Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  What this novel was, was an essay of the emotions—ours—the haunted esprit of our age, expressed by an intellect wedding itself constantly to the immediate, like some antenna, some thinking reed drawing together the vibrations in our air. So just as we had begun to tire of the narrow limits of the stream-of-consciousness “inner I—me,” this novelist took up the method again, with all its limits, but transposed the subject—to the inner “we.” Her characters were dangerously limited—they stood on a single premise; what drew the reader was the acuity with which he found phrased for him those very limits, that very premise which, as a citizen of our time, we all share. The writer seems to have caught for us, in her half lyrical, half philosophical net, the “we” of her era and of ours—that individual whose private self appears to be shrinking in the face of all the mass-media obligations and terrors of his public one. It was one of the earliest novels of this type, over here. Now we are all too well acquainted with them; many a novel may be named for one man, but he seems to speak in the voice of the aggregate, as a prancing symbol of what we think we are. I think that too will change.

  And so, the novel goes on. In fancy, I lend you these four. Each of them says to you what Turgenev remarks that little Feniitchka, the mistress of Nicholas Petrovitch, seemed to say when she became respectable: “Excuse me, I am not here for nothing.”

  BY 1963, WHEN ROBERT Hatch of The Nation asked me to review a clutch of foreign novels in any form I wanted, I had imposed certain rules on myself: never to do a review in order to blast someone or some book, never in fact to review anything not liked, only to review at will and at some length—and presumably for literature. (I had also kept off contemporary Americans—the only way I saw to keep friendships and avoid tea-pot tempests.) The Nation’s proposal seemed to me just on the order of what my British writer-friends might do—covering foreign news as it were, for a small, decent paper, at a thin, honorable price. ($75.)

  I started out bravely anti-critical, fell into complacency over books I could easily despise, and was gratefully redeemed by a book I could praise, Günter Grass The Tin Drum. (And by the Germans—for me so long an idée fixe by way of war and family, that the slightest snuff of them hurtled me into the long view without half trying.)

  The Nation asked me to continue, perhaps in a column, but I had had enough. Meanwhile, toward the end of my connection with The Reporter, I did some drama reviews.

  As a dance-student since the age of six and as a high school and college actress, I had had the amateur’s “inside” whiff of the theater; as audience, I had started as a patron of Gray’s Drugstore’s cut-rate tickets when I was twelve. After my first book, at the instance of Cheryl Crawford, who hoped for a play, I had attended the Actor’s Studio for about a year, but was not deflected—I still had too many novels to write. And I knew the theater would take all my devotion, not half. If I ever again wrote a play (in college I had been a student of Minor Latham) I would attach myself to a repertory theater. Meanwhile, at the studio, I had seen how a working theater can serve novelists; they see their own limits—and avenues—better defined.

  To review a play was refreshing; it took me “out of my field.” (By now, having written two or three novels, I had almost accepted the category thrust at me.) But a thinker’s only boundaries are his own. I had a vigorous sense that I was testing these—or else constructing them. For “the Germans”—actually my own compound of a childhood hatred of their bourgeoisie’s servility and “schmutz,” their evil history and my perverse love of their language—had appeared again. This time, I thought I was ready for them. The subject Was Peter Weiss’s play about Marat-Sade. I called the review, “The Agony of The Cartoon.”

  Some poets, painters, thinkers represent mankind always with the risus sardonicus of death and corruption on its face, whirling in a society which is a death dance. Others trace this face with a certain tenderness of perfectibility on it, and see the society too as teleological, pushing along that famous incline toward the stars. Between these two views lie all the gradations of art. In Peter Weiss’s play, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (and as performed with disciplined rage by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the wizardry of Peter Brook), the stage at the Martin Beck Theatre is a pitched one, for real and for metaphysical, angling its inmates down, and toward the audience. Musical accompaniment is fifed and tympanied, or rattled from the metal sheets used so often in productions of Godot, by inmates placed in the boxes, while a Brechtian chorus of four more sings and mimes from the stage or from trapdoors below. Coulmier, the director of the mental home where de Sade, as an inmate after 1801, wrote some of the theatrical entertainments that were produced there as therapy, sits onstage with his wife and daughter—as indeed the fashionable Parisians who came to watch the antics at Charenton did sit. There are incursions of actors into balcony and orchestra, wherever sit the aristocrats of the Martin Beck. For, as in Genet’s The Blacks, the audience is indictable. When it claps the cast at the end of the play, the inmates clap back.

  The intent is “total” theater, and in production terms—short of a possible spastic song-and-dance response from the ticketholders—the play gets it. Everyman is onstage in all the grotesques of his overt and hidden lunacy—the obsessive, the autoerotic, the weeper in her mob-cap, the drooler with the thick tongue, all performing their silent rhythms, and attended by coifed male nuns and butcher-clad nurses; the mime chorus is Elizabethanly drunken or whorish; other types and professions pass” behind in Molièresque charade. Directorial invention underscores the author’s intent at every chance. Where the author himself, careful not to have his play “about” one thing or any actor speak for only one, specifies that the Girondist deputy be played by an erotomaniac “in the smooth, tight trousers of an ‘Incroyable,’” then the Royal’s customary fondness for humanizing touches of bawdry improves upon this suggestion very versatilely; in a play which as much as anything is about revolution, then the blood poured from buckets at intervals is of course red, white, or blue.

  In the modern theater, where so much device is available (and for all the complaints, so much money for it), audiences have often to quarrel over whether the play is really the thing in a new production, or whether directorial energy has made it so. When the two are so merged as here, that question may remain as unanswerable as the dialectical questions in this play itself—rand like them, sets up one of the vital tensions which make theater. For while it is evident at once that this play is not, like The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a weakminded pageant in which the elephant spectacle is poised on the butterfly wings of bombast, nevertheless the visual and aural confusion is at times overwhelming—too close to circus for us to get it all at one whack. This is an old Brechtian trick, but an older theatrical one. In a sense the play here is swarmed over, even attacked by the production ideas it itself invites, but not swamped. Sometimes, in one of these three-ring whirligigs, there is clear contempt for the play’s words, but here the important monologues are delivered at as staid a pace as Hamlet’s, underscored by the choral flow. Even in the din at the finale, when all might well be chanting “O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!” with all Jamie Thomsons anywhere, instead of: “Charenton Charenton/Napoleon Napoleon/Nation Nation/Revolution Revolution/Copulation Copulation”—one wishes the best wish, to come back for another performance, or to go to the text.

  London critics have argued that the play itself derives from a number of fashionable sources; so it does, along with those I have indicated. But it is not merely an adroitly composite echo, though it is composite and does echo within itself. One brilliant idea sustains it: we are in the asylum; de Sade is producing his play; Marat (at whose actual funeral the real de Sade did deliver the oration) is in his bath (to which the real Marat was confined by a skin disease) before us, but in the bathhouse of the asylum, ready to be murdered by Charlotte Corday, toward which event all continuity proceeds. The
aristocratic onlookers are watching, onstage and off. Marat is played by a paranoiac inmate, Corday by a sleepwalking upper-class girl, costumed like an Empire nymph and singing her somnambulist horrors to the lute. The director, always ready to speak for conventional political and social order, must by his very role interrupt at intervals the actions of the “disturbed.” The audience has its half-knowledge of history, and an awareness that both history and itself are to be manipulated. So the play at once acquires a juggler’s multiplicity of levels, and any idea extractable from it is intended to be seen in movement with the others.

  Many so extracted are not new to the world’s logic: revolutions return rich and poor to the status quo, achieving nothing: money is Marxist in all its implications: man is a mad animal with further plans of madness. No criticism here, at least from me. Precisely because most ideas are not new to the world, ideas alone are unbearable in art, which must clothe and externalize them, it doesn’t matter how, as long as a forceful unrest is successfully raised under and around them. Mr. Weiss’s juggling is one way of doing that; he is not interested in a longitudinal play which progresses toward a resolution in the key of C—or even C sharp. “The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair/to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes” (Marat). Well and good, so far as it goes, and with a sop to existentialism too: though the pointlessly horrible aspects of our world are on record, they bear repeating. And although the energy with which both language and action here overstate, restate, and confuse themselves is familiarly Brechtian in mode, it is merely one of the many methods of drama, used to send us in pursuit of these elusive balances, these words lost in excitement—that is, back to the play.

  Here, I suspect one will find that Weiss has a multiplicity of very realistic images, but after that brilliant beginning, no metaphor that would sustain it toward greatness. Nobody is asking for “answers,” or a play with a literal “point,” which is why I say “metaphor.” Ideas may not resolve, but once the chaos of our world has been established, plays still may, and not necessarily on an up note—as Genet, Sartre, and Beckett have shown. This play is not surreal enough. The “chaos” is as well ordered as a concertmaster’s. And though Weiss clearly knows that “total” theater is not just “everybody running,” his play’s total statement falls far short of Brecht also, absconding, as is currently fashionable in so many of the arts, with an implied: “Get excited. Start thinking. But don’t ask me!”

  As the uncurtained scenes progress by topic and harangue—Stifled Unrest, Corday’s First Visit (she has three), Marat’s Liturgy, A Regrettable Intervention (a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, e.g., “forgive us our good deeds and lead us into temptation”), Marquis de Sade is Whipped, Song and Mime of the Glorification of the Beneficiary, to quote a few—the most interesting and best-maintained dialectical balance is that between de Sade and Marat, the freshest antitheses being there. In Conversation on Life and Death, de Sade, who hates Nature, “the passionless spectator” who “goads us to greater and greater acts,” complains that “even our inquisition gives us no pleasure nowadays … our postrevolutionary murders … are all official. … There’s no singular personal death to be had.” And Marat replies: “If I am extreme, I am not extreme in the same way as you/Against Nature’s silence I use action/In the vast indifference I invent a meaning … work to alter … and improve.” Later, de Sade says: “Before deciding what is wrong … we must find out what we are … for me the only reality is imagination/the world inside myself.” And Marat replies: “No restless ideas can break down walls/I never believed the pen alone could destroy institutions.”

