The Outsider (9 page)

For an enlargement of the position established by Camus and Hemingway regarding human freedom, it is necessary to turn to a neglected play of the 1920
’
s, Harley Granville-Barker
’
s
Secret Life.
A quotation from George Sampson
’
s
Concise Cam-bridge History of English Literature
will make clear its relevance at this stage:

[The Secret Life] is a puzzling, disturbing post-war play [that] shows us the intellectual world reduced to spiritual nihilism. There is no clear centre of dramatic interest. The characters just come and go, and what
^‘
love interest
’
there is seems entirely gratuitous. The dialogue is sometimes normally dramatic, sometimes philosophically enigmatic, as if the speakers had no other purpose than to ask riddles to which there can be no answer. Perhaps in no other volume is there so complete a revelation of the spiritual bankruptcy produced by the war.
¹⁹

The background of the play is the post-war party politics of the Liberal party. The interest centres around two main characters, the middle-aged ex-politician Evan Strowde, and Oliver Gauntlett, his natural son, who has returned from the war minus an arm. What plot the play has can easily be outlined. Before the war, Strowde had been in politics. He had quarrelled with the party leader and resigned. Now the party wants him back.

Oliver Gauntlett has been invalided from the war, gone into the City, and started to make a business career. When he is arrested at an anarchist meeting, he is glad to make the scandal an excuse for escaping from the futility of the City, It is Evan Strowde who puzzles him most. (At the beginning of the play he is not aware that Strowde is his father.) Strowde
’
s powerful intellect and great will-power should have made him a success in some field. Oliver wants to know why he has failed.

The play opens with a curious scene at Strowde
’
s house by the sea; Strowde and a group of old schoolfriends have gathered to perform
Tristan und Isolde
on the piano, singing the parts themselves. The performance over, they talk reminiscently of their younger days, and Salomons states his creed as a practical politician:

Salomons: Never be carried off on crusades you can
’
t finance
…
Don
’
t, for one moment, let art and religion and patriotism persuade you that you mean more than you do. Stand by Jerusalem when it comes to stoning the prophets. I must be off.

Eleanor: Before you
’
re answered?

Salomons: Answers are echoes.
²⁰

Joan Westbury, with whom Strowde had had a love affair sometime long before the war—who represents for him the clearest vision of certainty that he ever achieved—leans on the parapet of the loggia and stares at the moon:

Joan: I must pray now to the moon ... as one burnt-out lady to another, to teach me to order my ways.
²¹

She has lost her two sons in the war. More recently, her home was destroyed by fire. She leans, staring at the moon, as
the guests leave; from inside float snatches of the Second Act of
Tristan
—the love duet. The curtain descends on the first scene.

The fact that the play has no
‘
clear centre of dramatic interest
’
makes it difficult to summarize. Certain conversations stand out as being important to the exposition. There is the long scene between Strowde and Joan, when Strowde
’
s sister Eleanor is in London and they have spent the day together. They pick up the threads of their old romance, and Joan admits that she is still in love with Strowde; nevertheless, she insists they were right to separate instead of marrying. She could not have lived her love for Strowde; it would have killed her. Now she asks him the question which also puzzles Oliver: why is he not a success? Why is he not in power instead of these bungling, well-meaning politicians? His answer is the essence of the play:

Strowde: Save me from the illusion of power! I once had a glimpse—and I thank you for it—of a power that is in me. But that won
’
t answer to any call.

Joan: Not even to the call of a good cause?

Strowde
(as one who shakes himself free from the temptations of unreality)
: Excellent causes abound. They are served—as they are—by eminent prigs making a fine
p
arade, by little minds watching what
’
s to happen next.
...
Search for their strength—which is not to be borrowed or bargained for—it must spring from the secret life.
²²

He scouts Joan
’
s suggestion that perhaps it would have been better if they had never met:

Strowde: No, that
’
s blasphemy. At least don
’
t join the unbelieving mob who cry: Do something, anything, no matter what
...
all
’
s well while the wheels go round— while something
’
s being done.

Joan
(with
...
irony):
But seek first the kingdom of God, and the desire of all other things shall be taken from you?

Strowde
(very simply)
: It has been taken from me. I don
’
t complain and I don
’
t make a virtue of it. I
’
m not the first man who has found beliefs that he can
’
t put in his pocket like so much small change. But am I to deny them for all that?

This passage shows Strowde
’
s affinity with the other Outsiders we have considered. There is the
^‘
glimpse of power
’
, of contact with some reality, awareness of a new area of his own consciousness, that came in a time of emotional stress (as with Corporal Krebs and Camus
’
s hero). There is the constant searching of motive; analysis of other people
’
s and his own driving force (politicians are
‘
little minds
’
etc.; Roquentin:
salauds).
In one passage he even speaks with the accents of Wells
’
s pamphlet:

Joan: Evan—stir yourself out of this hopelessness of unbelief.

