The Difficulty of Being (19 page)

Before the rise of the curtain the orchestra strikes up J. S. Bach’s
Passacaglia
, orchestrated by Respighi. The curtain rises. The young painter is lying on his bed on his back, one foot raised along the wall. His head and one of his arms are hanging over the red blanket. He is smoking. He is wearing neither a shirt nor socks, but only a wrist watch, old slippers and the kind of boiler-suit known as ‘
stokers blues
’, of a dark blue on which the many coloured stains call to mind Harlequin’s motley.

The first phase (for immobility plays in this solemn fugue as active a part as motion) shows us the anguish of this young painter, his nervous tension, his dejection, the watch he keeps looking at, his pacing to and fro, his pauses under the rope he has knotted to the beam, his ear hesitating between the ticking of the time and the silence of the stairs. Mime which, carried to excess, incites the dance. (One of the
motifs
being that magnificent, circular and airy movement of a man consulting his wrist watch.)

The door opens. A young girl enters, a brunette, elegant, lithe, without a hat, in a simple pale yellow dress, very short (Gradiva’s shade of yellow) and black gloves. Right from the door, which she closes behind her, she pricks out her ill humour on her points. The young man dashes towards her, she repels him and strides across the room. He follows her. She upsets some chairs. The second phase will be the dance of the painter and this young girl who insults him, knocks him about, shrugs her shoulders, kicks him. The scene works up to the dance, that is to say to the uncoiling of bodies that clinch and unclinch, a cigarette that is spat out and crushed underfoot, a girl who three times running stamps with her heel on a poor kneeling fellow who falls, spins round, collapses, straightens up again with the extreme slowness of heavy smoke, in short of anger’s exploding thunderbolts.

This shifts our dancers to the extreme left of the room, whence the unhappy young man indicates the rope with an outstretched arm. And now the young lady cajoles him, leads him to a seat, sets him astride it, climbs onto the chair under the beam, adjusts the slip knot, then comes back and turns his head towards his gallows.

The young man’s revolt, his fit of fury, his chase after the fleeing girl whom he grasps by the hair, the flight of the girl and the door-slam that brings the second phase to an end.

The third phase shows the young man flattened against the door. His dance proceeds from his paroxysm. One after another he whirls the chairs in the air at arm’s length and breaks them against the walls. He tries to drag the table towards the gallows, stumbles, falls, gets up again, knocks the table over with his back. He clutches his breast in pain. Cries of pain issue from his mouth, which we see but do not hear. Pain steers him straight to the gallows. He contemplates the noose. He stretches up to it. He puts it round his neck.

It is at this point that M. Babilée displays an admirable cunning. How does he hang himself? I cannot think.
He does hang himself
. He hangs. His legs hang. His arms hang. His hair hangs. His shoulders hang. The sight of this sombre poetry, accompanied by the magnificence of Bach’s brass, was so beautiful that the audience broke into applause.

The fourth phase begins. The light changes. The room takes flight, leaving nothing but the triangle of the floor, the furniture, the framework of the gallows, the hanged man and the lamp.

These are now seen against the open night sky, in the midst of a surging sea made up of chimneys, of garrets, of electric signs, of rain-pipes, of roof-tops. In the distance the letters of
Citroën
light up in turn on the Eiffel Tower.

Across the roofs comes Death. She is a young white-faced woman in a ball-dress, perched on high buskins. A red hood covers her small skeleton’s head. She has on long red gloves, bracelets and a diamond necklace. Her tulle train trails after her onto the stage.

Her right hand, lifted, indicates the void. She advances towards the footlights. She turns away, crosses the stage, pauses on the extreme right and snaps her fingers. Slowly the young man frees his head from the slip knot, slides along the beam and lands on the ground. Death removes her skeleton’s mask and her hood. It is the yellow girl. She puts the mask on the motionless youth. He moves round her, walks a few steps, stops. Then Death holds out her hands. This gesture seems to urge on the young man with the stamp of death on his face. The
cortège
of the two dancers sets out across the roof-tops.

Yesterday the ballet company had just returned from Switzerland. From morning to night it was a matter of reassembling the scattered properties of our production, of marshalling our dances and the orchestra of sixty-four musicians, of getting the dresses finished at Mme Karinska’s, of persuading Mlle Philippart to walk on high buskins, of fastening straps to them, of painting M. Babilée’s boiler suit, of putting up the set of the room and the roof-tops, of fitting up the electric signs, of fixing the lighting-plot. In short, at seven o’clock in the evening, while the stagehands cleared the stage, we found ourselves faced with the prospect of disaster. The choreography came to a halt with the hanging of the young man. Roland Petit had refused to do anything about the last scene in my absence. The dancers were half dead with exhaustion. I suggested that we should let them sit in the auditorium and mime their parts to them. This we did.

I returned to the Palais-Royal. I dined. At ten o’clock I was back at the theatre, where the crowd was finding no seats
left, where the box office, overwhelmed, was turning away people who had booked theirs. Henri Sauguet had just left, furious. He had taken his orchestral score with him. He refused to allow
Les Forains
to be performed. The auditorium was crammed and in a state of great nervous tension.
Le Jeune Homme et la Mort
was third on the bill. The set of the rooftops presents a difficulty unusual in a ballet. The stage-hands kept losing their heads. The audience was growing impatient, stamping its feet, booing.

While the stage-hands went on with their work, Boris ordered the house lights to be put out. The orchestra struck up. From the very first chords of the Bach, we had the feeling that an extraordinary calm was pervading the whole place. The semi-darkness of the wings, full of running feet, of shouted orders, of feverish dressers (for Death had to be dressed in one minute) was less chaotic than one would have dared hope. Suddenly I saw Boris, looking distraught. He whispered to me: ‘There’s not enough music.’ That was the danger of our experiment. We called to the dancers to quicken the pace. They were no longer with us.

The miracle is that Boris was wrong, that the music was long enough and that our dancers left the stage on the last chords.

I had advised them not to acknowledge the applause at the curtain call but to continue on their sleep-walkers’ course.

They only came down from the roof-tops at the third curtain. And it was at the fourth that we realized that the audience was emerging from a hypnotic trance. I came to my senses on the stage, dragged forward by my dancers, facing that suddenly awakened audience, which was waking us by its uproar.

I must emphasize the fact that if I tell of this success, it is not a question of any satisfaction I derive from it, but a
question of that image which every poet, young or old, beautiful or ugly, tries to substitute for his own, and to which he gives the task of embellishing it.

Let me add that one minute of contact between an audience and a work momentarily abolishes the space that separates us from other people. This phenomenon, which can centralize the most opposed electric currents at the end of some point, enables us to live in a world where the ritual of courtesy alone gives us respite from the sickening loneliness of the human being.

A
ballet
possesses, moreover, the privilege of speaking all languages and of lifting the barrier between ourselves and those who speak in tongues unknown to us.

This evening they are taking me from my country retreat to the wings from which I shall watch the second performance. When I get back, I propose to write whether the contact is broken or still holds.

I have just come back from the Theatre des Champs-Elysées. Our ballet was given the same reception. Perhaps our dancers had less fire, but they performed their dances with a greater precision. In any case, whatever goes amiss, the beauty of the performance leaps the footlights, and the general atmosphere is an image of me, of my table, of my myths, an involuntary paraphrase of
Le Sang d’un Poète
.

Only from being invisible this atmosphere has become visible. This is what happens with
La Belle et la Bête
. Doubtless I am less clumsy with my guns, less hasty on the trigger. At any rate with this I reap a harvest that I failed to do in the old days with works more worthy of rousing emotion. I suppose these works fructify in silence and make the audience, without realizing it, better able to understand their content.

Thus quite a few people in 1946 thought that I had altered certain passages in
Les Parents Terribles
, whereas the play is the same as in 1939; it is they themselves who have changed, but they attribute this change to an alteration of the text.

Tonight the orchestra was ahead. It therefore came in on different movements. The synchronization worked faultlessly. The room was late in taking flight, leaving M. Babilée hanging from his beam. This produced a new beauty as a result of which the entry of Death was even more startling.

Is
Le Jeune Homme et la Mort
a ballet? No. It is a drama in mime, in which mime broadens its style to that of the dance. It is a dumb show in which I endeavour to endow gestures with the high relief of the cry and the spoken word. It is speech translated into the language of the body. It consists of monologues and dialogues that use the same vocabulary as painting, sculpture and music.

When shall I cease to read, with reference to this work or any other, praises of my lucidity? What do our critics imagine? There is my workshop. Work goes on there at night, when all the lights are out. I simply grope about and manage as best I can. That they should mistake this obsession with work, this being haunted by work,
that is to say by a work no longer concerned for a moment with what it is manufacturing
, for lucidity, for the supervision of this workshop, where nothing is overlooked, is evidence of a basic misapprehension, a very serious divorce between the critic and the poet.

For nothing but aridity would be born of this master’s eye. Whence would come the drama? Whence the dream? Whence the shadow they believe to be magic?

There is neither magic nor master’s eye. Only a great deal of love and a great deal of work. On this intervention of the soul they trip up, accustomed as they are on the one hand to Voltaire’s metronome, on the other to Rousseau’s hazel
switch. The precarious balance between these two extremes is perhaps the winning over of the modern trend, but for that critics must explore the zone, visit its mines and let in the unknown.

NOW HERE IS THIS WEIRD SENSATION OF DEADLOCK
beginning to grip me at the four cardinal points of my system and to knot itself at the centre. Is it the sudden heat or the storm, or the loneliness, or the uncertainty over the dates for my play, or the prospect of being homeless, or is it simply that this book refuses to go any further? I know these attacks of vague anguish, having often been their victim. Nothing is harder than to give them a shape that will allow us to look them in the face. From the moment this
malaise
appears, it dominates us. It does not allow us to read, write, sleep, walk, to live. It surrounds us with obscure threats. All that was opening closes. All that was helping deserts us. All that smiled looks on us icily. We dare not take a step. The ventures suggested to us wilt, become entangled, capsize over one another. Each time I let myself be caught by these advances of fate, which only lure us on the better to desert us. Each time I tell myself that I have reached calm waters, that I have paid dearly enough for the right to descend a gentle slope, and no longer slide headlong in the night.

No sooner am I lulled by this illusion than my body calls me to order. It switches on one of those red lights signifying
Danger
. Sufferings that I believed to have disappeared return with the anger of those who have made a false exit and bear us
a further grudge for having appeared ridiculous. My eyelids, my temples, my neck, my chest, my shoulders, my arms, my knuckles, devour me. The Morzine farce begins again. I get better and the malady thereby gains strength. It even seems to want to attack my mucous membrane, my gums, my throat, my palate. From the works it passes into the fuel and pollutes it. Patches of irritation, gum-boils of misery, fevers of despair, fill us with slight but most distressing symptoms. They grow quickly into a kind of nausea that we attribute to outside influence. It is probably our own condition colouring the world and making us think it responsible for our own colour. This jiggery-pokery only messes up my outside and my inside still further. Life appears to us insoluble, too vast, too small, too long, too short. Once, as a palliative for these constantly recurring attacks, I used to take opium, a remedy inducing euphoria. I gave it up ten years ago, on account of an honesty which is perhaps only foolishness. I wished to rely on my own resources alone, which does not make sense, since our inner self is made up of what we feed upon. In short, nothing is left to me but to endure these attacks and wait for the outcome.