The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016

by Tony Harrison

  I’m at a loss. No, let me see. I know!

  It’s his little finger like a croissant, so,

  crooked at Angelina’s where he sips his tea

  among the titled queens of ‘gay’ Paree!

  I had one couplet in the first draft which went:

  proof of all the mean and dirty tricks

  of Mankind circa 1666.

  I changed this to 1966, thinking, I suppose, to execute a circle of three hundred years for the Molière tercentenary. A fetishistic gesture, perhaps, and at this stage little more than that. Then I was reminded of André Ribaud’s series of articles in Le Canard enchaîné, which adopted the style of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires and under the title of La Cour satirised the autocratic regime of de Gaulle as if he were Louis XIV, under whose reign, of course, Le Misanthrope was first performed. The pieces were reissued in a paperback collection by Juillard in 1961. The series continued under M. Pompidou as La Régence. The point is that these articles in Le Canard enchaîné appeared regularly over a long period and terms such as ‘le roi’ and ‘la cour’ in M. Ribaud’s sense were as current as, say, ‘grocer’ was with us. Now the phrase ‘circa 1966’ seemed exactly right and La Cour gave me cues for the rewriting of all the many references to ‘the Court’ and ‘the king’, etc. As I rewrote in this way some of the implications of Le Misanthrope, so often concealed under the frills of the traditional courtier, became much clearer to me. I let two references to ‘the Court’ stand but put them in the inverted commas of Le Canard enchaîné. Some became ‘the Élysée’, and others more knowingly became ‘over there’ and the king a whispered confidential ‘HE’. One, if not the sole, cause of the guarded, wary politesse of court society was precisely its autocratic nature. ‘La Cour’, wrote Saint-Simon, ‘fut un autre manège de la politique du despotisme.’ Perhaps, I thought, by concentrating less on the forms of this politesse and more on its meaning I would be able to clarify a little the discrepancy between Alceste’s violent attacks on the symptoms of social corruption and his complete lack of an objective diagnosis. The outer Court of real power is reflected in the brilliant mirror of the ‘court’ of Célimène’s salon. It seems more than a linguistic accident that makes many commentators refer to Célimène’s salon as a ‘court’. Lionel Gossman brings out some of the inferences in Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963).

  The court of Célimène with its urbanity, wit and formal civility masking subterranean rivalries and resentments calls to mind a passage in Saint-Simon’s Mémoires which describes another and more celebrated court:

  Les fêtes fréquentes, les promenades particulières à Versailles, les voyages furent des moyens que le Roi saisit pour distinguer et pour mortifier en nommant les personnes qui à chaque fois en devaient être, et pour tenir chacun assidu et attentif à lui plaire. Il sentait qu’il n’avait pas à beaucoup près assez de grâces à répandre pour faire un effet continuel. Il en substitu donc aux véritables d’idéales, par la jalousie, les petits préférences qui se trouvaient tous les jours, et pour ainsi dire à tous moments, par son art. Les espérances que ses petites préférences et ces distinctions faisaient naître, et la consideration qui s’en tirat, personne ne fut plus ingénieux que lui à inventer …

  The frequent fetes, the private promenades at Versailles, the journeys, were means on which the King seized in order to distinguish or mortify the courtiers, and thus render them more assiduous in pleasing him. He felt that of real favours he had not enough to bestow; in order to keep up the spirit of devotion, he therefore unceasingly invented all sorts of ideal ones, little preferences and petty distinctions, which answered his purpose as well.

  While it would be ludicrous to suggest that Molière deliberately dressed Louis XIV up as Célimène, it is worth noting that some acute observers discovered in the supreme social reality of Molière’s own time the same structure of relations as that which binds Célimène and her world together in the supreme comedy of that same time.

