Read The Habit of Art: A Play Online
Authors: Alan Bennett
The Habit of Art: A Play (5 page)
Author
It’s a quotation.
Fitz
All I need to know.
Stuart
How do you want to do it?
Auden
How do you usually do it?
Stuart
I don’t. I’m normally doing the sucking, in which case I kneel. Can you kneel?
Auden
It’s maybe not a good idea. This is England all over. Hasn’t even mastered fellatio.
Stuart
Are you sure this is what you want to do? I’d be happy with a straight hand-job.
Auden
I wouldn’t…and I am the client and I’m getting nervous about the time.
Stuart
I’m in no rush. Would you like me to take my clothes off?
Auden
What on earth for?
Stuart
I thought you might like it.
Auden
Not particularly, and besides it takes time.
Stuart
We’re not catching a train.
Auden
Get up on the chair. Come
on
.
Stuart
For fuck’s sake.
He gets up on the chair, lowers his trousers and mimes lowering his pants. The clock strikes six.
Auden
Too late.
Stuart
Too late for what?
Auden
It’s six o’clock.
Stuart
So what are you going to do? Turn into a pumpkin? Why does it have to be six o’clock?
Auden
It doesn’t have to be six o’clock. It has to be before six o’clock. It’s always been six o’clock. It was six o’clock in New York.
Stuart
So? That makes it one o’clock here. Does your dick not know the time difference? I was just beginning to feel like it.
Auden
I’ll pay. Don’t get exercised over that.
Stuart
I was just beginning to feel like it. You don’t have such a thing as a tissue?
Auden shakes his head.
I somehow didn’t think you would.
Author
(
puts up hand
) Hello!
Fitz
Our author has his hand up.
Author
I hadn’t thought of it getting so far.
Kay
The director would like it to go even further.
Author
It’s at the end we need to see him.
Kay
It will only be his bum, darling.
Tim
And I don’t mind.
Author
The play is not about cocksucking.
Fitz
In this instance I tend to agree. And speaking for myself the last thing I want is a nightly vision of Timothy’s listless but I’m sure not uncomely genitalia.
Tim
I could alter that. The listless part.
Fitz
Child. It is too late and you are the wrong gender.
Kay
We’ll have a little look at it tomorrow. On we go.
Stuart
Do you want me to call again?
Auden
Provided we do it on time.
Stuart
I was on time. I’m building up a bit of a clientele in the university. North Oxford particularly. You get a better class of person than you do in the bus station.
Auden
(
paying him
) I can imagine.
Stuart
I shouldn’t be taking this. I’ve done nothing. Only I haven’t got anything else to offer. I could tidy up.
This plainly would not be welcome.
Auden
If you want to earn your money…tell me something I don’t know.
Stuart
Come again.
Auden
Everybody has some expertise. What have you learned? What has life taught you?
Stuart
Nothing much. I’m young. So far, the only thing I know about – I’m not sure how to put this – the only thing I know about are dicks.
Auden
So tell me about that.
Stuart
You want me to talk dirty?
Auden
No. Certainly not.
Stuart
Because I can do that. I go to a vicar in North Oxford. I do that for him.
Auden
Anglican, I hope? Church of England?
Stuart
Actually I think he’s Welsh.
Auden
Tell me about your clients.
Stuart
I can’t do that.
Auden
Why?
Stuart
I’m a professional. Anyway, what is there to tell?
Auden
Are many of them uncircumcised?
Stuart
You can’t always make out. More uncircumcised in the bus station than in North Oxford.
Auden
I was circumcised at the age of seven, which is rather late. Boys who hadn’t been circumcised shocked and fascinated me. I was allowed to go to the pictures with the grocer’s son. He hadn’t been. The genitals are fascinating, too, because they’re shape-shifting. Subject to desire obviously, but to fear and cold and…Yes?
ASM
(
prompting
) ‘The innate propensity…’
Auden
The innate propensity of all flesh to creep.
Stuart
Yes.
Auden
The penis has a personal character every bit as much as its owner and very often the two are quite different. Have you found that?
Stuart
A bit. I’ve got this old guy. I think he’s a professor, small, really ordinary. You’d never suspect what he’s got down his trousers. It’s amazing.
Auden
Men are incongruously…Yes?
ASM
(
prompting
) ‘Men are incongruously equipped…’
Auden
Men are incongruously equipped…Yes?
ASM
(
prompting
) ‘…in their very essence…’
Auden
Men are incongruously equipped in their very essence…
Fitz
I cannot learn this fucking stuff. I cannot do it.
Awkward pause.
Author
Mr Fitzpatrick. Is it me? Do I make you nervous?
Fitz
No, but you are in my eyeline.
Author
I’m sorry. I will remove myself.
He moves and sits down again.
Fitz
Oh, I thought you meant you were going.
Author
No fear.
Fitz
This stuff about circumcision: this is you, I take it?
Author
No. Him. It’s in his notebooks. Why?
Fitz
I just feel it diminishes him.
Author
‘The facts of a life are the truth of a life.’
Fitz
It’s like the peeing in the basin. We keep focusing on his frailties, putting a frame around them. It’s – as he says himself – impudent. It’s impertinent.
Author
The words are his, not mine.
Fitz
There’s no nobility to him. No…grandeur.
Author
He’s human. He’s old.
Fitz
And he talks about dicks. Where – this is what the audience will be thinking – where is the poetry?
Kay
Shall we take five?
Donald
You see this is where I think my speech about biography that Stephen cut would come in. ‘I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men…’
Kay
Tomorrow.
She talks aside to Fitz.
Is what’s bothering you that they won’t like you?
Fitz
No. Though they won’t. I hadn’t realised how unsympathetic he is. How…coarse. You see, this is why I think he should be reading all the time to give him more…credence.
Kay
No, darling. The reason why you think he should be reading all the time is so that you can keep a crib in the book.
Fitz
No.
Kay
You did it in
Hedda Gabler
.
Fitz
Did I?
Kay
You did it in
Vanya
. If he hadn’t been blind you’d have done it in
Oedipus
.
Fitz
You don’t know what it’s like.
Kay
I know it’s always like this…until you learn it.
Fitz
He doesn’t help, sitting there. ‘Mr Fitzpatrick.’ They don’t realise, playwrights, that you’ve got to come to it, find a way through. I’ll spend a penny. I may be some time.
Kay hugs him. Fitz goes out.
Tim
Why doesn’t he just…well…learn it?
Kay
It gets harder as you get older. There’s more in your head already.
Kay is now with the Author.
He was much better yesterday. You make him nervous.
Author
He doesn’t know it.
Kay
But he’s getting there. We haven’t had a run before.
Author
A run? You call this a
run
? My eighty-year-old grandmother with two plastic hips and crippled with arthritis could do a better run than this. Besides –
Kay
Besides what, darling?
Author
He just doesn’t look like Auden.
Kay
Well, I agree he’s a bit on the big side, but this is theatre, darling. It’s not about appearance. Stephen wants to get away from facile resemblance in favour of the reality beneath. Henry doesn’t look like Britten. He’s tall, but that’s as far as it goes. And Humphrey Carpenter was quite good-looking.
A remark which Donald overhears, though he’s not meant to, and is unsurprisingly depressed. Kay now takes it out on the ASM.
You don’t ever do what you did.
ASM
What did I do?
Kay
Correct the actor. Give him the line, yes –
The Sea and the Mirror
or whatever – but don’t make him look a fool.
ASM
Sorry.
Kay
You wouldn’t do it to a child, and that’s what actors are, children. You keep them happy.
Author
Nobody wants to keep me happy.
Kay
You don’t have to face the audience. You don’t have to go over the top like they do. (
Suddenly turning on Tim.
) Are you wearing makeup?
Tim
Not so’s you’d notice.
Kay
But why, darling?
Tim
I’m too old.
Kay
Darling, you’re twenty-five.
Tim
I’m twenty-nine. I’m supposed to be a rent boy. I’m not a boy at all.
Kay
It’s only a phrase. You’re a…you’re a rent person. It’s theatre, love, the magic of. Look at Edith Evans. She thought she was young so she was.
Tim
She wasn’t playing a rent boy.
Fitz comes back.
Kay
Now, where had we got to?
Fitz
Oh. I’m still on about dicks, surprise, surprise. I just feel he goes on, that’s all.
Author
He did go on. That was what he was like. He went on. And on. If you can show me a way of him going on without him actually going on I’d be very grateful.
Kay
Thank you. Tim!
Stuart
I didn’t know dicks were the kind of thing you could have a conversation about. I didn’t know it was something I had to offer. In a civilised way, I mean, not as a come-on.
Auden
Why not? It’s human. Nothing more so. I wrote a poem about it once.
Stuart
Yeah? Say it.
Auden
No. It was bad.
Carpenter
(
popping up
) This was ‘The Platonic Blow’.
Fitz
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Donald
What?
Fitz
I didn’t know you were going to be there, that’s all.
Donald
I’ve got to be somewhere.
Fitz
Do I know he’s there?
Author
No. He isn’t there.
Donald
So where am I? Am I in the mind?
Author
It’s not important.
Donald
It is to me. I need to know. Listen. Let’s decide this. I feel so
spare
. Can we go back to the start?
Fitz
Oh, please God.
Donald
I am discovered interviewing Auden after his return to Oxford in 1972. The interview is cut short by the arrival of a rent boy for whom Auden has briefly mistaken me. At which point my part in the story being over, the audience will expect me to leave the stage, but I don’t because…
Author
Because being the author of a literary biography of Auden, and ten years or so after that a biography of Benjamin Britten, you are in a unique position to give a commentary on their lives. You have become…the storyteller.
Donald
Mr Know-All. I just feel I irritate. I’m in the way.
Fitz
That’s because you are.
Kay
No, darling, no.
Author
You irritate him, I agree. But biographers always irritate their subjects.
Donald
If this were television I’d just be a voice-over and nobody would even notice.
Pause.
I just feel…I just feel I’m…
a device
.
Kay
A device? Oh no, darling. No.
Donald
I am. I am.
Kay
You’re not a device, darling. I’ve never thought you were a device.
ASM
And even if you are a device it’s a very good device, because otherwise they’d all be having to tell each other stuff they know already.
Kay
That’s right. Device is good.
Henry
And anyway, what’s a device? Horatio’s a device.
The Fool is a device.
