of the US Army
during World War II in the South Pacific.
Events do not go well, and Finch, found and tortured by the Japanese at a distance close enough to where the others are hiding so that they can hear his cries and suffer his torture, horrify the soldiers. As they move off to dig up their canoes, Coney is left alone to protect the gear as Finch crawls into the small clearing, dying in Coney’s arms.
Coney attempts to bury him so that the Japanese cannot dismember the
corpse, but by the time his friends return, he finds himself unable to walk,
suffering an inexplicable paralysis. He is carried away by a fellow soldier,
waking to find himself in a military hospital under the care of Captain Harold
Bitterger, a sympathetic psychiatrist.
In December 1945, the date this play appeared at the Belasco Theatre in
New York, the events of World War II was still so fresh that the audiences who
attended the performances would have felt the circumstances of the play had
occurred only yesterday. The play’s events are described as just a year
earlier, and only five months before the play's opening the US had bombed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If today much of the psychological jargon and the treatments used to
help Coney seem obsolete and naïve, one must remember that although Freud had
perhaps been assimilated by the intelligentsia, even a couple of years earlier
a major character in Guys and Dolls
had been told by his girlfriend, “Nathan, you got psychology, everybody’s got
it!” The ideas of post-war syndrome and psychological hysteria were startlingly
new concepts for the general public; treatment by "narcosynthesis"
must have seemed almost futuristic.
Any sensitive reader today, in our cure-all culture, might be able to
discern that the problem with Coney was a terrible feeling of guilt for not
having protected his close friend Finch, the only one of the group for whom his
being Jewish seemed to have no significance. The discovery later that Finch, in
a moment of duress, turned on his friend, parroting the statements of the other
men: “you lousy yellow…” stopping before he finished the word "Jew," and
transforming it into the word “jerk,” helps us to further understand Coney's
guilt. The hurt Coney momentarily endures in that statement results, a few
minutes later, in a momentary flash of pleasure when Finch gets shot. And we
realize that his regret for that momentary sensation is entangled with the
hundreds of racial and religious epithets Coen has had to endure not only
throughout his life but, more particularly, while he has put his own life on
the line for his prejudiced companions.
Laurents has created a painful and revelatory play about how racial
slurs and prejudices effect all Americans who must suffer them, whether in
civilian or military life. But the situation upon which Laurents focuses, where
Americans such as Coen were helping to battle just such hatred in Europe and
elsewhere, makes such disgusting behavior even more insufferable.
Only two years later, in 1947, the film Gentleman’s Agreement, would even more interestingly reveal the
ugliness and prevalence of American anti-Semitism and its effects on good
families and human inter-relationships, including Gregory Peck’s love with the
liberal WASP Kathy Lacey (played by Dorothy McGuire) and, even more evidently,
the job aspirations of the Dave Goldman (John Garfield). In that sense both of
these works, Home of the Brave and Gentleman’s Agreement should be
understood as works that helped, if all too slowly, alter standard American
prejudices with regards to being Jewish, prejudices which my own father,
fighting in World War II, thought he was challenging as well through his
actions as an Air Force bombardier flying over Germany.
Yet I cannot help but feel there is something “more” going on in
Laurent’s play that is not at all an issue in Gentleman’s Agreement, another matter that renders the central
subject of Home of the Brave somewhat
diffuse and incomprehensible. The good psychiatrist perceives the “central”
issue, so it seems, and “cures” his patient by helping Coen to realize that
every soldier, of necessity, feels, for an instant when another soldier is hit,
a momentary sense of relief, expressed, as another of Coney’s group, Mingo,
puts it “Thank God, it’s not me!” Coen is made to understand that he is like
everyone else, no matter how men like the intolerant T. J. describe him. That,
in turn, frees Coen to forgive himself, to comprehend his flash of anger and
hatred towards his dying friend as an instant of justifiable self-protection.
Even the psychiatrist, however, laments that he cannot go further, in
the short period he has to work with his patient, into Coen’s past in the
comprehension of his mental issues. By play’s end, now with Mingo’s help, we
can only believe that—unlike T. J.’s suspicions that one day Coney will go
“off” again—he will survive in the civilian world as a productive human being.
Yet Laurents, we feel, or at least I do,
has left something out. Why has Coen gone “off” in the first place? It is hard
to believe that a Jewish man living in what was an anti-Semitic society in the
1930s and 1940s, fighting in a War that, at least in the European scene,
occurred in part because of the
German hatred for and determination to destroy all European Jews, would still
be so utterly sensitive to what appears, at least in the context of the play,
as a few racial slurs. Yes, they would be painful, angering, particularly, when
uttered—or almost uttered—by a dear friend. But then, a moment before, Coen has
referred to Finch as a “dumb Arizona bastard,” perhaps to Finch just as painful
an epithet. Of course, there is a radical difference, one is a statement
dismissing one’s home state and the conditions of life there; the other is a
complete dismissal of belief and cultural identity, not only one’s own identity, but the identities of
one’s father and mother and all the generations before that. Yet both demean
and belittle the individuals to whom these slurs are thrown.
