ACT ONE

The play is set in Zurich, in two locations: the drawing room of Henry Carr’s apartment (‘THE ROOM’), and a section of the Zurich Public Library (‘THE LIBRARY’). Most of the action takes place within Carr’s memory, which goes back to the period of the First World War, and this period is reflected appropriately in the design and the costumes, etc. It is to be supposed that Old Can has lived in the same apartment since that time.

The ROOM must have the main door Centre Upstage: most of the entrances would be weakened seriously if they occuned from the side. Double doors would be best. However, there is also at least one side door. There is a centre table with a good chair on each side, and a side table, apart from other furniture.

The LIBRARY suggests a larger scaletall bookcases, etc. In Act Two Cecily (the librarian) requires a counter or desk, which need not necessarily be in view at the beginning of the play. Some of the entrances, e.g. Nadya’s, are probably through a door rather than from the wings.

The LIBRARY in the Prologue and the Second Act does not necessarily have to be presented from the same angle.

We begin in the LIBRARY

There are places for JOYCE, LENIN and TZARA.

GWEN sits with JOYCE. They are occupied with books, papers, pencils

LENIN is also writing quietly, among books and papers, TZARA is writing as the play begins. On his table are a hat and a large pair of scissors, TZARA finishes writing, then takes up the scissors and cuts the paper, word by word, into his hat. When all the words are in the hat he shakes the hat and empties it on the table. He rapidly separates the bits of paper into random lines, turning a few over, etc., and then reads the result in a loud voice.

TZARA: Eel ate enormous appletzara
key dairy chef’s hat he’ll learn oomparah!
Ill raced alas whispers kill later nut east,
noon avuncular ill day Clara!

CECILY (Entering): Sssssssh!

(Her admonition is to the Library in general. She enters from one wing, not through the door, and crosses the stage, leaving by the opposite wing, moving quite quickly, like someone who is busy. No one takes any notice.)

JOYCE (Dictating to GWEN): Deshill holles eamus …

GWEN (Writing): Deshill holles eamus …

JOYCE: Thrice.

GWEN: Uh-hum.

JOYCE: Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

GWEN: Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

JOYCE: Thrice.

GWEN: Uh-hum.

JOYCE: Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!

GWEN: Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!

JOYCE: Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!

GWEN: Likewise thrice?

JOYCE: Uh-hum.

(By this time TZARA has replaced the bits of paper into the hat. He takes out a handful, and reads the words one at a time, placing them into the hat as he reads each one.)

TZARA: Clara avuncular!
Whispers ill oomparah!
Eel nut dairy day
Appletzara …
… Hat!

CECILY (Re-entering): Ssssssh!

(CECILY has come in with a few books which she places by LENIN.)
(TZARA leaves the Library through the door.)
(It is now necessary that the audience should observe the following: GWEN has received from JOYCE a folder. CECILY
receives an identical folder from LENIN. These folders, assumed to contain manuscripts, are eye-catching objects in some striking colour. Each girl has cause to place her folder down on a table or chair, and each girl then picks up the wrong folder. In the original production, GWEN dropped a glove, etc., etc., but it is not important how this transference is achieved, only that it is seen to occur.)
(GWEN is now ready to leave the Library, and does so, taking Lenin’s folder with her.)
(CECILY also leaves, not through the door but into the wings.)
(NADYA enters as GWEN leaves; they bump into each other, and each apologizes, GWEN in English, NADYA in Russian.)
(NADYA enters in an agitated state. She looks round for her husband and goes straight to him. Their conversation is in Russian.)

NADYA: Vylodya!

LENIN: Shto takoya? (What is it?)

NADYA: Bronsky prishol. On s’kazal shto v’Peterburge revolutsia!

(Bronsky came to the house. He says there’s a revolution in St Petersburg.)

LENIN: Revolutsia!

(At this point JOYCE stands up and begins to walk up and down searching his pockets for tiny scraps of paper on which he has previously written down things he may wish to use. While the Lenins continue their conversation, JOYCE fishes out, one by one, these scraps of paper and reads out what he finds on them.)

JOYCE (Regarding his first find): ‘Morose delectation … Aquinas tunbelly … Frate porcospino …’
(He decides he doesn’t need this one. He screws it up and throws it away, and finds a second …)
‘Und alle Schiffe brucken …’
(He decides to keep this one, so re-pockets it. He takes out another.)
‘Entweder transubstantiality, oder consubstantiality, but in no way substantiality…’
(He decides to keep this one as well. Meanwhile, the LENINS have been continuing in the following manner):

LENIN: Otkuda on znayet? (How does he know?)

NADYA: Napisano v’Gazetakh. On govorit shto Tsar sobiraet’sia otretchsya ot prestola! (It’s all in the papers. He says the Tsar is going to abdicate!)

LENIN: Shtoty! (No!)

NADYA: Da! (Yes!)

LENIN: Eto v’gazetakh? (Is that in the newspapers?)

NADYA: Da – da. Idiom damoi. On zhdyot. (Yesyes. Come on home. He’s waiting.)

LENIN: On tam? (Is he there?)

NADYA: Da! (Yes!)

LENIN: Gazetakh u nievo? (He brought the paper?)

NADYA: Da! (Yes!)

LENIN: Ty sama vidyela? (You saw it yourself)

NADYA: Da, da, da! (Yes, yes, yes!)

(JOYCE’s voice, however, has dominated this passage. He now encounters a further scrap of paper which is lying on the floor: LENIN has inadvertently dropped it. JOYCE picks this paper up. NADYA is leaving the Library, through the door, LENIN saying in Russian …)

LENIN: Idyi nazad y skazhee y’moo shto ya prichazhoo. Tolka sobieru svayi b’magi. (Go home ahead of me. I will collect my papers and follow.)
(LENIN is gathering his papers. JOYCE is examining the dropped paper.)

JOYCE: ‘Lickspittle – capitalist – lackeys – of imperialism.’
(LENIN recognizes these words. He pauses, and approaches JOYCE.)

LENIN: Pardon! … Entschuldigung! … Scusi! … Excuse me!

JOYCE (Handing him the paper): Je vous en prie! Bitte! Prego! It’s perfectly all right!
(LENIN leaves. JOYCE is alone now.)
(Declaims) A librarianness of Zurisssh
only emerged from her niche
when a lack of response
to Nicht Reden! Silence!
obliged her to utter the plea –

CECILY (Entering as before): – ssssssh!

(JOYCE accedes to her request, puts on his hat, picks up his stick, and while she regards him with disapproval he leaves at a strolling pace, singing …)

JOYCE: If you ever go across the sea to Ireland …
It may be at the closing of the day …
You can sit and watch the moon rise over Claddagh
and watch the sun go down on Galway Bay …

(The stage now belongs to OLD CARR. The LIBRARY must now be replaced by the ROOM. Needless to say, the change should occur with as little disruption as possible, and the use of music as a bridge is probably desirable.)
(NOTE: In the original production, the Room contained a piano which was at different times used by Old Carr, and in this instance Old Carr played (very badly) the tune of Galway Bay while the set was changed; the piano being right downstage in a permanent position. It is possible that CARR has been immobile on stage from the beginning, an old man remembering …)

