Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Added to which, Aquinas says Prudence has eight parts: memoria, ratio, intellectus, docilitas, solertia, providentia, circumspectio, and cautio. All of which (do) (does) boil down to two words: skip town. To work on the play. The Archons. That’s the epic-allegory one I warned you about—the two-hour Gnostic version of the War Between the East Side and the West Side that we’re thinking of staging in the park and videotaping (television in the middle ’50s having become, thanks to the likes of you, something more than auditions).

  You remember, it came to me that time we visited Teotihuacán with Victoria after your Mexico City Amneris and Delilah. (I can still quote the review: “Una mujer de peso [with flaming red hair lay extended, half disrobed, in a dark fur cloak, upon a red ottoman, bent smiling over Samson, bound by the Philistines]).”

  It’s a little like a shorter version of the Mahabharata cut into Hardy’s Dynasts with more than just a nod to Monsignor Hugh Benson’s 1907 fable Lord of the World, a peppering of Plautus’s Asinaria (much with restless plebs) admixed with Coriolanus (idea of The Voices, as in The Cigarettes ) lines to cleave the general air with horrid speech. Boasting as it does, in addition to principals, a large cast of character men and women—Sixth Avenue will be put to work—bawds, grooms, bravos, duennas, domestics, porters, alquazils, alcaldes, night watchmen, municipal sanitation workers, and all the other forces of apparent good and obscure evil to be found in a great metropolis.

  We in the ages living

  In the buried past of the earth

  Built Nineveh with our sighing

  And Babel itself with our mirth.

  Basically, the good archons occupy the East Side—headquarters The Sherry Netherland, and the bad the West—headquarters The Dakota, and the theater of war is The Park. Except that the bad are in secret possession of the cathedral and Fanny Spellbound. I see him sitting under a hair dryer in the shape of the papal tiara. (And ye, ye unknown latencies shall thrill to every innuendo, and after all how desperately lèsemajesté is it? Monsignor Benson has the satanic airships destroy Rome and the pope with it.) Should I give our strategia control in return of St. John the Divine? Do we want it? They do of course have control of The Met, Carnegie, and City Center, but The Dr. Mabuse of Thirty-ninth Street is in secret league with the enemy. The one that started out as a comic rewrite of the Bacchae (you remember, it was called Revelers until Paranoy, peering over my shoulder at the premiere of NOIA at the program in my lap to see written the line “Mother, stop it—you’re tearing me to pieces!” groaned aloud), then veered off in the direction of the Troades. (You can blame your-pal-my-auntie for all this—it was she who insisted fifteen years ago I come back to New York, go to the Jesuits at Regis and learn Greek.) It’s the one that now bears the epigraph from Ezekiel 9: “Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near each other, each with his destroying weapon in his hand.”

  You can see I’m hell-bent on being the next Maxwell Anderson/Christopher Fry: weighty themes/elevated expression of same—particularly the warning that New York could well disappear, exactly the way Byzantium did, and become the sore point of stories with morals in them. (Serve everybody right, too: New Yorkers, amateurs of Byzantine melodrama and Befreiungskrieg.) And which, due to the success of the carnival shindig of Equinox last, and to the warm relations obtaining between (the aforementioned) Herself The Madge and Hizzoner, the mayor, late of Yorkville, we can get The City to let us put it on—or photograph it, anyway, at the Bethesda Fountain.

  It’s the one, in which, if she takes a shine to it (or they, my archons, the angels of the Rialto, offer her a whole lot of money, whichever happens first in the order of consequence). Or remind her that Shaw wrote Major Barbara for Eleanor Robson and she became Mrs. August Belmost. Perhaps I’d better not, though: the Miss Robson that was got took care of by the august August because she turned Shaw down. Still, Bridgewood is more likely to think of capturing a Texas millionaire through her art, through spectacle (even filmed) like the one The Redactor has made up for you in his pages, called Tulsa Buck O’Fogatry. Not bad. I’ll find out who the little bastard is if it takes overtures to the FBI and its heinous fag director through the very famous fag eminence I’m planning to excoriate in The Archons. Perhaps Strange will help me: I know these boys, they end up telling everything in confession.

  La Bridgewood will be playing a cross between Mnesilochus, protagonist (in drag) of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae (and like him/her required to speak in hendecasyllables, but I think she does that already), Ezekiel (aforementioned), and the Chrysler Building—all lit up, the way it was to have been originally, when they molded all that shining Krupp steel into New York’s signal cathedral facade, and to have a high priest consort called Nimrod. After all, I tell myself, and I’ve told Bridgewood, Bernhardt, La divine horizontale in The Great War, carried over the trenches in a litter to give performances of the last act of La dame aux camellias by calcium light at night, played Strasbourg Cathedral in a pageant. “Let’s make a name for ourselves”—she, La Bridgewood, will announce (in imitation of Praxagora) to the assembled throng of chic refugees speaking all the tongues of the earth, the redistribution of all wealth and influence in the metropolis, while being ferried across from The Ramble in a poop. (Anecdote: two yentas on the sidewalk at the intermission of a Long Day’s Journey into Night matinee. One to the other: “Well, it’s not really a show—more of a play.”) I’m hoping for the reverse reaction. (And of course, lest the enterprise should be thought allegorical, it will be done in the up-to-the-second equivalent of New York Togate, and not palliate.)

  Am hoping to feature opposite Bridgewood somebody beautiful. There are no more at home of course like your former Carnegie hall-mate. Percase whimsically did wonder were I to offer The Graybar Building to Cornell, and play John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers in the dual-piano version, might Marlon Man come back to be in it with her, as Grand Central Station, but we know, don’t we, he has bid sayonara to the stage.

  Somebody beautiful, because the part is suggested by the career of Alcibiades, of whom Aristophanes (my predecessor) wrote: A lion should not be raised in the city, but if you decide to do so, you must cater to his ways. (Sounds like Bringing Up Baby, no? Also reminds me that Marlon has already played a lion—a blond one. What we need here is somebody who looks like your current pet—he who can only act only for the camera and only under Sirk—and can act in the flesh at the level of—oh, I don’t know, Tony Perkins? What about gorgeous Tony?) The career of Alcibiades and the melodrama of his being accused of throwing a raucous party on the eve of the disastrous Sicilian expedition that defiled the Eleusinian mysteries. The one, finally, that contains that vaudeville of elements from Greek tragedy and comedy both: Oedipus, Orestes, Elektra, Antigone; Philoctetes, Ion, Io, Hecuba; Tiresias, Pentheus, Medea, etc. Plus The Bacchae as nuns—remember I told you what I thought nuns were, and how they arose out of the cult of Isis, the Magdalen, and Maria Egiziaca. They are the Christ’s bacchantes, and instead of tearing Dionysius to bits they “receive” bits of their etc. Just so you know.

  You wouldn’t tear a beloved to pieces of pressed white bread, would you? Anyway in the normal order of things a nun is not, despite the honorific title, a mother—pace Heloise—only I was thinking: you can always take the girl away from the nuns, but can you take the—but you took yourself away, didn’t you? Anyway, Tynan, next time he comes to town nosing for a job, will be sure to say I’ve been influenced by Giradoux and by John Whiting. He’s probably right.

  Speaking of French influence, one wag said he heard it was going to be a sort of American Soulier de Satin spanning over a decade, and that the argument starts when Bridgewood loses one of her fuck-me pumps at El Morocco. Not bad. I’d sooner be compared aforehand to Claudel, who, even if he was a Nazi sympathizer, was also a diplomat (and used the diplomatic pouch as we do for his correspondence), than to Fry, who is really only a schoolmaster trading in on the myth that Shakespeare was one, too, which is ridiculous, bec
ause Shakespeare, the bulk of him, was the sequestered twin brother of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who may have run a little lyceum for young men, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  (And the rest of him was Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke ... but you knew that).

  And then, at the opposite end of the spectrum to Claudel, somebody at the archdiocese told Kilgallen (who printed it) that what it is is a re-creation of the cast-of-four-thousand epic son et lumière enacting the downfall of capitalism in the Prater stadium in 1931.

  Question: will we, come next year, be finding The Archons (Belvedere Lawn; two performances) anthologized in the 1956-57 Burns Mantle? Quite possibly, as he never omits a Bridgewood vehicle, some of which have actually run only one and a half performances. . . .

