Читать книгу Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber - Страница 11

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“Tonight we shall discuss the demasculinization of the theatre of our time,” said Dr. Bach, “with a gloomy glance at the near future, when the stage will have become completely womanized.” Dr. Bach was an obdurate selector of themes for discussion, and he did his selecting with a pontifical air of authority and finality. We were sitting, this particular night, on the lawn of a guesthouse in Bermuda, where we had come, he from Boston and I from New York, to get away from television. I never found out what Dr. Bach was a doctor of, because he never gave me the chance to ask. He was a man in his late sixties, possibly a retired professor of philosophy, fond of dressing for dinner in a white dinner jacket and of sitting around until midnight over brandy and cigars, selecting subjects of conversation and pulling them apart until all the petals were gone and nothing was left but the stem. I had the feeling of listening to lectures rather than of taking part in postprandial exchanges of opinion, and Dr. Bach’s allusions to “our little talks” were something in the nature of a distortion of our summer evenings in the Fairy Isles.

“I overheard the young lady on your left at dinner,” said Dr. Bach, “remarking that she had seen the original company of ‘The Male Animal’ with Gene Tierney. Now, you and your collaborator, subconsciously aware fourteen years ago of the imminent feminization of Broadway, not only selected an aggressively masculine title for your comedy but actually filled the play with obtrusively male characters and only a hint of females, rather sketchily and ineptly drawn.” I squirmed a little in my chair, but seeing that I was about to speak, Dr. Bach raised his hand for silence and went on. “In spite of your manly efforts on behalf of the dramaturgic survival of your sex, we observe that your little farce will be remembered, if it is remembered, as a 1940 vehicle for Miss Gene Tierney. Edmund Kean, of course, would have strangled the young lady at your table. I refrain from describing what he might have done to Miss Tierney, had he played in support of her in your little comedy as Professor Jimmy Turner.”

I did get in a word at this point. I said, “Tommy.”

Dr. Bach held up his hand again. “Kean is only a fading memory now,” he said, “like Lemaître and the last of the great male actors, John Barrymore. You will think I have not heard of Brasseur, the violently energetic French actor who recently revived the male in the Continental theatre, but I remind you that he was playing Edmund Kean in the new version of Alexandre Dumas’s melodrama about that great Englishman. In a word, his was but a momentary backward glance at an ancient hurricane long since blown over, a phenomenon of fad, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The vigorous Brasseur will have been forgotten long before the ladies have ceased to babble about the public disturbance created by Miss Katharine Hepburn in Shaw’s ‘The Millionairess.’ ” Dr. Bach settled back in his chair, sipped his brandy, and gave his cigar a flourish. The overture had ended and he was about to raise the curtain on the play of his present argument.

“It is true,” said Dr. Bach, “that the Broadway critics, during recent seasons, have written of actresses as if they were superhuman geniuses, at once golden and edible, ineffable and endlessly describable, impalpable and all over the place, in the manner of men who had never seen a woman before, let alone a play. But we must seek further back for the true causes of the disease that I can only call Actressissima. The fault lies, ironically enough, with the male playwrights, who have womenchanted the modern theatre. They have all been specialists in the demasculinization of the stage. Let me tick off a few, at random.”

I could tell by his expression that he was not going to tick off anything at random but recite something he had rehearsed ever since he had eavesdropped on the young lady at my table. “Ibsen explores the condition of Woman,” he said, waving his cigar at an imaginary enrapt audience of scholars. “Shaw exposes the nature of women, Barrie exalts the virtues of ladies, Maugham exhibits the vices of females, Barry exploits the talents of actresses.”

It seemed so pat and studied that I cut in rather sharply, hoping to throw him off balance, with “How about Williams?”

He aimed his cigar at me as if it were a pistol. “Let us not discuss baseball,” he said testily. “I detest baseball.”

I sipped my brandy and said, “I mean Tennessee Williams.”

He realized that he had to deal with it, and he dealt with it, I think, rather neatly, considering the fact that not every verb begins with “ex.” He said, “Williams exhumes the dead dreams of the weaker sex.”