CARR: He was Irish, of course. Though not actually from Limerick – he was a Dublin man, Joyce, everybody knows that, couldn’t have written the book without. There was a young man from Dublin, tum-ti-ti-tum-ti-ti troublin’ … I used to have quite a knack for it, but there’s little encouragement for that sort of thing in the Consular Service. Not a great patron of poetry, the Service, didn’t push it, never made a feature of it. I mean you’d never say that a facility for rhyme and metre was the sine qua non of advancement in the Consular Service … Didn’t discourage it, I’m not saying that, on the contrary, a most enlightened and cultivated body of men, fully sympathetic to all the arts (look no further than the occasion that brought us together, me and Joyce, brought him to this room, full support, a theatrical event of the first water, great success, personal triumph in the demanding role of Ernest, not Ernest, the other one, in at the top, have we got the cucumber sandwiches for Lady Bracknell, notwithstanding the unfortunate consequences. Irish lout. Not one to bear a grudge, however, not after all these years, and him dead in the cemetery up the hill, no hard feelings either side, unpleasant as it is to be dragged through the courts for a few francs (though it wasn’t the money, or the trousers for that matter), but, be that as it may, all in all, truth be told, the encouragement of poetry writing was not the primary concern of the British Consulate in Zurich in 1917, and now I’ve lost my knack for it. Too late to go back for it. Alas and alack for it. But I digress. No apologies required, constant digression being the saving grace of senile reminiscence.
    My memoirs, is it, then? Life and times, friend of the famous. Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce As I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew. Through the Courts With James Joyce … What was he like, James Joyce, I am often asked. It is true that I knew him well at the height of his powers, his genius in full flood in the making of Ulysses, before publication and fame turned him into a public monument for pilgrim cameras more often than not in a velvet smoking jacket of an unknown colour, photography being in those days a black and white affair, but probably real blue if not empirical purple and sniffing a bunch of sultry violets that positively defy development, don’t go on, do it on my head, caviar for the general public, now then – Memories of James Joyce … It’s coming.
    To those of us who knew him, Joyce’s genius was never in doubt. To be in his presence was to be aware of an amazing intellect bent on shaping itself into the permanent form of its own monument – the book the world now knows as Ulysses! Though at that time we were still calling it (I hope memory serves) by its original title, Elasticated Bloomers.
    A prudish, prudent man, Joyce, in no way profligate or vulgar, and yet convivial, without being spend-thrift, and yet still without primness towards hard currency in all its transmutable and transferable forms and denominations, of which, however, he demanded only a sufficiency from the world at large, exhibiting a monkish unconcern for worldly and bodily comforts, without at the same time shutting himself off from the richness of human society, whose temptations, on the other hand, he met with an ascetic disregard tempered only by sudden and catastrophic aberrations – in short, a complex personality, an enigma, a
contradictory spokesman for the truth, an obsessive litigant and yet an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized – in short a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging, fornicating drunk not worth the paper, that’s that bit done.
   Further recollections of a Consular Official in Whitest Switzerland. The Ups and Downs of Consular Life in Zurich During the Great War: A Sketch.
   ’Twas in the bustling metropolis of swiftly gliding trams and greystone banking houses, of cosmopolitan restaurants on the great stone banks of the swiftly-gliding snot-green (mucus mutandis) Limmat River, of jewelled escapements and refugees of all kinds, e.g. Lenin, there’s a point… Lenin As I Knew Him. The Lenin I Knew. Halfway to the Finland Station with V. I. Lenin: A Sketch. I well remember the first time I met Lenin, or as he was known on his library ticket, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. To be in his presence was to be aware of a complex personality, enigmatic, magnetic, but not, I think, astigmatic, his piercing brown (if memory serves) eyes giving no hint of it. An essentially simple man, and yet an intellectual theoretician, bent, as I was already aware, on the seemingly impossible task of reshaping the civilized world into a federation of standing committees of workers’ deputies. As I shook the hand of this dynamic, gnomic and yet not, I think, anaemic stranger, who with his fine head of blond hair falling over his forehead had the clean-shaven look of a Scandinavian seafaring – hello, hello, got the wrong chap, has he? – take no notice, all come out in the wash, that’s the art of it. Fact of the matter, who (without benefit of historical perspective and the photograph album, Red Square packed to the corner stickers with comraderaderie, and now for our main speaker, balding bearded in the three-piece suit, good God if it isn’t Ulyanov!, knew him well, always sat between the window and Economics A–K etceterarera) well, take away all that, and who was he to Radek or Radek to him, or Martov or Martinov, Plekhanov, or he to Ulyanov for that matter? – in Zurich in 1917? Café conspirators, so what? Snowballs in hell. Snowballs at all, Lenin he only had one chance in a million,
remember the time they had the meeting? – Social Democrats for Civil War in Europe. Total attendance: four.
Ulyanov, Mrs Ulyanov, Zinoviev and a police spy. And now they want to know what was he like? What was he like,
Lenin, I am often asked.
(He makes an effort).
To those of us who knew him Lenin’s greatness was never in doubt.
(He gives up again.)
So why didn’t you put a pound on him, you’d be a millionaire, like that chap who bet sixpence against the Titanic. No. Truth of the matter, who’d have thought big oaks from a corner room at number 14 Spiegelgasse? – now here’s a thing: two revolutions formed in the same street. Face to face in Spiegelgasse! Street of Revolution! A sketch. Meet by the sadly-sliding chagrinned Limmat River, strike west and immediately we find ourselves soaking wet, strike east and immediately we find ourselves in the Old Town, having left behind the banking bouncing metropolis of trampolines and chronometry of all kinds for here time has stopped in the riddled maze of alleyways and by the way you’d never believe a Swiss redlight district, pornographic fretwork shops, vice dens, get a grip on yourself, sorry, sorry, second right, third left – Spiegelgasse! – narrow, cobbled, high old houses in a solid rank, number 14 the house of the narrow cobbler himself, Kammerer his name, Lenin his tenant – and across the way at Number One, the Meierei Bar, crucible of anti-art, cradle of Dada!!! Who? What? Whatsisay Dada?? You remember Dada! – historical halfway house between Futurism and Surrealism, twixt Marinetti and André Breton, ‘tween the before-the-war-to-end-all-wars years and the between-the-wars years – Dada! – down with reason, logic, causality, coherence, tradition, proportion, sense and consequence, my art belongs to Dada ‘cos Dada ‘e treats me so – well then, Memories of Dada by a Consular Friend of the Famous in Old Zurich: A Sketch.
    What did it do in the Great War, Dada, I am often asked. How did it begin? where did it? when? what was it, who
named it and why Dada? These are just some of the questions that continue to baffle Dadaists the world over. To those of us who lived through it Dada was, topographically speaking, the high point of Western European culture – I well remember as though it were yesteryear (oh where are they now?) how Hugo Ball – or was it Hans Arp? yes! – no – Picabia, was it? – no, Tzara – yes! – wrote his name in the snow with a walking stick and said: There! I think I’ll call it The Alps. Oh the yes-no’s of yesteryear. Whose only age done gone. Over the hills and far away the sixpounders pounding in howitzerland, no louder than the soft thud of snow falling off the roof – oh heavenl to be picked out – plucked out – blessed by the blood of a negligible wound and released into the folds of snow-covered hills – Oh, Switzerland! – unfurled like a white flag, pacific civilian Switzerland – the miraculous neutrality of it, the noncombatant impartiality of it, the non-aggression pacts of it, the international red cross of it – entente to the left, détente to the right, into the valley of the invalided blundered and wandered myself when young –
    Carr of the Consulate! – first name Henry, that much is beyond dispute, I’m mentioned in the books.
    For the rest I’d be willing to enter into discussion but not if you don’t mind correspondence, into matters of detail and chronology – I stand open to correction on all points, except for my height which can’t be far off, and the success of my performance, which I remember clearly, in the demanding role of Ernest (not Ernest, the other one) – that, and the sense of sheer relief at arriving in a state of rest, namely Switzerland, the still centre of the wheel of war. That’s really the thing – (CARR is now a young man in his drawing room in 1917. Ideally the actor should simply take off e.g. a hat and dressing gownno wig or beard, no make-upCarr’s age has been in his voice.) – the first thing to grasp about Switzerland is that there is no war here. Even when there is war everywhere else, there is no war in Switzerland.

