Kitabı oku: «Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play», sayfa 2
If the play is not successful, fatten Janet, engage a Living Skeleton, buy a drum, and take to the road.
If it is successful, play Oswald in Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Try Lovborg in Hedda Gabler anyhow: nobody has ever touched the part here; and Janet would be a perfect Hedda.
I can no more. I hope Mrs Mansfield has quite recovered from her shaking.
By the way, unless there is a great Bernard Shaw catch-on over Candida, as to the likelihood of which I am rather sceptical, the Philanderer had better lie quiet for a while. . . .
yours—wrecked
G. Bernard Shaw
10/ To William Archer
18th March 1895
[Dear Archer]
The ‘division of wealth’ passage is all right. If only he [Arthur Wing Pinero] had used the word, ‘distribution’ he would have cleared the reef.
I am greatly dissatisfied with my article on the play. I was in the middle of the worry and overwork thrown on me by the necessity of getting Candida ready for the boat on Saturday, with the parts all corrected and the full score provided with a minutely detailed plan of the stage action and so on. The production of the play on Wednesday rushed me mercilessly, as the paper has to be ready to catch the foreign mails on Friday afternoon; so that I was quite unable to get into a sympathetic, humane mood, and could only express the— in short, what I did express. However, I should not at all mind seeing Pinero driven back into the comic line. It is in that line alone that he shews the smallest fertility. [Pinero’s play The Notorious] Mrs Ebbsmith, like the other two wouldbe serious plays, not only shews awkwardness, constraint, and impotence on its intellectual side, but apparent exhaustion and sterility on its inventive side. All the characters in it bundled together, and squeezed in a wine press would not produce blood enough to make Dick Phenyl [a character of another Pinero’s play Sweet Lavender]. ‘The Hobby Horse’ is a masterpiece of humor and fancy in comparison. It seems to me that it is only by the frankest abandonment of himself to his own real tastes and capacities that he can do anything worth doing now on the stage. . . .
G.B.S.
11/ To Janet Achurch
20th March 1895
[My dear Janet]
I see that the mail goes tonight, and that the next one is two days off. Therefore I interrupt my Saturday Review work to send you a hasty line on one or two matters which I forgot to mention to you.
First, and most important, you are, immediately on receipt of this letter, to send for a barber, and have your head shaved absolutely bald. Then get a brown wig, of the natural color of your own hair. Candida with gold hair is improbable; but Candida with artificially gold hair is impossible. Further, you must not be fringy or fluffy. Send to a photograph shop for a picture of some Roman bust—say that of Julia, daughter of Augustus and wife of Agrippa, from the Uffizi [Galleries] in Florence—and take that as your model, or rather as your point of departure. You must part your hair in the middle, and be sweet, sensible, comely, dignified, and Madonna like. If you condescend to the vulgarity of being a pretty woman, much less a flashy one (as in that fatal supper scene in Clever Alice which was the true cause of the divine wrath that extinguished you for so long afterwards) you are lost. There are ten indispensable qualities which must underlie all your play: to wit, 1, Dignity, 2, Dignity, 3, Dignity, 4, Dignity, 5, Dignity, 6, Dignity, 7, Dignity, 8, Dignity, 9, Dignity, and 10, Dignity. And the least attempt on your part to be dignified will be utterly fatal.
Observe, Janet Achurch, what you have to do is to play the part. You have not to make a success. New York must notice nothing: it must say “Of course,” and go home quietly. If it says “Hooray” then you will be a mere popular actress, a sort of person whom I utterly decline to know. You must confine yourself strictly to your business, and do that punctually and faithfully, undisturbed by any covetings of success for yourself or me or the play. It does not matter whether the play fails or not, or whether you are admired or not: it is sufficient if you gain the respect of the public and your fellow artists, which you cannot fail to do if only you will keep yourself to the point. If Candida does not please the people, then go on to the next play without being disconcerted. This is the way to win the two main things needed: quiet sleep and efficient digestion.
Don’t take any undigested advice. On any point you are more likely to be right than anyone else once you have considered it. I urge you to go to church once a day at least to tranquillise your nerves. If you feel inclined to cry, go and meditate and pray. The religious life is the only one possible for you. Read the gospel of St John and the lives of the saints: they will do everything for you that morphia only pretends to do. Watch and pray and fast and be humbly proud; and all the rest shall be added to you.
Charrington [Janet’s husband] has burst out into an exceeding splendor of raiment, like a bridegroom. He has just been here devising a telegraph code for you. I went to see [Herbert] Flemming at the Independent Theatre after we parted at Waterloo, and have written a long notice of him for the Saturday [the 23rd March] which will please him and perhaps be of some use to him. He was so amazingly like you in his play that I have serious thoughts of getting him to play Candida at the copyrighting performance, unless I can persuade Ellen Terry, who has just written me a letter about another matter. [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree, writing from Chicago, wants the Philanderer; but no doubt Mansfield has mentioned that to you.
I said something to [Charles] Charrington about getting Marion Lea to play Prossy; but I did not mean it seriously, as I think that there would be no room for her in a company with you and Mrs Mansfield [née Beatrice Cameron] in it. I mention this as a matter of prudence; for Mansfield is so Napoleonic in his swoops at any suggestion that he is quite capable of telegraphing to her straight off. I shall write to him by the next mail. It is on the verge of six o’clock; so I must break off and make for the post.
Remember—the religious life. No ambition, and no golden hair. I know that you will understand my advice, and take it—for ten minutes or so.
GBS
12/ To Janet Achurch
23rd March 1895
My dear Janet
. . . I sometimes think over the matter coolly, and check my tendency to think that genius must beat all abuses, by deliberately recalling many an instance in which stimulants had beaten genius. Finally the millstones catch Janet and grind her remorselessly. I break through the fascination and get to a more human feeling for her. I have been no saint myself—have hunted after one form of happiness occasionally. Janet recreates me with an emotion which lifts me high out of that. I become a saint at once and write a drama in which I idealise Janet. I have a horrible fear that if I lecture her, she will detest me; but her soul, which has come to life, or rather awakened from its sleep since the night of the Novelty Theatre, is worth wrestling for; and I do brutal things—put money into her pocket secretly in order purposely to produce a scene with her husband. Janet at last wakes to the emotion under which I have abstained; and for a while she rapidly begins to draw on rich stores of life, becomes beautiful, becomes real, becomes almost saintly, looks at me with eyes that have no glamor of morphia in them, and with an affection that is not hysterical, though in the middle of it all she stabs me to the heart by dyeing her hair a refulgent yellow. The question is how am I to make Janet religious, so that she may recreate herself and feel no need of stimulants. That is the question that obsesses me.
Now you have my theory brought home to yourself. Now you know what I conceive as wanting for Candida, and what Eugene means when he says, “I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.” That is the language of the man recreated by a flash of religion.
It is drawing near post hour—12 midnight on Saturday to catch the German mail tomorrow morning. Let me hastily add that I have purposely abstained from worrying about your acting. Charrington is so nervous as to your interests that he is almost convinced that if you breathe the way you do at home, it will be an ungraceful trick. But you cannot help yourself by taking care not to do this or that. If only you occupy every moment of the play with Candida, you will not drop into any tricks that do not belong to her. And the time for pupilage is past: you must be left now to your own vigilance and conscience as an artist. Sweep all concern about little tricks and mannerisms away from your mind; and be generous to yourself as well as to the rest—for you must be generous to them, and make their points for them if necessary, since they will all be in much greater danger than you. In short, dearest Janet, be entirely magnanimous and beautiful in your thoughts and never mind the success of the play or of yourself. Believe me, it is not success that lies in our hands—yours or mine. Success is only an aspect that certain results of our work—not the work itself—bear in the eyes of others. Take it quietly and see what will happen.
There is a great deal for you to forgive in this letter. I have rambled into it without intending it: indeed I have quite got away from what I supposed I was going to say when I began.
