Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  That’s too bad, he said, Jarry and Ubu are the great discoveries I made at Bayencourt.

  Seeing that I was puzzled, he reminded me that he had spoken as long ago as April of the job that Etienne van Damme’s parents had offered him at Bayencourt, the name of their château and of the Ardennes village above which it perched. He was to teach English to their nephews and nieces starting on the first of July until early September, when he would have to leave to register for classes. I confessed that I had forgotten. It turned out, he continued, that also staying at Bayencourt was Mr. van Damme’s much younger brother Denis, the director of the national theater in Brussels. One evening, after his pupils had gone to bed, he was in the library of the château, a room he had been encouraged to use. He had before him on the table a volume of plays by Plautus and a Latin dictionary he was consulting. Seeing that I was smiling, Henry quickly assured me that he wasn’t doing it for show; he was really trying to get a head start on a seminar he knew he would be taking. Denis had looked over his shoulder and said he had a distinct recollection of Menaechni, the play to which Henry’s book was open. They began to talk about the theater generally, and Denis asked what he thought of Jarry. When Henry replied that he had never heard of him, Denis said this was a lacuna that should be filled; he was sure Jarry’s works were on the bookshelf with other Js, his brother being a stickler for strict alphabetical order by author. Indeed, in no time at all he had handed Henry the volume containing Ubu Roi, saying it was Jarry’s masterpiece. They would talk after Henry had read it.

  Henry put Plautus away and plunged into Ubu. He read in bed. The French gave him no trouble except for the strings of epithets, many of them obscene, the meaning of which he had to guess, not having in his room an adequate dictionary, and the puns, some of which he realized were plain beyond him. The next day, Denis asked what he thought. Henry replied without hesitation that he had been dazzled. That’s as I had hoped, Denis told him. I’m glad to have introduced you to Jarry. He’s the point of departure for everything important in avant-garde twentieth-century theater that followed Ubu, including the work of Brecht. The point Jarry put across definitively is that to pretend that what happens on the stage is real is not the best way to evoke reality. It can be done more convincingly if you make manifest to the audience that they are looking at a performance—at actors who are performers presenting personages in the play and not those personages themselves, and that the space in which the action takes place is a stage, and not the castle at Elsinore or some bourgeois drawing room.

  There is a need for distance between the actor and the role, Denis told me. No one in the audience can possibly believe a performance of Ubu replicates the way in which events actually unfolded. Its analogue is the “Mousetrap,” the play within a play in Hamlet: “the image of a murder done in Vienna.” No one in the audience—neither in the theater’s seats nor in the crucial audience on the stage, King Claudius and Queen Gertrude—believes for a moment that the players are the Duke Gonzago, his murderous brother, or his unfaithful queen, but for that very reason the point is gotten across all the more powerfully.

  True, I said, but what about the play Hamlet in which it’s lodged, Hamlet itself?

  It’s the same thing, he answered impatiently. You don’t suppose for a minute that the audience in the real theater’s seats believe that the man in a black Renaissance costume wearing a blond wig and declaiming gorgeous lines, much of the time to himself, is the prince of Denmark!

  As you can imagine, Henry continued, what Denis said then and on several other occasions made quite an impression on me. I went on to read Brecht plays in a French translation that Denis had his assistant send from Brussels, as well as the plays of Apollinaire and Cocteau, which were in Mr. van Damme’s library. Denis was right. Jarry was some sort of flash-in-the-pan genius. All the same, I’m not sure that I would have paid so much attention to him or what Denis had to say about the theater—however interesting—if I hadn’t been hooked by le père Ubu, this Falstaff without charm, obese, gluttonous, cowardly, and totally cruel. Naturally cruel. He is a mercenary soldier in the service of Wenceslas, the king of Poland. By the way, I don’t know whether Jarry knew the Christmas carol, though he surely knew Czech history, and Jarry’s Wenceslas is that kind of king, a good Saint Wenceslas. Ubu seizes power and kills him, crowning himself king. Then he slaughters Polish nobles and tax collectors, as well as his own chief coconspirator, and bleeds the country dry. He applies to Poland pataphynancial principles—that’s one of Jarry’s inventions—hilarious and fraudulent nonsense that you wouldn’t be surprised to see written up on the front page of the Times. Then it’s Ubu’s turn to be overthrown. You can see that the plot is all nonsense and I won’t say any more about it. The odd thing is that somehow all the Polish business struck me as wonderfully apt—inspired. It was my Poland and my Poles. A jolly gang. And that was the hook.

