“Titus reginam Beronicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur . . . statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam.” Miles cleared his throat and looked around the Coes’ living room. The dinner dishes were cleared, and the play-reading was about to begin. Warren and Jane Coe sat by the fireplace, sharing a book and a hassock. They had elected not to take parts; it would be more fun, they said, just to listen. The rest of the company was paired: Martha was looking on with the vicomte; Dolly with Harold Huber, a thin white-haired man in a red flannel shirt who used to be a lawyer and now ran a duck farm; Miles with Harriet Huber, a big pink woman with a gray pompadour. Helen Murphy had not come. The child was sick, and Helen had been calling all day, to try to change the date to next week, but somebody on the line had left the receiver off the hook, so in the end Miles had driven over alone, not to let the Coes down. Martha was alone too, and for a while, at dinner, it had looked as if she and Miles were going to play opposite each other, as the Emperor and the Jewish queen, but Martha had insisted that Bérénice be given to Dolly. Martha was quite high; the gin-and-french, without ice, before dinner, had evidently gone to her head, and she had gulped a lot of claret. Warren had not seen her that way for years, not since she had been married to Miles, and he had felt troubled as he repeatedly filled her empty wine glass. Her dark eyes glittered in her pale oval face, and she spoke very positively, interrupting Miles in the middle of his harangues. At the same time, she looked very pretty, with her tapering neck and gold knot of hair, like a girl in a locket; she had not reached the usual New Leeds state, where the eyes would narrow and the features slip out of drawing, like a loose mask—a thing Warren hated, no matter how many times he saw it happen. He was apprehensive for Martha, knowing her as he did and sharing her nervousness about Miles. An outsider might not have realized that she was tight, but Dolly Lamb, Warren noticed, when she came in after dinner with the vicomte, had given her a quick, quizzical look, the minute she heard her laughing, in clear, sharp peals, at something that was not awfully funny. Martha had noticed the look too and hastily set aside her glass of B and B. She asked for more coffee, but unfortunately it had run out, and Warren did not want to bother Jane, who seemed tired and preoccupied, with making a fresh pot. Instead, he hopped out to the kitchen and brought everybody a glass of water.
“Titus reginam Beronicen,” Miles began again. “Reginam,” murmured Martha to the vicomte, with a grimace, making the g hard. “I hate that soft, squelchy church Latin; after all, it’s Tacitus he’s quoting.” The vicomte furled his lower lip, like a little flag, and shrugged. “A matter of taste,” he said. “Who knows how the Romans pronounced?” “We do know,” whispered Martha. “Quiet!” Warren begged. “I want to hear Miles translate it.” “Say,” said Harold Huber, “include me out on the Latin. We came here to parler français, the way Harriet got it.” “It’s just the preface,” explained Dolly in an undertone, pointing to the text. “Racine gives the locus classicus he got the plot from.” “Oh,” replied Harold Huber. “Shoot,” he said to Miles. “ ‘Against his will and hers, Titus sent Queen Bérénice, whom, it is said, he had even promised to marry, away from the City.’ ” Miles glanced at Martha for confirmation. She nodded. “ ‘He, unwilling, sent her, unwilling, away,’ ” she said dreamily. “ ‘Statim’. ‘At once.’ ”
“Pronto,” Miles chuckled. “Forthwith. Subito. There you have it, boys and girls. Yet in Racine it takes five acts to bring off.” He took out a handkerchief and blew a trumpet blast on his long nose. “Racine’s a microscopist,” he explained. “A slow-motion camera trained on the passions.” “Precisely,” said Martha. “Unlike Corneille,” continued Miles, “he’s interested in process. Racine’s a kind of scientist—bear in mind that this is the seventeenth century, the great age of French science and invention.” Warren nudged Jane. “Gee, this is interesting,” he said. “Racine,” Miles went on, with a gimlet stare at his audience, “is a scientific observer of human behavior; he takes a single action and enlarges it, under his microscope, the way you might study a plant or the organs of an animal.” “Yes,” put in Martha, excitedly. “How clever of you, Miles. That’s why the unities were necessary to Racine. People think the unities were arbitrary and artificial—a convention of academicians. But I can see that you could look at them as scientific, as if he were setting up a laboratory, for a controlled experiment.” “Excuse me for living,” Warren bashfully interjected, when he saw that she was through, “but what are the unities?” The vicomte sighed and laced his broad red hands over his belly; Harriet Huber yawned. “Time, space, and action,” ventured Dolly. Martha nodded. “The action takes place in one day on a single set. Here it’s the cabinet or closet, as they used to call it—Titus’s glorified private study, where he transacts his personal business. Next door, on one side, stage right, I think, are his imperial apartments; stage left, on the other side, are the apartments of the queen, Bérénice. Rome and Jerusalem, and the parley-ground between.” “What’s she doing there, anyway?” inquired Harold Huber. “She’s his guest,” said Martha. “She and her suite. In history, her brother Agrippa was with her.” “Isn’t she Titus’s mistress?” Jane wondered. “Evidently,” said the vicomte, widening his blue eyes. Miles and Martha exchanged an interrogatory look. “I don’t think so,” said Martha. “No,” said Miles. “She isn’t. Racine doesn’t set it up that way. For five years, they’ve been engaged, but he hasn’t tampered with her. Racine makes that plain in the preface”—he tapped the book—“where he compares her to Dido. Bérénice, he says, doesn’t have to die in the end because she, unlike Dido with Aeneas, hadn’t gone the whole way with young Titus.”