GBS
13/ To Richard Mansfield
27th March 1895
My dear Mansfield
I wish I had time to write; but I haven’t. I hoped to get an interview into “Town Topics” [magazine] before Easter; but I am afraid I shall not be able to write it. This copyrighting performance [of Candida at the Theatre Royal] (program of which I enclose) with all its attendant arrangements and expenses, and a thousand other things besides my literary work (you haven’t the least idea what a lot of it I have to do to earn £6 a week and act as referee by cable in your combats with Janet) has left me without a moment. For Heaven’s sake star everybody who wants to be starred. Star the callboy; see that everybody else in the theatre has his name printed in letters three inches longer than your own; bribe the press to interview the entire staff; publish albums of their photographs taken at various periods of their march from the cradle to the grave; polish Janet’s boots and cast Mrs Mansfield for old women exclusively; only act and make them act within an inch of their lives. It is good business to star Janet; what is the use of giving a woman fifty pounds a week if you are not going to run her for all she is worth? Star her until she begs you for God’s sake not to raise any more expectations. She comes from Manchester: she will grab everything you try to keep from her. Treat her as the Roman soldiers treated the woman who asked for the gold things on their arms: crush her beneath the weight of your shield. Give her everything she dares ask; and make her understand that she has got to prove herself worth it on the 15th April. The performance must come off then: it is all over the press here already; and if it breaks down it will be impossible to avoid explanations. Never mind starring yourself: you are, or ought to be, hors concours. I told Janet to offer to be content with a line in diamond type in the bill, and then win her position: if she cannot rise to that, why, have a new fount of type cast for her, six feet high, and paint the town hell color with her name. These follies drive me stark mad: I hereby authorise you to announce her as the authoress of the play, if that will please her. . .
No fair play here for you or anyone else. Who wants fair play? London is a fortress in which every man must, as an outsider, batter a breach for himself. Then in, sword in hand. Success, achievement, fruition, is death. Fortunately, they fight you from behind barricades in every street when you have carried the wall; so that there is always an obstacle, and, consequently, an object in life.
All the same, no nonsense this time about an August season. The season is over by the middle of July. Don’t be in a hurry: Candida can wait until next year if it proves worth going on with at all. Immer Mut!
In haste
G. Bernard Shaw
14/ To Janet Achurch
30th March 1895
[My dear Janet]
I am sending by this mail an interview to “Town Topics,” which they may or may not insert. I am so addled by want of exercise, and ceaseless clatter, clatter, clatter at this machine, that I am incapable of writing anything that has not a hysterical air about it. . . I have a frightful feeling that my previous letters have been all morbid. However, no matter. The spring is germinating; this mail finishes all I can do with regard to “Candida” in America; the copyrighting performance is over at last; the Easter holiday is at hand; life rises in me and conscience wanes; and there is animation in my style even as I sing
But what are vernal joys to me?
Where thou art not, no spring can be.
I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else. Charrington called yesterday. He said you wouldn’t sign a contract, he was sure of that; you would rather not bind yourself. But my own feeling is that you had a stronger interest in getting a contract than Mansfield has in giving it to you. Suppose “Candida,” as is probable—more probable than any other event—is a success on the first night, a “succes d’estime” for the following fortnight, and then vanishes from the New York stage. Mansfield, in disgust at the whole business, may say that you have failed, and that you are not worth the fifty pounds a week. . .
On the other hand, if you get your two years contract, what will happen then? You will of course stipulate for leading parts (with a reasonable regard for Mrs Mansfield); and you will then be sure of work and fifty pounds a week for two years, during which you can save and look about you with a view to campaigning on your own account afterwards. No doubt two years seems a long time to you, who have been accustomed to start operations in a fortnight; but how have they succeeded? What are you afraid of in the transaction? Is it that Mansfield will not pay you? He must; he cannot exist without considerable property as a theatrical manager; and whilst the property is there, the law can force him to pay your salary. Or is it that he will give you no parts, and prevent you by injunction from playing for anyone else? Do you think people behave that way when it costs them fifty pounds a week?
But you may be dreaming that “Candida” will be such a success that it will place New York at your feet. It won’t; and even if it does, it will not place Boston and Chicago and so on at your feet without Mansfield. It will really be a success of the combination of yourself with Mansfield; and it is absolutely impossible for it to justify you in feeling sure that you would maintain your lead without him. You may say that [Charles] Frohmann or somebody will say “Come and be my leading lady at a hundred a week.” Well, the chance of that contingency is just good enough to enable you to extract a two years contract from Mansfield now; but it is not good enough to risk going without a contract for. Besides, it was Mansfield, not Frohmann or another, that gave you your chance; and he is entitled to the full profit of it if it turns out well. And he has “Candida,” subject, it is true, to the condition of playing it fifty times a year with you in the title part, but morally entitled, if you go to another manager for purely commercial reasons, to demand the substitution of—say Ellen Terry. What plays have the other managers got that would shew you to the fullest advantage?
All this you must ponder carefully. In telling Mansfield to let you have your own way, I am running the great risk that he will comply, and that your way will be the old ruinous way. The summing up of the case is this. Either you intend to make your career in America as some manager’s leading lady, or you intend to make it as your own entrepreneur. Well, you cannot begin the latter at once because you have no money; and you must once for all give up the old plan of throwing your friends’ savings into enterprises that are as ill considered as enterprises conducted with other peoples’ money usually are. Therefore, you must work for a salary for a few years at least. Are you going to let the certainty of a two years engagement at fifty pounds a week (excellent pay) slip through your fingers on the chance of “Candida” being successful enough to bring you a better offer?
That’s the question you have to face. I don’t advise you one way or the other; I simply take care that the case in favour of a contract shall be put clearly before you. Probably [your husband Charles] Charrington will put the other side with equal eloquence.
GBS
15/ To Janet Achurch
3rd April 1895
[My dear Janet]
I had looked forward to writing you a long letter; but your cable to Charrington saying that Candida is withdrawn has dropped here with explosive force, Charrington being all for an immediate departure as a stowaway on the next liner to New York. However, I shall cable to Mansfield; for he must produce “Candida” now, and produce it at once too, or else there will be forty thousand fiends to pay; for the newspaper boom here is immense—two interviews with me this week, paragraphs innumerable, quotations from the passage about you and Ellen Terry in my preface to [William] Archer’s book, altogether such an outburst of interest that the fact of the advent of Candida under Mansfield’s management with you in the title part is nailed into the public mind. [Clement] Scott ignores it and announces another project of Mansfield’s. If there is any failure, he will jump at the chance of alluding to “misleading statements” and so forth; and then woe to those who trifle with me; for the explanations will lose none of their picturesqueness if I have to make them. It will be an advertisement for me and the play in any case, one which may perhaps end, if Mansfield leaves me in the lurch, in the rapid production of “Candida” here, with “The Philanderer” on top of it. When I learn that you are not busy rehearsing with all your might, remorse leaves me.
I forget whether I told you that the clause in the agreement relating to you runs as follows:
“The Manager shall engage Miss Janet Achurch and shall cast her for the title part of Candida at all performances given under this agreement and shall not permit Miss Janet Achurch to perform publicly in America on any occasion prior to her appearance as Candida.” . . .
GBS
16/ To Janet Achurch
5th April 1895
My dear Janet
I have played my last card, and am beaten, as far as I can see, without remedy. I have done what I could; I have scamped none of the work, stinted none of the minutes or sixpences; I have worked the press; I have privately flattered Mansfield and abused you; I have concentrated every force that I could bring to bear to secure you a good show with Candida. Can I do anything more? And how long must I keep my temper with these rotten levers that break in my hands the moment the dead lift comes? It is the distance that has defeated me. If only I were in New York, with one hand on his throat, and the other on the public pulse through the interviewers, I would play him a scene from the life of Wellington that would astonish him. Never has man yet made such a sacrifice for a woman as I am making now in not letting fly at him by this mail. But I have so laid things out to force him for his own credit to keep faith with me, that I cannot be certain that he may not tomorrow realize that he had better do Candida after all. He will get letters of mine that are on their way, and may guess from them that my smile has a Saturday Review set of teeth behind it. He may lose heart over whatever other play he intends to open with. He may receive a visit from an angel in the night warning him that Charrington is on the seas after his scalp. If I fire a shot now that cannot strike him for eight days, it may strike you by upsetting some new arrangement made in the meantime. I am tied hand and foot—not a bad thing for a man in a rage—and can only grind my teeth to you privately. If this were a big misfortune I should not mind: if you had dropped all the existing copies of the play accidentally into the Atlantic, it would have wrinkled my brow less than it would have wrinkled the Atlantic: the infuriating thing is that it is an annoyance, and no misfortune at all. I have my play; I have you for the part; I have a huge extra advertisement; I have not a single false step to regret all through. But this only sets my conscience perfectly free to boil over with the impatience of the capable workman who finds a trumpery job spoiled by the breaking of the tool he is using. Besides, my deepest humanity is revolted by his skulking in his throne room and refusing to see you and treat with you as one artist of the first rank with another. The compromise he has made is simply a payment to you to give him the power of preventing you from appearing in New York this season. —But this is waste of time: let me talk sense.
