Bradbury, Ray - SSC 10 (16 page)

Kelly

A
tenth-run flicker from the year nineteen hundred and thirty-
seven caught him by the short hairs, you mean!

Fogarty
We've
never run a sprint over before
        

O'Gavin
(sweetly)

Phil,
dear boy, is the
last
reel of the Deanna Durbin
fillum
still there?

Phil's Voice
It
ain't
in the Ladies'.

O'Gavin

What
a wit the boy has. Now, Phil, do you think you could
just thread the singing girl back through the
infernal machine
there and give us
the
Finis
again?

Phil

Is
that
what you
all
want?

There is a hard moment of indecision.

Fogarty
(tempted)

Including,
of course, all of the song "The Lovely Isle of
Innis
-
free"?

Phil
The whole damn island, sure!

Everybody beams. This has hit them where they live.

The Old Man
Done! Places, everyone!

doone
and
o'gavin
race to sit down.

The Young Man

Hold
on! There's no audience. Without them, there're no ob
stacles, no real
contest.

Finn
(scowls, thinks)
Why,
let's
all
of us be the audience!

All
(flinging
themselves into seats)
Grand!
Fine! Wonderful!

the
young man
is left alone, looking at his friends.

The Young Man
I
beg pardon.

The Old Man
(seated)
Yes
, lad?

The Young Man
There's no one outside by the exit,
to judge who wins.

Everyone is shocked to hear this. They look around.

Timulty
Then, Yank, would
you mind doing us the service?

the young man
nods,
backs off, then turns and runs back out to
the exit door, onstage.

Phil's Voice
Are
ya
clods down there ready?

The Old Man
(turning)
If Deanna Durbin and the Anthem
is!

Phil's Voice
Here goes!

The lights go out. The music surges. A voice sings. By the exit
door,
the young man
tenses,
waiting, checking his watch. He
holds
the door half open, listening.

The Young Man

Forty
seconds . . . thirty . . . ten seconds . . . there's the
Finale . . . ! They're—
Off
!

He flings himself back as if afraid a flood of men will mob out
over him. We hear the grand Ta-Ta of cymbals,
drums, brass.
Then
—
silence.

the young man
opens
the door wide and peers into the dark,
then
stiffens to attention as

The National Anthem plays. Even shorter this time, at double-quick speed.

When it is over,
the young man
steps
in and peers down at
the long row
where the "audience" and the two competitors are
seated. They all stand and look back and up at the
projection
room.

Tears are streaming from their eyes. They are dabbing their cheeks.

The Old Man
(calls)
Phil, darling . . . ?

Finn
. . . once more?

They all sit down. Only
timulty
remains
standing, eyes wet. He
gestures.

TlMULTY

And this time . . .
without
the Anthem?
Blackout.

Music.
A swift Irish reel, with blended overtones of the lilting "
Innisfree
," old Deanna Durbin songs, and at the very
last, the
Anthem, in its most
truncated form.

The
real
audience can, if
it wishes, run for the exits, now, for
our Play has come to

THE
  
END

an
Afterword
by Kay Bradbury

_I
had never wanted
to go to
Ireland
in my life.

Yet
here was John Huston on the telephone asking me to his
hotel for a drink. Later that afternoon, drinks in
hand, Huston
eyed me carefully and
said, "How would you like to live in
Ireland
and write
Moby Dick
for the screen?"

And
suddenly we were off after the White Whale;
myself
,
the
wife, and two daughters.

It
took me seven months to track, catch, and throw the
Whale flukes out.

From
October to April I lived in a country where I did not
want to be.

I
thought that I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing of
Ireland
. The Church was deplorable. The weather was
dreadful.
The poverty was
inadmissible. I would have none of it. Besides,
there was this Big Fish . . .

I
did not count on my subconscious tripping me up. In the
middle of all the threadbare dampness, while
trying to beach Leviathan with my typewriter, my antennae were noticing the
people. Not that my wide-awake self, conscious and
afoot, did
not notice them, like and
admire and have some for friends, and
see
them often, no. But the overall thing, pervasive, was the
poorness and the rain and feeling sorry for
myself
in a sorry
land.

