by Tom Stoppard
CARR: Newspapers or coded telegram?
BENNETT: General rumour put about Zurich by the crowds of spies, counter-spies, radicals, artists and riff-raff of all kinds. Mr Tzara called, sir. He did not wait.
CARR: I’m not sure that I approve of your taking up this modish novelty of ‘free association’, Bennett.
BENNETT: I’m sorry, sir. It is only that Mr Tzara being an artist –
CARR: I will not have you passing moral judgements on my friends. If Mr Tzara is an artist that is his misfortune.
BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.
CARR: Is there anything of interest?
BENNETT: In St Petersburg, the Provisional Government has now declared its intention to carry on the war. However, the committee of workers’ deputies, or Soviet, consider the war to be nothing more than an imperialist adventure carried on at the expense of workers of both sides. To co-operate in this adventure is to be stigmatized in a novel phrase which seems to translate as a ‘lickspittle capitalist lackey’, unnecessarily offensive in my view.
CARR (Languidly): I’m not sure that I’m much interested in your views, Bennett.
BENNETT (Apologetically): They’re not particularly interesting, sir. However, there is a more extreme position put forward by the Bolshevik party. The Bolshevik line is that some unspecified but unique property of the Russian situation, unforeseen by Marx, has caused the bourgeois-capitalist era of Russian history to be compressed into the last few days, and that the time for the proletarian revolution is now ripe. But the Bolsheviks are a small minority in the Soviet, and their leader, Vladimir Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, has been in exile since the abortive 1905 revolution, and is in fact living in Zurich.
CARR: Naturally.
BENNETT: Yes, sir – if I may quote La Rochefoucauld, ‘Quel pays sanguinaire, même le fromage est plein des trous.’ Lenin is desperately trying to return to Russia but naturally the Allies will not allow him free passage. Since Lenin is almost alone in proclaiming the Bolshevik orthodoxy, which is indeed his creation, his views at present count for nothing in St Petersburg. A betting man would lay odds of about a million to one against Lenin’s view prevailing. However, it is suggested that you take all steps to ascertain his plans.
CARR: I ascertain Lenin’s plans?
BENNETT: Telegram from the Minister.
(He starts to leave.)
CARR: A million to one.
BENNETT: I’d put a pound on him, sir.
CARR: You know him?
BENNETT: I do, sir. And if any doubt remained, the British Secret Service assures us that the man to watch is Kerensky.
(Exit BENNETT.)
CARR (Aside): Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.
BENNETT (Entering): Mr Tzara.
(TZARA enters. BENNETT retires.)
CARR: How are you, my dear Tristan. What brings you here? (This Tzara (there is to be another) is a Romanian nonsense. His entrance might be set to appropriate music.)
TZARA (Ebulliently): Plaizure, plaizure! What else? Eating ez usual, I see ‘Enri?! – ’allo – ’allo, vhat is all the teapots etcetera? Somebody comink? It is Gwendolen I hopp! – I luff ’er, ’Enri – I have come by tram expressly to propose a marriage – ah – ha! –
BENNETT (Entering): Miss Gwendolen and Mr Joyce.
(GWENDOLEN and JAMES JOYCE enter. BENNETT remains by the door. GWENDOLEN and TZARA are momentarily transfixed by each other. This is hardly noticed as JOYCE has made it his own entrance.)
JOYCE:
Top o’ the morning! – James Joyce!
I hope you’ll allow me to voice
my regrets in advance
for coming on the off-chance –
b’jasus I hadn’t much choice!
(This JOYCE is obviously an Irish nonsense. The whole scene is going to take a limerick form, so for clarity’s sake the lay-out of the text is modified.)
CARR:
I… sorry… would you say that again?
JOYCE:
Begob – I’d better explain
I’m told that you are a –
TZARA:
Miss Carr!
GWEN:
Mr Tzara!
JOYCE:
(Seeing TZARA for the first time) B’jasus’. Joyce is the name.
GWEN:
I’m sorry! – how terribly rude!
Henry – Mr Joyce!
CARR:
How d’you do?