Strowde
{grimly)
: When the donkey
’
s at the end of his tether and eaten his patch bare, he
’
s to cut capers and kick up dust, is he?
²³

It is motive that has collapsed. The Outsider has glimpsed a higher form of reality than he has so far known. Subsequently he loses that glimpse and has to accept a second-best. But the
‘
first-best
’
is known to exist. Joan admits that she accepted marriage to a civil servant and
‘
housekeeping in odd corners of the world
’
because the strain of living on the level of
‘
first-best
’
would have been too much for her. Strowde has not given up the aspiration to the first-best, but he has preferred to do nothing when it seemed out of reach.

When, at the close of the scene, Eleanor returns with the news that Joan
’
s husband has died of a heart attack, the full implication of the scene has been hammered home. It was Joan who accepted second-best; now she has lost even that.

In the Second Act, Strowde decides to return to politics; Oliver wants the job of his secretary, and when Strowde refuses, he automatically turns to the woman they are both in love with, Joan Westbury. There is an important scene between Oliver and Joan. He explains to her the reason he wants the close contact with Strowde. He wants to know why Strowde has failed. Joan points out that Strowde can hardly be said to have failed as a politician; but Oliver was not referring to that kind of success:

Oliver: Nothing
’
s much easier, is it, than to make that sort of success if you
’
ve the appetite for it.
...
But Evan set out
to get past all tricks, to the heart of things Is it a stone-dead heart of things, and dare no one say so when he finds
out?
²⁴

Oliver has a symbol for this state of moral emptiness:

A shell missed me outside Albert and did for my watch. I could shake it, and it would tick for a bit, but the spring was gone. I
’
ve an idea I don
’
t grow any older now, and when I come to die, it
’
ll seem an odd, out-of-date sort of catastrophe.
²⁶

This is Keat
’
s
‘
posthumous existence
’
of the last letter to Brown. Oliver
’
s solution to the question is simple: destruction.

Oliver: Save me from weary people with their No More War. What we want is a real one.

Joan: And where
’
s the enemy?

Oliver: If I knew where, I shouldn
’
t be sitting here helpless. But we
’
re tricked so easily.
²⁸

In spite of this, certain notions still have value for him: courage and discipline. When Joan asks him: Tell me how one soberly hates people—I don
’
t think I know.
’

Oliver: Well, you can
’
t love a mob, surely to goodness? Because that
’
s to be one of them, chattering and scolding and snivelling and cheering—maudlin drunk if you like. I learned to be soldier enough to hate a mob. There
’
s discipline in heaven
…
²⁷

Both Oliver and Strowde are obsessed by a Pascalian world-contempt, an insight into
‘
the misery of man without God
’
. But for either of them to accept God would be bad faith; the Existentialist must see and touch his solution, not merely accept it.

Strowde
’
s problem is not a dramatic problem; it can produce none of the violent emotions and make
‘
good theatre
’
. And with the problem fully set out in these two important conversations, Granville-Barker has very little more to do than devise further situations that will show Oliver and Strowde in
their characters of world-contemners. Strowde begins electioneering, with Oliver as his secretary; in America, Joan Westbury is dying. It remains for Strowde to throw over the politics and sail for America; renounce the meaningless and turn towards his symbol of meaning. He leaves London on the eve of the election. But Joan Westbury is dead before he gets to Southampton. The reader is left feeling oddly
‘
up in the air
’
about it all. No happy finale, no dramatic tying up of loose
ends.

The last scene of the play recalls echoes of the first. When Strowde has gone, Oliver talks to the millionaire businessman, Lord Clumbermere. Clumbermere is another symbol of material success, like Salomons. But his philosophy is not so brutal; he is a vague, rather shy idealist, as well as a vastly successful businessman:

Clumbermere: You think you
’
re all for truth and justice. Right—come and run my pen factory and find out if that is
so.

Oliver: If I ran your pen factory, I
’
d be for the pen, the whole pen and nothing but the pen.

Clumbermere: Then you
’
d be of little use to me. If we
want a good gold nib, it
’
s religion we must make it with
…

Oliver: But are you a devil then, my lord, that you want to beat the souls of men into pen nibs?

Clumbermere: I hope not, Mr. Gauntlett, but if I am,
please show me the way out of the pit
…
²⁸

Afterwards Oliver and the American girl Susan argue about whether to recall Strowde with the news that Joan is dead. Oliver finally gives way, with a bad grace. And when Susan tells him that he doesn
’
t know what he wants, he summarizes: