Sullivan, page 21
But it was a friendly place. You got to say hello to people; to the coloured students, and the office workers, and the friendly prostitutes who patrolled at the top of the square where it went out on to the main road.
He climbed three flights of stairs to their room. It was a very big room with two beds in it and room for four more, a beautiful, wasteful Georgian fireplace, settee, chairs and a table. It was a beautiful ceiling, but spoiled at the far end where the room was partitioned for a bathroom and a linen closet.
Pi was bending over the small gas-ring. He was stirring things in a pot. He was looking over his shoulder, grinning, as Sullivan came in. Sullivan thought how good it was that Pi was there. Pi didn’t give a tuppenny damn about the theatre. Pi didn’t care if Chekhov had never lived, or Shaw or Ibsen. He could sit and listen to all the usual claptrap of the outsiders, the hangers-on, who would talk theatre until the cows came home. They didn’t have to work at it for a living.
‘Smells good, Pi,’ he said. He threw off his overcoat and went over and lay on the bed. He sighed.
‘How did it go?’ Pi asked.
‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Sullivan.
‘Are you very depressed?’ Pi asked.
‘Yes,’ said Sullivan.
‘It will probably be a great success so,’ said Pi.
‘It should be,’ said Sullivan. ‘They are certainly getting everything in it. If this succeeds, Pi, we’ll be rolling in money. You know that?’
‘What will you do with it?’ Pi asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said Sullivan, ‘but, boy, we will be rolling in it. No more need to make do. No worry about the rent. No cold breath of the wolf on the back of your neck. Heaven!’
‘Hum,’ said Pi.
‘Thinking of Duke Street,’ said Sullivan. ‘Nice to be home for a while in Duke Street. Just for a while. Going up to Morgan Taylor’s for a pennyworth of apples. Batting at the door. Door opens. Who’s there? Bernie is there, in a white dress, looking at you with clear eyes. Saying: Come in, Sullivan. Welcome home, Pi. How would you like that, Pi? Eh?’
‘I would like that fine,’ said Pi. ‘That would be good. Let’s do it, Sullivan. Let’s pack up now and go home and do it.’
‘Nearly would, Pi,’ said Sullivan. ‘ Very nearly would. But not now. First we have to raise the knocker on the door of fame and fortune and let it fall. After that. After that maybe.’ He sighed again.
‘You know, Sullivan,’ said Pi, stirring away at the appetising stew. It was all out of a tin, mushroom soup, beef, kidney, carrots and potatoes. ‘There’s a woman down in the street below and she has triplets. Saw them over in the Park a couple of times. Janey, you should see the pram. It’s a big wide pram. You should see the three kids side by side in this pram. Three fat bouncing babies all dressed in blue. Wonderful to see people’s eyes brightening up when they see this sight. Nice people too. Her husband is very proud of the three. I do all things well, he says, laughing.’
There was no sound from Sullivan. Pi looked up at him. He went over to him. Sullivan was asleep. Pi looked down at him. His face was pale. There were blue circles under his eyes. You poor old bastard, Pi said silently to him, wasn’t it a pity you ever had to start reading Shakespeare in order to cure your stutters? That fixed you. But then he would have gone that road anyhow, he supposed. He thought of the pace; theatres, rehearsals, touring, different digs, clashings of temperaments; the fabulous striving; living on nervous tension and worry, and all for what. To get to the top of the tree. Well, you got to the top of the tree and where did you go from there? Suppose you put the same amount of sweat and talent and energy into some other profession, where would you end up? Maybe in jail, Pi thought, chuckling, and went back to his stew shaking his head.
When he woke him for the meal Sullivan had beads of sweat on his forehead. He was shivering.
‘Oh God,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, shaking his head, ‘now for another first night.’
He remembered very little of it afterwards. He remembered Oswald resplendent in dress clothes, looking a different person; being introduced to some of Oswald’s colleagues, vague, untidy men who spoke Johnsonese and seemed completely out of place amongst theatrical people. Oswald saying: ‘ You will take them by storm, and after this a series of more great plays stretching away into infinity.’
The horror of his first words; the fear that haunted him, even now, after all his experience, that his words would turn into stutters, that he would leave the people in the theatre molten with embarrassment for him; but his words came out clean: So you are Katherina. You surprise me. I expected a child and I see a beautiful woman. We will walk in the garden where the sunlight will be your rival. No other.
After that, so many costume changes, he didn’t have time to think about how is it going, or what do they say. No time for the relayed rumours.
After that, a horrible moment. When he was with Tony. It seemed to him that Tony had a sardonic gleam in his eye. Why should he notice that? What can you give us beyond assurance? Why should we choose life at your hands when we can embrace death to our own advantage? You are so wrong. In the end of kings you see the beginning of new life. When I think of the end of kings, I see rivers of blood flowing over the plains that are filled with the bones of the people; the poor grinning skulls of democracy crying to the sky.
Normally he would build a picture in front of his mind’s eye. He would see each picture as he described it with his mouth; and know that out of his unselfconsciousness would come sincerity: that by convincing himself first he had the power to convince the people who were listening to him. Now suddenly pictures refused to come, and he found himself listening to his own words in cold blood; a desperate moment of blind panic; his brain shouting: clichés, clichés, clichés, after each sentence. He didn’t know what held him from running from the stage, with what desperate endeavour he forced his mind to look at the meaning and not the words; and then he was flooded with calm again and could finish the scene: I may die, Nitro, but when I am dead, you will be only half alive. You are not fighting for a cause; you are merely fighting me, and when I am gone you will have no cause and you will be left alone, and then they will destroy you and reap the benefit of your years in prison and city sewers. If blood is all that will resolve it, then blood let there be, but remember when you shed the blood of a king you are sending tears rolling forever down the corridor of time. You have two minutes to get back to your rabble.
After that when he changed again he said to Pi: ‘This play is a failure, Pi. I know it.’
Pi said: ‘Relax, Sullivan. Every play you say the same thing after the second act I know you.’
‘This time I know,’ said Sullivan. ‘I really know.’
He didn’t know of course. How measure applause? There was prolonged applause. How know in the middle of beautiful gowned ladies, elegant gentlemen, drinking champagne?
You don’t know, until you get the papers, Sullivan, and they walked the silent streets, the three of them, Sullivan, Tony and Pi, until the delivery vans rattled and their fate was clunked at their feet.
Chapter Twenty Two
Sullivan had never been beaten badly, physically. One time he remembered watching a fight between two men at the Docks. One of them was very big and drunk. The other was butty and very angry. He got the big man down and before he could be restrained he kicked him three or four times under the ribs with his heavy hob-nailed boot. Watching this, Sullivan had winced each time the heavy boot went home.
He felt himself now as if he was being kicked by a heavy boot in the stomach. It was almost physical. He would bend forward and groan and then straighten up and run his hand tightly over his head, grinding his teeth.
Pi was sitting on the window stool watching him, saying nothing.
Tony was half lying, half sitting on the settee, watching him.
‘No,’ said Sullivan, ‘I won’t believe it. It couldn’t have been that bad.’
‘It wasn’t good,’ said Tony. ‘You know that. You must have known that deep down in you all the time. I knew it the first day I read the script.’
‘Then why did you go on with it, tell me that?’ Sullivan asked.
‘Committed.’ said Tony. ‘ You can’t go back on your word. What does it matter anyhow? We had fun. It was a change. I wanted a change.’ Also he wanted to be near Greta. He wouldn’t tell Sullivan that. But that was part of it too.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Sullivan asked. ‘Why in the name of God didn’t you tell me? How could I have been so blind!’
‘I tried to tell you,’ said Tony. ‘You wouldn’t listen. You read the script too.’
‘Only my own part,’ said Sullivan. ‘It seemed good. It seemed full of meat; full of drama. But was I that bad?’
‘You were as good as you could be,’ said Tony. ‘You tried too hard. You try top hard with something mediocre and you are only showing it up, to make it fall. And you fall with it.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Sullivan groaning, sitting on the bed, covering his face with his hands.
‘You think you are bad,’ said Tony. ‘Look what they did to Oswald. Mediocrity; pretentiousness; stick to your last; ponderous rumbling settings; boredom; messages; vague philosophy; and the fellow who said: Gurnett, go back to sea. Think of the collapse of his dream and what it means to him. You only got panned as an actor. You can rise again. Oswald was just blotted out.’
‘Damn it,’ said Sullivan, ‘he deserves to be blotted out, writing tripe like that’ He saw the protest on Tony’s face. ‘ No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry for Oswald. It was a tough break. But I was relying too much on this. All right, I confess it. I didn’t think it was so wonderful but I thought that I, Sullivan, the great Sullivan, could pull it through, by my own power. What an ego! Well, it’s bust now, anyhow, and be damned to it.’
‘We’re going to have a visitor now,’ said Pi, looking out of the window. He saw the figure of Oswald coming out of the taxi. He looked very round and squat from this height. He paid off the taxi, looked at the number on the door, was baulked by one of the fat cats stretched across his path. He put out a polished shoe and he kicked the cat in the belly; not a hard kick, one of impulsion. Pi had to laugh at the outrage of the cat, who spat and raised its fur and walked away on tight legs.
‘He kicked a cat,’ Pi reported. None of them moved. They traced Oswald’s coming. Only the bottom flight was carpeted. The other two were covered in linoleum, so they could listen to the tap-tap of his feet on the stairs. Then he flung open the door. His eyes were gleaming. He spread his arms.
‘Louts; morons; imcompetents; nincompoops; gutter merchants; boors and blatherskites, that’s what they are!’ he said. He closed the door behind him and leaned against it. ‘ You read what they have done to me?’ he asked. ‘ You read what they have done to the drama? A death-blow! Let them go back to their farces and drawing-room comedies and inanities and disguised leg shows. Look what I gave them; something they have been crying out for for many years, and what do they do to me? They crucify me! They drag me into the market-place and pelt me with ordure. Who could imagine that the London of Shakespeare would sink so low?’ He sat on a chair. He looked at Sullivan. Sullivan was looking at him apathetically.
‘For what they did to you, my boy,’ Oswald said, ‘I am sorry. I gave them talent and they threw it back in my teeth. You will rise again, never fear, and I will rise again too, have no fear of that.’
‘Tell me something, Oswald,’ said Tony, ‘ just one thing. Before you came over and discovered Sullivan and myself had you shown the scripts to any actors over here?’
‘Certainly,’ said Oswald. ‘I am not altogether a simpleton. I know that in order to put over a good work you must have an established name. But most of them were busy. They were engaged on films or rehearsing for other plays. They couldn’t accept and I was glad. Then I saw Sullivan. Believe me, Sullivan, no other actor on the face of the earth could have done Paul as you have performed him. No matter what they say, to me you will always be Paul. You put flesh on my dream.’
Sullivan smiled wanly.
‘But what they did to Greta was unforgivable, unforgivable!’ said Oswald. ‘I am strong, you are strong, we can fight back. But that girl. Their sneers were unforgivable. How could they? That wonderful scene! Sullivan walking down the steps with her bloodstained body in his arms; her breast bared to the vulgar, gaze, she in death. I tell you every single time I saw that scene the tears came to my eyes. What happened? What kind of prosaic minds have they? Who will ever explain it to me?’
Tony’s heart contracted, thinking of Greta and what they had said. She was inexperienced all right, but it would have taken great genius to have carried off some of the scenes she was saddled with.
‘So what are you going to do, Oswald?’ he asked.
‘Fight,’ said Oswald. ‘I’m going to fight them to the last penny I have, and I’ll tell you something, the people will be on my side. You’ll see. No matter what they say, the simple plain common people are going to besiege that box-office.’ He sat down again. His hands drooped, upturned on his knees. ‘ It’s a blow. I have to admit that. A dream of a lifetime. A man fashions a dream, piece by piece, bit by bit, like a mosaic, each, separate piece nothing of itself until the whole is revealed. I think of all that, how I did it, and it should have been acclaimed. I swear if there was any justice at all in the world it would have been acclaimed. Ah, what they did to me! I must say, I am sad.’
