Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  As a rule, Shaw’s arbitrariness does not disturb. After all, he is conducting a seminar with enormous wit and style and we don’t much mind his more casual contrivances. But in this play they don’t come off. I think it has to do with a fundamental conflict between characters and settings. The characters, of course, are our old friends the Bernard Shaw Team of Fabian Debaters; we know each one of them already. But what are they doing in this peculiar Midsummer’s Eve ambiance? They seem a bit puzzled, too. As they debate with their usual ease they tend nervously to eye the shrubbery: are there elves at the bottom of that garden? Have we been booked into an allegory? Are we going to find out we’re all dead or something? Steady, chaps, the old boy’s got us into one of those plays. They rattle on bravely but they are clearly ill at ease, and so is the audience. I think it was one of the New York daily reviewers who observed that the mood is not Chekhov but J. M. Barrie. Which is exactly right. We are led to expect magic, fey girls upon the heath, and revelation through fantasy. But we get none of it. Instead we are offered the old Debating Team in top form but in the wrong place and mood (oh, for that dentist’s office!). As a result the debaters recede as characters; we grow indifferent to them; they are too humorous in the original sense of the word. Especially Ellie, Shaw’s super-girl. In this version she is more than ever iron, ready to mother not heroes but heroines. Shaw dotes on Ellie; I found her purest drip-torture. Halfway through the play I had a startling aperçu: Shaw regarded himself not as a man or an artist or a social meliorist but as a kind of superwoman, a chaste spinster fiercely armed with the umbrella of dialectic, asexual limbs blue-stockinged, and tongue wagging. Of all the debaters assembled, I liked only Captain Shotover, because his dottiness contrasted agreeably with the uneasy predictability of his teammates.

  Finally, at the play’s end, I found myself entirely confused as to what Shaw intended. Shaw is not, even when he would like to be, an impressionist, a Chekhov turning life before our eyes to no end but that life observed is sufficient. Look, we live, we are, says Chekhov. While Shaw declares briskly: Pull up your socks! Fall in line there. Come along now. Double-quick march and we’ll overtake the future by morning! One loves Shaw for his optimism, but moonlight is not a time for marching, and Heartbreak House is a moonlight play, suitable for recapturing the past. Elegy and debate cancel one another out. Nor is the work really satiric, an attack on “folly and worthlessness.” These people are splendid and unique, and Shaw knows it. He cannot blow them up at the end.

  Shaw’s prefaces—no matter how proudly irrelevant their content may, at first, seem to the play that follows (sometimes a bit forlornly)—usually turn out to be apposite or at least complementary. But not this preface. In fact, it is misleading. Shaw talks about Chekhov. He finds the country-house mentality Chekhov seems to be writing about endemic to Europe, part of the sweet sickness of the bourgeoisie. Therefore Shaw will examine the same house in the same way, only in English terms. Ever since that preface, we have all dutifully considered this play in terms of Chekhov. Does it compare? Is it as good? Why is it unlike? It is true that both are dealing with the same dying society of “nice people,” but where Chekhov’s interest was the “nice people,” Shaw’s interest was the dying society and the birth pains of the new.

  Shaw once told Sir Cedric Hardwicke that he had no idea how to end the play until the first bombs fell. I suspect he had originally planned to allow Captain Shotover to attain “the Seventh Degree of concentration,” thereby detonating the dynamite he had stored in the gravel pit and blowing up the enemy Mangan. As it was, at the last minute, the bomb from the Zeppelin did the trick even better, providing Shaw quite literally with a god from the machine. Then, almost as an afterthought, Shaw comes to the point:

  HECTOR: Well, I don’t mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

  CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.

  HECTOR: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

  CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.

  And that’s it. Captain Shotover, supposed to have sold his soul to the devil, to have meddled with mysticism, to have mastered the non sequitur, turns out to be a good Fabian socialist after all. Obviously, Shotover was a humbug mystic, excusably deranged by the setting Shaw put him in; not until faced with his world’s extinction does he throw off the mask of dottiness to reveal the bright, hard, intelligent face of Bernard Shaw, who to this day has a good deal to tell us about the danger of a society drifting as opposed to one which has learned the virtue of setting a deliberate course by fixed stars. To navigate is to plan. Laissez-faire, though always delightful for a few, in crisis is disastrous for all. There is no alternative to a planned society; that is the burden of the Shaw debate. Almost as an afterthought he makes this familiar point as the bomb drops near Heartbreak House.

