The Habit of Art: A Play Page 6

  Donald It was just a thought, only I haven’t got the hang of the tuba yet. I wanted to make it plain Carpenter was a man of many parts. (Going off.) He wrote children’s books. He ran the Cheltenham Festival…Oh for fuck’s sake!

  By which time he’s offstage.

  Author I am saying nothing.

  Kay Leave it with me.

  ASM Well, I like it.

  Tom Sorry, Kay.

  Kay Brian, you should go.

  Company say goodbye to Brian.

  Stand by, stand by. Ready? LIGHTS UP!

  Auden Death in Venice. Yes. He was my father-in-law, of course, Thomas Mann. I married his daughter Erika. It was in order to get her out of Germany. What are buggers for? I saw him from time to time. Nice woman, Erika. Not long dead. I was genuinely upset. Still. I am the only one of my family not to get divorced.

  He has difficulty remembering this speech, gets cross and roughly takes off the mask.

  Fitz I can’t do it with this fucking thing on!

  Kay (calling dresser over to Fitz) Ralph!

  Ralph takes mask from Fitz and puts it in box. Donald reenters quietly with stool.

  Fitz I’ll keep trying, but whatever he says tomorrow, if it doesn’t work, I think we should forget it. I’ll just have to dye the hair and do the makeup. Besides, it stinks.

  Kay Makeup can be rather restful, darling.

  Fitz It can. It can.

  Ralph Baby powder!

  Kay (to Ralph, who is exiting) Bless you, darling. On!

  ASM (giving cue) ‘So what’s the problem?’

  Auden So what’s the problem? Who is doing the libretto?

  Britten Myfanwy. Piper. John’s wife.

  Auden You mean you’re writing it yourself?

  Britten No. Though I have one or two ideas, obviously.

  Auden There are some writers who set their sights on the Nobel Prize before they even pick up the pen. Elias Canetti is like that. And I’m afraid Thomas Mann. Never underestimate the role of the will in the artistic life. Some writers are all will. Talent you can dispense with, but not will. Will is paramount. Not joy, not delight, but grim application. What were we talking about?

  Britten Thomas Mann. Death in Venice.

  Auden Two of his sisters committed suicide, as did two of his sons. He was a genuine artist.

  Chester’s in Athens.

  Britten Yes.

  Auden Where is Peter?

  Britten I said. Toronto.

  Auden Do you repeat yourself?

  Britten is about to answer when Auden goes on.

  They tell me I do, but that’s not my fault. They treat me like an oracle and that’s what oracles do, repeat themselves. Arid?

  Britten What?

  Auden Your music. I wouldn’t have said that it was arid. Detached. Dispassionate. A tune something of an indulgence. But not arid. Do you always mean what you write?

  Britten In the sense that Shostakovich sometimes doesn’t? I think so. Don’t you?

  Auden I do now. But I didn’t always. When I was young I used to leave meaning to chance. If it sounded right I let the meaning take care of itself. It’s why I find some of my early stuff so embarrassing.

  Britten In those days I’d ask you what a line meant and rather than explain it you’d just write another.

  Auden Very naughty. Except that now I’m more scrupulous and make an effort to tell the truth, people say it’s dull and my early stuff was better.

  Britten Lucky Soviets, I sometimes think…composers panicked into popularity. Else martyred into incomprehension. Here, who cares?

  Carpenter, who has been on the stage but quite unobtrusively, now moves.

  Fitz Are you on still?

  Donald Yes. I never really go off.

  Fitz But you don’t speak?

  Donald Not in words, no. I don’t speak. But my presence speaks. Which helps, I think. It helps you, doesn’t it?

  Neither Fitz nor Henry gives any indication that it does.

  Look. I am sitting here making occasional notes for their two biographies that I shall in due course be writing, so that in a sense the whole scene is in my head.

  I am imagining you.

  (To Author.) You did mean me to be on?

  Author No. But then what do I know? I didn’t mean you to sing or get up in drag.

