On the morning after Van's first night with Ada in "Ardis the Second" Ada tells Van that her teacher at the Drama School thinks she is better in farces than in tragedy:
They sat, facing each other, at a breakfast table, munching black bread with fresh butter, and Virginia ham, and slices of genuine Emmenthaler cheese — and here’s a pot of transparent honey: two cheerful cousins, ‘raiding the icebox’ as children in old fairy tales, and the thrushes were sweetly whistling in the bright-green garden as the dark-green shadows drew in their claws.
‘My teacher,’ she said, ‘at the Drama School thinks I’m better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!’
‘There is nothing to know,’ retorted Van. ‘Nothing, nothing has changed! But that’s the general impression, it was too dim down there for details, we’ll examine them tomorrow on our little island: "My sister, do you still recall..."’
‘Oh shut up!’ said Ada. ‘I’ve given up all that stuff — petits vers, vers de soie...’
‘Come, come,’ cried Van, ‘some of the rhymes were magnificent arcrobatics on the part of the child’s mind: "Oh! qui me rendra, ma Lucile, et le grand chêne and zee big hill." Little Lucile,’ he added in an effort to dissipate her frowns with a joke, ‘little Lucile has become so peachy that I think I’ll switch over to her if you keep losing your temper like that. I remember the first time you got cross with me was when I chucked a stone at a statue and frightened a finch. That’s memory!’
She was on bad terms with memory. She thought the servants would be up soon now, and then one could have something hot. That fridge was all fudge, really. (1.31)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): petits vers etc.: fugitive poetry and silk worms.
In his essay The Tragedy of Tragedy (1941) VN mentions Shaw's brilliant farces (especially Candida):
I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw's brilliant farces (especially Candida), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance, Strife), in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand's Time Is a Dream), in one or two American plays such as the first act of The Children's Hour and the first act of Of Mice and Men (the rest of the play is dismal nonsense)--in many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits, artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.
In his essay Playwriting (1941) VN says that complicated setting is generally described (with very minute details and at great length) in the pages of the worst plays (Shaw's excepted):
We must draw a definite line between the author's gift and the theatre's contribution. I am speaking only of the former and refer to the latter insofar as the author has imagined it. It is quite clear that as bad direction or a bad cast may ruin the best play, the theatre may turn everything into a couple of hours of fugitive glamour. A nonsense rhyme may be staged by a director or actor of genius and a mere pun may be turned into a splendid show owing to the sets of a gifted painter. But all this has nothing to do with the dramatist's task; it may clarify and bring to life his suggestions, it can even make a bad play look--and only look--like a good one; but the merits of the play as disclosed by the printed word are what they are, not more, not less. In fact, I cannot think of a single fine drama that is not a pleasure both to see and read, though, to be sure, a certain part of footlight-pleasure is not the same as the corresponding part of reading-lamp pleasure, the one being in that part sensual (good show, fine acting), the other being in the corresponding part purely imaginative (which is compensated by the fact that any definite incarnation is always a limitation of possibilities). But the main and most important part of the pleasure is exactly the same in both cases. It is the delight in harmony, artistic truth, fascinating surprises, and the deep satisfaction at being surprised--and, mind you, the surprise is always there even if you have seen the play and read the book many times. For perfect pleasure the stage must not be too bookish and the book not too stagy. You will note that complicated setting is generally described (with very minute details and at great length) in the pages of the worst plays (Shaw's excepted) and, vice versa, that very good plays are rather indifferent to the setting. Such ponderous descriptions of paraphernalia, generally allied with a prefaced description of the characters and with a whole string of qualifying adverbs in italics directing every speech in the play, are, more often than not, the result of an author's feeling that his play does not contain all it is meant to contain--and so off he goes in a pathetic and long-winded attempt to strengthen matters by decorative addition. More rarely, such superfluous ornamentation is dictated by the strong-willed author's desire to have the play staged and acted exactly as he intended--but even in this case the method is highly irritating.