I let my companion dangle in what was for him an unusually long silence--perhaps a dozen seconds, during which I suppose he was trying to fit Chekhov and O’Neill into his tidy game of definition. “It seems to me,” I began finally, “that--”

“Not at all,” he said abruptly. “I have been considering the staggering price the male playwrights may have to pay, in the end, for their preoccupation with various phases of the female. Their names are likely, unless I am greatly mistaken, to become entirely forgotten, and this is intolerable to the masculine ego. Something will have to give, probably the masculine ego, and we shall be reduced to the stature of chipmunks. Even now, many a person who knows who played Hedda Gabler does not know who wrote it. I chanced to be in the lobby of the theatre between acts during Blanche Yurka’s production of ‘Hedda,’ and I overheard two distinguished New York critics discussing the play, if you could call it discussing the play. ‘She isn’t Emily Stevens,’ said one of them. The other thought a moment and said, ‘No, she isn’t Emily Stevens.’ Now, the criticism of a drama in terms of who the actress playing the title role wasn’t should have stood out for me as a clear portent of what was to come. To be sure, there had been many earlier warning signs, most of them undoubtedly familiar to you: the practice, or convention, of changing Peter Pan into a girl onstage, to say nothing of making a female out of Jim Hawkins in ‘Treasure Island’ and, eminently, the fact that the most aggressively virile of all creatures, the barnyard cock, is forever identified with the gentlest of virgin actresses.”

I decided it was my turn to wedge in a sentence or two. “Men are more interesting than women,” I said, “but women are indubitably more fascinating, and possibly more amusing. This may account for the playwrights’ immemorial dedication to an examination of the opposite sex.”

“You are missing the point,” said Dr. Bach sharply. “The absorption of male playwrights with the female is merely a further evidence of their blatant ego. They believe that only the masculine mind is capable of comprehending the intricacies of the feminine nature and of presenting to the world Woman’s despair and eventual doom. It is a fine piece of irony that, in so reasoning, the playwrights have succeeded in writing their own doom.” He finished his brandy and set down the glass on the table that stood between us. I splashed more brandy into it, and now that I had got my foot in the door of the discussion I found something else to say. “There can be no doubt--” I began, but he waved it aside with his cigar. “You used the word ‘immemorial’ rather loosely,” he said. “There was a long time, an epoch even, during which the male character and actor properly dominated our theatre. I refer to the era of the matinee idol, a term that aptly represents the decline of such giants as the ones I have already mentioned. I remember when the actress was kept sternly in her place. I remember David Warfield in ‘The Music Master,’ Otis Skinner in ‘Mister Antonio,’ William Hodge in ‘The Man from Home,’ Henry Miller in ‘The Great Divide,’ William Faversham in ‘The Squaw Man,’ H. B. Warner in ‘Alias Jimmy Valentine,’ John Drew in ‘Rosemary,’ Robert Edeson in ‘Strongheart,’ Dustin Farnum in ‘Cameo Kirby,’ Maclyn Arbuckle in ‘The Round Up,’ Douglas Fairbanks in ‘Hawthorne of the U.S.A.,’ and even, God save my soul, Cyril Scott in ‘The Prince Chap,’ and Guy Bates Post in ‘Omar, the Tent Maker.’ The male persisted even into the nineteen-twenties. There was Robert Ames in ‘The Hero,’ Frank Craven in ‘The First Year,’ Harry Beresford in ‘The Old Soak,’ and a few others, including a young friend of yours in ‘The Poor Nut.’ Who remembers, for example, the name of the lady who played opposite Glenn Hunter in ‘Merton of the Movies’?”

I had him there and moved in quickly. “I do,” I told him. “Florence Nash.”

He almost dropped his cigar, and then became absorbed in a long study of the brandy in his glass.

