Читать книгу The Scene is Changed - Ashley Dukes - Страница 10

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In his autobiography La Vie de Henri Brulard, having concluded two long chapters about his life, Stendhal writes "After so many general observations, I shall now get born". I have much the same feeling in approaching the year 1912, when actually I reached the age of twenty-seven. Après tant de considérations générales, je vais naître. Up to now I have seen a little of the stage and the world, enough to make a prologue to my own comedy or tragedy or whatever it is destined to be; I can estimate the parts so far played by thought and action in the shaping of a mind. Now must come the rise of the curtain and the "act of preparation", as the French call it, in which the drama really begins. I have started a career; but do I really want the things that success in a career brings with it, money and reputation, settlement and responsibility, all the many millstones that our century can hang about the neck of artists and writers? This may be begging the question: such burdens are very welcome if one is able to bear them. In this year 1912 I see older writers whom I know personally, men like Arnold Bennett, struggling with them all the same. I think again of the gaunt ill-dressed figure of Synge, standing in 1907 on the stage of the Great Queen Street Theatre on the London first night of The Playboy and facing the Irish hooligans with the unseeing eyes of a dreamer. It is true he was then a man about to die of a mortal sickness; but what more could he have asked of life than to have written this comedy, and lived among the Aran islanders and the folk of Kerry, and sat staring before him in some Paris café while a waiter brought his single unheeded drink? In a life like that, pauses and silences count for most and bring their own reward. They count for most in every act of preparation, when the outward progress of the drama is so slow as to be imperceptible.

One thing I see now which I could never then have foreseen—that is how lucky we were, we men now in the fifties, to have known what the world was like before 1914. Seeing what has since befallen and was then in course of preparing, we need not talk of "that civilization" but simply "what the world was like". It had many worthwhile things to offer the grown man or woman; and by grown I mean mature, ready at some age in the twenties to face outward catastrophe if need be. The unlucky ones are the men now in the thirties and forties, who were born into one cataclysm of our social life and now must face another without real experience of the first. They are the legion of the frustrated, and from no fault of their own. Beside them, though they are half a generation our juniors, we can be young and confident. And here let me be forgiven the egoism of standing, in 1912, waiting to be born. The earliest recollection of Stendhal's infancy was biting his nurse's cheek when she asked him too sentimentally for a kiss. Mine is that of casting off socialism and the Fabians and the New Age, always with due gratitude for past favours, and beginning a new hedonist life on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair, which Frank Harris had made a man's paper thriving, as always, on its Spy cartoons of notabilities. Also I was writing dramatic criticisms for the Star and short essays called "turnovers" for the Globe. Royalties came in from translations such as Sudermann's Midsummer Fires which I did for Miss Horniman's theatre in Manchester. I was planning a book on Molière's characters, in which one should get acquainted with Alceste and Célimène as people of our century, instead of thinking of them as figures in the classics. Two or three unacted plays lying in my own desk did not seem to matter: a time for them would surely come along.

I moved from a Bloomsbury attic into a top floor in Mortimer Street, near Oxford Circus; and presently T. E. Hulme, a writer on philosophy and translator of Bergson, came to share it with me. Our link at first was that we had been on the staff of The New Age together; but soon we found much more in common. Hulme made a strong impression on his time, though his writings actually were to be few (he was killed in 1917 on the Belgian coast, quite near my own Company headquarters). A book about him by Michael Roberts (1938) deals with his attitude to the world. Tall and rather Prussian-looking, with greying fair hair and blue eyes, he would sit for hours unwinding, as it were, general ideas, with expansive gestures which began and ended in the region of his chest. He seldom went to bed before three or got up before noon; but his reading was done in the morning hours. On all evenings when I was not at the theatre, we dined in a chop-house behind the Café Royal with the sculptors Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska and a group of English painters including Nevinson and Robert Bevan; and also sometimes Richard Curle, Conrad's friend and biographer, and Ramiro de Maeztu, who became Spanish ambassador to the Argentine. The rest of the evening was spent in the Café itself, generally in talking about the world, the inevitability of war, Marinetti's futurism or Ezra Pound's verse, or the paper that Wyndham Lewis was bringing out called Blast. Once a week these conversations were carried on more fully in a house in Frith Street, where Middleton Murry and C. R. V. Nevinson used to join us. We knew of the work of T. S. Eliot, though he never came himself to these gatherings.