JOYCE:
Delighted!
TZARA:
Good day!
JOYCE:
I just wanted to say
how sorry I am to intrude.
CARR:
Tell me… are you some kind of a poet?
JOYCE:
You know my work?
CARR:
No–it’s
something about your deliv’ry –
can’t quite –
JOYCE:
Irish.
CARR:
From Lim’rick?
JOYCE:
No – Dublin, don’t tell me you know it!
GWEN:
He’s a poor writer –
JOYCE:
Aha!
A fine writer who writes caviar
for the general, hence poor –
TZARA:
Wants to touch you for sure.
JOYCE:
I’m addressing my friend, Mr …
CARR:
(Gulp) Carr.
GWEN:
Mr Tzara writes poetry and sculpts,
with quite unexpected results.
I’m told he recites
and on Saturday nights
does all kinds of things for adults.
JOYCE:
I really don’t think Mr Carr
is interested much in da-dah –
TZARA:
We say it like Dah-da.
JOYCE:
(To CARR) The fact is I’m rather hard up.
CARR:
Yes I’m told that you are.
If it’s money you want, I’m afraid …
GWEN:
Oh, Henry! – he’s mounting a play,
and Mr Joyce thought
your official support …
CARR:
Ah…!
JOYCE:
And a couple of pounds till I’m paid.
CARR:
I don’t see why not. For my part,
H.M.G. is considered pro-Art.
TZARA:
Consider me anti.
GWEN:
Consider your auntie?
JOYCE:
A pound would do for a start.
CARR:
The Boche put on culture a-plenty for Swiss, what’s the word?
JOYCE:
Cognoscenti.
CARR:
It’s worth fifty tanks
JOYCE:
Or twenty-five francs
CARR:
Now … British culture …
JOYCE:
I’ll take twenty.
TZARA:
(Scornful) Culture and reason!
JOYCE:
Fifteen.
TZARA:
They give us the mincing machine!
GWEN:
That’s awf’ly profound.
JOYCE:
Could you lend me a pound?
TZARA:
All literature is obscene!
The classics – tradition – vomit on it!
GWEN:
(Oh!)
TZARA:
Beethoven! Mozart! I spit on it!
GWEN:
(Oh!)
TZARA:
Everything’s chance!
GWEN
:
Consider your aunts.
TZARA:
Causality – logic – I sssssh –
GWEN:
–awf’ly profound
JOYCE:
(To BENNETT) Could you lend me a pound?
GWEN:
I thought he was going to say ‘Shit on it’.
(Her hand flies, too late, to her mouth, CARR has been thinking hard.)
CARR:
By jove, I’ve got it! Iolanthe!
TZARA:
Obscene!
CARR:
Is it?
TZARA:
Avanti!
Gut’n tag! Adios!
GWEN:
Au revoir!
TZARA:
Vamonos!
BENNETT:
Give my regards to your auntie.
(BENNETT closes the door behind TZARA and GWEN.) (The whole thing has been manic from beginning to end, and now it’s finished, except that JOYCE is a leftover.)
JOYCE:
A Romanian rhymer I met
used a system he based on roulette.
His reliance on chance
was a def’nite advance
and yet … and yet … and yet …
(The light steps down between verses.)
An impromptu poet of Hibernia
rhymed himself into a hernia.
He became quite adept
at the practice except
for occasional anti-climaxes.
When I want to leave things in the air
I say, ‘Excuse me, I’ve got to repair
to my book about Bloom –’
and just leave the room.
(He has gone. Pause. Low light on motionless CARR in his chair.)
CARR: Well, let us resume. Zurich By One Who Was There. (Normal light.)
BENNETT (entering): Mr Tzara.
(TZARA enters. BENNETT retires.)
CARR: How are you, my dear Tristan? What brings you here?
(TZARA, no less than CARR, is straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest.)
TZARA: Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring anyone anywhere? Eating and drinking, as usual, I see, Henry? I have often observed that Stoical principles are more easily borne by those of Epicurean habits.