  The production now on view is ambitious, and at many points successful. As usual, I found myself more attentive to the audience than to the play. As they say in physics, there is no action without reaction. I can think of no urgent reason for writing about productions in the theater unless one also writes about the audience, too. The play acts upon the audience, which is society today; the audience reacts and in its reaction one can get a sense of the superstitions and prejudices which obtain. Theater can be revelatory. In fact, I wish sociologists would spend more time in the theater and less in conducting polls and drawing graphs. Any audience at Tea and Sympathy or Auntie Mame will tell them more about the way we live now than a house-to-house canvass from Morristown to White Plains with pad and pencil.

  In the case of an old play like Heartbreak House one may also use it as a touchstone. In the 1920’s it seemed one thing, in the 1930’s another, and so on. To those watching, the day I saw it, Heartbreak House was a delightful place, menaced by burglars, self-made men, and Zeppelins. The clothes were chic yet quaint and every woman saw herself up there pouring tea for weak enamored men who tended to burst into tears while the ladies talked a bright blue streak. Whenever the debate really got going, 1959’s attention flagged: Is that a rubber plant? Can they still get egret feathers or is that an imitation? Did you leave the keys in the car?…Bernard Shaw, I’m afraid, was being taken for Oscar Wilde, and afflicted with un-Wildean longueurs. But then we are not used to debate at any level. If Bernard Shaw, who made the act of argument as pleasurable as any writer who ever lived, cannot hold his audience except by predictable paradoxes and references to adultery and all the familiar junk of the Commercialites, we the audience are in a bad way. Although in fairness it must be admitted that talking about society and the better life and planning of any sort has never been a characteristic of the Anglo-American mind.

  Nevertheless, Harold Clurman has directed this production just as though we were really awake out there and knew what was going on. He is enormously helped by Diana Wynyard and Pamela Brown, who are beautifully right for this kind of thing. Maurice Evans, an actor I seem to like only as Richard II no matter what else he plays, is unexpectedly fine as Captain Shotover. I’m not sure dressing up to look like Bernard Shaw was a wise idea; I suspect Shaw would have hated it; but it does help Mr. Evans to hide beneath whiskers and putty the self-pitying face of Richard II, and I could not have liked him more. Sam Levene of course was all wrong as Boss Mangan. He is a good farceur, but in another style, and his scenes tended to throw everyone else off: it was not unlike casting our own beloved Marjorie Main as Lady Bracknell. The other weak link is Diane Cilento as Ellie, the supergirl. Miss Cilento plays with a grinding monotony made worse because she has gone and got herself one of those Voices. Let me explain. Right after the war, Pamela Brown’s most lovely strange diction was the ambition and despair of every English girl on the stage. We got Miss Brown’s Voice in every possible key. Then there was heard in the land Joan Greenwood’s hoarse, intimate rasp, to our delight and her peers’ despai
r. Now Miss Cilento has distilled herself a voice which is two-parts Brown and one-part Greenwood, and I think she ought to give it up, right now. She is a beautiful girl with some talent; yet if Ellie is to be made less than revolting she must be played with as little artifice and as much “naturalness” as possible. I daresay Mr. Clurman was aware of this, but sooner get a bird to sing Mozart than force an actress to discard a Voice she has worked on. All in all, reservations about this particular play aside, I hope it runs forever and gives heart to those who expect the theater to be something more than a business for those who, in their calculated desire to please us, only make us more than ever absent of mind.

  The Reporter, November 26, 1959.

  *I was briefly a drama critic for The Reporter magazine. At the end of my tenure I decided that the government and the foundations should subsidize not the actors, writers, theaters but the audience. We are the ones who need the money, not the actors, who should pay us for watching them, since we can never enjoy the experience as much as they do.

