Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Osborne’s case was different. He seemed not to make distinction between the world’s confusion, his hero’s, or his putative own, not even to perceive it or care. However, when “a pox on all your houses” is stated with such wit, vigor, and passion too, it makes for a rousing evening. Some audience irritation derived from having to admit it, particularly in the case of the hero’s famous soliloquy, which went on and on with such an intimacy of nagging that one began to need either to answer back, as in a family quarrel, or else leave the room—and then had to remind oneself that to make a theater seem a room, or an audience a family, is virtue indeed. Here what the author had done was to use sheer length and circuitous repetition in even greater proportions than Wagnerians are used to, or families either. And here, too, our itch went unappeased, for though Osborne might seem to be seeking a Tinker Bell rapport with us, he never gave us the satisfaction of being asked the question out loud.

  In Inadmissible Evidence, Nicol Williamson brilliantly plays a solicitor whose hysterically egoistic need of both office and home entourages—mistress, wife, daughter, clerks, and secretaries—demands that they dance attendance on his twenty-four-hour daily merry-go-round of broken promises, until the clock runs down, the luck runs out, and the dread blow falls: he is alone. The promises are of varying sorts. He has an inability to keep appointments with clients in jail or at his office, he runs very near the law regarding trumped-up evidence; he doesn’t write his own briefs or study them, and meanwhile twits his junior and senior clerks for the hard work they do to keep the firm in order, plus the dull lives they must lead in consequence; his clients do not get a fair shake, at least from him. Nobody does; he cannot keep his appointments with life, though he presumably has a rare old time in the evasionary hours between.

  For, mainly, his broken promises are to women; being late or never home to dinner with the wife is the least of them. He “stays late” at his office twenty-four hours a day for the usual reasons: he can’t get to the mistress with whom he pleads each day to stay home for his call; he has outgoing and incoming mistresses among the secretaries; even his own daughter is kept waiting so that he may be seen breaking his promises to her (or perhaps as excuse for the long digression—in this case on the younger generation—of which there is at least one in each Osborne play, often the liveliest part of it or the most worthy of serious attention). Always the broken bargains are plastered up with charm and/or argument, and the boundless energy of a personality whose energy can exert itself only thus and has done so since schooldays; he is an emotional athlete while obviously believing himself to be a sexual one.

  Williamson’s job is to make us believe in the hero’s basilisk effect on others. The problem is somewhat akin to that of bringing on-stage a “great man” already known to us from the annals of history or art and having the greatness weigh true. For almost three-quarters through, Williamson, if not the play, gets away with it. Of course every energy and bit of brilliance is tipped his way; the other males are mere placatory figures and the women either telephonic devices or plasticine presences; the departing and pregnant office wife bows out in a tantrum; her successor complements the hero’s monologue with the complaisant gestures, almost in tutu, of a ballerina choreographed for Hot Young Thing and Has to Have It. (If a woman had written the play, which is somehow quite imaginable, she would rightly have been accused of seeing all “obligation” only in the context of what is due the female.)

  What defeats both actor and play a good hour before its end is its monologue. For while Osborne, plainly narrowing his boundaries if not yet in control of them, has settled for the inadequacies of one man over those of an entire country or world, it can now be seen far too clearly that his real talent, even more especially when he is dealing with a modern man than with a historical one, is still for soliloquy. The play is actually a monologue and certainly in monotone, with any roles other than the hero—or male lead, as one is continuously tempted to call him—performing as little more than subservient projections of his will (and whose metaphysic?).