  Meanwhile, speaking of lyceums, everywhere one goes in New York this instant October one hears talk of everything under the sun, much of it revolving around you: it is the truth. A book about you would have to include hundreds of examples—an enormous kick-line of them, as in the play Waiting For Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

  [Further this theme: the voices of the New York night “scripting” the book of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, The Archons, their lives, art politics, music politics, world politics, Destiny itself in the long run. Samples overheard and copied down (everybody is taping everybody at home and between the Inquiring Photographer and roving reporters on radio and television Everyman is a player.’]

  If it is a defeating thing to insist on producing Art or Nothing (a new dramatic experiment, replete with progression d’effet, charpente, facade, cadences—and at military funerals there’s always one to count the cadence—not a morality for ranted recitation), then I shall go down howling. Or perhaps, better advised, instead, and better put in the words of my favorite extinct Ulster bard, the blind Seamus MacCuarta, to the people of the Cooley peninsula, for not properly recognizing his literary worth, I shall let them be—as badgers living underground their narrow lives, gorging themselves on the sweetmeats of innutritive illusion (as in any bawdy house on any side street north of Forty-second Street between Sixth and Eight Avenues you care to name).

  After the Gotham signing party for Under Nephin (funny the way they think they owe me something for cutting me out of the Sitwell picture. They cut Jimmy Merrill out, too, and I don’t think either of us is going to suffer much from it: if only it were a sign of some transaction or other, but I can’t imagine it is) I don’t plan to be back in New York making the rounds rigged out in me fancy Dan until the New Year. (“Where does he go?” one linebacker asked another, I was told. “Oh, you know my dear, that island, somewhere off Massachusetts.” “Hm. He ought to be going to one off New Hampshire, called Smuttynose.”) Except of course to check one or more further Meneghini apparitions—the Tosca, the Lucia—and perhaps to spend an afternoon with her and Leo Lerman. (She’s not much for the passagiata: the publicity has been wormy—the Time cover, Dolores, the coy attentions commencing to be paid, we are told in appalled whispers, by “The Old Oaken Bucket in the Well of Loneliness”—and really, what a vicious parody of the divine Marie Dressler that one’s turned into: Cole Porter is a disillusioned cookie to think her fun; Johnny Donovan, drunk at Madame Spivvy’s, doing imitations of the Hy Gardner interview—like that.)

  There was a gag going around that the ghost of Toscanini had appeared to the Meneghini the night before the opening, wailing, “The music is too great—it is beyond human powers. Cancel!” In any event, it was not a great official triumph, but details anon. One interesting theory had it that it is the only role she will not have a great success in at the Metropolitan, because the gods (which is to say the Elohim, dear, and not merely the Family Circle) will not have it. They will have it that Rosa’s triumph in her greatest role will here and only here go uncontested—her statue up on the Miller Shoe Building and all. I’m reminded of what you said of MMC, quoting Chorley wasn’t it, on Malibran, that nature had given her a rebel to subdue and not a vessel to command. I’m going to the second one, of course—we all are. Shame about her and New York—even about her and the Met. After having been treated as an anagram of Scala itself, and breezing of an aftermath into Biffi to be met as if she were Iside-stessa by those gaggles of gorgeous and ecstatic melochecche—well, schlepping it with Tony Arturi and Frances Moore from the Old Brewery across to the Burger Ranch, or down to Macy’s could hardly have been her idea of fan romance, and the Gotham City High Life, though it may attract her attention, can never do for her what the Milanese have done, for she lacks your (and Milanov’s) flair for the Ringling Brothers aspect of thuh opra, and for corralling private citizens in significant numbers (and Leo could make her welcome anywhere that mattered in New York, save Nuncle’s elevator at the Chelsea).

  As a matter of fact, at Herbert Weinstock’s party for her last week (fully of those people from the kick-line, momentarily diverted from talking about you to talking about her) she was terribly quiet and shy—and when I mentioned you (I had to: she wasn’t wearing glasses and didn’t know who I was, not that it’s in her interest to recall me, especially from three years ago in Mexico City) she gave that odd look composed of complicity and awe: the awe I saw on her face on stage when in the boudoir scene you down-winded her with that open chest “figlia di Faraoni!” Open chest, incidentally, is something she should give up using: she is of breath too short for the gesture. So there.