“You left out some old classics,” I reminded him. “The gentlemen who figured so prominently in ‘Secret Service,’ ‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back,’ ‘The Servant in the House,’ and, of course, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ There was also, later on, Joseph Schildkraut in ‘Liliom.’ ”

He turned ponderously in his chair and gave me a cold stare. “It was Eva Le Gallienne in ‘Liliom,’ ” he objected. “I was coming to her. The twenties marked the beginning of the end of men in the theatre. Consider the body blows they had to endure at the time: the Kikis, the Lulu Belles, the Miss Lulu Betts, the Saint Joans, the Mother Goddams, and the Miss Thompsons. This is a casual conversation we are having, not a precise calendar. It may be that man’s day upon our stage began to bleed to death when the Reverend Davidson cut his throat on Pago Pago.”

We sat in silence for a long moment, contemplating the bleeding to death of the theatrical male. “We have skipped a little lightly over William Gillette,” I put in.

He took a long drink of brandy this time, glanced at me as if I wasn’t there, and observed, “William Gillette as an actor died in ‘Dear Brutus’ at the hands of an eighteen-year-old snippet named Helen Hayes.”

I thought he was going a bit too far, but I didn’t say anything. His face took on a faint shade of uneasiness, and as I watched him, I wondered if his agile memory had suddenly stumbled upon the gallant stands put up by the embattled Male in “What Price Glory?,” “Journey’s End,” and “The Front Page.” If he had disinterred these brave members of a vanishing sex, he said nothing about it, and I let the plays pass without mention.

“Man’s interest in Woman,” I began, catching my companion’s pontifical note, “is superficial and momentary at best. I have been thinking about a discussion I had with half a dozen gentlemen some twenty years ago in a place called Tony’s. Someone had posed the question ‘With what person, alive or dead, would you like to spend your last evening on earth?’ Only one man present chose a woman. All the others selected men, for the dangers they had known, or the shutouts they had pitched, or for the things they had written, composed, invented, discovered, or got away with. I recall that Mike Romanoff selected Oswald Spengler, possibly preferring intellectual stimulation at the end, however dismal, to spiritual comfort, and that a moody Irishman, up to his ears in rye, simply said, ‘Old Overholt,’ and closed his eyes. Someone, I believe, said he would like to pass his final hours in the company of the captain of the Mary Celeste to find out, as he put it, what the hell happened.”

Dr. Bach looked at me with a faint sign of interest.

“Who selected the woman?” he asked.

I suppose I blushed a bit. “I did,” I told him. “Raquel Meller.”

Dr. Bach gave a small start, as if I had thrown something at him. “Let us keep this discussion out of the realm of emotional involvement,” he suggested.

“I never met the lady,” I said a little stiffly. He had a comment for that, as he had for everything. “Let us not get into the unattainable,” he commanded. “Men have got into the unattainable and never returned.”

It was fun to embarrass my friend. “I was also in love with Irene Fenwick and Marie Doro,” I said. “They were both unattainable. Nonetheless, I managed somehow to find my way back.” He treated all this with a heavy cold silence, tossed away his cigar, and brought out a fresh one. I held out my lighter and clicked it several times, but it wouldn’t work. He found a match and a new tangent.

“A sensitive ex-lieutenant of police with whom I was at Harvard,” he began, “persuaded me to accompany him not long ago to a performance of something called ‘Gigi,’ an Americanized French bibelot from which all the Gallic essences were strained, so that what I endured for two hours and a half seemed like some overlabored preparation for a junior prom. I had been informed that the star, an English child, possessed a new and undreamed-of something or other. Since I had decided that this miraculous gift was probably some kind of visual illusion, I sat through the piece with my eyes closed. In the play, the young girl romps with a man of the world, and during this scene, I was later told, love suddenly came to them both. Now, I have lived in France, and I am deeply aware that love in that realistic nation is not an accidental by-product of rumpus. Since I couldn’t see what was going on, nothing whatever came across the footlights to me except the sounds of romp, and there’s enough of that in real life to satisfy me. During a curious ten-second silence, representing the holy stillness of dawning perpetual rapture, I was about to shout ‘Get on with it!’ when my intuitive companion arrested me. I was in bed and asleep by eleven-twenty that night, the ineluctable magic of the little girl having eluded me completely. She is, I understand, the greatest of the Hepburns, as Shirley Booth is the greatest of the Booths.” He took, for the first time, a dollop instead of a sip of his brandy.