BENNETT: Yes, sir.

(BENNETT has entered with a tray of tea things, set for two, with sandwiches.)

CARR: It is this complete absence of bellicosity, coupled with an ostentatious punctuality of public clocks, that gives the place its reassuring air of permanence. Switzerland, one instinctively feels, will not go away. Nor will it turn into somewhere else. You have no doubt heard allusions to the beneficial quality of the Swiss air, Bennett. The quality referred to is permanence.

BENNETT: Yes, sir.

CARR: Desperate men who have heard the clocks strike thirteen in Alsace, in Trieste, in Serbia and Montenegro, who have felt the ground shift beneath them in Estonia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, arrive in Switzerland and after a few deep breaths find that the ringing and buzzing in their ears has regulated itself into a soothing tick-tock, and that the ground beneath their feet, while invariably sloping, is as steady as an alp. Tonight I incline to the theatre; get me out the straight cut trouser with the blue satin stripe and the silk cutaway. I’ll wear the opal studs.

BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.

CARR: Is there anything of interest?

BENNETT: The Neue Zuricher Zeitung and the Zuricher Post announce, respectively, an important Allied and German victory, each side gaining ground after inflicting heavy casualties on the other with little loss to itself.

CARR: Ah – yes … the war! Poor devils! How I wish I could get back to the trenches! – to my comrades in arms – the wonderful spirit out there in the mud and wire – the brave days and fearful nights. Bliss it was to see the dawn! To be alive was very heaven! Never in the whole history of human conflict was there anything to match the carnage – God’s blood!, the shot and shell! – graveyard stench! – Christ Jesu! – deserted by simpletons, they damn us to hell – ora pro nobis – quick! no, get me out! – I think to match the carnation, oxblood shot-silk cravat, starched, creased just so, asserted by a simple pin, the damask lapels – or a brown, no, biscuit – no – get me out the straight cut trouser with the blue satin stripe and the silk cutaway. I’ll wear the opal studs.

BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.

CARR: Is there anything of interest?

BENNETT: The war continues to dominate the newspapers, sir.

CARR: Ah yes… the war, always the war …

(A note on the above: the scene (and most of the play) is under the erratic control of Old Carr’s memory, which is not notably reliable, and also of his various prejudices and delusions. One result is that the story (like a toy train perhaps) occasionally jumps the rails and has to be restarted at the point where it goes wild.

This scene has several of these ‘time slips’, indicated by the repetitions of the exchange between BENNETT and CARR about the ‘newspapers and telegrams’. Later in the play there are similar cycles as Carr’s memory drops a scene and then picks it up again with a repeated line (e.g. CARR and CECILY in the Library). It may be desirable to mark these moments more heavily by using an extraneous sound or a light effect, or both. The sound of a cuckoo-clock, artificially amplified, would be appropriate since it alludes to time and to Switzerland; in which case a naturalistic cuckoo-clock could be seen to strike during the here-and-now scene of Old Carr’s first monologue. At any rate the effect of these time-slips is not meant to be bewildering, and it should be made clear what is happening.)

I was in Savile Row when I heard the news, talking to the head cutter at Drewitt and Madge in a hounds-tooth check slightly flared behind the knee, quite unusual. Old Drewitt, or Madge, came in and told me. Never trusted the Hun, I remarked. Boche, he replied, and I, at that time unfamiliar with the appellation, turned on my heel and walked into Trimmett and Punch where I ordered a complete suit of Harris knicker-bockers with hacking vents. By the time they were ready, I was in France. Great days! Dawn breaking over no-man’s-land. Dewdrops glistening on the poppies in the early morning sun – All quiet on the Western Front… Tickety boo, tickety boo, tickety boo…

BENNETT: A gentleman called, sir. He did not wait.

CARR: What did he want?

BENNETT: He did not vouchsafe his business, sir. He left his card.
(Offers it on a salver.)

CARR: ‘Tristan Tzara. Dada Dada Dada.’ Did he have a stutter?

BENETT: He spoke French with a Romanian accent, and wore a monocle.

CARR: He is obviously trying to pass himself off as a spy. It is a form of vanity widely indulged in in Zurich during a European war, I believe, and adds greatly to the inconveniences caused by the crowds of real spies who conspire to fill the Odeon and the Terrasse, and make it almost impossible to get a table at either.

BENNETT: I have noticed him with a group of friends at the Terrasse, sir. Whether they were conspirators I could not, of course, tell.

CARR: To masquerade as a conspirator, or at any rate to speak French with a Romanian accent and wear a monocle, is at least as wicked as to be one; in fact, rather more wicked, since it gives a dishonest impression of perfidy, and, moreover, makes the over-crowding in the cafés gratuitous, being the result neither of genuine intrigue nor bona fide treachery – was it not, after all, La Rochefoucauld in his Maximes who had it that in Zurich in Spring in wartime a gentleman is hard put to find a vacant seat for the spurious spies peeping at police spies spying on spies eyeing counterspies what a bloody country even the cheese has got holes in it!! (Off the rails again, CARR has, on the above words, done violence to the inside of a cheese sandwich.)

BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.

CARR: Is there anything of interest?

BENNETT: There is a revolution in Russia, sir.

CARR: Really? What sort of revolution?

BENNETT: A social revolution, sir.

CARR: A social revolution? Unaccompanied women smoking at the Opera, that sort of thing? …

BENNETT: Not precisely that, sir. It is more in the nature of a revolution of classes contraposed by the fissiparous disequilibrium of Russian society.

CARR: What do you mean, classes?

BENNETT: Masters and servants. As it were. Sir.

CARR: Oh. Masters and servants. Classes.

BENNETT (Expressionless as always): There have been scenes of violence.

CARR: I see. Well, I’m not in the least bit surprised, Bennett. I don’t wish to appear wise after the event, but anyone with half an acquaintance with Russian society could see that the day was not far off before the exploited class, disillusioned by the neglect of its interests, alarmed by the falling value of the rouble, and above all goaded beyond endurance by the insolent rapacity of its servants, should turn upon those butlers, footmen, cooks, valets … Parenthetically, Bennett, I see from your book that on Thursday night when Mr Tzara was dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed. I have had previous occasion to speak to you of the virtues of moderation, Bennett: this time I will only say, remember Russia.

BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.

CARR: Is there anything of interest?

BENNETT: The Tsar has now abdicated, sir. There is a Provisional Government headed by Prince Lvov, with Guchkov as Minister of War, Milyukov Foreign Minister and the Socialist Kerensky as Minister of Justice. The inclusion of Kerensky is calculated to recommend the Government to a broad base of the common people, but effective authority has already been challenged by a committee of workers’ deputies, or ‘Soviet’, which has for the moment united all shades of socialist opinion. However there is no immediate prospect of the Socialists seizing power, for the revolution is regarded by them as the fulfilment of Karl Marx’s prophecy of a bourgeois capitalist era in Russia’s progress towards socialism. According to Marx, there is no way for a country to leap from autocracy to socialism: while the ultimate triumph of socialism is inevitable, being the necessary end of the process of dialectical materialism, it must be preceded by a bourgeois-capitalist stage of development. When the time is ripe, and not before, there will be a further revolution, led by the organized industrial workers, or ‘Proletariat’. Thus, it is the duty of Russian Marxists to welcome the present bourgeois revolution, even though it might take several generations to get through. As things stand, therefore, if one can be certain of anything it is that Russia is set fair to become a parliamentary democracy on the British model.

