The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome
Page 14
In 1997, we were in Rome from May 20 to July 4.
21 May 97 I sit at the Bar G up the road and look over at the Villa Aurelia. I love the Academy and our parallel existence in Rome. In every corner of the Academy, you feel activity; people coming here to write, to paint, to compose, to discover —to put history into a new perspective as an artist, an architect, a scholar. This efflorescence of creativity at the highest point of Rome, with a connection with art going on behind every window. Joseph Brodsky said that being at the American Academy was a shortcut to paradise. Is there a play here?
22 May 97 Maybe not. Why? Because this is the place everybody wants to be. Most plays are not set at the destination of where you want to be. Aren’t plays more comfortable trying to get out of the place of dissatisfaction to the place where you want to be, to get to the Ideal where—in the words of Mary Tyrone—“We were so happy for a while”? Blanche trying to reclaim Belle Reve—those three sisters trying to get to Moscow—or how to make Thebes healthy again—or knowing that Godot’s arrival will make this barren place understandable. No, the AAR—here, right now—this is the utopia, the goal, the Jerusalem. Here the cherry orchard is always safe, secure, and flourishing. You can’t write a play about happiness and contentment. Can you?
23 May 97 But wait. What if someone had won a year at the Academy and for some reason during that time was expelled from that paradise? Why the expulsion? An artist or a scholar no longer able to work at his or her art or research. What kind of an artist? What kind of scholar? How could writing or music or scholarly work be the cause of ejection?
28 May 97 Look at the labels on tubes of oil paint. See the lethal warnings about the toxins and carcinogenics that are displayed with skull and crossbones on the basic tools of a painter’s craft. Suppose paint has given my painter cancer. He recovers, but will no longer be able to work the way he always has, to use the paint that got him the Rome prize.
Gaugin: “A man is incapable of doing two things at once, and I can only do one—paint.”
My painter—call him Matt—feels expelled not just from the Academy, but from everything that defines his life. How to get Matt back on the track as an artist will be the action of the play.
It’s not a one-man show. Who are his friends?
29 May 97 The Academy is divided between scholars and artists. In 1915, the director of the Academy, Jesse Benedict Carter, wrote that the Academy had begun “what many persons considered to be the perilous experiment of housing together artists and scholars. The baleful influence of the juxtaposition of the misers of facts with the spendthrifts of imagination had been painted for us in lurid colors…. The prophets forgot one small but significant fact: our fellows are … ours by combined process of competition and selection [and are] … united on a mutual base of common sense which eschews the encyclopedist and the futurist alike.”
30 May 97 Wonderful concert of Arthur Levering’s music played by Donald Berman. One piece is hilarious: “Uncle Inferno,” written for six hands at one piano. Oscar Hijuelos, who’s here visiting, says the piece makes him remember Sabu in Song of India singing, “I Want To Be a Sailor.” The Academy makes you remember things long since forgotten or discarded. Everything comes back for review. I love the spirit of collegiality that permeates every fiber of this place.
31 May 97 The play—whatever it will be—will be set at the Academy, but it must not be about the Academy. The AAR is the backdrop. It must not be a roman a clef.
The artist’s Academy friends would help him get back on track. His friend would be not another painter, but a scholar—Pete—who’s also won a Rome prize. The girl. Matt’s girlfriend is here on a fellowship. Sarah’s a curator—yes, for the Metropolitan Museum.
Matt is a painter who believes in high art. He’s not kidding when he calls out to Caravaggio, Piero to wait for him.
Van Gogh: “I have a hankering after the eternal.”
Matt believes that the role of the artist is to bear witness to his time on this planet, to say through his art this is what it was like to be alive now.
2 June 97 Pete and Sarah will have none of this. In the great democratic zeitgeist, the idea of an artist as a rarified being is an elitist concept. In a democracy, you’re an artist if you say you’re an artist. Duchamp. Beuys. Pete and Sarah are determined to get Matt out of his despair and get him back working. So what if he can’t use paint? Painting poisoned him! Besides, painting is an outdated concept. There are so many new tools to use for art. Pete and Sarah barrage Matt with options of what’s considered art today. Matt rejects all their suggestions. None of the tools that Pete and Sarah offer as alternatives to paint have the aesthetic dimensions of paint. Pete or Sarah has to provide an alternative tool that has the tragic dimensions of paint.
If art’s about bearing witness to your time, what time is the play set in?
In 1997, I worked on other projects. In 1998, we were in and out of Rome from April 25 through June 8.
28 April 98 Dinner tonight on the lush rooftop garden of a Roman friend. I asked why Rome’s become a chaos of construction? La Principessa B. tells me with great Italian drama that a nightmare is about to happen: For il Giubeleo, the Holy Year, coming up in 2000 (the last one was in 1975), Rome is building, rebuilding, getting ready for the hordes of fifty million. Other guests chime in: Thirty million—no no no, I hear eighty million pilgrims will descend on us. La Principessa continues: “Whatever the number, it’s in the high millions. These pellegrini will stay an average of three days on their pellegrinaggio to go through the four basilicas and get all their sins forgiven. It’s a very good deal as these things go. But here’s the wonderful part. For all these pellegrini, Rome has only thirty-five thousand hotel rooms. Chaos! Caos!”