“Miss Booth comes across the footlights to me,” I said defensively, “by a kind of magic I have never encountered in any other actress. She could play anyone from Snow White to Mrs. Grover Cleveland.”

“Pish,” said Dr. Bach. “The damnation has descended upon you. You have caught the sickness of our age. I can see the female Zeitgeist hovering about your head and whispering in your ear. You stand in peril, sir, of becoming one of those writers who serve as literary eunuchs at the courts of the Misses Ethel Merman and Judy Holliday. It makes no difference, the critics say, what is written for them or who writes it. The ladies turn even the most senescent drivel into their peculiar jewels and gold, we are solemnly informed. Would God that Joseph Jefferson were still alive, or Mansfield, or even Nat Goodwin! I sat there at ‘Gigi’ praying for the entrance of Ed Wynn or W. C. Fields with his kadoola-kadoola, but I have apparently not deserved these blessings even from the generous and merciful God that we all know is concerned with our every distress.” The tree toads across Pomander Road occupied the moment with their melancholy warnings.

“You find women less bearable than I do,” I observed at last. “What I mean to say is that the element of personal taste enters into everything, with its magnifying glass and its automatic simplifier.” I was beginning to feel the brandy all right. “I confess there was not a single moment,” I went on, “when I cared what happened to Sabrina Fair, but on the other hand, I still wake up at night hoping that little Sheba will come back.”

“Posh,” said Dr. Bach. “You are talking like a dogman, not a calm, disinterested critic of the ladies of the theatre. Calmness and disinterestedness have, of course, disappeared almost without a trace. Now that every play is either a dismal failure or what is called, I believe, a smasherino, a theatrical exhibit is either ‘terrible’ or ‘sublime.’ Humor is seeping out of critical appraisal, too. No longer is there a reviewer capable of saying that such-and-such a female performer tears a passion to titters.”

“Tatters,” I corrected him.

“Titters,” he insisted. It was obviously a gag that he enjoyed, and I paid it the tribute of a short laugh. He finished his brandy and sighed and put the glass down again, but waved the bottle away when I picked it up. “Now that the New York critics have reached the top of Mount Everest,” he said sourly, “having scaled Mount Fulsome with a mighty burst of rhetoric, to reach Summa Cum Laude at last, from where the tiny tattered banners of Bernhardt and Réjane may be seen faintly waving far below the bright and deathless colors of Miss Audrey Hepburn, we may perhaps hope for some kind of respite and repose, since there is no longer any place to go but down. Unless, of course, another English or French or perhaps Portuguese young woman appears suddenly from the regions which are holy land. Leaving aside the ecstasies of Poe and the excesses of Andrew Marvell, there has been nothing in all the range of my reading to compare with the critical exaltation of the Misses Booth, Hepburn, Jeanmaire, and Rosalind Russell since the late Joseph Hergesheimer, in an old issue of the American Mercury, compared the charms of the April moon unfavorably with those of Miss Lillian Gish.” He gave brooding attention to the glowing end of his cigar. The tree toads filled the interval with their mournful chant of “Sweet, sweet, sweet.”

“What about the future?” I asked finally. “You were going to take a gloomy glance at the future of the theatre.”

Dr. Bach made a little gesture of annoyance. “The future’s dark indeed, sir,” he said. “There will always be, I suppose, revivals of Shakespeare, mostly ‘As You Like It’ whenever a new lady genius of unique magic and lovely legs comes out of Surrey or Marseille or Des Moines to send the transfigured critics to their eager and abused typewriters, but the great tragedies of the Bard, the wondrous kings and princes, the Falstaffs and Hamlets, have probably already strutted their final hour upon the boards. I have no doubt that the young lady at your table could tell you the name of the Cordelia who was so ably supported in the most recent production of ‘Lear’ by Mr. Louis Calhern. Our young admirer of the histrionic talents of Miss Tierney could never have seen Wolheim and Boyd in the Anderson-Stallings classic, but her mother has surely told her the name of the actress who dominated the play in the role of Charmaine.” He was laboring his point now, but I decided to let him have free rein, and he had it. “I am thinking,” he said, “of what the future playwrights, probably lady playwrights, will do to ‘Macbeth’ or ‘The Tragedy of Lady Macbeth’ in the years to come, when they rewrite it to make room for the actresses of tomorrow. King Duncan, in this feminized version, will have a queen, thus affording a part for some new Judith Anderson or Tallulah Bankhead who is now in her teens somewhere in Connecticut or New Jersey. I can hear her saying to Duncan, as he twitters of swallows and St. Martin’s summer, ‘Thinkst thou I would let thee spend the night in these damp and hollow corridors alone with this crown-crazy twain?’ Fleance will become Florence, a change of sex which would admittedly account for this character’s now dubious escape from the assassins.” He tossed away his cigar and watched it expire in the damp night grass.