Pi felt very sorry for him anyhow. His face looked old, almost haggard. The red cheeks were fine-drawn with purple lines; the great shoulders were slumped.
‘Cheer up, Mr. Gurnett,’ said Pi, ‘the buses are still running.’
Gurnett straightened himself up. He laughed. He got to his feet.
‘How true, Pi, how true!’ he said. ‘The buses are still running. And we will run too, ahead of those literary murderers. You’ll see. You have to put your faith in the people. Watch the people. Well, I’ll go. One must face them. One mustn’t hide one’s head as if one were ashamed. One must be seen wherever it is customary for one to be seen. No skulking behind the arras. Let our light shine in the open for all to see, and let no man say that we are dismayed. Thank you for the comfort you have given me. The support. All will be well. You’ll see. I will be vindicated by the people. Until to-night.’
Then he was gone.
The three of them kept looking at the closed door.
‘The poor little bastard,’ said Tony. ‘ He’s like a child who had built a cardboard castle and somebody knocked it down on him.’
‘And me with it,’ said Sullivan. ‘I was up on the loftiest pinnacle holding the flag.’
‘I’m going out to get a little drink,’ said Tony. ‘I will see you to-night.’
‘And you came well out of it, Tony,’ said Sullivan. ‘How is it that you came well out of it?’
‘Ah, the old dog for the hard road,’ said Tony. ‘That’s something you have yet to learn, Sullivan. You have to learn how to duck. Trickery. Dodging missiles. Throwing away. You could have thrown away half your part instead of dishing it out fully and your heart with it. Where there’s no blood the heart runs dry.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Sullivan sourly. And Tony went.
Sullivan wished with all his heart that he could hold back the night. That was impossible. The thing you don’t want to face always rushes on you like an avalanche. You think of it. All pretence of success is snatched away. A thing is exposed as a failure. That should be the end of it. But actors have to conquer their feelings of helplessness and hopelessness and present their show as if it was the most successful thing that ever happened; raise their hearts from their boots, and play.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t nearly as bad as he had expected it to be. Written on the notice-board were three chalked words, FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! That was Oswald. Oswald appeared. He went to each one of them. He encouraged them. He pleaded with them. He soothed them. He spoke about the all-conquering people until they had visions of millions of the little people from all over the country marching on their theatre to book the place out for five years.
In the event there were only about forty people in the house, all told, and half of these were deadheads, complimentary tickets. Once it got under way, a feeling of light-headedness seemed to take hold of all of them. It seemed as if the ends to which they had been reduced caused them to cast off their, masks and be themselves. You know how people will behave in success, all slightly drunk with the heady wine of flattery; eyes shining; feelings bubbling; glittering eyes mostly downcast; the quippery; the knowledge that for a certain foreseeable time they had security. But now the struggle to make the best of a bad job made them feel for each other for the first time; to help each other; to commiserate with each other; even between scenes to be able to quote the bad things which had been said and to talk without malice. To-morrow the blame would be apportioned, to everybody but yourself. But to-night it seemed as if they were all spiritually, companionably and unexplainably uplifted in the midst of disaster. It was a good feeling. And Sullivan unaccountably enjoyed it, even if he knew that it was a temporary thing, that tomorrow or even late to-night might see the end of it.
Of them all, Sullivan felt most sorry for Greta. She had been badly handled. From none had she got praise; from all blame and barbed jeers. Had she been in any other part, her beauty might have been the saving of her, but in this particular part she had been an outstanding target And her final appearance, bare-breasted, blood-spattered; this to Oswald should have been the petrifying climax of his play, and somehow it turned out as something to jeer at, a sort of hopelessly futile and insulting gesture to a bored and bedevilled audience.
