Travesties (7 page)

CARR
: Or in mourning?

JOYCE
: Not the other one – Ernest.

CARR
(
Claps his hands once
): Describe the play briefly, omitting all but essential detail.

JOYCE
: Act One. The curtain rises. A flat in Mayfair. Teatime.

You enter in a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket with black frogging – hose white, cravat perfect, boots elastic-sided, trousers of your own choice. Act Two.

CARR
: I shall have to make certain expenditures.

JOYCE
: A rose garden. After lunch. Some by-play among the small parts. You enter in a debonair garden party outfit – beribboned boater, gaily striped blazer, parti-coloured shoes, trousers of your own choice.

CARR
(
Instantly
): Cream flannel.

JOYCE
: Act Three. The morning room. A few moments later.

CARR
: A change of costume?

JOYCE
: Possibly by the alteration of a mere line or two of dialogue…

CARR
: You have brought a copy of the play?

JOYCE
: I have it here.

CARR
: Then let us retire to the next room and peruse it.

(
CARR
opens the door of'his' room for
JOYCE
.)

JOYCE
: About those two pounds –

CARR
(
Generously, reaching for his wallet
): My dear Phyllis … !
(–
and closes it after them
.)
(
Pause. Freeze
.)

GWEN
(
Absently
): Gomorrahist… Silly bugger.

(
TZARA
comes forward with rare diffidence, holding a hat like a brimming bowl. It transpires that he has written down a Shakespeare sonnet and cut it up into single words which he has
placed in the hat
.)

TZARA
: Miss Carr …

GWEN
: Mr Tzara! – you're not leaving? (
The hat
)

TZARA
: Not before I offer you my poem.

(
He offers the hat
.
GWEN
looks into it
.)

GWEN
: Your technique is unusual.

TZARA
: All poetry is a reshuffling of a pack of picture cards, and all poets are cheats. I offer you a Shakespeare sonnet, but it is no longer his. It comes from the wellspring where my atoms are uniquely organized, and my signature is written in the hand of chance.

GWEN
: Which sonnet – was it?

TZARA
: The eighteenth. In English.

GWEN
: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day…'
      ‘… Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
   Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
   And summer's lease hath all too short a date …'

(
And she continues accompanied by a romantic orchestra
.)
   ‘Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
   And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
   And every fair from fair sometime declines,
   By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
   But thy eternal summer shall not fade
   Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
   Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
   When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this and this gives life to thee …'

TZARA
: Yes, that's the one.

GWEN
: You tear him for his bad verses?

(
She lets a handful of words fall from her fingers, back into the hat, and her sadness starts to give way to anger
.)
These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.

TZARA
: Ay, Madam.

GWEN
: Truly I wish the gods had made thee poetical.

TZARA
: I do not know what poetical is. Is it honest in word and deed? Is it a true thing?

GWEN
: Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking
before and after, gave us not
that
capability,
and
god-like reason to fust in us unused.

TZARA
: I was not born under a rhyming planet. Those fellows of infinite tongue that can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do reason themselves out again. And that would set my teeth nothing on edge –
nothing
so much as mincing poetry.

GWEN
(
Rising to his vicious edge
): Thy honesty and love doth mince
this
matter – Put your bonnet for his right use, ‘tis for the head! (
Sniffs away a tear
) I had rather than forty shilling I had my book of songs and sonnets here.
(
She has turned away. He approaches with his hat offered
.)

TZARA
(
Gently
): But since he died, and poet better prove, his for his style you'll read, mine for my – love.
(
GWEN
hesitates but then takes the first slip of paper out of the hat
.)

GWEN
: ‘Darling'.

(
She now continues, holding on to all the pieces of paper she takes out
.)
   shake thou thy gold buds
   the untrimm'd but short fair shade
   shines –
   see, this lovely hot possession growest
   so long
   by nature's course –
   so … long–heaven!

(
She gives a little shriek, using ‘heaven' and turns her back on the hat, taking a few steps away from
TZARA
,
who takes out the next few words, lowering the temperature
…)

TZARA
: And declines,
   summer changing, more temperate complexion …

GWEN
(
Still flustered
): Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr Tzara. Whenever people talk to me about the weather I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.

TZARA
(
Coming to her
): I do mean something else, Miss Carr. Ever since I met you I have admired you.
(
He drops his few papers into the hat, she does likewise with hers, he puts the hat aside
.)

GWEN
: For me you have always had an irresistible fascination. Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. As you know I have been helping Mr Joyce with his new book, which I am convinced is a work of genius. Alas, in fashionable society, genius is regarded as an affront to the ordinary decencies of family life. A girl has few opportunities to meet a man like yourself who shares her regard for Mr Joyce as an artist.

TZARA
: I, Gwendolen?

GWEN
: Did you think, my darling, that I had not noticed you at the library? – how you gaze at him in admiration all the way from Economics to Foreign Literature? When I elicited by discreet questioning that you, too, were a poet of the most up-to-date disposition, I knew I was destined to love you.

TZARA
(
Amazed
): Do you really love me, Gwendolen?

GWEN
: Passionately!

TZARA
: Darling, you don't know how happy you've made me.

