Canadian Letter [1964]
This is the year we celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Even before the birthday, the exploration of the canon had begun with the first items in comprehensive television and radio series usually running to the true Shakespearian extent of two or three hours. Scarcely a day passes but a new book on Shakespeare is announced. Interpreter and counter-interpreter – like spy and counter-spy working for conflicting powers –utter their manifestos and demolish with withering scorn all theories but their own. Conferences have already been gathering, as though for scholars as for the Canada geese this is the migrating season; but the trend is southerly. Papers are being read and more will follow, and these will in their various ways be published. There is an Oxford club which, though it takes its name from Shakespeare, has as its single item on the agenda for all meetings the resolution ‘that the Bard be not read tonight’. Will they this year suspend their normal operations and read by candlelight ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’? We expect to survive the season. And it is unlikely that the plays and poems will suffer from producer and scholar more damage this time than they have in the past.
Ever since the Shakespeare Festival Theatre was founded in Stratford, Ontario, a few years ago (a big tent to start with, now a substantial modern theatre building on the same site), Canadians feel that they have a special stake in the Bard; not without reason. The Stratford success has had a wide influence on theatre in this country, and some effect elsewhere. Here it has provided a focus for the best acting and stage production the country can muster. Also an annual occasion so brilliant and prosperous has been extended to include some witty if unconventional Gilbert and Sullivan, and some public music-making of fine quality that avoids both bombast and a punitive educational intent. Some even maintain that Stratford has given definition to something that might be legitimately called a Canadian accent.
Anyway, when the BBC decided to film a television version of Hamlet at Elsinore last year, the young Canadian actor Christopher Plummer was chosen for the leading part. The broadcast – which you also probably saw – made one realize what momentum and confidence the Stratford experiment (now the Stratford tradition) has given to the best Canadian actors. The acoustics of Elsinore must have been unusually recondite so to overtax the fastidious sound-engineers of the BBC; but when the visual quality of television is still poor a defect in sound recording is much less damaging than it would be in film. The effect of the Elsinore version was perhaps heightened for us by contrast with a disappointing performance of Hamlet by Richard Burton, at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto at about the same time, in the dispiriting backwash of the Cleopatra fiasco. But that does not account for the astonishing force of the whole BBC production. Plummer’s brooding intelligent Hamlet was compelling in its singleness; for its unity depended not upon some conception of the character but upon the driving consistency with which he discovered the strong, wavering, sensitive identity of Hamlet. Horror, disgust, self-hatred, and perplexity were here beautifully interwoven and the pattern was – as one might hope – very different from the conventional nerveless confusion and squalid self-pity of the wavering modern man. I don’t remember ever seeing before a Hamlet that, for all his variety of moods and turns, was an identifiable person; nor have I seen before a production of the play that could so innocently refrain from exploiting the more obvious symbols that lie upon the surface of the words. In the Stratford production of Romeo and Juliet Plummer made a fine truculent and gallant Mercutio who fought lyrically with the rapier and died in the most correct and splendid style as Shakespeare must have intended. In Hamlet he entered a different world and found there at a deeply intrinsicated centre a nature horrified, haunted, and affectionate. Hamlet himself had become the commanding symbol like an octopus eye among tentacles.
We cannot turn the pages of Shakespeare without coming upon his central respect for order; for him, the figure of social order is the structure for all that is wholesome in man’s action, endeavour, and reward, so that ‘sanctity and health’ is the right vision of a king. All things are set in a due order, in its outlines of an elemental simplicity, in its intricacy unimaginably complex; to disrupt order is a monstrous crime; the restoration of order is often a destructive process. Such a notion certainly helps us to understand what Shakespeare has to say, and may give us a warm nostalgic sense of a golden age departed; but I think we stand away from it by saying that it is of course part of an outmoded cosmology, a vestige of an antique hierarchical social structure which we have now outgrown. Yet it seemed to me that the idea of order returned with almost archetypal force in what must surely be accounted, on any score card, the most sensational event of the year – the assassination of John Kennedy,
Out of the instant mood of astonished grief, dark feelings of vicarious guilt welled up. As these feelings persisted, they recovered with something of its ancient zest the lost and eroded horror of the first nuclear murders. The general public is not as well informed in matters of psychology as they might be, and the common interpretation of this feeling was not, I think, correct. It could not be said that the American people – or any people for that matter – willed (unconsciously or not) the murder of Kennedy. Yet there was something inevitable about the murder, and we recognized this with the same feelings that we might discover ourselves unwittingly caught in an incestuous relationship. The Mariner in Coleridge’s poem kills the albatross out of moral indolence not out of deliberate malice; and only in our own day would that be regarded as an extenuating circumstance. What was horrifying about Kennedy’s murder was not that it fulfilled desire but that it satisfied taste. It was made to order. It was so perfect a piece of journalism that it might almost have been an invention of the press.
In a very real sense this is what the press has been waiting for for years. All the time the technical equipment improves but the occasion to use it doesn’t turn up, and surely sooner or later something in all the public appearances of public figures will vindicate all that diligent preparation and the aggressive watchfulness, something far beyond the public smile from an open limousine on a public occasion against a democratic blur of anonymous faces. With the irony that seems to afflict the professional in any technical field, it was an amateur who –accidentally at the right moment – took the only actual photographs of Kennedy actually being struck by bullets; but that perhaps is a small detail. The setting was in other respects ideal; the scene well-lighted (for shooting of various kinds), the central elements well composed with a symbolically urban setting, and suitably furnished with the interested and variegated crowd that can always turn the press photographer’s work from pleasure to duty. Potentially everything was just about perfect; and when the action started, the pace and incredulous tension of those few moments automatically gave the camera work the blurred and grainy imperfection that alone gives dramatic intensity and power to the work of an instrument too efficient to be true. Very little was missed; and the background coverage, for which after all there had been plenty of practice, was excellent. Throughout that day and night the sense of horror was sustained by the hushed, platitudinous, and self-expressive utterances of many people at microphones; and some had had inadequate emotional preparation for such a task. And behind this the next phase moved forward with inexorable logic, the mechanical consequence of a sequence of false premisses which by repetition ‘the press’ has induced the public to accept as axiomatic, ending in the proposition that journalists have a ‘right’ to the sensational, even (it would seem) to manufacture the sensational if necessary. Act II: the assassination of the assassinator. This time the lighting was not so good and the scene a bit overcrowded; but the television cameras were set up and lighted and rolling; so they got what they could scarcely have dared to hope for – a real murder. An important ‘first’ surely. It could only have been better if it had been the President himself. Is it a Freudian accident that I cannot remember the name of the man who murdered the President, but I can with effort remember the name of the murderer of die murderer? Perhaps after all an employer of striptease artistes may be more memorable than an ideological enthusiast.
There were on that first day some expressions of genuine grief and incredulous revulsion; no one could deny that. Everybody who could get at a microphone seems to have done so, and the results were not always admirable. It was what was not said by ‘the media’ that day and the days following that accumulated to express the true and underlying but incoherent feeling of the American people and of the world at large. Here Shakespeare enters. Grief certainly, and horror, and disgust, and a sudden realization of the impermanence of things and the vanity of human wishes. But under it all, in a country where perhaps more than anywhere else in the world the notion of aristocracy has been trodden blindly into the darkness, there was a rediscovery of something like the pre-democratic ideal of order. The occasion was neither simply political nor personal nor national, nor even international: it was primordial. In the Roman world it was an offence against good taste to chop down with axes in the street certain orders of people, whether they were malefactors or not. Kennedy, as a man killed, whether he had been so regarded before, was seen not only as President of the United States but as a sort of king or prince or ideal, a person sanctified beyond the scope of common ambition or hatred not for what he was but for what he stood for. To destroy such a person was to assail the order of human existence; it was a primitive offence as difficult to grasp as the inventiveness of Cain’s discovery of murder. You couldn’t ascribe such an act even to your worst political enemies. It could only be the act of a madman or of a man evil beyond the conceivable range of human motivation. Yet it had happened; there could be no doubt of that; there were the photographs.
There is still some hard thinking to be done about journalism and its effects upon our desires, and about the connection it helps us to establish between what we want and what we get. Yeats raised such a question at the end of ‘The Second Coming’:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It used to be said in defence of the imperfections of government that we get the government we deserve; I wonder whether the press shows us not what we deserve but what we are. Can it be that one of the main props of the democratic order is also one of its most dangerous enemies?
Then there is a pair of circumstances that will probably mark the end of an old and evil era. James Hoffa, President of the largest union in the United States, has been found guilty of contaminating witnesses in law; and in Canada, Hal Banks, President of the Seamen’s International Union, has been found guilty of deliberate punitive violence against competitors in the field of union authority. Unlike the trials that finally put a stop to the early big-time gangsters like Al Capone, both these men have been tried and found guilty of exactly the lawless irresponsibility and violence which makes them a menace to good order. The democratic principle of self-determination is a dangerous one; intelligent autocrats have always found means of subverting and manipulating it to their own ends. In matters of commercial morals, western industrial society seems to have drifted a long way away from the shaping and invigorating virtues of the law. It is encouraging therefore to find that the law is not powerless to detect, define, test within the strict ritual of the courts, and punish ingenious misdeeds that are widely known to the public at large and which are even admired in many quarters as acts of superior intelligence and social imagination.
Another kind of trial has been in progress for some time now; the trial of some of the staff of the Auschwitz camps. I have watched the reports with particular interest because a couple of years ago I prepared for radio a version of Primo Levi’s account of nearly two years in Auschwitz: If This is a Man. A young Italian Jew, he wrote his book almost twenty years after the event, in order to examine dispassionately what had happened to him: because it had happened it deserved to be examined closely and recorded accurately. His account is detached, astringent, uncondemning: his book could be read by a child, and indeed my own children have listened to the broadcast version of his book without suffering the shock of gratuitous horror. The broadcast was postponed first because of the Eichmann trial and now will not be released until this autumn, by which time the fragmentary reports of the actual Auschwitz trials will have been buried. The Eichmann trial was a great political and journalistic occasion almost entirely uncontaminated by the minutiae of horror though not wholly purified of rhetoric. Eichmann emerges as a rather dim middle-aged executive with only moderate prospects. The Auschwitz trials are much more horrible being more radical; and that is probably why we conspire to allow them to be reported with casual incompleteness. But the London Observer printed with an early account of the trials a photograph of the humiliation of an old Jew in Auschwitz: he stood with head bowed beside the bodies of his executed companions, his striped and squalid clothes held together (as Levi so exactly describes) with bits of string, his tormentors smiling around him, withdrawn, their faces round, well-fed, and young. I do not expect to forget that picture.
This year a little group of university people have put together some essays on the government of Canadian universities arguing that universities would be better governed by members of the academic profession than by prosperous businessmen, successful engineers, and defeated politicians. Provincial governments, who reserve responsibility over the federal government for matters of education, are now with vociferous belatedness addressing themselves to a programme of rapid university expansion. There are ample signs of ill provision and ill preparation; and where government pays, sooner or later government will want to interfere. A joint commission, called by representatives of the academic profession and of university governors, is just beginning its work of inquiry.
Revolving these matters – and others political, learned, and personal which I have not set down – I am inclined to suppose after all that Shakespeare is still the outstanding figure. Last summer I saw in Regent’s Park a superlative night-time outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cut the plays as you will, and the poems too, there is your grave sententious Shakespeare, and your lyrical and perplexed sonneteer, and your compassionate all-understanding searcher of hearts. But beyond Falstaff and his cronies, Sir Toby Belch, Touchstone, and the spiv Autolycus, there is the unmatched outrageous foolery of the play in which ‘sweet bully Bottom’ and his bird-brained colleagues act out Pyramus and Thisbe. Surely Shakespeare spoke of himself when he wrote in Richard II:
As in a theatre the eyes of men
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
Can he have written that unwittingly too?