Air Raid

When Archibald MacLeish wrote his dramatic poem for radio, The Fall of the City, last year, he discovered several notable means and ends. For one thing he showed that the most persuasive of classic dramatis personae, the narrator or chorus, was none other than the most accepted public spokesman in 20th-century life, the radio announcer. The announcer could describe events in a way that would make them immediately believed.

To those who considered verse too archaic a form to be nozzled through an audio tube, Pulitzer-Prize Poet MacLeish pointed out that since radio engages only the ear, "verse has no visual presence to compete with. . . . The ear is already half poet." Poet MacLeish then proceeded to give the ears of the U. S. radio audience 30 minutes of the finest verbal music of its time.

This Thursday (10 p.m. EST), again from CBS's Workshop, Poet MacLeish speaks to half-poet ears through another verse play, Air Raid. The station announcement is followed at once by the studio director's voice addressing:

. . . You who fish the fathoms of the night

With poles on rooftops and long loops of wire

Those of you who driving from some visit

Finger the button on the dashboard dial . . .

You have one thought tonight and only one:

Will there be war? Has war come?

Is Europe burning from the Tiber to the Somme?

The station then gets through for a spot news broadcast from an old European border town. The announcer is stationed on a tenement roof and as he waits and fears for the enemy planes to come over, his microphone picks up the incongruous, commonplace sounds and voices of women chattering, of children playing. The 1930s have brought war to the kitchen, casualties to the bedroom floor. Air Raid reflects this horror unforgettably. Sounding like the voice in a newsreel from Madrid, Barcelona, Shanghai, Nanking, Poet Mac-Leish's tensed announcer fills in the waiting time by remarking:

We call it peace and kill the women and the children.

Our women die in peace beneath the lintels of their doors.

We've learned much; civilization has gentled us:

We've learned to take the dying and the wounds without the wars. . . .

As in The Fall of the City, the tyrant that is expected from across the border is ''not the usual enemy! . . . This one conquers other things than countries." And, as in The Fall of the City the people were paralyzed by fear of the tyrant and by uncertainty, in Air Raid the women's doom is their paralyzing disbelief in the tyrant's inhumanity.

Shrewder with his sound effects this time, Poet MacLeish has added to his impelling verse imperative noises. A woman sings a scale and the scale is parodied by the warning siren, the whine of the raiding planes. It is echoed in a boy's voice calling, is converted into an agonized scream to end the play. Oddity of Air Raid is that, in spite of the fact that the situation is a straight projection of last month's Czechoslovakian crisis, when a man listened for war at his loudspeaker like a frightened bellboy at a murderer's keyhole, prescient Poet MacLeish began it in the spring, rewrote it in August.

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