He persisted. He swallowed insult, and in his new notion of himself as the Fool, he frequently gave insult, but he never gave up. He was determined to be a professional. If this was the way artists worked, he would be an artist in so far as a librettist was permitted such presumption.
It was not the way all artists worked. At least once a week Powell dashed up from Stratford in his snorting little red car, and his artistic method was all oil and balm.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely! Oh, this is very fine stuff, Simon. Do you know, when I am working on my other production—I’m getting up Twelfth Night, you know, for a May opening—I find words coming into my head that are not Shakespeare. They are unadulterated Darcourt. You’ve missed your calling, Sim bach. You are a poet. No doubt about it.”
“No, Geraint, I am not a poet. I am exploiting a poet to produce this stuff. The arias, and the long bits, are all his—with some tinkering, I admit. Only the recitativo passages are mine, and because of the way Nilla wants things, they are absolute buggers, because they have to have all this loose accompaniment underneath, and stresses falling in places that defy any sort of poetic common sense. Why can’t the singers just speak those parts, and sound like human beings and not crazed parrots?”
“Come on, Sim bach, you know why. Because Hoffmann wanted it otherwise, that’s why. He was an adventurer, an innovator. Long before Wagner he wanted an opera that was sung clear through, not broken up with spoken passages or recitative that is simply gabble to bustle on the plot. We must be faithful to old Hoffmann, boy. We must never betray old Hoffmann.”
“Very well. But it’s killing me.”
“No it isn’t. I’ve never seen you looking better. But now I’m going to talk against everything I’ve just said. We must have one big number for Arthur in Act Three, where he says loud and clear what Love is, and why he’s forgiving Guenevere and Lancelot. And there isn’t a damned scrap of Hoffmann that does it.”
“And so?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Dear little Schnaky-Waky is going to have to write a tune all by her dear little self, and you’re going to have to find words for it.”
“No, no,” said the Doctor. “That would indeed be untrue to Hoffmann.”
“Listen, Nilla. More operas have been spoiled by too much artistic conscience than have ever been glorified by genius. Just for the moment, forget about Hoffmann. Or no, that’s not what I mean. Think of what Hoffmann would do if he were still alive. I see him now, the wonderful bright-eyed little chap, chewing his quill and thinking, ‘What we need in Act Three is a great big, smashing aria for Arthur that pulls the whole thing together, and knocks the audience out of their socks. It’s got to be the one that everybody remembers, and that the barrel-organs play in the streets.’ We don’t have barrel-organs now, but he wouldn’t know that. It’s got to get the young, and the old, and if the critics despise it the critics of the next generation will hail it as genius.”
“I will not agree to anything that has a cheap appeal,” said the Doctor.
“Nilla—dear, uncompromising Nilla fach–there is the truly cheap art, and we all know what it is, but there is another kind of art, that goes far beyond what critics call good taste. Good taste is really just a kind of aesthetic vegetarianism, you know. You go beyond it at your peril, and you end up with schmalz like ‘M’appari’ in Marta. Or maybe you come up with ‘Voi, che sapete’, or ‘Porgi amor’, which is genius. Or you get the Evening Star aria out of Tannhäuser or the Habanera out of Carmen–and you can’t say Wagner dealt in cheap goods, and Bizet wrote the one sure-fire opera. You artists really must stop kicking the public in the face. They’re not all fools, you know. You’ve got to get something into this Hoffmann job that will lift it above a fancy academic exercise to earn Schnak a degree. We’ve got to wow ‘em, Nilla! Can you resist that?”
“This is very dangerous talk, Powell. I’m not sure I should let Hulda listen. These are dirtier words than any even she knows.”
“Come on, Nilla. I know this is the voice of the Tempter, but the Tempter has inspired some damned good stuff. Now listen carefully, Nilla. Have you ever heard this?
Though critics may bow to art,
And I am its own true lover,
It is not art, but heart
Which wins the wide world over.”