“Oh, I bet they slept together,” said Jane airily. “Everybody knows about those long engagements. You can’t tell me they didn’t have intercourse.” She giggled. A look of amusement passed between Miles and Martha. “Not in Racine, Jane,” said Martha. “He says they didn’t, and you have to suspend your disbelief for the purposes of the play.” “Maybe they did in history, dear,” said Warren. “But this is a work of art, and you have to accept the artist’s convention.” “Oh, pooh,” said Jane. “If they didn’t sleep together, that was the whole trouble. That’s why their affair fizzled out. If he’d had them sleep together, he could have had a happy ending.” “Maybe that’s why he didn’t,” suggested Dolly gravely. “He didn’t want a happy ending, you mean?” put in Warren. “Right,” said Miles.
“Will somebody please tell us what this is all about?” Plump Harriet Huber querulously patted her pompadour. Except for her batik robes and the priests’ vestments she sometimes wore, she was a very ordinary woman, who had formerly been a singer. Harold Huber was brighter than she was and keen as a whip, Warren had found, on his specialty, which had been railroad law. He had come a cropper through some arbitrage deal and nearly been put in jail, but he had a sharp head for business and had made good, up here, with his duck farm, which he had bought up cheap from a derelict writer who had mortgaged the ducks to go to Paris. Everybody ate ducks, to help Harold, but poor Harriet always seemed a little out of things, like somebody’s mother. “All you people,” she complained now, “seem to have read the play ahead of time.” “Yes, Miles, give us the story,” chimed in Harold Huber. “I think Paul should do it,” said Jane with a hostess’s eye on the vicomte, who sat blinking drowsily in his canvas chair. “Let the baron tell it,” Miles conceded grandly. “Ah well,” said the vicomte, opening his eyes, “it is many years since I have seen it performed. Mon oncle, le duc, took me when I was a little shaver, to see Bernhardt in the role. It was before her break with the Comédie Française. He had a mistress, I believe, who was playing the part of the confidante—your part, my dear girl,” he added, to Martha. “Later, there was a quarrel between her and Bernhardt.” “Let’s get on with the story,” Miles said impatiently.
But Paul was offended. “You tell it, my friend,” he said. “It’s nothing. A ficelle. ‘Marion pleure, Marion crie; Marion veut qu’on la marie,’ as Voltaire wittily said.” He broke off into a fit of coughing. “I don’t believe he knows it at all,” Jane whispered to Warren. “Not Voltaire—” began Martha. “Ssh,” said Warren. “Titus,” commenced Miles, “the new Emperor of Rome, loves Queen Bérénice of Judaea.” “What you would call today a puppet queen,” interjected the vicomte, smoothing his long bob. “Titus,” said Miles, “has conquered Jerusalem.” “The Arch of Titus,” whispered Dolly, to Harold Huber. “Quiet!” implored Warren. “Titus,” Miles resumed at a brisker pace, “has brought the vassal queen to Rome, where he conceives the notion of marrying her. His father—” “Vespasian,” announced Martha. “Damn it, Martha,” exclaimed Miles. “Stop helping me. Tell the story yourself.” He folded his arms and scowled. “Shall I?” Martha appealed to the company, as Miles remained stubbornly silent, his narrow lips set. “Go ahead, Martha,” said Jane. “All right, then,” said Martha. “When the play opens, it’s Titus’s wedding day. His father, Vespasian, has died, just a few days before, I think, and Titus is now Caesar. In her apartments, Bérénice is waiting to be married. She doesn’t realize (dramatic irony) that Titus has decided to renounce her, because Roman law and custom forbid Caesar to marry a queen and a foreigner.” “Why?” said Harriet Huber. “Prejudice,” said the vicomte, looking at them over a large pair of glasses, which he had produced from his pocket. “It is the same as with us in France. Ever since they threw their own kings out, the Romans détestaient les rois.” “The Senate,” resumed Martha, “has reminded Titus of his duty and he comes to tell Bérénice that he’s going to send her back to Judaea—unwillingly.” The vicomte looked up from the text. “But Bérénice is naughty,” he supplied. “She takes it in a bad spirit—not nobly—protests that he is tired of her and threatens to kill herself. Eh bien, Titus, who loves her still, becomes a bad boy too and threatens to kill himself. When the lovely Bérénice hears this, she knows that he loves her and rises to her full height.” The vicomte sat up in his chair, threw his chest out and held himself at attention. “She renounces Titus, of her own volition, and sets sail for Judaea, promising not to die. Titus stays in Rome and takes up his job as Emperor.”
“And that’s all?” said Harriet Huber, curiously. “That’s all,” said the vicomte, settling back in his chair with a somewhat triumphant expression. “You forgot Antiochus,” prompted Martha. “Ah yes,” said the vicomte. “The king of Comagena. It is the part I will take. Another Oriental, like Bérénice. Another barbarian. He is Titus’s rival. He loves Bérénice and hopes to get her, what do you say, on the rebound. But in the end he too renounces. He gives up his crafty design and becomes like a Roman.” There was a silence. Dolly frowned. “It’s rather like an Austen novel, isn’t it?” she timidly observed. “All the characters become educated; they grow up and buckle down to their duties, like Emma marrying Mr. Knightley.” She screwed up her brows. “It sounds awfully uncomfortable,” she added, with a little shiver. “But naturally,” said the vicomte. “The characters have growing pains. That is what tragedy is.”
“Let me ask you a question,” said Warren, who had been waiting dutifully for an opening in the conversation. “Why doesn’t Titus give up the job of Emperor and just marry Bérénice and live like a plain citizen?” “Like the Duke of Windsor,” exclaimed Harriet. “I knew it reminded me of something. ‘The woman I love.’ ” She laughed a little and looked at her husband. But Jane, who seemed out of sorts for some reason this evening, turned impatiently on Warren. “Oh, Warren,” she said, “you know the answer to that. It’s right there in the play.” “I forget,” confessed Warren.
Miles opened the book. “Act V, Scene 6,” he noted, and began to declaim, addressing himself to Dolly:
“Oui, madame, et je dois moins encore vous dire
Que je suis prêt pour vous abandonner l’empire,
De vous suivre, et d’aller, trop content de mes fers,
Soupir avec vous au bout de l’univers.”
“Isn’t that just like the Duke of Windsor?” cried Harriet. “ ‘To sigh with you at the ends of the earth’? Wasn’t there something like that in that record he made?” She hunted in her text. “Je suis prêt pour vous abandonner l’empire . . . ?” She turned a questioning glance on her husband. “Probably the Duke of Windsor copied it out of Racine,” declared Jane, rounding her eyes and dropping her jaw. “Hardly,” said Miles, with a curt, silencing nod in her direction. He continued, his green eyes fixed on Dolly:
“Vous même rougiriez de ma lâche conduite
Vous verriez à regret marcher à votre suite
Un indigne empereur sans empire, sans cour,
Vil spectacle aux humains de la faiblesse de l’amour.”
Dolly colored, as if in character, under Miles’s stare. “There, you see, Warren,” said Jane. “Think of poor Titus giving up his empire, trailing around after her, and with all those trunks. . . .” “What trunks, darling?” Warren turned to her anxiously. “I don’t get your point.” “Why, the Duchess of Windsor’s, of course,” retorted Jane. “Everybody knows about her traveling with seventy trunks of dresses. In Titus’s day, probably, in Palestine, it would have been on camels.” Harold Huber guffawed. “But Jane is quite right,” interposed the vicomte, with an air of virtuous reproof. “That is what Titus would have become if he had married the queen for love—a flunkey.” “ ‘Un indigne empereur . . . vil spectacle aux humains de la faiblesse de l’amour,’ ” quoted Miles again in a sonorous voice; his French was extremely fluent, but he spoke with a rolling accent that made it sound like an Irish brogue. The vicomte and Martha smiled. “But is love a weakness?” cried Warren in alarm. “Does anybody here think love is a weakness?” “In a king, certainly,” said the vicomte, folding his hands. “Do you agree with that, Miles?” Warren turned to his friend. “Not only in a king,” he said finally, in his drawling voice. “In any man, I would say. Love is for boys and women.” Martha’s fair brows made two skeptical arcs, but she said nothing. Warren looked hopefully around the circle, but nobody rose to love’s defense. “What about Plato?” he said to Miles, in a tone of diffident reminder. “That isn’t what Plato says.” “Plato meant something different,” Miles replied brusquely. “The concept you’re thinking of—romantic love—was unknown to him.” “That’s not what I got out of him,” protested Warren. “If that isn’t romantic love in the Symposium, what is it?” he said. “Transcendence. Idealization,” said Martha. “Plato despairs of love, mortal love, as we understand it.” Miles tapped his foot in its fancy shoe. “Oh, excuse me,” she said, demurely. “I interrupted again.” “I agree with Miles,” Jane suddenly proclaimed. “In a man, love is a weakness.” Warren jumped up from the hassock. He was quivering all over. “You don’t mean that,” he said incredulously. “Oh yes,” said Jane. “Well, all I can say—” he began, and then words failed him. “I could eat that rug,” he finally announced, pointing to a cotton string rug of a tattletale gray shade that lay in front of the fireplace. Dolly’s humorous eyebrows lifted inquiringly as she examined the rug and then Warren. “Not really?” she murmured. “Really!” replied Warren fiercely, clenching and unclenching his jaws as if he were about to bite into it. “Calm down, dearie,” said Jane. “Why not get on with the play?” suggested Harold Huber. “Let’s postpone the arguments of counsel till after the case has been presented.”
The play-reading proceeded. Warren, choking back his emotions, acted as monitor. He and Jane—he explained to the newcomers, with a bitter glance at his mate—had read aloud so many times, both to each other and in groups, that they had worked out a set of rules for it. Nobody was to interrupt the reading during an act; at the end of each act, questions of translation could be asked. Questions of interpretation were to be deferred until the whole play had been read, and no side remarks were tolerated. Laughing was strictly forbidden except in the case of a comedy. Drinks were served after the reading. As he enunciated these rules, hollow laughter echoed in the chambers of his heart. He felt like that French schoolmaster giving the Last Class in conquered Alsace-Lorraine. His marriage was over, probably, after tonight, now that Jane had let him know how she really felt about things. He loved her, and she considered it a weakness. To go on after that would be hypocrisy.
Rules, he said to himself wanly. He and Jane made them together, and then she broke them. It was just like these play-readings, where he, poor simp, tried to keep order and everybody laughed at him. And the regulations they had made—except the one about drinking—were harder on him than anybody. When an interesting point came up, he could hardly hold himself in; waiting till the end for a discussion was agony, especially since by the time they had finished, nobody else ever seemed to remember the passage he had in mind. But it was not fair to the author, he and Jane had agreed, to pick a play to pieces before it had had a chance to say its whole say.
Yet she was always one of the worst offenders, giggling and interrupting and popping her eyes or making trips to the kitchen during the most significant parts. Every time they read aloud, he constantly had to remind her that the play or the poem had the floor. But tonight, as he slowly became aware, she was more subdued than usual, as if she knew what she had done to him and the reckoning that lay ahead for both of them, after the others had gone. She did not poke him when Miles gave a funny reading or when Martha overacted her part. She sat listening, thoughtfully, her chin sunk in her hand. Her mind, he could suddenly tell, was a million miles away from him, though he could feel the comfortable warmth of her big vital body next to him, on the hassock. She had no idea how she had wounded him, evidently, and, soothed by her physical presence, he gradually let himself relent toward her, even though he knew that this was the worst crime one human could commit against another: not to take their words seriously. When she turned and smiled at him, vaguely, during the first intermission, he smiled back and wiggled his ears slightly, feeling like Judas Iscariot.
He turned his attention to the play. He had hoped he would like it better in French than he had when the two of them had read it in English, but instead it let him down even more. Unlike Jane, he was not musical, and that, he guessed, was the trouble: the jingling alexandrines sounded monotonous to him, even when Paul was reading. He liked Dolly best; her accent was neat and pretty, though she did not put much expression into her lines. Martha and the vicomte were frowning over their text when Dolly came to the big scene of despair and jealousy in the fourth act, where she was supposed to be waiting for Titus in a state of extreme disorder. Martha, as her waiting woman, read her own lines with unnecessary urgency, as if she were trying to push Dolly into the proper mood:
“Mais voulez-vous parâitre en ce désordre extrême?
Remettez vous, madame, et rentrez en vous-même.
Laissez-moi relever ces voiles dédachés,
Et ces cheveux épars dont vos yeux sont cachés.
Souffrez que de vos pleurs je répare l’outrage.”
This sounded very comical, in Martha’s quick, passionate voice, while Dolly sat there, cool as a cucumber, not a silvery blond hair out of place. Even Miles looked up and chuckled when Dolly replied, in her circumspect tinkling bell-tones: “Laisse, laisse, Phénice; il verra son ouvrage.” Warren had to call twice for silence before Dolly could go on with her part. She was at her best, Warren thought, in the final passage, when she turned to the vicomte, with imperturbable dignity, like the senior prefect in her boarding school:
“Sur Titus et sur moi, réglez votre conduite.
Je l’aime, je le fuis; Titus m’aime; il me quitte.
Portez loin de mes yeux vos soupirs et vos fers.
Adieu. Servons tous trois d’exemple à l’univers.”
It was a pretty poor example they were going to set the universe, in Warren’s opinion, but at least Dolly gave him the idea that a person could feel that way.
Unfortunately, he missed the first part of the discussion, because he was busy fixing drinks for everybody. Even Jane wanted one, to his surprise; she asked for a bourbon and fizzy, and drank it straight down when he brought it. “I was thirsty,” she said. All the dinner guests were thirsty, it turned out; there had been a mite too much salt in the roast. Dolly took a glass of port, and the vicomte joined her. “I thought you didn’t drink,” exclaimed Martha, tactlessly, for the vicomte often drank, in moderation, since his reform. The Hubers and Martha had Scotch; Miles had a big drink of bourbon, to wet his whistle, as he called it. Warren himself had a glass of plain fizzy, when he finally joined the circle. Martha and Miles, on good terms again, were talking about the influence of Port Royal on Racine, and the Hubers seemed rather out of it. They had had the smallest parts—Titus’s and Antiochus’s confidants—and people always forgot that they were not intellectuals. Warren brought the subject back to the play, which they could all share.
“How terribly Protestant it is,” said Dolly, making a little face. “But naturally,” said the vicomte. “Port Royal was Jansenist. That is a Protestant heresy. Racine had it in his bones.” “Why do you say ‘Protestant,’ Miss Lamb?” demanded Harriet Huber. “What’s the difference, Miss Lamb?” Martha answered for her, taking a long drink. “Setting a good example. Renunciation. Training the will. Scruples.” “But don’t the Catholics have those?” Harriet asked the vicomte. “We are not puritans,” said the vicomte, sipping his port. “Miles,” said Martha suddenly, “how would you distinguish between the Corneillean will and the Racinian will? There’re the same conflicts, in Corneille, between passion and duty, between the state and the family, between the family and the single person. Yet you couldn’t say that Corneille was Protestant. . . .” Warren’s head kept turning eagerly, back and forth, from face to face; it made him feel as if he were watching a tennis match. “Well,” said Miles, cautiously, “in Corneille, I would say there was more feeling for power. It’s an imperial will, in Corneille, swelling out to world-domination. He wrote a Bérénice too, you know.” “Maybe we ought to read that next,” proffered Warren conscientiously. “To get both sides—” “A Renaissance will,” broke in Martha. “The difference between setting an example, like Titus and Bérénice, and dominating through your will, like the people in Cinna or the Cid. ‘Je suis maître de moi comme de l’univers. Je suis, je veux l’être.’ Do you remember that, Dolly, from college?” “I hated it,” said Dolly, with feeling. “It’s more Faustian in Corneille, wouldn’t you say, Miles?” persisted Martha. “And isn’t there something else? In Racine the conflict of passions is more internalized, within the soul of the character—his famous ‘psychological realism.’ The soul, in Racine, is an arena, full of sinuous savage beasts leaping at the whip.” “Good Heavens,” said Harriet Huber. “ ‘Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée,’ ” quoted Miles. “If you remember your Phèdre. The beast within. A thoroughly Protestant vision, I agree, Miss Lamb.” Dolly colored. “Love, in Racine,” pursued Martha, with a significant glance at Dolly, as if reminding her of some earlier conversation, “love is seen as a sort of diabolical possession—witchcraft. Poor Phèdre. Racine made her a great heroine by giving her a bad conscience. It’s more sensual that way too. She hates herself and this passion that fastens itself on her, like a bird of prey.”
