Echoes from a golden time when Corwin worked at CBS
Five years later, the innovative radio producer would never have had as much freedom
In February 1996, the CPB Radio Program Fund announced backing for With Corwin, a series of six new radio dramas by Norman Corwin, once one of commercial radio's most celebrated producers. Corwin--a professor at the University of Southern California in recent years--is continuing a comeback on public radio, with recent rebroadcasts of his programs from the end of World War II. Scheduled in April 1996 was 13 by Corwin, a selection of his programs from 1939-49, repackaged by Mary Beth Kirchner and Dan Gediman and distributed as part of the NPR Playhouse series. Tom Lewis, author of Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio wrote this appreciation, originally published in Current, Jan. 15, 1996.
By Tom Lewis
''I am a Dead Sea Scroll'' said Norman Corwin as he fixed me with his gaze across a microphone. It was May 1992, and I was interviewing Corwin for a program to be broadcast on public radio. I pondered his description. Long forgotten until their discovery by shepherds in caves beside the Dead Sea, the scrolls contained the wisdom of the Old Testament. In his own way Corwin had revealed a rare wisdom gleaned from his years working in radio.
Just who is this Dead Sea Scroll? About 50 years ago, at the height of radio's golden age, few would have asked the question. Over half of the adult population in the country--about 60 million people--had gathered round their radios to listen to Norman Corwin's shows "We Hold These Truths,'' celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, and "On a Note of Triumph,'' marking the Allies' victory over Germany. Corwin's reverence for the power of words, his scrupulous attention to sound and detail extracted the best from the medium and appealed to the best instincts of his listeners. They might tune in NBC for the knee-slapping laughs of Jack Benny or Amos 'n Andy, but they turned to CBS for the drama, the documentary, the poetry, and the rich fantasy and verbal ingenuity of Norman Corwin.
CBS provided Corwin with a number of outlets for his work, including its prestigious Columbia Workshop, then the most avant-garde dramatic series on radio. Through the Workshop he presented "Twenty-Six by Corwin,'' 26 shows in just half a year. The series ranks with the greatest achievements in the history of radio production. Other series followed, including "An American in England'' and "Columbia Presents Corwin,'' along with special programs. Almost all appeared on the CBS network.
Corwin thrived on deadlines. "I loved what I was doing,'' he said, "I was not conscious of it being a very great sacrifice. I was so enchanted and intrigued and challenged with the necessity to come up with a new program every week--having nothing to do with what preceded it or would follow it. I did not resent the fact that immediately after the broadcast on the ride home from the studio I'd have to think, 'What am I going to write about next week?,' and I'd get started on it the next morning. And if in two days it didn't come I would have to drop it and start on another tack. And that, of course, was a very risky, hazardous business, because I was not only writing--but I was also directing and producing them. It was complete dedication--it was exhausting and often I thought, 'What an idiot I am for taking this on, this is crazy.' But it wasn't crazy, it was made possible, made feasible by the fact that I loved what I was doing. It was like one rhapsodic dream from start to finish.''
While the feat was Herculean (Corwin served as writer, director and producer), the variety of his programs was exceptional. Corwin is a man capable of modulating his artistic ability to produce many moods, across a wide range:
- "The Undecided Molecule,'' a light, humorous, verse play about a molecule on trial for refusing assignment to one of the elements, who is charged by the court with:
Unwilling to be named.
Rebelling when defined.
Declining to be blamed.
Objecting when assigned.
Protesting when selected.
Resisting an attack.
Refusing to be directed.
And talking back.
- The horror of a bomber's plane's spiraling from the heavens to certain death in "They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease'':
That's all.
That's all the fighting they will care to do.
They have a treaty with the earth
That never will be broken.
They are unbeautiful in death
Their bodies scattered and bestrewn
Amid the shattered theorem.
There is a little oil and blood
Slow draining in the ground.
The metal is still hot, but it will cool.
You need not bother picking up the parts.
The sun has reached meridian.
The day is warm.
There's not a ripple in the air.