  We appreciate this for a number of nicely posed—and mixed—reasons. Clarity, in the midst of a continuous-movement play, is welcome. We rise to how neatly Jesuitical it is that de Sade, that doctrinaire of the perverse and the exaggerated, should be made to speak for or stand for the inner imagination (usually assigned to gentler lyrists), and that it should be Marat, apostle of revolutions artistically complete to the last blood-drop, who itches symptomatically on the cross of that bloodletting, and dreams of action—in his bath. I say “stand for” with intent. For the counterside of plays which juggle, raise the hair, and leave us is that if the smoke clears for even a moment, the people tend to stand and stare at us from under the paternal arm of the playwright, as the adroit antitheses they are.

  Weigh these as one may. Weiss’s stance is clear enough without statement. He writes of humanity in those ever-resuscitated grotesques of flesh-hatred which, in the long line from Bosch to Breughel and before, we used to call medieval. It is of course a genre which must accompany us forever, like our own smell. Lately the Germans have done it best; between wars they have an especial talent for it. Curiously, whether done by a Jew who lives in Sweden, or a half-Pole, it is recognizable as German still. Günter Grass’s robust humor gives the genre more depth; what grim jokes there are in the Weiss Marat-Sade are very like those in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent London production of Brecht’s Puntilla at which American audiences seem to laugh timidly, at least in this kind of play.

  To be able to speak of the Marat-Sade as “this kind” of play may also be a measure of its scope, and of Brecht’s “epic” theater in general. Must it always be couched in terms of the cartoon? Or is that why, though the artist is not obliged to answer his own questions, “this kind” of play seems to truncate the question before it is asked? The power and agony of the medieval cartoons of humanity is in their assumption, under the grimacing flesh and the snake-scales, of a spiritual antithesis. Mr. Weiss neither demands nor assumes any antithesis, which is why his play remains one-dimensional and he correctly describes it as Marxist. Within that span, it has the mesmerism our own caricatures always have for us. We see the normals regarding the lunatics regarding the normals. It is no wonder that everybody claps.

  Censorship, when not too serious, is often fun to watch. The modern version of the sport, now that sex has less shock to it, will be to catch onto whatever else will be sex’s substitute, not in the great arenas of politics and civil law, but in the small daily mind.

  Once upon a time, in the story “The Hollow Boy,” Harper’s Magazine hadn’t let me, then a new writer, say a girl had her “monthlies”—which was the idiom proper to the story—but had insisted on the word “period.” In the Weiss review, The Reporter had balked at letting me say that Peter Brook had improved on the stage directions for the erotomaniac’s trousers by having him wear an erect penis, presumably wooden, inside them. “Improved upon them very versatilely” was all I could think of—a fine example of how Euphues takes over when you can’t be direct.

  Yet in another piece, The Reporter let me speak of buggery—and even the arse—I was talking about homosexuals in literature—perhaps because the legal abrogation of homosexual freedom was just then under scrutiny in Britain, and therefore a liberal cause. For, what we were going through over here, especially in the theater, was that period of heart-in-the-right-place sentimentality which always precedes admitting a wronged sector of humanity to its full rights. As a Jew traveling in upstate New York, and a woman traveling in literature, I already knew that line. One day, but not quite yet, I would write at more length of homosexual writers, and of what American sex in general has done to its literature. Meanwhile, in a piece called, “Will We Get There by Candlelight?” I had this to say:

  In a recent week I spent approximately seven hours of an otherwise idle life at two of John Osborne’s plays then running concurrently in London, the West End production of Inadmissible Evidence at Wyndham’s, and A Patriot for Me, in repertory and out of the Lord Chamberlain’s clutches, at the Royal Court’s “private” showing to the members of the theater club we had joined at least two days previously, that being the length of time which must lapse legally here between desire and performance. With the exception of Epitaph for George Dillon, seen off-Broadway, and The Entertainer, which I missed altogether, it has been my luck to
see Osborne plays on home ground, beginning with the 1956 production of Look Back in Anger, which I was fortunate enough to catch on one of those celebrated Monday nights when discussions were held after the performance so that patrons could relieve their outrage at what the playwright was doing to English life, society, sex, youth, the class warfare, the welfare state, death and taxes, redbrick universities, the owners of sweetshops, middle-class girls who marry them and have therefore to do their own ironing—and general hard times for anti-heroes all.

  In the 1956 Look Back in Anger, not all of the audience’s rage was caused by attack on institutions precious to it, or even by Osborne’s wickedly skin-raising flicks of line-to-line dialogue. Instead, it was in part teased out by the antics of the “anger” in the play itself, as it flitted restlessly from target to target like a bird that defecated intelligently from the air but never perched, or like a floating paranoia that never revealed itself centrally—what made the patrons sore was that what cannot be grasped cannot be attacked. In discussions of last year’s Tiny Alice, Edward Albee’s reply to questions on what this play was about suggested that this was not necessary to know; if the audience would but “think” along with him he would be satisfied—and, he hoped, they would be too. Thus he very cannily and properly avoided saying whether he himself knew precisely—for any artist is a fool who is willing to state his subject except in the work itself, or at least in another work as long.