William Gibson's The Seesaw Log … is a blow-by-blow, cut-by-cut account of an ordeal that occupied two years of the author's life and left him, at the end, financially enriched and spiritually depleted. In short, it is a success story. At the same time it is a study of defeat. In the course of a hundred and forty pages, the rugged-individualist theory of art, which regards the author's intentions as sacrosanct, is eroded and finally overwhelmed by the rugged collectivism of an industry in which nothing is more sacred than the will of the audience. Per se, the struggle is old stuff. The cry of the betrayed dramatist ("That's not my play!") is among the more easily identifiable night sounds of Broadway, and if the theme of ideals versus commercialism were to be banished from literature today, a tidy heap of American writers would be out of work tomorrow. Mr. Gibson's book, however, has three qualities that, conjoined, give it a special fascination. One is the sturdy excellence of its prose. The second is its attention to detail; this is the fullest factual record I can remember of the daily hazards involved in getting a Broadway show on the road and bringing it back alive. Thirdly, and personally, I was fascinated by the ambiguity of Mr. Gibson's conclusions. By a strange exercise of doublethink, he seems to have felt simultaneously fulfilled and frustrated when his play became a hit. While resenting the changes he had been called on to make, he was grateful to those who had asked him to make them. After a characteristic agony of rewriting in Philadelphia, he describes himself as suffering "the paradoxical experience of seeing his work improve by becoming poorer." No student of semantics could resist a phrase like that. (pp. 316-17)
As acted, Two for the Seesaw is funny, accurate, and often poignant. Since Mr. Gibson offers no specific examples of the alterations he was required to make, and since he informs us that the printed text contains elements of several versions, it is almost impossible to tell whether we have lost a masterpiece or gained a smash. For a fledgling playwright, Mr. Gibson seems to have gone in for an awful lot of backstage hectoring, lecturing, and quasi-directing, so that one is tempted to wonder how much his own behaviour contributed to the general uproar. Be that as it may, his main point is that he was forced to modify his original conception under pressure from his co-workers and his audience. How humiliating that sounds! Yet Chekhov re-wrote at the behest of Stanislavsky, and Bertolt Brecht, perhaps the most original dramatist of our century, was not only ready but positively eager to learn from his spectators and to incorporate into his work the suggestions of fellow intellectuals…. No dramatist, in other words, is an island. To think otherwise is a form of solipsism.
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