With
the Beast rendered down into oil and delivered to the
cameras, I fled
Ireland
,
positive I had learned naught save how
to dread storms, fogs, and the penny-beggar streets
of
Dublin
and
Kilcock
.

But
the subliminal eye is shrewd. While I lamented my hard
work and my inability, every other day, to feel as
much like
Herman Melville as I wished,
my interior self kept alert, snuffed
deep,
listened long, watched close, and filed Ireland and its people for other times
when I might relax and let them teem
forth
to my own surprise.

I
came home via
Sicily
and
Italy
where I had baked myself
free of the Irish winter, assuring one and all,
"I'll write nothing
ever about
the
Connemora
Lightfoots
and the Donnybrook
Gazelles."

I
should have remembered my experience with Mexico, many
years before, where I had encountered not rain and
poverty,
but sun and poverty, and
come away panicked by a weather
of
mortality and the terrible sweet smell when the Mexicans
exhaled death. I had at last written some fine
nightmares out of
that.

Even
so, I insisted,
Eire
was dead, the wake over, her people
would never haunt me.

Several years passed.

Then
one rainy afternoon Mike (whose real name is Nick), the taxi-driver, came to
sit just out of sight in my mind. He
nudged
me gently and dared to remind me of our journeys together across the bogs,
along the
Liffey
, and him talking and
wheeling his old iron car slow through the mist
night after night,
driving me home to
the Royal Hibernian Hotel, the one man
I
knew best in all the wild green country, from dozens of scores
of Dark Journeys.

"Tell
the truth about me," Mike said. "Just put it down the
way it
was."

And
suddenly I had a short story and a play. And the story
is true and the play is true. It happened like
that. It could have
happened no other
way.

Well,
the story we understand, but why, after all these years,
did I turn to the stage?

It
was not a turn, but a return.

I
acted on the amateur stage, and radio, as a boy. I wrote
plays as a young man. These plays,
unproduced
, were so bad
that I promised myself never to write again for the stage until
late in life, after I'd learned to write all the
other ways first and best. Simultaneously, I gave up acting because I dreaded
the
competitive politics actors must
play in order to work. Besides:
the
short story, the novel, called. I answered. I plunged into
writing. Years passed. I went to hundreds of plays.
I loved them. I read hundreds of plays. I loved them. But still I held off from
ever writing Act I, Scene I, again.
Then came
Moby Dick,
a while
to brood over it, and suddenly here was Mike, my taxi-
driver, rummaging my soul, lifting up
titbits
of adventure from
a few years before near the Hill of Tara or inland at the au
tumn changing of leaves in
Killeshandra
.
My old love of the theater with a final shove pushed me over.

One
other thing jolted me back toward the stage. In the last
five years I have borrowed or bought a good many
European and American Idea Plays to read; I have watched the Absurd and the
More-Than-Absurd Theatre. In the aggregate I could
not help but judge the plays as frail exercises,
more often than
not half-witted, but
above all lacking in the prime requisites of
imagination and ability.

It
is only fair, given this flat
opinion,
I should now
put my
own head on the
chopping-block. You may, if you wish, be my
executioners.

This
is not so unusual. Literary history is filled with writers
who, rightly or wrongly, felt they could tidy up,
improve upon,
or revolutionize a given
field. So, many of us plunge forward where angels leave no
dustprint
.

Having
dared once, exuberant, I dared again. When Mike
vaulted from my machine, others unbidden followed.

And
the more that swarmed, the more jostled to fill the
spaces.

I
suddenly saw that I knew more of the
minglings
and
com
motions of the Irish than I could
disentangle in a month or a
year of
writing and unraveling them forth. Inadvertently, I found myself blessing the
secret mind, and winnowing a vast interior
post-office, calling nights, towns,
weathers,
beasts, bicycles,
churches, cinemas,
and ritual marches and flights by name.

Mike
had started me at an amble; I broke into a trot which
was before long a Full Sprint pacing my dear
friends, the
Queen's Own Evaders.