  THE TWELVE CAESARS*

  Tiberius, Capri. Pool of water. Small children…So far so good. One’s laborious translation was making awful sense. Then…Fish. Fish? The erotic mental image became surreal. Another victory for the Loeb Library’s sly translator, J. C. Rolfe, who, correctly anticipating the prurience of schoolboy readers, left Suetonius’s gaudier passages in the hard original. One failed to crack those intriguing footnotes not because the syntax was so difficult (though it was not easy for students drilled in military rather than civilian Latin) but because the range of vice revealed was considerably beyond the imagination of even the most depraved schoolboy. There was a point at which one rejected one’s own translation. Tiberius and the little fish, for instance.

  Happily, we now have a full translation of the text, the work of Mr. Robert Graves, who, under the spell of his Triple Goddess, has lately been retranslating the classics. One of his first tributes to her was a fine rendering of The Golden Ass; then Lucan’s Pharsalia; then the Greek Myths, a collation aimed at rearranging the hierarchy of Olympus to afford his Goddess (the female principle) a central position at the expense of the male. (Beware Apollo’s wrath, Graves: the “godling” is more than front man for the “Ninefold Muse-Goddess.”) Now, as a diversion, Mr. Graves has given us The Twelve Caesars of Suetonius in a good, dry, no-nonsense style; and, pleasantly enough, the Ancient Mother of Us All is remarkable only by her absence, perhaps a subtle criticism of an intensely masculine period in history.

  Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—lawyer and author of a dozen books, among them Lives of Famous Whores and The Physical Defects of Mankind (What was that about?)—worked for a time as private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian. Presumably it was during this period that he had access to the imperial archives, where he got the material for The Twelve Caesars, the only complete book of his to survive. Suetonius was born in A.D. 69, the year of the three Caesars Galba, Otho, Vitellius; and he grew up under the Flavians: Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, whom he deals with as contemporaries. He was also close enough in time to the first six Caesars to have known men who knew them intimately, at least from Tiberius on, and it is this place in time which gives such immediacy to his history.

  Suetonius saw the world’s history from 49 B.C. to A.D. 96 as the intimate narrative of twelve men wielding absolute power. With impressive curiosity he tracked down anecdotes, recording them dispassionately, despite a somewhat stylized reactionary bias. Like his fellow historians from Livy to the stuffy but interesting Dion Cassius, Suetonius was a political reactionary to whom the old Republic was the time of virtue and the Empire, implicitly, was not. But it is not for his political convictions that we read Suetonius. Rather, it is his gift for telling us what we want to know. I am delighted to read that Augustus was under five feet seven, blond, wore lifts in his sandals to appear taller, had seven birthmarks and weak eyes; that he softened the hairs of his legs with hot walnut shells, and liked to gamble. Or to learn that the droll Vespasian’s last words were: “Dear me, I must be turning into a god.” (“Dear me” being Graves for “Vae.”) The stories, true or not, are entertaining, and when they deal with sex startling, even to a post-Kinseyan.

  Gibbon, in his stately way, mourned that of the twelve Caesars only Claudius was sexually “regular.” From the sexual opportunism of Julius Caesar to the sadism of Nero to the doddering pederasty of Galba, the sexual lives of the Caesars encompassed every aspect of what our post-medieval time has termed “sexual abnormality.” It would be wrong, however, to dismiss, as so many commentators have, the wide variety of Caesarean sensuality as simply the viciousness of twelve abnormal men. They were, after all, a fairly representative lot. They differed from us—and their contemporaries—only in the fact of power, which made it possible for each to act out his most recondite sexual fantasies. This is the psychological fascination of Suetonius. What will men so placed do? The answer, apparently, is anything and everything. Alfred Whitehead once remarked that one got the essence of a culture not by those things which were said at the time but by those things which were not said, the underlying assumptions of the society, too obvious to be stated. Now it is an underlying assumption of twentieth-century America that human beings are either heterosexual or, through some arresting of normal psychic growth, homosexual, with very little traffic back and forth. To us, the norm is heterosexual; the family is central; all else is deviation, pleasing or not depending on one’s own tastes and moral preoccupations. Suetonius reveals a very different world. His underlying assumption is that man is bisexual and that given complete freedom to love—or, perhaps more to the point in the case of the Caesars, to violate—others, he will do so, going blithely from male to female as fancy dictates. Nor is Suetonius alone in this assumption of man’s variousness. From Plato to the rise of Pauline Christianity, which tried to put the lid on sex, it is explicit in classical writing. Yet to this day Christian, Freudian and Marxian commentators have all decreed or ignored this fact of nature in the interest each of a patented approach to the Kingdom of Heaven. It is an odd experience for a contemporary to read of Nero’s simultaneous passion for both a man and a woman. Something seems wrong. It must be one or the other, not both. And yet this sexual eclecticism recurs again and again. And though some of the Caesars quite obviously preferred women to men (Augustus had a particular penchant for Nabokovian nymphets), their sexual crisscrossing is extraordinary in its lack of pattern. And one suspects that despite the stern moral legislation of our own time human beings are no different. If nothing else, Dr. Kinsey revealed in his dogged, arithmetical way that we are all a good deal less predictable and bland than anyone had suspected.

