Occasional Prose (2 page)

In the late forties, he went back to Europe, working first for UNESCO in Paris (for which he was very unsuited). He returned finally to Rome, where he started doing a theatre column for the old
Il Mondo
, a liberal (in the American sense) weekly. In the fifties, with Ignazio Silone, he founded the monthly
Tempo Presente
. When he died, he was doing theatre reviews for
L’Espresso
and writing political and philosophical reflections about once a month for
La Stampa
. His ideas did not fit into any established category; he was neither on the left nor on the right. Nor did it follow that he was in the middle
—
he was alone. Though his thought remained faithful, in its way, to philosophical anarchism, he had long lost the belief in political “effectiveness.”

In America, after the forties, he was not well known. He sent occasional “Letters” from Europe to
Partisan Review
and wrote occasionally for
Dissent
. In 1966 he gave the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton. They dealt with the novel and the idea of history in it, and were published, as a volume, in London under the title
The Paradox of History
. In Italy, his volume of theatre essays,
La Situazione drammatica
, had won a prize in Venice, and his Gauss lectures were published in book form as
Credere e non credere.

The present essay is a preface to a selection of his theatre reviews and essays, not including those in
La Situazione drammatica
, to be published in Italian following a selection of his political writings. It is characteristic, probably, of our period that his death should have prompted what might almost be called his “discovery.” Consciousness of a loss has awakened curiosity as to what exactly was in the vacated space.

Nicola Chiaromonte deeply loved the theatre. The fact was surprising, “out of character,” to those who knew him as a man attached above all to ideas and principles, a theorist and reasoner, and—perhaps more important in this connection—a detester of artifice. He
was
every one of those things, though it did not follow that he was also, as some imagined, a puritan and therefore a natural enemy of the stage. Yet grease paint and footlights, the makeshifts of illusion and impersonation, were scarcely, you might have thought, his element. The glamour of the theatre, long recognized as one of its essential attractions (a collection of theatre pieces by the excellent American critic Stark Young was called simply
Glamour
), ought to have keen a source of repulsion for Chiaromonte, even as a youth. And, unlike many or most play-reviewers, he had never, so far as I know, cherished any ambition to tread the boards himself.

It is hard to imagine him dressing up as a child to take part in home theatricals or school pageants, indeed to picture him in any sort of costume or disguise. Nor can I hear him declaiming poetry at a Prize Day to the admiration of teachers and parents. There was nothing histrionic in him; when he spoke in public, he was certainly no orator, though sometimes forceful when angered by incomprehension of what to him intellectually or morally was clear as day. If he was “stage-struck” at any period in his life, collected theatre programs, pored over photos of stars, this cannot have come about through a process of identification with objects of fame and applause. No one could have been less desirous of shining than Chiaromonte, and the hero-worship of actors common in his and my day among young people should have been totally foreign to him who had so little interest in the immediate satisfactions of the performing, capering ego.

Nevertheless not only was he a continuous playgoer, by profession and inclination, but he loved actors and actresses. To go backstage with Chiaromonte after a performance, say at the Eliseo, was a delightful and entertaining experience; though a modest and shy man, he basked in the atmosphere of good will and affection that he seemed both to bring with him into the actors’ dressing-rooms and to find there waiting to meet him. As his theatre criticism shows, he was a friendly critic of actors and a respecter of their art—encouraging to young people and beginners but fond too of the old idols even when compelled to remonstrate with them for some misguided interpretation of a scene or role. He had a great simplicity of heart, and if perhaps he looked on actors as children, something childlike in him responded, so that often he seemed more at home, more easily himself, in the greenroom than at any soiree of his fellow writers and intellectuals.

Few theatre critics can have taken the pains Chiaromonte did to go to see what small groups of actors, amateurs or novices, were essaying, usually in some remote, inconvenient part of the city and in a semi-empty hall or room. Whether in Rome, Paris, or New York, he could be counted on to have a sympathetic look. He was not so indulgent with “name” directors. He deplored the ascendancy of the director and blamed most of the evils of the contemporary theatre on a system in which the director was the star, usurping the place of the actors as well as that of the text.

The promotion of the director to top billing coincided with the rise of the movies (of which Chiaromonte was no fan), and the overwhelming emphasis in the contemporary theatre on staging, on decor and “effects,” reflected the influence of the movies, in which the virtuoso director is all-powerful, everything being grist to his mill, capable, that is, of being processed as in a giant factory. There is a film industry, but there can never be a theatre “industry”—a point not understood by hubristic stage directors—because every performance is inevitably one of a kind and cannot be reproduced the following night. Chiaromonte’s love of the theatre must have sprung partly from the love of handcrafts and dislike of mass production, and the poor ephemerid players with whom he sympathized were its artisans.

Yet this does not altogether explain his fascination with the stage—a love affair constantly frustrated and almost doomed to disappointment, for the theatre, among all the contemporary arts, is the least flourishing. Why go to the theatre at all nowadays, since most plays and most productions are so bad? If you do not care for the movies, why not stay home and read a book? Or watch television or listen to records. And in fact people, by and large, do
not
go to the theatre any more. A study made last spring in the United States showed that only a minute fraction of Americans under thirty had ever seen a live play. The results would probably be similar in Western Europe; it is only behind the Iron Curtain that the theatre is still valued as an instrument of socialization. In capitalist countries, those of us who continue to go to
le spectacle
, as the French call it, are conscious of belonging to an ever-dwindling minority—not an elite, really, but a peculiar species of animal nearly extinct.

No doubt there is a vicious circle. The decline in public interest means that playwrights and actors, who must eat, turn to films and television, which means fewer and poorer stage productions, which in turn causes public interest to decline still more. The theatre is dependent on numbers, both to produce it and to consume it. Far more than the novel or, say, the sonnet, it is keyed to demand. A sonnet, requiring only one hand to produce, may be composed for a single reader—its addressee—and a novel, also a one-man job, may be written to be read by posterity or circulated in manuscript to friends, but even street theatre demands a troupe, a vehicle, a permit usually, and some curious spectators.

Chiaromonte seems sometimes to have hoped that the theatre might be kept alive by groups of amateurs putting on shows, like children’s plays, for audiences of family and friends. Yet going to a professional performance is a voluntary, spontaneous undertaking (“Let’s get tickets for Sunday’s matinee”) while amateur theatricals, like children’s plays, are to some degree compulsory on members of a small immediate circle, who feel duty-bound to attend, and duty, in the long run, is a feeble incentive to spur one to take part, regularly, in what is supposed to be a pleasure.

The sociability of the theatre distinguishes it from films, where one sits in the dark, and from concerts, where many listen with eyes closed, shutting out the environment the better to take in the sound. One is never lonely in the theatre, whether one holds a single ticket or not. The play is a social event, and watching the audience arrive, observing it during intermissions in the bar or foyer, is one of the playgoer’s privileged diversions, like gazing around at a party and ticking off the guests as they come in. To take one’s seat early and crane one’s neck waiting for the hall to fill up, sometimes with painful slowness, initiates one into suspense, a mixture of dread and longing very like what one will experience when the house lights finally dim and the curtain rises: one inspects the balcony and the gallery—still too few there—follows the usher’s quickening footsteps up and down the orchestra aisles—two more, three more,
four
!

At the movies, it does not matter if you are the only spectator present; except for the inconvenience of having other people stumble past you, your enjoyment is not affected one way or the other. But at a play it is sad to be surrounded by empty seats. I think I could not bear to be the solitary member of an audience and not just because I would feel sorry for the actors. At a play everybody wants the pride of a packed house. Sitting together with others, intent on a performance that will never be precisely the same, even if you occupy the same seat the next night and for a dozen nights thereafter, makes going to the theatre an immersion into community, like the yearly mass baptism that used to be performed on every baby born in a parish. A theatre audience is a self-constituted assembly and, unlike an anomic film audience, generally has a civic character. Something of the sort happens also at sporting events—people go to the stadium, rather than watch on television, not just to eat hot dogs but to bear joint witness to some feat or dramatic contest—with the difference that in the theatre you are simply absorbed in the spectacle and do not take sides.

Yet in the theatre nowadays that exalting sentiment of community, of civic participation, and the sense of privilege it carries, has ceased to elate the remnant of playgoers, just because we are a remnant, because we are such freaks, such a minority, so unrepresentative. At any given moment, we were always a happy few, since a theatre has a limited seating capacity and does not “project,” but now we are not even envied. The community we take our place in, as the usher leads us down the aisle, has no civic or statistical significance; we might as well be installed around a Ouija board. Uniting to watch a play, whether it is
Hamlet
or
Hair
, we recognize ourselves as veteran members of an obsolescent cult or fraternity, some of us, in the stalls, wearing the old class uniform—or vestment—of dinner jacket and evening gown, others in ancient shawls or queer rusty hats; even the children, if it is a matinee, seem to have been freshly exhumed from mothballs to enact, with their parents and schoolmates, the archaic boring rite of being-at-the-play.

Chiaromonte was well aware that some mystery attached to his faithful attendance at this charade. In the essay written after a heart attack had caused him to drop his theatre column for nearly a year, he asked himself why in the world he was starting it up again. What was the use? Writing about the theatre in Italy (where things were even worse than elsewhere), you found yourself saying something negative seventy percent of the time. Since the theatre was clearly dying, what was the point of going on?

His answers to these insistent questions do not wholly dispel the mystery: he likes writing his column and likes the paper (the old
Il Mondo
) it appears in and the liberty the paper gives him to write about whatever he wants, using the theatre as a springboard. He likes having a part to play, a role assigned to him, that of the critic, whose mask he wears, in the common drama of society, where we all play our parts, and the theatre is not just a microcosm of the real world, it is a cosmos in which all that is lived in the real world may be clarified and purified to a point where it can acquire significance. Finally, there is not only the real theatre, as it exists today, but also the idea of the theatre, and abominable as the real theatre is, it still fascinates him
because
of its hideous deformity, as we continue to love an altered, disfigured being and refuse to acknowledge that the creature is beyond redemption. What he is saying, in short, is that he cannot tear himself away from his seat in the stalls since he is in love with the
idea
of the theatre, even in its fallen state, as one might be with a fallen woman. In sheer horror, if nothing else, he remains in his place, unable to turn his eyes away.

Something like this is what most of us who love the theatre feel, though no one, I think, has expressed it so forcibly. Despite all we know, despite our better judgment, we keep coming back to it. In my own case, I ought to add, it is more in perpetual hope than in despairing fascination. I can never quell a stir of anticipation when the curtain parts. But, unlike Chiaromonte, I have never had the dream of reforming the theatre—only the dream that it would somehow reform itself—which probably means that my passion for it has been less than his.

In any case, though, why the theatre? What caused him to fall in love with that sad strumpet in the first place when he might have chosen a good woman—painting, sculpture, poetry, instrumental music—or even that demi-rep, opera? And if he wanted to suffer, what about films, which offer plenty of opportunities for exasperation to anyone who has a pure “idea” of the cinema? The truth is he was allergic to the silver screen. Like most people who care about the stage, he would rather see a play,
any
play, providing it was serious, than a film “masterpiece” that everybody was talking about. On the screen, not being a puritan, he appreciated ribald farce and fast-moving comic extravaganzas (on the order of
Dr. Strangelove
,
Divorzio all’Italiano
); it was the “art” film he could not tolerate and the widely diffused belief that the cinema, with its greater powers of representation, had superseded the theatre
qua
dramatic art, as though the limitations of the stage had been a mere matter of technical incapacity, which the camera had rendered otiose—the oft-voiced idea, that is, that if Shakespeare had only been born in the age of the moving picture he would have been the first to write movie scripts, grateful for the exciting possibilities of a medium that would free him from the cramped makeshifts of the Globe.