Spectator's Journal/There Will Always Be English
Shaw, Peter
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THERE WILL ALWAYS BE ENGLISH by Peter shaw For some years now the protagonists of the most interesting English plays have been living in the past. Typically an elderly,...
...Nowadays, as his colleague Miss Garth has remarked, swans are a "protected species...
...a third suffers through his teenaged daughter's mental breakdown, long illness, and death...
...The elderly protagonist, however, has been replaced by a man in middle age...
...The staff of five is Peter Shaw has written for Commentary, the New Criterion, and other periodicals...
...Few in the audience, after all, could be expected to notice that the allusions to "Leda and the Swan" evoke the mystic notion of an exhausted modern civilization in need of a violent rebirth-one symbolized by the primitively powerful, raping swan...
...Quartermaine accepts his dismissal with his usual accommodating manners...
...The new part-time instructor, a nervous, accident prone young man, marries a girl reported to suffer from a speech impediment...
...Quartermaine is not alone in having lost touch with the historical sources of these...
...Henceforth, she says, she will take in only "traditional foreigners...
...I had the whole lot of them dismissing it with contempt-the three or four from the Eastern bloc, all the ones from Fascist countries, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the South Americans-the French were the loudest, as always-but even the Japanese...
...is cooked...
...But perhaps not for long...
...as promising players, their beginning to get into arguments, their violating the rules, and finally their losing and breaking the equipment...
...a second, who is a spinster, is shaken at the death of her sick mother...
...One teacher has a baby...
...Reviewers have taken Quartermaine to be a virtually clinical case of mental debility...
...Then as he ends the play looking out into the audience, one thinks of the once proud English on the world stage as he whispers his habitual expression of dismay: "Oh Lord...
...These are the "terms" of the title...
...Quartermaine's Terms records the present results of this dissociation as it is illustrated in the lives of its small staff of teachers...
...Elsewhere in the Cambridge community things are not going much better for British life and institutions...
...And inasmuch as Harold Pinter was the London director, he may well be responsible for the styles of American productions at the Long Wharf in New Haven and now in New York City...
...As a result, Quartermaine's Terms has been taken as a play about an eccentric individual instead of a study of a whole civilization.of a whole civilization...
...All well with mother, I trust...
...These students seem to have failed to understand Miss Garth's point in showing them a medieval recipe for roasted swan as part of her course in British life and institutions...
...It would not be wrong to call the results "Pinter-esque...
...At the end Quartermaine faces his colleague Henry Windscape, who has been kind enough over the years to let Quartermaine kill some time by babysitting for his children, one of whom is the disturbed teenager...
...Henry cannot tell what went wrong with the class: "usually it's perfectly clear to me but this time it all came out rather oddly...
...Mother is dying...
...Glancing over Miss Garth's shoulder at the recipe, he enthusiastically speculates on how it might be used in the British Life and Institutions course...
...One could trace eating habits from medieval feasts "to the modern dinner of frozen hamburgers, frozen chips and frozen peasand-and-thus illustrating one aspect of our culture's advance, eh, from a very few eating splendidly to almost everybody getting hideously fed...
...In the removal of these lines there is a kind of censorship at work that is a quite different matter from the imposition of a modernist style on the play...
...The mannered, mild title character retains little more of the past that made him than the habits, gestures, and speech that define an Englishman...
...The action takes place in this same room over nearly three years, in the course of which one of the school's directors ages visibly, and the other dies...
...Yes, thanks Eddie, top form...
...On the other hand the playwright's cranky, chauvinistic poking of fun at foreigners, and his culinary sniping at Welfare State egalitarian-ism, were evidently felt to be all too graspable by the audience, and both were removed...
...He is author, most recently, of American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard...
...The swan, Quartermaine recalls in his key speech (which echoes Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "Leda and the Swan"), was "most beautiful," "so calm," and had "all that-that power...
...It is possible though not easy to sense the post-imperial theme of Quartermaine's Terms in its current New York production, performed by a cast of accomplished American actors...
...Typically an elderly, superannuated gentleman meanders along expressing nostalgic and retrograde opinions that somehow charm us as reminders of better times...
...They sink helplessly into the vortex of family tragedies, all the while conducting themselves, like Quartermaine, with impeccable, hollow English manners...
...Hexter emphasizes the uniqueness of the "liberty and representation" developed by the English...
...The scene is the teacher's room of a small school located in Cambridge at which English is taught to foreigners...
...Their talk is of spouses and children, elderly parents, evenings at the movies, babysitting, weekends- some appropriately think of going to see The Cherry Orchard on Saturday night-and vacations...
...And yet both his concentration and memory function perfectly when it comes to inquiring in detail about the domestic doings of his colleagues' numerous spouses and progeny-he visits, loves, and is loved by the children...
...Top form, thanks...
...Possibly because this new character has been exposed to the present egalitarian society of England for a larger proportion of his life, he has trouble recalling just exactly what the country has lost...
...In a recent article on "The Birth of Modern Freedom" in the Times Literary Supplement, J.H...
...Elsewhere the police are complaining that some French girls have attempted to kill a swan among the punters on the ordinarily serene Cam river...
...Henry, who has just been made principal after the death of one of the co-directors and the retirement of the other, immediately tells Quartermaine that under the new administration there won't be "any room for you anymore...
...Not the least reason for the success of their parliamentary system, Hexter points out, was the efficiency with which it raised money to support England's wars, and hence her national might...
...But in Simon Gray's Quarter-maine 's Terms the regret is again mild...
...she is nevertheless hired to teach at the school, and they have a baby...
...In the course of it the audience should hear the foreign students starting out "The new Vanity Fair magazine, dedicated to putting its readers at ease with modern expression in the arts, found the play "offensive" and explained that, "in the most obvious fashion, Gray presents Quartermaine metaphorically as a wild swan, and discussion of a medieval recipe for baked swan telegraphs that his goose...
...An almost continuous game of croquet, representing much that is English, is supposed to take place just outside the set's French doors...
...Scene ends have been shortened and cut off by quick blackouts...
...Along with these cuts there is the usual removal of English colloquialisms for an American production...
...A fourth is left by his wife and children, then finally completes the first draft of an obviously inept first novel...
...I trust you all had a good weekend...
...The tone of reminiscence has sometimes grown bitter, as in Harold Pinter's recent No Man's Land-which concerned two superannuated old gentlemen...
...The action of Quartermaine's Terms, which has been running for over a year in New York, nominally takes place in the early 1960s, though the time might just as well be the present...
...Then, in post-imperial England, although the institutions remained in place, they came to be associated mainly with the culture, and no longer with power...
...In the text Henry comes in from giving some of the students an apparently successful croquet lesson-an incident likewise cut from the production...
...How's mother...
...His colleague, Henry Windscape, the brightest of the group, comes in shaken after trying to teach his class on British Life and Institutions something about "our parliamentary system...
...Cornley, a local landlady, has complained that the school's three Turks don't know how to use the bathroom...
...Out of kindness the aged school directors have kept him employed despite his growing more absentmindedly incompetent from term to term...
...they ask one another...
...In Quartermaine's case the past that evolved these formulae has dissolved into a single vague memory of a swan, the stately but endangered creature that has already been associated in the audience's mind with British life and institutions (the play could easily have been titled "Swan Song...
...In this case that unnecessary, insulting practice further abstracts the characters from their milieu...
...Have a good weekend...
...The new effects tend to produce discontinuity and strangeness...
...They have not...
...The powerful swan of Britain's imperial past was apparently sufficiently Aesopian to be left in...
...Finally, and least excusably, passages tending to bring the play of certain ideas to the surface have also been removed...
...Equally pointed was Henry Windscape's speech on Miss Garth's recipe for roasted swan...
...At the local French restaurant some Japanese students have gotten drunk and broken up the furnishings...
...Information about Quartermaine's life is omitted, making him seem even more disembodied than was intended...
...Quartermaine and his colleagues have been reduced to supplying foreigners with the country's last salable commodities: English language and culture...
...John (pronounced "Sinjun") Quartermaine, the last member of the staff, is a vague, middle-aged bachelor who cannot tell one foreign student from another...
...Eventually, one may add, the unique institutions of freedom entwined themselves with English culture and became inseparable from it...
...made up of middle-aged nonentities permanently installed at the very bottom rung of the academic ladder...
...But unfortunately the play has been cut so as to make it appear more obscure than it really is...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
