The Habit of Art: A Play (8 page)

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?

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 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
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.

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 promises. I wish Chester were here. He’d love 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…

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.

Auden
(
crossing out again
) Well, we can lose that for a start. This is a novelist. A self-proclaimed man of the world. He doesn’t need a dream to tell him he fancies someone.

Britten
It puts it into context.

Auden
And coming from the subconscious makes it respectable. Apollo, Dionysus. Tosh…it’s a boy on a beach.

Britten
You don’t understand. In the book Aschenbach is the innocent. He is seduced by beauty.

Auden
That’s why you were attracted to it? Presumably because at sixty-eight, or whatever he is, Aschenbach is the innocent and the boy leads him on? You fancy it the story of your life.

Britten
No. No. Stop! Stop! (
He covers his ears.
) It’s too soon. You haven’t changed. You ask too many questions, just like you always did. I don’t know the answers yet and I only find the answers through the music. Ask too many questions too soon, and I never will because it won’t get written. I have to write it before I can write it, can’t you see that? In the book –

Auden
Ben, fuck the book. I can’t write a furtive libretto. You like boys, Ben. No amount of dressing Tadzio up as a vision of Apollo can alter the fact that Dionysus for you comes in a grey flannel suit or cricket whites. This is an old man lusting after a boy, and Apollo has got fuck all to do with it.

Britten
Wystan. How many more times? Aschenbach is the innocent. In the story it is the boy who is the tempter. If all my operas are concerned with the loss of innocence, well, in this one the innocence is – the old man’s.

Auden
What does it matter? Why does innocence come into it? Neither of them are innocent. It’s not corruption. It’s collaboration.

Britten
Constraint, that’s what you’ve never appreciated.

Auden
Rubbish. A poet is governed by constraint, by metre and form.

Britten
No, I mean where subjects are concerned. Where this subject is concerned. You don’t believe in restraint.

I do. I always have. And I hope I never see the day when in opera or in drama there is nothing that cannot be sung or said. A time of no limits.

Auden
This is England talking, isn’t it, Ben? This is taste, modesty, self-restraint. The family virtues. Except that you don’t belong in a family any more than I do. And you’re harder to spot. Lovable, sought after, beautifully mannered; the parents didn’t mind, maybe, but you were the predator.

Britten
No. No. (
To Author. As Henry.
) Is it true about the parents? Didn’t they mind?

Author
The fathers could be uneasy. The mothers didn’t seem to mind at all.

Fitz
Dear Ben.

Henry
Did anything happen?

Author
(
shrugs
) There were boys all through his life to whom he gave his heart. Sometimes he was loved in return. And licensed.

Henry
And that’s when Aldeburgh looked the other way.

Author
He seems to have been drawn to boys who knew the score. Who didn’t flinch at the occasional hug or were unabashed when the naked composer came and sat on the side of the bath. ‘What a funny boy you are.’

Henry
But no one ever complained?

Author
So far as we know, the worst Britten inflicted on these beloved youths was occasional embarrassment.

Kay
Mmm. On…

Britten
If I like boys…

Auden
Ben, there is no ‘if’…

Britten
All right, all right. Listen. For once in your life,
listen
. I don’t prey on them. They like me if only because I…attend to them. I listen. And since many of them are musical we play together…musically. Even the ones I cannot touch I can play with. And maybe one sort of playing is a substitute for another sort of playing, but it means we can do things together and perfectly properly. There is no threat in a duet. Or…playing the teacups.

Auden
Still, it’s a dangerous game. Imagine the scene – you have, I’m sure. A middle-aged man wakes up one morning, unemployed mostly but who gets by giving violin lessons or doing music copying…some ex-Tadzio who decides those high times in Aldeburgh were when his life took the wrong turning. So being a dutiful citizen he goes down to the police station, though not of course in Aldeburgh, and tells his story. Then you wake up.

The model pupils of this world believe that artists have to pay, otherwise it isn’t fair. You’ve never really paid, have you?

Britten
Not paid? I’m dying.

Auden
Ben, Ben. Death isn’t the payment. Death is just the checkout. (
Pause.
) I’ve failed the test, haven’t I?

Britten
There was no test. I needed a hand. Not with the writing. Someone to say, ‘Go on. Go on.’ You used to be good at that. But you were always a bully. I’m too old for that.

Auden
And too celebrated. Too loved. But so you’ve always been. Still, it’s nice you thought of me. People don’t, nowadays, much. So. What do I say to you, Benjie? I say, ‘Take no notice. Go on, my dear.’

Britten
Even with Myfanwy?

Auden
Even with Myfanwy and Apollo and Dionysus and all that counterfeit classical luggage. We know it’s boys, Benjie.

Let everybody like you.

Let them love you.

But go on. Go on.

Britten
‘Wherever you go and whatever you do you will always be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, praise everything you do, and you build yourself a warm little nest of love by playing the lovable talented little boy.’

Auden
Who said that? It’s very good.

Britten
You did. It’s a letter you wrote me when we parted in New York in 1942. And you said if I was ever to grow up I would have to learn how to be a shit.

Auden
Well, you’ve managed that. Oh, not with me, but with all the other friends you’ve turned your back on. Still, dear Benjie, I’m glad you came. And – Myfanwy permitting, of course – I could still help out with the libretto. I knew him, you see. Mann was my father-in-law. Did I tell you that?

Britten
When I was a boy – because at twenty-three I was still a boy – I was baffled by the torrent of words that used to pour out of you and I clung to my pathetic staves and bar lines lest I drown in your wake. These magnificent words – I used to think my paltry music just an afterthought, a servant to the words. But it’s not. Music melts words…your words and Myfanwy’s, too. It’s the music that matters, even in Gilbert and Sullivan. Music wins.