Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

  CARR: My God, you little Romanian wog – you bloody dago – you jumped-up phrase-making smart-alecy arty-intellectual Balkan turd!!! Think you know it all! – while we poor dupes think we’re fighting for ideals, you’ve got a profound understanding of what is really going on, underneath! – you’ve got a phrase for it! You pedant! Do you think your phrases are the true sum of each man’s living of each day? – capitalism with the gloves off? – do you think that’s the true experience of a wire-cutting party caught in a crossfire in no-man’s-land? (Viciously) It’s all the rage in Zurich! – You slug! I’ll tell you what’s really going on: I went to war because it was my duty, because my country needed me, and that’s patriotism. I went to war because I believed that those boring little Belgians and incompetent Frogs had the right to be defended from German militarism, and that’s love of freedom. That’s how things are underneath, and I won’t be told by some yellow-bellied Bolshevik that I ended up in the trenches because there’s a profit in ball-bearings!

  TZARA (Storming): Quite right! You ended up in the trenches, because on the 28th of June 1900 the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary married beneath him and found that the wife he loved was never allowed to sit next to him on royal occasions, except! when he was acting in his military capacity as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army – in which capacity he therefore decided to inspect the army in Bosnia, so that at least on their wedding anniversary, the 28th of June 1914, they might ride side by side in an open carriage through the streets of Sarajevo! (Sentimentally) Aaaaah!

  (Then slaps his hands sharply together like a gun-shot) Or, to put it another way –

  CARR (Quietly): We’re here because we’re here … because we’re here because we’re here … we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here …

  (CARR has dropped into the familiar chant, quite quiet. TZARA joins in, just using the sound ‘da-da’ to the same tune. The light starts to go. The chant grows. When CARR starts to speak, TZARA continues the chanting quietly for a few more moments under CARR’s words.)

  Great days! The dawn breaking over no-man’s-land – Dewdrops glistening on the poppies in the early morning sun! The trenches stirring to life!… ‘Good morning, corporal! All quiet on the Western Front?’… ‘Tickety-boo, sir!’ – ‘Carry on!’ – Wonderful spirit in the trenches – never in the whole history of human conflict was there anything to match the courage, the comradeship, the warmth, the cold, the mud, the stench – fear – folly – Christ Jesu!, but for this blessed leg! – I never thought to be picked out, plucked out, blessed by the blood of a blighty wound – oh heaven! – released into folds of snow-white feather beds, pacific civilian heaven!, the mystical swissticality of it, the entente cordiality of it!, the Jesus Christ I’m out of it! – into the valley of the invalided – Carr of the Consulate!

  (Lights to normal.)

  And what brings you here, my dear Tristan?

  TZARA: Oh, pleasure, pleasure … What else should bring anyone anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Henry?

  CARR: I believe it is customary in good society to take a cucumber sandwich at five o’clock. Where have you been since last Thursday?

  TZARA: In the Public Library.

  CARR: What on earth were you doing there?

  TZARA: That’s just what I kept asking myself.

  CARR: And what was the reply?

  TZARA: ‘Ssssh!’ Cecily does not approve of garrulity in the Reference Section.

  CARR: Who is Cecily? And is she as pretty and well-bred as she sounds? Cecily is a name well thought of at fashionable christenings.

  TZARA: Cecily is a librarianness. I say, do you know someone called Joyce?

  CARR: Joyce is a name which could only expose a child to comment around the font.

  TZARA: No, no, Mr Joyce, Irish writer, mainly of limericks, christened James Augustine, though registered, due to a clerical error, as James Augusta, a little known fact.

  CARR: Certainly I did not know it. But then I have never taken an interest in Irish affairs. In fashionable society it would be considered a sign of incipient vulgarity with radical undertones.

  TZARA: The war caught Joyce and his wife in Trieste in Austro-Hungary. They got into Switzerland and settled in Zurich. He lives in Universitatsstrasse, and is often seen round about, in the library, in the cafés, wearing, for example, a black pinstripe jacket with grey herringbone trousers, or brown Donegal jacket with black pinstripe trousers, or grey herringbone jacket with brown Donegal trousers, all being the mismatched halves of sundry sundered Sunday suits: sorts language into hands of contract bridge. His limericks are said to be more interesting, though hardly likely to start a revolution – I say, do you know someone called Ulyanov?

  CARR: I’m finding this conversation extremely hard to follow.

  And you still have not told me what you were doing in the public library. I had no idea that poets nowadays were interested in literature. Or is it that your interest is in Cecily?

  TZARA: Good heavens, no. Cecily is rather pretty, and wellbred, as you surmised, but her views on poetry are very old-fashioned and her knowledge of the poets, as indeed of everything else, is eccentric, being based on alphabetical precedence. She is working her way along the shelves. She has read Allingham, Anon, Arnold, Belloc, Blake, both Brownings, Byron, and so on up to, I believe, G.

  CARR: Who is Allingham?

  TZARA: ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men …’ Cecily would regard any poem that came out of a hat with the gravest suspicion. Hello – why the extra cup? – why cucumber sandwiches? Who’s coming to tea?

  CARR: It is merely set for Gwendolen – she usually returns at about this hour.

