Joyce or a Chicken?

Already the season's most controversial play, Thornton Wilder's cockeyed The Skin of Our Teeth (TIME, Nov. 30) last week started a louder controversy concerning its source. In the Saturday Review of Literature Sarah Lawrence College's Joseph Campbell and Reader's Digest Editor Henry Morton Robinson blasted Wilder's account of the human race as "an Americanized recreation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake."

Having been for three years jointly at work on a key to Joyce's recondite novel, the two men launched their attack with a great show of ammunition. First cannonading away at The Skin of Our Teeth's "borrowed" form, characters, plot elements, they followed up with scholarly small shot, including the charge that "the great swathing of scarfs and wrappings" of Wilder's Mr. Antrobus (see cut) looked like the "caoutchouc kepi and . .. blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberized inverness" of Joyce's H. C. Earwicker.

Not at all harassed, Playwright Wilder was not at all helpful. "All I can say," he told reporters brusquely, "is to urge those who are interested to read Finnegans Wake and make up their minds for themselves." The few initiated stalwarts who had both read Finnegans Wake and seen the play, were of the opinion that Campbell & Robinson were trying to make headlines out of what should have been footnotes, were confusing influences with imitation. According to Michael Myerberg, the producer of The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder got his idea when a chicken landed in his lap at Hellzapoppin.

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