CARR: Newspapers or coded telegram?

BENNETT: General rumour put about Zurich by the crowds of spies, counter-spies, radicals, artists and riff-raff of all kinds. Mr Tzara called, sir. He did not wait.

CARR: I’m not sure that I approve of your taking up this modish novelty of ‘free association’, Bennett.

BENNETT: I’m sorry, sir. It is only that Mr Tzara being an artist –

CARR: I will not have you passing moral judgements on my friends. If Mr Tzara is an artist that is his misfortune.

BENNETT: Yes, sir. I have put the newspapers and telegrams on the sideboard, sir.

CARR: Is there anything of interest?

BENNETT: In St Petersburg, the Provisional Government has now declared its intention to carry on the war. However, the committee of workers’ deputies, or Soviet, consider the war to be nothing more than an imperialist adventure carried on at the expense of workers of both sides. To co-operate in this adventure is to be stigmatized in a novel phrase which seems to translate as a ‘lickspittle capitalist lackey’, unnecessarily offensive in my view.

CARR (Languidly): I’m not sure that I’m much interested in your views, Bennett.

BENNETT (Apologetically): They’re not particularly interesting, sir. However, there is a more extreme position put forward by the Bolshevik party. The Bolshevik line is that some unspecified but unique property of the Russian situation, unforeseen by Marx, has caused the bourgeois-capitalist era of Russian history to be compressed into the last few days, and that the time for the proletarian revolution is now ripe. But the Bolsheviks are a small minority in the Soviet, and their leader, Vladimir Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, has been in exile since the abortive 1905 revolution, and is in fact living in Zurich.

CARR: Naturally.

BENNETT: Yes, sir – if I may quote La Rochefoucauld, ‘Quel pays sanguinaire, même le fromage est plein des trous.’ Lenin is desperately trying to return to Russia but naturally the Allies will not allow him free passage. Since Lenin is almost alone in proclaiming the Bolshevik orthodoxy, which is indeed his creation, his views at present count for nothing in St Petersburg. A betting man would lay odds of about a million to one against Lenin’s view prevailing. However, it is suggested that you take all steps to ascertain his plans.

CARR: I ascertain Lenin’s plans?

BENNETT: Telegram from the Minister.
(He starts to leave.)

CARR: A million to one.

BENNETT: I’d put a pound on him, sir.

CARR: You know him?

BENNETT: I do, sir. And if any doubt remained, the British Secret Service assures us that the man to watch is Kerensky.
(Exit BENNETT.)

CARR (Aside): Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.

BENNETT (Entering): Mr Tzara.
(TZARA enters. BENNETT retires.)

CARR: How are you, my dear Tristan. What brings you here? (This Tzara (there is to be another) is a Romanian nonsense. His entrance might be set to appropriate music.)

TZARA (Ebulliently): Plaizure, plaizure! What else? Eating ez usual, I see ‘Enri?! – ’allo – ’allo, vhat is all the teapots etcetera? Somebody comink? It is Gwendolen I hopp! – I luff ’er, ’Enri – I have come by tram expressly to propose a marriage – ah – ha! –

BENNETT (Entering): Miss Gwendolen and Mr Joyce.

(GWENDOLEN and JAMES JOYCE enter. BENNETT remains by the door. GWENDOLEN and TZARA are momentarily transfixed by each other. This is hardly noticed as JOYCE has made it his own entrance.)

JOYCE:

Top o’ the morning! – James Joyce!
I hope you’ll allow me to voice
my regrets in advance
for coming on the off-chance –
b’jasus I hadn’t much choice!

(This JOYCE is obviously an Irish nonsense. The whole scene is going to take a limerick form, so for clarity’s sake the lay-out of the text is modified.)

CARR:

I… sorry… would you say that again?

JOYCE:

Begob – I’d better explain
I’m told that you are a –

TZARA:

Miss Carr!

GWEN:

      Mr Tzara!

JOYCE:

(Seeing TZARA for the first time) B’jasus’. Joyce is the name.

GWEN:

I’m sorry! – how terribly rude!
Henry – Mr Joyce!

CARR:

      How d’you do?

JOYCE:

Delighted!

TZARA:

    Good day!

JOYCE:

I just wanted to say
how sorry I am to intrude.

CARR:

Tell me… are you some kind of a poet?

JOYCE:

You know my work?

CARR:

      No–it’s
something about your deliv’ry –
can’t quite –

JOYCE:

      Irish.

CARR:

      From Lim’rick?

JOYCE:

No – Dublin, don’t tell me you know it!

GWEN:

He’s a poor writer –

JOYCE:

      Aha!
A fine writer who writes caviar
for the general, hence poor –

TZARA:

Wants to touch you for sure.

JOYCE:

I’m addressing my friend, Mr …

CARR:

(Gulp)       Carr.

GWEN:

Mr Tzara writes poetry and sculpts,
with quite unexpected results.
I’m told he recites
and on Saturday nights
does all kinds of things for adults.

JOYCE:

I really don’t think Mr Carr
is interested much in da-dah –

TZARA:

We say it like Dah-da.

JOYCE:

(To CARR) The fact is I’m rather hard up.

CARR:

Yes I’m told that you are.
If it’s money you want, I’m afraid …

GWEN:

Oh, Henry! – he’s mounting a play,
and Mr Joyce thought
your official support …

CARR:

Ah…!

JOYCE:

    And a couple of pounds till I’m paid.

CARR:

I don’t see why not. For my part,
H.M.G. is considered pro-Art.

TZARA:

Consider me anti.

GWEN:

Consider your auntie?

JOYCE:

A pound would do for a start.

CARR:

The Boche put on culture a-plenty for Swiss, what’s the word?

JOYCE:

      Cognoscenti.

CARR:

It’s worth fifty tanks

JOYCE:

Or twenty-five francs

CARR:

Now … British culture …

JOYCE:

      I’ll take twenty.

TZARA:

(Scornful) Culture and reason!

JOYCE:

      Fifteen.

TZARA:

They give us the mincing machine!

GWEN:

That’s awf’ly profound.

JOYCE:

Could you lend me a pound?

TZARA:

All literature is obscene!
The classics – tradition – vomit on it!

GWEN:

(Oh!)

TZARA:

Beethoven! Mozart! I spit on it!

GWEN:

(Oh!)

TZARA:

Everything’s chance!

GWEN:

Consider your aunts.

TZARA:

Causality – logic – I sssssh –

GWEN:

–awf’ly profound

JOYCE:

(To BENNETT) Could you lend me a pound?

GWEN:

I thought he was going to say ‘Shit on it’.

(Her hand flies, too late, to her mouth, CARR has been thinking hard.)

CARR:

By jove, I’ve got it! Iolanthe!

TZARA:

Obscene!

CARR:

       Is it?

TZARA:

       Avanti!
Gut’n tag! Adios!

GWEN:

Au revoir!

TZARA:

Vamonos!

BENNETT:

Give my regards to your auntie.

(BENNETT closes the door behind TZARA and GWEN.) (The whole thing has been manic from beginning to end, and now it’s finished, except that JOYCE is a leftover.)

JOYCE:

A Romanian rhymer I met
used a system he based on roulette.
His reliance on chance
was a def’nite advance
and yet … and yet … and yet …

(The light steps down between verses.)

