TV in Print

TELEVISION PLAYS (268 pp.) -- Paddy Chayefsky -- Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Not so long ago -- perhaps the life span of a single picture tube -- it would have seemed presumptuous to put a batch of TV scripts between hard covers, somewhat like sending Milton Berle's headgear to the Smithsonian. But some TV drama has been getting astonishingly good in recent years, and one writer who helped make it so is a young (32) New Yorker named Paddy Chayefsky. Even off the TV screen and in cold print, these six plays are surprisingly entertaining, certainly better than a great many literary short-story collections. The Chayefsky characters come alive without the help of actors and sets (or commercials), and the best of them flash an image into the reader's mind that is not easily switched off. As he has shown in his famous TV play Marty, recently made into a movie, (TIME, April 18), Author Chayefsky is a small poet of the big-city block: his world is made up of bars, butcher shops and subways, the gasoline-poisoned little parks, the dim flats with their installment-plan elegance. The people he has put into these surroundings have troubles rather than tragedies. Chayefsky himself defines their limitations when he says aptly of one play: "It tells a small story about a familiar character and pursues [it] with relentless literalness to one small synthesized moment of crisis." But these crises rarely fail to move, and the characters are so real that it hurts. Among them: P:Joe Manx, a builder and once a big shot who still dreams of The Big Deal that will make him rich again, but in the end comes to understand his wife when she says: "Joe, we don't want a million dollars from you . . . We just want to have you around the house. We like to eat dinner with you. We like to see your face." P:A touching old widow, The Mother, cannot resign herself to a useless limbo amid gabbing, useless old women and struggles to find work in a New York garment factory. P:Charlie, a young New Jersey husband who, during The Bachelor Party given for a friend about to marry, briefly rebels against the monotony and monogamy of his life. But after a night out in New York, trying to find gaiety in the city of dreadful joy, Charlie goes home, smiling happily in the dirty dawn. In Chayefsky's simple dramatic formula, the burden weighing on a character usually has a counterpoise, e.g., Joe Manx lives in the past, but if he goes on doing it he will endanger his child's future; the Mother desperately tries to keep her job at the sewing machine, but the boss who eventually fires her has to struggle just as desperately to keep his business going. Perhaps Chayefsky's greatest merit as a writer is that he has an unerring ear for speech and an uncanny ability to give plain people solemn or even noble things to say without making them sound solemn or noble. From the author's interesting if sometimes pompous notes, the reader will learn a great many technical details about the TV business, including the TV writer's pay (from $300 to $3,000 per script), which Chayefsky indignantly denounces as practically on the sweatshop level. Chayefsky thinks that in its hunger for new material "TV is an endless, almost monstrous, drain." But if the slice-of-life style of TV drama ever begins to wear thin (as in the end it must), it will always be possible to turn off the set and read Chayefsky. It is good reading about good people who have the kind of dignity that is gropingly expressed by one character when he says: "So you see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are."

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