The Habit of Art: A Play (7 page)

How is Peter?

Britten
He’s in Toronto.

Auden
Chester is in Athens. He’s often in Athens. Does Peter have friends?

Britten
Friends? Oh,
friends
. Well, if he does I never ask.

Auden
You’re lucky not to be told. I am. How respectable we have become, both with our long-term partners. What do you call him?

Britten
Peter?

Auden
Do you say, my friend? My partner? My companion?

Britten
I try not to call him anything.

Auden
Because neither of us have actually said, have we, both of us just about claspable to society’s nervous bosom after a lifetime of our deviant status publicly unaffirmed. I’ve never felt the need either to pretend or proclaim. So no ‘coming out’.

In literature, though, it’s different, where a close analysis of my poems and their pronouns has resulted in a tardy retrospective emergence. It is now assumed without it ever having been said. Has nobody in Aldeburgh ever remarked on your setup?

Britten
With Peter? No, of course not. Anyway, the ladies of Aldeburgh are iron-clad. Are you out of fashion now?

Auden
At twenty I tried to vex my elders. Past sixty, it’s the young I hope to shock. I’m unforgiven by the left because I have long since ceased to rally the troops. Still, I
rankle
, which is not unsatisfying.

Britten
The last thing of mine that was generally liked was the
War Requiem
.

Auden
I missed that.

Britten
It was very popular, though that of course turned informed musical opinion off. Stravinsky didn’t like it one bit. Now it’s Tippett who’s way out in front. I’m no longer avant garde. Tippett is the one the students listen to, model themselves on. The money is on Michael.

Auden
Art isn’t tennis, Ben. You don’t have to win.

Britten
I’d forgotten that.

Auden
What?

Britten
When you disapprove, you turn into a schoolmaster and call me Ben, which is what other people call me. You always called me Benjie. He’s a nice man, but he’s so…soppy.

Auden
Sorry. Who is this?

Britten
Tippett. These days they think I’m arid. Dry. I’m
spare
, I’m not dry.

Auden
Does it matter what they think?

Britten
I’ve never wanted to shock. I just want an audience to think that this is music that they’ve heard before and that it’s a kind of coming home – even when they’re hearing it for the first time. I want it to seem inevitable. Still, I’m not the darling any more, which should please you.

Auden
Me? Why?

Britten
You once told me that was what I wanted. To be loved.

Auden
Did I?

Britten
However we cling on.

Auden
That’s a misconception. Clinging on.

Britten
I’m sure.

Auden
We do not contain life. It contains us, holds us sometimes in its jaws. The senile, the demented, life has them in its teeth…in the cracks and holes of its teeth, maybe, but still in its teeth. They cannot let go of it until it lets go of them.

Britten
I have nothing to say. I would add more to your conversation if I just sat at the piano and accompanied it.

Auden
When I left New York to come back to England someone in my building was practising ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ on the saxophone.

Britten
Yes.

Auden
Benjie. Why have you come to see me now? It can’t have been easy. I am a corpse. I was safely dead. Why am I being resurrected?

Britten
You’re not working on anything at the moment?

Auden
Nothing in particular. I work every day. But no. Nobody asks me any more.

Britten
I’m working on something. An opera.
Death in Venice.

Auden
Yes, I believe I heard. Good subject.

Britten
You think so?

Auden
Oh Benjie, yes. Lovely idea. I’m surprised no one has done it before. Made for opera.

Britten
It’s proving difficult.

Auden
Well, it is difficult.

Britten
Wystan, I was trying to remember, what did we used to do? How did we used to start?

Kay
And curtain. Tea!

Fitz
But no cake. No cake!

ASM
Fifteen minutes, everyone!

The rehearsal room as before, with all the company present except Donald, but including Brian, who is in Russian peasant costume as he’s visiting from his Chekhov matinee. Fitz as Auden has the mask on.

Donald enters, dressed in drag and carrying a tuba. He then performs à la Douglas Byng, ‘I’m Doris, the Goddess of Wind’. In the course of this the Author enters but says nothing. At the end there is virtual silence from the company.

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!

Author
I am saying nothing.

Kay
Leave it with me.

ASM
Well, I like it.

Tom
Sorry, Kay.

Kay
Brian, you should go.

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.

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

Kay
(
calling dresser over to Fitz
) Ralph!

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?

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?

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?

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…

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.

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.

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?

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 –