I felt myself dozing and cut in on his gloomy prefigurings in order to stay awake. “Perhaps it will be Lady Banquo and not Banquo,” I suggested, “who appears to Macbeth in the famous banquet scene. After all, ‘Never shake thy gory locks at me’ has always sounded to me like a line addressed to a female; otherwise it would surely be ‘Never shake thy gory beard at me.’ I have always doubted that a staunch Scotsman in a crowded and well-lighted hall would get the chattering jitters at sight of a dead man, but the apparition of a dead and bloody lady is something else again.”

I poured myself more brandy, and he held out his glass impatiently. “Let us not--” he began, but I interrupted him. I felt it was my turn. “Then there is that duel between Macbeth and Macduff,” I said. “I have always felt that ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped’ is completely out of place in a mortal combat with broad-swords fought by two powerfully built medieval warriors. Such men would surely not discuss a Caesarean section at a moment like that. Lady Macduff and Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, scratching and pulling hair, would give the line verisimilitude.”

He gulped his brandy and said irritably, “We have had too much to drink.” He stood up. I was about to say something in conclusion, but realized I would have to let him have the last word. “ ‘Macbeth’ is a rough-and-tumble mystery show, suitable for the kiddies and for television. The king should be played as if he were afraid someone was about to play Sam Spade. No one in his right senses, man or woman, would kill a king in a bedroom. The place to kill a king is on a heath. You can blame it on witches or the weather, or a horse with a loose shoe. It is the ‘Hamlet’ of the future that mainly concerns and disturbs me. Some little doxy from Holland, who has run up like a weed overnight into the grandeur and glory of transcendent ability, will insist that the immortal drama be revised in order to build up the part of Ophelia at the expense of the mighty periods of the forlorn prince.” We began to cross the lawn slowly, toward the welcoming arms leading up to the porch of the guesthouse. At the foot of the steps, he turned and gazed at me. “I can see from here where the change will begin,” he said. “When Hamlet says to the deranged idiot, ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ the magic little Dutch girl will turn upon him and cry, ‘Get thee to a monastery,’ and he will exit, flinging roses, and blowing the time upon dandelion clocks.” He had mercifully not heard, I felt sure, about Siobhan McKenna and the strange story of her desire to play the Prince of Denmark. I did not tell him, for fear that he might have a fatal stroke, upon the spot.

He stood a moment, motionless and wordless; then he said, “The rest is silex,” and began a tremulous ascent of the curving steps. In the hall inside we shook hands, an inevitable part of our nightly ritual, to go our separate ways to bed.

“Good night, sweet Prince,” I said, “and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

He turned on me and glowered. “I shall not sleep,” he said pettishly. “I propose to proceed to the kitchen and brew myself a large pot of strong coffee.”

I gave his apt pleasantry of a moment before, about the silex, a belated but appreciative tribute of laughter. He bowed slightly and murmured something I didn’t catch. “How about tomorrow night?” I asked.

“Tomorrow night,” he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the rickety old stairs leading to the first floor and the kitchen, “our little talk shall deal with the appalling decline in our time of something or other, I haven’t decided what.” I reached the door of my bedroom and opened it. He stood for a moment at the top of the steps, his back toward me. “Snippets!” he said, as if to himself. “Moppets!” He descended slowly and cautiously the steep staircase that had been built more than three hundred years before Audrey Hepburn was born. I heard the kitchen door closing behind him.