  It seems very worth noting, though the last thing I wanted to suggest was that Diana Rigg was Charles de Gaulle in drag. The roi soleil shines on some and leaves others in outer darkness. It was written of de Gaulle quite recently that ‘he was so narcissistically self-absorbed in being the Idea of France on the international plane that a great many Frenchmen came to feel half-consciously that they were only anonymous fodder for his representational ego’. The sense of intrigue is strong in the play, outside and inside, even in the minor off-stage characters, impaled only on the spike of Célimène’s wit in the portrait scene, Timante ‘the cloak-and-dagger-ite’, and the resentments of Adraste ‘the utter megalomaniac’. There is an off-stage autocratic power ‘over there’, and once the rehearsals got onto the set this became literally so, for the Élysée Palace was through the window and over the way. This power continually enters into the conversation of the salon, in its consciousness of being ‘in’, its knowingness. Later, the power irrupts into the room in the threat of arrest for a subversive pamphlet. Both Oronte and Arsinoé are tempters in that they offer Alceste ‘influence’, they will ‘oil the wheels’ or obtain a ‘place’ or a ‘sinecure’, if only he will admire a piddling poem or show some sexual interest. Acaste and Clitandre come to Célimène’s ‘party’ directly from the Élysée. There is a constant feeling of the nearness of political power. There is also something in the restless gaiety of such a salon that conceals defeat and desperation. It seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in all periods of impending change. One recalls Gérard de Nerval’s comment on a similar brilliance of his own set in Sylvie:

  … où toute mélancolie cédait devant la verve intarissable … tel qu’il s’en est trouvé dans les époques de rénovation ou de décadence, et dont les discussions se haussaient à ce point, que les plus timides d’entre nous allaient voir parfois aux fenêtres si les Huns, les Turcomans ou les Cosaques n’arrivaient pas enfin pour couper court à ces arguments …

  … with the sense of bitter sadness left by a vanished dream … Periods of renewal or decadence always produce such natures, and our discussions often became so animated that timid ones in the company would glance from the window to see if the Huns, the Turkomans or the Cossacks were not coming to put an end to those disputations …

  It is difficult with this reading of the background of the play to assent to the Romantic interpretations of it, though they have helped to focus on the obvious subjective anguish of Alceste. The play is not a tragedy, not even the tragédie bourgeoise that Brunetière called it, and certainly it is utterly absurd to call it ‘an uncompromising left-wing play’, as one critic did. It is too complex a play to be claimed by either left or right. Alceste is not a political radical, and far from being a proto-Marxist, and certainly, as he wavers between the salon of a coquette and a country estate, no activist. One has to clear désert of its Romantic accretions and go to Madame de Sévigné and the Furetière dictionary of 1690 for the meaning: country estate. Alceste’s désert is rather like an inverted image of the Moscow of the Three Sisters of Chekhov. I have already said how the modern background helps to show the absence of real objective social analysis in Alceste’s outbursts, though it by no means should exclude his subjective pain and anguish, which make him a both comic and moving figure. Others have been less lenient with Alceste. Mauriac said of him that ‘in a world where injustice is rife, he is up in arms against trivialities’. Against this judgement Martin Turnell in The Classical Moment asks us to set Stendhal’s view of Alceste:

  His mania for hurling himself against whatever appears odious, his gift for close and accurate reasoning and his extreme probity would soon have led him into politics or, what would have been much worse, to an objectionable and seditious philosophy. Célimène’s salon would at once have been compromised and soon become a desert. And what would a coquette find to do in a deserted salon?

  One must also remember how horrified he is to have a subversive pamphlet foisted onto him by his enemi
es, in the way that Molière himself had by dévots angered by Tartuffe. It seems to me that the production at the National took cognizance of both these extremes of opinion, and while recognising Alceste’s potential for political thought, is faithful to Molière in leaving in ambiguity any fulfilment of that potential. If the play is set ‘circa 1966’, the spectator worried by these issues can always ask himself the question, ‘What would the position of this Alceste be in les événements of May 1968?’ The transposition, in my view, helps to make the background more important, though none the less background to the central human relationship, than the stereotypes of period costume perhaps allow.