  TZARA: How perfectly delightful, and to be honest not unexpected. I am in love with Gwendolen and have come expressly to propose to her.

  CARR: Well, that is a surprise.

  TZARA: Surely not, Henry; I have made my feelings for Gwendolen quite plain.

  CARR: Of course you have, my dear fellow. But my surprise stems from the fact that you must surely have met Gwendolen at the Public Library, for she has left here every morning this week saying that that is where she is going, and Gwendolen is a scrupulously truthful girl. In fact, as her elder brother I have had to speak to her about it. Unrelieved truthfulness can give a young girl a reputation for insincerity. I have known plain girls with nothing to hide captivate the London season purely by discriminate mendacity.

  TZARA: Oh, I assure you Gwendolen has been in the Public Library. But I have had to admire her from afar, all the way from Economics to Foreign Literature.

  CARR: I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It’s the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl’s mind.

  TZARA: Well, in this library Foreign Literature includes English.

  CARR: What a novel arrangement. Is any reason given?

  TZARA (Impatiently): The point is, Henry, I can’t get to speak to her alone.

  CARR: Ah, yes-her chaperone.

  TZARA: Chaperone?

  CARR: Yes – you don’t imagine I’d let my sister go unchaperoned in a city largely frequented by foreigners. Gwendolen has made a friend in Zurich. I have not met her but Gwendolen assures me that they are continuously in each other’s company, and from a description which I have elicited by discreet questioning she cannot but be a wholesome and restraining influence, being practically middle-aged, plainly dressed, bespectacled and answering to the name of Joyce, oh good heavens. Is he after her money?

  TZARA: Only in derisory instalments. He claims to be writing a novel, and has made a disciple out of Gwendolen. She transcribes for him, looks things up in works of reference, and so on. The poor girl is so innocent she does not stop to wonder what possible book could be derived from reference to Homer’s Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory for 1904.

  CARR: Homer’s Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory?

&
nbsp; TZARA: For 1904.

  CARR: I admit it’s an unusual combination of sources, but not wholly without possibilities. Anyway, there’s no need to behave as though you were married to her already. You are not married to her already, and I don’t think you ever will be.

  TZARA: Why on earth do you say that?

  CARR: In the first place, girls never marry Romanians, and in the second place I don’t give my consent.

  TZARA: Your consent!

  CARR: My dear fellow, Gwendolen is my sister and before I allow you to marry her you will have to clear up the whole question of Jack.

  TZARA: Jack! What on earth do you mean? What do you mean, Henry, by Jack? I don’t know anyone of the name of Jack.

  CARR (Taking a library ticket from his pocket): You left this here the last time you dined.

  TZARA: Do you mean to say you have had my library ticket all this time? I had to pay a small fine in replacing it.

  CARR: That was extravagant of you, since the ticket does not belong to you. It is made out in the name of Mr Jack Tzara, and your name isn’t Jack, it’s Tristan.

  TZARA: No, it isn’t, it’s Jack.

  CARR: You have always told me it was Tristan. I have introduced you to everyone as Tristan. You answer to the name of Tristan. Your notoriety at the Meierei Bar is firmly associated with the name Tristan. It is perfectly absurd saying your name isn’t Tristan.

  TZARA: Well, my name is Tristan in the Meierei Bar and Jack in the library, and the ticket was issued in the library.

  CARR: To write – or at any rate to draw words out of a hat – under one name, and appear at the Public Library under another is an understandable precaution – but I cannot believe that that is the whole explanation.

  TZARA: My dear Henry, the explanation is perfectly simple. One day last year, not long after the triumph at the Meierei Bar of our noise concert for siren, rattle and fire-extinguisher, a bunch of the boys were sinking a beer at the Cafe Zum Adler – myself, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Picabia … Arp, as usual, was inserting a warm croissant into his nose, I was quietly improving a Shakespeare sonnet with a pair of scissors.

  CARR: Which one?

  TZARA: I believe it was the Eighteenth, the one beginning ‘Vergleichen solle ich dich dem Sommertag, Da du weit lieblicher, weit milder bist?’

  CARR: But surely, in German it’s hardly worth the trouble.

  TZARA (Cheerfully): Oh, completely pointless. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be Dada. Well, who should come in but Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, with a group of Zimmerwaldists.

  CARR: That sounds like the last word in revolutionary socialism.

  TZARA: It is. At Zimmerwald in 1915 we called on the workers of the world to oppose the war.

  CARR: We?

  TZARA: Well, I dine with them, and, in fact, was doing so on this occasion when someone at the bar piano started to play a Beethoven sonata. Lenin went completely to pieces, wept like a child. When he recovered he dried his eyes and lashed into the Dadaists! – ‘decadent nihilists, flogging too good for them’, and so on. Fortunately, the name Tzara meant nothing to him, but a few days later I met him at the library and he introduced me to Cecily. ‘Tzara!’ said she. ‘Not the Dadaist, I hope!’ I could feel Lenin’s eyes upon me. ‘My younger brother, Tristan,’ I replied. ‘Most unfortunate. Terrible blow to the family.’ When I filled up my application form, for some reason the first name I thought of was Jack. It has really turned out rather well.

  CARR (With great interest): Cecily knows Lenin, does she?

  TZARA: Oh, yes, he’s made quite a disciple out of Cecily. She’s helping him with his book on Imperialism.

  CARR (Thoughtfully): Did you say the reference section?

  TZARA: They agree on everything, including art. As a Dadaist, I am the natural enemy of bourgeois art and the natural ally of the political left, but the odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art.

  CARR: There’s nothing odd about that. Revolution in art is in no way connected with class revolution. Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else.

  TZARA: Because man cannot live by bread alone.

  CARR: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on. When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour – weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you’ve got a chit for life? (Passionately) Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.

  TZARA (Hard): Yes, by Christ! – and when you see the drawings he made on the walls of the cave, and the fingernail patterns he one day pressed into the clay of the cooking pot, then you say, My God, I am of these people! It’s not the hunters and the warriors that put you on the first rung of the ladder to consecutive thought and a rather unusual flair in your poncey trousers.

  CARR: Oh yes it was. The hunter decorated the pot, the warrior scrawled the antelope on the wall, the artist came home with the kill. All of a piece. The idea of the artist as a special kind of human being is art’s greatest achievement, and it’s a fake!

  TZARA: My God, you bloody English philistine – you ignorant smart-arse bogus bourgeois Anglo-Saxon prick! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat – grind – shit. Hunt – eat – fight – grind – saw the logs – shit. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But that difference has become smaller and smaller and smaller. Art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the pay-master. The artist has negated himself: paint – eat – sculpt – grind – write – shit. (A light change.)

  Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man – is a coffee-mill! That is the message of Dada. – dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada…

  (TZARA is shouting, raving. CARR immobile.)

  (Normal light as BENNETT opens the door. Everything back to ‘normal’.)

  BENNETT: Miss Gwendolen and Mr Joyce.

  (GWENDOLEN and JOYCE appear as before. BENNETT retires.)

  JOYCE: Good morning, my name is James Joyce –

  CARR: James Augusta?

  JOYCE (Taken aback): Was that a shot in the dark?

  CARR: Not at all – I am a student of footnotes to expatriate Irish literature.

  JOYCE: You know my work?

  CARR: No – only your name.

  TZARA: Miss Carr…

  GWEN: Mr Tzara…

  CARR: … but something about you suggests Limerick.

  JOYCE: Dublin, don’t tell me you know it?

  CARR: Only from the guidebook, and I gather you are in the process of revising that.

  JOYCE: Yes.

  GWEN: Oh! I’m sorry – how terribly rude! Henry – Mr Joyce –

  CARR: How’dyou do?

  JOYCE: Delighted.

  TZARA: Good day.

  JOYCE: I just wanted to say –

  GWEN: Do you know Mr Tzara, the poet?

  JOYCE: By sight, and reputation; but I am a martyr to glaucoma and inflation. Recently as I was walking down the

  Bahnhofstrasse my eye was caught by a gallery showcase and I was made almost insensible with pain.

  GWEN: Mr Joyce has written a poem about it. It is something you two have in common.

  JOYCE: Hardly. Mr Tzara’s disability is monocular, and, by rumour, affected, whereas I have certificates for conjunctivitis, iritis and synechia, and am something of an international eyesore.

  GWEN: I mean poetry. I was thinking of y
our poem

  ‘Bahnhofstrasse’, beginning

  ‘The eyes that mock me sign the way

  Whereto I pass at eve of day, Grey way whose violet signals are

  The trysting and the twining star.’

  TZARA (To JOYCE): For your masterpiece

  I have great expectorations

  (GWEN’s squeak, ‘Oh!’)

  For you I would evacuate a monument.

  (Oh!)

  Art for art’s sake – I am likewise defecated

  GWEN: Dedicated –

  TZARA: I’m a foreigner.

  JOYCE: So am I.

  GWEN: But it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I have a good ear, would you not agree, Mr Tzara?

  TZARA: It is the most perfect thing about you, Miss Carr.

  GWEN: Oh, I hope not. That would leave no room for development.

  JOYCE: But have you not read any of Mr Tzara’s poems?

  GWEN: To my shame I have not – but perhaps the shame is yours, Mr Tzara.

  TZARA: I accept it – but the matter can be easily put right, and at once.

  GWEN (Fluttering): Oh, Mr Tzara!…

  (TZARA retires to the sideboard, or writing table if there is one, and begins to write fluently on a large piece of white paper.)

  CARR (To JOYCE): And what about you, Doris?

  JOYCE: Joyce.

  CARR: Joyce.

  JOYCE: It is not as a poet that I come to see you, sir, but as the business manager of the English Players, a theatrical troupe.

  CARR: The business manager?

  JOYCE: Yes.

  CARR: Well, if it’s money you want, I’m afraid …

  GWEN: Oh, Henry! – he’s mounting a play, and Mr Joyce thought your official support –

  JOYCE: Perhaps I’d better explain. It seems, sir, that my name is in bad odour among the British community in Zurich.

  Whether it is my occasional contribution to the neutralist press, or whether it is my version of Mr Dooley, beginning: