The Habit of Art: A Play Read Online Free PDF Page A

inanimate colloquy must now cease.
    Clock
    Not yet, you fools with your fatuous rhyme,
    I rule here. I am the time.
    Metre, rhythm, scansion, verse.
    His life is ruled by verse’s curse.
    All
    Time. Time. Time.
    Auden, in slippers and carrying a plastic bag, comes in, leaving the door open. He picks up the telephone.
    Auden It’s Mr Auden. Should anyone call for me send them straight through. ( He calls out. ) Come up.
    He then goes to the washbasin, pees. A young man comes in.
    Did we speak on the phone? Stuart?
    Carpenter Humphrey.
    Fitz Were the slippers round-the-clock?
    Author They were. He had corns.
    Fitz It’s not important.
    Do I mime the martinis?
    ASM rushes on with props.
    ASM Sorry.
    Kay ( to Fitz ) I know, I know.
    ASM Will you want any of the trimmings?
    Fitz Like what?
    ASM Cocktail cherry. Umbrellas?
    Author ( anguished ) NO.
    Fitz The author says no.
    ASM I thought that was the purpose of martinis.
    Auden I’ve been to a funeral, though nobody warned me that in Oxford the crematorium is practically in High Wycombe. I thought I’d take a bus, only when I gave him my travel card the conductor said I couldn’t use it here. I said, why? He said because this wasn’t New York. I don’t remember bus conductors being such pedants. I’d only mounted the conveyance out of a mistaken sense of economy. I shan’t want the massage.
    Carpenter is mystified.
    Whoever I spoke to on the phone said there was massage. I don’t want it.
    Carpenter I don’t do it.
    Auden What do you do? The funeral service was unspeakable. Barbarous. Whatever happened to ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’? Instead of which there was a lot of twaddle about the deceased having just gone next door.
    Auden has been making martinis during this. He now puts two brimming martinis on the table.
    ( As he takes one of the martinis. ) Will you want that one?
    Carpenter What is it?
    Auden Martini.
    Carpenter Is it going begging?
    Auden By no means. It’s what you would call ‘spoken for’.
    Carpenter By whom?
    Auden Guess. How much will I be paying you?
    Carpenter Me?
    Auden You sound well-educated.
    Carpenter I suppose.
    Auden And also middle class. As a young man I used to think the lower classes were not fully persons and ought to go to bed when asked.
    Carpenter What did they think?
    Auden I never enquired.
    A clock begins to strike the half-hour.
    Auden Here we go. Take off your trousers.
    Carpenter What for?
    Auden What do you think? Come along, it’s half past.
    Carpenter What am I being asked to do?
    Auden You aren’t being asked to do anything. You’re being paid. This is a transaction. I am going to suck you off.
    Carpenter But I’m with the BBC.
    Auden Really? Well, that can’t be helped. Ideally I would have preferred someone who was more a son of the soil, but it takes all sorts. In New York one of the rent boys worked at the Pierpont Morgan Library.
    Carpenter I am not a rent boy. I was at Keble.
    Auden I see. Not a rent boy. Pity. I should have known. The proprietor of the agency – ‘pimp’ would I suppose be the spade-calling word – described you on the phone as ‘chunky’. He sounded Australian. That is often the case with what might be called the ancillary caring services…dental hygiene, physiotherapy, the minding of old people, the massaging of middle-aged men…These not undistasteful tasks seem to come more naturally to those from Down Under.
    Well, at least you haven’t brought any of your poetry to read…have you?
    Carpenter It can wait. Of course. ( Taking out his tape recorder. ) I understand now about the drinks, and the time. As you wrote in City without Walls :
    ‘So obsessive a ritualist
    a pleasant surprise
    makes him cross.
    Without a watch
    he would never know when
    to feel hungry or horny.’
    Auden ( cutting him off ) Yes, quite.
    Carpenter has taken out a small tape recorder and put it on the table. Auden regards it with distaste.
    Carpenter Mr Auden, how do you feel to be back in