29 April 98 Of course. Set the Academy play in the Holy Year 2000. All these pilgrims traveling to Rome for redemption. A Christian hajj to our Mecca. Isn’t every fellow who comes to the Academy a pilgrim? Canterbury Tales for the year 2000. Chaucer. Is this my version of Chaucer?
30 April 98 I find the perfect book in the Academy library, The Roman Jubilee, written in 1925 by Herbert Thurston, S.J. Ahh, the Jesuits of my college days. It tells me all I need to know about the upcoming Holy Year. It seems in the early centuries of the Church, pilgrims would travel to sites in the Holy Land, making it a very profitable travel business for the Church. The Crusades at the end of the 13th century killed off that industry. The head of the ever-pragmatic Church, Pope Boniface, did a very smart thing. He declared 1300 to be a Holy Year, meaning that if all the pilgrims who normally would go to the Holy Land would come instead to Rome they’d get all the benefits plus lots of special ones. The Holy Year equivalent of double or triple frequent flier miles to heaven. All they had to do was follow a few rules, which still stand today, seven hundred years later.
1 May 98 I stroll down the hill to a bookstore in Vatican City. learn about II Comitatoper il Grande Giubileo dell’anno 2000, the Vatican committee that runs the Holy Year. I go to its offices and ask to meet a priest. He is very cautious with his information. Why am I asking? Who am I? Why do I need to know? A play? What kind of play? He is very suspicious and terminates the meeting. The play needs a Vatican representative to carry the rules of the Holy Year. Don’t forget the Vatican bank is called the Institute for Works of Religion. Make the priest very worldly. (After the play opened, at least five people asked me if I had based my priest on a specific priest. Such as? I asked. The five people named five different priests as source.)
But who would my pilgrims be?
2 May 98 I walk around Rome trying to figure out who my pilgrims would be. How are they part of this Academy play? Pilgrims’ Progress. Pilgrims’ Regress. Chaucer. Chaucer in Rome? Did Chaucer go to Rome?
3 May 98 Back to the library. In 1372-73, Edward III sent Chaucer on a trade mission to Genoa and then on to Florence and Padua, where Chaucer met Petrarch. No Rome. But I like the sound of Chaucer in Rome.
I think of The House of Blue Leaves
, in which Rome came to New York. In the year 2000, reverse the tables. New York comes to Rome.
Who’s alive or sane at the end of Blue Leaves to make the trip? Only Ronnie the son who was eighteen in 1965 and who was born in 1947, making him fifty-three today. Ronnie comes to Rome. Am I writing a sequel? Just keep writing.
4 May 98 I come across this detail: In 1699 the great Restoration playwright George Farquhar (The Beaux Stratagem) wrote a play called The Constant Couple; or A Trip to the Jubilee, about the Holy Year.
5 May 98 The Academy does its memory tricks. Revisiting Blue Leaves makes me think of my father: The man with the soul of an artist who had no gifts as an artist. Eddie dreamed of writing songs, of writing a symphony of the city. “Johnny, with the undercurrent of the symphony being the subway rumbling or riding the ferry boat to Staten Island. The sound of-the trading floor at the Stock Exchange [where he worked]. That churning under everything all the time. The sirens. The jackhammers. The fire trucks. Making music out of all that. Nobody’s done it like I hear in my head.” “Why don’t you do it?” I ask. Eddie: (sudden anger) “Because I didn’t have fucking parents like me who shell out for piano lessons. You don’t have to know about music to hear the music.”
7 May 98 Pete and Matt and Sarah are all in their late twenties. Is Ronnie the father of Matt the artist or Sarah or Pete? Keep the legacy going. Ronnie is father of Pete. Pete comes into focus. Keep the balance between the painter and the scholar.
Pete will finally come up with an idea for art that attracts Matt.
9 May 98 What is the source of art? What else but our life. Pete offers the facts of his life—his parents—to Matt.
10 May 98 I find a copy of Farquahr’s play at the Academy. No. The Holy Year is only a backdrop.
11 May 98 I thought of myself coming to Europe in 1965 to flee my past, flee who I was, find what I thought I should be. And what I found was the material for Blue Leaves. Let the past show up here. Pete’s parents. The pilgrims. All these sudden appearances. But Catholicism is filled with sudden appearances. The Annunciation. The conversion of St. Paul. Yes! Let this be what Sarah is researching on her curatorial.
Gaugin: “I am seeking to discover an unknown corner of myself.”
12 May 98 On the theory that art is ripped out of your life, Pete offers his parents to Matt as the tools of art. Find out why they’ve come for purification. Video them. See people baring their souls. Matt sniffs truth. Matt takes Pete’s offer. Matt is home.
Is it betrayal? Is all art betrayal?
