Bradbury, Ray - SSC 10
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I should have remembered my experience with Mexico, many years before, where I had encountered not rain and poverty, but sun and poverty, and come away panicked by a weather of mortality and the terrible sweet smell when the Mexicans exhaled death. I had at last written some fine nightmares out of that.
Even so, I insisted, Eire was dead, the wake over, her people would never haunt me.
Several years passed.
Then one rainy afternoon Mike (whose real name is Nick), the taxi-driver, came to sit just out of sight in my mind. He nudged me gently and dared to remind me of our journeys together across the bogs, along the Liffey, and him talking and wheeling his old iron car slow through the mist night after night, driving me home to the Royal Hibernian Hotel, the one man I knew best in all the wild green country, from dozens of scores of Dark Journeys.
"Tell the truth about me," Mike said. "Just put it down the way it was."
And suddenly I had a short story and a play. And the story is true and the play is true. It happened like that. It could have happened no other way.
Well, the story we understand, but why, after all these years, did I turn to the stage?
It was not a turn, but a return.
I acted on the amateur stage, and radio, as a boy. I wrote plays as a young man. These plays, unproduced, were so bad that I promised myself never to write again for the stage until late in life, after I'd learned to write all the other ways first and best. Simultaneously, I gave up acting because I dreaded the competitive politics actors must play in order to work. Besides: the short story, the novel, called. I answered. I plunged into writing. Years passed. I went to hundreds of plays. I loved them. I read hundreds of plays. I loved them. But still I held off from ever writing Act I, Scene I, again. Then came Moby Dick, a while to brood over it, and suddenly here was Mike, my taxi-driver, rummaging my soul, lifting up titbits of adventure from a few years before near the Hill of Tara or inland at the autumn changing of leaves in Killeshandra. My old love of the theater with a final shove pushed me over.
One other thing jolted me back toward the stage. In the last five years I have borrowed or bought a good many European and American Idea Plays to read; I have watched the Absurd and the More-Than-Absurd Theatre. In the aggregate I could not help but judge the plays as frail exercises, more often than not half-witted, but above all lacking in the prime requisites of imagination and ability.
It is only fair, given this flat opinion, I should now put my own head on the chopping-block. You may, if you wish, be my executioners.
This is not so unusual. Literary history is filled with writers who, rightly or wrongly, felt they could tidy up, improve upon, or revolutionize a given field. So, many of us plunge forward where angels leave no dustprint.
Having dared once, exuberant, I dared again. When Mike vaulted from my machine, others unbidden followed.
And the more that swarmed, the more jostled to fill the spaces.
I suddenly saw that I knew more of the minglings and commotions of the Irish than I could disentangle in a month or a year of writing and unraveling them forth. Inadvertently, I found myself blessing the secret mind, and winnowing a vast interior post-office, calling nights, towns, weathers, beasts, bicycles, churches, cinemas, and ritual marches and flights by name.
Mike had started me at an amble; I broke into a trot which was before long a Full Sprint pacing my dear friends, the Queen's Own Evaders.
The stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of their way.
Now done, and busy with other plays about science-fiction machineries which will spin their cogs in yet another book—do I have an after-the-fact theory to fit play-writing?
Yes.
For only after, can one nail down, examine, explain.
To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Here's how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following:
We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes.
We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears.
We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run.
We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of the audience.
We build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then, if we are good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow our audiences to be sick.
Each tension seeks its own proper end, release, and relaxation.
No tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically, must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.
There are seeming exceptions to this, in which novels or plays end at the height of tension, but the release is implied. The audience is asked to go forth into the world and explode an idea. The final action is passed on from creator to reader-viewer whose job it is to finish off the laughter, the tears, the violence, the sexuality, or the sickness.
Not to know this is not to know the essence of creativity, which, at heart, is the essence of man's being.
If I were to advise new writers, if I were to advise the new writer in myself, going into the theatre of the Absurd, the almost-Absurd, the theatre of Ideas, the any-kind-of-theatre-at-all, I would advise like this:
Tell me no pointless jokes.
I will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter.
Build me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamentations.
I will go find me better wailing walls.
Do not clench my fists for me and hide the target.
I might strike you, instead.
Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship's rail.
For, please understand, if you poison me, I must be sick. It seems to me that many people writing the sick film, the sick novel, the sick play, have forgotten that poison can destroy minds even as it can destroy flesh. Most poison bottles have emetic recipes stamped on the labels. Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.
The art aesthetic is all encompassing, there is room in it for every horror, every delight, if the tensions representing these are carried to their furthest perimeters and released in action. I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.
Given all this, what are we to make of a book mainly composed of Irish comedies?
Well, the means whereby men "make do" with the world, which is more often than not by their wit and humor, is the good stuff of serious thought. We think long and much on the universe and the ways of God and man toward man, and then cry into our inkwells to service tragedies, or throw our heads way back and give one hell of a yell of laughter.
This time out, given poverty, given bicycle collisions in fogs that might turn deadly serious, given rank prejudice and raw bias, given suicidal cold and insufficient means against such cold, given Ireland that is, and all its priest-ridden and sleet-worn souls, I have chosen to lift my head from my hands, I have chosen not to weep but to laugh with them as they themselves must laugh, in order to survive, in the pubs, and on the roads of a lost and much-overpraised bog.
To take the plays more or less in the order of their veracity to life and my experience in Ireland, THE FIRST NIGHT OF LENT, as I have a
lready noted, is a true portrayal of my adventures with Mike, the lone taxi-driver of Kilcock.
THE GREAT COLLISION OF MONDAY LAST is based a bit more roughly on Truth, with a sidewise look at fancy and a backward glance at the lie which, once gone over, cannot be treaded again, for now it is booby-trapped. The fact is, collisions occur all the time in Ireland between hell-bent sinner bicyclists, with dread results. From the echoes of multiple collisions I harkened for further reverberations which became the play.
A CLEAR VIEW OF AN IRISH MIST can best be approached thiswise:
If Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Titian and others invented the wide-screen frozen cinema of the Renaissance, it was the Irish first came full-blown with the Hi-Fi and the Long-Play Stereo.
Just open the doors of any pub, stand out of the blast, and you'll know what I mean.
I woke one night in Dublin, half-panicked by something, shook my wife and cried, I think, "The Troubles! They're on again!" or perhaps "There's a riot downstairs!"
"No such thing," my wife murmured, rolling over. "There was a dance up the street. It's just letting out." Or perhaps she protested, falling into a snooze, "They've just shut the pubs . . ."
No matter. A great river of Irish swept by below, all "tweeter," all "woofer," and playing on forever.
The flood took the better part of an hour to die away and empty into the Liffey; for little side-flurries swept into storefronts or whirlpooled at streetcorners with fearful arguments and ardent proclamations. Poets were striking blows for freedom, actors were pounding Yeats into the earth just to yank him out again. If women or girls were present they were stormed to silence by the concussions.
In sum, if Guinness is the national stout, conversation is the royal republican wine, liberally manufactured and sold everywhere men so much as bump elbows in passing.
Irishmen inhale but never exhale: they talk.
And they surely regret the lost time it takes to draw breath, for during that split second some idiot with full lungs might dart in to seize the arguments and not give them back save by main force.
Given this overall and inescapable truth, I have fancied forth A CLEAR VIEW OF AN IRISH MIST to show what might happen to the National LP and the dear Hi-Fi should an irrational beast dare them to THINK.
Which leaves us at last with the Anthem Sprinters themselves.
Squashed betwixt wet sky and damp earth, sex has little place to lie down in anywhere from Dublin to Galway. Women, strange creatures that they be, hesitate but a moment when offered a choice between a sodden tromp for love in the flooded fields or the dry cinema where one can squeeze out one's passions as well as can be under the circumstances by knocking knees, clubbing feet and squirming elbows. If the girl did not make this choice, the Church would make it for her. The growing and tumescent lad then has but two ports to put in at, the pub and the cinema. Both places overflow in all towns any night.
But the Church and State, synonymous, lurk everywhere.
The pubs close too early for Reason to have been completely defeated.
The American "fillums," which make clerical collars to jump up and down in apprehension, are censored.
And, Worst, at the end of each show, the damn Anthem is played.
It was while in Dublin, nightly attending old Wally Beery movies to get in out of the cold, I first noticed that my wife and I, like the rest, were on our feet and half up the aisle before FINIS hit the screen.
This observation put me within a hair of forming teams and scoring champs for their ability to make the MEN'S split seconds ahead of the infernal national ditty.
These plays have taught me much, but mostly about myself. I hope never, as a result, to doubt my subconscious again. I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself. But lacking this, in future I will turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed at a time when I thought I was sitting this one out.
These then are a blind man's plays, suddenly seen. I am grateful that part of me paid attention and saved coins when I could have sworn I was poverty-stricken.
In addition, one can only hope that these plays have been taken in small doses, one at a time. One-act plays, short stories, shots of the best Irish whiskey, all should be savored separate and apart. Too, if one should sit down to read all these plays in one night, one would discover certain encounters or facts in one play not connecting up with encounters or facts in another. This results from all the plays being written separately, with no thought being given to plays future or plays past. The result is a series of one-acts meant to be done separately and read in the same fashion. Though, of course, with a few deletions and additions, the entirety could be staged of an evening. I have chosen, however, to let the plays stand as they are, separate and apart, for they are more enjoyable as creative units, and I insist you must look on them as such; that is my prerogative.
Call all of what you have read in this book mere frivolous calligraphy if you wish. But here, I believe, we find ways of making do with squalls of weather, melancholy drizzles of church rhetoric, the improbability if not the impossibility of sex, the inevitability of death, and the boring ritual of the same old pomp-and-drum corp washing, hanging out, and taking in the same tired old national linen.
The church has put her on her knees, the weather drowned, and politics all but buried her, but Ireland, dear God, with vim and gusto, still sprints for that far EXIT.
And, do you know? I think she'll make it.
Ray Bradbury July 31st, 1962
The Anthem Sprinters
and Other Antics by Ray Bradbury
While engaged in writing a screenplay in Ireland, Ray Bradbury fell in, around and under the quick sprinting spirit and feet of Erin's men, and learned all there is to know of Anthem Sprinting —the curious Irish race which the reader learns about in the title play.
The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics includes the hilarious adventures and misadventures of an innocent American in the grasp of the imaginative rural Irish. In these four plays, Mr. Bradbury discloses the effect of Deanna Durbin on an important local contest and the comic results of an attempt to introduce modern commercial slogans into a tradition-bound community. Not only that, but he tells the fearful consequences of great Bicycle Collisions on the boggy roads of back-country Eire, as well as advising all who may wish to know what it is best to give up for Lent. These and other antics are the charming, always amusing, displays of wit and wisdom in these first plays by the well-known American writer.
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