  Meanwhile, I had begun to learn what I thought of Osborne’s metaphysic, or perhaps “moralities” was the better word. Hide as an author may behind his naughtiness (a word that would never occur to me except in England) or behind, say, his strenuously risky modernity, why did both these words, searched out to express his style, bring to mind such an opposite as “morality”?—a nineteenth-century antique that has not yet come back into its own in America. The answer may be that nursery-naughtiness brings on nannyish moralizing, in the reviewer as in the reviewed. Following this train of thought in the entr’acte, I recalled how many recent British plays did go back to the nursery in the end for emphasis—remember Osborne’s own squirrels and bears in Look Back, or Dorothy Tutin kneeling down to repeat “Dod bless Mummy” (as example to be taken, Dod Wot, of a pre-suicide’s mental state) in Graham Greene’s The Living Room. (American authors don’t go back to the nursery; they go back to childhood, which can be orful, but is not the same.)

  “He’s trying to write Everyman with one character,” I mused, “in this case Vanitie”—but this didn’t seem quite enough either. Suddenly there came to mind a favorite set of illustrations in an old bound Harper’s of the-mid-1860s—a double-page spread of drawings showing the progressive corruption of a provincial young man, his rise in city sophistication and champagne wickedness, and predictable fall. As with many nineteenth-century cartoons, the style of these was a kind of bowdlerized Hogarth, still teeming with an eighteenth-century cast of characters, but all arranged now according to a virtue and a vice that plumbed the depths of neither. It had always typified for me that exact limit of “Victorian” sentiment in which good and evil become the tamed gorgons Naughty and Nice, watching over that slough of dismay (not despond) where, sadly but never quite tragically, the good people are uniformly dull and the wicked have all the endowment of vitality and charm. This seems to me both the range of Osborne’s “anger,” and how it stratifies itself also, which may be why it originally bewildered audiences used to the newer psychological mixtures. It may also be why Osborne’s comic comments have a persistently topical superficiality, and why his tragic ones never really hurt. I’d certainly never thought of him before as one of our more eminent Victorians, but take away the shrewd or shrewish patter of the language, especially as it attaches to sexual matters, and remember that our grandfathers never went undistinguished for staying power or long breath—and see what you see.

  The second of these two plays, A Patriot for Me, tells the story of the rise within the Imperial and Royal Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the nobody Alfred Redl; of his fatal flaw of homosexuality which leads to his spying for the archenemy Russia; and his ultimate fall.

  Aside from the documentary technique that divides the scenes (those screen flashes: “Prague 1896,” “Vienna 1897,” which are always such a deadly impediment to the natural flow of “legitimate” theater that so knowing a dramatist can surely have used them only in haste) there is nothing here that devotees of Victor Herbert might not take to, except, of course, a slight sexual displacement. Alfred can’t love the Countess because going to bed with a woman gives him the willies (we have already had a scene with a whore, a tender one of course). And Alfred’s dear friend is a dear boy—Flash, Vienna, 1902! Plus any modern analogy the author would not be sorry to see us make.

  And meanwhile we have the monologue again, this time Alfred’s. For monologue is what it really is—though in intent he speaks to people rather than at them, and the fast blackouts of the staging help by breaking up what might flower into soliloquy. Despite whores and nightmares, Colonel Redl takes ten scenes to discover his own dark secret, though the audience, being much wickeder, has long since jumped the gun. After that, why, the downfall—gradual very, and with flourishes, not infrequently, of violins. Surely even the Greeks, who made so much of fatal flaws, including this one, never followed one so dead straight to such literal consequences as the simple Osborne p
sychologic does—or with such deadly obvious development of event and retinue. Colonel Oblensky, the shaggy-friendly, cynic-sinister head of Russian intelligence who recruits Redl by blackmail (in a scene in the snow of winter, what else?) is himself a man of parts, many of them previously played and written by Peter Ustinov. Actually, all the sins against believability end by giving the play a kind of grossly reverse artistic form all its own, as we learn to deal with the difficulty of believing in light opera and psychology at the same time, with the oversimple scarlet-letterdom of the psychology itself, plus the unfortunate fact that, unlike Williamson, this time even Maxmilian Schell cannot make the hero as Dick Deadeye a fascinator as all the other actors keep saying he is—perhaps because vanitie allows of more inflection than sodomy.