CARR (Stiffly): I believe it is done to drink a glass of hock and seltzer before luncheon, and it is well done to drink it well before luncheon. I took to drinking hock and seltzer for my nerves at a time when nerves were fashionable in good society. This season it is trenchfoot, but I drink it regardless because I feel much better after it.
TZARA: You might have felt much better anyway.
CARR: No, no – post hock, propter hock.
TZARA: But, my dear Henry, causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war.
CARR: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn’t it?
TZARA: Was it? I thought it was Serbia …
CARR: Brave little Serbia…? No, I don’t think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.
TZARA: Oh, what nonsense you talk!
CARR: It may be nonsense, but at least it is clever nonsense.
TZARA: I am sick of cleverness. In point of fact, everything is Chance.
CARR: That sounds awfully clever. What does it mean?
TZARA: It means, my dear Henry, that the causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. And it is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause.
CARR: It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence.
TZARA (Articulately): Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.
CARR (Slight pause): Oh, what nonsense you talk!
TZARA: It may be nonsense, but at least it’s not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war.
CARR: You forget that I was there, in the mud and blood of a foreign field, unmatched by anything in the whole history of human carnage. Ruined several pairs of trousers. Nobody who has not been in the trenches can have the faintest conception of the horror of it. I had hardly set foot in France before I sank in up to the knees in a pair of twill jodphurs with pigskin straps handstitched by Ramidge and Hawkes. And so it went on – the sixteen ounce serge, the heavy worsteds, the silk flannel mixture – until I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable lambswool dyed khaki in the yarn to my own specification. I tell you, there is nothing in Switzerland to compare with it.
TZARA: Oh, come now, Henry, your trousers always look –
CARR: I mean with trench warfare.
TZARA: Well, I daresay, Henry, but you could have spent the time in Switzerland as an artist.
CARR (Coldly): My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. When I sent round to Hamish and Rudge for their military pattern book, I was responding to feelings of patriotism, duty, to my love of freedom, my hatred of tyranny and my sense of oneness with the underdog – I mean in general, I never particularly cared for the Belgians as such. And besides I couldn’t be an artist anywhere – I can do none of the things by which is meant Art.
TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat.
CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art.
TZARA: I see I have made myself clear.
CARR: Then you are not actually an artist at all?
TZARA: On the contrary. I have just told you I am.
CARR: But that does not make you an artist. An artist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. If there is any point in using language at all it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas. I might claim to be able to fly … Lo, I say, I am flying. But you are not propelling yourself about while suspended in the air, someone may point out. Ah no, I reply, that is no longer considered the proper concern of people who can fly. In fact, it is frowned upon. Nowadays, a flyer never leaves the ground and wouldn’t know how. I see, says my somewhat baffled interlocutor, so when you say you can fly you are using the word in a purely private sense. I see I have made myself clear, I say. Then, says this chap in some relief, you cannot actually fly after all? On the contrary, I say, I have just told you I can. Don’t you see my dear Tristan you are simply asking me to accept that the word Art means whatever you wish it to mean; but I do not accept it.
TZARA: Why not? You do exactly the same thing with words like patriotism, duty, love, freedom, king and country, brave little Belgium, saucy little Serbia –
CARR: (Coldly): You are insulting my comrades-in-arms, many of whom died on the field of honour –
TZARA: – and honour – all the traditional sophistries for waging wars of expansion and self-interest, set to patriotic hymns. Music is corrupted, language conscripted. Words are taken to stand for their opposites. That is why anti-art is the art of our time.
(The argument becomes progressively more heated.)
CARR: The nerve of it. Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists. It is never quite put in those terms but it is a useful way of grasping what civilized ideals are all about. The easiest way
of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist. The ingratitude of artists, indeed their hostility, not to mention the loss of nerve and failure of talent which accounts for ‘modern art’, merely demonstrate the freedom of the artist to be ungrateful, hostile, self-centred and talentless, for which freedom I went to war.
TZARA: Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted. But how much better to live bravely in Switzerland than to die cravenly in France, quite apart from what it does to one’s trousers.