The Habit of Art: A Play Read online

  Nothing else you want? I’ll say goodnight.

  Stuart (maybe toasting him) Goodnight.

  Boyle doesn’t dignify him with a reply.

  Auden Late. Nine o’clock.

  Stuart You could still suck me off.

  Auden As a nightcap, you mean? I prefer Scotch. Were you ever innocent?

  Stuart What of? I haven’t done anything.

  Auden Untouched. Unfingermarked.

  Stuart When I was young. Still am young, I suppose. Though not untouched, obviously.

  Auden Do you blame anybody?

  Stuart shrugs.

  Stuart (looking at the room) Do you?

  Auden smiles.

  Auden Dirt is everywhere.

  Stuart Not on people. Also there’s no need to stink. Not these days.

  Auden Maybe you should be a nurse.

  Stuart I thought of that. Another job where you fiddle with people and take dicks for granted.

  Auden has put on a record and now plays the first of the ‘Four Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes.

  (To the audience.) He asked me all sorts of questions. I asked him nothing. Later, much much later, when all these people were dead, I started to read and it discovered to me what my questions should have been. These unasked questions reproach me still.

  Carpenter Both their deaths were appropriately located: Auden, aged sixty-six, a transient’s death of a heart attack alone in a middling hotel in Vienna. Not cosy, anyway.

  Britten, true to form, died more decorously at home, aged sixty-three, in the arms of Peter Pears, though dying in someone’s arms can seldom be comfortable for either party so that one is never sure this isn’t simply a figure of speech. For all the sacred music Britten had written, it was Auden who was the believer – both of them, though, ending up commemorated in Westminster Abbey.

  Auden It cannot be said too often: what matters is the work.

  ASM distributes some new pages. The music is switched off.

  Fitz What’s this?

  Kay You know what it is. We did it yesterday. It’s the new ending.

  Fitz I still don’t see what’s wrong with what we’ve got. It’s a nice dying fall. It’s in the poet’s own words. What’s the matter with it?

  Author It was something Auden himself said – which is in the play, or was, till you cut it out – how he felt that the end of The Tempest really won’t do, that it’s all very neat but that there’s more to be said. And so he lets Caliban speak. That’s why the play is called Caliban’s Day. Look, Auden and Britten are dead, Carpenter died in 2005, the only survivor the boy – which is Caliban again. What happens to him?

  Fitz Does it matter? The audience aren’t going to care. The punters.

  Author Exactly. So it does matter. They have to be made to care. You have to dispose of the boy. They’re dead, but Caliban is still with us.

  Henry Caliban is always with us.

  Kay Let’s run it, anyway.

  Henry Is he supposed to win, the boy? Because that’s sentimental. Those boys don’t win.

  Tim Your friend at RADA did.

  Donald And he lives on. That’s winning in anybody’s book.

  Author Can we just do it?

  Kay Yes. Just top and tail it with the other. Fitz.

  Auden It cannot be said too often: what matters is the work. That night in Vienna I read from my poem on the death of Yeats.

  He recites this faultlessly.

  Earth, receive an honoured guest;

  William Yeats is laid to rest:

  Let the Irish vessel lie

  Emptied of its poetry.

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent,

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique,

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives;

  Pardons cowardice, conceit,

  Lays its honours at their feet.

  Time that with this strange excuse

  Pardoned Kipling and his views,

  And will pardon Paul Claudel,

  Pardons him for writing well.

  Follow, poet, follow right

  To the bottom of the night,

  With your unconstraining voice

  Still persuade us to rejoice;

  In the deserts of the heart

  Let the healing fountain start,

  In the prison of his days

  Teach the free man how to praise.

  Fitz And that’s where I believe it ought to end, with the poetry. Nobilmente. Well, it trumps everything else. I’m sorry, love, but I do. And not for me. I don’t want the last word. I’m thinking of Auden. That’s where the audience will want it to end, anyway.

  Author With the boy left out of the account it’s too easy. If Auden thought The Tempest was too tidy, what is that?

  Fitz Let the poet speak, that’s all I’m saying.

  Kay For the moment I think we should rehearse what is written.

  Author Thank you.

  Kay Tim.

  Stuart Auden asked me that night what it was that I wanted. I didn’t know then and I don’t altogether know now, but if I had spoken then, this is what I should have said.

  Carpenter And the boy stands up like a wild fig tree from monumental marble.

  Fitz You see, what does that mean?

  Author It’s a quotation from Coleridge.

  Fitz Who’s going to know that?

  Tim Are we going to do the scene or not?

  Kay Yes, we are. Fitz, behave.

  Tim Then he summons Britten back, right? (Then as Stuart.) He should come back, for a start.

  Britten I have already. I do not need a summons. My famous car has disappeared.

  Fitz Is it me? (Then as Auden.) So once more Caliban prepares to address the audience.

  Tim Am I taking my clothes off?

  Fitz Oh, for fuck’s sake, does he have to? Nobody’ll look at anything else.

  Author He has to take his clothes off.

  Fitz It’s so old-fashioned.

  Henry That’s not for you to say, is it? He has to take his clothes off because he’s saying, ‘This is all I have.’

  Kay Could we leave it for today and just concentrate on the text? (Giving cue.) ‘So once more…’

  Auden So once more Caliban prepares to address the audience.

  Stuart No, not Caliban, whoever he was. And not in the language of Henry James, or any other tosser. No. Me. Us. Here. Now. When do we figure and get to say our say? The great men’s lives are neatly parcelled for posterity, but what about us? When do we take our bow? Not in biography. Not even in diaries.

  ‘A boy came round. Picked up on the hill. Didn’t stay.’

