No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  [Exeunt William and Clara Matthews. Enter REGAN.]

  REGAN: Oh, Lord. Now don’t take on abaht it. Wot did you expect? You carnn’t break bad abits like nailbiting in a few weeks let alone worse ones like marriage. Besides the only way they’ve got of livin in the future is lookin back on the past. That’s always ow the gentry as survived. Separashun indeed! After they’ve brought you lot up.

  REGAN: Lor luv a duck, you don’t know when you’re well orf. Now, look, you’re going to be payin out to them for the rest of their lives. At least I ope so, or I shan’t get my wages. With them together you can keep some check on what you’re all sendin, but if they’re apart…. Well! But I’m surprised at you not knowin that, Mr Quentin. It’s in The Book. Centralizashun, e says, is one of the keys to modern society …

  QUENTIN: What book? Who says?

  [REGAN goes up to the bookcase and takes out a large book. She presents it to QUENTIN.]

  REGAN: Why! The Book, of corse!

  QUENTIN: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, by Bernard Shaw! Good God! That Mussolini-loving old heretic.

  RUPERT: So démodé!

  MARCUS: So tiresome!

  ALL TOGETHER: Except, of course, for Saint Joan. Whatever do you know about Bernard Shaw, Regan?

  REGAN: Nix me dolly. But them’s the lines I was given. [Exit REGAN.]

  QUENTIN: An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. I ought to know that title. When was it published? [He turns to title page.] 1928! But … But, that’s not for three years yet. It must be some mistake.

  MARCUS: Oh God, it’s just one of those tedious Shavian jokes.

  RUPERT: Thank goodness, there’s unlikely to be a revival of his plays.

  [Curtain. The actors, recovering from their paradoxical feats, fall into the relaxing intimacy of ‘The Game’.]

  MR JUSTICE SCALES: Not the least repellant feature of capitalism in decline is the degree to which the cynical exploiters become victims of their own sentimental shibboleths. The sanctity of marriage, the inviolability of the home, can at such times take in even the most clear headed idolators of the cash nexus.

  MARCUS THE COUNTESS [patting her Eton crop into place]: Exploiter isn’t a very nice thing to call anyone, least of all a mother [turning to RUPERT THE BILLY POP] I don’t think we ever really made the children understand the joy of living. But let’s forget them, darling. Do you know, I don’t know whether it’s the change or not but all I really want now is just to be a comfortable old Joan to your Darby.

  RUPERT THE BILLY POP [taking her hand sentimentally]: However the change may change you dear, it hasn’t changed you for me.

  MR JUSTICE SCALES: Marriage! Sense of the Past!

  QUENTIN: Oh, Christ! It’s too disgusting to go on, isn’t it?

  RUPERT: Yes, we’re not children now.

  MARCUS: I think I am a bit. But I don’t like Rupert holding my hand. He does it so fraternally.

  RUPERT [dropping Marcus’ hand quickly]: Though after six years in the theatre I could pretend to press a cod’s fin with passion if the producer told me to. Well, I must be off. We’re playing a matinée this afternoon.

  II. 1935

  Notes and thoughts upon notes on the playing by Rupert Matthews of Andrey Prozorhov in The Three Sisters.

  *

  He says in his letters when he still hadn’t found his way – ‘You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.’ As Willie says, he was so much like us – an interpretative artist. Of course, again and again, to Gorki and to others, he seems to dismiss actors as fools, but not always. I think he would have believed in our responsibility, the limited one of ‘stating the problem correctly’ if we are to bring his art alive, participate in the beauty he has created, as much as he held himself responsible when writing it. So let me now try to state the problem of Andrey correctly.

