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BEST VERSE DRAMA
Air Raid
by Archibald MacLeish
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Despite many handicaps, radio has managed to improve the quality of its own literature remarkably during the past three years. Many new writers have been discovered by the industry, and many established writers have been persuaded to work for it. The case of Archibald MacLeish is worth mentioning. CBS secured his first radio effort, “The Fall of the City,” and the production carried a tremendous impact to listeners. It is one of the great broadcasts of all times. There are two interesting points to be made in this connection. The first is that that although MacLeish had no technical knowledge of radio, his first play required almost no revision whatever and furthermore was within forty seconds of being “on the nose” when it was first submitted. To me this means that those writers who look sideways at radio as an unfamiliar medium do not have so much to fear as they think. Any writer who can write a play can write a radio play,
MacLeish’s great interest in radio as a medium for verse drama yielded in the course of time a second piece, “Air Raid,” which is reprinted here. The creation of this single half hour property (and this is my second point) took MacLeish seven months. Its writing and its construction show the painstaking effort that went into it. It is not the sort of thing that could duplicate itself every week. That is the main reason why those efforts that must duplicate themselves every week can never compete in literary value with those that are written as all the world’s best work is written — leisurely, soberly, reflectively, voluntarily.
Archibald MacLeish is sufficiently well known to the reading public and radio public alike not to require much biographical comment. By Presidential appointment he
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