American radio drama factories

I am reading Ian Rodger's 1982 book Radio Drama (London: MacMillan), which is on loan from Stephen F. Austin University and due back shortly. Rodger was a writer and reviewer (for The Listener) of radio plays. His book begins with the usual lamentations over the lack of critical attention devoted to radio plays, despite their relatively large audience when compared to stage production. He provides an interesting, if fairly unoriginal, perspective on the effects of the mass audience on radio writing. Rodger contrasts pre-broadcasting literatures, such as the stage play and the novel, with broadcasting: the former, aimed at a limited audience, could presume that its readership or audience did not include certain sectors of society, such as servants and peasants, and that it could therefore make fun of such people, upon whom it did not depend for its commercial success. With radio, however, audiences broadened, and the writer was forced to engage in the much more difficult task of appealing across social classes. Generally Rodger seems to see this as a good development; he seems critical of the exclusionary literature of past ages. But there are interesting moment in which he indicates that the products of such new pressures must be artistically weakened.

One such moment, which may have some relevance for discussions of Orson Welles' radio work (given his self-promotion as the auteur versus his actual role as merely one of many collaborators working on his Mercury and Campbell broadcasts), concerns the effects of commercial sponsorship on American radio drama. Rodger quotes Eckhard Breitinger's industrially tinged description of American radio drama authorship: “Commercial sponsoring and commercial forms of production [...] implies an implementation of industrial modes of manufacturing scripts by using dialoguers and the almost mechanical assembling of individual scenes or parts of a programme by different hands into a ‘unified whole.” Rodger goes on to comment on Breitinger's assessment, continuing the industiral metaphor, “Such factory conditions obviously precluded the free expression of the individual artist and rarely encouraged work of intellectual integrity” (30).

That "intellectual integrity" is the highest aim of art is not a universally accepted proposition, and it may be a problematic one in radio art. As Michele Hilmes writes in Radio Voices, radio often projected false images of the individual artist, such as Welles, whose intellectual integrity purportedly created programs that, in fact, resulted from widespread collaboration. In discussing American radio drama, Rodger acknowledges the help that Welles had, referring to "Howard Koch's adapation of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells" (31), which Welles "produced." But elsewhere he upholds the concept of the individual artistic creator, singling out Archibald MacLeish for rare praise among American radio artists. It seems important that MacLeish is a poet, the model for the isolated, creative individual (Rodger quotes MacLeish's advocacy of poetic radio writing, "The eye is a realist [...] the ear is already half poet" [31]); and here he maintains MacLeish's status as sole originator of The Fall of the City by representing Irving Reis's role as merely a solicitor of the work: "Irving Reis initiated poetic drama on radio when he invited Archibald MacLeish to write The Fall of the City. I don't know if Reis's role was really this limited, but the extremely collaborative nature of radio production would make one suspect that MacLeish was only one piece of the creative puzzle.

This issue of the genesis of radio works seems to be an important one. Rodger elsewhere celebrates the "sense of community" that produces radio broadcasts, whereby "producers, actors, technicians and writers collaborate rather than compete. There is a swift and open exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect which is not common in the theatre or film and television studios" (4). But where is the line which, once crossed, signals the transition from product of happy collaboration to a precluding of "the free expression of the individual artist"? Rodger seems to place the line somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He justifies this nationalized evaluation of artistic integrity through the reasoning that America was even more diverse than England, requiring an extremely monotone drama that would not offend or confuse any listeners. This seems to make sense. And I don't know that I would argue against the harmful effects of sponsorship on artistic creation. Still, the concept of the individual artist seems to come under serious attack with the mass media, and I don't know that Rodger interrogates this concept fully enough.

Rodger does, however, have an interesting observation about the use of narrators in American radio drama. Staying on his theme of the ethnically diverse American audience, Rodger notes that such “random and disparate audiences required a genial interlocutor to lead them into the dramatized scenes" (30). Although he doesn't specifically mention Welles in connection to this narrating function, Welles seems to be one such "genial interlocutor," particularly given his interest in uniting listeners of different races and national origins under some idea of American (and more broadly defined Western) culture.