In 1964, Sir John Gielgud convinced Richard Burton to star in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Still smoking hot from his big-screen romance with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton was looking to solidify his street cred as a serious actor after a few Hollywood duds. Gielgud’s motivation is a little less clear, as gradually becomes clear to the rest of the cast and crew.
In any case, they shook hands and with Alex Cohen as producer, Gielgud began assembling a stellar cast: Hume Cronyn as Polonius, Alfred Drake as Claudius, a young John Cullum as Laertes, and an impressive list of veteran character actors such as Barnard Hughes, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Kit Culkin (father of Macaulay et al.), and Linda Marsh. As Guildenstern, he picked William Redfield. Though just 37 at the time, Redfield already had thirty years’ experience in radio, TV, film, and theatre.
Gielgud took the cast up to Toronto in late January 1964 to begin rehearsals. Redfield began providing a running account of the process through a series of letters to his friend, Bob Mills, back in New York, and these are the letters collected in Letters from an Actor. It was nearly a month into rehearsals before Redfield hit his stride, moving from notes scratched on cocktail napkins to what eventually became at-times epic narratives of the daily/nightly goings-on on and off stage.
From the very beginning, there was a certain tension — mostly artistic — that pervaded the production. Gielgud was the epitome of the subtle and refined school of acting, perhaps the great master of underplay. And by this point, he had decades of Hamlet under this belt. As Redfield notes, “He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those roles; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one … and on through every degree of accomplishment and competence.”
Burton, on the other hand, was part of the postwar, naturalistic school of British actors and possessed of a sometimes volcanic temperament. Burton was direct. “As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound,” writes Redfield. “I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains.”
The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.
If there was anything Gielgud stressed, it was verbal delivery. He knew the play backwards and forwards and would hone in on the smallest things in an actor’s lines. “Not ‘the’ — ‘the‘” he stresses to Redfield at one point. This drives Redfield nuts, for all his admiration for Gielgud, because at the same time he continues to ignore the actor’s plea that Burton is completely mangling the speech following the the line. After one performance during the play’s preview run in Boston, he tells Phil Coolidge, who plays the Captain, “Coolidge, it’s a charming performance, but get yourself a hat. I couldn’t tell you why, but you’re nothing without a hat.” When the play finally opened on Broadway, Peggy Cass (raise your hand if you know her name from To Tell the Truth) offered Redfield a summary of the situation: “No direction for this show. Everyone was left to strike out on his own. Hume Cronyn got a triple.”
William Redfield was perhaps the ideal reporter for this beat. He had a big enough part to be in the midst of much of the action on stage and a small enough one to have plenty of time to observe. Indeed he’d realized early in his career that he’d never be a star. When he was 17, a friend told him, “You do not have a star’s temperament. You are not a killer. A star must be a killer. You will be one of the best actors in the country but you will never be a star no matter how many times you are billed above the title.”
He also had a healthy respect for just how tough the business of acting is:
The theatre is more ruthless than a factory, more expensive than a newspaper, and more closely watched than a shoe-shine boy. The theatre’s product is fearfully expensive; the theatre’s guarantee of employment is nil; the theatre’s competition is savage; the theatre’s employer’s are gamblers with the odds a good eight to one against them. Do you think the actors don’t know this? In fact, you will not meet a more tough-gutted and realistic group of people professionally speaking during your lifetime than actors. Why? Because when a play fails, Armaggedon is upon us. It even costs money to cart the scenery away.
Show me a working actor and I will show you a man with a cement stomach.
One reason the production has gone down in history is that it was perhaps the earliest example of the kind of stage-to-screen bridges one now sees in things like streamed performances from the Met. A group of television producers approached Alex Cohen and convinced him to allow a live performance to be filmed in a new process called “Electronovision.” The resulting “Theatrofilm” was shown in thousands of movie theaters around the U.S. and grossed a healthy $4,000,000. You can see it yourself on YouTube. But none of the profits benefited the actors. Redfield writes bitterly, “The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice.”
Sadly, Letters from an Actor was William Redfield’s only venture into print, aside from a collaboration with his friend, Wally Cox, on Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955), a spin-off from Cox’s television series of the same name. He carried on with a busy career as a character actor until dying of leukemia at the age of 49 in 1976. You can get a small but superb example of his work in this clip from Elaine May’s 1971 film, A New Leaf, in which he tries to tell Walter Matthau’s character he’s broke:
Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from “Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines” (1943)
I knew Mina Curtiss’s name as the collector and editor of the letters of Marcel Proust. Curtiss wrote of her experiences in tracking down Proust’s letters in her 1978 memoir, Other People’s Letters (which is, unfortunately, out of print again). But I was surprised to learn that during World War Two, she collected letters written by America G.I.s stationed all over the world and from all walks of life in the 1944 book, Letters Home.
I found the following review, by journalist and historian Gerald W. Johnson, in a small stack of brown and brittle old copies of the New York Herald Tribune weekly book review section that I bought from a dingy antique store in San Antonio back when we lived there. The review not only makes the book sound well worth rediscovering but itself captures some of things lost from that time (“It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race”–a sentence no one could write today, for good and bad reasons).
The War — by the Boys Who Are Fighting It by Gerald W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 11, 1944, p.1.
An intelligent woman, an associate professor of English in Smith College, has selected out of some thousands about a hundred letters from forty-odd men in the fighting services, including the merchant marine, and presents them in a book as a picture of war from the enlisted man’s standpoint.
Incidentally, she presents a problem that floors the reviewer. It is a good book, yes. But what kind of a book? The answer is, every kind—and how are you to describe every kind of book in a single review? In some cases, several letters from one man are reproduced; but no man is given more than twenty-five pages. The result is that style, content, point of view, everything changes with each new section.” There are intensely religious sections and bawdy sections, sentimental sections and cynical sections, tender and tough; polished and semi-literate, comic and tragic. One vast field of literature, however, is missing altogether. There isn’t a phony section in the book. These men were writing, not for publication, but for the information of the people at home, and not many men write pretentiously to the crowd at home.
Not that the book is altogether a truthful record. Take, for example, the letters written to a certain Mrs. Roark, of Grover, N. C., by her six sons in the services. Every man of them swore up and down that he was in fine health and spirits with not a care in the world and Mom must stop worrying (the one who was in the Philippines died in a Japanese prison camp). It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race.
It is evident, too, that the writers are more discreet than exact when they touch upon two subjects—the horrors of the battlefield and the recreations of the man-at-arms in his infrequent hours of ease. But who would have it otherwise? The people at home do not, and cannot, know at the same time either the comradeship or the fierce stimulation of an active campaign. Yet without these the perspective on both recreations and horrors must be all wrong.
The letters are all from the ranks. Letters from officers were excluded as reflecting too much the sophisticated point of view; the exceptions are a few airmen, a parachute trooper, an ensign or two and a lieutenant of ordnance, and each of these was chosen for a highly individual point of view.
I said there is not a phony letter in the collection, yet there is one composed entirely of the most stilted, threadbare clichés from all the Fourth of July orations ever made. Furthermore, it came from this country and was written by a woman to her husband. He was an oiler in the merchant marine and he had been on one of the early runs to Murmansk, before protection was well organized. That convoy lost nine out of eighteen ships. New he was off again, and his wife wrote him as if she were addressing a large and unintelligent audience. But before you finish that discharge of bombast you discover the truth–the woman was sick with fear, but she had been told she must write cheerful letters and she was going to be cheerful if it killed her. When you see that, it transmutes all the tinsel into gold.
How it feels to drive a tank for the first time; what one does standing watch on the bridge of a destroyer; how the “grease monkeys” (ground crew) sweat it out when their pilot comes back an hour late; how the Australian women stride; how it felt to be torpedoed off Algiers; how sorry the men in Italy are for those on Guadalcanal; what the soldiers think of strikers—all these are here and they are of the substance of war as it is.
The book is full of stunning remarks: “I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” “Heaven help them [the Japs] when all our forces are concentrated in the Pacific. They are going to need all His help and a hell of a lot more, too!” “I’m a Roosevelt man but sometimes I wonder why.” “Freedom? Maybe it’s more than freedom. I think it is for the fulfillment of all the dreams and sacrifices that we, the people make.”
If you are interested in a picture of the war as a whole, done with literary skill, by all means stick to the books of war correspondents, who are professional writers, much better at the trade than these men. But if your wish is to see the thing as it is, to comprehend the attitudes of the men who are fighting it, this will do more for you than the most brilliant productions of the professionals.
