He persisted. He swallowed insult, and in his new notion of himself as the Fool, he frequently gave insult, but he never gave up. He was determined to be a professional. If this was the way artists worked, he would be an artist in so far as a librettist was permitted such presumption.
It was not the way all artists worked. At least once a week Powell dashed up from Stratford in his snorting little red car, and his artistic method was all oil and balm.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely! Oh, this is very fine stuff, Simon. Do you know, when I am working on my other production—I’m getting up Twelfth Night, you know, for a May opening—I find words coming into my head that are not Shakespeare. They are unadulterated Darcourt. You’ve missed your calling, Sim bach. You are a poet. No doubt about it.”
“No, Geraint, I am not a poet. I am exploiting a poet to produce this stuff. The arias, and the long bits, are all his—with some tinkering, I admit. Only the recitativo passages are mine, and because of the way Nilla wants things, they are absolute buggers, because they have to have all this loose accompaniment underneath, and stresses falling in places that defy any sort of poetic common sense. Why can’t the singers just speak those parts, and sound like human beings and not crazed parrots?”
“Come on, Sim bach, you know why. Because Hoffmann wanted it otherwise, that’s why. He was an adventurer, an innovator. Long before Wagner he wanted an opera that was sung clear through, not broken up with spoken passages or recitative that is simply gabble to bustle on the plot. We must be faithful to old Hoffmann, boy. We must never betray old Hoffmann.”
“Very well. But it’s killing me.”
“No it isn’t. I’ve never seen you looking better. But now I’m going to talk against everything I’ve just said. We must have one big number for Arthur in Act Three, where he says loud and clear what Love is, and why he’s forgiving Guenevere and Lancelot. And there isn’t a damned scrap of Hoffmann that does it.”
“And so?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Dear little Schnaky-Waky is going to have to write a tune all by her dear little self, and you’re going to have to find words for it.”
“No, no,” said the Doctor. “That would indeed be untrue to Hoffmann.”
“Listen, Nilla. More operas have been spoiled by too much artistic conscience than have ever been glorified by genius. Just for the moment, forget about Hoffmann. Or no, that’s not what I mean. Think of what Hoffmann would do if he were still alive. I see him now, the wonderful bright-eyed little chap, chewing his quill and thinking, ‘What we need in Act Three is a great big, smashing aria for Arthur that pulls the whole thing together, and knocks the audience out of their socks. It’s got to be the one that everybody remembers, and that the barrel-organs play in the streets.’ We don’t have barrel-organs now, but he wouldn’t know that. It’s got to get the young, and the old, and if the critics despise it the critics of the next generation will hail it as genius.”
“I will not agree to anything that has a cheap appeal,” said the Doctor.
“Nilla—dear, uncompromising Nilla fach–there is the truly cheap art, and we all know what it is, but there is another kind of art, that goes far beyond what critics call good taste. Good taste is really just a kind of aesthetic vegetarianism, you know. You go beyond it at your peril, and you end up with schmalz like ‘M’appari’ in Marta. Or maybe you come up with ‘Voi, che sapete’, or ‘Porgi amor’, which is genius. Or you get the Evening Star aria out of Tannhäuser or the Habanera out of Carmen–and you can’t say Wagner dealt in cheap goods, and Bizet wrote the one sure-fire opera. You artists really must stop kicking the public in the face. They’re not all fools, you know. You’ve got to get something into this Hoffmann job that will lift it above a fancy academic exercise to earn Schnak a degree. We’ve got to wow ‘em, Nilla! Can you resist that?”
“This is very dangerous talk, Powell. I’m not sure I should let Hulda listen. These are dirtier words than any even she knows.”
“Come on, Nilla. I know this is the voice of the Tempter, but the Tempter has inspired some damned good stuff. Now listen carefully, Nilla. Have you ever heard this?
Darcourt, who had been listening with delight to the spellbinder, roared with laughter. He lifted his voice in imitation of Powell’s bardic chant, and continued:
“Is that English poetry?” said the Doctor, her brows raised almost into her hair.
“Jesus, I think that’s wonderful!” said Schnak. “Oh, Nilla, did you ever hear it said better?”
“I am not at home in English verse,” said the Doctor, “but that sounds to me like—I will not use Hulda’s word—but it sounds like crap. That is a new word I have learned and it is very useful. Crap!”
“The expression is unquestionably crap,” said Darcourt. “But in the crap there is a precious jewel of truth. That is one of the problems of poetry. Even a terrible poet may hit on a truth. Even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn.”
“The professor sets us right, as he always does,” said Powell. “Raw heart can’t make art but woe to art when it snubs heart. By God—I ought to be a librettist! Now—will you do it?”
“I’ll have a crack at it,” said Schnak. “I’ve had about enough of writing music wrapped in Hoffmann’s old bathrobe.”
“I’ll certainly have a crack at it,” said Darcourt. “But on one condition. I find the verse before Schnak writes the music.”
“Sim bach, I see it in your eye! You have the verse already.”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” said Darcourt, and he recited it to them.
“Do that again, will you,” said Schnak, looking at Darcourt without suspicion and resentment for the first time since they had met.
Darcourt recited it again.
“That’s it!” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, Sim bach.”
“But is it good English verse?” said the Doctor.
“I’m not a man who awards marks to poets as if they were schoolboys,” said Darcourt. “It is from the best of a very good man, and far beyond the level of an opera libretto.”
“You’re surely going to tell us who the very good man is?” said Powell.
“He’s the man you spoke of as the base upon which we should rest this opera, the first time we discussed it,” said Darcourt. “It’s Sir Walter Scott.”
3
Can it be true, thought Darcourt, that I am sitting in this grand penthouse on a Sunday evening eating cold roast chicken and salad with three figures from Arthurian legend? Three people working out, in such terms as modernity dictates, the great myth of the betrayed king, the enchantress queen, and the brilliant adventurer?
Does the analogy hold? What did King Arthur attempt? He tried to extend the reach of civilization by demanding that his Knights, who belonged to an undoubted Elite of Birth, should embrace the concept of chivalry, thereby becoming an Elite of Achievement. Not just power, but the intelligent, unselfish use of power to make a better world; that was the idea.