GWEN
: My own Tristan!
(
They embrace
.)

TZARA
(
Breaking off
): But you don't mean that you couldn't love me if I didn't share your regard for Mr Joyce as an artist?

GWEN
: But you do.

TZARA
: Yes. I know I
do
, but supposing –
(
She kisses him on the mouth.)
(They embrace
.
JOYCE
re-enters
.)

JOYCE
: Rise, sir, from that semi-recumbent posture!
(
TZARA
and
GWEN
spring apart
.
JOYCE
walks across to the main door, picking up his hat, opens the door, addresses
TZARA
.)
Your monocle is in the wrong eye.
(
TZARA
has indeed placed his monocle in the wrong eye. He replaces it
.
JOYCE
has left on his line
.)

GWEN
: I must tell Henry!

(
GWEN
gives
TZARA
the folder she acquired in the Prologue
.)
Here is a chapter of Mr Joyce's book which I have been transcribing for him.

TZARA
: But have you ever come across Dada, darling?

GWEN
: Never, da-da-darling! The chapter we are doing next is cast in the form of the Christian Catechism!

(
GWEN
kisses him and runs into Henry's room
.)
(
The main door opens again and
JOYCE
re-enters, pausing in the threshold. He is covered from head to breast in little bits of white paper, each bit bearing one of the words of Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, i.e
.
TZARA
was using Joyce's hat
.)

JOYCE
: What is the meaning of this?

TZARA
: It has no meaning. It is without meaning as Nature is. It is Dada.

JOYCE
: Give further examples of Dada.

TZARA
: The Zoological Gardens after closing time. The logical gardenia. The bankrupt gambler. The successful gambler. The Eggboard, a sport or pastime for the top ten thousand in which the players, covered from head to foot in eggyolk, leave the field of play.

JOYCE
: Are you the inventor of this sport or pastime?

TZARA
: I am not.

JOYCE
: What is the name of the inventor?

TZARA
: Arp.

JOYCE
: By what familiarity, indicating possession and amicability in equal parts, do you habitually refer to him?

TZARA
: My friend Arp.

JOYCE
: Alternating with what colloquialism redolent of virtue and longevity?

TZARA
: Good old Arp.

JOYCE
: From whom did Arp receive encouragement and friendship?

TZARA
: From Hugo Ball.

JOYCE
: Describe Ball by epithet.

TZARA
: Unspherical. Tall, thin, sacerdotal, German.

JOYCE
: Describe him by enumeration of his occupations and preoccupations.

TZARA
: Novelist, journalist, philosopher, poet, artist, mystic, pacifist, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire at the Meierei Bar, number one Spiegelgasse.

JOYCE
: Did Ball keep a diary?

TZARA
: He did.

JOYCE
: Was it published?

TZARA
: It was.

JOYCE
: Is it in the public domain by virtue of the expiration of copyright protection as defined in the Berne Convention of 1886?

TZARA
: It is not.

JOYCE
: Quote discriminately from Ball's diary in such a manner as to avoid forfeiting the goodwill of his executors.

TZARA:
‘I went to the owner of the Meierei Bar and said, “I want to start a nightclub.” That same evening Tzara gave a reading of poems, conservative in style, which he rather endearingly fished out of the various pockets of his coat.'

JOYCE
: Is that the coat?

TZARA
: It is.

JOYCE
: In what regard is a coat inferior, and in what superior, to a hat in so far as they are interchangeable in the production of poetry?

TZARA
:
Inferior
to a hat in regard to the tendency of one or both sleeves to hang down in front of the eyes, with the resultant possibility of the wearer falling off the edge of the platform.
Superior
to a hat in regard to the number of its pockets.

JOYCE
: Amplify discreetly from any contemporary diarist whose estate is not given to obsessive litigation over trivial infringements of copyright.

TZARA
: ‘On February 26th Richard Huelsenbeck arrived from Berlin, and on March 30th Herr Tristan Tzara was the initiator of a performance, the first in Zurich and in the world, of simultanist verse, including a poème simultané of his own composition.'

JOYCE
: Quote severally your recollections of what was declaimed synchronously.

TZARA
: I began, ‘Boum boum boum il déshabille sa chair quand les grenouilles humides commencerent a brûler.'
Huelsenbeck began, ‘Ahoi ahoi des admirals gwirktes
Beinkleid schnell zerfallt.' Janco chanted, ‘I can hear the
whip o' will around the hill and at five o'clock when tea is set
I like to have my tea with some brunette, everybody's doing
it, doing it.' The title of the poem was ‘Admiral Seeks House To Let'.
(
All this time
,
JOYCE
has been picking bits of paper from his hair
and from his clothes, replacing each bit in his hat, which is on his knees. Casually, he conjures from the hat a white carnation, apparently made from the bits of paper (he turns the hat up to show it is empty
). He tosses the carnation at
TZARA
.)

JOYCE
: How would you describe this triumph?

TZARA
(
Putting the carnation into his buttonhole
): As just and proper. Well merited. An example of enterprise and charm receiving their due. (
JOYCE
starts to pull silk hankies from the hat
.)