“Let’s get back to Bérénice for a minute,” urged Warren. “I’d like to hear what the rest of you think about the philosophy in there.” “ ‘Philosophy’?” questioned the vicomte. “There is no philosophy in Bérénice.” “Warren means a philosophy of life,” said Martha. “Isn’t it the same thing?” protested Warren. “No,” said Miles. “Gee, I’d like to discuss that with you,” said Warren. “Later, my boy,” said Miles. “Let’s stick to the subject.” “Well, but . . .” said Warren, hesitantly. He wanted to point out that no discussion could be worth anything if you did not go back and define your principles, but he could see the impatience in both Miles’s and Martha’s faces. He conquered his disappointment. “What I want to know,” he began, “is whether this play makes you as mad as it does me. It makes me want to eat nails.” “Why, Warren?” said Martha gently. “The way I see it,” said Warren, “that Titus is a prig and a hypocrite. He was no gentleman, if you’ll pardon my French.” “Why?” said Dolly. “He was engaged to Bérénice, darn it,” cried Warren, “and then he broke his promise to her, just for reasons of state. I call that pretty cheap. He owed it to her to marry her, when he’d been engaged to her for five years.” “And she wasn’t getting any younger,” said Martha, with a laugh.
“But his father died, dearie,” said Jane. “When he got to be Caesar, he couldn’t marry her, because of that old law.” “He should have thought of that before he got engaged to her,” Warren said hotly. “He knew the law and he knew his father was going to die some time. And it strikes me,” he continued, emboldened, when nobody answered, “it strikes me Racine was pretty much of a faker not to have made that point in the play. If Shakespeare wrote that play, he darn well would have showed what a son of a bitch Titus really was.” Miles looked at Martha, who looked at Dolly. Warren could tell from their expressions that they thought he had made a point. “You’re right in a way, of course,” said Martha finally. “Don’t you think so, Miles? In a play by Shakespeare, Titus might have been shown up a little, like Prince Hal. It’s the same plot, really, when you think about it. A playboy prince and his boon companions. The education of a king. When the prince’s father dies, the prince, rather priggishly, sends his companions away. The rejection of Falstaff isn’t too different from the rejection of Bérénice, only in Racine it’s called renunciation. Probably Shakespeare,” she went on, with an apologetic smile at the vicomte, “is truer to the way things happen. One never knows, in real life, exactly how much self-interest or surfeit there is in these great renunciations.”
“That’s all old stuff,” said Jane. “People don’t renounce any more, unless they’re compulsive or something.” “There was Kierkegaard,” said Warren. “I gave up my singing career for Harold,” observed Harriet. “Probably you wanted to anyway,” said Jane, candidly. “I mean, would you have given up Harold for your singing? I’ll bet Prince Hal was bored stiff with Falstaff. He sounds just like some of the people around here. And I’ll bet Titus, underneath, was anti-Semitic. It says right here in the play that he doesn’t want to get mixed up with Bérénice’s Jewish relations.” Laughter shook the room. “Jane’s right,” said Warren, stoutly. “Act II, Scene 2. Shall I read it?” “We remember,” said Harold Huber. “Those two queens, wasn’t it, of Bérénice’s blood, who married a slave or something?” Warren nodded. “But that isn’t anti-Semitism, Mr. Coe,” protested Dolly. “Something pretty darn close to it,” said Warren. “It shows what kind of a guy Titus was that he’d listen to an argument like that.”
Miles sighed. “Racine wasn’t interested in character,” he said. “You have to get that through your noodle. You can’t judge him the way you do Shakespeare. Shakespeare was interested in politics and political types, which means he was interested in motive—the thing that makes people move, the way they do, in society. Underneath, of course, you’ll find the archaic patterns. The death of the father alters the Oedipal constellation; the son, so to speak, intromits the father, swallows him, and assumes his primordial role. That’s what we see happening underneath the surface of both these plays—the Henry IV sequence and Bérénice. The renunciation of Bérénice may involve a belated rejection of the mother, the feminine component, in Titus; you see the same thing with Falstaff, whose relation with Prince Hal was suspiciously homosexual.” Jane adjusted an earring. “That’s what I always told you,” she said to Warren, who nodded sadly.
“What about the death of the mother, Miles?” inquired Harold Huber. “That doesn’t have the same importance,” said Miles. “Not for the normal man, in his prime. The normal man outlives the mother while she’s still hale and hearty. It’s only in pathological instances that you find a son coming into manhood, finally, when the mother passes on.” Jane sat picking at a spot on her skirt. For some reason, she kept staring at Miles’s shoes, which were black and very shiny looking, cut almost like a pair of slippers. “Still, Miles,” she said casually, “in our culture you’ll find a lot of fuss about the death of the mother. Or do you think that’s all commercialized, like Mother’s Day and Christmas?” “Purely ritualistic,” said Miles. “Contrary to popular opinion, the mother doesn’t count in the American scene. I used to see it in my practice. She lives too damn long. Of course, there’s a certain amount of guilt among the descendants when they eventually get rid of the old girl. Half racial memory; half social uneasiness. They think they’re expected to feel something.”
There was a silence. If Warren was a fair sample, they were all thinking about Harriet, who was three times a grandmother and devoted to her two sons. “An angel just passed over,” she said brightly. “The angel of death,” said the vicomte, crossing himself. Harriet turned to him. “I was just reading an article,” she said. “By a Protestant minister. About how people are going back to religion. I never felt the need of it myself, but perhaps that shows I’m a back number.” “Like all of us,” said Martha, sharply. “None of us, except the vicomte, are religious.” “But what about church attendance figures?” ventured Harriet. “Aren’t modern people supposed to be feeling a lack in their lives that they need religion to fill?” Martha shrugged. “An advertising gambit,” she said. “First you convince people they lack something and then you sell them a product to remedy it. People ‘need’ religion to ‘deepen their awareness’ or give them ‘tragic irony’—the way I ‘need’ a facial cream to make my life more glamorous.” Warren felt a little embarrassed, on account of Paul; if Martha were completely sober, she would not have flared up like that. “But if there is a lack, Martha?” said Dolly. “Then it ought not to be filled,” said Martha. “If it’s a real lack, it’s a necessary hollow in life that can’t be stuffed up, like a chicken. Insufficiency. Shortcoming. I don’t need God as a measure to feel that. Do you, Dolly?” “God, no!” said Dolly.