Throughout one of the earlier scenes, moreover, Coen calls Finch a
“jerk” numerous times. A few minutes later he describes Finch to Mingo as “the
Arizona tumbleweed.” So Coen himself is not above handing out a few epithets
that suggest his friend’s backwardness, lack of education, and cultural
isolation. What exactly does Coen’s over-sensitivity to slurs he must have
heard much of his life suggest? I am reminded of an important scene in Gentleman’s Agreement, when Phil Green
(Gregory Peck) revels to his Jewish friend, Dave Goldman, that he is pretending
to be Jewish in order to write a story about anti-Semitism:
Phil Green: I've been saying I'm Jewish, and
it works.
Dave Goldman: Why, you crazy fool! It's working?
Phil: It works too well. I've been
having my nose rubbed in it, and I don't like the smell.
Dave: You're not insulated yet, Phil.
The impact must be quite a business on you.
Phil: You mean you get indifferent to it
in time?
Dave: No, but you're concentrating a
lifetime into a few weeks. You're not changing the facts, you're just making
them hurt more.
So too does Peter Coen seem to be
concentrating all his hurt into a single incident having to do with a young
Arizona boy named Finch.
Of course, it helps to know that he and Finch are not just friends, but are planning, when they are
discharged, to open a bar together in…Finch’s “whistlestop home” in rural
Arizona. A Pittsburgh Jewish boy in Arizona? Something is wrong with this
picture. Or, I should perhaps say, something is quite right—if you comprehend
the situation. The two men are clearly in love, whether or not they know it or
the author is willing to express it. The very fact that Peter Coen, who keeps
Kosher and is religiously observant, would be willing to abandon city life and
move to a small town in the Southwest in the 1940s—long before that area’s
startling growth—in order to open a bar where “married men” will feel
comfortable, speaks volumes. The two men are suggesting a long term
relationship completely off the beaten path, which was a way of saying, in
those days, they were committing themselves to one another.
Of course, Laurents cannot speak of this, and why should he? His central
issue was painful enough. To have illuminated it as a story of their love would
have completely overwhelmed any other concerns he might have wanted to express.
Or, to put it another way, if Laurents had centered the work on gay sexuality
in 1945, the play would never have been produced. While it was the time to discuss, finally, the issue of anti-Semitism, gays
would have to wait through the blistering attacks on
I know there are a few readers, who have read several of my essays, who
will say that I find these issues in too many plays, films, fictions, etc.—and
they are right. My response is that for much of the 20th century
writers who wanted to consider these difficulties had no choice but to bury
them in other narratives that opened for those who understood and were
sympathetic to the situations and were closed or oblique to those who were not.
Moreover, I want to make it clear that I am not diminishing the obvious
concern of Laurents’ play. It’s simply
that the love between these two soldiers, sexual or not, intensifies and
clarifies everything!
Laurents, moreover, takes this issue even further when, once Coen has
regained his sense of self and purpose, he goes off with another man—this time
Mingo—perhaps the kind of married man for whom Finch and Coen had planned their
bar. Mingo suggests he is willing to partner, at least the bar, with Peter. A
man whose wife has abandoned him, Mingo even likes poetry (perceived by many in
this decade as a woman’s avocation), which he claims throughout the play his wife
writes, but which we suspect, given the appropriateness of the lines he quotes,
he himself might have written:
Frightened,
you are my
only friend.
And
frightened, we are everyone.
Someone must
take a stand.
Coward, take
my coward’s hand.
The ending is a bit like Rick and Louie’s last lines in Casablanca:
Coney: Hey,
coward.
Mingo
[turning]: What?
Coney:
[coming to him]. Take my coward’s hand.
[He lifts
the bag up on Mingo’s back.]
Mingo: Pete,
my boy, you’ve got a charming memory.
[A slight
pause.]
Coney
[softly]. Delightful!.....
And it is…charming, delightful, as
the one-armed survivor and the formally paralyzed man walk off into the sunset.
*Over the years, I have made note of
the countless times coincidence has played an important role in my life. I read
this play while I was visiting New York, having found it in the library located
in Sherry Bernstein’s apartment where I was staying. The books in the room in
which I slept belonged to Charles Bernstein’s brother and were stored on an
entire wall of the room. I often chose to borrow a book on my visits there, and
on the morning of May 4th had chosen quite at random to read Laurent’s play
before I fell to sleep after midnight. The next morning in a taxi on my way to
a Broadway matinee, the radio news reported that Arthur Laurents had died.
New York, May 8, 2011
Reprinted from USTheater (May 2011).