The
stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of
their way.

Now
done, and busy with other plays about science-fiction
machineries which will spin their cogs in yet
another book—do I have an after-the-fact theory to fit play-writing?

Yes.

For
only after, can one nail down, examine,
explain
.

To
try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of
all art, be it acting, writing,
painting, or
living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Here's
how my theory goes. We writers are up to the follow
ing:

We
build tensions toward laughter,
then
give permission,
and
laughter comes.

We
build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and
hope to see our audience in tears.

We
build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run.

We
build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the
other tensions mix to be modified and transcended,
and allow
that fruition in the mind of
the audience.

We
build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then,
if we are
good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow
our audiences to be sick.

Each
tension seeks its own proper end, release, and relaxa
tion.

No
tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically,
must be built which remains unreleased. Without
this, any art
ends incomplete, halfway
to its goal. And in real life, as we
know,
the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to mad
ness.

There
are seeming exceptions to this, in which novels or
plays end at the height of tension, but the release
is implied.
The audience is asked to
go forth into the world and explode
an
idea. The final action is passed on from creator to reader-
viewer whose job it is to finish off the laughter,
the tears, the
violence, the
sexuality, or the sickness.

Not
to know this is not to know the essence of creativity,
which, at heart, is the essence of man's being.

If
I were to advise new writers, if I were to advise the new
writer in myself, going into the theatre of the
Absurd, the almost-Absurd, the theatre of Ideas, the
any-kind-of-theatre-at-all,
I would
advise like this:

Tell
me no pointless jokes.

I
will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter.

Build
me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamen
tations.

I
will go find me better wailing walls.

Do
not clench my fists for me and hide the target.

I
might strike you, instead.

Above
all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to
the ship's rail.

For,
please understand, if you poison me, I must be sick. It
seems to me that many people writing the sick film,
the sick
novel, the sick play, have
forgotten that poison can destroy minds
even as it can destroy flesh. Most poison bottles have emetic
recipes stamped on the labels. Through neglect,
ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual
Borgias
cram hairballs down our
throats and
refuse us the convulsion that could make us well.
They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient
knowledge
that only by being truly
sick can one regain health. Even beasts
know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how
to be sick then, in the right time and place, so
that I may again
walk in the fields
and with the wise and smiling dogs know
enough to chew sweet grass.

The
art aesthetic is all encompassing, there is room in it for
every horror, every delight, if the tensions
representing these are
carried to
their furthest perimeters and released in action. I ask
for no happy endings. I ask only for proper
endings based on
proper assessments
of energy contained and given detonation.

Given
all this, what are we to make of a book mainly com
posed of Irish comedies?

Well,
the means whereby men "make do" with the world,
which is more often than not by their wit and
humor, is the good
stuff of serious thought. We think long and much on
the universe
and the ways of God and man
toward man, and then cry into
our
inkwells to service tragedies, or throw our heads way back and give one hell of
a yell of laughter.

This
time out, given poverty, given bicycle collisions in fogs
that might turn deadly serious, given rank
prejudice and raw
bias, given suicidal cold and insufficient means
against such cold,
given Ireland that is, and
all its priest-ridden and sleet-worn
souls,
I have chosen to lift my head from my hands, I have
chosen not to weep but to laugh with them as they
themselves
must laugh, in order to
survive, in the pubs, and on the roads
of
a lost and much-
overpraised
bog.

To
take the plays more or less in the order of their veracity
to life and my experience in
Ireland
, THE FIRST NIGHT OF
LENT, as I have already noted, is a true portrayal
of my ad
ventures with Mike, the lone
taxi-driver of
Kilcock
.

THE
GREAT COLLISION OF MONDAY LAST is based
a bit more roughly on Truth, with a sidewise look at fancy and a
backward glance at the lie which, once gone over,
cannot be
treaded again, for now it
is booby-trapped. The fact is
,
collisions
occur
all
the time in
Ireland
between hell-bent sinner bicyclists,
with dread results. From the echoes of multiple
collisions I
harkened for further
reverberations which became the play.