  That time should soon come (or may have) when homosexuals and heterosexuals alike will be bored at the recurrence of homosexuality as the dark secret or the fatal flaw of current dramas. For any such labeling of a man or of a life by a single quality is not only to patronize human individuality but also to sacrifice any artistic one, to melodrama or perhaps naughtiness. In the same way, to jot in a little anti-Jewishness—Redl is a concealed Jew, and the generals are made to make such anti-Semitic cracks as one expects of “the period”—is no automatic passport to drama or even sympathy; here it remains one of Osborne’s digressions, notable only as it suggests that where once these were almost arrogantly designed to kill our sympathies, now they seem complaisantly to bid for it. Too late, for, prefaces to the contrary, this is no story of a Jew in that army, or a man of any kind anywhere in history or out of it. Take the young man of my old Harper’s magazine cartoon, which was called “The Drunkard’s Decline,” change the accent, the army, the sex of the whores, and the vintage of the champagne—but keep the sentiment—and call it “A Fairy’s Fall.”

  Nevertheless. Nursery or not, buggery fascinates us all. It is a word I never think of except in England—perhaps because it suggests a verbal bluntness, possibly a specious-one, common to English sexuality in general. As against the brilliantly emotional or religious logistic with which French writers depict the homosexual, or the shadowy, sometimes subcritical murk the Americans use, it does suit the bracing English style, half music hall, half Elizabethan clown, with which Osborne stages the one lively scene of the play, a cruelly funny one, where Redl attends a party “in drag.” There Redl, in uniform, fades from the play altogether; it is the supernumeraries in their transvestite array who are the thing: the false soubrette who warbles, Lady Godiva with rope tails hanging indecently from “her” pink tights, the classic whore telling of “her” first fall, and the Baron, a boxer-shouldered dowager in white satin ball dress and tiara, hilariously queening it over all. In spite of plenty of material from the good old folklore—“He wanted to be a homosexual but his mother wouldn’t let him”—or perhaps by a canny use of it, here is a scene that should be the comic set piece on the subject for quite a while, though I can’t see it being performed even in those “progressive” schools at home (where I hear they sometimes do Genet’s The Maids with girls, a lovely confusion which would never occur in the land of Sir Andrew Aguecheek). For though Osborne’s patriot has all but disappeared—and it has taken the playwright how many miles to get to this Babylon?—the scene has brio, to put it politely, and it’s certainly worth your time, though its full zest may not travel. Remember, that though the Lord Chamberlain might not get at us in our club, it couldn’t have been the aura of censorship that had so sharpened the author’s wit or our reception of it, as much as the aura of crime. For if there was brio here there was good reason; where homosexual practice elsewhere may be illstarred, in Britain it is illegal. It is necessary to understand the place occupied in this empire by a question that Parliament itself studies from time to time.

  As we left the theater, trying to pin down between us the exact nature of Osborne’s Sachertorte, we heard a native voice bluntly do it for us. “Bit like The Merry Widow arse-backwards, wasn’t it?”

  Goes to show what can be done on home ground. Anticriticism, like other mischief, attacks the idle—like me when between books. At one such a time, The Kenyon Review asked me to contribute to a symposium on the short story. The symposium, like the Festschrift, is a device to keep a literary magazine going, as well as a straight road to the highest form of nonsense without humor. It appeals to vanities who don’t mind sounding off in a crowd of them. I refused, but the idea smoldered, until I wrote the following, under the title “Talk Given In Heaven After Refusing To Go There”—(which the Sunday Times “Speaking Of Books” column called “Writing Without Rules.”)

  To write about “the” short story or “the” novel as an entity—an actual “art form” wandering the Aegean or West 44th Street and only waiting to be drafted for the literary wars—is an ancient kind of high-altitude nonsense. From which the artist unerringly excludes himself, every time he sits down to write a manuscript which shall be as single in shape and essence as the mortal coil will allow.