“But you two are superior people,” said Jane thoughtfully. “Take the average person; take Mrs. Silvia, my cleaning woman—” “I refuse that,” said Martha. “I am an average person.” Everybody laughed at the haughty air with which Martha said this. “Oh, come on, Martha,” said Jane, yawning and rearranging her hair. “We all know we’re superior to the ordinary person, mentally, anyway, and we all live more interesting lives. We don’t need religion; we’ve got books and pictures and music. We don’t have to go to church for spiritual stimulation. It’s just like in Rome; Christianity was a slave religion. A person like Titus was above it, the way he was above marrying Bérénice, because he was the Emperor. Love’s a form of slavery too; an Emperor couldn’t be a slave to love—that’s what the play is saying.” “But what about his promise?” squealed Warren, anxious to get the conversation back on the main track. “Do you think some people are superior to promises?” “Oh, Warren,” said Jane. “Promises in love don’t mean anything. Look at all the people who get divorced.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. Warren felt about the size of a pin. But Dolly rescued the situation. “It seems to me,” she remarked, “that there isn’t any ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ at issue in the play. It’s really taken for granted what Titus ought to do. The interest is in whether he can do it.” The vicomte nodded. “Quite right,” he said. “It is not a modern problem play. The standards are there, for Titus and Bérénice; no one in the play doubts them. The question is whether the characters can rise to conformity with them.”
“Conformity!” Warren hopped on the word, which was the one he had been seeking all along, he joyously realized. “You’ve put your finger on it, Paul,” he announced excitedly, waving his hand for silence. “That’s what I hate in this play. It’s all about conformity. The characters are a bunch of conformists. Bérénice, for about two minutes, is a rebel, and then she throws in the sponge and conforms like the rest of them.” “But that is tragedy, my dear fellow,” said the vicomte. “The principal figure learns to be sage.” “Not for me, it isn’t,” said Warren. “Oh yes,” said the vicomte. “The old Oedipus, for example, has learned to be wise.” “To me, that’s just horror,” exclaimed Warren. “Oh no, it isn’t,” said Harriet. Everybody, suddenly, began talking all at once, the way they always did when a discussion got promising. Warren could hardly hear himself think. “Life is horrible,” said Harold Huber, dryly. “Oh no, it isn’t,” cried Dolly. “It’s beautiful!”
“Oh, I know life is horrible,” Warren interrupted, with a happy smile. “I learned to accept that long ago. Everybody’s a bastard, including me and Jane. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad as all hell about it.” Every eye turned on him in bewilderment. “Excuse me, Warren,” said Harold, “but I don’t get you. What’s the argument? If you’ve learned to accept the facts of life, what’s eating you about Racine?” Warren looked miserably about him; nobody understood him, not even Jane. He caught Martha’s eye imploringly. “I see what he’s getting at,” said Martha, after a moment’s thought. “What Warren misses in Racine is the bitterness. Isn’t that it? In the Greeks you get bitterness and you get it again in Shakespeare. There’s acceptance without resignation—a kind of defiance, in the end, like Othello’s last speech: ‘I have done the state some service and they know’t.’ There’s none of that in Racine—none that I remember. The characters are too subservient to official morality, serviables, like courtiers.” Warren bobbed his head up and down, exultantly, in dumb show, while she was talking; this, he presumed, was what he had meant to convey. Pleased with herself, manifestly, Martha smoothed back a vagrant lock of hair and sank back into her chair with a sigh. They had finished with Bérénice.
The conversation broke up into dialogues. Miles went to make himself a drink and brought Martha one. He sat down beside her. “That was fast work,” he commented, mopping his brow. Martha smiled at the tribute; her face wore its mischievous look. “Still,” Miles went on, in a low voice, “between you and me, what is it they accept, d’you think, in the Greeks and Shakespeare? Not a social code of morality or manners, as the Frenchies understood it.” Warren took a seat on the floor near them. “They accepted the way things are,” said Martha. “Inevitability. The way things happen, regularly. The laws of geometry of the universe.” “I’ll buy that,” said Miles. “There’s one big exception,” he added. “I know,” said Martha. “Hamlet.” “You think so too?” inquired Miles with a genial start. He was always surprised, Warren had noticed, when anybody had the same thought he had. “In Hamlet,” Miles continued, “everything has gone screwy. No more laws. No more regularity. A ghost is masterminding the action, and nobody’s sure whether he comes from the good place or the bad place. In Hamlet—Martha, you’ll appreciate this—ambiguity raises its ugly head. Is Gertrude’s marriage unnatural or isn’t it? Is Claudius a villain or just the fall guy? Is Hamlet crazy? That question never gets settled. You can read it that he is crazy, like a lot of loonies that pretend to be mad, thinking that they’re fooling their keepers. Or you can read it the other way. Hamlet himself isn’t sure whether he’s crazy or not. He keeps pinching himself, like a person trying to find out whether he’s dreaming. That’s the famous doubt.” Martha smiled. “I agree,” she murmured. “But doesn’t that open the question of whether Hamlet is really a tragedy? Or a pathetic case history, which is what some actors make it seem?” “Ummm,” said Miles. “Jones’s interpretation—too narrowly psychoanalytic. Those categories are all right for the groundlings, but I don’t find them too helpful in my own thinking nowadays. If Hamlet’s just a neurotic, the problem loses interest. For me, Hamlet initiates the crisis in epistemology. If it’s clinical, it’s a case history in the annals of philosophy. A hero questions, for the first time, the whole apparatus of cognition. He sees differently from the ‘normal’ people in the play, from his mother and old Polonius and Uncle Claudius and Ophelia. Is his vision distorted by the ghost’s revelations? Should he trust the ghost or mock him? And this doubt is involved with the whole epistemological puzzle, with how do you know what you know.” “Exactly,” cried Martha. “The mistrust first of our senses and then of our moral perceptions. That was what I was working on, for my doctorate, the history of that. The two mistrusts are related, as Kant saw when he tried to reorganize the whole subject: how much do we know and how?” “I always said you had a head for philosophy,” observed Miles, blowing his nose.