Darcourt, who had been listening with delight to the spellbinder, roared with laughter. He lifted his voice in imitation of Powell’s bardic chant, and continued:
“And it is not the poet’s song,
Though sweeter than sweet bells chiming,
Which thrills us through and through,
But the heart which beats under the rhyming.”
“Is that English poetry?” said the Doctor, her brows raised almost into her hair.
“Jesus, I think that’s wonderful!” said Schnak. “Oh, Nilla, did you ever hear it said better?”
“I am not at home in English verse,” said the Doctor, “but that sounds to me like—I will not use Hulda’s word—but it sounds like crap. That is a new word I have learned and it is very useful. Crap!”
“The expression is unquestionably crap,” said Darcourt. “But in the crap there is a precious jewel of truth. That is one of the problems of poetry. Even a terrible poet may hit on a truth. Even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn.”
“The professor sets us right, as he always does,” said Powell. “Raw heart can’t make art but woe to art when it snubs heart. By God—I ought to be a librettist! Now—will you do it?”
“I’ll have a crack at it,” said Schnak. “I’ve had about enough of writing music wrapped in Hoffmann’s old bathrobe.”
“I’ll certainly have a crack at it,” said Darcourt. “But on one condition. I find the verse before Schnak writes the music.”
“Sim bach, I see it in your eye! You have the verse already.”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” said Darcourt, and he recited it to them.
“Do that again, will you,” said Schnak, looking at Darcourt without suspicion and resentment for the first time since they had met.
Darcourt recited it again.
“That’s it!” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, Sim bach.”
“But is it good English verse?” said the Doctor.
“I’m not a man who awards marks to poets as if they were schoolboys,” said Darcourt. “It is from the best of a very good man, and far beyond the level of an opera libretto.”
“You’re surely going to tell us who the very good man is?” said Powell.
“He’s the man you spoke of as the base upon which we should rest this opera, the first time we discussed it,” said Darcourt. “It’s Sir Walter Scott.”
3
Can it be true, thought Darcourt, that I am sitting in this grand penthouse on a Sunday evening eating cold roast chicken and salad with three figures from Arthurian legend? Three people working out, in such terms as modernity dictates, the great myth of the betrayed king, the enchantress queen, and the brilliant adventurer?
Does the analogy hold? What did King Arthur attempt? He tried to extend the reach of civilization by demanding that his Knights, who belonged to an undoubted Elite of Birth, should embrace the concept of chivalry, thereby becoming an Elite of Achievement. Not just power, but the intelligent, unselfish use of power to make a better world; that was the idea.
What about Arthur Cornish, who is helping himself to currant jelly across the table? He belongs to a Birth Elite of a kind; of a Canadian kind, which thinks three generations of money are enough in themselves to make a man significant, do what he will. But Arthur wants to be an intellectual, and to advance civilization by the use of his power, which is his money; or rather, the money of the late Francis Cornish, the mysterious fortune which nobody can quite explain. Surely that is an attempt, and a very respectable attempt, to advance into an Elite of Achievement? Arthur Cornish probably commands more hard cash and more power than Arthur of Britain ever dreamed of.
Quee
n Guenevere lives in legend as a partner in an adulterous love that brought great grief to King Arthur. Not all the legends present her as a woman troubled by love alone; sometimes she is a discontented wife, an ambitious woman of a fretful spirit, a figure more solid and varied than Tennyson draws her.
Certainly Maria fills the bill. She had told Darcourt, not so very long ago, before she married Arthur, that she had fallen in love with him because of his frankness, his largeness of spirit, and also his attractive freedom from the academic world to which her own ambitions were confined. Arthur had offered her love, but also friendship, and she had found it irresistible. Yet a woman cannot live solely in the realm of her love; she must have a life of her own; she must shed light, as well as reflecting it. It looked as if Maria’s light, since her marriage, had been somewhat under a cloud. She had tried too hard to be Arthur’s wife, first, last, and all the time, and her spirit was in rebellion. How long had they been married? Twenty months, was it? Twenty months of forsaking all others and cleaving only unto him? It simply won’t work. No woman worth marrying is nothing but a wife, if the man is something better than a roaring egotist, which Arthur certainly is not, for all his peremptory, rich man’s ways in certain matters. Darcourt, himself unmarried, had seen many marriages, and united more couples, he thought in his Old Ontario way, than he could shake a stick at. The marriages that worked best were those in which the unity still permitted of some separateness—not a ranting independence, but a firm possession by both man and woman of their own souls.