  He wants every work to be a reformation, and to come like Luther’s, straight from the bowel. Secretly he hopes people will get to understand it because they too have bowels—which is one of the connections between literature and the world. Only one of course. And mentioned here merely to anticipate a volume of essays shortly to be published on that subject by Marvin Mudwrack, Leslie Fiddler and Steven Muckus—to be entitled “OUR Mortal Coil: A Symposium.” What is a symposium? It is an attempt to arrange in orderly theory those very works that are alive because they are singular. And to put down the artist for disorderly conduct unbecoming to a symposium.

  There is no “the” short story. Or novel. More than a foot away from a particular one, we are discussing the nature of art—another fooler. The nature of art is that, one foot away, it can best be talked of only in terms of what it isn’t. For the artist knows that a work of art is everything else but what can be said of it, one foot away. What he says of it—meanwhile standing on his own navel to get close enough—is what he makes his art of. He doesn’t waste time dreaming of the realms of “the.” Insomniac that he is, he’s forever working on a “this,” beautiful as a skin without pores, and to the words of anyone else—not pervious.

  The symposiast of anything, however, is an old-fashioned Platonist. He believes in Rainbow’s End. Clinking up there among the other absolutes is the final Smasher Short Story and the definitive Nevermore Novel, at which writers down here are to aim as faithfully as they can. The symposiast’s job is to establish their pecking order. He does this very simply. First he sips, from any blushful cup of Hippocrene proffered. Then, like any winetaster, he spits. … And here I am back at the bodily functions again. It will take a critic to tell me why the very thought of criticism so often leads me there.

  For the critic’s job, as some see it, is to tell all of us not only what we and the artist are to believe—but what the Artist already does believe about the Art Form he’s working in. Against that Ammunition, the artist can only say, in the lowest case possible: i don’t. Or he can sit and think about his immortality—that endless and useless chance to talk back. For if he opens his mouth to shout to the heavens what he doesn’t believe in, he can never command the decibel of those crying aloft what they do.

  I don’t believe that the short story or the novel—or the symphony, or the sculpture of object—should ever stand still enough in artistic time for us to say unequivocally what it is, or should be. For that is the End, whenever that happens, isn’t it? I don’t believe in any comprehensive methodology of any kind—even if you say I’ve used it. What you really see, if a piece of work is good enough, is the particular order it has self-imposed.

  “Point of view”? In the professorial anthologies, every story has one, narratively speaking—whatever that is. Often the prefaces still urge that a story has or should have only one point of view. Readers of these should remember that the commentator is urging strictly his own limits, not the author’s. No reason why a st
ory can’t be told from 80 points of view if the writer can manage it—the best are as spiny with viewpoint as a porcupine, as whorled as a whelk’s idea of a whelk. Even in a work of the smallest scope, the daring attempt is to do as many things as possible, and to do them inseparably. I once said as much, to the first students I’d ever addressed. One said thoughtfully, “That’s not what Miss Rubaker said.” My answer was awed—we were from the same city. “You had Miss Rubaker too?” I guess I never listened to her. But in some quarters, I hear her yet.

  I hear other voices too. Mr. James, striding to dictate, stares across the Channel and says, “Today, I shall write a story with an ‘omnipotent narrator.’ Or is it ‘omniscient’?” Mr. Joyce scowls myopically higher. “Mine ends in an epiphany.” Now I’d advise both those eminences not to be too sure of what they’ve done, before looking it up in Northrop Frye. I’ve not read him myself. All those people are too smart for me. They know everything—except that their business is fantasy. Of a purer, more restricted sort than mine.

  The writer should flee confrontations of that sort in the manner that Blake fled Joshua Reynolds; he should beat down classifications, or any gnomic effort to put it all in a neat nutshell. Read it all if he must, and learn to spit it out. Write a story like a nutshell, and another as fleecy as the top of Mount Ida, if he chooses. If he’s lucky, he isn’t even an iconoclast. That’s for the converts to creative freedom. If he’s blessed, he has a more congenital disorder. He doesn’t even see the rules that are there.