  ‘Your grandfather was sucked off by W. H. Auden.’

  ‘Benjamin Britten sat naked on the side of my bath.’

  Because if nothing else, we at least contributed. We were in attendance, we boys of art. And though there’s the odd photograph, nobody remembers who they’re of: uncaptioned or ‘with an unidentified friend’, unnamed girls, unnameable boys, the flings, the tricks. The fodder of art.

  Carpenter So what is it you want? A mention? A footnote?

  Stuart I want to figure. He goes on about stuff being cosy, England and that. But it’s not England that’s cosy. It’s art, literature, him, you, the lot of you. Because there’s always someone left out. You all have a map. I don’t have a map. I don’t even know what I don’t know. I want to get in. I want to join. I want to know.

  Auden No. You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know any more. You want what Caliban always wants: you want to be knowing. We can’t help you.

  A piano plays ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. Auden and Britten are seated, Carpenter leans across the table between them. Stuart picks up his bag and opens the door, turns to look back at them, Britten turns briefly to him, then away.

  Stuart closes the door as the music ends.

  Kay Thank you. Well done, darlings. Ful
l company ten o’clock tomorrow.

  Fitz It will be better.

  Kay (hugging Fitz) I know.

  Phone rings. Matt answers it.

  Fitz And tomorrow I can smoke.

  Henry It is bleak. I thought maybe at the finish I should take his hand?

  Author No…

  Matt Fitz, your car’s outside.

  Fitz Thank you.

  Tim Will you be all right?

  Fitz You see, that’s what’s wrong with The Tempest. The question Caliban never got the chance to ask:

  ‘Will you be all right, Prospero?’

  I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. What’s done is done. What’s not done…that’s done, too. And now for some real work:

  ‘How would you describe your favourite instant coffee? Because if you are like me it comes with a hint of the hacienda!’ Now that is proper acting. Night.

  Exits as company call goodnights after him.

  Tim Oh dear.

  Henry Don’t worry. He’ll get away with it. He always has. And if he forgets, he’s playing someone who does forget. They’ll think it’s inspired. Whereas I, who know every plodding word, will be thought to have turned in my usual efficient performance.

  Kay And thank goodness.

  Henry You’ve seen it all before.

  She kisses him.

  Donald I’ve still not found him, have I?

  Tim Who?

  Donald Carpenter.

  Kay It’s getting there, love.

  Donald Did the music thing help?

  Kay makes an equivocal gesture.

  It’s hard because to me, you see, Carpenter is the centre of the play. Its heart.

  Henry (to Tim, who is wheeling his bike) Which way are you going?

  Tim The pub.

  During all this Henry has been hanging around for Tim. They exit.

  Donald I wonder if I ought to have a wig.

  Kay Tomorrow, darling.

  The Author nearly bumps into Donald, who raises a sheepish hand in farewell.

  Author Actors. I never get used to them.

  Kay Fitz is frightened, that’s what it is. But then everybody’s frightened. To act is to be frightened. When I used to do it I was always frightened. Threw up before every performance.

  Author I didn’t know you acted.

  Kay Yes. I loved it.

  Author What happened?

  Kay Nothing. That was the trouble.

  Author You were very good this afternoon.

  Kay Actors are like soldiers. The soldiers fear the enemy. The actors fear the audience. Fear of failing. Fear of forgetting, fear of art. Olivier ended up terrified. If you sat in the front row you could see him trembling. And besides all that, there’s the fear of this building. I worked once or twice with Ronald Eyre. Difficult man and, like all the best directors, an ex-schoolmaster. Ron knew what fear was…he’d worked at the RSC and he was here not long after it opened. The opening was, of course, disastrous. Ron said they should have moved out straight away, gone back to the Old Vic and rented the place out, made the Olivier into a skating rink, the Cottesloe a billiard hall and the Lyttelton boxing. Then after twenty-odd years of ordinary unpretentious entertainment, when it’s shabby and run-down and been purged of culture, and all the pretension had long since been beaten out of it, then with no fanfare at all they should sneak back with the occasional play and nobody need be frightened any more. Except of course the actors.

  He was wrong, though, Ron. Because what’s knocked the corners off the place, taken the shine off it and made it dingy and unintimidating – are plays. Plays plump, plays paltry, plays preposterous, plays purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten – but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays. The habit of art.

  Author What happened to him?

  Kay Ron? Oh, you know. He died.

  The Author is going.

  Author But about the play. I am right, aren’t I? There is always somebody left out, one way or another.

  Kay Oh yes, darling. Every, every time.

  He goes, she collects her things, then turns out the lights as she exits.

  Faber and Faber, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2009 by Forelake Ltd.

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2009 in slightly different form by Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Faber and Faber, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Two extracts from Profile by W. H. Auden © 1965 by W. H. Auden, used by permission of Random House. Extract from September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden © 1965 by W. H. Auden, used by permission of Random House. Extract from In Memory of W. B. Yeats © 1939 by W. H. Auden, used by permission of Random House. Extract from letter by W. H. Auden to Benjamin Britten, 31 January 1942 © 1991 by the Estate of W. H. Auden, used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

  The introduction was first published in the London Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 21, 5 November 2009.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bennett, Alan, 1934–

  The habit of art / Alan Bennett; with an introduction by the author.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-86547-944-9

  1. Actors—Drama. 2. Theater rehearsals—Drama. 3. Britten, Benjamin, 1913–1976—Drama. 4. Auden. W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907–1973—Drama. 5. Play within a play. I. Title.

  PR6052.E5H33 2010

  822'.914—dc22

  2010014341

  www.fsgbooks.com

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