- a meditation on community and civilization from "Cromer,'' a program about an English village threatened by Germany during WWII:
A town is like a person. It has a character, a complexion, and a name. It has a set of habits. It's hard-working or lazy, rich or poor, handsome or ugly. Some towns never amount to much; some get sick and die; some grow big and powerful and lead their race. ... They know the seasons and the way of winds, each taking its share of sun and moon and standing up to storm. And they are mortal also in the respect of violence and death. For war may come to any and to all of them.
Whatever he wrote, Corwin always infused it with a reverence for the mood, the rhythms of language. "As a kid I was attracted to language--even when I didn't understand it,'' Corwin said. "I thought it was rich and melodic and beautiful for its sound if nothing else. So long before I understood what Keats was writing about, or Shakespeare, I became tipsy on imbibing their lines.''
For a time Corwin enjoyed the confidence of CBS that few have had with a commercial network before or since. "I was nourished by the attitude of the network, which was very liberal, I don't mean in the political sense, but they never asked to see what I was doing. They never said, 'You are doing 26 programs.' 'We'd like the titles of them, please, or what they will consist of.' 'Let us see what you've written.' Never. The first they heard of it was when it was on the air.''
"Had I come along just a few years later, certainly no more than five years later,'' Corwin continued, "I would never have the opportunities that I did have nor the freedom. It was just not in the cards--never has been since. The gatekeepers, so to speak, the men who are in charge of broadcasting, are in a position where everything is compartmentalized, departmentalized. There are editors and censors, and there are people who worry about what they call 'program practices' and 'program policies,' and they comb a script for all of that. I was lucky. They trusted me, and I would not abuse my privileges.''
But the world of commercial radio did change. CBS decided to abandon the Columbia Workshop and its commitment to thoughtful, dramatic programming. The writer who had produced the purest, unalloyed gold of the era would have no venue for his work. Corwin learned of the decision from none other than the head of the network, William Paley, the man who had created a small niche for quality within commercial radio. It happened in 1948, in a chance encounter on a cross-country train trip from California to New York.
"He made clear,'' Corwin recalled, that while he and the network appreciated the kind of work I had done, they really were interested in reaching the greatest number of people in their programming. And I realized he was telling me that the future for the man who wrote programs that CBS had taken deep bows for, was no longer guaranteed or planned. I remember feeling when I arrived in New York that I was washed up. And I felt suddenly very old, very useless, and that all my work had been writ not in water but in air.''
The age of the great radio networks, which consisted of as many as 400 stations, was over. "It was not a death from natural causes,'' Corwin told me. "It ended out of sheer manipulation. Television came along in a great rush. And the broadcasters, the industry, the economists and the captains of the broadcast industry realized that minute for minute, television was going to be a far more profitable medium than radio.'' Paley went on to raid NBC of its talent, paying outrageous sums for shows like Jack Benny and Amos 'n Andy. They would become hits on his new CBS Television network.
Fortunately for us, though, Corwin's words were not writ only in air. They were recorded by CBS on transcription disks, and by a happy accident Corwin was at the trash bin when the network was about to discard them. With support from private foundations National Public Radio has digitally remastered 13 programs to restore their sound to the original studio quality, a project in celebration of Corwin's 85th birthday this year. NPR will broadcast the series beginning April 1996. Guest hosts, including Robert Altman, Ray Bradbury, Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt, Norman Lear, Scott Simon and Susan Stamberg, will provide introductions to the programs.
Fortunately, too, NPR will enable a new generation of listeners to discover the joy of Corwin's work. Corwin, who once adjured us to "do a little civil thinking every day,'' belongs on public radio, that lone outpost of civility in a bleak wilderness of screaming and shouting, 800 talk numbers and reverb boxes. After an absence from radio for nearly half a century, it's good at last to have Corwin back.
A Dead Sea Scroll? For once, the master of metaphor has stumbled. The tapes, not Corwin, are the scrolls. They have captured his wisdom, which might otherwise have been lost in the evanescence of the radio wave. Think of Corwin as a comet that comes round at its appointed time, in our case every 50 years. It brightens our firmament and graces our lives with its own rare and peculiar light. And we are richer for it.
Current
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