  The climax is Act III not Act IV. For me that means ‘My dear sisters, my dear, good sisters, don’t believe what I’ve been saying, don’t believe it.’ But how does that fit in with Willie? The notes I’ve taken from him after rehearsals say ‘knock knees even in Act I’. And I have them, I feel them. ‘By Act IV the whole body stooped and loose, the legs bent, an attitude of immense and complete fatigue.’ Fatigue is surely the key to everybody in the play except for Natasha’s busy bossing about (I should think Sukey will get like that – she gets it from the Countess, but the Countess isn’t a prig) but I have to fight it in the play, or rather I don’t, I’m too tired like all the Prozorhovs. Willie says it’s a decline of a class. I don’t really think that sort of general judgement is very helpful. I want to know how Andrey feels, not how the Russian gentry felt. He keeps on emphasizing that the only really happy moment is the eighty year old peasant woman’s in Act IV, ‘Oh, my child, what a life I’m having! Such comfort! … The Lord’s been kind to me in my old age.’ To everyone else it seems as though he’s been unkind in their youth. Yes, youth, that seems to me important. My notes from Willie read, ‘You’re like an old donkey brought to the knacker’s with an unwillingness that is just enough to prolong your own agony, even to break into a feeble, angry braying. Two angry brays – the first half false, “Natasha is a fine woman…. I love and respect my wife” turning into “my dear sisters … don’t believe what I’ve been saying” and the second almost a straightforward bray in Act IV to Chebutykin, “My wife is my wife … but there’s something about her which pulls her down to a level of an animal, a sort of mean, blind, thick-skinned animal.”’ My comments: of course he’s right – ‘unwilling tiredness’ is the key. And physically now I feel just as he wishes – a sagging behind the knees and in the hams, too, as though the string had been half cut. My shoulders hunch, my stomach bulges a bit more all the time as the play moves on. I feel it, and the trailing handkerchief and the slight shuffle (on towards a sort of Chebutykin, yet harassed, snapped at). But ‘old’? Willie’s wrong, I know he is. Andrey is a young man, he doesn’t even seem middle-aged like his brother-in-law Koolyghin, he’s absolutely young but looking old, a young man who falls slowly, irrevocably into tired, old ways. He has failed. He will never be a professor now, but he will carry the professor’s stoop and the professor’s shuffle. I do think I have absolutely understood this part. But feeling is more important.

  If I had stayed on at 52, or rather let myself be sent to Ceylon by the firm, I might have been a sort of Andrey, only not with the professor’s stoop and shuffle, but with ham actor’s gestures and postures of a city gent, growing more ham and more tired every year. Mr Goatcher, the little man who came down from the Liverpool Branch every week, was like that – perhaps he was a thwarted actor. But it’s hard to make much of these ‘could have beens’. I was never a Prozorhov, never for a moment doubted that I would leave 52. None of us did. Certainly my three sisters were quite sure of getting to Moscow, and did. But, of course, the fear was there. If I can work back into the nursery days and games – but so much of that was fun, the fun that kept us going. Mag and me fooling. If we had lived in the country, we might have been Prozorhovs, Tchekov people, I suppose. But 52 was so ugly. Not like Tchekov’s dachas in their birch woods. So we had to get out. We so desperately needed some beauty in our lives. Beauty with elegance. The Matthews were only potential Prozorhovs. If I can only get back to that potential past though – the long stifling nursery afternoons, the long talks about ambitions and schemes which at times did – even for me – seem almost dreams.

  The clue is Billy Pop. If only I could shed some of the layers of contempt and hatred which she made me feel for him. But he’s so awful, the fat white slug. Fat white sluggard whom nobody loves. Perhaps I can begin from there. First he isn’t really fat, only run to seed. And then he’s certainly not white, on the contrary and Heaven knows why, he’s always rather bronzed and pinkcheeked – russet apple. And then his mother l
oved him deeply. And she love-hates him enough to be unable to leave him. And he loves himself dearly, oh so dearly, that he’ll preserve himself until Doomsday.

  There I go immediately in disgust and dislike. And probably there would go Sofochka and Bobik about Andrey if we could have the ‘T.S.’ twenty years later. But the fact is that Andrey is an irritating man and an absurd, comic man. (This is essential to Tchekov, for to him, Willie tells us, all failure is comic. N.B. read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc., etc. There must be abridged versions. Better accept what Willie says here, for the feeling’s the thing. Acting is feeling. We’re not, thank God, playing Shaw. So we can take all these ideas for granted as simply the atmosphere we breathe.) But also a moving, a pathetic even loveable man. B.P. has irritated me and I’ve laughed at him. But I’ve never loved him, I couldn’t. Why not? Well, he’s more active in defending himself than Andrey, his whole life is a sly defence of himself. But Andrey survives. If I could get that touch of survival into him – not sly, of course, with him, but surviving.