 

An impromptu poet of Hibernia
rhymed himself into a hernia.
He became quite adept
at the practice except
for occasional anti-climaxes.

 

When I want to leave things in the air
I say, ‘Excuse me, I’ve got to repair
to my book about Bloom –’
and just leave the room.

(He has gone. Pause. Low light on motionless CARR in his chair.)

CARR: Well, let us resume. Zurich By One Who Was There. (Normal light.)

BENNETT (entering): Mr Tzara.

(TZARA enters. BENNETT retires.)

CARR: How are you, my dear Tristan? What brings you here?

(TZARA, no less than CARR, is straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest.)

TZARA: Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring anyone anywhere? Eating and drinking, as usual, I see, Henry? I have often observed that Stoical principles are more easily borne by those of Epicurean habits.

CARR (Stiffly): I believe it is done to drink a glass of hock and seltzer before luncheon, and it is well done to drink it well before luncheon. I took to drinking hock and seltzer for my nerves at a time when nerves were fashionable in good society. This season it is trenchfoot, but I drink it regardless because I feel much better after it.

TZARA: You might have felt much better anyway.

CARR: No, no – post hock, propter hock.

TZARA: But, my dear Henry, causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war.

CARR: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn’t it?

TZARA: Was it? I thought it was Serbia …

CARR: Brave little Serbia…? No, I don’t think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

TZARA: Oh, what nonsense you talk!

CARR: It may be nonsense, but at least it is clever nonsense.

TZARA: I am sick of cleverness. In point of fact, everything is Chance.

CARR: That sounds awfully clever. What does it mean?

TZARA: It means, my dear Henry, that the causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about. And it is the duty of the artist to jeer and howl and belch at the delusion that infinite generations of real effects can be inferred from the gross expression of apparent cause.

CARR: It is the duty of the artist to beautify existence.

TZARA (Articulately): Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.

CARR (Slight pause): Oh, what nonsense you talk!

TZARA: It may be nonsense, but at least it’s not clever nonsense. Cleverness has been exploded, along with so much else, by the war.

CARR: You forget that I was there, in the mud and blood of a foreign field, unmatched by anything in the whole history of human carnage. Ruined several pairs of trousers. Nobody who has not been in the trenches can have the faintest conception of the horror of it. I had hardly set foot in France before I sank in up to the knees in a pair of twill jodphurs with pigskin straps handstitched by Ramidge and Hawkes. And so it went on – the sixteen ounce serge, the heavy worsteds, the silk flannel mixture – until I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable lambswool dyed khaki in the yarn to my own specification. I tell you, there is nothing in Switzerland to compare with it.

TZARA: Oh, come now, Henry, your trousers always look –

CARR: I mean with trench warfare.

TZARA: Well, I daresay, Henry, but you could have spent the time in Switzerland as an artist.

CARR (Coldly): My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. When I sent round to Hamish and Rudge for their military pattern book, I was responding to feelings of patriotism, duty, to my love of freedom, my hatred of tyranny and my sense of oneness with the underdog – I mean in general, I never particularly cared for the Belgians as such. And besides I couldn’t be an artist anywhere – I can do none of the things by which is meant Art.

TZARA: Doing the things by which is meant Art is no longer considered the proper concern of the artist. In fact it is frowned upon. Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a hat.

CARR: But that is simply to change the meaning of the word Art.

TZARA: I see I have made myself clear.

CARR: Then you are not actually an artist at all?

TZARA: On the contrary. I have just told you I am.

CARR: But that does not make you an artist. An artist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. If there is any point in using language at all it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas. I might claim to be able to fly … Lo, I say, I am flying. But you are not propelling yourself about while suspended in the air, someone may point out. Ah no, I reply, that is no longer considered the proper concern of people who can fly. In fact, it is frowned upon. Nowadays, a flyer never leaves the ground and wouldn’t know how. I see, says my somewhat baffled interlocutor, so when you say you can fly you are using the word in a purely private sense. I see I have made myself clear, I say. Then, says this chap in some relief, you cannot actually fly after all? On the contrary, I say, I have just told you I can. Don’t you see my dear Tristan you are simply asking me to accept that the word Art means whatever you wish it to mean; but I do not accept it.

TZARA: Why not? You do exactly the same thing with words like patriotism, duty, love, freedom, king and country, brave little Belgium, saucy little Serbia –

CARR: (Coldly): You are insulting my comrades-in-arms, many of whom died on the field of honour –

TZARA: – and honour – all the traditional sophistries for waging wars of expansion and self-interest, set to patriotic hymns. Music is corrupted, language conscripted. Words are taken to stand for their opposites. That is why anti-art is the art of our time.
(The argument becomes progressively more heated.)

CARR: The nerve of it. Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists. It is never quite put in those terms but it is a useful way of grasping what civilized ideals are all about. The easiest way of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist. The ingratitude of artists, indeed their hostility, not to mention the loss of nerve and failure of talent which accounts for ‘modern art’, merely demonstrate the freedom of the artist to be ungrateful, hostile, self-centred and talentless, for which freedom I went to war.

TZARA: Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations; for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal; for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted. But how much better to live bravely in Switzerland than to die cravenly in France, quite apart from what it does to one’s trousers.

CARR: My God, you little Romanian wog – you bloody dago – you jumped-up phrase-making smart-alecy arty-intellectual Balkan turd!!! Think you know it all! – while we poor dupes think we’re fighting for ideals, you’ve got a profound understanding of what is really going on, underneath! – you’ve got a phrase for it! You pedant! Do you think your phrases are the true sum of each man’s living of each day? – capitalism with the gloves off? – do you think that’s the true experience of a wire-cutting party caught in a crossfire in no-man’s-land? (Viciously) It’s all the rage in Zurich! – You slug! I’ll tell you what’s really going on: I went to war because it was my duty, because my country needed me, and that’s patriotism. I went to war because I believed that those boring little Belgians and incompetent Frogs had the right to be defended from German militarism, and that’s love of freedom. That’s how things are underneath, and I won’t be told by some yellow-bellied Bolshevik that I ended up in the trenches because there’s a profit in ball-bearings!

TZARA (Storming): Quite right! You ended up in the trenches, because on the 28th of June 1900 the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary married beneath him and found that the wife he loved was never allowed to sit next to him on royal occasions, except! when he was acting in his military capacity as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army – in which capacity he therefore decided to inspect the army in Bosnia, so that at least on their wedding anniversary, the 28th of June 1914, they might ride side by side in an open carriage through the streets of Sarajevo! (Sentimentally) Aaaaah!
(Then slaps his hands sharply together like a gun-shot) Or, to put it another way –

CARR (Quietly): We’re here because we’re here … because we’re here because we’re here … we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here …
(CARR has dropped into the familiar chant, quite quiet. TZARA joins in, just using the soundda-da’ to the same tune. The light starts to go. The chant grows. When CARR starts to speak, TZARA continues the chanting quietly for a few more moments under CARR’s words.)
Great days! The dawn breaking over no-man’s-land – Dewdrops glistening on the poppies in the early morning sun! The trenches stirring to life!… ‘Good morning, corporal! All quiet on the Western Front?’… ‘Tickety-boo, sir!’ – ‘Carry on!’ – Wonderful spirit in the trenches – never in the whole history of human conflict was there anything to match the courage, the comradeship, the warmth, the cold, the mud, the stench – fear – folly – Christ Jesu!, but for this blessed leg! – I never thought to be picked out, plucked out, blessed by the blood of a blighty wound – oh heaven! – released into folds of snow-white feather beds, pacific civilian heaven!, the mystical swissticality of it, the entente cordiality of it!, the Jesus Christ I’m out of it! – into the valley of the invalided – Carr of the Consulate!
(Lights to normal.)

And what brings you here, my dear Tristan?

TZARA: Oh, pleasure, pleasure … What else should bring anyone anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Henry?

CARR: I believe it is customary in good society to take a cucumber sandwich at five o’clock. Where have you been since last Thursday?

TZARA: In the Public Library.

CARR: What on earth were you doing there?

TZARA: That’s just what I kept asking myself.

CARR: And what was the reply?

TZARA: ‘Ssssh!’ Cecily does not approve of garrulity in the Reference Section.

CARR: Who is Cecily? And is she as pretty and well-bred as she sounds? Cecily is a name well thought of at fashionable christenings.

TZARA: Cecily is a librarianness. I say, do you know someone called Joyce?

CARR: Joyce is a name which could only expose a child to comment around the font.

TZARA: No, no, Mr Joyce, Irish writer, mainly of limericks, christened James Augustine, though registered, due to a clerical error, as James Augusta, a little known fact.

CARR: Certainly I did not know it. But then I have never taken an interest in Irish affairs. In fashionable society it would be considered a sign of incipient vulgarity with radical undertones.

TZARA: The war caught Joyce and his wife in Trieste in Austro-Hungary. They got into Switzerland and settled in Zurich. He lives in Universitatsstrasse, and is often seen round about, in the library, in the cafés, wearing, for example, a black pinstripe jacket with grey herringbone trousers, or brown Donegal jacket with black pinstripe trousers, or grey herringbone jacket with brown Donegal trousers, all being the mismatched halves of sundry sundered Sunday suits: sorts language into hands of contract bridge. His limericks are said to be more interesting, though hardly likely to start a revolution – I say, do you know someone called Ulyanov?

CARR: I’m finding this conversation extremely hard to follow.

And you still have not told me what you were doing in the public library. I had no idea that poets nowadays were interested in literature. Or is it that your interest is in Cecily?

TZARA: Good heavens, no. Cecily is rather pretty, and wellbred, as you surmised, but her views on poetry are very old-fashioned and her knowledge of the poets, as indeed of everything else, is eccentric, being based on alphabetical precedence. She is working her way along the shelves. She has read Allingham, Anon, Arnold, Belloc, Blake, both Brownings, Byron, and so on up to, I believe, G.

CARR: Who is Allingham?

TZARA: ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men …’ Cecily would regard any poem that came out of a hat with the gravest suspicion. Hello – why the extra cup? – why cucumber sandwiches? Who’s coming to tea?

CARR: It is merely set for Gwendolen – she usually returns at about this hour.

TZARA: How perfectly delightful, and to be honest not unexpected. I am in love with Gwendolen and have come expressly to propose to her.

CARR: Well, that is a surprise.

TZARA: Surely not, Henry; I have made my feelings for Gwendolen quite plain.

CARR: Of course you have, my dear fellow. But my surprise stems from the fact that you must surely have met Gwendolen at the Public Library, for she has left here every morning this week saying that that is where she is going, and Gwendolen is a scrupulously truthful girl. In fact, as her elder brother I have had to speak to her about it. Unrelieved truthfulness can give a young girl a reputation for insincerity. I have known plain girls with nothing to hide captivate the London season purely by discriminate mendacity.

TZARA: Oh, I assure you Gwendolen has been in the Public Library. But I have had to admire her from afar, all the way from Economics to Foreign Literature.

CARR: I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It’s the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl’s mind.

TZARA: Well, in this library Foreign Literature includes English.

CARR: What a novel arrangement. Is any reason given?

TZARA (Impatiently): The point is, Henry, I can’t get to speak to her alone.

CARR: Ah, yes-her chaperone.

TZARA: Chaperone?

CARR: Yes – you don’t imagine I’d let my sister go unchaperoned in a city largely frequented by foreigners. Gwendolen has made a friend in Zurich. I have not met her but Gwendolen assures me that they are continuously in each other’s company, and from a description which I have elicited by discreet questioning she cannot but be a wholesome and restraining influence, being practically middle-aged, plainly dressed, bespectacled and answering to the name of Joyce, oh good heavens. Is he after her money?

TZARA: Only in derisory instalments. He claims to be writing a novel, and has made a disciple out of Gwendolen. She transcribes for him, looks things up in works of reference, and so on. The poor girl is so innocent she does not stop to wonder what possible book could be derived from reference to Homer’s Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory for 1904.

CARR: Homer’s Odyssey and the Dublin Street Directory?

TZARA: For 1904.

CARR: I admit it’s an unusual combination of sources, but not wholly without possibilities. Anyway, there’s no need to behave as though you were married to her already. You are not married to her already, and I don’t think you ever will be.

TZARA: Why on earth do you say that?

CARR: In the first place, girls never marry Romanians, and in the second place I don’t give my consent.

TZARA: Your consent!

CARR: My dear fellow, Gwendolen is my sister and before I allow you to marry her you will have to clear up the whole question of Jack.

TZARA: Jack! What on earth do you mean? What do you mean, Henry, by Jack? I don’t know anyone of the name of Jack.

CARR (Taking a library ticket from his pocket): You left this here the last time you dined.

TZARA: Do you mean to say you have had my library ticket all this time? I had to pay a small fine in replacing it.

CARR: That was extravagant of you, since the ticket does not belong to you. It is made out in the name of Mr Jack Tzara, and your name isn’t Jack, it’s Tristan.

TZARA: No, it isn’t, it’s Jack.

CARR: You have always told me it was Tristan. I have introduced you to everyone as Tristan. You answer to the name of Tristan. Your notoriety at the Meierei Bar is firmly associated with the name Tristan. It is perfectly absurd saying your name isn’t Tristan.

TZARA: Well, my name is Tristan in the Meierei Bar and Jack in the library, and the ticket was issued in the library.

CARR: To write – or at any rate to draw words out of a hat – under one name, and appear at the Public Library under another is an understandable precaution – but I cannot believe that that is the whole explanation.

TZARA: My dear Henry, the explanation is perfectly simple. One day last year, not long after the triumph at the Meierei Bar of our noise concert for siren, rattle and fire-extinguisher, a bunch of the boys were sinking a beer at the Cafe Zum Adler – myself, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Picabia … Arp, as usual, was inserting a warm croissant into his nose, I was quietly improving a Shakespeare sonnet with a pair of scissors.

CARR: Which one?

TZARA: I believe it was the Eighteenth, the one beginning ‘Vergleichen solle ich dich dem Sommertag, Da du weit lieblicher, weit milder bist?’

CARR: But surely, in German it’s hardly worth the trouble.

TZARA (Cheerfully): Oh, completely pointless. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be Dada. Well, who should come in but Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, with a group of Zimmerwaldists.

CARR: That sounds like the last word in revolutionary socialism.

TZARA: It is. At Zimmerwald in 1915 we called on the workers of the world to oppose the war.

CARR: We?

TZARA: Well, I dine with them, and, in fact, was doing so on this occasion when someone at the bar piano started to play a Beethoven sonata. Lenin went completely to pieces, wept like a child. When he recovered he dried his eyes and lashed into the Dadaists! – ‘decadent nihilists, flogging too good for them’, and so on. Fortunately, the name Tzara meant nothing to him, but a few days later I met him at the library and he introduced me to Cecily. ‘Tzara!’ said she. ‘Not the Dadaist, I hope!’ I could feel Lenin’s eyes upon me. ‘My younger brother, Tristan,’ I replied. ‘Most unfortunate. Terrible blow to the family.’ When I filled up my application form, for some reason the first name I thought of was Jack. It has really turned out rather well.

CARR (With great interest): Cecily knows Lenin, does she?

TZARA: Oh, yes, he’s made quite a disciple out of Cecily. She’s helping him with his book on Imperialism.

CARR (Thoughtfully): Did you say the reference section?

TZARA: They agree on everything, including art. As a Dadaist, I am the natural enemy of bourgeois art and the natural ally of the political left, but the odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art.

CARR: There’s nothing odd about that. Revolution in art is in no way connected with class revolution. Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else.

TZARA: Because man cannot live by bread alone.

CARR: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on. When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour – weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you’ve got a chit for life? (Passionately) Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.

TZARA (Hard): Yes, by Christ! – and when you see the drawings he made on the walls of the cave, and the fingernail patterns he one day pressed into the clay of the cooking pot, then you say, My God, I am of these people! It’s not the hunters and the warriors that put you on the first rung of the ladder to consecutive thought and a rather unusual flair in your poncey trousers.

CARR: Oh yes it was. The hunter decorated the pot, the warrior scrawled the antelope on the wall, the artist came home with the kill. All of a piece. The idea of the artist as a special kind of human being is art’s greatest achievement, and it’s a fake!

TZARA: My God, you bloody English philistine – you ignorant smart-arse bogus bourgeois Anglo-Saxon prick! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat – grind – shit. Hunt – eat – fight – grind – saw the logs – shit. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But that difference has become smaller and smaller and smaller. Art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the pay-master. The artist has negated himself: paint – eat – sculpt – grind – write – shit. (A light change.)
Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man – is a coffee-mill! That is the message of Dada. – dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada…
(TZARA is shouting, raving. CARR immobile.)
(Normal light as
BENNETT opens the door. Everything back to ‘normal’.)

BENNETT: Miss Gwendolen and Mr Joyce.

(GWENDOLEN and JOYCE appear as before. BENNETT retires.)

JOYCE: Good morning, my name is James Joyce –

CARR: James Augusta?

JOYCE (Taken aback): Was that a shot in the dark?

CARR: Not at all – I am a student of footnotes to expatriate Irish literature.

JOYCE: You know my work?

CARR: No – only your name.

TZARA: Miss Carr…

GWEN: Mr Tzara…

CARR: … but something about you suggests Limerick.

JOYCE: Dublin, don’t tell me you know it?

CARR: Only from the guidebook, and I gather you are in the process of revising that.

JOYCE: Yes.

GWEN: Oh! I’m sorry – how terribly rude! Henry – Mr Joyce –

CARR: How’dyou do?

JOYCE: Delighted.

TZARA: Good day.

JOYCE: I just wanted to say –

GWEN: Do you know Mr Tzara, the poet?

JOYCE: By sight, and reputation; but I am a martyr to glaucoma and inflation. Recently as I was walking down the
Bahnhofstrasse my eye was caught by a gallery showcase and I was made almost insensible with pain.

GWEN: Mr Joyce has written a poem about it. It is something you two have in common.

JOYCE: Hardly. Mr Tzara’s disability is monocular, and, by rumour, affected, whereas I have certificates for conjunctivitis, iritis and synechia, and am something of an international eyesore.

GWEN: I mean poetry. I was thinking of your poem
‘Bahnhofstrasse’, beginning
   ‘The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day,   Grey way whose violet signals are
   The trysting and the twining star.’

TZARA (To JOYCE): For your masterpiece
I have great expectorations
(GWEN’s squeak, ‘Oh!’)
For you I would evacuate a monument.
(Oh!)
Art for art’s sake – I am likewise defecated

GWEN: Dedicated –

TZARA: I’m a foreigner.

JOYCE: So am I.

GWEN: But it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I have a good ear, would you not agree, Mr Tzara?

TZARA: It is the most perfect thing about you, Miss Carr.

GWEN: Oh, I hope not. That would leave no room for development.

JOYCE: But have you not read any of Mr Tzara’s poems?

GWEN: To my shame I have not – but perhaps the shame is yours, Mr Tzara.

TZARA: I accept it – but the matter can be easily put right, and at once.

GWEN (Fluttering): Oh, Mr Tzara!…

(TZARA retires to the sideboard, or writing table if there is one, and begins to write fluently on a large piece of white paper.)

CARR (To JOYCE): And what about you, Doris?

JOYCE: Joyce.

CARR: Joyce.

JOYCE: It is not as a poet that I come to see you, sir, but as the business manager of the English Players, a theatrical troupe.

CARR: The business manager?

JOYCE: Yes.

CARR: Well, if it’s money you want, I’m afraid …

GWEN: Oh, Henry! – he’s mounting a play, and Mr Joyce thought your official support –

JOYCE: Perhaps I’d better explain. It seems, sir, that my name is in bad odour among the British community in Zurich.
Whether it is my occasional contribution to the neutralist press, or whether it is my version of Mr Dooley, beginning:
   ‘Who is the man, when all the gallant nations run to war,
   Goes home to have his dinner by the very first cable car,
   And as he eats his canteloupe contorts himself with mirth
   To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth?’
–and ending:
   ‘It’s Mr Dooley
   Mr Dooley
   The wisest wight our country ever knew!
   “Poor Europe ambles
   like sheep to shambles”
   Sighs Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-ooo.’
or some other cause altogether, the impression remains that I
regard both sides with equal indifference.

CARR: And you don’t?

JOYCE: Only as an artist. As an artist, naturally I attach no importance to the swings and roundabout of political history. But I come here not as an artist but as James A. Joyce. I am an Irishman. The proudest boast of an Irishman is – I paid back my way …

CARR: So it is money.

JOYCE: A couple of pounds would be welcome – certainly, but it is to repay a debt that I have come. Not long ago, after many years of self-reliance and hardship during which my work had been neglected and reviled even to the point of being burned by a bigoted Dublin printer, there being no other kind of printer available in Dublin, I received £100 from the Civil List at the discretion of the Prime Minister.

CARR: The Prime Minister –?

JOYCE: Mr Asquith.

CARR: I am perfectly well aware who the Prime Minister is – I am the representative of His Majesty’s Government in Zurich.

JOYCE: The Prime Minister is Mr Lloyd George, but at that time it was Mr Asquith.

CARR: Oh yes.

JOYCE: I do not at this moment possess £100, nor was it the intention that I would repay the debt in kind. However I mentioned the English Players. By the fortune of war, Zurich has become the theatrical centre of Europe. Here culture is the continuation of war by other means – Italian opera against French painting – German music against Russian ballet – but nothing from England. Night after night, actors totter about the raked stages of this alpine renaissance, speaking in every tongue but one – the tongue of Shakespeare – of Sheridan – of Wilde … The English Players intend to mount a repertoire of masterpieces that will show the Swiss who leads the world in dramatic art.

CARR: Gilbert and Sullivan – by God!

GWEN: And also Mr Joyce’s own play Exiles which so far, unfortunately –

JOYCE: That’s quite by the way –

CARR: Patience!

JOYCE: Exactly. First things first.

CARR: Trial by Jury! Pirates of Penzance!

JOYCE: We intend to begin with that quintessential English jewel, The Importance of Being Earnest.

CARR (Pause): I don’t know it. But I’ve heard of it and I don’t like it. It is a play written by an Irish – (Glances at GWENDOLEN) Gomorrahist – Now look here, Janice, I may as well tell you, His Majesty’s Government –

JOYCE: I have come to ask you to play the leading role.