13 May 98 Hawthorne said somewhere that the one unpardonable sin is to betray someone. His phrase: “Violating the sanctity of a human heart.”
Did I betray my parents in Blue Leaves?
Kant. The second categorical imperative: “Act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person, or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means whereby.”
Rousseau: “Man is too noble a being to serve simply as the instrument for others, and he must not be used for what suits them without consulting also what suits himself … it is never right to harm a human soul for the advantage of others.”
I am becoming a rolodex of quotations.
14 May 98 Did Blue Leaves betray my parents? No. They are my life. My life belongs to me. That’s my justification.
15 May 98 Pete stumbles into art by offering up his parents as grist for Matt’s work. Matt survives brilliantly out of it, survives and goes on. But Pete is devastated by the chaos he has caused. He doesn’t have the—the what? The blind spot of the artist? Graham Greene’s splinter of ice that’s at the heart of every novelist—or artist.
16 May 98 Everybody in the play is a pilgrim on some kind of journey searching for some kind of redemption. Matt gets redeemed by success. What redeems Pete? Does Pete get redeemed?
17 May 98 Matt and Pete switch souls.
18 May 98 Don’t judge Matt’s success. Matt’s not a sellout. He’s staying alive as an artist until the next door opens. Matt, the artist, discovers a pragmatic self who can adapt to life. Pete, the scholar, discovers he has the soul of an artist, but neither the gifts nor the resilience.
19 May 98 Do I have to show Pete being redeemed? No. His redemption is not what this play is about. His getting to a place where he needs redemption is. He destroys his parents somehow. The play’s beginning: Matt in despair, Pete joyous. End: Matt in his joy, Pete in despair.
Seeing the eccentric movie of Portrait of a Lady, with its dish of lima beans that talk to Isabel Archer, sent me back to the source, which I last read in college. It became very valuable to me in the writing of this play.
24 May 98 I underline in Portrait of a Lady: “I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed. One must accept one’s deeds.”
Again Portrait: “She had long before taken this old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruins of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… She had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers.”
Henry James has no talking lima beans anywhere.
25 May 98 After Isabel’s betrayal by Gilbert and Madame Merle, she goes to Rome. Why? I read Phillip Rahv’s essay on Portrait in Literature in the Sixth Sense: “Only through heroic suffering is its evil to be redeemed. On this tragic note, the story ends.”
At the end Matt and Sarah will find Pete not in Rome, but in Italy—yes, in Sicily. Italy as a place where people who have suffered work out their destinies.
And I wrote a draft of the play.
February 99 I show a rough draft to the Williamstown Theater Festival and the director Nicholas Martin. They say, let’s take a chance. Let’s do Chaucer in Rome in July 1999.
3 June 99 In Rome for a month to finish first draft of Chaucer. Polly Holliday, Bruce Norris, Lee Wilkoff, B.D. Wong, Kali Rocha have signed on in good faith. I’m cutting it too close to the wire.
7 June 99 I still don’t know the specifics of Matt’s cancer.
15 June 99 Still no specifics of Matt’s cancer.
1 July 99 My last day in Rome. Our writer friend Gian-Luigi Melaga comes to the rescue; before Adele and I go to the airport, he takes me to Ospedale Regina Margharita to meet Rafael Argentieri, a dermatologist. II Dottore shows me horrible photos of the kind of malignancy Matt’s paints would have given him. Squamos cell carcinoma.
6 July 99 I show up in Williamstown with new draft of play. We go into rehearsal.
4 August 99 A commercial management wants to do the play immediately. Andre Bishop wants to produce the play at Lincoln Center, but not for a year and a half. Not till 2001! Wait. The play takes place in the upcoming 2000. Let the Holy Year happen. Suppose the Pope dies. Suppose some event happens that should be in the play. Learn a lesson from Rome. A year and a half? Seconds by Rome standards.
October 2000 At the Damien Hirst show at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The most interesting fact about the show is that it cost a couple of million dollars to install. Adele and I walk around the tall water-filled glass cases displaying shark-like fish swimming around tables from a gynecologist’s office. Another display: beautifully crafted shelves containing vials of every pill he’s taken or is currently taking.
George Steiner has a phrase in his new book. He calls Duchamp “a high priest of triviality.”
June 2000 I come across something the great German painter Gerhard Richter said: “I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or of even knowing what such a thing ought to
look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen.” This is Matt.
10 April 2001 The Pope survived. Rome survived. The play has its first preview tonight.
I didn’t set out to write a sequel to The House of Blue Leaves. But is Chaucer In Rome a sequel? I thought I was over the issues of Blue Leaves. Isn’t writing a play some sort of exorcism? No, all you’re doing is setting those roots deeper.
Thirty years later, in 2002, I read the last lines of the preface I wrote for The House of Blue Leaves in 1972. “I liked them, loved them, stayed too long and didn’t go away.” Thirty years later, it still stands. But then I met Adele in 1975 and real life began.
—JOHN GUARE
March 2002
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