  But B.P. and his hopes of being a great writer, there we have Andrey – ‘Just think – I’m secretary of the local council now … and the most I can ever hope for is to become a member of the council myself … I, who dream every night that I’m a professor in Moscow University, a famous academician, the pride of all Russia!’ Well, B.P. was more than a member of the local council. He had been an up and coming writer. But how much I can’t really say. It had already gone when I remember clearly. No that’s not true. When I was still at my prep, oh before 1914, he came and spoke to the school about Cricket in Literature – later, in the twenties, he still did it at a guinea a time for local literary societies – but at that time he created a tremendous impression and the master who introduced treated him as a terrific pot. I suppose he’d had his beauty with the Yellow Book and the Savoy and playing cricket with Stephen Philips. And no one interested later. Of course he sees himself as Shakespeare or Tolstoy. His humour, his. acceptance of life, of its joys and sorrows. I must get that in Andrey. That’s what makes him lovable. But not with B.P. That’s all sly bunkum with him. Acceptance of his own joys and of others ‘sorrows. That’s his humour. But if I can remember him pushing the twins in the pram, sent out by her to do it. Me walking or rather running breathlessly beside. Oh years ago. They were building. Yes, of course, Westminster Cathedral. And me so tired, asking if we can go back. And his dead mechanical pushing of the pram, humming some little tune, not even hearing me, dreaming. Yes, that’s it. That’s Andrey in the 4th Act. What was it B.P. said? Suddenly, and I didn’t understand?’ We must all grope our way. As best we can. Into that complete darkness.’ Self-pitying bunkum. I used it once later in The Game …’

  *

  Looking from the terrace the whole world seemed to shimmer, then to tremble, then to heave and at last to break again and again on and on down over the Heath and across the wide river of London’s dancing lights to misty beginnings in the Surrey Hills, where the primeval monsters crowded at Crystal Palace, or perhaps even as far as the death place of our ancestor at Piltdown. All green – sea and evening sky, shagreen, malachite, turquoise, emerald, jade, celadon, beryl, opaline and aquamarine. Here you could not tell young men from the grass they lay upon, or young women from the leaves of the trees. In one great mass Marcus had created a kitchen garden of living dancers who, as they danced, put now cabbages against lavender, now spinach against peas, now lettuce against parsley. Greenfinch ladies chattered with matrons dressed as Amazon green parrots, peacock young men paraded before voluptuous snake green debs. As for the lounge lizards they were dressed in their natural lizard green. ‘My dear,’ said one, ‘Marcus tells me it’s the green of cheetah’s urine,’ and ‘Mine, darling, is the green of turtles’ fat.’ Green! green! everywhere green. But predominant tonight the yellowish green that came from banana leaves and parrot feathers – for the theme of this year’s ball was Tropic. And to Marcus’ delight there was indeed something swampy hot, breathless in the air that belied the spring frost – something apart from the hundreds of braziers that warmed the dancers. The night might have been cut by scorching sunrays and the discordant shrieks of swinging monkeys and of flashing unseen birds. And yet on this coolish English April evening the sea of leaves that carried on wave after wave from where the costumes ended were of young chestnuts, very young oaks and elms. This indeed was his supreme triumph, that by writing now ‘Tropic’ or three years ago ‘Sherwood’ or three years earlier’ Fontainebleau’ on three hundred cards he could summon up a symphony of greens, a moving Monet that could, even within one colour range, turn Hampstead into an Amazon world of conures and caymans, into Robin Hood’s deerhaunted forest, into a day’s hunting for Francis I – and all at the will of a pen, or rather of Miss Manning and her typewriter. The touch of frost in the air too had covered their jungle with a vast, ever darkening, deep blue, star sequined cloak of tropic sky.

  Fat Lady Westerton, slime and sedge-covered – a section of the great, green, greasy Limpopo river that had opened the ball by streaming across the lawn – seemed more like some camouflaged hippo as she rolled towards him across the terrace, engulfing great mounds of salmon pâté as she came.

