Both Your Houses (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly teaches creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly explains why Anderson was right to keep Alan McClean’s relationships with Congressman Gray and his daughter in the background of the play, while another writer might have made them the focus of the story.

In the earliest versions of his satirical drama Both Your Houses, Maxwell Anderson left his protagonist, Alan McClean, the high-minded outsider bent on reorganizing the political structure of the House of Representatives, incapable of taking any definitive action. Alan sees his deepest beliefs violated by those around him, and he knows that he can impose some measure of honesty, but he also knows that doing so will endanger Simeon Gray’s career. The play was more centered around human relations in those early drafts than it is in the final, published version. McClean’s bond with Gray and Gray’s daughter, Marjorie, dictated his behavior then, and the complex political maneuvering that goes on before a bill is passed was used as colorful background. The earlier versions told a more traditional story, one that audiences would feel comfortable with, framing the issues with familiar dynamics. It relied on the human tendency to care that the boy loves the girl; that the young man finds out that his hero is flawed; that the youth must surpass his father-figure and replace him; and that the youth defends his vulnerable old mentor.

These are elements that appear in the version of Both Your Houses that was eventually published in 1933, but by the time the play had been refined and rewritten they were pushed into the background, functioning as mere plot complications rather than as crucial elements that drive the action. In many ways, this de-emphasis of the human aspect weakens the play, leaving it to hold audiences’ interest solely with its depiction of bureaucratic procedures. In the broader scope, though, it was wise of Anderson to give up the traditional emphasis on interpersonal relationships. Pushing them out of the way in order to show just what actually goes on in the legislature is a move that takes some nerve, but it pays off in the end, and makes the play a more unique, unpredictable work. Anderson seems to have found what is at the heart of this situation; it is not a play about love or respect, although it does have room to include those two elements, briefly. The play’s impact is gained from its disregard of human emotions; this enables it to show the inhumanity of government policies that affect the lives of all citizens.

The relationship between McClean and Marjorie is presented as being so faint and uneven that it is barely discernible. Viewers seated late, or readers who have trouble discerning who is who in the play’s turbulent first pages, might understandably fail to realize that there is a relationship between them. When Bus, the older and more experienced secretary, notes that there are clear signs of interest from McClean, Marjorie hopes that Bus is right. The matter is never discussed after that. Marjorie and McClean have lunch dates, and she does hesitate before asking him to give up his crusade to defeat the appropriations bill, but aside from that the only sign of affection between them is her continuous use of his first name. Readers can sense some bond of affection between them, and audiences can have even more of a sense of this depending on how the characters are played on stage, but there is nothing in the script that indicates a love affair that is torrid or deep.

In fact, the relationship between Marjorie and McClean shows itself to be exactly what it is: the shadow of a plot device important in an earlier version but not really needed here. Marjorie worries about McClean when she is talking to the old gang around the committee room, but she is in no position to offer him any aid or comfort. She is too much a product of the political machine to be drawn in to his idealistic plan to change the way the federal government is run. The effect of her actions on the plot is practically nonexistent, but what she does not do speaks volumes about the hypnotic control of political power. One gets the impression that the sort of person who would allow this relationship with McClean to wither on the vine before it had a chance to bloom into a full-fledged romance would be content to live a life in emotional isolation, true to no one except her father.

In most respects, McClean’s relationship with Bus, the wisecracking older secretary, is more interesting than the one he shares with Marjorie. The romance between McClean and Marjorie is described and referred to but never really acted upon, while the relationship between Bus and McClean grows right before audience’s eyes. She is a better foil for him: cynical when he is overly idealistic, but then surprisingly idealistic just as he is losing faith in his crusade. By contrast, Marjorie is written as a party insider, but she is not exactly corrupt enough to serve as a lesson in the seductive nature of power. Bus is used to bring out more aspects of Alan McClean, while Marjorie is used to complicate his motives.

Congressman Simeon Gray could also be a more significant figure in McClean’s attempt to

right the wrongs of congressional appropriations, but making him a stronger presence in Both Your Houses would dilute Anderson’s message about the unbelievable horror of the political system. Gray functions in the final version of the play as a touchstone, as the one person who is seen the same way by people on both sides of the debate. He is considered by all of the characters, though not necessarily by the author, to be an honest man who has gotten himself into a vulnerable position by trusting his co-workers and by working so hard that he fails to keep track of his own relationship to the bill he is working on. No one in the play — not McClean or even the jaded old politico Sol Fitzmaurice — doubts Gray’s claim that the provision in the bill for construction of a penitentiary in his district appeared there before he even noticed it. Also, there is no debate about whether this penitentiary is needed for the common good, unlike measures requested by the other congressmen, which clearly have no purpose but to siphon cash out of the federal coffers.

Still, audiences cannot accept Gray’s innocence as blindly as his friends and acquaintances do. It is unlikely that an appropriation for a large construction project in his district would have appeared in the bill without his notice, especially when it seems to be the answer to his personal financial dilemma. An argument could be made that Col. Sprague, the steel tycoon who dug up the information about Gray’s failing bank, could have manipulated the situation by having some other congressperson plant the penitentiary in the bill, tempting Gray subtly to cross the line into corruption. There is, after all, a hint that Sprague arranged for the crusading young McClean to find out about the penitentiary, and that the “mix-up” at the detection agency was no mix-up after all. Anderson arranges this situation so that the truth could be either that Gray was cunning or that he was duped; the author leaves the matter open to interpretation.

If McClean were more closely involved with Gray or with his daughter, there would be less room for interpretation; Gray would have to be rendered more clearly, and the answer to whether he is as innocent as he claims to be would have to come into sharper definition. Such clarity would actually defeat one of the play’s main points, that of the uncertainty of trust. It is crucial to the play, and to the view of American politics Anderson presents through it, that McClean not find any strong, dependable ally in Washington. Morality is so vague in Congress that McClean asks for help in his crusade from Sol, who is painted as the most unabashedly corrupt politician of them all. Both Your Houses would be less confusing if Simeon Gray were clearly virtuous or corrupt, but it would not be as true to the complexity that Anderson does succeed in capturing.

One can easily see why Anderson would have originally conceived Both Your Houses as a story of initiation or loss of innocence; an idealistic young man finding out that the woman he loves and the man he admires are as compromised as the worst of the political hacks he is struggling against is an eternal theme. It is often repeated throughout literature because it works, holding audience’s interest while presenting the opposing sides of a conflict. It takes a skillful writer to know that he does not have to frame the issue so clearly, that the situation he presents does not have to boil down to an eternal theme in order for audiences to follow it. Another story might feature McClean’s relationships with Marjorie and Simeon Gray, but for this one, revealing less gives the situation more mystery, and makes the young congressman’s journey into the dark corridors of the government that much more frightening.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Both Your Houses, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• This play is often referred to as an example of Depression-era political thought, pointing out how the rich feed off the labor of the poor. Perhaps the purest example of the pro-labor movement in the 1930s is Clifford Odets’s 1935 play Waiting for Lefty, in which taxi drivers in a union hall discuss life and their place in it. It is available in the paperback Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, published by Grove Press in 1993.
• Anderson was often said to be the artistic successor of Eugene O’Neill, who also wrote about sweeping historical subjects. Many people consider O’Neill’s 1939 drama The Iceman Cometh, about an assortment of lower-class people in a run-down bar, to be his best work. It has been published by Vintage Books in a 1999 edition.
• Anderson is remembered for his experiments writing dramas in blank verse. Readers will find his best examples of this style, written between 1929 and 1939, in Eleven Verse Plays, published in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace and World. Included are the favorites Winterset, Valley Forge, and Key Largo.
• Anderson’s daughter, Hesper, is an accomplished screenwriter. She recently published her memoir of what it was like growing up with a famous writer and associating with the greatest literary figures of the thirties and forties. South Mountain Road: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery, by Hesper Anderson, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2000.
• Readers can gain a sense of what Anderson was thinking when he wrote this play and of his long and varied career from Dramatists in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958. It was published by University of North Carolina Press in 1977.
• One of the more recent biographies of Anderson is Nancy J. Doran Hazelton’s Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage, published in 1991 by Library Research Associates. As the title suggests, the focus is not on Anderson’s entire life but on a vibrant time in Broadway theater, the 1930s through the 1950s.
• In 1947, at the height of Anderson’s career, da Capra Press compiled some of his major pieces about show business in Off Broadway: Essays about Theater.
• This play is just one mentioned in Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression, by Malcolm Goldstein. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1974.