Infamous

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Note from Julia: Back in 2017, there was a convergence of Sarahs. Longtime public radio producer and New School associate professor Sarah Montague wrote an essay for a project run by Ann Heppermann at Sarah Lawrence College called The Sarah Awards (which gave awards to new audio fiction, back in those first heady days of its revival in the US with podcasting). 

In her essay Toward a Poetics of Audio, Montague wrote about the dearth of critical writing about radio and audio. She made the point that our relative invisibility as a creative culture was partly because of a lack of a critical culture, “any kind of consistent vocabulary around audio creation, and any way to move that discourse into the public eye.”

One of those classes, which Montague still teaches, is called Radio/Audio Masterworks. “I identify significant and rich radio and audio works — classic and contemporary — and ask my students to interrogate them as they might  Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; or Picasso’s Guernica,” she tells me. “In other words, works that have stood the test of time, that extend the possibilities of their form and change the way we see the world.”

In the years since Sarah’s essay appeared, we have seen some resurgence of audio criticism (and adjacent industry coverage) — in The New York Times, in The New Yorker, and via a number of independent efforts including Good Tape, Podcast Review, Radio Doc Review, and podcasts such as Phonograph. 

But Sarah has been the most persistent in trying to connect audio creativity today with the legacy of radio’s past. The narrative podcast Audio Maverick, which she produced, is one such effort. Her classes at New School are another. I’ve spoken with Sarah’s students, and her undergraduates far know more about classic radio drama and documentary than I do. Her work is truly impressive.

So I’m very pleased that today we get a guest post from Sarah Montague. It’s an excerpt from a chapter of a book she’s writing, the kind of text that her students deserve: A serious examination of masterworks from audio’s past — including a big one that put its star on the map.

Here’s Sarah:

The night aliens came through the air

Let’s begin with an obvious masterwork: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. It is the exception that proves the rule, in that it is not only well known, but infamous. For the wrong reasons.

In case you need reminding: At 8pm on Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, listeners to the Columbia Broadcasting System (now CBS) tuned into a broadcast announcing that Martians had landed in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey. These aliens were terrifying, implacable and bent on the destruction of the human race. Radio listeners heard their landing and subsequent obliteration of everything around. Soldiers were sent to fight them, but they marched unchallenged into Manhattan, where among their targets was the very radio station reporting their conquest. But then, the creatures died, victims of their own metabolisms. Whew. Close call.

First let’s acknowledge the real world: the program, part of Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air, had been listed in the paper; the show begins with the house announcer telling us that the “The Columbia Broadcasting Network presents…” and then introducing Welles. Furthermore, the audience of this era, radio’s “Golden Age,” consumed prodigious quantities of drama, comedy, and entertainment. Their ears were well-trained in the suspension of disbelief. 

But some listeners did panic, particularly those who may have tuned in later in the program. Headlines the following morning included “Fake Radio War Stirs Terror Through U.S.” and “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact.”

Welles was a famous twister of the truth and told various versions throughout his life of how the infamous broadcast came to be. Often he protested his innocence, but sometimes he admitted that there was an element of calculation in the way the play was presented — At 8pm, the much more popular Charlie McCarthy comedy show was wrapping up on NBC, and late comers to CBS would miss the network ID and announcer intro. Instead, they’d get their dials tuned over to CBS just in time for Welles’ opening speech:

It was a terrifying soliloquy about the aliens that introduced the idea of “intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic” with their eye — or eyes or whatever — on us.

So yes, during the broadcast, there was indeed a “panic,” but those reports were deliberately exaggerated by the press, which was in a battle with broadcast radio for advertising dollars. What better way to trounce the networks than by demonstrating how dangerous and irresponsible they could be? (For more on this aspect of the broadcast’s history, it is ably deconstructed in A. Brad Schwartz’s 2017 book Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.)

CBS officials apologized for allegedly frightening the public, and Welles’ audacity started him on a rich, if uneven, career in Hollywood. War of the Worlds was a brilliant and intuitive construction, produced by the seat of the pants, which transformed its source material — an earnest anti-colonial tract by writer HG Wells, chosen at the last minute — into an imaginative tour de force.

The dark backdrop

History and current events provided the real-world backdrop to this drama, because there was a “war drama” underway in the actual world, and it felt disturbingly close to Americans. The growing dominance of Hitler’s Reich in Europe, and the dark rim of post-Depression anxiety and xenophobia, all created a resonance for the otherwise improbable narrative about alien invaders.  

Welles was a trained Shakespearean, used to inhabiting dramatic worlds in which action and metaphor co-existed, so he was also drawn to a tragedy from the previous spring—the explosion that consumed the airship the Hindenburg minutes of its landing in Manchester Township, New Jersey.  When the Martians’ death ray obliterates the onlookers of Grover’s Mills, New Jersey — and the militia sent to protect them — it was the molten airship tragedy that informed listeners’ imaginary landscapes.

Welles’ and writer Howard Koch’s brilliant manipulation of their own medium moves War of the Worlds into the category of masterpiece. Its main artistic conceit, that of interrupted radio programs and reports, creates not only verisimilitude, but increases listener anxiety (and draws on listener familiarity with breaking war news). And, as the play moves forward into devastation and confrontation, it both collapses and accelerates time — in a little under an hour, the conquest is complete.  

Throughout the piece, Welles is at the center of his own deception. He is the voice of God that leads us from the prelude (“We know now that in the early years of the 20^th century this world was being watched by intelligences greater than man’s”) into the action. And once inside the play, Welles surfaces again, as “Professor Richard Pierson” — the authoritative voice that will lead us from soothing assurances about the stability of the cosmos, into the heart of darkness.  

A king voice

Welles once said that he had “a king voice” — commanding and believable — and it was that sonorous cadence, as much as the vivid convulsions of the action, that drew listeners in, and made them believe, or willingly suspend disbelief.

One last thing makes War of the Worlds not only memorable and iconic, but exceptional. The ending is contemplative, ironic. The alien monsters are quelled by a kind of hubris — they couldn’t survive in the atmosphere of the planet they have devastated. But we pause only momentarily to think on that. Instead, we are led to this point by Pierson’s solitary quest. He encounters a “common man” figure who expresses his skepticism about science and authority; he walks through the streets of an abandoned city, where he finally catches sight of the fallen enemy. His character’s final soliloquy celebrates the world we have almost lost — and might yet lose. 

Notice how it iteratively links glimpses of restored normality to the word “strange” as if horror were an afterimage not easily dispelled.

As a child, John Ruskin was given an illustrated version of a poem by Samuel Rogers, “Italy”.  The artist was J.M.W. Turner, and the encounter made Ruskin a groundbreaking art critic. Because, he said of the encounter, “I found I knew a book of pictures almost by heart.” 

War of the Worlds is a broadcast to know by heart.

JB: Thanks so much to Sarah Montague for her guest post! I know she’d be pleased if you followed up by listening to Orson and HG in actual conversation. The two Well(e)s appeared together in 1940 at KTSA in San Antonio. Listen here.

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