Was it any use talking to Arthur and Maria about souls? Probably not. Souls are not fashionable, at present. People will listen with wondering acquiescence to scientific talk of such invisible entities as are said to be everywhere and very important, but they shy away from talk of souls. Souls have a bad name in the world of atomic energy.
Souls were a reality to Darcourt, however. Souls, not as gassy aspiration and unreal nobility, but as the force that divides the living human creature from the raw material for the mortician’s craft. Souls as a totality of consciousness, what man knows of himself and also that hidden vast part of himself which knows and impels him, used and abused by everybody, called upon or rejected, but inescapable.
What about Powell? Now there was a man who would assert, with passionate eloquence, that he had a soul, but who was clearly driven by that portion of his soul that was not within the range of his direct knowledge, that part of the spirit that some people—Mamusia, for instance—would call his fate. But a man’s fate is his own, more than he knows. We attract what we are. And it was Powell’s fate that had drawn him to seduce his friend’s wife, probably—no, Darcourt was sure, undoubtedly—with the complicity of Maria’s fate, just as Lancelot had seduced, or been seduced by, Guenevere.
“Do you want more dressing on your salad, Simon?” said Maria. She and Arthur and Powell had been talking while Darcourt mused.
Yes, he would like more dressing on his salad. He really must not drift off into unheeding speculation while the others were talking. And what had they been talking about?
About the impending child, of course. They talked about it a good deal, and with a frankness Darcourt found astonishing. It was five months on its way, and Maria wore becoming gowns in which she did not look pregnant, like the women Darcourt saw in the streets who wore slacks in which their distended bellies were forced upon the world, but clever gowns that enhanced, without concealing, her increasing girth.
Arthur and Geraint were rivals in solicitude. Neither had been a father before, they said, sometimes as a joke but always with an undercurrent of concern. They fussed over Maria, urging her to sit when she was perfectly comfortable standing, and rushing to fetch her things that she did not greatly want. They urged her not to drive her car, to put her feet on a stool when she sat, to get plenty of rest, to drink milk (which her doctor told her not to do), to eat heartily, to eat wisely, to drink very little wine and no spirits, to put aside the more inflammatory parts of the newspapers. They were a little disappointed that she exhibited no irrational cravings for peculiar foods; they would have been overjoyed if she had made eerie demands for pickles drenched in ice cream. These were old wives’ tales, said Maria, laughing at them. But, like prospective fathers from an earlier day, they were pestilent old wives, and they grew together in old-wifery. They were better friends than ever.
Had Arthur and Lancelot, in the mythical long ago, fretted and fussed so? Of course not; they had no ambiguous baby.
“The meeting with Schnak’s parents went very well,” said Powell.
“Who met them? Sorry, I haven’t been attending,” said Darcourt.
“Nilla insisted that Schnak ask them in. Nilla is very strict with Schnak and is teaching her manners. Won’t listen to Schnak’s fits of bad-mouthing her old folks. You must ask them here, Hulda dearest, she said, and we must be very, very sweet to them. And that’s what they did.”
“Were you there?” said Maria.
“Indeed I was. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. If I may say so, I was the star turn, the cherry on the cake. I got on with the elder Schnaks brilliantly.”
“Tell all,” said Maria.