  Meanwhile, the father pulled us into the kitchen and announced summarily, “In my daughter’s breast there beats the spirit of Thermopylae!” (Not to be confused with the Spirit of Marathon—q.v. Under Nephin—who was in fact The Pythia herself—of Delphi—who raised a fog that confused the invader under Brennus—by the way not a Boi—most likely an Illyrian Keltoi—so that they fell about, and taking one another for the enemy, slew their own in overwhelming numbers.) “I don’t know if he knows what he means, dear,” I heard Leo L. whisper to Robert Giroux, but I hope to God nobody tries to convince Maria to sing Xerxes!” I thought to myself, self-immolation at the hot gates of hell?

  Absit omen. Sounds to me like her fantasy runs to mass suicide after her final performance—and to think that this underground epic accuses you of Stuvwxyzchina—with notes left all over town, reading Go, stranger-to-this-mystery, and tell the Times, the Tribune, the Journal-American, the World Telegram and Sun, the News, the Mirror, the Post, and the Brooklyn Eagle, that here, obeying her behests, we fell (or were burnt to crisps. Really, she should leave Marfa’s scene to you, even if you have poached on her Violetta). Whereas you’re content with bringing them screaming to their feet, she must have them paroxysmal, fetal, trussed in straitjackets, begging for surcease of sorrow and for merciful death—and you never know: if the kick-line runs out of steam, if you stay away more than a single season, if you retire to have children, she could prevail—which, after all, might be, well, as the Princeton boys are said to say, only fair—because as for life as you—and I, sometimes, construe it, she is, I’m afraid, maladapted.

  Which leaves her high and dry on Art’s cushioned pinnacle. I prefer your approach; I do. But I have an idea she’ll never be happy here, never can be; it’s my belief that something very Greek happened to her with daddy, and that all this with the mother is, truly, the cover story.

  The Time cover story was vile, and obviously threw her. (She is a very nervous woman, pace, spirit of Thermopylae, and it ought to be remembered that the size of New York, compared to that of Milan, or Chicago even, is enough to throw anybody, not to mention somebody it’s already thrown out, so to speak.) Neither is she terribly well educated—but you knew that. She is witty—or caustic—but for instance, she missed the point entirely when, in some banter at Herbert W.’s about the fee controversy, it was mentioned that Tucker was reportedly outraged and might not do the Tosca because she was getting secret outside help, as it were, Leo Lerman snapped, “Doesn’t he realize Maria wishes to emulate the virtuous woman of the Bible whose price is above Ruby’s?” One thinks of what you yours
elf might have said of the Meneghini (in relation to the Frankly Dowdy Diva from above the Gelateria in Parma) countering the charge that the fondness for luxury and couture seemed to sit ill on a supposedly dedicated artist. “Sure, where’s the harm at all—and a bit of class.”

  And, after all, although it’s a shameful truth, Time is a great part of New York: a vile part, but a significant one. I must tell you, it did occur to me that, feeling the way you’ve felt all these years about her, we might have mobilized something preemptive—but who knew that Luce would do what he did, in the holy name of motherhood? (And he likely entertains some confused notions about her premature antifascist activities during the war.) He would have done the same thing to you, you realize, when you landed here—unable as he was to disentangle the skein of your story, buying the story that you had been singing in Omsk, in Minsk (as opposed to Minsky’s, in Jersey City; it is known you went there with Auntie, Consuelo Gilligan, and Grainne de Paor, but whether or not you gave them a song is not recorded), in Vitebsk (and probably convinced in his own alleged mind that you pushed Masaryk out the window like some Bohunk Tosca), had you not known what you know: had you not given that private warble over in Jersey, and enjoyed that fortuitous deep-dish tea with Lucy Moses and Lila Tyng, who’d so adored you that winter in Paris as Amneris, as to the true authorship—and the exact remuneration involved in the transaction—of The Women. (I remember how you said, “But there is a copy of the script in the Library of Congress with her handwritten corrections, and Paranoy’s pointing out how easy it was to sit at rehearsals and transcribe the action of director and rethinking and cast rethinking and rewriting to keep the audience from leaving the theater. And you said it seemed so much her story and how hard it was to imagine a man writing it. Well, perhaps now, in the light of what’s been coming to light you wonder what your story is, in relation to the said text—and so perhaps does Neri [see below].)