By this mail I write to Miss [Elisabeth] Marbury, my agent (Empire Theatre Building, 40th St. and Broadway), instructing her to get the script and parts of Candida, and the script of The Philanderer from Mansfield, if he has not changed his mind by the time my letter arrives. I have further instructed her to give the parts to you, and to send me back the script. You will therefore have the set of parts as well as a prompt copy in your possession, in case of need. But as I still think Candida a valuable chance for you, I will not let you throw away the first performance of it except on a thoroughly serious occasion. C. C. [Charles Charrington] starts tonight for Liverpool to join the Cunarder which sails tomorrow. He insists on going as an emigrant; and as there seems to me to be something in his contention that he will be too seasick to care where or how he travels—oh, here he is; and he is not going after all: your cablegram has stopped him. . . .
GBS
17/ Bernard Shaw’s interview with Lady Colin Campbell née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood published by her newspaper Realm “Candida: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw”
5th April 1895
Now, Mr Shaw, as himself avers, writes plays more by accident than design. An idea occurs to him on a bus; and presently the idea has—quite fortuitously—spread itself into a play. It was about the latest accident—Candida—that we were talking—and about its author.
‘I am the most conventional of men,’ sighed Mr Shaw, somewhat regretfully.
‘And yet,’ I suggested, ‘there is an impression abroad that any work of yours is likely to be unconventional.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Mr Shaw, ‘that the conventional play has never been written?’
‘I suppose the conventional reply would be that the conventional play is “all over the stage”.’
‘Not at all. The play “all over the stage” is the play in which the convention is violated. It is not the convention, but the violation of it, which is the subject of the play. That is what the playwright and the public wallow in. The convention is really only an assumption that what the characters are doing is extremely wrong. It is never explained or argued for a moment why it’s wrong, or what the conventional position really is. The author assumes it, the public assumes it, all for the sake of a bit of tragedy—and there you are. Now, it occurred to me that, as the really conventional play remained to be written, I was just the sort of man to write it.’
It was a hard saying. I pleaded for more light.
‘In Candida,’ explained Mr Shaw, ‘the convention is the subject of the play.’
‘What convention?’
‘I beg your pardon—the wife-and-mother convention. The strongest and best position a woman can occupy, you know, is that of a wife and a mother.’
‘Then, you accept the convention as valid?’
‘Of course, there is a truth in that, as in every other convention. Not that every woman is in her right place as a wife and a mother. Some women in that predicament are in a hopelessly wrong position. They are married to the wrong man; they have no genius for motherhood; there are a thousand and one ways in which they may be out of their plane. But my heroine happens to be precisely in the right position. That, you perceive, is an absolutely original and yet a completely conventional situation for a heroine.’
‘But do you find it a thrillingly dramatic one?’
‘That’s a home question, in more senses than one. And a question that must be answered by the public. For myself, I have found it, as a dramatist, a sufficiently dramatic situation. I have found in it a motive which completely satisfies my dramatic sense.’
‘And what of the plot? Does the heroine never get out of this original and conventional situation?’
‘If I told you the plot, you would think it the dullest affair you had ever heard. There is a clergyman and his wife—who is Candida, the heroine.’
‘Who is the villain of the piece?’
‘I never deal in villainy. The nearest thing I have got to it is a minor poet, who falls in love with the heroine.’
‘Ah! And then what happens?’
‘Some conversations. That’s all.’
‘Absolutely nothing more than that?’
‘No more than that. But such conversations!’
‘Doesn’t the heroine even run away with the minor poet—or—or anything?’
‘No—nothing. She stays at home with her husband. Rather a good idea—isn’t it?’
‘Yes—conventional in real life, and novel on the stage. Really, I suppose lots of wives stay with their husbands. Only, it’s a point that the modern drama has missed.’
Thereupon it struck me that I might clear up a matter which has been bothering people a good deal for the last few years. There is no category for Mr Bernard Shaw. We like to be able to stick a label on a man, put him in a pigeon-hole, and be certain of always finding him there.
‘Some time ago,’ I said, ‘I remember asking you what you were—a musical critic, a dramatic critic, a demagogue, a dramatist? Independent candidates stand a poor chance for Walhalla [a hall of fame that honours laudable and distinguished people in German history]. On which ticket are you going for election?’
‘I am all of them by turns,’ replied Mr Shaw. ‘Not long ago I was a musical critic, as you know. But when I began to write plays I recognised the necessity of getting into a position to slate other people’s plays. So I became a dramatic critic. Beyond that, nothing is changed. I am still a leader of the democracy, which still persists in taking no notice whatever of my teachings.’
‘Now,—speaking for a moment as a dramatic critic—what do you consider the chief faults of Mr G. Bernard Shaw, the playwright?’
Mr Shaw took counsel with his beard.
‘It is very difficult to say,’ he said at length,—‘very difficult indeed. Speaking from my own point of view, of course I start miles ahead of anyone else, and keep there. But from the point of view of the public—well, perhaps, one of my faults is that I do not preach enough: I am not sufficiently didactic. The public want a dramatist to tell them ten minutes beforehand what he is going to do, then to do it, and then, ten minutes afterwards, to tell them what is the right moral to draw from it. The public,’ continued Mr Shaw, leaning forward confidentially, ‘want to be bored, and I am never a bore. That is one of my greatest failings. For the public are quite uncomfortable when they look for the moral in (say) Arms and the Man and can’t find one.’
‘Except, perhaps, that a true story seldom has any moral. Have you any other failings?’
‘The only other is a kindred one. It comes from my lack of experience in writing for the stage. When I get a good idea I have not had sufficient practice to work it for all it is worth and exhaust it. I have to run away from it, as it were, and take refuge in being brilliant and sparkling. With experience comes dulness. When I have written enough plays to grow dull I shall succeed. But at present I have only been a dramatist to amuse myself.’
‘And a demagogue to amuse other people?’
‘Exactly.’
18/ Richard Mansfield to an American dramatic critic and author William Winter
10th April 1895
. . . I have discarded play after play, and I am in despair. I cannot present—I cannot act, the sickening rot the playwright of today turns out. Shaw’s Candida was sweet and clean—but he’s evidently got a religious turn—an awakening to Christianity; and it’s just two and one-half hours of preaching, and I fear the people don’t want that. Also, there is no part for me but a sickly youth, a poet who falls in love with Candida—who is a young lady of thirty-five and the wife of an honest clergyman, who is a socialist! There is no change of scene in three acts, and no action beyond moving from a chair to a sofa, and vice versa. O, ye Gods and little fishes! . . .
[Richard Mansfield]
19/ To Janet Achurch
13th April 1895
[My dear Janet]
I have just come up from Beachy Head, where I am spending Easter week, for one night to see a piece at the Adelphi [The Girl I Left Behind Me by Franklyn Fyles and David Belasco]. I find a letter from you waiting for me—the one in which you describe Mansfield’s Bluntschli [in Arms and the Man] and so on: also his objection to put his head on Candida’s knees, which I propose to get over by putting his head beneath Candida’s feet presently. I have just ten minutes before post hour to send you a line.
