Der Zuschauer

And sometimes the burning hotel drives towards you, instead of you driving towards the inferno. People continue to be tossed from the shelter. People continue to think they will get back in, or, instead, stay at the Sally. Even the Albany Street wet-shelter, shit-hole has cut its alkie beds in half, a third, who knows? No money, these days, is available for active drunks, dope-fiends, unless you are Bill Clegg, literary agent in New York, author of Portrait of an Addict as A Young Man. “He had a thriving business as a literary agent, representing a growing list of writers. He had a supportive partner, trusting colleagues, and loving friends when he walked away from his work and embarked on a two-month crack binge. He had been released from rehab nine months earlier, and his relapse would cost him his home, his money, his career, and very nearly his life.” That bullshit is from the dust-jacket. Nine and two makes eleven, right? Wooie! Irvine Welsh writes: “A remarkable achievement. Bill Clegg’s story of a man–largely locked in hotel rooms, engaged in a desperate, heart-wrenching battle with himself–is destined to become a cult classic of writing on drug addiction.” All I can say is fuck Irvine Welsh for his cliches; he should have stuck his head in a nasty toilet and spared us the desperation, the destiny, the cult classic, and remarkable achievment. As for Bill Clegg, fuck his wanker asshole and his almost lost his home, his money, his career, and very nearly, his life. If a writer like Andrew O’Hagan is reduced to “instant classic,” “beauty and truth,” and “I suppose we live for the magic of these things,” then we are all lost in a miasma of dreck; cheap, whisper-thin, toilet paper; and bad-boy at Dartmouth masturbation. Sebestian Junger, went to war for 15 months, as a sort of male camp-follower. He at least “showed [us] the adrenaline-fueled confusion of being ambushed.” He knocked me to the floor, he took all my crack, and he took the last of the toilet paper. Junger, at least, “shows what it means to fight, serve, and face down mortal danger on a constant basis.” But really, why can’t any of these male pussies actually write well? Socrates went to war, Sophocles went to war. Grant and Sherman wrote well after the fact. I’ve been locked in hotel rooms; I’ve seen public men’s rooms in Central Square. I’ve lost my only pair of glasses down a fecal rat-hole. It wasn’t my cell-phone. Trusting colleagues, loving friends? Dylan Thomas put some egg into his whiskey. Malcolm Lowry ate the worm in the tequila bottle. When did being “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” become such a man-girl exercise in bad writing? Hemingway, Ford Maddox Ford, Dos Passos, and Faulkner could write. Most of the time they did write well. George Orwell wrote well about being down and out; the dishroom was greasy; the john stank. Josepth Roth wrote brillantly while lit up on schnapps or marc. He didn’t make himself out to be a hero for drinking hard. He wrote about men and women living in history. His last rehab episode was in the Hospital Necker, in Paris, where friends reported seeing him strapped to his bed with delirium tremens; he was denied alcohol by the hospital staff; no benzos in May of 1939. According to the poet and translator, Michael Hoffmann, that was a “contributory cause of his death.” “I have finished my last book. I don’t want a doctor, just a priest.”

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
Copyright 2012. Der Zuschauer.

Things keep happening; people keep getting tossed; women get caught blowing men in the cellar, off you go. Others are told to leave for what? Why? Who knows? People keep getting tossed. Then people die. One King of Naples, hispanic, a Yankee/Giants/Mets/Jets fan, has numerous wives, girlfriends, comes up from Jersey and does the Boston system and eventually, after one year or more, gets housing, and then dies within weeks of moving out and in. Dead two days when the police find him. We last spoke on Superbowl Sunday. I congratulated him on the Giants’ victory; he graciously accepted my congratulations. There is more to tell: grey hair, pony-tail, constant cane, white bathrobe. No hint of drugs or booze so far as I knew, but what do I know? Now? Then? Tomorrow? There have been some various controversies regarding the use of artwork amidst texts, and god, we writers just are happy to have some access to publication and money per line or word. We don’t decide these matters; Ekaterina Degot, decides this; Max Klinger decides this. We just do the writing, I just do the writing, such as it is. There are commissars as well; people, women most often, who decide about correct language, human kindness in a nutshell cliché. There are commissars who watch Law and Order: SUV, pop-eyed, uncritical, and yet, are all over your attitude and tone of voice. Prohibition is so very inside the heart of every American woman in the United States. What are we to do? What is to be done?
I find it hard to keep straight, I find it hard not to worry about being appalling, shocking, nasty. There are dogs in the ditch; there are butt-ugly skanks, skags, assholes in the square. There are people who are experts on Wodehouse and know nothing about Celine. There are excuses for Eliot and there is rabid hatred of Pound. There are hefty Norton Anthologies Of African-American Literature. Who actually reads Black History in February? Do you? There is a book published this past January, Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, edited and translated by the English poet, Michael Hofmann, that I think is superb and useful for anyone who is hacking away in the trade: meaning writing at anything at all. I have read Roth in German and English. He is one of ours, if you and fate will allow me to assert this. But then, evidently, I am a dog; I am not a son of the soil, I am not a man of the factories and cow barns, a pork butcher to the world; I am only a writer, I am a white man and I get Faulkner’s expression, “a train car full of cannon balls” quicker than you do. I’ve seen men drink shoe-polish, and I’ve seen men drink sterno drained through cheese-cloth; I’ve seen men drink Listerene and I didn’t care whether they lived or died. There is hope and faith in The Brothers Karamazov that is above the underground, but then Dostoevsky was a gambler and where’s the recovery in that?

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
copyright 2012. Der Zuschauer.

Dear Readers,
I think we all live in history, whether we know it or not. We here on Guam Island have never tried to be viciously up to date. For the best obituaries for Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens we recommend our sister publication, Arts and Letter Daily, and its blog lists. You may well know just whom of the above is Havel and Hitchens; we will let you guess on the third man. You remember the third man, don’t you? And who played the zither? Did he do this in Vienna or Hollywood? Anyway, Ekaterina Degot is said to be at work on a piece about what Leon Trotsky, from beyond the grave, would have had to say about both Hitchens and Havel. We would have loved to have had Hitchens on Havel but time and space did not allow that to happen. Maxim Gorky, the 3rd, is writing a piece about Havel’s Letters to Olga, and how prison is somewhat, very like, being homeless in Central Square, Cambridge. Then, there is Stanley Richardson’s memory piece, Drama in the Fall of 1989, which will touch on Hitchens, Havel, Gorbachev, Socialism With a Human Face, Clement Ottwald and his missing hat. Dear Reader, are you old enough to know what a Tribant is? Also, can any of you help us with the derivation of this phrase, “We live in History”?

Max Klinger,
Editor in Chief
Der Zuschauer
Copyright 2011.

Maxim Gorky April 1902

An Autumn Night
Source: The Social Democrat, Vol. VI No. 4, April, 1902, pp. 123-128, (3,761 words);
Translated: by Emily Jakowleff and Dora B. Montefiore;
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford. Further editing by Der Zuschauer.

I found myself one autumn night in an uncomfortable and awkward position. I had just arrived in a town where I did not know a single creature; I had not a penny in my pocket, nor a corner where to lay my head.
For a day or two I kept things going by disposing of all such articles of clothing as were not absolutely indispensable. When the proceeds of my wardrobe were exhausted, I determined to set out for a place called Oustya, where I knew there were some wharves and dockyards, which would offer a chance of work. When, however, I arrived there the stir and bustle of the year were over—for it was already the latter end of October, and the place was now empty and deserted.
I tramped about the wet sands, sending the water splashing at every step I took. Eagerly I scanned the ground under my feet, hoping to find some refuse that might be eatable. I had arrived at that state when I would have eaten anything. I prowled about the deserted huts and stalls, thinking how pleasant it would be to feel my hunger satisfied for once in my life. Under existing social conditions it is so much easier to quench the hunger of the mind than it is to satisfy the hunger of the body. As one wanders about the streets, with their richly decorated buildings, which one feels certain are just as luxurious inside as they are outside; exulting thoughts arise in one’s mind, as one contemplates the wonders achieved by architecture, sanitation, and many other elevating and improving arts and sciences. One meets people warmly and comfortably clad—they are well behaved, they always make way for one, anxious, to the point of fastidiousness, to avoid even the knowledge of the existence of beings such as we are. But, thank God, the souls of the starving are often far better nourished than are those of the rich and prosperous! Such a state of affairs gives the rich many a chance of drawing witty comparisons in their own favor.
Evening drew on, the rain pattered down, the north wind blew in fitful gusts; it whistled among the empty stalls and sheds, and rattled against the boarded windows of the deserted vodka-shops. The waves of the river turned to spray under the stroke of the blast, as they dashed boisterously against the sandy shore, throwing their white crests high up into the air; then, as if anxious to return to the vast expanse they had just left, they jostled and leaped back one over the other. The river seemed to have a presentiment that winter was near, and to be making nervous attempts to escape the icy bonds, which the bleak north wind might lay upon it that very night. The sky was dark and lowering, a cold, cutting drizzle, so fine that the drops were scarcely visible, swept through the air. The depressing landscape which surrounded me seemed sadder still for the stumps of two disfigured, broken down willows, and the overturned boat lying near their roots. A battered, overturned boat, and two melancholy old trees stripped naked by the cold wind. Everything suggested ruin, desolation, and disuse. The sky, shedding endless tears, gave a last finishing touch to the whole mournful picture. So desolate and so gloomy seemed all around, that it began to appear to me as if everything in the world, with the exception of myself, were decaying, and that very soon, I alone should remain in the world—the only living being left—I, for whom cold death might be already lurking somewhere near.
I was only eighteen then, and what beauty there is in that age! Thus I walked about the cold damp sands, my teeth chattering an accompaniment to my thoughts in honor of hunger and cold, when suddenly as I turned sharply round the corner of a stall I came across a stooping figure wearing the dress of a woman. Her clothes were wet, and hung closely around her. I stopped and tried to find out what she was doing; and then I discovered that she was scraping a hole in the sand with her hands under one of the market stalls.
“Why are you doing that?” I inquired, sitting down beside her. She uttered a low cry, and sprang quickly to her feet. As she stood up facing me, her large grey eyes full of terror, I noticed she was a girl of about my own age with a very pretty face, which, I regret to say, was somewhat disfigured by three large bruises. The bruises, though placed in symmetrical order, still had the effect of spoiling her beauty. One bruise was just above the bridge of her nose; the others consisted of two black eyes. All of them were exactly of the same size, and had been evidently inflicted by an artist in the art of disfiguring people’s faces. The girl stood staring at me, but the expression of terror gradually disappeared from her eyes. She shook the sand from her hands, straightened the cotton handkerchief on her head, and said; with a slight shiver in her voice:
“Well, I suppose you are hungry also; if so, come and dig for a little while, my hands are aching. Look there,” she continued, nodding towards the stall she had been trying to undermine, “in that stall we shall be sure to find some bread, and maybe some sausage. You see this stall has not been regularly closed yet.”
I started digging. After some few minutes rest, spent in watching me, she squatted down beside me, and began to work as well.
We grubbed away for some time in silence. It is difficult to say at this distance of time whether any thought of the civil code, any considerations of morality, or of the rights of property; or of other good things, which wise people tell us should ever be present in our minds, troubled me at that moment. But as I desire to keep as near as possible to the truth, I fear I must acknowledge that at the time I was so engrossed with my work of undermining the stall, that no room was left in my mind for anything but expectation of the treasure I hoped to discover as a reward of my toil. Evening came on apace. The gloom, damp, cold, and raw, grew every moment more and more dense. The swish of the waves was heard less distinctly, but the rain beat louder and more insistently against the boards of the stall. Not far off we heard the night watchman’s rattle.
“Has the stall a floor or not?” inquired my companion in a low voice.
Not understanding exactly what she meant, I did not answer.
“I am asking you if the stall has a floor or not; because if it has there is no use in our going on digging—if we come across thick boards, what can we do? In that case had we not better break the lock; it’s a trumpery little thing,”
A bright thought seldom comes into a woman’s head; but still, as in this case “happy thoughts” do come into their minds occasionally. I always have a respect for “happy thoughts,” and try and avail myself of them as well as I can.
Acting on this principle, I felt for the lock, gave it a wrench, and pulled it off, screws and all. My accomplice immediately stooped down, and gliding like a snake through the square, raised the lid of the stall. When there, she uttered a cry of encouragement.
“Well done, my brave lad!”
A word of approbation from, a woman is worth more to me than a hymn of praise from a man, even if he be as eloquent as all the orators, ancient and modern, put together. Under the circumstances I am describing however, I was not in such an amiable frame of mind as I am now; I paid no heed, therefore, to the girl’s exclamation, but briefly and impatiently queried:
“What have you found there?”
Instead of replying, she began to enumerate in a monotonous voice the various articles sire had discovered.
“A hamper of bottles, some empty bags, an umbrella, an iron pail.”
None of these, however, were eatable, and my hopes were fast fading away. Suddenly she shouted joyfully:
“I have found it at last!”
“What have you found?” “Bread! A whole loaf! Only it’s a little damp. Here, catch!”
At the same moment a loaf of bread rolled at my feet; and my brave little friend soon stood by my side.
Meanwhile I had broken off a hunk of bread, and, cramming it into my mouth, devoured it greedily.
“Come, I say, give me a bit, too. We must get away from this place at once. Where do you think we had better go?” Her searching glance tried to penetrate the gloom of the dark, damp and stormy night.
“Over yonder there is an old boat turned upside dawn; let us get under it.”
“All right; come along!”
We made for the boat, breaking off and eating pieces of bread, and cramming them into our mouths as we walked along. The rain fell ever more heavily, and the river roared louder. A prolonged, derisive whistle sounded some way off—it seemed as if some strong, desperate being were laughing mockingly at everything on earth at the wretched autumn night, and at us, its two heroes. Our hearts throbbed painfully at each shriek of the whistle; but nothing prevented me from eating my bread greedily; the girl walking by my side did the same.
“What is your name?” I inquired, vaguely.
“Natasha,” was the curt, answer, as the girl continued to chew her bread noisily.
I looked at her, and my heart ached for her. Then I turned my glance, ahead into the gloom, and it seemed to me as if the mocking face of my fate were smiling at me, with a cold, enigmatic smile.
Ceaselessly the drops of rain beat against the timber of the old boat, and their soft patter awoke many a sad thought. The wind whistling through the crevices of the timber howled fiercely; a chip of wood hanging loosely inside rattled and quivered out an anxious, sad dirge. So monotonous and so despairing was the sound of the waves as they dashed against the river banks, that it seemed as if they wished to confide the story of some oppression, of some insupportable grief, of which they were utterly weary, and of which they desired to unburden themselves, so that it might be shared with someone else. The noise of the rain, mingled with the rush of the waves, together produced the effect of a long, endlessly deep sound, floating in the air—the sigh of the earth, weary of the never-ceasing changes of the weather—the hot, bright summers, succeeded by the damp, cold and dreary autumns. The wind still continued to sweep and howl over the desolate shore; the foaming river moaned its sad monotonous complaint. Our shelter under the boat was destitute of anything like comfort; it was damp and narrow, and ice-cold drops of rain, mingled with piercing gusts of wind, penetrated through the rotting timbers. We sat in silence, shivering with the cold. I remember getting very sleepy. Natasha, who had curled herself up into a ball, leaned back against the side of the boat; her arms encircled her knees, on which rested her head. She gazed steadily out towards the river. Her wide-open eyes shone brightly, and seemed to grow larger for the black bruises beneath them. She neither spoke nor moved, and her silent, motionless figure inspired me with awe. I longed to say something to her, but did not know how to begin. At last she broke silence.
“What a wretched business our life is!” She spoke each word distinctly, slowly, and with deep conviction. She did not seem to be complaining; there was too much indifference in her voice for that. Apparently she had been reviewing her life, and had put into words, as well as she was able, the conclusion she had arrived at concerning it. A conclusion that I at least could not dispute without being false to myself. I preferred, therefore, to leave her words unanswered, and she once more assumed her silent and motionless attitude, taking no notice whatever of me.
“If one could but croak, and have done with it all,” she murmured, in a low and pensive tone. But still there was no note of complaint in her voice. It seemed as if she had reviewed her past life, and had come to the conclusion that there was no use in continuing to live; and that the only way to escape the mockery of existence was, as she expressed it, “to croak.”
Her clear, cold reasoning made me feel thoroughly sick at, heart. I felt I had no alternative but either to speak or burst into tears. To cry before a woman, however, seemed disgraceful, the more so, as she herself had not shed a single tear.
At last I managed to speak.
“Who has been knocking you about?” I asked, unable to find a more delicate way of alluding to her disfigurement.
“Why, Pashka, of course!”
“Who is he?”
“He’s my lover. He’s a baker.”
“Does he behave like that often?”
“Yes, very often; every time he is drunk.”
Then leaning towards me she began to tell all about her relations with Pashka. She was a “girl of the town,” he, a baker with an auburn mustache; he played the accordion splendidly. He had met her at the “establishment,” had charmed her by his gay manners, his smart, well-polished top-boots, and his splendid clothes. Why, he wore a coat that was worth at least fifteen roubles! She fell in love with him for all these fine qualities, and put herself under his “protection.” No sooner did he realize his position than he began to appropriate the money she earned from the other “visitors”; this money he would spend in drink, and when drunk he beat her without mercy. All this, she explained, would not have troubled her much, if it were not that he shamelessly courted other girls under her very nose.
“That was what hurt me most! I saw he was only making game of me, the rascal; and I was no worse looking than the other girls! The day before yesterday I asked permission of my ‘mistress’ to go out. I went straight to the house where Pashka lives, and found him there with Dounija; she was full of drink, and he not much better. I went for him, I can tell you. ‘You rascal, you dog!’ I shouted. Then he began. He knocked me down, he dragged me about by the hair, he abused me in every way he could think of. But even all that would not have mattered so much. The worst part of the business was that he tore my dress and jacket to pieces. Now I do not know what to do! I dare not go back to my mistress in this state, with all my clothes torn. I paid five roubles for my jacket. He dragged the handkerchief from my head. Oh! great God! what can I do now?”
The last few words were uttered in a plaintive, trembling voice. The ever howling wind grew louder and colder. My teeth began once more to chatter. The girl shivered and crept closer to me—so close that I could see her eyes flashing in the gloom. “What brutes you men! I should like to crush you all under my feet! I would disfigure you all if I could. If I saw any of you dying in the gutter I would only spit in your faces, and leave you there without a spark of pity. You miserable, wretches! You come cringing and fawning to us like mean dogs, but as soon as some silly girl trusts you, and gives way to you, all is over. You spurn and deride her, you dirty rascals!”
She possessed an endless stock of abusive epithets, but none of them were uttered with any force. One felt they expressed neither anger nor hatred for these “dirty rascals.”
The tone of her voice, was not in harmony with the words she spoke; but what she said made a deeper impression on me than could have been made by the most eloquent, forcible, and pessimistic book or argument that I had ever come across, either before that night or since. I can only express it in this way; and compare it to the death agony, which must itself be always more real, more poignant, and truer to nature than the best description by a master-hand can ever be.
Well, I was suffering acutely, though whether my sufferings were caused entirely by the cold, or by my companion’s words, I cannot now exactly say. I uttered a low groan, and gnashed my teeth. At the same moment I felt two cold little hands fluttering near me—one of them touched my neck and the other my cheek, and a soft, caressing voice inquired sympathetically:
“Will you not tell me who you are?”
It seemed almost for a moment as if someone else was speaking, and not the Natasha who, only a few moments before, had been reviling all mankind, and calling down evil on the heads of men. She was speaking now, however, in quick, hurried tones.
“What is the matter with you? Are you cold? Are you freezing? Poor fellow! Why did you not say so? Why did you not tell me before that you were cold? Come and lie down here. Stretch yourself out like, that, and I will lie down also. Now, just put your arms round me, come closer to me. Now you will be nice and warm. By-and-bye we will lie back to back, and so warm our backs. And so we shall manage to get through the night. Why are you in such a miserable state? Have you been drinking, or have you been dismissed from your situation? Well, whatever it is, it does not matter! Don’t fret about it.”
This girl was actually trying to comfort me. She was even trying to encourage me!
Damn it all! What frightful irony there was in all this. Just when I was busily occupied, settling the destiny of the whole human race, when I was dreaming of reforming the whole social order of things, and plotting all kinds of political revolutions; reading also extremely wise books, the meaning of which, in all probability, was never quite clear, even to, their authors; when I was endeavoring in every way to make of myself a prominent social and active force, just, in a word, when I seemed to have fulfilled the greater part of my task, and presumed that I had at least won a right to existence by making myself indispensable to the human race, and by taking a prominent place in the history of mankind—to think that such a person should stand in need of warmth, lent by the body of a fallen woman, an unhappy, shattered, persecuted creature, for whom there is no room and no place in the world! A woman whom I ought to have protected and cared for, instead of allowing her to console and comfort me, though, indeed, if the thought of my duty toward her had ever entered my mind, I confess I should not have known how to set about accomplishing it. I tried to make myself believe that it was all only a dream, an absurd nightmare, which had come across me during heavy sleep.
But, alas! The cold rain drops continued to pour down on me; the warm breast of the girl was pressed close against mine; her hot breath, tainted, it must be acknowledged with the faint odor of vodka, but oh, so wonderfully revivifying, awoke me to reality; and proved to me almost against my will that it was no dream. The wind howled and moaned pitifully. The rain beat ever louder against the old boat, and the waves outside hissed, while we, lying still in a close embrace, shivered still from the cold. This was indeed stern reality. I felt convinced that no dream, however monstrous, however unbearable, could ever have vied in oppressiveness with this crushing actuality. Natasha continued to talk softly, soothingly, kindly, as none but a woman can do.
Her simple gentle words caused warm feelings to creep into my heart, and I felt it melting within me.
A flood of tears poured down my cheeks, washing away the anger, the grief, the self-conceit, the evil that had accumulated in my heart in the course of that terrible night. Once more Natasha endeavored to comfort me.
“Do, not weep like that dear. Do stop crying. Please God, something will turn up. You will find another place. You will be all right soon”. Kisses, hot, caressing, and soothing mingled with her words.
They were the very first kisses I had ever received from a woman; and they were the best. All those I received later were bought at much too high a price.
“Come, come! Stop that noise; what a strange fellow you are. Tomorrow I will try and find you some work, if that’s what’s the matter.”
The low, soft, persuasive whispers came wafted to me as though through a dream. Thus we remained in each others’ arms till daybreak. As soon as dawn appeared we crawled out from under the boat, and made our way towards the town. There we bid each other a warm farewell, and parted – never to meet, again; though for more than six months I searched for that sweet girl through all the slums of the town—the girl with whom I had spent an autumn night.
If she is dead—the best thing that could have happened to her—may her soul rest in peace. If she is still alive, God grant her a quiet mind, and may she never realize her fall; for that would be only a cruel and futile suffering, and would serve no useful purpose in this world.

(Translated by Emily Jakowleff and Dora B. Montefiore.)

Dora Montefiore Archive | Maxim Gorky Archive
Social Democrat

Last night rats crawled upon my sleeping face; it was no wet dream. They bit, tore, ripped the skin from my face. There were Alcoholics Anonymous rats, Salvation Army rats, Prescribing Psych-Nurse rats, Substance Abuse Specialists rats, even Shelter Faggot rats. They went for my throat, my eye balls; they shit in my beard. They even tried to get at my genitals, and tore at my jeans. They told me that there was something wrong with me and that there would always be something wrong with me and even if I was clean for 42 years I would still be a 42-year-old scum-bag relapse waiting to happen. The rats gnawed on my ears, my fingers, my toes. They made filet mignon butt-steak out of my ass. They told me I needed a mentor and he would be a dominant homo mentor, even if he was actually a she-slag, butch-pussy dyke in a hideous rhumba skirt. I fought back. I threw unopened beers at them; I smashed rum and brandy bottles and slashed them into pieces. I had an alcoholic, homophobic, misogynistic, giant-killing fit. I slaughtered them all. I killed all the rats. I fought for my eyes, my ears, my cheeks, my penis and my balls. I said no to faggots and Alcoholics Anonymous; I said no to mentoring, and consensus about failure, and most profoundly I said no to a higher power, who was just a nasty, filthy Sodomite in a Nurse Ratchet white dress. And when I woke up I was clean, and I was calm and I had been reading Pliny, the Younger’s Letters. I knew that wet dreams were about loving and not about rats and scum-bags, weasels and stoats. I felt reassured no one would ever ask me about going to a meeting again. “Did you ever see anyone more fearful and abject than Marcus Regulus, following Domitian’s death?”

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
Copyright Der Zuschauer 2011.

The are no pussies in an animal shelter. nor punch-bunnies either. There are barking dogs, baying hounds, Aegis-class cruise missiles, but there are no pussies in a shelter. There are no female breasts, no tits, titties, no jugs, hooters, fun-bags, wahoos. There are no bra-busters in a men’s shelter. No A-Cups, no B-Cups, C-Cups, D or DD-Cups, no Triple E-Cups, no Quatro F-Cups. There are no female nipples: pink, red, or brown, barely pronounced, big as your thumb, flashing like lights on a patrol car. No biting, no sucking Lulu’s nippons. There are no girly armpits either, shaved, hairy, stubbled, five-o’clocked, razor-fatigued, no sweaty, salt-licked, girly armpits. Nothing. There is no female pubic hair in a men’s animal shelter. No bush, cotton candy, Black Forest, swampland, barely there, tease-tufted, no navel to anus, no shaved, bald, nor red-demonette, nor wooly bully. And, of course, there is no pussy, beaver, squack, snatch, taco, bearded clam, sperm-barn; there is no mons veneris, Venusberg, love-shack; there is no semen-intake center in a dog house. You will find the usual gattling-guns, howitzers, moon-rockets, yogurt cannons, roman candles, sad-sack dicks. There are baton rouges, baton noirs, tossers, and walking sticks. But, alas, there is no muff-diving, no rug-munching, no forced march, no frog-march, no boob patrol, no crotch hawking, nothing like that in a men’s animal shelter. Just the pass word: Ou la femme? Charchez la femme?
I don’t even know what it looks like.
I never knew what it looked like.
I can still remember what it smells like.
Fish shack in late August.
Sauteed sole in a lemon beurre blanc sauce.
She harrowed out my nostrils.
Nipples like red cherries in the snow.
Armpits with hair like the end of the Korean War.
Curls at the back of her neck.
Her ears gone beet-red.
I remember when-
Let’s twist, twist, twist again,
Like we did last summer.
O do you remember when?
Let’s twist, again, like we did last year.

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
Copyright by Der Zuschauer, 2011.

Last night in the shelter two men were tossed for having dirty urine. Outside it was dark and below freezing. Dirty urine refers to the results of a test which indicates evidence of alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and/or other drugs in the body. The two men were no angels; one learned they had both served jail-time from their rather loud, whispered, conspiratorial conversation. The larger man had the bunk above me. Both had been “randomly picked” for a urine test. “Random” after only two nights was certainly not “random.” “Arbitrary” was certainly not “arbitrary.” The shorter man hung on the other man’s ear like an Ugolino or Iago, fastened on like a ghost draining a corpse. He was the “smart guy” in a colony of imbeciles. Always with the know it all about everything and nothing. “This is shit; that is shinola.”
“We can do drugs, but we have to be cool about it. We can obtain at AA meetings; we can use at AA meetings.”
The larger man had the rough splendor and good looks of a working class Mark Antony. The other had not even the trick of uniqueness. He was a clinging shade, a ghoulish shadow. They both had the lethal skin tone of oxycontin.They knew they had dirty urine. Right beside me, ostensibly asleep, they whispered hoarsely. The large man had been asked for a urine sample, then the shadow; can shadows pee, or bleed, or even die? The ghoul was resigned: dirty urine, back out on the street. Mark Antony was in anguish.
“We should have stayed at the Sally.”
The Sally is street lingo for the hideous Salvation Army shit-hole in Central Square.
“If we go back tonight we only get 4 nights back in.”
“If we wait out tonight we can go back tomorrow for six nights.”
“Are you going to test or what?”
“But why us after 2 nights?”
“If you have dirty urine you don’t belong in here anyway.”
“We start a new job in the morning, full-time, construction.”
“Let us stay the night, then we won’t come back.”
“Test-or get out!”
All this time I’m wide awake in a deep sleep. The hairs on my arm stand up; I’m dried up in my throat like a 1,000 year old mummy that needs to cough, wants to spit, would kill for a cold beer. Why just these two? Why care if you know you’ll test negative to either “random, arbitrary,” or even fucking “deliberate?” Where would I go? Back to the Sally, into the Charles River, like that young black women who took her own life last week? Don’t you have a babe, a broad with a wide bed-even if she nags, and doesn’t let you drink? Don’t you have a friend with a sofa worth surfing? You could drink ice beer there and read Lucretius. Why care if you know you’ll test negative? What do I know? Why do I know? How could I know? Digression: creation balances destruction.
“There’s nothing to do but test, then we’re out, but the restrictions will be less if we come back.”
“I don’t want to go out.”
“We have to.”
I wait to pee until the smoke breaks when both the gladiators and the enforcer will be outside on the landing. I wait to pee so I won’t be seen to be awake. I’m really out cold, unavailable for “random, arbitrary, or deliberate.” I’m really out cold, I’m stone cold dead on the floor; I’m out like a light.
“Okay, let’s do it; we’ll test.”
I’m out like a light. There must be an infinite number of worlds. There is no divine interference in the self-regulated working of nature. The world had a beginning and will have an end. I’m out like a light. Stone cold dead on the floor. Serene like Epicurus. I wake up. The men are gone. The enforcer is gone. Lucretius is there. There is frost on the roof across the way. I still have money for ice beer. What to do? What to do next? There is no third form of existence. All qualities are properties and accidents of matter and space. Time to rise, time to rise and shine.

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
Copyright Der Zuschauer 20011.

Here on Guam Island I keep a female sea turtle as a walking companion; I call her Betty Page. She is polylingual and a great reader; she has just begun a romp through the Collected Novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Betty is generally good company, if a bit slow. She never nags me about drinking; nor does she ever make an issue out of the “tone in my voice.” No stunner in a bikini, she can pop the cork on a Phalz Riesling with aclarity. I have, as you will expect, been reading myself. Last week I finished George Saintsbury’s History of Criticism (3 vols., 1,675 pages), and believe me, it was a quick and pleasant read. At present I am flying through Peter Whitebrook’s William Archer, a biography of the eminent dramatic critic and early Ibsen champion and translator. Other volumes cover my desk. Beside various editions of the TLS and the NYRB, I have been looking at Granta, Aliens #114. You might look at Philip Oltermann’s “The B.O.G. Standard.”  The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 2010) has a very lively conversation with Gordon Rogoff by Bert Cardullo, called “The Elusive Object and the Fading Craft of Theatre Criticism.” Less interesting is Dean Wilcox’ “Criticism as Creative Act” which relies on the usual tedious suspects, among them: Barthes, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty, and Eco. Its all about “the commonality of process between theory and practice, between performance and analysis.” Samuel Beckett is quoted as well, but unfortunately it is not the one about his one great ambition: “sitting around drunk on my ass all day reading Dante.”

The special double issue of Comparative Drama (Winter 2010/Spring 2011) devoted to “translation, performance, and reception of Greek Drama, 1900-1960″ is notable and we can recomend two pieces: Simon Perris’ article on Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women and World Peace, and, Niall W. Slater’s article on Harley Granville Barker’s staging of Murray’s The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in the Yale Bowl in 1915, and at other Ivy League colleges. Other essays promise: Robert Davis’ “Is Mr. Euripides a Communist? The Federal Theatre Project’s 1938 Trojan Incident,” and Michael Simpson’s” Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and The Elder Statesman.” One can’t help remarking, happily, about the absence of jargoneering in the journal, and wondering at the paucity of material in most all academic articles, 8-10 pages, and out. I’m meant to be reviewing Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, eds. High, Martin, and Oellers; a reissue of Stefan Zweig’s Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: the struggle with the daemon; and New Essays on Diderot, ed. Fowler, from the Cambridge Press. Dr. Stanley Richardson has sent me a strange collection: Ein Molotow-Cocktail auf Fremder Bettkante: Lyrik der siebziger/achtziger Jahre von Dichtern aus der DDR. But then he may well be mad as a hatter by now. We enjoyed his recent piece on Wallace Shawn but noted in it signs of alienation, disaffection, and an aridity of soul that makes us think the man needs a glass now and then, and a companion like my Betty Page. We’ve invited him to come out and ponder the great oceans of the world, but he always remarks on his daughters, and says he cannot leave the Northeast Corrider. Herr Doktor tells us he is reading through the New Oxford Anthology of 18th Century Verse. Others books on my desk include Writing the New Berlin: The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature, and Arthur Schnitzler: Three Last Plays, trans. G. J. Weinberger.

Dear Readers, All Our Best to You.

Finicky, Critical…Even Angry

by Stanley Richardson

I recently went to a revival of Wally Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, presented by the Whistler in the Dark Theatre Company, at the Piano Factory. This small, young, gifted company has a very impressive, ambitious production history, including multiple presentations of Howard Barker plays, single plays by Eric Overmyer, Deborah Levy, Dario Fo, the immortal Snoo Wilson, and the highly acclaimed Tales From Ovid, based on the Ted Hughes’ translations. In fact if one were to judge artistic directors and their programming on intellectual substance, artistic audacity, and the adroit realization of “highly theatrical and physically inventive plays,” then one could argue Meg Taintor is the most successful such in Boston. Of course the Piano Factory theatre is tiny (maybe 40 seats), the casts are almost always too young, the lighting makes one fear the onset of glacoma, and the toilet situation is atrocious. Still, one cannot reach towards “greatness” in the theatre without the aspiring to such–and with the brio and gravitas that perhaps only the young can manage without trepidation.

I am a dramaturg who rarely goes to the theatre, as much from a sort of theatrical misanthropy as for any other concrete reason, like money; and there are so many concrete reasons for not going to the theatre in the 21st century. However, I have long thought Shawn a major American dramatist, have written an encyclopedia article on him (Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama), and helped, somewhat, to arrange for a BBC production of his play, The Fever. I also, long ago in the late 1980s, saw an early production of Aunt Dan and Lemon, directed by David Wheeler, at Adrian Hall’s Trinity Repertory Theatre. I had been startled, a little bit dazzled, and also outraged at that play and that production. People in London, at the world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, had shouted out in anger and outrage. Down in Providence I could understand why–but I had not shouted out from the audience. We theatre-goers in America are a well-behaved bunch. The lights go down and we shut up, we behave, we don’t say a word. That’s why when my colleague Matt Mayerchak, suggested going to Whistler’s revival, I thought, “Yes, lets go, lets see about the outrage and the shouting, let’s see if Shawn had wanted the yelling.” I thought, let’s go and see about what might, as Shawn himself has written, “explain the nasty atmosphere that hovered in those rooms when my plays were being performed.”

Then, after all, here was a play that engaged with history. Aunt Dan and Lemon posits one character that admires the Nazis for their successful efficiencey in the extermination of Jews and another who admires Henry Kissenger and his courage in overseeing the bombing of North Vietman. I have long encouraged history plays, plays that grapple with historical characters, eschew costume melodrama, and manage to circumvent around the dreaded “topical,” and so too avoid becoming dated. So, I thought will dated topicality preclude a sucessful revival of a historical drama? Aunt Dan and Lemon first appeared in 1985, well after the notorious last days of Saigon and the end of the Viet Nam War itself. The aforesaid Henry Kissinger went on to counsel George Bush, Jr., on his Iraq War as he had his father’s first Iraq War. In fact Christopher Hitchens and othe intellectuals have been calling for Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal for years. There was even a mysterious vist by Bush, Jr., to Mongolia. Who knew what time itself would do to history?

This question of history and the resultant questions of morality did not escape the Whistler production team. Director Bridget Kathleen O’Leary writes somewhat confusedly in her program notes: “Then, two weeks before our first rehearsal, while I was working on the play in my living room, the United States invaded Libya.” Of course, neither the US or NATO invaded Libya. There were airstrikes; airstrikes continue, but no soldiers “invaded” Libya. But still, it was real history happening. “That night it was all anyone wanted to talk about. Everyone had these polarizing views of being in yet another war–and how disapointed they were in the goverment.” So one sees that hazy “history” leads to moral fog, and not only can moral fog lead to bad art, as Shawn would acknowledge, it can also be dangerous as he would undoubtedly point out as well.

O’Leary continues: “As I began to contribute to the conversation, suddenly there was Aunt Dan’s voice coming through my mouth. I was making the case that we couldn’t possibly know what the war was about or what decisions went into declaring a war.” No war was or has been declared. “We didn’t know what might happen if the United States didn’t get involved and how many different countries and conflicts our government was juggling at any given moment.” The real fact is that astute, alert citizens largely know or knew. O’Leary goes further: “Moreover, we didn’t want to know.” She continues histrionically: “Oh my God, was I becoming a Republican? Was I losing my moral, liberal superiority? Who was I now? As I collected my thoughts…I felt oddly balanced. My world view felt a little more open and I realized I was ready to start tackling this production.” Indeed, ready world-historically, so it would seem.

Dear Reader, I didn’t get to the Director’s Notes before watching and listening to Aunt Dan and Lemon. What if I had? O’Leary suggest we think about “the yard, the neighbor, the family and the world. Why is is it okay for us to push poorer people out of neighborhoods so we can build high-rise condos and Starbucks but not okay for us to invade countries because we want their resources? Why can we create laws that determine right and wrong and ask our government to enforce them on us, but it’s not okay for our military to offer the same services to smaller countries? Why are we allowed to kill criminals who have gone thru [sic] the justice system, but not people who have betrayed our own moral codes?”

These remarks, Dear Reader, are intellectually specious and morally confused. If one argues, as I will, that there is a deliberate pedagogic transfer of specious logic and dogma from the character, Aunt Dan, (the Kissenger questions) to the character, Lemon, and her own logic and dogma regarding the death camps and the Shoah, then what must one think of the result of the play’s invective in a period such as this one, rife with nondeclared wars, terrorism, the death of Bin Laden? If one doesn’t begin to look at the poisonous pedagogic transfers that come out of Shawn’s play? We go from Shawn to Aunt Dan to Lemon to director and audience. Specious moral argument begats confusion and intellectual fog. And so as Bridget O’Leary suggests “sit forward and enjoy.” Let’s look closely at Shawn’t play, its pity and fear, or the lack thereof.

Critics have suggested that with Aunt Dan and Lemon Shawn began to give up on traditional dramatic structure altogether, largely dispensing with dialogue and plot and depending instead on direct address and this is a dramaturgical method crucial to the arguments in this essay. Such a method can be found in most of Shawn’s work: A Thought in Three Parts (1976) and Marie and Bruce (1978) were written before Aunt Dan and Lemon. The Fever (1991), which followed, certainly bolsters this contention. Originally conceived as a piece to be presented in apartments to small groups, the two-hour monologue was performed initially by Shawn himself in both private and public venues. The Designated Mourner (1995), using three vivid characters, continues mostly in direct address. Finally, his later play, Grasses of a Thousands Colors (2009), begins characteristically: “Well. Hello, everybody. Hello! Hello there! I’m just so flattered that you’ve come to see me here this evening and that you’re actually going to allow me to read you some sections from my memoirs–I hardly know what to say except, ‘Thank you. I’m grateful.’” And in the premiere of this play Shawn delivers these lines. In the premiere of Aunt Dan and Lemon Shawn performed the parts of the father, Freddie, and Jaspar.

Some critics have suggested that the plays are not theatrical at all. This perhaps ignores the reason for Shawn’s reduction of dramaturgy to single, speaking voices: the result is a focus on content. This is a formal accomplishement that allows for sustained and relentless examination of central moral and ethical issues. They provoke thought. Dear Reader or Dear Audience Member, you are button-holed; Wallace Shawn is pulling on your coat about something. The direct address allows us to dispense with the concept or dodge that the appalling ideas expressed in Aunt Dan and Lemon are contained within the characterizations. The possible escape from “But the mere fact of killing human beings in order to creat a certain way of life is not something that exactly distinguishes the Nazis from anybody else. That’s just absurd. When any people feels that its hopes for a desirable future are threatened by some other group, they always do the very same thing,” One wants to stand up and ask the actor playing Lemon, “Were the Nazis threatened by the Jews in Germany?”

I have seen three plays that led me to feel, to believe, I was in the presence of genuine evil. The first time was in London in 1982, when I was on a honeymoon and went to see the great English actor, Alec McCowen, play Adolf Hitler in Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation of the George Steiner’s novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. The play, the bulk of which is less than stellar, tells the story of a group of Jewish Nazi hunters, who pursue a rumor that Hitler, A.H., is alive in an Amazon jungle. They come upon the now very-aged Hitler in a clearing, a defiant, disturbingly articulate madman/genuis. “You must not let him speak…his tongue is like no other.” But let him speak they do; aware that others, the Israelis among them, are on their heels and apt to spirit A.H. away, the group decides to try him in the jungle before this can happen. In his defense A.H. makes four points.

Firstly, Hitler states he took his doctrines regarding the Jews from them: he derived his own ideas of a master Aryan race from the Jews and their desire to separate themselves from the other “unclean” races. “My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation.” Secondly, he justifies the final solution stating that “the virus of utopia had to be stopped.” Thirdly, A.H. reminds his captors he was not the originator of totalitarianism and its crimes. “Stalin had perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich.” Further, he points out that the number of lives lost in his actions are dwarfed by the various atrocities committed elsewhere in the world: Africa, China, Russia. Fourthly, and finally, Hitler maintains that the Third Reich resulted in the state of Israel, that he is the Messiah, whose actions were allowed by God, in order to bring his chosen people home. “Should you not honor me who has made…Zion a reality?” At this point the indian witness acting as jury shouts out “proven” and the helicoptor sounds of the outside world close the play. As mentioned earlier the frame story is less than satisfactory and I remember saying to my bride that the dramatist had waited too long to bring Hitler on. However, then came Alec McCowan to deliver A.H.’s tirade, and the profound sense of evil that came into that small theatre was when I realised I was following the logic of the argument, and thinking yes, yes, yes, and I was nodding in approval of a profoundly perverted and specious logic. George Steiner, who is Jewish, has made there arguments about Israel and Zion elswhere. The play was highly controversial, although there were no shouted objections the night I saw the play. At the end there was no applause, only the stunned silence of a genuinely shocked audience. My wife and I returned to the Savoy Hotel, and I remember sitting there drinking red burgundy and saying: “A.H was a dramatic character inside a dramatic context: A mock trial in the jungles of South America. It was no different than listening to Macbeth after the murder of Lady McDuff and the children. Alec McCowan is a great actor; one must be shocked into pity and fear: that is what catharsis means.” Still I have never forgotten how far I fell into the logic of pure evil.

I have seen King Lears that did not break my heart; Richard the Thirds that did not appall me; I have seen a Bacchae that made me laugh out loud, Lord Pentheus’ head being carried about on a stick by his mother. These failed projects did not stun nor shock because tragedy was not accomplished, either because of incapacity on the part of the actors, or blighted mise en scene. Many elements can spoil a tragedy. However, the Medea of Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner in the touring production of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, did shock me: the murder of children by a mother offstage. We saw no violence, nor dead children; we saw only, children being brought to slaughter; we saw only bloody knives, and bloody hands, bloody clothing, much as one does in watching the scene just after Macbeth has slaughtered Duncan in his sleep. Here there was great acting and great mise en scene, and great dramaturgy. I sat appalled, shocked to the very marrow; while, next to me sat weeping, shuddering pity, a wife and mother of a small child, my own wee daughter. And, of course again, Medea and her sons, her husband, are all characters in a drama.