The atmosphere of this group was authoritarian, and no doubt Hulme, had he lived, would have embraced some form of fascism. The significance of all our argument lay in its anticipation, by about ten years, of any political movement embodying its ideas. There was nothing, actually, about which we were united: the sharpest divisions were on religion as a motive in art and literature. Hulme himself declared that he was a member of the Church of England and left it at that. Again I cannot remember any anti-semitic feeling. Jacob Epstein, who was in the midst of his "abstract" period as sculptor, does not recall it either. Our general interest in "abstract" art led us especially to a revaluation of the images of poetry and a strong reaction against romantic verse. This movement would certainly have extended to drama, had any members of the group been able to take the theatre seriously, even the intellectual theatre. But Shaw, I regret to say, was not even discussed as a thinker. As a rationalist, he had shown his opposition to the "heroic values" forming the central nerve of our essential ethic. "The author of Arms and the Man", wrote Hulme, "reminds one of the wasps described by Fabre, who sting their prey in the central ganglia in order to paralyse it, in this way acting as though they were expert entomologists, though in reality they can have no conscious knowledge of what they are doing."

I have to give this short account of intellectual birth-pangs in 1912-13, although my total picture is incomplete because it leaves out the emotional stresses of the same time. I was living among new people in a new eager world, which, however, had few points of contact with the theatre and the writing for and about it which was my living. The contacts which did exist were personal, and through them I drew closer to friends on the stage, most of them working for serious theatre through repertory or some such endeavour in London or the provinces. The London stage was noteworthy only for the productions of Granville Barker, but these included Arnold Bennett's Great Adventure at the Kingsway, Shaw's Androcles and the Lion at the St. James's, and especially a Midsummer Night's Dream at the Savoy, in which by the aid of an apron stage peopled with "bronze angels" the play was given moments of new and extraordinary loveliness. The leaven of creative direction was already working upon our theatres; and England, which had seemed to me rather dull and reactionary when I came from abroad, was again the home and hearth of everything I cared for. Visits to Paris in these years made me familiar with the boulevardian theatres, their witty playwrights and smooth players: I took to chess among the professionals in the Café de la Régence, and pursued my Molière studies at the Française. In the Alps I walked more passes.

Late in 1913 the Stage Society asked me to translate two plays by Anatole France, one of which was the Comedy of the Man who Married a Dumb Wife. This title sounded familiar, and taking down my Rabelais I found the whole tale in Pantagruel, where it is recorded as the subject of a medieval farce played at Montpellier. Anatole France's only embroidery of the plot was to make the husband a much-bribed judge; and probably he did not think it necessary to give the origin, except implicitly in a dedication to a French society for Rabelaisian research. The comedy has a perfect peripety or dramatic reversal of action, for the dumb wife whose tongue is loosened by the surgeon talks too much, and since she cannot be made dumb again, the only remedy is to make her husband deaf. In two acts, it is a classical hour's entertainment if the players can keep up the sublime spirit of mock-solemnity.

The Stage Society production was made at the Haymarket early in 1914, with the dumb wife played by Maire O'Neill, the original Pegeen Mike of Synge's Playboy. At the dress rehearsal I found Granville Barker at the back of the circle enjoying the play, and he said at once that he would like to acquire it for Lillah McCarthy. The two performances went well, but the derivation from Rabelais passed unnoticed by all the critics, including the Francophile and learned A. B. Walkley of The Times. Had I known it, this was to be my last direct contact with the stage for at least six years: it was also eventually to be the means by which I met and married a wife, herself by no means dumb. The fact that the comedy was played at the Haymarket completed the chain of association, for there my Man with a Load of Mischief was to be produced eleven years later for its first London run. Whatever other parts are played in the theatre, luck admittedly plays the lead. It is so important that in Middle Europe the actual wishing of luck is thought unlucky, and an actor or playwright is wished Hals-und-Beinbruch instead. This means "broken neck and legs to you", and it serves just as well. It is contracted to H. und B.B. in German telegrams to players wishing them a good first night.

And so we came to the summer of 1914, which perhaps in recollection seems more charged with fate than it seemed at the time. I went to the Derby with Hulme, who had never seen a racecourse before and was fascinated by the mathematical adroitness of the bookmakers in adjusting the changing odds. We stood on the Hill opposite the grandstand, and it gave him equal satisfaction to see the King (George this time and not Edward) flanked by the entire peerage and many members of the House of Commons, all in the ceremonial attire of Epsom. But he reminded me that the Shah of Persia on a visit to this country a few years earlier had declined to see the Derby, saying "It is already known to me that one horse is swifter than another".

The booths on the Downs were pulled up and the roundabouts cleared away, and England was never quite the same again—but then England never is. Hulme was to be wounded within a year and killed within three: I was to be a soldier nearly five years and go back with an army of occupation to the Germany where he and I had both studied. Our period of training brought us together again, with others including Rupert Brooke who had returned from the expedition to Antwerp. The theatre had stopped at first and then reopened with spy plays and revues, the usual provender of war. A distinguished exception under Granville Barker was the Kingsway, which gave Thomas Hardy's epic drama The Dynasts. In this first autumn, too, eight of Shakespeare's plays were performed at the Old Vic, where Matheson Lang inaugurated the season. Twenty-five of the plays in the First Folio were to be given in this theatre before the Armistice. Even Reinhardt in Berlin could not do so well as this. The Stage Society wisely continued its work, and I made them do The Recruiting Officer by Farquhar early in 1915. This was the first Restoration comedy to be revived for many years, and it led to the performance of plays by Congreve during the war, and afterwards to the formation of the Phoenix as a producing unit.