  Erich Auerbach’s brilliant study of the meaning of La Cour et La Ville in the seventeenth century shows that real power has bypassed such people as Acaste and his whole class, ‘meaningless, without economic or political or any other organic foundation’. Alceste is only partially or potentially liberated from this milieu. With Gossman I find something almost Chekhovian in Le Misanthrope. ‘Chekhov’, he writes, ‘joins hands over the centuries with his great predecessor, for Molière’s Misanthrope is the first profound statement in modern terms of the world’s silent indifference to those who no longer have any significant place in it or relation to it.’

  IV

  We began rehearsals in late December 1972, with a text that was for me still only partially anchored in the recent past. I felt that I had by no means solved all the problems of the transposition, but we had decided to leave the text as it stood as a ‘springboard’ into the play, and we hoped that I would be able to do what rewriting seemed necessary in a concentrated way after hearing the actors’ reactions and earliest interpretations. The best way to illustrate what happened during rehearsals and how much the text owes to the close collaboration of director, actors and poet is to take a few examples. I had earlier objected to John Dexter that since we were now in the ’60s of this century a poetaster like Oronte was unlikely to produce a sonnet. Others agreed, and Kenneth Tynan felt that a parody of a modern style would be better. The more I heard the sonnet in rehearsals, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t right. I had originally given Oronte a sonnet in octosyllabics, as in Molière:

  Hope can ease the lover’s pain,

  make anguish easier to bear,

  but, Phyllis, that’s a doubtful gain

  if all that follows hope’s despair.

  Great kindness to me once you showed.

  You should have been I think less kind.

  Why so much so soon bestowed

  if hope was all you had in mind?

  With all eternity to wait

  a lover’s zeal turns desperate

  and looks for hope in last extremes!

  Lovely Phyllis, I’m past care

  but lovers like me all despair

  if offered only hope and dreams.

  I planted deliberate excrescences for Alceste to pick up in his outburst when it finally comes, making the criticism a little more specific than in the original:

  You followed unnatural models when you wrote;

  your style’s stiff and awkward. Let me quote:

  ‘last extremes’ tautologous, the rest, hot air;

  it goes in circles: bear/care, despair/despair,

  wait/desperate, all pretty desperate rhymes.

  It’s repetitive: hope you use five times.

  When the sonnet went, that went too. I had earlier rewritten all the entrances in the first three acts to adapt to John Dexter’s idea of running those acts together with a party going on downstairs, as a means of overcoming the perennial problem of ‘visiting’ in seventeenth-century plays. This also led to the brilliant juxtaposition of Lully’s music to the same music transposed into a modem pop idiom by Marc Wilkinson. We had still not solved the problem of an equivalent for the Marshalsea of France, an office of the seventeenth century created to arbitrate in quarrels between gentlemen after the abolition of duelling. It is an obscure enough office to warrant a note in all editions and translations. The dramatic point lies in the discrepancy between the machinery brought to bear and the triviality of the quarrel between Alceste and Oronte over the trifling poem in question. I made the Marshalsea the Académie Française at John Dexter’s suggestion. Kenneth Tynan had suggested that Oronte should threaten to have Alceste blackballed from Le Jockey Club, which though socially plausible hadn’t, we decided, the right imposing sound for an English audience unacquainted with French high life. But I had tried a version with Le Jockey Club. I imagined Oronte coming over to Célimène’s party, a little drunk and overfed, from Maxim’s, where the Club Committee, say, had been dining, with his poem, clearly intended for Célimène, doodled on the Maxim’s menu, which he turned this way and that as he reconstructed the jottings as he recited. I tried to retain the theme of the original sonnet, with its contrast between a lover’s hope and despair, while trying to draw the metaphors from the new context. It went something like:

  That kiss was my apéritif,

  that cuddle the hors d’oeuvres.

  Now I’m wanting the roast beef

  that’s something you won’t serve.

  Passion’s a sort of super chef

  and you his spécialité.

  Fulfilment the head waiter’s deaf

  and never looks my way.

  And so alone at Love’s Maxim’s

  I gnaw the empty air.

  Here’s my plate of hopeless dreams,

  my drained glass of despair.

  Neither Alec McCowen nor Diana Rigg, whose insights into comedy were a constant inspiration for me to produce them better lines, thought the new Oronte poem appropriate. I could see that they were right and I rejected it there and then. Diana Rigg went to her dressing room and brought back a ‘little magazine’ of poetry, and said that she thought Oronte was more likely to write something like the poems in it. We all read them aloud and decided she was right. Memories of editing little magazines came back to me, and that evening after rehearsals, prompted by the magazine Diana Rigg had given me ‘for inspiration’, I wrote Oronte’s poem as it now stands, again preserving the theme, if nothing else:

  Hope was assuaging:

  its glimmer

  cheered my gloomy pilgrimage

  to the gold shrine of your love …

  a mirage of water pool and palms

  to a nomad lost in the Sahara …

  but in the end it only makes thirst worse.

  Darling, if this hot trek

  to some phantasmal Mecca

  of love’s consummation

  is some sort of Herculean Labour

  then I’ve fallen by the wayside.

  A deeper, darker otherwhere

  is unfulfilment …

  we who have bathed in the lustrous light

  of your charisma

  now languish in miasmal black despair

  and all we hopeless lovers share

  the nightmare of the bathosphere.

  Alceste’s outburst, to correspond to Oronte’s new literary excrescences, I felt had to be somewhat ruder than before:

  Jesus wept!

  It’s bloody rubbish, rhythmically inept,

  vacuous verbiage, wind, gas, guff.

  All lovestruck amateurs churn out that stuff.

  It’s formless, slack, a nauseating sprawl,

  and riddled with stale clichés; that’s not all.

  ‘Thirst worse’ cacophonous, and those ‘ek eks’

  sound like a bullfrog in the throes of sex.

  The bullfrog, of course, came partly from Aristophanes and partly from the grotesque appearance of the huffing, much-padded Gawn Grainger as Oronte.

  Another passage that was rewritten in rehearsal was Eliante’s speech beginning:

  L’amour pour l’ordinaire, est peu fait à ces lois.

  Et l’on voit les amants vanter toujours leur choix.

  (vv. 711–12)

  Many editors, I think wrongly, find the dramatic justification of this speech a
little doubtful, and try to explain its presence by saying that Molière was using up an old version of Lucretius’ De rerum Natura (IV, 1160–69) that he had written in his youth. The piece has a relevance I haven’t the space to dwell on, but one cannot escape the feeling that the lines have the air of a prepared set piece, as though Eliante were only able to be witty through the proxy of quotation, as opposed to Célimène’s spontaneous crackle. I decided to take those critics head-on and allow Eliante to call her speech ‘not inapposite’ to the situation. I also went back to the Latin of Lucretius for the examples of love’s euphemisms and made Eliante introduce her speech with the admission that what was to follow was a quotation from a well-known source:

  How does that bit in old Lucretius go,

  that bit on blinkered lovers? O, you know …

  I could give many examples of lines, phrases, whole couplets, words which I revised in collaboration with the actors, when they were reaching for something better, or funnier, or simply dramatically more effective. Often I went away and produced a set of possible alternatives for one couplet, and the actor in question and John Dexter and maybe others involved in the scene would test them and vote on which was best. The last alteration to be made was in the same Eliante speech. It was something I had felt to be wrong but, I suppose, had hoped that at this late stage no one would notice. I had all along tried to maintain the illusion of ‘Frenchness’ by making use of French words, not necessarily in the original, which were common currency in English, often as rhyme words to stress their presence, phrases like: ‘au fait’, ‘bons mots’, ‘mon cher’, ‘entrée’, ‘ordinaire’, ‘enchanté’. But in Eliante’s speech I had: