The Literati Read online

  From your blood this monster drank;

  AMANDA & PHILOMENA:

  Ah!

  TRISTAN:

  The outrage persists night and day!

  If you go to your bath, take him down,

  Then bargain no longer, I pray,

  And by your own hands let him drown.

  PHILOMENA:

  I’m quite overwhelmed!

  AMANDA:

  I faint! One could actually die of such treasures!

  PHILOMENA:

  Now I know how it feels to be seized by a thousand pleasures!

  AMANDA:

  ‘If you go to your bath, take him down—’

  PHILOMENA:

  ‘And by your own hands let him drown.’

  By your very own hands … drown him … right there … in the bath water!

  AMANDA:

  Every moment of the verse builds up to this charming slaughter.

  PHILOMENA:

  One promenades through these verses in a kind of ravenous stupor;

  AMANDA:

  And the things upon which one treads are all transcendentally super;

  PHILOMENA:

  As if we have entered a realm where everything is sacred and holy,

  Like passing through little paths, all strewn with gladioli.

  TRISTAN:

  So you like the poem, then?

  PHILOMENA:

  It’s a riveting and marvellous sonnet;

  No-one’s done anything better.

  AMANDA:

  So Jules, what are your thoughts on it?

  Or are these succulent morsels too refined for your untutored gullet?

  PHILOMENA:

  Right through this entire reading, you’ve sat there like a stunned mullet.

  JULIET:

  Each of us here below plays a part as best we can,

  A great mind is not something I just decide to be better than.

  TRISTAN:

  Perhaps my verses disturb you?

  JULIET:

  I don’t know, because I wasn’t listening.

  PHILOMENA:

  Let’s move on to the birth of the epigram!

  AMANDA:

  Like witnesses at a christening!

  TRISTAN:

  ‘CONCERNING A CARRIAGE OF REDDISH-ROSE,

  BEING A GIFT TO A LADY FRIEND’

  PHILOMENA:

  Catchy title!

  AMANDA:

  It really grabs you.

  PHILOMENA:

  It’s so unexpected, so rare.

  AMANDA:

  It opens the door to a hundred joys and the road that will take you there.

  TRISTAN:

  Love—

  AMANDA & PHILOMENA:

  Ah!

  TRISTAN:

  Love sells its bonds for a princely sum

  And a less wealthy man have I now become

  For behold this coach most beautiful and bold

  With its bas-relief of such perfect gold

  That it stuns all the lands it passes by

  Raising the glory of my Laïs on high—

  Say no more—

  PHILOMENA:

  Ah, ‘my Laïs’! How Greek! Now there is true erudition.

  TRISTAN:

  Say no more—

  AMANDA:

  The words themselves are gold! What a lustrous composition.

  TRISTAN:

  Say no more of its rose-red hue

  But that it pays my debt to you.

  AMANDA:

  Who would have seen that coming?

  PHILOMENA:

  What good taste to leave the best till last.

  Let’s hear it for our Writer of the Week! You’ve left us all quite aghast!

  Applause.

  I don’t know, from the moment we met, if I was predisposed in your favour,

  But I admire your verse and your prose as something precious to savour.

  TRISTAN:

  Madam is most gratifying; might it be appropriate to enquire

  If perhaps you have something yourself that I might, in turn, admire?

  PHILOMENA:

  I have written nothing in verse, but I have good reason to expect

  That I will soon be able to show you, out of friendship and respect,

  Eight chapters outlining my plan for a women’s academy;

  I am taking Plato’s skeletal framework and giving it anatomy.

  And the most exciting project on which the Academy will be employed

  Is a very noble enterprise, at which I am overjoyed;

  A glorious undertaking, which will be lavishly lauded

  When the history of great minds is ultimately recorded;

  We will achieve what many claim to be humanly unfulfillable:

  The removal from our language of every unpleasant syllable,

  Those sounds which crudely accompany an otherwise beautiful word

  And which are so insulting to our ear, that they’d be better left unheard,

  For though they amuse the groundlings, they make the judicious grieve

  With dirty double meanings, which naughty boys thrill to conceive,

  In those sickening public places, where the illiterati congregate

  To insult our human decency through the language they mutilate.

  TRISTAN:

  What an ardent cause and a dithyrambic articulation!

  PHILOMENA:

  You will see all our laws when they are ready for publication.

  AMANDA:

  We will be, by those laws, the judges of all expression

  And all prose and all verse will be subject to our discretion.

  Only we and our friends will decide what passes for wit,

  And those outside the club will be regarded as counterfeit.

  No-one will become a member except at our inviting

  And we alone will rule on what amounts to good writing.

  JULIET and CLINTON try to leave.

  PHILOMENA:

  Wait! Juliet! I thought I made it perfectly clear

  I have something to say to you, so I need you to stay here.

  JULIET:

  But I have no business here;

  PHILOMENA:

  Yes, you do, as you’ll soon see.

  JULIET:

  Well, for the life of me, I can’t imagine what it could be.

  TRISTAN:

  I am curious to hear a word from the young man who brought chairs;

  He makes no contribution; he simply sits and stares.

  What think you, dare I ask, of Aristotle’s peripatetic school?

  CLINTON:

  I have no considered opinion;

  AMANDA:

  On Aristotle, Clinton’s a fool.

  TRISTAN:

  On the magnetism of Descartes?

  AMANDA:

  Clinton finds it hard to endure us.

  TRISTAN:

  Perhaps you lean to Lucretius? Or have a penchant for Epicurus?

  Lucretius demystified the gods in his incandescent De Rerum Natura—

  CLINTON:

  Well, I look forward to having a squiz, maybe when I’m a bit maturer.

  TRISTAN:

  Mmm. What think you, then, of the realm of Platonic abstraction?

  CLINTON:

  Not a lot;

  AMANDA:

  It’s hardly a field, which for Clinton, holds much attraction,

  Is it, darling?

  CLINTON:

  Well—

  JULIET:

  Amanda!

  AMANDA:

  In his Republic, Plato asks

  Why women should not share equally in all of men’s tasks;

  And he struck another blow for women, in an argument well-polished

  That the traditional nuclear family really should be abolished.

  You claim, my dear Jules, that my position is demonic,

  But it turns out, in fact, that I am simply neo-Platonic.

  PHILOMENA:

>   When he drafted his Republic, the subject of women arose,

  And I’ve come to see it as some kind of personal challenge, I suppose,

  To avenge the female sex of all the wrongs done to us

  By writing one all-embracing and voluminous omnibus,

  Illustrating the indignity of placing limits on the female mind

  By subjecting us to trivial tasks, to which our talents were confined,

  And closing the door to knowledge and hiding from our sight

  The grandeur of the universe and its sublime interior light.

  TRISTAN:

  Brava! My position on women is well known and it won’t surprise;

  That if I render homage to the splendour of your eyes

  I also raise your minds in Platonic exaltation

  And humbly take my place in your literary emancipation.

  SCENE THREE

  TRISTAN, PHILOMENA, AMANDA, JULIET, CLINTON, VADIUS.

  DOCTOR VADIUS enters. She has heard the last exchange.

  VADIUS:

  I’m afraid you are mistaken; from Plato we have much to learn,

  But he was not bothered about women’s rights, only with their usefulness.

  Yes, women could do what men do, but in all truthfulness,

  This was a community benefit, a purely practical concern.

  He was hardly a trumpeting herald for women’s liberation

  Just because he thought domesticity a waste of woman-power;

  Working in an office or factory would hardly rupture her flower;

  If she were strong enough, why should there be any differentiation?

  And as for the nuclear family, he saw it a waste of talents

  To have a good teacher stuck at home acting as a nursery maid;

  If she has administrative skills or a leaning towards a trade

  Then spending all day on children was unproductive, on balance.

  And having female nannies to take care of someone else’s offspring

  Relegated these females to a kind of inferior status.

  You could just as well have au pair boys to fill that hiatus;

  So the grand communal nursery, to Plato, was just a practical thing.

  TRISTAN:

  Doctor Athénaïs Vadius, what a pleasure to hear erudition!

  Of the Greek and Latin authors, you have such eloquent command;

  If I partook of the error, then I accept your reprimand.

  And I assure you, of this mistake, there will be no repetition.

  PHILOMENA:

  Learnèd Doctor Vadius, your reputation is beyond doubt.

  And, God, can one restrain oneself on anything Latin or Greek?

  AMANDA:

  I have just become moist! Did someone Greek speak?

  JULIET:

  You’ll excuse me, I don’t know Greek, so I had better bow out.

  VADIUS:

  Must you go?

  PHILOMENA:

  [Stopping her] Juliet!

  VADIUS:

  [To JULIET] I was rather eager to see you;

  [To them] Those welcoming words bid me to stay, if I’m not disturbing,

  And provided my presence in this hallowed circle is not perturbing—

  PHILOMENA:

  Au contraire! Every woman secretly wants to be you!

  And one learnèd in Greek at any gathering, is an improvement.

  TRISTAN:

  As Doctor Vadius is a leading light on both verse and prose,

  She might herself have something to read us, if we may so propose?

  VADIUS:

  You’re too kind, but I must be honest: In the literary movement,

  I see it as a fault in authors, with the works that they write,

  To dominate the company and every conversation,

  And whether it be at cafés, dinner tables or some celebration,

  To bore the guests to death with a book from which they recite.

  To me, there’s nothing more pathetic, no practice I more abhor,

  Than writers going about, almost begging for praise,

  And earbashing the first people who happen to meet their gaze,

  Who very often are the martyrs whom they bored the night before.

  I am opposed to this self-promotion; on this I remain avowed,

  And I remember a certain Greek—

  AMANDA & PHILOMENA:

  Ah!

  VADIUS:

  —Under whose influence I fell,

  Who proposed a specific law, whereby he would expel

  Any writers who felt the urge to read their own works aloud.

  It is for others, not myself, to read any works of mine.

  [Giving them:] If you wish, take this ballad; it’s dedicated to young lovers;

  TRISTAN:

  [Perusing it] These verses have a lyrical beauty quite unavailable to others.

  Venus and all the Graces reign, and in your poems they shine.

  You have a flowing turn of phrase, each word the perfect choice.

  It is suffusèd with ethos, and pathos is ubiquitous,

  Like the ‘Eclogues of Virgil’ and the ‘Idylls of Theocritus’;

  Your odes have a noble air, and they sing with a gallant voice,

  So sweetly rendered, that they make dear Horace seem second-rate.

  Is there anything so romantic as your lovely chansonettes?

  Your sonnets are bejewelled with gems one never forgets.

  The rondos and the madrigals are so adorably ornate;

  If this country did you justice, if you were recognised by this age,

  You would sit atop a gilded carriage, being borne from place to place,

  Your statues would adorn our streets, and stamps would bear your face,

  For the genius of your oeuvre explodes on every page.

  VADIUS:

  I am a humble servant of language;

  CLINTON:

  No, you’re a true high achiever!

  VADIUS:

  Clinton, you are passionate, and I place great value on it.

  TRISTAN:

  Have you, by any chance, heard of a certain recent sonnet,

  ‘To the Princess Uranie, On the Subject of Her Fever’?

  VADIUS:

  Yes, as a matter of fact, it was read to me yesterday.

  TRISTAN:

  Do you know who the author is?

  VADIUS:

  I haven’t the faintest clue,

  But one thing I do know is: it’s not worth a brass razoo.

  TRISTAN:

  A great many people, in fact, find it admirable, so they say.

  VADIUS:

  That doesn’t prevent it from being awful, or being laughed at,

  And if you had also read it, you would share my point of view.

  TRISTAN:

  I fear that on this matter, I simply cannot agree with you.

  Very few writers, if any, could write such a sonnet as that.

  VADIUS:

  True; it would take an alarming absence of taste and poetic flair

  To think up such drivel in the first place, and then actually write it down.

  TRISTAN:

  I cannot concur; it could only be written by a poet of great renown.

  VADIUS:

  God preserve us! If I’d written that, I’d shoot myself then and there.

  TRISTAN:

  I have a very sound reason for liking it.

  VADIUS:

  Oh?

  TRISTAN:

  The sonnet was written by me.

  VADIUS:

  You!

  TRISTAN:

  Yes, me.

  VADIUS:

  I’m so sorry. How on earth could I have missed the point?

  TRISTAN:

  It is indeed unfortunate, Madam, that my sonnet should so disappoint.

  VADIUS:

  I should add, while it was being read, I was buzzed by a bumblebee,

  And the man in front was snoring, and his wife ha
d a dreadful cough,

  So it is just possible I may have been more than a little distracted,

  And the chap who read it was not very good; I’m afraid he overacted,

  So—

  TRISTAN:

  This is an outrage.

  VADIUS:

  Sorry. It was not my intention to scoff.

  By way of compensation, please accept the gift of my ballad.

  TRISTAN:

  Ballads are not to my liking; I find them insipid and rigid;

  They hail from a bygone era, and strike me as soulless and frigid.

  VADIUS:

  I beg to disagree; it is a form that’s stylistically valid.

  TRISTAN:

  Ballads are for snobs and pedants;

  VADIUS:

  Then it should appeal to you.

  TRISTAN:

  Go back to your ivory tower, and let those of us who can, write.

  VADIUS:

  One of my duties in the ‘tower’ is to expose plagiarism to the light.

  There is barely a phrase in your sonnet, which is either original or new.

  You have plundered the works of others, creating a false impression,

  Selling second-hand goods; you are a disgrace to your profession.

  VADIUS goes, followed by CLINTON.

  SCENE FOUR

  TRISTAN, PHILOMENA, AMANDA, JULIET.

  TRISTAN:

  None of that was true, Madam, and you mustn’t blame me

  For my anger at Doctor Vadius’ attempts to shame me.

  I was defending your good judgment of my sweet little sonnet.

  PHILOMENA:

  She herself openly admitted she had a bee in her bonnet.

  Do not trouble yourself; professional envy is alive and well.

  I will apply my healing powers to repair that unhappy quarrel.

  But let’s talk of another matter. Come here, Juliet.

  For a rather long time, I have found it a cause of regret

  That you don’t seem to have a mind, and are vacuous; that said,

  I have now discovered a way of installing one in your head.

  JULIET:

  You’d be going to a lot of trouble, and totally wasting your time.

  I don’t aspire to clever talk; there are no heights I wish to climb.

  I like to live simply, and not stress over everything;

  When I think of all the misery that growing a mind can bring,

  I just don’t have an ambition to mess about with my head.

  I find I’m perfectly happy, Mama, to be blissfully stupid instead.

  And things go much better for me if I use ordinary communication

  Without jumping through rings of fire to make brilliant conversation.

  PHILOMENA:

  Yes, but I am wounded to the core, as it could never satisfy me

  To suffer one of my bloodline bringing such shame and infamy;

  The beauty of your face is but a fragile ornament,

  A passing flower, a falling star that vanishes in the firmament;