  Fitz One doesn’t like to think one is just a figment of somebody’s imagination.

  Donald People. If I’m not going to be a device, I need a story to tell, and writing the books is my story.

  Fitz (mouthing to Kay) Voice-over. Six o’clock.

  Kay Two words: Stephen; tomorrow. On…

  Donald takes stool upstage and sits in armchair.

  ASM ‘Myfanwy is very easy to work with.’

  Britten Myfanwy is very easy to work with.

  Auden Who?

  Britten My librettist. Very quick.

  Auden We were quick. We were good and by God we were quick.

  Britten You were a wizard. No librettist I’ve worked with since has ever been half as good. I was quite good, too. (And, since Auden isn’t going to say it:) Yes, you were, Ben.

  Auden The boss on the GPO films, Grierson, is revered now, you know. ‘The Father of the Documentary.’ He was such an innocent. (Portentous voice.) ‘Ever on the alert, this worker lubricates his tool with soap.’

  Britten There are bits of Night Mail in the opera, though no one else will spot them.

  Auden So do you repeat yourself? What opera?

  Britten Death in Venice.

  Auden He was my father-in-law, you know.

  Britten People who’ve got wind of it aren’t keen. They say it’s the same old story. Innocence corrupted. Peter doesn’t like it. Thinks it’s wicked. He says it’s killing me.

  You ask me why I came…I came because I feel so lonely.

  Auden Of course it’s lonely. It’s new. What do you expect?

  Britten I don’t know who else to ask. Usually, you see, there’s encouragement. Excitement. Everyone pulling together. Aldeburgh, it’s a family. This time…I get the feeling they’re slightly embarrassed.

  Auden They’ll come round.

  Britten No they won’t. It’s the boy. The man and the boy.

  Auden Nothing new there. Of course it’s The Blue Angel, isn’t it, Death in Venice…with Aschenbach as Emil Jannings and the boy Marlene Dietrich. All for love. I met her once, Dietrich. She wasn’t stupid.

  Britten The boy is fourteen.

  Auden Oh. I thought he was eleven. In life he was eleven. You’re not asking me to write it?

  Britten Myfanwy’s writing it…has written it, actually. No, I just came…

  Auden Because I would be delighted. Nothing would please me more. Myfanwy who?

  Britten John Piper’s wife.

  Auden You say you’re lonely. Doesn’t she hold your hand?

  Britten I’m not sure she cares for it all that much either. I don’t know anybody else, anybody else who doesn’t defer.

  Pause.

  It’s not so much even that I want help. I just want…company.

  Auden There’s nothing I’d like to do more. I haven’t anything on at the moment. There’s the odd lecture, but these days they all come out of stock. This would be something new. Goody goody.

  Kay (to the Author) Okay! (stopping Fitz) We think we might know this next bit.

  Author Well, someone has to.

  Kay (giving script pages to Henry) Thank you, Henry. It’s Penny and Brian, but Penny and Brian…

  Author Are in the Chekhov. I know.

  Kay Tom.

  Tom plays. Words and Music are played by Stage Management.

  Words (played by Kay) The words of Auden. (She bows.)

  Music (played by ASM) The notes of Ben. (He bows.)

  Words Once we worked together and now again.

  Music But it must work, this revived hook-up.

  Words Or Death in Venice will be a fuck-up. (Words takes back script pages.)


  I’m nervous.

  Music Don’t be. They’re chums. And Ben is a sweetie.

  Words Wystan, too…in his way.

  Music The gang, that’s the operas, the chamber music, the musica totalis…we adore Ben. He’s our creator, after all.

  Words He’s never…ashamed of you?

  Music Ashamed? Of his compositions? Why should he be? We’re his children. Wystan’s not ashamed of you?

  Words No…but he is a perfectionist.

  Music So is Ben. And he loves to show us off and we get to no end of places. The Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room, the BBC Studios in Maida Vale. Then when it’s all over its back to Snape to compare notes. Do you go abroad at all?

  Words Austria in the Summer. New York.

  Music New York? Pff. We’re just back from Valparaiso!

  Words You like Ben. But does Ben like you?

  Music Like us? No! He loves us!

  Words It’s never, ‘Do I mean that still?’

  Music No.

  Words Never, ‘Was I being sincere?’

  Music The idea.

  Words Look.

  I have to come clean. We, the poems, the stuff he’s written…we are sometimes hated.

  Music Hated? But he wrote you.

  Words We embarrass him. We embarrass him so much several of my colleagues never even made it into the Collected Poems.

  Music No!

  Words Excluded. Purged.

  Music Purged?

  Words Never spoken of again. There was Spain, a perfectly good poem cut out completely. Another one, September 1, 1939, he had ‘second thoughts’ about. And you can’t do that, you see. It makes the rest of the oeuvre very nervous…I mean, who’s going to be next?

  ASM shakes head sadly.

  Music Dear me. I don’t like the sound of this.

  Still let’s look on the bright side: people only listen to the music; nobody listens to the words.

  Words That’s what Wystan says. (As Kay.) Moving on.

  Auden What’s it like, Myfanwy’s libretto?

  Britten Very good. Just the ticket. I’m not sure she always understands the book quite, but it’s good. It’s good.

  Auden Does she surprise you?

  Britten She is a bit naive.

  Auden No, no. Does she show the subject in an unexpected light? Does she surprise you into music?

  Britten Well…

  Auden In the opera house words themselves go for nothing. An operatic audience doesn’t listen to the words and only hears maybe one in five. But that’s not the point. The librettist’s function comes earlier because what the librettist, the writer of the words, has paradoxically to do is deliver the music. The librettist is a midwife…But it’s a while since I read Death in Venice. Remind me.

  Britten Aschenbach is a famous author respected –

  Auden That’s right, and more to the point, respectable –

  Britten Married with a daughter, his wife is dead –

  Auden That’s right –

  Britten – and he takes himself off to Venice where he stays on the Lido. He’s suffering from writer’s block.

  Auden Oh, I’d forgotten that. It’s not a complaint from which I’ve ever suffered…or entirely believe in. Whatever form it takes there is never any fun reading about constipation. It assumes, too, that the natural condition of writers is writing whereas the natural condition of most writers is not writing.

  Have you ever had composer’s block?

  Britten No, though people do. Walton, for instance, takes his time. Anyway, Aschenbach is in the hotel –

  Auden Yes, where he sees – I don’t recall him ever speaking to – a Polish family with a beautiful son of fourteen, with whom he becomes obsessed. Tadzio.

  Britten Aschenbach gazes at the boy, besotted with his beauty and thinking in this way to recharge his batteries.

  Auden Yes, that’s it. He’s supposed to be looking for inspiration. But if he wants to look at a beautiful boy, why does he need an excuse? You never do.

  Britten There’s an epidemic of cholera in mainland Venice –

  Auden That’s right, which the authorities are anxious to hush up, though the whole city reeks of carbolic. He ought to leave but fascination with the boy keeps him on the Lido and in the process makes him dye his hair, paint his face and lose all dignity. Eventually he contracts cholera and dies on the beach, still gazing adoringly at Tadzio, whose final gesture seems to beckon him out to sea, with the implication being that he, Tadzio, is also an angel of death.

  Britten You remember it very well.

  Auden Well, he was my father-in-law. Isn’t Myfanwy Piper one of those big girls that Betjeman likes? Or pretends to. He always used to say it was boys with him but that was John just wanting to be in the swim. How is Betjeman?

  Britten shakes his head.

  In Oxford the other day apparently. He’s supposed to like Oxford. Never comes to see me.

  Britten (who has a copy) I’ve known the novel all my life.

  Auden Of course. We all have. It’s a queer set book.

  Britten And Thomas Mann is Aschenbach, presumably.

  Auden Their predicament is the same. The eye for male beauty. The occluded sexuality. God, he could be pompous.

  He has taken the book from Britten.

  ‘He thought of his fame, reflected that many people recognised him in the street and would gaze at him respectfully, saluting the unerring and graceful power of his language.’

  Pompous ass.

  Still, it’s a good story with all the unfulfilled longing in the music. Think what Strauss could have done with it.

  Britten smiles heroically in the circumstances.

  Britten Tact was never your strong point.

  Auden Lots of lagoon stuff of course. The sea. The sea is your thing, isn’t it?

  Britten So I’m told.

  Auden That’s right. Extravagant, unacceptable, and the love literally unspeakable but not unsingable, it’s made for opera. And made for you. ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof one sings.’

  Britten It scares me.

  Auden That’s good, Benjie.

  Britten It comes quite close to home.

  Auden So it should.

  Britten It touches on stuff I can’t really talk to Myfanwy about. Though she’s a nice woman. To do with me, obviously. Though she probably knows.

  Auden I’m sure she does.

  Britten I don’t mean she’s a prude. The reverse, really. The boys’ beach games, for instance. She wants Tadzio and his friends to dance naked. I think there might be problems about that.

  Auden The closer you can steer to yourself the better it will be.

  Britten This is Tadzio’s music.

  He plays it on the piano.

  As I say, people don’t like it already.

  Auden The music? We-e-ll…

  Britten No, not the music. The story. They are uneasy about the story.

  Auden What people?

  Britten In Aldeburgh. I’ve only mentioned it to a select few, but word gets round. ‘Here we go again,’ is what they’re saying. ‘Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw. Britten’s perennial theme of innocence corrupted.’ Sometimes I think they’ll come for me as they came for Grimes.

  Auden Why should they? They know the score. Half of them have thrown their boys at you in the first place. But they’re not keen?

  Britten Not so far.

  Auden I am.

  Britten Wystan.

  Auden I am. I long to do it.

  Britten Wystan. All I want is help.

  Auden But I can write the whole thing. Won’t that be a help?

  Britten But it’s promised for next year’s festival.

  Auden So? We’ve done it before. We used to polish off a film in a week. And it’s so long since I had anything worthwhile to do, it will be sheer pleasure.

  Britten What about Myfanwy?

  Auden Ditch her. You’re queer. They expect you to break your prom
ises. I wish Chester were here. He’d love it.

  Auden gets hold of the script and starts going through it.

  Britten No. All I need is somebody – you – to tell me I’ve got it right.

  Auden Who will sing Aschenbach?

  Britten Peter, of course.

  Auden Peter?

  Britten Peter.

  Auden Peter. Oh of course. Don’t need that. (He puts a line through a page of the libretto.)

  Britten Some people – some critics – don’t care for his style of singing, but they’ve come round to it. It’s true his voice has its limits but he has made them see that it is beautiful.

  Auden That is the nature of style. It imposes itself. Do without that. (Another crossing out.)…Style is the sum of one’s imperfections…what one can’t do, as much as what one can…

  Auden is still going through the libretto, ticking and crossing.

  It’s all right, this. It will do, I’m sure. But we can do better. Tell me about the boy. How old should he be?

  Britten Myfanwy and I thought we might get away with seventeen.

  Auden You mean with the audience?

  Britten Yes.

  Auden Because in the book he’s fourteen.

  Britten Well, sixteen then. It depends what he looks like.

  Auden Or whatever age it is nowadays that beauty can be legally admired. The boy Thomas Mann actually saw and took a fancy to was eleven. He wrote him up as being fourteen. Now you’re suggesting sixteen. At this rate he’ll soon be drawing a pension.

  Britten Wystan, you have to take the audience with you.

  Auden Ben, why are you still sending messages in code? These days you can come clean.

  Britten About fourteen-year-old boys? I don’t think so.

  Auden In the music you can.

  Britten This isn’t the music. This is the libretto.

  Auden And the libretto shapes the music, as I’ve explained. Doesn’t Aschenbach have a dream in which he is shocked to find he lusts after the boy? (Looking at the script again.)

  Britten He does, yes. He sees him as a vision of Apollo.