  ‘Better than last year, far better. Well done, Pierrot,’ she growled. She had compounded all her doubts and her liking for him with this ambiguous name. ‘Did you see Olive Menzies’ boy Charlie? He makes the most frightening boa constrictor. He’s swallowing his partner, Gertie Ritter. She’s come as a huge toad. She’s got all the Ritter emeralds on, if you ask me. She says she’s a jewelled toad whatever that may be. It’s a bit horrid.’

  Marcus smiled at her as a recompense for her horror, and twisted his body and his arms so that she could see how, but for the liana roots that served for jungle fig leaves, he was completely naked. Poor old thing, both fat and ugly, she needed some compensations. He only hoped that she would not be more horrified before her car arrived at midnight. Down in the garden, across the lawns, in the shrubberies, to his certain knowledge, boas and pythons copulated, peacocks possessed parrots, crocodiles, alligators and caymans devoured peacocks, and parrots devoured green praying mantises. There had been an element of the chase in both Sherwood and Fontainebleau, but in Jungle he had decided on the kill. At any rate she would have gone before she could see the green sea serpents sodomizing.

  ‘What is a jewelled toad?’ she asked when she had finished off the remains of a dish of glacé pineapple and felt free to be curious. She lowered herself on to a small gilt chair, asking, ‘It won’t break, will it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, uncertain. ‘Well, there was once a prince,’ he spoke the childish words with relish: he loved telling stories. ‘I shan’t have to picture him to you Lady Westerton, for I am sure you have had many a prince at your feet …’

  ‘Hundreds, Pierrot,’ she said.

  ‘There was also, as too often, an absolutely unspeakably wicked fairy …’

  But now her eyes were fixed upon a bowl of marrons glacés. She leaned across him and took two.

  ‘Scrummy,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want to hear about the jewelled toad, do you, Lady Westerton?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do really, Pierrot. But that’s what Gertie Ritter’s dressed as. I can tell you that.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me how anyone’s dressed. After all, I designed the costumes. With a little helpful criticism from Osbert.’

  Something in the tone of his voice brought her to her feet, though with cumbrous difficulty.

  ‘Yes. I think I should leave it a bit more to everybody’s choice another year. After all a ball’s not a theatrical performance. It’s a bit of fun. Slime!’ she said, waving in turn two or three pieces of the green monkey fur which he had chosen to represent the Limpopo’s clogged surface. ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to have a change from green either. Three years running’s enough for any one colour. After all green’s not Jack’s racing colours or anything, is it? I should try pink. Pink�
��s always becoming for the gels.’

  He wanted to shout after her, ‘Don’t fart at other people’s parties’, for that was what she was doing as she waddled across the terrace – and not a silent pête jesuite either. She probably thought it was grande dame to fart loudly. Perhaps it was. Oh, damn. There was never any way of getting back at people. He sat repeating, as Jack had taught him, ‘malice is dreary and disfiguring, malice is dreary] and disfiguring’, until his face, at least, must have been less contorted than his body felt, for Ivo Latham, passing him, snapped his crocodile jaws and said, ‘I have no intention of swallowing anything as delicious as you in one go. Is it too early to ask you to dance with me?’

  ‘Much. We can’t hope to get rid of the respectables until two.’

  On the other hand some of his peevishness must have stuck, for when he was still sitting there, merely thinking what a success it all was, and how right he had been to make the explorers and conquerors – from Pizzaro through Cook and Mungo Park to Stanley – come in a green version of their period costumes, Mary Clough came over and said:

  ‘Why are you looking so sulky? Is Jack being unfaithful or something?’

  And at that very moment Jack came by, garlanded with green orchids followed by a group of debs, all green humming birds, who darted and swooped at him. From the cascades of waxy blooms he looked out like the most delicately Syrian of Emperors, exalted with the thoughts of the Mesan ceremonies.

  ‘I think,’ he cried, ‘that they’re trying to suck my nectar. A new experience,’ and he winked broadly at Mary and Marcus.

  ‘Jack winking!’ Mary cried, ‘Now that is good.’

  ‘Don’t you mean vulgar?’

  ‘Oh do leave off. You are an Edwardian. You fish away like my Aunt Rose. You know very well that all his friends care for you so much just because you’ve made him happy. In bed and out. And don’t ask which is more important, because to distinguish between those two sorts of happiness is one of the real sins.’