  * * *

  —

  One of the few engaging aspects of the Julio-Claudians was authorship. They all wrote; some wrote well. Julius Caesar, in addition to his account of that famed crusade in Gaul, wrote an Oedipus. Augustus wrote an Ajax, with some difficulty. When asked by a friend what his Ajax had been up to lately, Augustus sighed: “He has fallen not on his sword, but wiped himself out on my sponge.” Tiberius wrote an Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar. The scatterbrained Claudius, a charmingly dim prince, was a devoted pedant who tried to reform the alphabet. He was also among the first to have a serious go at Etruscan history. Nero of course is remembered as a poet. Julius Caesar and Augustus were distinguished prose writers; each preferred plain old-fashioned Latin. Augustus particularly disliked what he called the “Asiatic” style, favored by, among others, his rival Marc Antony, whose speeches he found imprecise and “stinking of farfetched phrases.”

  Other than the fact of power, the twelve Caesars as men had little in common with one another. But that little was significant: a fear of the knife in the dark. Of the twelve, eight (perhaps nine) were murdered. As Domitian remarked not long before he himself was struck down: “Emperors are necessarily wretched men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their
lives are real.” In an understandable attempt to outguess destiny, they studied omens, cast horoscopes, and analyzed dreams (they were ingenious symbolists, anticipating Dr. Freud, himself a Roman buff). The view of life from Palatine Hill was not comforting, and though none of the Caesars was religious in our sense of the word, all inclined to the Stoic. It was Tiberius, with characteristic bleakness, who underscored their dangerous estate when he declared that it was Fate, not the gods, which ordered the lives of men.

  Yet what, finally, was the effect of absolute power on twelve representative men? Suetonius makes it quite plain: disastrous. Caligula was certifiably mad. Nero, who started well, became progressively irrational. Even the stern Tiberius’s character weakened. In fact, Tacitus, in covering the same period as Suetonius, observes: “Even after his enormous experience of public affairs, Tiberius was ruined and transformed by the violent influence of absolute power.” Caligula gave the game away when he told a critic, “Bear in mind that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” And that cruelty which is innate in human beings, now given the opportunity to use others as toys, flowered monstrously in the Caesars. Suetonius’s case history (and it is precisely that) of Domitian is particularly fascinating. An intelligent man of some charm, trained to govern, Domitian upon succeeding to the Principate at first contented himself with tearing the wings off flies, an infantile pastime which gradually palled until, inevitably, for flies he substituted men. His favorite game was to talk gently of mercy to a nervous victim; then, once all fears had been allayed, execute him. Nor were the Caesars entirely unobjective about their bizarre position. There is an oddly revealing letter of Tiberius to the Senate which had offered to ensure in advance ratification of all his future deeds. Tiberius declined the offer: “So long as my wits do not fail me, you can count on the consistency of my behavior; but I should not like you to set the precedent of binding yourselves to approve a man’s every action; for what if something happened to alter that man’s character?” In terror of their lives, haunted by dreams and omens, giddy with dominion, it is no wonder that actual insanity was often the Caesarean refuge from a reality so intoxicating.