“The same thing in ethics,” pursued Martha. “Raskolnikov’s question: if there is no God, how do I know that I shouldn’t murder a useless old woman? Raskolnikov’s question was Kant’s question.” “Why shouldn’t Raskolnikov?” burst in Warren. “I’ve often thought about that. Jane and I read it two years ago, and it seemed to us that Dostoevski stacked the cards at the end there. He never gives you a reason why Raskolnikov should feel sorry at the end. Raskolnikov was right, according to his lights. I wouldn’t want to murder an old woman myself, but that’s probably because of the way I was brought up—my conditioning. Logically, there’s no reason.” “Logic doesn’t answer those questions,” murmured Martha, with a side glance at Miles. “You have to start with a datum. Put the question the other way round. ‘I wouldn’t want to murder an old woman; what are my reasons?’ You’ll get further that way.” Warren rubbed his head in perplexity. “But gee,” he said, “that’s a pretty big assumption you make there. I mean, why should I assume that my own private preferences hold good for the rest of us humans? I don’t want to murder old women, but some other fellow might be made differently. It seems to me you’ve got to consider that. You’ve got to give that fellow a reason. Don’t you think so, Miles?” Miles looked down into his pleading eyes. “The electric chair,” he said. “That’s the reason we give him.” Warren felt deeply hurt; Miles was only playing with him. “But you can’t do that,” he protested. “You have to show him why you’re giving him the electric chair.” “He’s right, in a way, Miles,” intervened Martha. “You have to make universals. ‘Behave so that thy maxim could be a universal law.’ I agree with Kant.” Miles frowned. “Kant’s effort failed—too mechanically monistic. Listen, Warren,” he said thickly. “For you, it’s an academic question. If you don’t want to murder old women, let it go at that. Don’t worry about the other fellow. Live selfishly.”
A snort of laughter broke from him. Martha smiled too. Warren could see that she disagreed with Miles, but instead of arguing with him, she changed the subject. “He’s like Shaw,” she said to Miles, with a teasing look down at Warren. “A doubt-spreader. He wants to marshal the logical reasons for every conceivable villainy, even though he himself wouldn’t hurt a fly or touch a cup of coffee. That’s why poor Shaw couldn’t write a tragedy even when he tried. The tragic action turned into a discussion group, with everybody putting forward his point of view, for debate. Just like you,” she said to Warren, who was snuggled at their feet.
“But isn’t that what the Greeks thought, Martha?” objected Warren, sitting up. “We saw the Antigone this summer at the Arena Theater and, golly, it seemed to me, that all the characters were in the right there. Just like Saint Joan or Don Juan in Hell—we have that on records. I mean, everybody has his point of view. Creon is right, the way he looks at it, wanting to uphold the law, and Antigone is right, the way she looks at it, wanting to bury her brother. It’s awfully interesting if you compare that with Saint Joan, where Joan is right in her way, and the Archbishop, Cauchois, is right in his. If you compare the texts, you’ll see what I mean.” A happy thought struck him. He jumped up. “Let me just run out to the studio and get them, and I can show you.” “Sit down. We can remember,” Miles said curtly. “It’ll only take a minute,” pleaded Warren. “No,” said Miles, looking at the watch on his freckled wrist. Warren complied. He knew Miles’s irascible humors and he was afraid that if he disobeyed him, Miles would be gone when he returned. “Tell me the difference, then,” he said, scrambling back to his place on the floor, by their side.
“You tell him, Miles,” said Martha. “After you,” said Miles, with a courtly bow from the waist. “No, please, you do it,” cried Martha. “Well,” commenced Miles, “in Shaw, it’s a matter of logical demonstration. Each character ‘proves’ the validity of his position, sometimes by paradox, like Candida’s father. In Sophocles, it’s different,” he broke off, rather irascibly. “For God’s sake, Warren, get me a drink.” Warren could hear them conferring as he fixed them both drinks. His conscience troubled him a little, for he felt they had both had plenty, but he knew they would go on talking as long as he supplied them with liquor. “In Sophocles, Warren,” said Martha, when he came back, “the characters don’t set up a debate. They act. And it’s shown that action itself is ambivalent. An action like Antigone’s can be both right and wrong simultaneously—not right from her point of view and wrong from Creon’s but right and wrong absolutely, in the chain of consequences it sets off. Her brother gets buried, as piety demands, but her lover, Haemon, kills himself, as the result of her deed and its punishment. You can see it better with Orestes. Orestes’s action in killing his mother, Clytemnestra, was both right and wrong—enjoined on him by the gods and yet accursed. He had to purge the action of its wrong aspect by penance and madness before reconciliation could take place, and the Erinyes become the Eumenides. Did it ever strike you,” she interrupted herself, turning to Miles, “that Hamlet is Orestes in reverse? Hamlet pays for his murder by suffering and madness ahead of time, while Orestes kills his mother on credit and has to pay the bill in the sequel. In Hamlet, by the time Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup, all passion has been spent.” Miles laughed. “I always thought of Hamlet as an early bohemian,” he said. “A student, frequenter of actors, constantly philosophizing and living off his uncle. That’s why the poor devil couldn’t make anything happen, till the end, when he balled everything up and killed the wrong people.”