“Well, they turned up, in answer to a telephone call from Schnak, which she made while Nilla stood over her with a whip, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve seen them. Not what I would call clubbable people, and they were all set to resent Nilla and lecture Schnak. But not a bit of it. Nilla was charming, and there was enough high-bred European atmosphere floating around for the elder Schnaks to recognize Nilla as a genuine grandee. Not just rich people, like you Cornishes, but a person of aristocratic quality. You’d be amazed how powerful that still is. She spoke to them quite a lot of the time in German, and that kept Schnak out of things, because although she understands pretty well, she can’t say much in the old tongue. I don’t know any more German than I need to follow a Wagner libretto, but I could tell that Nilla was being really gracious. Not patronizing, but speaking to them as equals, and as an older person like themselves, deeply concerned about Schnak. She talked about art, and music, and they softened up a bit under that and the rich cakes and the coffee with lots of whipped cream. They didn’t soften much, although they were impressed by the huge heap of musical manuscript Schnak had piled up. Obviously the girl was working. What was sticking in their gullets was Schnak’s rebellion against what they think of as religion. That was where I came in very strong.”
“You, Geraint? You agreed with those bitter Puritans about religion?”
“Of course I did, Arthur, bach. Don’t forget I grew up a Calvinistic Methodist, with a father who was a mighty shaman in the faith. I let them know that, of course. But, said I, look at me, deep into the world of art, and theatre and music, and the fatherhood and splendour of God is present to me every hour of my life, and infuses everything I do. Does God speak only with a single tongue? I asked them. Does His mighty love not reach out to those who have not yet come to the full belief, to the life of total faith? May He not speak even in the theatre, in the opera house, to those who have fled from Him into a world they think frivolous and abandoned to pleasure? Oh, my friends, you are blessed in knowing the fullness of God’s revealed Word. You have not encountered, as I have, the God who knows how to speak to the fallen and the reprobate through the language of art; you have not met with the Cunning of God, by which He reaches out to His children who shut their ears to His true voice. Our God is stern with those like yourselves whom He has marked from birth as His own, but He is gentle and subtle with those who have strayed into worldly paths. He speaks with many voices, and one of the most winning is the voice of music. Your daughter has been greatly gifted in music and dare you say that she is not marked by God as one of His own, to be His instrument, His harp of Zion, to draw His erring children to Him? Do you, Elias Schnakenburg, say that your child may not be speaking—I say this with humility—through her music with the voice of God Himself? Do you? Can you presume so far? Oh, Elias Schnakenburg, I u
rge you, I beg you, to reflect deeply upon these mysteries, and then reject your daughter’s vocation if you dare!”
“By God, Geraint, did you say that?”
“Indeed I did, Maria. That and a good deal more. I even gave them a touch of the old Welsh hwyl; I sang my peroration. Worked like a charm.”
Maria was overcome. “Geraint, you bloody crook!” she said when she could speak.
“Maria fach, you wound me profoundly. Sincere, every word of it. And true, what’s more. Sim bach, you know what preaching is. Did I say a word that you would not have spoken from a pulpit?”
“I liked that about the Cunning of God, Geraint bach. About the rest of it I can only say that I am sure you were sincere while you were speaking, and I am not surprised the elder Schnaks fell for it. Yes—on consideration I would say that what you told them was true. But I am not so sure about your intention in doing so.”
“My intention was to make them like our opera, and to give them pleasure, and sew up the rent garment of the Schnakenburg family.”
“And did you succeed?”
“Ma Schnakenburg was overjoyed to see her child clean and putting on some flesh; Pa Schnakenburg was, if I do not do the man injustice, glad to find Hulda in such classy company, because there is a snob in everybody, and Pa Schnak has not forgotten the elegant world of aristocratic Europe. I just put the cherry on the cake with some fancy theology.”
“Not theology, Geraint. Rhetoric,” said Darcourt.
“Sim bach, I wish you would stop knocking rhetoric. What is it? It is what the poet calls upon when the Muse is sleeping. It is what the preacher calls on when he must reach ears that need tickling to get their attention. Those of us who live in the world of art would be flat on our arses most of the time if we had no rhetoric to hold us up. Rhetoric is only base when base men use it. With me, it is the way in which I arouse the ancient and permanent elements in the spiritual structure of man by measured, rhythmic speech. Your rejection of my rhetoric springs from a mean envy, and I am disappointed in you.”
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