Twice I have watched Aunt Dan and Lemon and been stunned and shocked, not so much with emotion as with intellectual fury and outrage. These are the reasons why. In the Whistler production Jen O’Connor, as Lemon, opens the play. Her performance is assured and remarkable. Her voice is soothing and confident, in the moments most disturbing, genuinely brillant. Lemon is in an armchair; in this same armchair she will close out the play. All of the dramatic fragments, soliloquies, asides, tirades, and monologues are contained within this one direct address to the audience. “Hello, dear audience, dear good people who have taken yourselves out for a special treat, a night at the theater. Hello, little children. How sweet you are, how innocent. If everyone were just like you, perhaps the world would be nice again, perhaps we all would be happy again.” Note the coy, patronizing tone of this. It is a soft beginning as theatrical beginnings go. It is somewhat awkward but after all complimentary, soothing, like all bedtime stories are. Still, isn’t there something odd about the cosiness; isn’t there something odd, and well, smarmy? It is a dear audience, people who are good and dear. The audience is addressed as sweet, innocent children, perhaps. And if everyone in the world were like you, Dear Audience. perhaps the world would be nice again. But of course the audience isn’t and never could be just sweet like children, and perhaps you, Dear Audience, are part of the problem. Maybe, in fact you are the problem. So the play might just be an attack on our smug, uncomprehending self-regard, our assumed innocence and sweetness. “Dear people, come inside into my little flat, and I’ll tell you everything about my life.”

Lemon is 25 and she is telling us a story in order teach us a lesson, just as she has been taught by Aunt Dan and her lessons about Henry Kissinger and the bombing of North Viet Nam. Lemon’s story, her aside to the audience, is a version of what Aunt Dan did for her. “I used to read mysteries–detective novels–to put myself to sleep.” One might remember that mysteries, detective novels, are murder mysteries, they are, in their own way, soothing stories about murder and mayhem, which help put people asleep all over the world. “Lately I’ve been reading about the Nazi killing of the Jews instead.” And so, Dear Reader, we learn what is at the bottom of our little bedtime story. “There are a lot of books about the Nazi death camps. I was reading one last night about the camp called Treblinka.”

“In Treblinka, according to the book, they had these special sheds where the children and women undressed and had their hair taken off, and then they had a sort of narrow outdoor passageway, lined by fences, that led from these sheds all the way out to the gas chambers, and they called that passageway the Road to Heaven. And when the children and women were undressing in the sheds, the guards addressed them quite politely, and what the guards said was that they were going to be taken outside for a shower and disinfection–which happens to be a phrase you read so often in these books, again and again, ‘a shower and disinfection.’ ‘A shower and disinfection.’ The guards told them that they didn’t need to be worried about their clothes at all, because very soon they would be coming back to this very same room, and no one would touch their clothes in the meanwhile. But then once the women and children stepped out of the sheds onto the Road to Heaven, there were other guards waiting for them, and those guards used whips, and the women and children were made to run rapidly down the road and all the way into the chambers, which were tiled with orange and white tiles and looked like showers, but which were really killing chambers. And then the doors would be slammed shut and the poison would be pumped in until everyone was dead, twenty minutes later, or half an hour later.”

Now if there is one story that most people have heard about the Nazis, it is this one about the death camps and the gas. Note for this particular murder story it is about women and children, not men, except as guards, and perhaps this makes the story appalling but also cozy, more comfortable. The Road to Heaven might as well be the Yellow Brick Road. There is nothing wrong with being naked amongst women and children; their hair is “taken off” as opposed to brutal shearing. There are the good guards and the bad guards. And then Lemon explains about the humanity of the good guards and the Nazis in general, even while involved directly in mass murder. The sweet and innocent will only remain good for so long. The bedtime story tone disapears altogether.

“So apparently the Nazis had learned that it was possible to keep everyone calm and orderly when they were inside the sheds, but that as soon as they found themselves outside, naked, in that narrow passageway, they instinctively knew what was happening to them, and so guards were stationed there with whips to reduce the confusion to a sort of minimum. The strategy was to deal with them politely for as long as possible, and then to use whips when politeness no longer sufficed. Today, of course, the Nazis are considered dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they managed to to accomplish a great deal of what they wanted to do. They were certainly successfual against the Jews.”

So, having dumped the poison in as part of the special treat, Lemon goes on with her story telling, and who is she? She looks to be in her early 20s and drinks lots of celery and lime juice. She lives modestly on her parent’s savings; they have both died early in their 50s; her father was American and her mother English. Lemon doesn’t work, spends lots of time “just doing nothing, looking at the wall.” She doesn’t like television or radio, no crossword puzzles, no visitors, doesn’t follow sports, and she definitely doesn’t follow the news. “I hate reading the daily papers, and actually people who do read them in a way seem like idiots to me, because they get widly excited about every new person or thing that comes along, and they think that the world is about to enormously improve, and then a year later they’re shocked to learn that that new thing or that new person that was going to make everything wonderful all of a sudden was in fact just nothing or he was just a crook like everyone else, which is exactly what I would probably have guessed already.” This is also exactly how Lemon responds to Aunt Dan and all the people she introduces to Lemon. She gets wildly excited and thinks the world is about to enormously improve.

“Of course I haven’t lived much of a life, and I would never say I had. Most of my ‘sex,’ if you can call it that, has been with myself. And so many of my experiences have had to do with being sick, like visiting different doctors, falling down on my face in public buildings, throwing up in hallways in strange places, and things like that. So in a way I’m sitting here living in the past, and I don’t really have much of a past to live in. And also, of course, I should say that I’m not a brilliant person, and I’ve never claimed to be one. And actually most of the people I’ve known as an adult haven’t been that brillant either, which happens to suit me fine, because I don’t have the energy to deal with anybody brillant today.”

But what about those poeple in the past, were they brillant? Mother and Father? Aunt Dan and Henry Kissinger? Aren’t all the people in one’s past somehow brillant? Older, adult like one wants to grow up and be like, not old and past it like one never wants to be. You remember Mindy and Raimondo and the Brasilia Chantelle. “They had a vibraphone, a banjo, a sax, and a harp.” You remember Andy, Freddie, Flora and June? Not your ordinary combo–eh? Do you remember what we did last summer?

“…Because my most intense memories really go back to my childhood, but not so much to things that I did: instead I remember things I was told. And one of the times that was most intense for me–and that I’ve been thinking about especially in the last few days–is a certain summer I want to tell you about. And to describe that summer I have to tell you a little about my background and go a bit farther back into things. And you know, people talk about life as if the only things that matter are your own experiences, the things you saw or the things you did or the things that happened to you. But you see, to me that’s not true. It’s not true at all. To me what matters really is the people you knew, the things you learned from them, the things that influenced you deeply and made you what you are. So I may not have done very much in my life. And yet I really feel I’ve had a great life, because of what I’ve learned from the people I knew.”

The schwarmerei, the melange, the fragmented dramatic sketches of Aunt Dan and Lemon, the afore mentioned stage business of soliloquies, monologues, tirades, and asides, are, well, sketchy, insubstantial, distracting. But distracting they are meant to be. We have Mother and Father and Lemon’s eating disorder at an early age. We have “using your brain,” orgy parties, gambling miracles, Americans in England, prostitution as LuLu life-force. “They’re all academics, they’re scholars, they’re writers…” We have Oxford at dawn, reading English poetry aloud. “The sound of her voice was so beautiful. It was so soothing. It made everyone feel calm and at peace.”

Then, of course, there is Raimondo’s murder onstage. Mindy drugs his drink, blows him onstage. Then she ties him up and strangles him with her stockings. We’re meant to be appalled at this, but of course Raimondo is a chauvinist pig and a liar, if not an outright moral scumbag, so we are meant, I guess, to enjoy this demise of a police informer. This latter piece of sleazy catharsis pops out of one of Aunt Dan’s stories; but the stories are not all gloom and schadenfruede.

There are film houses at Oxford showing all night vampire movies on Saturday nights, “and of course all the students would bring these huge bottles of wine into the theatre with them…We’d sort of crawl out–dripping with blood…and then…we’d put on some record like Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night…I mean, Lemon, you know, that Transfigured Night could just make you squeal, it’s just as if Arnold Schoenberg was inside your dress and running his hands over your entire body.” Clearly, Lemon, as a child, was missing out on a lot of thing’s sensually.

The Whistler presentations of this material are sketchy as well. The drinks business alone (celery and lime juice, and extended booze bottles), is enough to make one despair of any sense of mise-en-scene. Slosh this, spill that, clink this. The necessity of doubling parts is made even less plausible in a tiny theatre like the Piano Factory, and the wing-it direction of the drinks business is duplicated in the indefinite orgy-lounging on the bed. Raimondo’s removal of Mindy’s stockings, the crotch-kissing, and the strangulation, all gain from awful proximity and the scene is a throat-scratching, cough-catching, gruesome bit of Grand-Guignol. The ensemble players in the production were Melissa Baroni, Scott Sweatt, Mac Young, Melissa Barker, and Alejandro Simoes

The most developed dramatic scenes of the play, the arguments over Henry Kissinger, between Lemon’s mother and Aunt Dan, also provide us with the one truly likeable person in the play, the mother, and she provides us, I think, with the one sensible direction to take after the close of play. The mother is played well by Baroni. Meg Taintor takes on the daunting role of Aunt Dan, and if less than incandescent through out, her performance has its stronger moments. It is clear in Aunt Dan’s earlier speeches to Lemon that she is suffering from mania bordering on dementia. “Now Lemon, I have to tell you something very important about myself…It is that I never–no matter how annoyed or angry I may be–I never, ever shout at a waiter. And as a matter of fact, I never shout at a porter or a clerk in a bank or any body else who is in a weaker position in society than me.” Who is Aunt Dan? Lemon tells us she is one of the youngest Americans to ever teach at Oxford, although none of her speeches would actually indicate she is an academic or scholar, except that mention of a porter. Her rants do indicate somekind of intelligence in desperate straits. “So now almost everyone who isn’t at least a minister of foreign affairs feels that there’s something wrong with what they do.” Perhaps, even, the academic teaching at Oxford feels this is so. “Each one feels I shouldn’t be a laborer, I shouldn’t be a clerk, I shouldn’t be a minor official! I’m better than that!” And the result of all this dissatisfaction with our mediocre places in life?

“So what’s going to happen? We’re going to start seeing these embittered typists typing up their documents incorrectly–and then passing them on to these embittered contractors, who will misintepret them to these huge armies of embittered carpenters and embittered mechanics, and a year later or two years later, we’re going to start seeing these ten-story buildings in every city collapsing to the ground, because each one of them is missing some crucial screw in some crucial girder. Buildings will collapse. Planes will come crashing out of the sky. Babies will be poisoned by bad baby food. How can it happen any other way?” Lemon, who hears this when she’s only eleven years old, remarks, “I would watch the wind gently playing with her hair.” Later after vampire films and transfigured nights we will hear about someone who was “at least a minister of foreign affairs.”

Henry Kissinger, who has recently turned 88, and published a sixteenth book, On China, turns out to be Aunt Dan’s hero and obsession. “Usually Aunt Dan didn’t care about politics. In fact I remember her saying, ‘When it comes to politics, I’m an ignoramous.’ But there were certain people who Aunt Dan really loved, and one of them was the diplomat Henry Kissinger, who was working for the American government at the time I was eleven. And it reached a kind of point that she was obssessed with Kissinger. When people would criticize him, she would really become upset.”

One wonders, how much did Aunt Dan know about this “cheerful bachelor in Washington and Hollywood…going out with lots of different girls.” Had she known his family had fled Germany in 1938 and ended up in the United States? Had she known he ended up in the US Army, and as a 22 year-old sergeant, fluent in German, went back to defeated Germany in 1945? Perhaps. “I don’t care if he goes out with beautiful girls or likes to ride around on a yacht with millionaires and sheikhs…Look at his face! Look at his fact! He can stay up night after night after night, having a wonderful time with beautiful girls, but he will always have that look on his face, my Lemon, that look of melancholy–that look that can’t be erased, because he has seen the power of evil in the world.”

The play, such as it is, does not make clear whether she knew about the 27 year-old Kissinger as an undergraduate at Harvard writing a 357 page senior honors thesis on “The Meaning of History.” We do learn she saw him once in person. “It was last winter, and I had a date to have lunch one day at this club in Washington. Well, as I entered the rather formal room where one waited for one’s luncheon partner in this rather disgusting, rather unbearable club–and I was waiting to meet a rather disgusting, rather unbearable friend, a member of the club–I saw, sitting in an armchair, reading a large manuscript, Henry Kissinger.” Now this crush Aunt Dan had was not unique, or particularly odd. John G. Stoessinger has noted in his The Anguish of Power, “There was a time when Henry Kissinger could do no wrong. While men around him crumbled, he went on to greater heights. Not only did he wield great power; he was also fervently admired, as a negotiator, he was compared to a magician. Next to him, great stars paled into insignicance in the political firmament. He was like a comet blazing brightly in a darkened sky.” Still, Aunt Dan has a crush.

“The boastful exuberance of the public Kissinger was nowhere to be seen in this private moment. Kissinger’s thoughts were not on himself, they were on what was written in that large manuscript–and from that same downward look you could tell that the manuscript was not some theoretical essay, not some analysis of something that happened a hundred years ago.” Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation was a study of the diplomacy of the early 19th century, about Metternich and Lord Castlereagh, and the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and its durable peace treaty, which left continental Europe in peace for 100 years. No, Aunt Dan insists this manuscript in Kissinger’s lap must be a “document describing some crucial problem which had to be dealt with by Kissinger soon…” In A World Restored Kissinger writes: “All the elements of Metternich’s later policy are already apparent in the period: the careful preparation, the emphasis on obtaining the widest possible moral concensus, the utilization of the advesary’s psychology to destroy him utterly.” Whether Aunt Dan knew this material or not one can’t help notice how powerfully and astutely it describes Wallace Shawn’s own dramaturgy.

Whatever the basis of Aunt Dan’s obsession with Henry Kissinger, what matters in the play is that it provides for a radical critique of American foreign policy in the 1970s, the 1980s, coming on up to the Arab Spring and events in the Middle-East: Libya, Iraq, and further east, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “I mean, all right now, Lemon, you know, let’s face it–we all know there are countries in this world that are not ideal. They’re poor. They’re imperfect. Their governments are corrupt. Their water is polluted. But the people in some of these countries are very happy–they have their own farms, they have their own shops, their own political parties, their own newspapers, their own lives that they’re leading quietly day by day. And in a lot of these countries the leaders have always been friendly to us, and we’ve been friendly to them and helped them and supported them.” Is this Iran in 1979? Is this Viet Nam in 1973? Or Libya in 2011?

“But then what often happens is that there are always some young intellectuals in all of these countries, and they’ve studied economics at the Sorbonne or Berkeley, and they come home, and they decide to become rebels, and they take up arms, and they eventually throw out the leaders who were friendly to us, and they takeover the whole country. Well, pretty soon they start closing the newspapers, and they confiscate the farms, and they set up big camps way out in the contry. And people start disappearing. People start getting shot. Well now, this is exactly the kind of situation that Kissinger faces every day. What should he do?” This is exactly the kind of situation Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, faces today in Yemen and Bahrain and in Libya.

“What should he do? Should he give some support to our old friends who are trying to fight these young rebels? Or should he just accept the situation and let the young rebels do what they like?” Similar grave questions faced Present Bill Clinton in Ruwanda and the Balkan nations. “Well Lemon, do you know–it’s as if these journalists don’t care what he does, so long as they can think of a way to put it in some horrible light! I mean, does he decide to let the rebels do what they like? Well then, everyone will say, ‘This is very unpleasant! All our old friends are being rounded up and slaughtered! Why didn’t Kissinger do something to protect these people?’ But does he decide instead to help our old friends and fight the young rebels? Well then, he is a bully! He’s a thug! He’s a warped, raging, vengeful pig who’s trying to show off his masculinity by staging a battle with these pitiful, weak, tiny rebels!” All these are sound remarks about appalling situations. However Aunt Dan is an hysterical person, an emotionally and intellectually unstable person, speaking to an eleven year-old. “You know, it’s the hypocrisy of it all that makes me want to just crawl to the toilet and vomit, Lemon. I can’t belive people can sink so low!”

The eleven-year old decides to become a love slave for Henry Kissinger. “As for myself, the truth was that I was quite prepared to serve Kissinger as his peronal slave–I imagined he liked young girls as slaves.” But Lemon begins to realize that a lot of people didn’t see Kissinger in the same light as she and Aunt Dan did, her own mother for instance. “In fact, mother didn’t like him even at all–just not one bit–and throughout that summer, when Mother and Aunt Dan would chat in the garden in the afternoons, whenever the conversation turned to the subject of Kissinger…things would suddenly become extremely tense. And, naturally, at the time I wasn’t in a position to see these conversations as steps toward a final split between Mother and Aunt Dan but that, of course, was exactly what they were.”

Lemon’s mother is sound, consistent, and powerful on Henry Kissinger; her arguments could aptly apply to the Clintons or Barack Obama. In response to Aunt Dan’s question asking if she, the mother, thinks Kissinger likes “bombing a village full of poor peasants,” she replies, “Dan, if you’re asking whether I think he personally enjoys it–I have no idea. I don’t know. I don’t know him.”

“Well Dan, after all, there are people who for one reason or another…just can’t control their lust for blood, or they just give in literallly to that side of their nature…No, Dan, I don’t know him, really. I have no idea. I’m sure he believes that what he is doing is right–that he can’t avoid it…But you know, he could believe that he had to do it–he could feel that he was only striking out against a danger, an immediate, terrible danger, a threat to America or the world–but you know still it could be…a delusion, actually, Dan, or what if it isn’t really so utterly crucial?…Does he have a heart which is capable of weighing them correctly?…Well, I suppose I want him to assess the threat he is facing…with scrupulous honesty…and then I want him to think about those people. Yes, I suppose I do want him to weep and sob at this desk. Yes. Then let him make his decisions.”

