Joyce, Colum, Johnston, Meredith

Burgess Meredith’s production of the Circe episode from Joyce’s
_Ulysses_, at the Rooftop Theatre in New York, left me with half a
dozen problems. The most important of these, from my point of view, is
why it should be so remarkably good. I may as well be frank. apart
from Rabelais, no great author has ever bored me so mush as Joyce, and
of everything Joyce has written, few pieces have bored me as much as
the Circe episode. If ever there was an undramatic book, it was
_Ulysses_. It moves with a sort of deadly mechanical precision from
one rhetorical device to another, and it is held together by an
internal system of correspondences and analogies that make my most
unfavorite pastime‒solving crossword puzzles‒seem a blessed
relief. The nearest it approaches to what I call drama is the point at
which Leopold Bloom calls Stephen Daedalus “Stephen,” a not very
impressive dramatic effect that Joyce had already seemed to have
exhausted in _Ivy-Day in the Committee Room_. No doubt it was of great
importance to a half gentleman like Joyce, but everybody calls me by
my first name, and I rather like it.

Hence I suppose, Mr. Meredith’s choice of the Circe episode as a
dramatic framework to his piece, for here, at least, something does
happen, even if it only happens in the characters’ heads. Yet even in
this, one is aware that there isn’t really any strong dramatic
framework. The first act is magnificent entertainment, but the second
drags, and the contrived climax in which Bloom sees a vision of his
dead son Rudy is simply not good enough. In the book we accept it
because we have accepted the idea of the dead son, and are willing to
accept it as a correspondence with Bloom’s attachment to Stephen, but
if it is to be used in a play, the audience must somehow or other be
made aware that it is intended to be important. From my point of view
as a member of the audience, I couldn’t have cared less if the
wretched child had appeared in the guise of the Prince of Wales.

Yet _Ulysses in Nightown_ is fine theatre. Only two other performances
I have seen in the last seven years in America could compare with
it‒the Yeats verse plays and the dramatized _Finnegans Wake_ that I
saw in the Harvard Poets’ Theatre. The mixture of Joyce and Yeats
makes me wonder. It is true that I have always loved the Yeats verse
plays, but even my best friends are aware that I can’t stand Joyce. The
thing that left me stupefied after _Finnegans Wake_ was that I, who
couldn’t read a pave of the text without getting a headache, could be
moved to laughter and tears at hearing it spoken by somebody like
Eddie Chamberlain, one of the discoveries of the Poets’ Theatre. Now,
what does happen to Joyce on the stage that makes him fit company for
the greatest of modern verse dramatists? What does it teach me about
Joyce I didn’t know (and obviously I have a blind spot about Joyce)?
Above all, what does it teach me about the theatre?

Well, first of all I must remark that Padraic Colum and Denis Johnston
have done with “Circe” exactly what Mary Manning did with _Finnegans
Wake_; taken the whole pedantic paraphernalia of allusion and
correspondence, and tipped it, body and bones, holus-bolus, into the
rubbish dump. It is true that, lacking the audacity of a clever woman,
they did not hire an Irish tenor to sing “My Lagan Love” o “The Castle
of Dromore.” (This I find it hard to forgive.) But they have not
hesitated to lay hands on any “Beauties of Joyce” that appealed to
them, including the final cadenza of _Ulysses_, and stick them in
wherever a suitable place seemed to offer itself, regardless of what
violence they might be doing to the sacred System. “Circe” itself, for
instance, is sustained by an elaborate code of cross references to
animals while “Hades” draws its cross references from the undertaker’s
trade, but a substantial chunk of “Hades” has been sandwiched into
“Circe” where it clearly does not belong, and I can only report that
the result is elegant. The wages of adaptation is death, but these two
adaptations are blazing with life, and if Broadway producers ever come
to their senses we may expect to find them competing with each other
across the street. Both are literature, but both are first-class
entertainment.

What these plays teach about Joyce is his essential lack of folk
quality, in contrast with Yeats. Joyce was a towny, and he could not
admit any virtue in his fellow countrymen who sang “Barbara Allen” and
told stories about Finn MacCool‒unlike himself, a well educated,
Jesuit-trained scholarly man who preferred Rossini and “Och, pilaloo,
oh, I’m kilt” and other distinguished music hall songs. Yeats, lacking
the benefit of a Jesuit education, stupidly continued to admire folk
songs and stories, and loved the theatre because it was still the most
popular of the arts. When he said to ma that “a good play is something
you can write on a postcard.” he showed his complete understanding of
the simplification inherent in all folk art. Joyce’s play _Exiles_
showed that he didn’t know there was such a word as “simplification.”
But‒and this is my blind spot‒he really did love his Dubliners, and
what Padraic Colum and Denis Johnston have done is what Miss Manning
did before them. They have torn the heart out of Joyce’s work and put
it into the physical body of the theatre, where miraculously (from my
point of view, if not theirs) it continues to beat loud and
clear. They have taken the most private of arts and translated it into
the most public one, and Mr. Bloom, detached from his Homeric
associations and passed through the robust clowning of Zero Mostel,
has come to life. (Even they, for all their skill, could do nothing
with that dreary stick Stephen Daedalus, which is what makes the
second act such heavy, heavy going.)

Of course Mr. Mostel isn’t Ulysses or even Bloom, because no
theatrical producer could possibly handle the final literary gimmick
that holds this crazy book together, and shows us that Bloom and
Dedalus are not so much father and son as two aspects of the same
character, and that character the author’s. Joyce strangely combines
in himself the attributes of the Big Shot and the Little Man, and Bloom
is the Little Man side of his character, with his schemes for getting
rich quick, his milk-and-water humanitarianism‒“slow coaches and
immaculate contraceptives for the populace”‒and his perverted
sexuality. That is for the birds and the Ph.D.’s, and by a process of
simplification inherent in all good folk art. Mr. Mostel has turned
Joyce -Bloom into a very attractive character indeed. Even the sexual
queerness, as interpreted by Mr. Mostel, took on an Aristophanic
delight. If Mr. Mostel ever wants a recommendation, eh may quote me as
saying that dirty jokes, which had caused me to scowl and say things
worse than anything Joyce had imagined, made me laugh outright when
_he_ said them.

What it teaches about the theatre is something I had always
suspected‒that in spite of Ibsen, Chekhov and the rest, it still
remains a folk art and can still blend a thousand different people of
different races and cultures into one laughing , sobbing, enchanted
group.