CARR: What?

JOYCE: We would be honoured and grateful.

CARR: What on earth makes you think that I am qualified to play the leading role in The Importance of Being Earnest?

GWEN: It was my suggestion, Henry. You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton.

CARR: Yes, I know, but –

JOYCE: We are short of a good actor to play the lead – he’s an articulate and witty English gentleman –

CARR: Ernest?

JOYCE: Not Ernest – the other one.

CARR (Tempted): No – no – I absolutely –

JOYCE: Aristocratic – romantic – epigrammatic – he’s a young swell.

CARR: A swell…?

JOYCE: He says things like, I may occasionally be a little overdressed but I make up for it by being immensely overeducated. That gives you the general idea of him.

CARR: How many changes of costume?

JOYCE: Two complete outfits.

CARR: Town or country?

JOYCE: First one then the other.

CARR: Indoors or out?

JOYCE: Both.

CARR: Summer or winter?

JOYCE: Summer but not too hot.

CARR: Not raining?

JOYCE: Not a cloud in the sky.

CARR: But he could be wearing – a boater?

JOYCE: It is expressly stipulated.

CARR: And he’s not in – pyjamas?

JOYCE: Expressly proscribed.

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.)

JOYCE: What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Tzara’s thoughts about Ball’s thoughts about Tzara, and Tzara’s thoughts about Ball’s thoughts about Tzara’s thoughts about Ball?

TZARA: He thought that he thought that he knew what he was thinking, whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he did not.

JOYCE: And did he?

TZARA: He did and he didn’t.

JOYCE: What did Dada bring to pictorial art, sculpture, poetry and music that had not been brought to these activities previously in …
(The appropriate flags start coming out of the hat.)
… Barcelona, New York, Paris, Rome and St Petersburg by, for example, Picabia, Duchamp, Satie, Marinetti, and Mayakovsky who shouts his fractured lines in a yellow blazer with blue roses painted on his cheeks?

TZARA: The word Dada.

JOYCE: Describe sensibly without self-contradiction, and especially without reference to people stuffing bread rolls up their noses, how the word Dada was discovered.

TZARA: Tristan Tzara discovered the word Dada by accident in a Larousse Dictionary. It has been said, and he does not deny, that a paper-knife was inserted at random into the book. Huelsenbeck recounts how he discovered the word one day in Hugo Ball’s dictionary while Tzara was not present. Hans Arp, however, has stated, ‘I hereby declare that Tristan Tzara found the word Dada on February the 8th 1916 at six o’clock in the afternoon.’

JOYCE: Were there further disagreements between Tzara and Huelsenbeck?

TZARA: There were.

JOYCE: As to?

TZARA: As to the meaning and purpose of Dada.

JOYCE: Huelsenbeck demanding, for example?

TZARA: International revolutionary union of all artists on the basis of radical Communism.

JOYCE: As opposed to Tzara’s demanding?

TZARA: The right to urinate in different colours.

JOYCE: Each person in different colours at different times, or different people in each colour all the time? Or everybody multi-coloured every time?

TZARA: It was more to make the point that making poetry should be as natural as making water –

JOYCE (Rising: the conjuring is over): God send you don’t make them in the one hat.
(This is too much for TZARA.)

TZARA: By God, you supercilious streak of Irish puke! You four-eyed, bog-ignorant, potato-eating ponce! Your art has failed. You’ve turned literature into a religion and it’s as dead as all the rest, it’s an overripe corpse and you’re cutting fancy figures at the wake. It’s too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist! Dada! Dada! Dada!! (He starts to smash whatever crockery is to hand; which done, he strikes a satisfied pose. JOYCE has not moved.)

JOYCE: You are an over-excited little man, with a need for selfexpression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify – capriciously – their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships – and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes – husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer … It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there’s a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it – and if you hope to shame it into the grave with your fashionable magic, I would strongly advise you to try and acquire some genius and if possible some subtlety before the season is quite over. Top o’ the morning, Mr Tzara!
(With which JOYCE produces a rabbit out of his hat, puts the hat on his head, and leaves, holding the rabbit.)
(CARR’s voice is heard off.)

CARR (Voice off): ‘Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example what on earth is the use of them? They seem as a class to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.’
(TZARA has moved to CARR’s door. He opens it, and goes through.)
(Voice off) ‘How are you, my dear Ernest. What brings you up to town?’ – ‘Pleasure, pleasure – eating as usual, I see, Algy…’
(CARR enters, as Old Carr, holding a book.) Algy! The other one. Personal triumph in the demanding role of Algernon Montcrieff. The Theater zur Kaufleuten on Pelikanstrasse, an evening in Spring, the English Players in that quintessential English jewel ‘The Imprudence of Being –’ Now I’ve forgotten the first one. By Oscar Wilde. Henry Carr as Algy. Other parts played by Tristan Rawson, Cecil Palmer, Ethel Turner, Evelyn Cotton … forget the rest. Tickets five francs, four bob a nob and every seat filled, must have made a packet for the Irish lout and his cronies – still,
not one to bear a grudge, not after all these years, and him dead in the cemetery up the hill, unpleasant as it is to be dragged through the courts for a few francs – after I’d paid for my trousers and filled every seat in the house – not very pleasant to be handed ten francs like a tip! – and then asking me for twenty-five francs for tickets – bloody nerve – Here, I got it out –
(From his pocket, a tattered document.)
– Bezirksgericht Zuerich, Zurich District Court, in the case of Dr James Joyce – doctor my eye – plaintiff and counter-defendant versus Henry Carr, defendant and counter-plaintiff, with reference to the claim for settlement of the following issues: (a) Suit: is defendant and counter-plaintiff (that’s me) obliged to pay the plaintiff and counter-defendant (that’s him) twenty-five francs? (b) Counter-suit: is plaintiff and counter-defendant bound to pay defendant and counter-plaintiff three hundred francs? Have you got that? Joyce says I owe him twenty-five francs for tickets. I say Joyce owes me three hundred francs for the trousers, etcetera, purchased by me for my performance as Henry – or rather – god dammit! – the other one …

Incidentally, you may or may not have noticed that I got my wires crossed a bit here and there, you know how it is when the old think-box gets stuck in a groove and before you know where you are you’ve jumped the points and suddenly you think, No, steady on, old chap, that was Algernon – Algernon! There you are – all coming back now, I’ve got it straight, I’ll be all right from here on. In fact, anybody hanging on just for the cheap comedy of senile confusion might as well go because now I’m on to how I met Lenin and could have changed the course of history etcetera, what’s this?? (the document) Oh yes.

Erkannt – has decided that. I. Der Beklagte, the defendant, Henry Carr, is obliged to pay den Klager, the plaintiff, James Joyce, twenty-five francs. The counter-claim of Henry Carr is denied. Herr Carr to indemnify Doktor Joyce sixty francs for trouble and expenses. In other words, a travesty of justice. Later the other case came up – Oh yes, he sued me for slander, claimed I called him a swindler and a cad … Thrown out of court, naturally. But it was the money with Joyce. Well, it was a long time ago. He left Zurich after the war, went to Paris, stayed twenty years and turned up here again in December 1940. Another war… But he was a sick man then, perforated ulcer, and in January he was dead … buried one cold snowy day in the Fluntern Cemetery up the hill.

I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him – ‘And what did you do in the Great War?’ ‘I wrote Ulysses,’ he said. ‘What did you do?’

Bloody nerve.

(BLACKOUT.)