And now it is time to write a few words about war as an interlude in life and a pause on this journey. It is the simpler to do so because this chapter I am writing has been half a dozen times interrupted by air raid warnings, and one of them is in progress as I write this sentence in a room of my own theatre. (As the sentence ends the all-clear is sounded, and the theatre cat comes to rub himself against my legs and tell me of his heroism.) These thunderous echoes in 1940 recall very clearly the sequence from 1914 onwards. I held every rank, except that of sergeant, from private soldier to major and company commander. From early in 1916 until the Armistice, I took part as a combatant in every action of importance on the Western Front from St. Quentin northward. No injury ever took me further back than an advanced dressing station. As an officer I was mounted and grew very fond of my horse, a red roan who behind the lines would go for walks with me like a dog. I still carried Pascal, Stendhal, Casanova and the rest in my valise. At no time had I any impulse to write about the experiences of war, nor do I wish to do so now. The descriptions I have read in the pages of novels appear to me to have as much value as a clinical account, say, of agonies on a deathbed; and certainly no more. Since Tolstoy's War and Peace there has been nothing essentially to be said on this subject. One illuminating experience of war is long association and comradeship with men one might never otherwise have known.

But I am glad to have seen the major assaults on the Somme and the first lumbering entry of tanks into warfare; the turning of the dolphins in the phosphorescent waters of the North Sea at the mouth of the Yser, where my gun position Extrême-Gauche lay among the sandhills; the tower of Ypres Cloth Hall before it was finally overthrown; the blowing of the great mines at Messines; the streaming of the Cavalry Corps at dawn through the broken Hindenburg Line, even though they came back the same evening; and the Very lights that went up in a desolate landscape, but without the chatter of machine-guns, to serve as fireworks after dusk on Armistice Day. I am critical of heroic values; but in their grim precision these remain and I would not have missed them. Nor is their memory weakened by any repetition of war's alarms. The loss of friends apart, the one personal event was my marriage in the spring of 1918 when it seemed the thing might last for ever (I mean of course the war).

In mid-November 1918 my division began the march to the Rhine, a journey of some 200 miles which I made on foot, my horse being needed for laggards at the rear of the column. The French villages in the freed zone were garlanded and festooned to greet us: in the first of our billets for the night we had to liberate a cow which the farmer had driven upstairs to save her from being driven off by the retreating Germans. Cows can get upstairs but not down and the engineers had to lift her through the window-opening with a crane. In Belgium we would invite the burgomaster to dine in the mess, toasting the kings Albert and George in whisky: he would then tell us where to find wild boar of the Ardennes, which we hunted with service rifles if the conditions admitted a day's halt. I had a day's pike-fishing in the Meuse. Presently we crossed the German frontier marked by great stones on a bleak plateau; and there the divisional general stood under the flag to take the salute. The Eifel, a high wooded part of the Rhineland through which we marched for days, has a Catholic population and peasant houses like those of Bavaria. We passed more and more abandoned German equipment and cars; and from the opposite direction came, in groups or singly, ragged bearded men, hardly recognizable as British prisoners now freed and making their way to Channel ports.

So there was Germany again, strangely revisited after ten years; and in the clean houses with their wood-burning tiled stoves one spoke with the sullen but correct local authorities, distributing so many troops to each farm or cottage and reserving the castle on a rocky eminence as personal headquarters for the night. Here might be paintings and woodcarvings, or a library of books finely bound; things that helped to bring back circulation to the soldier's numbed mind. It became increasingly important to find good quarters at the journey's end, which was timed for Christmas Eve; and as we left the foothills for the alluvial plain of the Rhine, I rode forward to reconnoitre the village of Flerzheim which had been allotted to two companies. Good quarters were few, and my choice fell immediately upon a nunnery with seventeenth-century turrets, which stood in moated seclusion on the outskirts of the place. The Mother Superior, with the parish priest, received me on the threshold and was not surprised to hear that officers and men would be quartered on her. The priest observed that it had been happening ever since the Thirty Years' War. One wing of the ground floor, and half the cells in the main corridor of the floor above, had been evacuated already and the two parts of the building separated by curtains (also, I fear, by barricades). The Mother Superior kindly offered me her own cell, as she had withdrawn with the rest. In half an hour all was settled; and within a week the mess servants were handing in our rations at the kitchen window and the nuns, growing themselves rosier each day, were cooking the best meals I had known in my military career. Life had definitely begun again, and theatre was about to begin.