The letters of Iowa soldiers [published in a daily column in the Des Moines Register and Tribune] stimulated me to make an anthology of enlisted men’s letters from all over the United States. (Officer’s letters predominated in similar anthologies.) I wrote a letter to two hundred and fifty newspapers asking them to publish a request to families of servicemen to send me their letters. Most of the city papers, as well as many small-town and village weeklies, cooperated. Within weeks I was swamped with contributions. In cartons, in outsized envelopes, in show boxes, or just in paper parcels came more hundreds of letters than even I with my obsessive curiosity could digest. But after I sampled one or two out of every batch it became clear that a collection of single letters would not reproduce or re-create the impact of my Iowa experience. I therefore chose thirty-six series of letters written from a man’s first day in the service to his latest and sometimes his last. Sixteen states and almost every branch of the armed services were represented.
Letters Home was published on D-Day and had a very good notice on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book section. But the book failed to attract many readers, although excrepts from it continue to be published in textbooks and anthologies. Obviously my great interest in letters intended for someone is not widely shared. Even I, when the selection was finally made, felt smothered by other people’s letters and thought that never again would I want to read any that weren’t written to me.
Only three years later, Curtiss was in Paris hunting down Proust’s unpublished letters.
Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss Boston: Little, Brown, 1944
In his foreword to The Letters of Ruth Draper: A Self-Portrait of a Great Actress (1920-1956), Sir John Gielgud writes, “I have always felt that Ruth Draper was (with Martha Graham) the greatest individual performer that America has ever given us.” Yet, despite the fact that her career spanned the eras of sound recordings, radio, films, and television, virtually no trace of her performances now remains aside from a few recordings she made — with some reluctance — in 1954, less than two years before she died. These recordings have recently been remastered and are available at www.drapermonologues.com. Their release led Michael Feingold, writing on TheaterMania.com, to call Draper “America’s Greatest Woman Playwright (Maybe)” and inspired Annette Benning to recreate four of them in a 2014 show at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
One of her performances, before a 1954 meeting of the Community Service Society, is available online at the WNYC Archives. In “Three Generations From the Court of Domestic Relations,” which she first performed in 1919, Draper appears as the 79 year old Anna Abrahams, then as Anna’s daughter, Sadie Greenman (47), and finally, as Rosie Greenman (19), Sadie’s daughter. The three women are speaking with a judge, and it gradually emerges that Rosie is trying to convince the judge to direct that her mother and grandmother be put in a home for elderly women so she and her boyfriend can leave for some small town out West where he’s been promised a job. All we hear is Draper’s voice, of course, but from that alone — her changing accents, diction, vocabulary, emotional tenor — that she transforms completely in the course of a 20-minute performance.
She explained her inspiration in an early — and rare – interview with a Boston reporter in 1925:
I used to know a City Magistrate who presided in the Domestic Relations Court, and he told me I could come and sit with him when I wanted to and see what was going on. That’s where I saw the old Jewish woman. In real life, though, the situation was not the same as it is in the stage sketch. The old woman’s daughter and her granddaughter wanted to have her sent away. I thought that was less interesting than placing the stress on the attitude of the youngest generation, so I built the sketch around the young woman, instead of the old one.
Despite the fact that she played poor women in many of her monologues, Draper was accustomed from birth to the society of the wealthy and famous. Her father was a successful surgeon in New York City and her mother was the daughter of Charles A. Dana, editor and part owner of The New York Sun. She attended an exclusive girls’ school, came out as a debutante in 1902, and was active in the Junior League. She would later use her insider knowledge of society women to devastating effect in such pieces as “The Italian Lesson,” “A Debutante at a Dance,” and “A Cocktail Party.”
But she had shown a flair for performance from a young age, and a family friend, the great Polish pianist Paderewski, encouraged her to pursue her passion: “You must do this professionally,” he told her in 1910. “You must make the decision. It must come from you, from inside.” She began by performing short one-person skits of her own creation at private functions at the homes of society friends around New York, and quickly gained a reputation as something of a phenomenon. Henry Adams saw her perform in Washington, D.C. in 1911 and wrote thereafter, “She is a little genius and quite fascinates me.”
In 1913, she traveled to England, where she appeared at parties hosted by society dames and ladies of the nobility. Her audiences included, on different occasions, King George V and Queen Mary and Prime Minister Henry Asquith. While in London, she became friends with Henry James, who once remarked to her, “My dear young friend, you have woven yourself a magic carpet — stand on it!” James even wrote a sketch for her, though Draper never attempted to perform it. The artist John Singer Sargent made several sketches of her, including the one featured on the cover of The Letters of Ruth Draper, which shows her in costume for the sketch, The Scottish Immigrant at Ellis Island.
She returned home to America just before World War One broke out, and her mother died a few weeks after her arrival. She toured the country performing on behalf of War Relief Benefits, and, for the only time in her career, acted as a member of a full cast in a Cyril Harcourt play, A Lady’s Name. The experience quickly convinced her that she should only perform solo, and in works she had written and conceived herself. In October 1918, she returned to England and then, on the day after Armistice, crossed to France.
For the next eight months, she toured American Army camps, entertaining the troops. She returned to England and resumed making the rounds of private homes, but her experience of performing before the soldiers had given her confidence that her art could appeal to more than just the wealthy and privileged. In January 1920, she booked Aeolian Hall in London for a single performance, and the reviews encouraged her to book it for five more in May 1920. This run rocketed her to success. “She is a hit of the season,” wrote The Observer, and The Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer proclaimed:
The art of Miss Draper stands alone…. To hold an audience enthralled for nearly two hours with this brand of dramatic art, without the aid of properties, music or scenery, is indeed a triumph. There is no doubt that her listeners would cheerfully have allowed Mis Draper to continue indefinitely.
The letters in The Letters of Ruth Draper begin at this point and continue over the course of the next 36 years, up to just two weeks before her death, at the age of 72, in 1956. Throughout these decades, she travelled all over the world, performing constantly. As Morton Dauwen Zabel writes in the memoir that introduces The Art of Ruth Draper: Her Dramas and Characters (1960), which can be found in electronic form on the Internet Archive (link):
She performed wherever her travels took her — in theatres, in halls, in drawing-rooms, in college auditoriums, in a country store in New Mexico, in a ship’s salon. She carried none of the enormous equipment of scenery, lights, costumes, managers, impresarios, and paraphernalia the great Frenchwoman [Sarah Bernhardt] required. She travelled through six continents and over thousands of miles by land, sea, and air without retinue, staff, or company, carrying all the equipment she needed in a few dress-cases or hat-boxes and the most rudimentary of make-up kits.
When the French actor and producer, Lugné-Poe, who assisted Draper in arranging her tours over the next twenty years, first approached her about appearing at his theater, he asked her how many assistants and other cast members she would need. “Non, oh non,” she answered. “Je suis seule. Je n’ai besoin de personne. Seule, moi. Un rideau [curtain], seul.” The simplicity of her needs is demonstrated by a sample of the stage requirements listed in an appendix to The Art of Ruth Draper:
A Class in Greek Poise: A plain straight chair, and a small plain table.
Christmas Eve on the Embankment at Night: A plain low wooden bench, if possible of weathered appearance.
A Cocktail Party: A drawing-room chair with or without arms, and a low coffee-table.
A Dalmatian Peasant in the Hall of a New York Hospital: A plain straight office chair.
A Debutante at a Dance: A large roomy upholstered or overstuffed armchair.
Doctors and Diets: A small rectangular table to serve as a restaurant table, and a straight restaurant chair.
She could … arrive at the theatre twenty to thirty minutes before curtain time. She would glance at her mail, ask her stage manager which “sketches” were on her program for that performance, and then, with the help of her dresser, slip out of her dress or suit, and don her pinkish kimono while she supplemented — really only strengthened — her makeup: a little blue eye-shadow, the minimum of mascara and brown eye pencil and rouge — very little — dark lipstick shaped on with her fingertip, powder with a rabbit’s foot or soft brush. She simply wore her own face — her primary tool of expression. Dark brown wavy hair, large brown eyes compelling, expressive, and all-seeing, skin clear with a tone slightly — very slightly — tawny.
Then into her stage dress: brown or beige lace, a dark brown velvet, always sleeveless, basic, unobtrusive, to which could be added shawls or bits of costume for her characterizations. A final glance in the mirror and she walked quickly out to the wing where her dresser had laid out on a table the “costumes” and props for that performance, put on the necessary items; the curtain rose, and with a final word to whomever she was chatting with, she walked into the stage lights — a different character and personality. No more than that, no rehearsal, no moment of reflection or of gathering herself together.
Despite the fact that she was among the best-paid and most in-demand actresses of her day, Draper was little interested in publicity. The playwright Russel Crouse, who worked as her first press agent, once wrote that, “It was a strange association for she did not want any publicity, refused to see me half the time, and every thing I did to help her sell out, which she did, I did in spite of her.” She would do her part by performing, Warren writes, “but personal interviews, details of her off-stage self, most definitely not!” She once called publicity “only a sham sort of literature, pre-digested by someone else for ‘ready reading.'”
In part, the simple pace of her career kept the scope of her private life limited. Of the hundreds of letters published in The Letters of Ruth Draper, the majority are to a few of her close friends and relatives. But when she did have a great romance, it turned out more dramatic than any of her pieces. In early 1928, while appearing in Rome (among Draper’s talents was an ability to perform with equal facility in English, Italian, French, and German), she met Lauro de Bosis, a poet, scientist, and classical scholar. She was 43, he 26, but they were immediately drawn to each other. De Bosis pursued her in earnest, but Draper was filled with self-doubts. After some weeks together, she returned to the U.S., in some confusion. “My great object is to stop thinking — stop worrying — rejoice in the fact that I am loved — in the wonder of my life with its richness and beauty. I seemingly have everything — yet I can’t grasp it — that’s my trouble.
De Bosis followed her a few months later, taking a post with the Italy-America Society in New York City. He and Draper spent many days together, and when she boarded a ship for a tour of Europe the next spring, de Bosis travelled with her. By late 1929, they were considering marriage, but events intruded on their plans. A passionate anti-Fascist, de Bosis abruptly decided in June 1930 to give up his post and returned to Italy, where he began organizing a resistance group, Alleanza Nazionale. It soon attracted the attention of Mussolini’s police, and while de Bosis was away in New York settling his affairs, they arrested two of his associates, searched his mother’s house, and, upon finding incriminating letters, arrested her, too.
Signora de Bosis was released after she signed a letter to Mussolini denying any sympathies for the anti-Fascist cause, but the situation made it impossible for de Bosis to return to Italy. Instead, he moved to Paris, taking a job as a concierge to survive and working with other exiles to organize support against the regime. Inspired by a bold daylight flight by a fellow radical, Giovanni Bassanesi, during which he scattered anti-Mussolini leaflets over Milan, de Bosis began taking flying lessons and bought himself a small airplane. On 3 October 1931, he took off from Marseilles with less than a full tank of fuel, having told the ground crew that he was headed for Barcelona. Instead, he headed for Rome, where he dropped leaflets and circled the city for half an hour before heading out to sea. He was never seen again.
His fate was unknown for some time. Two weeks after his departure, Draper wondered to a friend “if Lauro should call me up perhaps from Spain, or South America, or Egypt.” By early November, howerver, it was clear that he had crashed somewhere at sea, most likely having run out of fuel somewhere between Italy and Corsica. Though she grieved for the loss, she committed to carry on: “O well, I must grit my teeth and know one can’t recall the past, and have a second chance — with all my weaknessses and failures he loved me — and regretted nothing — that I know. By early January 1932, she was touring again, appearing in a series of twelve one-week engagements throughout Great Britain.
And tour she continued to do, despite the travel restrictions of a world war, for the rest of her life. In the last twelve months before her death, she performed in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Scotland, London, The Hague, Vienna, Italy, and Paris. When she couldn’t cross the Atlantic two or three times a year, as had been her habit, she settled for crossing the U.S. by train, appearing everywhere from Jacksonville, Florida to Seattle, Washington. A few weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack, she wrote enthusiastically to Corinne Robinson (mother of columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop) from Minot, North Dakota:
We go to such funny places, and now and then to a friend and luxury and comfort, and in spite of the bad hot air I do like trains! I have superb audiences everywhere, and the response is terrific. New people, young people, alert and keen and warm, and it’s very gratifying…. No worry about advertising, no risk, and assured packed house everything with the “best people” in town and, what I love, the youth! The high school and civic auditoriums I simply hate, but that’s where concerts are held, so I have to bear it, but the audiences seem wild with delight, and it’s a wonderful satisfaction.
Ruth Draper, in a Sol Hurok publicity photo from 1942 By the early 1950s, her place in the world of the arts was so respected that she was awarded a CBE in 1951 and invited to give a private performance at a gala dinner at Windsor Castle. As she ended her last piece, The Scottish Immigrant, she slipped and fell flat on her back. “I managed to get up rather gracefully considering the shock,” she wrote her niece, “and the first persons who came forward were the Queen and both Princesses.”
Such exalted recognition did not lessen her appeal, however, as a young Kenneth Tynan wrote in one of his Observer reviews:
I want to declare Miss Draper open to the new generation of playgoers, and to trample on their suspicions, which I once shared, that she might turn out to be a museum-piece, ripe for the dust-sheet and oblivion. She is, on the contrary, about as old-fashioned and mummified as spring, and as I watched her perform her thronging monologues the other night, I could only conclude that this was the best and most modern group acting I had ever seen….
I have an idea that, at the back of her mind, Miss Draper is hoping still to find a company of actors skillful enough to stand up to comparison with the accuracy, tact, and wisdom of her technique. She is actually doing her contemporaries a great kindness by not exposing them to such a hazard.
The Scottish Immigrant, which Draper first performed in 1912, was also her very last monologue. On December 29, 1956, the fifth night of what was intended to be a four-week season at the Playhouse Theatre, just off Broadway, she complained to her assistant at one point that, “I just went blank — and kept on talking. I never did that before.” She closed the show with her piece about the girl from the Highlands arriving at Ellis Island to join her fiance, rushing off stage at the end, calling out, “Sandy, my Sandy — I’m here!” Afterward, she asked to be driven to see the Christmas lights in the city, then went home for supper. Her maid found her in bed the next morning, dead from a heart attack.
While her work has inspired several generations of performers, including Lily Tomlin, Spaulding Gray, and Julia Sweeney, and continues to be celebrated, her decision to devote herself strictly to live performances has ensured that Ruth Draper will forever be something of a neglected genius. As David Benson remarked in connection with a 2002 BBC Radio 4 tribute to her work:
If you want to be immortal you must be in films – the best theatre dies with its audience and the best telly and even radio disappears after a while. But movies are forever. Ruth Draper made no films, apart from a few experimental tests with Alexander Korda which were never used. It is a great shame, as the audio recordings, brilliant though they are, only give us half the magic of her work. We miss seeing what she did.
The Letters of Ruth Draper: A Self-Portrait of a Great Actress (1920-1956), edited by Neilla Warren New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979
The delight of reading John Guest’s Broken Images, which I posted about recently, led me to look for his other works. A short search, as his few other publications were collections of other people’s work.
One, for which he did not even claim credit, bears the odd title of Ambrosia and Small Beer. Subtitled “The Record of a Correspondence between Edward Marsh and Christopher Hassall, Arranged by Christopher Hassall,” the book was being prepared for publication by Hassall when he died suddenly at the age of 51. Guest, who had been a close friend of Hassall since the two served together in an anti-aircraft battery in 1940, was a senior editor at Longmans, Green and Company, Hassall’s publisher, and took over the final work on the book.
Christopher Hassall and Edward Marsh first met in March 1934. Hassall was 22, just graduated from Oxford, trying to pull together his first book of poetry, and working for Ivor Novello, the legendary singer, actor, composer and playwright. Marsh was 61, a senior Civil Servant nearing retirement, and already well-known as a mentor and patron to creative talents such as Novello, D. H. Lawrence, and Rupert Brooke. The four collections of Georgian Poetry he edited had been hugely successful–selling as many as 20,000 copies each–and Marsh was also known to have been responsible for editing and maturing the prose style of his minister/MP, Winston Churchill. Marsh’s Wikipedia entry categorizes him as a “polymath”–probably one of the few people to earn that label.
Marsh was also something of a cornerstone figure in the homosexual community of his time. At 22, Christopher Hassall was a beautiful young man, and that, combined with his poetic talents, certainly held a strong attraction for Marsh. Within days of their meeting, Marsh was writing long letters filled with detailed criticisms–word by word examinations in some cases–of Hassall’s poetry. Soon, however, the correspondence moved into the wider world of Marsh’s intellectual interests, artistic passions, and social contacts.
Marsh never married and appears never to have had any long-term intimate relationships. He lived alone and had the time and, apparently, tremendous energy to devote to those friendships he most valued. Hassall identifies this as an vital factor in their relationship: “As a solitary man, Marsh tended to live the private lives of other people. Some of his most intense experiences were lived vicariously.” While Hassall includes excerpts from many of his own letters and notes to Marsh, the bulk of Ambrosia and Small Beer comes from Marsh’s pen.
Fluent in a half-dozen languages, Marsh had a prodigious memory for facts, concepts, and poetry. His was a mind of both tremendous breadth and surgical precision. “Nothing seems to have got lost between the brain and the pen,” the writer George Moore once remarked of a letter calling for a civil list pension to be granted for James Joyce. But he was also a great lover of gossip and jokes. Hassall called him “an ornament of society with an inexhaustible fund of small talk,” and the title comes from his description of Marsh’s conversation: “an engaging blend of ambrosia and small beer.”
Marsh continued to write to Hassall as the young man became–in partnership with Novello–a successful librettist, as he married, served in the Army during the Second World War, and enjoyed success as an actor, poet, and producer after the war. Indeed, the correspondence continued right up to Marsh’s death in 1953. Ambrosia and Small Beer collects perhaps a third of the total material, but one suspects that what is omitted is hardly to be missed. As Hassall remarked in his preface, Marsh loved to indulge in gossip that had little lasting value.
What’s left, however, is great fun for anyone who loves literature, people and humor. Marsh knew almost everyone who was anyone in Britain of the 1930s and 1940s, and a healthy share of them invited him to dinner and country house weekends. He read a good share of the better and lesser books published during that period and is generous in devoting space to his personal reviews. I’ve discovered a fair number of neglected titles in the course of reading this book. And he delighted in sharing jokes. I suspect that one of the services Hassall performed on posterity’s behalf was to weed out the duds from the gems, because there are plenty of good laughs to be found here.
In many ways, Ambrosia and Small Beer reminds me of James Agate’s Ego–the nine volumes of diaries that he published between 1935 and 1946: it’s erudite, bitchy, and funny. I would give Ambrosia a slight edge, however, for the invaluable leavening effect of Hassall’s editing and his own contributions. While Agate was notorious for endlessly rewriting his own work, Hassall had a wonderful sense for what to include and what to delete.
We can be grateful, for example, that he chose to include the text Marsh enclosed to accompany the following comment, from a letter in April 1944:
Someone named Adrian Earle wrote to say he was writing a life of Lionel Johnson, and asked if I could contribute anything. I send you the rough copy of what I wrote for him–it’s inexpressibly slight.
Marsh’s piece is as follows:
I met Lionel Johnson only once, when we both stayed with the late Lord Russell for a night in the latter nineties at a little house near London. I forget who else was there, except Harry Marillier and Edmund Garrett. When Russell and the others went to bed, L. J. asked me to stay up with him: he was born with insomnia, he told me, and had never been able to sleep, in his cradle or since; so we settled down to talk. His conversation was enthralling, but alas very little of what he said has stuck in my memory. One topic was the novels of George Meredith, which he put very high; but he owned that after giving one week of his life to the first chapter of The Egoist he had come to the conclusion that it had no meaning whatever. Later in the night he discoursed with eloquence on the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he exalted as the most wonderful structure of thought that the world had produced; and–this is my last fragment–he said that he had never in his life been able to do a sum of any kind.
At about five or six in the morning he poured himself out a tumblerful of neat whisky, after drinking which he said that now he would be able to sleep; so I went to bed, leaving him curled under a rug in a big armchair.
For the justification to forego reading The Egoist alone, I am grateful that Hassall chose to include this.
After Marsh’s death, Hassall began collecting materials for a biography, which he published in 1959: Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts. One reviewer called it, “The most entertaining biography since Boswell.” If Ambrosia and Small Beer is any indication, I am eager to make my own assessment of the biography.
Ambrosia and Small Beer: The Record of a Correspondence between Edward Marsh and Christopher Hassall, Arranged by Christopher Hassall New York City: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965
Fred Allen. To ninety-nine out of a hundred people under the age of sixty, that name means about as much as John Smith or Jane Doe. I recognize it because I was suckered into sending off for one of those old-time radio compilations they used to hawk at every other commercial break during the Saturday afternoon showing of old movies featuring W. C. Fields, Mae West and the Marx Brothers. One of the records included a routine from “Allen’s Alley,” Allen’s hit NBC radio comedy series from the 1940s, that was full of fine and horrible puns, barbed put-downs, and various other antics, all delivered at machine-gun speed.
Allen’s nervous energy seems not to have been just an act, and he burned himself out early, dropping dead of a heart attack on a New York street at the age of 61. He’d made the switch from radio to TV and was a regular on “What’s My Line?” but he’d also slipped from star to wise-cracking character on a show that, hit though it was, was still just a game show. Had he survived into the 1960s or 1970s, he might have been remembered as well as Jack Benny.
In 1965, Doubleday published a collection on Allen’s letters edited by Joe McCarthy (no relation to the Senator): Fred Allen’s Letters. I use the word “edited” because that’s what it says on the jacket. I suspect he just tossed a boxful of the letters down a staircase and let that determine his sequence. The book is divided into sections with titles such as “The Early Days,” “Old Friends,” and “Show Biz People,” but there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what goes where.
Not that it makes much of a difference. There’s a certain appropriateness in the randomness of the selections that fits with Allen’s sense of humor, and it guarantees you never know quite what’s coming next.
Allen composed at the typewriter and rarely bothered with the shift key, so these letters might remind some of Don Marquis’ The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (which is a Penguin Classic now–wow). I’ve kept this book by the bedside, dipping into every few nights, and my wife is heartily sick of having me shake the bed with muffled chuckling.
Here are a couple of samples to whet your appetite:
To Mabel Dawson (a fan)
dear miss dawson …
thank you for your letter.
you will be glad to learn that the honey arrived in excellent condition. portland had some at breakfast yesterday and reported it was the best she had ever tasted.
we don’t get much honey here in new york. we have had one bee for some time. we have no flowers and have to let him out to sneak into the various floral shops in the neighborhood. i think our bee is nearsighted. it must spend a lot of time on artificial flowers, for the amount of honey it gives some months is negligible.
our bee has no comb. it carries the honey on its person. when we want honey we summon the bee, point to the biscuit, or whatever object we want honey on, the bee flies to the table, squats and buzzes a little and when it arises we have about enough honey to float a caraway seed.
we can imagine what a boon it is to us to have three large jars of honey. we are sending our bee down to florida for a good rest this winter. i am sure that when it returns, brown and healthy, it will be ready to pick up where it left off and keep us in honey for years to come.
we are having a difficult time finding guests to use on the program but i guess we will manage to keep going some way during the coming season. if not, some week, i may put our bee on the show and there will be a real b on n.b.c.
To Ed Simmons and Norman Lear (yes, that Norman Lear), two comedy writers who had sent Allen a joke letter asking his permission to start a polish fan club.
… for many years, i have been against fan clubs. i remember back in 1902 a group of girls got together in littleton, new hampshire, to form a guy kibbee fan club. mr. kibbee, even at that early age was as bald as a boy scout’s knee, and the girls all shaved their heads to look like their idol. all through the summer the little baldheaded girls had a jolly time. they had guy kibbee meetings, they talked like guy kibbee and when field days were held the fan club would rush out and spell guy kibbee in different formations and in different languages. with their little bald heads they were a shiny sight. when the cold weather arrived, however, it was another story. thirty of the baldheaded girls contracted penumonia and within three months the entire guy kibbee fan club was wiped out.
that is only one reason i hesitate to sponsor a fan club. if beri beri or scurvy breaks out in your group how is it going to look with little emaciated bodies lying around the streets of california wearing my fan club buttons.
Fred Allen’s Letters, edited by Joe McCarthy New York City: Doubleday, 1965.
The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.
I knew 
, Sir John Gielgud writes, “I have always felt that 
(1960), which can be found in electronic form on the Internet Archive (
, which I posted about recently, led me to look for his other works. A short search, as his few other publications were collections of other people’s work.
. Subtitled “The Record of a Correspondence between Edward Marsh and Christopher Hassall, Arranged by Christopher Hassall,” the book was being prepared for publication by Hassall when he died suddenly at the age of 51. Guest, who had been a close friend of Hassall since the two served together in an anti-aircraft battery in 1940, was a senior editor at Longmans, Green and Company, Hassall’s publisher, and took over the final work on the book.
. One reviewer called it, “The most entertaining biography since Boswell.” If 
. I use the word “edited” because that’s what it says on the jacket. I suspect he just tossed a boxful of the letters down a staircase and let that determine his sequence. The book is divided into sections with titles such as “The Early Days,” “Old Friends,” and “Show Biz People,” but there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what goes where.