Such As What? Find It. One Thing. Getting Married
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“ Such as what? Find it. One thing. Getting married. (She crumples up her parents’ marriage certificate in her hand and throws it away.) Being born? Being dead? They’re mistakes.” The very passion of the dismissal shows she cares .... A moment later she refuses Johnnie’s challenge to kill herself. Her rare moments of fear in the play come when she faces the force with which things matter to her—such as her hesitation over searching the boxes when the first one reveals a dress redolent with her long dead and loved mother’s smell. (What Johnnie is afraid of is that things should come to matter.) The power that makes the character of Hester a great literary conception comes from the tension between the opposite poles of her caring. On the one side she hates. Her hatred seems all consuming. She hates her memories, she hates her father, she hates her present life, she hates the pious woman she met on the train, she hates the respectable world. “ Happy families is fat men crawling onto frightened women. And when you’ve had enough he doesn’t stop ‘ lady ’.” She has aborted to rid herself of an unwanted baby. She can say: “ The whole damned thing is a mistake. The sooner they blow it up with their atom bombs the better.” And yet she searches. And her search, after all, is for “ compensation ” in the broadest sense, not merely a chance for a few months of better life, but for the point of life, the reality of love, her own identity, perhaps even—though she hates the religious label—for God. Part of why she fails to find is because she fails until too late to make a sufficient identification between the goal of her search and her sense of the mother whom one side of her despises for her subjugation and early defeat. The mother after all embodied the reality of love. Only after a flare of hate in which she declares “ There is no God! There never was! ” and unwittingly flings her mother’s dress to the floor with the other rubbish and loses its smell, does Hester make the identification, in terms that are also the clearest and intensest expression of the positive side of her caring: “ It’s gone. Too late again. Just a rag. An empty rag. That’s how it happened. She got lost among the rubbish. I forgot she was here—in here, alive, to touch, to talk to, to love. I wanted to. The hating was hard. Hate! Hate! So much to hate I forgot she was here .... She was clean. I stink Mommie. I’m dirty and I stink.” Hester’s failure to find, or her loss after finding, is terrible. Terrible. Partly because—since she strips the labels off experience as intensely as Johnnie applies them—her search does not start from any mere idea but comes out of a pure and absolute hunger. And partly it is terrible, intolerable as I have suggested, 75 because of her aliveness to us, her intimate involving presence as a literary creation. Like Johnnie she is magnificently incarnated: though her body stinks she is revolted by Johhnie’s apathetic squalour; her memories include “ windy days with nothing to do,” “ the way the grass went grey around the laundry drain,” “ that special ironing smell ” ; she is placed for us in a world of impersonal hired rooms and unfriendly hotel lounges; the contents of her suitcase include a tin of condensed milk. Fugard is a poet of the familiar. Morry and Zach, for all their difference, were bound to gether by a blood knot: they were complementary to each other. Johnnie and Hester are absolute opposites, contradictions of each other. They can only be brought into conjunction for the briefest interval—hello and goodbye. This schematic contrast between them is the strongest evidence that the story of this play is not meant merely as a story but as a parable with several possible applications of meaning. I suggest that the meaning will go beyond the symbolic schemes that can be neatly articulated, but let me glance at one or two of those schemes. For example, the Afrikaner volk, much of whose history and culture is alluded to. Johnnie the conservative element, Hester the rebellious element, their father the Afrikaner past. The view, then, seems desperately pessimistic, since neither side has a healthy victory: the real triumph belongs to the dead and suf focating past. The same or parallel divisions appear in other peoples, smaller groups, individual minds. And one can apply the symbo lism on the philosophical level as well: if the father is that God who has died for modern man, what reverberations there are in the way Johnnie uses his supposed presence in the next room to subdue and silence Hester! The interest of such applications is obvious and strong. But meaning on this level implies intention, a message, an exhortation. And if, in the case of each interpretation, we are caught between Hester’s defeat and Johnnie’s surrender, the exhortation becomes a call to despair, the message threatens to turn out a meaningless “ What the hell! ” This would be a not unfashionable upshot. It is what the Beat writers have to say. It seems to be the burden of that paradoxical genius who is one of Fugard’s particular heroes and influences, Samuel Beckett. But I would regard Hello and Goodbye as chiefly a failure if this were the result. In faet, the meaningless pessimism is pre cluded by the qualities that chiefly account for the play’s im mediate (theatre-live) impaet—the aliveness of the writing, and the autonomous aliveness of Hester. Though frustrated over the compensation, Hester has clearly grown in the course of this search, at least in self-knowledge, self-awareness. Halfway through she admits she is looking for more than she thought she had come for—and her last words are: “ I’m too far away from my life. I want to get back to it, in it, be it, be myself again the way I was when 1 walked in. It will come I suppose. But at this moment—there she is waiting, here she is going and somebody’s watching all of it. But it isn’t God. It’s me.” The point is, surely, that she will always now, in this God-like way, be different. She is defeated, but she remains alive—and life has always the power to change both itself and the universe. Balkema’s mean edition is not worthy of this play’s importance. THE BEGINNERS, by Dan Jacobson. Published by Weiclenfeld and Nicolson, London. I don’t understand this book. Not that there is anything ob scure in what it recounts or in the style—on the contrary, every thing seems as ordinary and straightfoward as breakfast—but 1 can’t find what holds it all together. What scheme or theme or feeling makes just this lot of material, presented in just this way and this order with these comments, necessary, alive, a single working whole? One wouldn’t ask such a question if there were a story making its own visible progress through all the parts of this very long narrative and reaching its end by the end. But this seems to be an anti-story novel. An enormous number of things happen during its course, and there are many small stories embedded, either complete or in fragments or in bare outline in its fabric: Life wants to tell stories, and this book presents a hefty slice of life. But it is as though Dan Jacobson had set out to frustrate life’s story-making proclivity: again and again he begins a tale and then drops it out of sight, or else traces a remote chain of accidents consequent on an event that has no story-link with them. But perhaps I am wrong, and life is like that—against the telling of clear, neat stories—and Jacobson is being more than commonly faithful to life. All the same, as far as a novel is concerned all this gives us is a negative quantity, absence of a story, with the possible advantage that this could force us to look deeper into the material for its unifying principle. What could this principle be? The title and the epigraph (“ It is not thy duty to complete the task; but neither art thou free to desist from it ”) should serve as clues. And indeed, the book has many references to beginners and beginnings. It opens with an episode (a good story this) involving Jewish immigrants to South Africa early this century, in which an errand begun is not completed. Later we have several cases of men beginning love affairs and abandoning them. An African learning to read at a night school refers to his class as “ the beginners.” A man embarks on a political career and drops it for the sake of the woman he desires. Another begins as a successful author and ends as a cynical politician. A stowaway from Cape Town is discovered and trans-shipped in mid-ocean to be returned to his port of embarkation. Someone starts a business and dies before he can reap the benefits. We are shown initiation ceremonies at a university; Jewish youths preparing for emigration on a Trans vaal training farm; Zionist pioneers on a new kibbutz in the newly established state of Israel; newcomers to London groping, losing the selves they brought, attempting fresh beginnings, in that bewildering world.