It was common for educated liberal Americans in the 1950s to feel, as the novelist John Cheever wrote in 1959, that we were living in hell. The tragedy of life was then as much talked about as multiculturalism is today. The "tragic vision" was smuggled aboard in the New Critical ideology we learned in our college English classes. This vision fed upon the Cold War and on what we'd learned of human depravity in World War II and Korea. The vision emphasized our profound limits: said we couldn't expect to improve life much -- would fail to overcome our own failings, to say nothing of society's. All we could do was stoically keep muddling on, as we had in the war, pushing toward small, nearby, mainly private goals. At times we almost felt we were living a “long day’s journey into night,” which Eugene O’Neill play burst on the scene in 1956 and won all the prizes.
This narrow view of human possibility was set to music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur in their failed 1956 comic operetta, Candide. At the end of the show, Candide -- having been many times seduced, swindled, and murdered -- turns up in Westphalia, where he began, and finds Cunegonde, the woman he's always loved, who herself has been raped and killed again and again. Her optimism absurdly undiminished, Cunegonde says now they can start over and make a life as harmonious and noble as their "master," the tutor Pangloss, promised them. Candide interrupts:
No, we won't "think noble," because we're not noble. We won't live in beautiful harmony, because there's no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best, and live out our lives. Dear God! that's all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.
And he sings the anthem of the fifties as I knew the decade:
You’ve been a fool, and so have I
But come and be my wife.
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.
Cunegonde immediately sees the wisdom of this new vision of life; she sings:
I thought the world was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.
The whole chorus takes up the song, their sound so big the words blur and you have to get them from the script:
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please,
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.
And now the chorus overwhelms the orchestra, goes a cappella in multipart harmony for a Messiah-like climax that shakes the stage and phonograph speaker:
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good.
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow!
And make our garden grow!
In the original cast recording, you can hear a woman’s voice -- Barbara Cook’s as Cunegonde, I assume -- enter a split second early on the final “And.” I like thinking that much that was positive in my youth is symbolized by Miss Cook’s impulsiveness and energy too great to be contained.
