A Private Mythology

The Manuscripts and Plays of John Whiting

Gabrielle Robinson (Ed.)

1988
156 pages
ISBN 0838751407

Although several books about John Whiting have appeared since his death in 1963, mitigating the passionate hostility of the playwright's early critics, he remains like his heroes, a "noman." Using the manuscripts of his plays and other unpublished materials, as well as the testimony of Whiting's theatrical contemporaries, Gabrielle Robinson, in A private Mythology, explores the recurring thematic patterns in Whiting's work, which manifest themselves from the unpublished early novel, "Not a Foot of Land," through the major plays, Saint's Days, Marching Song, and The Devils, to the last unfinished plays, "Noman" and "The Nomads."
Whiting's fantastic world of real and imaginary warfare, sudden violence, and equally sudden collapse contains many of the elements of modernism. Yet he neither adopted a familiar form that could elicit a definite response nor created a new form to express his vision. But there is something alarming about Whiting's presentation precisely because it is not formalized into a new dramatic genre. The hostility of the early critics was therefore no accident; it even can be seen as an appropriate response to Whiting's work with its moodiness, incoherence, and irrational violence.

About the editor:

Gabrielle Robinson is a professor of English at Indiana University at South Bend.