Martha giggled. Warren had seldom heard such an interesting discussion, but he wished they would stay on the subject, instead of making fun of it. “What did you mean,” he said, hitching himself closer to Martha, “about Antigone being right and wrong at the same time? You mean she shouldn’t have buried her brother if some innocent third party was going to suffer for it?” Martha shook her head, rather crossly; all at once, she looked dead tired. “No,” she said. “She had to bury her brother. There’s no should or shouldn’t. Or right or wrong, in the modern sense. There’s only the tragic perspective: the eye of eternity or the Greek measure of limit, which everybody oversteps, by a sort of fatality. Nobody can stay in the right—I mean in real life—that’s the terrible thing, Warren. If you think you’re in the right for more than a few seconds, you’ll find that you’re in the wrong. Nobody can have a permanent claim on being the injured party; it seems horribly unfair, but there it is. As soon as you feel injured and begin to cry for justice, you discover that your position has gotten undermined; the ground has shifted beneath you, in a slow sort of landslide, and you find yourself cut off.”
“You mean you become unpopular—you’re talking about martyrs? We see a lot of that in the law courts,” said Harold Huber, easily. For some time, everybody had been listening to the conversation; Martha’s tone had become rather dramatic and personal. From Jane’s saucer eyes and Dolly’s worried frown, Warren could see that everybody must be drawing the same inference he was: that she was alluding to herself and Miles. “Unpopular—that too,” said Martha. “Though that isn’t what I meant. But it’s the same thing. You can joy in unpopularity, and that becomes evil too, very quickly. It’s another form of righteousness, of that fatal feeling that you’re triumphantly in the right.” “I get that fatal fe-e-ling,” sang Harriet Huber.
Just then, the telephone rang—two longs and a short. Alarm crossed every face; it was so late, after midnight. Warren moved to answer it, but Jane, swift as an eagle, in her black shawl and black skirt, darted across the room and pounced on the phone before he could get to it. “Who? Who?” she said, warding him off with her elbow when he tried to listen too. He was sure it must be bad news of some sort, but then her tall figure relaxed a little, and she motioned to Martha. “It’s John,” she announced. The others tried to make conversation while Martha talked, but Jane stood beside her, with a face of unabashed curiosity, taking in every word. “No, I’m not,” Warren could not help hearing Martha protest. “Not very, anyway. Do I sound funny? . . . Of course not. Dolly’s here. . . . All right, all right. Good-bye, darling.” “He says I sound tight,” she remarked, ruefully, to Jane. “Where is he?” Jane demanded. “In Boston.” “In Boston?” Jane stared. “You mean he’s spending the night?” “Curiosity killed the cat, Jane,” observed Harriet. “No, no; he’s just leaving,” said Martha. “He’s at an all-night garage. He had to have the car fixed.”
Jane seemed strangely concerned. “Why, he’ll never get back tonight,” she prophesied. “In all this storm. He should have started sooner.” “It’s only three hours,” said Martha. “Four, in this weather,” said Jane, dourly shaking her locks. “I’ll bet he stops for the night at one of those little road-places and doesn’t get home till noon tomorrow. He’ll be so exhausted he’ll oversleep.” Martha laughed. “You don’t know John,” she said. “He’ll be here, a little after three.” But Jane continued to take a gloomy view. “He’ll probably have an accident,” she said. “Hurrying. On these slippery roads.” “Jane!” said Warren sharply. She had always had a tendency to pry, which he accepted in her, because she was a woman, but now the thought crossed his mind that she might be a little demented. If so, it was his fault; he was too absorbed in his work and left her with nothing to think about but other people’s doings. “Calamity Jane,” chuckled Harold. “Why don’t you let Martha do the worrying? He’s probably had a date with a blonde.” Jane recovered herself; she shook her big body like a collie dog. “Martha’s a blonde,” she pointed out, in her practical way. “A brunette, then,” emended Harold.
Dolly rose. The good-natured Hubers seemed to bore her. “I’ll take you home,” she said to Martha. Warren’s heart sank. “Oh, stay,” he pleaded, offering her another glass of port. But Dolly was adamant. She was painting from nature, she explained, and had started a picture for which she needed the early morning light. “Oh,” said Warren sadly. He turned to Martha. She could stay a little longer, he argued. It was out of Dolly’s way to take her; Dolly lived just over the dunes and Martha was on the other side of the peninsula. The Hubers would take her, when they returned Paul to the village. And she had not finished her drink yet. “I’ll take her,” said Miles, peremptorily. Martha hesitated, glancing from face to face. “A little longer,” she said nervously. “Are you sure, Martha?” said Dolly, with a keen look into her friend’s brilliant, excited eyes, which veered away from her. “I might as well be hanged for a sheep,” said Martha, settling back in her chair. Warren beamed. “Wonderful!” he said. “Gee, it’s funny you should say that,” he added, after a moment’s consideration. “What?” said Martha. “About a sheep,” confided Warren. “Jane and I are going to get some. She fixed it up today, with the high-school principal. I knew I had something to tell you. Remind me when I get back.” He took the flashlight and led Dolly out; Martha turned back to Miles.