That a single play can bring such gravitas, lyricism, intellectual power, and moral ambition is remarkable, and one of the primary reasons to recognize Shawn as a major American playwright. Who else in the United States brings so much to the stage? Kissinger himself has remarked that “Genuis cannot be quantified; nor can catastrophe or tragedy.” We know evil men can evidence genius. Dramatists of genius can produce great drama, genuine tragedy, that is also deliberately perverse. At the end of Euripides’ Medea, she is allowed to get away Scot-free through sorcery; deus ex machina, flying dragons, allow her to escape from her crimes, fraticide, infanticide, and all the rest, her truly appalling crimes.

There is a question of perversion in Shawn’s play as well. And it has nothing to do with the arguments over Kissinger and realpolitik; it has nothing to do with the onstage murder of Raimondo or Aunt Dan’s callous desription of its aftermath. “She had to put the guy in this plastic sack, kick him down her back stairs, haul him outside, and stick him into the trunk of a car that was parked in an alley.” The perversion comes in the direct address of Lemon to the audience, whoever happens to be there one night in Providence or at the Piano Factory. This direct address opens and closes the play. An interval or intermission is not in the cards. “The action of this play is continuous. There should be no pauses at all, except where indicated, despite the fact that the setting changes.”

Despite Lemon’s development as a character she is in essence the voice of Wallace Shawn and he is accusing all of us, Dear Audience, we educated children, pretendling to be sweet and innocent, he is accusing us of living a life of comfort based on activities just like those of the Nazis in the Shoah, or Holocaust. There are equivalences made: Jews, American Indians, Communists. And finally there are cockroaches, because Lemon and Shawn will not have human compassion; that will not do. There is underneath this roach business the nasty joke: Why do we enjoy tragedy? Raimondo didn’t arouse compassion, but as we shall see, a squashed, crippled cockroach is all we get for compassion, jo jo catharsis.

“The thing is that the Nazis were trying to create a certain way of life for themselves. That’s obvious if you read these books I’m reading. They believed that the primitive society of the Germanic tribes had created a life of wholeness and meaning for each person. They blamed the sickness and degeneracy of society as they knew it–before they came to power, of course–on the mixture of races that had taken place since that tribal period. In their opinion, all the destructive values of greed, materialism, competitiveness, dishonesty, and so on, had been brought into their society by non-Germanic races. They may have been wrong about it, but that was their belief. So they were trying to create, or re-create, some sort of society of brothers, bound together by a certain code of loyalty and honor. So to make that attempt, they had to remove the non-Germans, they had to eliminate interbreeding. They were trying to create a certain way of life. Now today, of course, everybody says, ‘How awful! How awful!’ And they were certainly ruthless and thorough in what they did. But the mere fact of killing human beings in order to create a certain way of life is not something that exactly distinguishes the Nazis from eerybody else.”

Here one notes the rant and dementia of Aunt Dan or the Wally Shawn of My Dinner With Andre who has such great guilt over eating quail and drinking a very good bottle of wine. That the Nazis are unique? “That’s absurd. When any people feels that its hopes for a desirable future are threatened by some other group, they always do the same thing. The only question is the degree of the threat.” Lemon/Shawn examples Communists, then moves onto the American Indians. “…When the Europeans first came to America, well, the Indians were there. The Indians fought them for every scrap of land. There was no chance to build the kind of society the Europeans wanted with the Indians there….And so they decided to kill the Indians. So it becomes absurd to talk about the Nazis as if the Nazis were unique.”

What happens, however, when one ignores the uniqueness of each historical event, is that relativisim comes into explanations and defenses, and a 90 year-old Hitler can defend his actions by mentioning Stalin and the Gulag Archipalago. Mao’s Great Leap Forward becomes various different kinds of first encounters in North and South America. And then let’s go ahead and get wooly about fur coats and become Vegan, and see pest extermination as the same thing as eating chicken or slaughtering Jews.

“Each one of us has his own fear of pain and his own fear of death. It’s true for people and for every type of creature that lives. I remember once squashing a huge brown roach–I slammed it with my shoe, but it wasn’t dead and I sat and watched it, and it’s an awful period just before any creature dies–any insect or animal–when you’re watching the stupid, ignorant things that that creature is trying to do to fight off its death–whether it’s moving its arms or its legs, or it’s kicking, or it’s trying to crawl to another part of the floor, or it’s trying to lift itself off the ground–those things can’t prevent death?–but the creature is trying out every gesture it’s capable of, hoping, hoping that something will help it. And I remember how I felt as I watched that big brown roach squirming and crawling, and yet it was totally squashed, and I could see its insides slowly come oozing out. And I’m sure that the bigger a thing is, the more you hate to see it.”

The above is surely Shawn not Lemon. Shawn has zeroed in on three specific scenes of death: the fairy-tale demise of the women and children on the Road to Heaven; then the amoral, repugnant murder of Raimondo; but why is the brutal attack, and slow, agonizing death of the big brown roach the most disturbing and awful? Why are pity and fear so perversely located within the death of a bug? What would Herr G.E. Lessing think of this? Goethe? Thomas Mann?

Shawn has dealt with the Jews on other occassions. In his 2008 introduction to A Good Night Out and A Thought Part in Three Parts he wrote:  “…I feel I’ve been frequently reminded, for example, that the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich played Mozart on the violin during the same period in which he planned the extermination of the Jews of Europe. But my speculation on this, if I may offer one, is that perhaps, because of his history and who he was, Commander Heydrich did not fully absorb the human possibilities that others have grasped through listening to the music of Mozart. Similarly, the young English major Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people in a famous massacre at a college in Virginia, even though a kindly professor of English had given him private tutorials in creative writing and had even tried to ask him about his own problems. She did her best, but Cho was too deeply trapped in the quicksand of his own mind, and the lessons in creative writing didn’t save him. He didn’t hear enough, or understand enough, of what his teacher was trying to tell him. Mozart, being a composor of music rather than a supernatural creature from outerspace, was not up to the task of convincing Reinhard Heydrich to get off the path he was on and move to another one. But just as the failure of Cho’s teacher can hardly lead us to say that no kindly teacher has ever helped or saved a student, so it seems preposterous to leap from Mozart’s inability to reconstruct Reinhard Heydrich to the claim that composors, painters, and writers have not influenced the world by offering humanity their wisdom and their vision of what life could be.”

The Nazi playing Mozart on the violin while working out the structural details of the Final Solution is even more of a worrisome cliche than “shower and disinfection, shower and disinfection.” The thinking and the very language itself is sloppy on Mozart, and the discussion of Seung-Hui Cho is just plain wrong-headed. Note the stress on his being an “English major,” note the “kindly professor of English.” Note the sarcastic tone of “private tutorials in creative writing,” which, of course did not save Cho. Asking Cho about his personal problems did not save the 32 people who were “killed” in the “famous massacre,” which Shawn fails to consider. The “failure” Shawn mentions is that of the unfortunate English teacher, who, seemingly, just didn’t get the job done. What is missing from Shawn’s “wisdom and…vision of what life could be” is compassion. His assault on the audience’s self-esteem has continued with The Fever, The Designated Mourner, etc.

“We have to admit that we don’t really care. And I think that last admission is what really makes people go mad about the Nazis, because in our own society we have this kind of cult built up around what people call the feeling of ‘compassion.’ I remember my mother screaming all the time, ‘Compassion! Compassion! You have to have compasssion for other people! You have to have compassion for other human beings!…So you have to say finally, well, fine, if there are all these people like my mother who want to go around talking about compassion all day, well, fine that’s their right…Here is somthing you’ve heard about to the point of nausea all your life, but do you personally, actually remember feeling it…?”

Dear Audience, have you? What was it like? Dear Audience, direct address to you?

“Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Aunt Dan…It’s easy to say we should all be loving and sweet, but meanwhile we’re enjoying a certain way of life–and we’re actually living–due to the existense of certain other people who are willing to take the job of killing on their own backs, and it’s not a bad thing every once in a while to admit that that’s the way we’re living, and even to give those certain people a tiny, fractional crumb of thanks.”

Dear Reader, Dear Audience Member, we’ve been had; I’ve been had, you’ve been had; and remember, never yell out “Fire!” in a crowded theatre unless its absolutely necessary.

Stanley Richardson is a writer and dramaturg, and Der Zuschauer correspondent for the Northeast Corridor. Copyright 2011 by Der Zuschauer, all rights reserved.

“…instead of the irregular and comprehensive plots–the rich discursive dialogue–the ramblings of fancy–the magic creations of poetry–the rapid succession of incidents and characters–the soft, flexible, and ever–varying diction–and the flowing, continuous, and easy versification, which characterized those masters of the golden time, we have had tame, formal, elaborate, and stately compositions–meagre stories–few personages–characters decorous and consistent, but without nature or spirit–a guarded, timid, classical diction–ingenious and methodical disquisitions–turgid or sententious declamations–and a solem and monotonous strain of versification…”

This extract was taken from the Edinburgh Review of February 1822, to be found in various libraries around the globe, in this case from the wonderful Tisch Library at Tufts University in the United States. More to follow as our associates are able. Max Klinger, Editor in Chief.