first reactions to GAME OF FOOLS

The writing of the first draft of my first play, Game of Fools, was not unlike driving a lancet into the painfully swollen flesh of a malignant sore on one's own body. The first frantic stab of pain was almost nauseating, but as the corruption rushed out, relieving the pressure that had built up to such a crescendo of agony, the resulting ease and relaxation were very nearly drug-like in quality. I did not need to examine what I had done to know that it was an ugly, unprofessional job. I did not need to be told that a trained technician could have done the thing much better. But a trained technician hadn't seemed handy at the time. I had to act for myself, and as might be expected under the circumstances, rather than brood upon my own handiwork, I opened a new bottle of Bourbon whiskey, drank half of it and slept the clock around. Later I faced the job of cleaning up.

Here in America where our precious pioneer blood of individuality is being bred out of us so rapidly by the forces of utilitarian conformity, and the practical, usable grasp of our new situation in civilization not yet spread down from those few intellectual peaks lofty enough to view the direction and pattern of our movement as a people, it has seemed to me for some time now that the art of fiction, as many other arts, is rather in a state of suspension, a point where the tide of general creation pauses to turn, and then to flow strongly with revealed purpose once

"but don't quote me!" by James (Barr) Fugate

again. As the Roaring Twenties understood the significance of the death of Victorianism with World War I, and produced the glorious Wolves (Virginia and Thomas,) and the Hemingways, so perhaps the Sixties or Seventies will be the first to see in the round the full artistic possibilities of ideas as new as atomic usage and the United Nations. Or maybe, since all progress is so painful, it will take longer. At any rate, it strikes me repeatedly that today's writers are like a group of Sleeping Beauties. The thorn forests around them still have to be penetrated more effectively by someone yet to come. In the meantime, troubled by embarrassing dreams of the past and indistinct visions of the future, probably the best they can do as a group is to keep breathing as audibly as possible to prevent a mistaken interment with those even less quick than they are at present.

Game of Fools has been out six weeks now and so far the small, but still excited, buzz is not unlike that of a sixth-grade classroom while the teacher has stepped outside to cut a good, stout, hickory switch.

"Have you heard? Little James Barr just spit in the teacher's eye!"

Of course, everyone is delighted at the spectacle of teacher's offended dignity and needless to say, like all good kiddies everywhere, bubbling with anticipation of the spectacle of James getting his comeuppance publicly.

School is sure to let out early today!

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