  Would you like to read Ubu? he asked me. If you would, I have it right in my book bag, in the original and in English. I did a translation in Bayencourt. Denis thinks it’s publishable—if ever I find someone interested in Jarry.

  I said that of course I’d read the play.

  He rummaged in the bag and extracted from it a beautiful little volume in a leather binding, which he said was Denis’ own copy given to him as a parting gift, and the typescript of the translation.

  You’ll have fun, he said. I have decided to stage Ubu. When you read it, you will see why and you will also think that I’ll need a cast and sets on the order of Birth of a Nation. But that’s not true. The first performance by real actors—real professionals—was at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in 1896, with W. B. Yeats of all people in the audience. When the curtain went down, there was a big brawl; many in the audience found the play and the performance utterly outrageous and shocking. What’s interesting from my point of view is that Ubu had been successfully performed prior to that time by amateurs using marionettes, and there have been marionette performances since, in regular theaters. I want to do it in the patio of the Fogg. It’s the perfect setting; not too big and not too small, and I love the irony of the Renaissance setting for this pseudo-medieval farce. I don’t see why undergraduates can’t do as well as marionettes, provided the right puppeteer pulls the strings. That will be my job. I’ll direct and I suppose I’ll produce, unless someone else on the same wavelength and frequency volunteers.

  I asked Henry whether he’d gone off his rocker.

  By way of an answer, he pulled out of his book bag a notebook full of production notes, sketches, and stage directions, and talked about his plans so convincingly that I began to think that this might just be yet another seemingly impossible undertaking that he would somehow pull off.

  I wished him luck and asked whether Margot had also been at Bayencourt. I had not seen her since our freshman year, and whatever Henry had told me about her during the winter and spring of my illness I had forgotten.

  He hesitated and said that he wanted to make it very clear that the van Dammes had hired him because of the impression he had made on them during his short previous visit as someone who could get their gang of six-to eleven-year-olds to become interested in speaking English and actually doing it—a crazy idea, since the result might be a gang of little Belgians speaking with a Polish accent, but nevertheless it was their idea—and neither Etienne nor Margot had intervened. A couple of times Etienne had come to the château from Brussels, where he was working for the utility holding company controlled by the family. Margot hadn’t appeared at all. He thought she had spent the summer with her parents in London and the south of France. He didn’t know whether Etienne had gone to visit her.

  In that case, I observed, they must have broken up. Henry answered that he didn’t know; neither Margot nor Etienne had told him anything.

  I NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED that Henry would feel himself an interloper in the house dining room and perhaps be treated as such. Over the course of his sophomore year, although he and Archie were st
ill living in exile on Mount Auburn Street, he had climbed the house social ladder, reaching one of the higher rungs to which an intellectual or an aesthete who hadn’t gone to the right school could aspire. He was on easy terms with Tom Peabody and the other younger tutors and didn’t hesitate to sit down beside them at lunch or dinner. It was more surprising to see him at a table Tom called the Parnassus, the fiefdom of a coterie consisting mostly of juniors with heavy pretensions to culture whose conversation was a potpourri of anecdotes concerning the Lunts, Cole Porter, Wystan Auden, Thornton Wilder, General Marshall, Ruth Draper, and various other luminaries, all of them—General Marshall excepted—referred to by first name. They had been friends since kindergarten and had all been to the right schools or, in any event, to schools that were acceptable. I had gone with Tom Peabody to see Jerome Robbins’s ballet The Cage in New York. The attractiveness, cohesion, and fundamental hostility toward outsiders of Parnassus made me think of Robbins’s endogamic insects; a foppish junior by the name of Ralph Wilmerding, to whom I took an instant dislike that I hoped was not induced by envy, was clearly their carnivorous insect queen.

  I was friends with another member of the coterie, a senior called Jack Merton, who was in my small creative writing class. A rich orphan from San Francisco, he was probably the only undergraduate to wear day in and day out gray worsted suits and brown brogues, in preference to the standard ratty tweed jacket, chinos, and loafers. His Chevy convertible was parked and kept spotlessly clean at Mrs. McCartney’s garage right off Harvard Square; one of his two leggy girlfriends was at Sarah Lawrence, the other at Vassar. He gave them equal time, spending alternate weekends with one in New York and with the other at his house on Narragansett Bay. The poetry he wrote was convoluted and sometimes precious, but I liked it better than anything else that was written in our class, and I liked him. I sat down occasionally at the Parnassian table when Merton had an empty chair beside him. This initiative let Henry off the hook; he didn’t have to decide whether he was in good enough standing to introduce me. In fact Tom Peabody’s frequent presence at the table, especially at lunch, would have given me sufficient entrée, had I wished it.

  Henry’s apparent friendship with these men, none of whom he had known when we were freshmen, mystified me. I asked Henry whether they could possibly be friends of Archie’s. He laughed and assured me that they weren’t. Then he told me rather airily that it was quite simple: he had found them attractive, more attractive than anyone else in the house, and had taken advantage of an occasion when Tom was at their table and there was room for one more. Then one thing led to another, and he was thinking that a couple of them—he named Wilmerding and his acolyte, Scott Allen—might want to be involved in his production of Ubu. There was no way he could do it all alone. I was surprised, but not much later I attended, in Wilmerding’s living room, what Wilmerding called an organizational meeting for Henry’s and his Ubu project.

  SHORTLY BEFORE that afternoon, Henry was putting up notices in all the houses announcing the audition for Ubu—to run an ad in the Crimson was in his opinion a waste of money. There was an oversize sophomore with a stentorian voice and a tendency to pontificate whom he had been observing here and there with an eye to casting him as Ubu, and he had ideas about the two other principal male characters, Capitaine Bordure, Ubu’s adjutant whose name Henry translated as Gagarbage, and the young son of the king of Poland, Bougrelas, or Buggerson in Henry’s version. Wilmerding had not yet told him whether he liked those choices, but Henry saw no reason why he shouldn’t, and anyway wasn’t going to waste time talking to him about it. It took an eternity for Wilmerding to make up his mind about anything. Perhaps he was preternaturally careful. The other role still to be cast was la mère Ubu, a gross personage, as fat and repulsive as her husband. There were enough girls at Radcliffe, he remarked, who fit that description, but, as he was not after method actors, he wondered whether a beautiful girl who could act might not be more effective if she could convey obesity and grossness notwithstanding her real appearance. It was worth a try.

  Margot, for instance? I asked.

  We were walking back to the house from the Widener. Henry stopped to retie the laces of his tennis shoes and asked me to wait. When he straightened up he said that he wasn’t sure where he stood with Margot. It was a complicated business. I suggested we talk about it over a cup of tea at Hayes-Bickford. We took a table in the back, Henry wanting to be sure that we weren’t overheard. He drank his tea in a couple of gulps and looking away from me said he was sure it was wrong to say what he was about to tell me, but, at the same time, he had to talk to someone. Archie was out of the question so it came down to me. Jarry and Ubu Roi were not his only once-in-a-lifetime experiences at Bayencourt, he said. There was something much more grave and extraordinary. Something between Madame van Damme and him.

  Did you get into some sort of trouble? I asked. I hadn’t gotten the impression that you left there under a cloud.

  He laughed, and said that wasn’t the problem—or perhaps there was no problem at all, in any event not yet. He had slept with Madame van Damme. I mean Madeleine.

  Such was my astonishment that I asked him to repeat what he had said, and when he had done so, I asked how such a thing was possible. He said it had been very simple, weirdly simple. Monsieur van Damme was at Bayencourt only on weekends, and not necessarily every weekend, and Denis had already left. He was spending the last three weeks of August with friends near Biarritz. There was no one at the château during the week except the children, the servants, Madeleine, and himself. From the start, Henry had gotten along very well with the husband and wife. As he had already mentioned when telling me about Denis van Damme, he had been told to make himself at home in the library. Usually he went there after dinner. He would sit on a sofa near the windows, which were left open to let in cool evening air. When Madeleine came to the library, she almost always sat in one of the huge tapestry-covered armchairs on either side of the fireplace. Monsieur van Damme would sit in the other.

  Here Henry broke off the story in order to get another cup of tea. I asked him to get one for me as well.

  I should tell you, he continued, that Madeleine is very attractive—as an objective fact, without thinking that there could be something between us. It would have been preposterous. She is tall, big boned, and athletic looking, with an incredible head of blond hair barely touched by gray. She can’t be more than fifty, and I have no idea whether she seems younger or older. Anyway, that evening I was absorbed in my book—by a weird coincidence Le rouge et le noir—when she sat down at the other end of my sofa and began to ask me a series of personal questions, first about college, then about Margot, whom she said she didn’t really understand, and then about the war. She knew something about my past but not much, or perhaps she was simply pretending not to know. That, as you can imagine, put me on edge, and I answered her questions with real difficulty because I felt that my back was against the wall, more so than at the Standishes’ lunch. I couldn’t disregard the fact that she was my employer and in a sense my hostess. At the same time, no doubt about it, I found her interest and sympathy flattering, perhaps even exciting. So I answered but as briefly as possible. Then she told me that during the war her parents had helped a number of Jews to hide. That hadn’t been as difficult in Belgium as in Poland—or so she thought. Although her husband personally had absolutely nothing against Jews, the rest of his family was all Flemish rightists and anti-Semites. That made a lot of trouble during the war and put her parents in danger. Her too because she was involved in the Resistance. The Resistance was also anathema to her in-laws. The tables were turned right after the war, when it was the in-laws who faced various difficulties. I’m not sure whether it was the way she told this story or that the air had gotten colder, but I shivered. She noticed it, asked me to close the windows, and, when I had done so, asked me to sit down beside her. I did as she said, whereupon she took my hand, held it against her face, and said, Aren’t you going to ask me
to come to bed with you?

  My response, Henry continued, was to put my arm around her and kiss her. I was very awkward, but she let me, just once. Then she pushed me away very gently and said, Turn out the lights here and go to your room. I won’t be long. My room at Bayencourt was a little bigger than your bedroom here: an armoire and a chest of drawers, a worktable at the window, a straight-back chair, and one armchair. I quickly stuffed the underwear and shirt that I had left on the bed into the armoire, took off my jacket and tie, and waited. The time before she appeared moved very slowly or very fast, I’m not sure which; my heart was beating so hard that I could hardly bear it. Then the door opened. She wore a long red velvet bathrobe. Her feet were bare. I stood up and held my arms out to her, and when she did the same the bathrobe opened. She was naked. It was like seeing Dürer’s Eve except that her hair was pinned up in a bun behind her head. She helped me undress and we lay down on the bed. She spoke before I did. Is this your first time? she asked. I nodded, without daring to touch her. Then just lie on your back, she said, and be very quiet. She bent over me and let down that amazing hair, which fell like a tent over her shoulders and me. When it was over she said, Now you can be patient and tender. She stayed with me until dawn. From then on she came to me every night, twice even when Monsieur van Damme was there. They sleep in separate bedrooms so that after he had gone to his room all she had to do was to wait ten minutes to be sure he was asleep. I can hardly describe what it was like.

  I nodded. The truth is that I was shaken by his story.

  Anyway, to go back to Margot, he said, which is how I got started telling you all this, you can imagine how uneasy I am about Margot and Etienne. It’s not that I am afraid they know; that’s not possible. But I can’t help feeling terribly anxious, as if I had wronged them, betrayed our friendship.