In his essay VN mentions that genius of the stage, Stanislavsky (the stage name of Konstantin Alekseyev, 1863-1938):
The one and only stage convention that I accept may be formulated in the following way: the people you see or hear can under no circumstances see or hear you. This convention is at the same time a unique feature of the dramatic art: under no circumstances of human life can the most secret watcher or eavesdropper be absolutely immune to the possibility of being found out by those he is spying upon, not other people in particular, but the world as a whole. A closer analogy is the relation between an individual and outside nature; this, however, leads to a philosophical idea which I shall refer to at the end of this lecture. A play is an ideal conspiracy, because, even though it is absolutely exposed to our view, we are as powerless to influence the course of action as the stage inhabitants are to see us, while influencing our inner selves with almost superhuman ease. We have thus the paradox of an invisible world of free spirits (ourselves) watching uncontrollable but earthbound proceedings, which--a compensation--are endowed with the power of exactly that spiritual intervention which we invisible watchers paradoxically lack. Sight and hearing but no intervention on one side and spiritual intervention but no sight or hearing on the other are the main features of the beautifully balanced and perfectly fair division drawn by the line of footlights. It may be proved further that this convention is a natural rule of the theatre and that when there is any freakish attempt to break it, then either the breaking is only a delusion, or the play stops being a play. That is why I call ridiculous the attempts of the Soviet theatre to have the spectators join in the play. This is connected with the assumption that the players themselves are spectators and, indeed, we can easily imagine inexperienced actors under slapdash management in the dumb parts of attendants just as engrossed in watching the performance of the great actor in the major part as we, ordinary spectators, are. But, besides the danger of letting even the least important actor remain outside the play, there exists one inescapable law, a law (laid down by that genius of the stage, Stanislavsky) that invalidates all reasoning deriving from the delusion that the footlights are not as definite a separation between spectator and player as our main stage convention implies. Roughly speaking, this law is that, provided he does not annoy his neighbors, the spectator is perfectly free to do whatever he pleases, to yawn or laugh, or to arrive late, or to leave his place if he is bored with the play or has business elsewhere; but the man on the stage, however inactive and mute he is, is absolutely bound by the conspiracy of the stage and by its main convention: that is, he may not wander back into the wings for a drink or a chat, nor may he indulge in any physical exuberance that would clash with the idea of his part. And, vice-versa, if we imagine some playwright or manager, brimming over with those collectivist and mass-loving notions that are a blight in regard to all art, making the spectators play, too (as a crowd, for instance, reacting to certain doings or speeches; even going so far as to hand round, for instance, printed words that the spectators must say aloud, or just leaving these words to our own discretion; turning the stage loose into the house and having the regular actors mingle with the audience, etc.), such a method, apart from the ever-lurking possibility of the play's being wrecked by the local wit or fatally suffering from the unpreparedness of impromptu actors, is an utter delusion to boot, because the spectator remains perfectly free to refuse to participate and may leave the theatre if he does not care for such fooling. In the case of his being forced to act because the play refers to the Perfect State and is running in the governmental theatre of a country ruled by a dictator, the theatre in such case is merely a barbarous ceremony or a Sunday-school class for the teaching of police regulation--or again, what goes on in theatre is the same as goes on in the dictator's country, public life being the constant and universal acting in the dreadful farce composed by a stage-minded Father of the People.
At fourteen Ada took Stan Slavsky's private lessons of drama, despair, hope:
At fourteen, Ada had firmly believed she would shoot to stardom and there, with a grand bang, break into prismatic tears of triumph. She studied at special schools. Unsuccessful but gifted actresses, as well as Stan Slavsky (no relation, and not a stage name), gave her private lessons of drama, despair, hope. Her debut was a quiet little disaster; her subsequent appearances were sincerely applauded only by close friends.
‘One’s first love,’ she told Van, ‘is one’s first standing ovation, and that is what makes great artists — so Stan and his girl friend, who played Miss Spangle Triangle in Flying Rings, assured me. Actual recognition may come only with the last wreath.’
‘Bosh!’ said Van.
‘Precisely — he too was hooted by hack hoods in much older Amsterdams, and look how three hundred years later every Poppy Group pup copies him! I still think I have talent, but then maybe I’m confusing the right podhod (approach) with talent, which does not give a dry fig for rules deduced from past art.’
‘Well, at least you know that,’ said Van; ‘and you’ve dwelt at length upon it in one of your letters.’
‘I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on "characters," not on "types" of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author, because playwrights, as the greatest among them has shown, are closer to poets than to novelists. In "real" life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void — unless we be artists ourselves, naturally; but in a good play I feel authored, I feel passed by the board of censors, I feel secure, with only a breathing blackness before me (instead of our Fourth-Wall Time), I feel cuddled in the embrace of puzzled Will (he thought I was you) or in that of the much more normal Anton Pavlovich, who was always passionately fond of long dark hair.’
‘That you also wrote to me once.’
The beginning of Ada’s limelife in 1891 happened to coincide with the end of her mother’s twenty-five-year-long career. What is more, both appeared in Chekhov’s Four Sisters. Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka (‘odd female’ — as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. It was the (somewhat expanded) part of the nun that Marina acted in an elaborate film version of the play; and the picture and she received a goodly amount of undeserved praise.
‘Ever since I planned to go on the stage,’ said Ada (we are using her notes), ‘I was haunted by Marina’s mediocrity, au dire de la critique, which either ignored her or lumped her in the common grave with other "adequate sustainers"; or, if the role had sufficient magnitude, the gamut went from "wooden " to "sensitive" (the highest compliment her accomplishments had ever received). And here she was, at the most delicate moment of my career, multiplying and sending out to friends and foes such exasperating comments as "Durmanova is superb as the neurotic nun, having transferred an essentially static and episodical part into et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
‘Of course, the cinema has no language problems,’ continued Ada (while Van swallowed, rather than stifled, a yawn). ‘Marina and three of the men did not need the excellent dubbing which the other members of the cast, who lacked the lingo, were provided with; but our wretched Yakima production could rely on only two Russians, Stan’s protégé Altshuler in the role of Baron Nikolay Lvovich Tuzenbach-Krone-Altschauer, and myself as Irina, la pauvre et noble enfant, who is a telegraph operator in one act, a town-council employee in another, and a schoolteacher in the end. All the rest had a macedoine of accents — English, French, Italian — by the way what’s the Italian for "window"?’
‘Finestra, sestra,’ said Van, mimicking a mad prompter.
‘Irina (sobbing): "Where, where has it all gone? Oh, dear, oh, dear! All is forgotten, forgotten, muddled up in my head — I don’t remember the Italian for ‘ceiling’ or, say, ‘window.’"’
‘No, "window" comes first in that speech,’ said Van, ‘because she looks around, and then up; in the natural movement of thought.’
‘Yes, of course: still wrestling with "window," she looks up and is confronted by the equally enigmatic "ceiling." In fact, I’m sure I played it your psychological way, but what does it matter, what did it matter? — the performance was perfectly odious, my baron kept fluffing every other line — but Marina, Marina was marvelous in her world of shadows! "Ten years and one have gone by-abye since I left Moscow"’ — (Ada, now playing Varvara, copied the nun’s ‘singsongy devotional tone’ (pevuchiy ton bogomolki, as indicated by Chekhov and as rendered so irritatingly well by Marina). ‘"Nowadays, Old Basmannaya Street, where you (turning to Irina) were born a score of yearkins (godkov) ago, is Busman Road, lined on both sides with workshops and garages (Irina tries to control her tears). Why, then, should you want to go back, Arinushka? (Irina sobs in reply)." Naturally, as would-every fine player, mother improvised quite a bit, bless her soul. And moreover her voice — in young tuneful Russian! — is substituted for Lenore’s corny brogue.’
Van had seen the picture and had liked it. An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline —
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen!
— harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a California patio just before the film was released. Varvara, the late General Sergey Prozorov’s eldest daughter, comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady, to have tea with Olga, Marsha, and Irina on the latter’s name day. Much to the nun’s dismay, her three sisters dream only of one thing — leaving cool, damp, mosquito-infested but otherwise nice and peaceful ‘Permanent’ as Irina mockingly dubs it, for high life in remote and sinful Moscow, Id., the former capital of Estotiland. In the first edition of his play, which never quite manages to heave the soft sigh of a masterpiece, Tchechoff (as he spelled his name when living that year at the execrable Pension Russe, 9, rue Gounod, Nice) crammed into the two pages of a ludicrous expository scene all the information he wished to get rid of, great lumps of recollections and calendar dates — an impossible burden to place on the fragile shoulders of three unhappy Estotiwomen. Later he redistributed that information through a considerably longer scene in which the arrival of the monashka Varvara provides all the speeches needed to satisfy the restless curiosity of the audience. This was a neat stroke of stagecraft, but unfortunately (as so often occurs in the case of characters brought in for disingenuous purposes) the nun stayed on, and not until the third, penultimate, act was the author able to bundle her off, back to her convent.
‘I assume,’ said Van (knowing his girl), ‘that you did not want any tips from Marina for your Irina?’
‘It would have only resulted in a row. I always resented her suggestions because they were made in a sarcastic, insulting manner. I’ve heard mother birds going into neurotic paroxysms of fury and mockery when their poor little tailless ones (bezkhvostïe bednyachkí) were slow in learning to fly. I’ve had enough of that. By the way, here’s the program of my flop.’
Van glanced through the list of players and D.P.’s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking camera)’, had been assigned to a ‘Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff’ and somebody called ‘John Starling’ had been cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him — he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see ("the blush now replaced by a matovaya pallor") I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.’
‘I see. And Yakim —’
‘Oh, he was nothing.’
‘No, I mean, Yakim, at least, did not, as his rhymesake did, take a picture of your brother embracing his girl. Played by Dawn de Laire.’
‘I’m not sure. I seem to recall that our director did not mind some comic relief.’
‘Dawn en robe rose et verte, at the end of Act One.’
‘I think there was a click in the wings and some healthy mirth in the house. All poor Starling had to do in the play was to hollo off stage from a rowboat on the Kama River to give the signal for my fiancé to come to the dueling ground.’ (2.9)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): fokus-pokus: Russ., bogus magic.
au dire etc.: according to the reviewers.
finestra, sestra: Ital., window, sister.
Arinushka: Russ., folksy diminutive of ‘Irina’.
oh qui me rendra etc.: Oh, who’ll give me back
my hill and the big oak.
sekundant: Russ., second.
puerulus: Lat., little lad.
matovaya: Russ., dull-toned.
Stan Slavsky also seems to be Marina’s new director of artistic conscience (as Ada calls him in one of her letters to Van):
[Los Angeles, 1889]
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the legendary river of Old Rus. Da. Oh, write me, one tiny note, I’m trying so hard to please you! Want some more (desperate) little topics? Marina’s new director of artistic conscience defines Infinity as the farthest point from the camera which is still in fair focus. She has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters). She sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and role overflow into everyday life, insists on keeping it up at the hotel restaurant, drinks tea v prikusku (‘biting sugar between sips’), and feigns to misunderstand every question in Varvara’s quaint way of feigning stupidity — a double imbroglio, which annoys strangers but which somehow makes me feel I’m her daughter much more distinctly than in the Ardis era. She’s a great hit here, on the whole. They gave her (not quite gratis, I’m afraid) a special bungalow, labeled Marina Durmanova, in Universal City. As for me, I’m only an incidental waitress in a fourth-rate Western, hip-swinging between table-slapping drunks, but I rather enjoy the Houssaie atmosphere, the dutiful art, the winding hill roads, the reconstructions of streets, and the obligatory square, and a mauve shop sign on an ornate wooden façade, and around noon all the extras in period togs queuing before a glass booth, but I have nobody to call.
Speaking of calls, I saw a truly marvelous ornithological film the other night with Demon. I had never grasped the fact that the paleotropical sunbirds (look them up!) are ‘mimotypes’ of the New World hummingbirds, and all my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours. I know, I know! I even know that you stopped reading at ‘grasped’ — as in the old days.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Da: yes (Russ.).