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Strangers in a Room: A Delicate Balance Revisited E. G. BIERHAUS JR. • W. H. AUDEN IN THE DYER'S HAND lists six functions of a critic, the fourth being: "Give a 'reading' of a work which increases my understanding of it." 1 In giving a new reading of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, I hope to increase the reader's understanding of this play by making him more aware of its ambiguities and by pointing out to him new associations within it. Although no one reading of A Delicate Balance, however careful, can reveal or distil or explain its full meaning simply because no work of art can ever finally be fully understood, a new reading does provide a new focus which changes the play's perspective. My reading of A Delicate Balance is new because I do not think its primary focus is on the responsibilities of friendship. This is present but secondary. The primary focus is rather political, making the focus both a more moral and intellectual one. In friendship the emphasis is on the rights of the friend, in politics on the rights of the individual or self, in this case Tobias. To substantiate this reading, I shall examine three aspects of A Delicate Balance which to my mind require further attention: the significance of the characters' names, the surprising permutations of the characters, and finally the parable of Tobias and the cat. I Names have many resonances for Albee: biblical (Jerry and Peter in Zoo Story), historical (George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), sexual (Tiny Alice).2 "The Players" in A Delicate Balance are no exception. (Notice that we have players instead of a cast because this is to be a contest.) Agnes, lamb of God, is also a third century saint, a virgin martyr who was decapitated because her body refused to burn at the stake. Agnes, a 199 200 E. G. BIERHAUS JR. transliteration of the Greek a:yv(k (pronounced hagnos), means "pure" and chaste." Tobias means "God is good." In The Book a/Tobit Tobias cures his father's blindness with the help of the archangel Raphael, his guardian. Edna also appears in The Book of Tobit as Tobias' mother-in-law. Harry is the diminutive of HenlY, a name which evolved from the Old German words for "house," or "home," and "ruler." Julia is the feminine form of Julius. "The Romans supposed the name to be derived from Greek WVAO<; 'downy,' but there is no good evidence for thiS."3 Downy means "feathery" or "fluffy," but it is also slang for "wide awake" or "knowing.,,4 Claire of course means "to make clear" as Agnes observes: "Claire, who watches from the sidelines, has seen so very much, has seen us all so clearly, have you not, Claire. You were not named for nothing."s Lastly, there is Teddy. Teddy, the dead son of Agnes and Tobias, is the diminutive of Edward, an Old English compound meaning "rich," "happy," and "ward," "guardian," and of Theodore, Greek for "god's gift." Edward and Theodore are both saints; Edward is also a king and martyr. The resonances are various and conflicting, though always pertinent and never deceptive. Agnes, more wolf than lamb ("... I am grimly serious. Yes?"), far from saintly ("We do not attempt the impossible," and "I'm not a fool," both saintly imperatives), more sacrificing than sacrificed (to Claire: "If you are not an alcoholic, you are beyond forgiveness," and to Julia: "How dare you embarrass me and your father!" [notice the "me" first]), is neither pure nor chaste in either the physical or spiritual sense (Claire to Julia: "Your mommy got her pudenda scuffed a couple of times herself 'fore she met old Toby," and Agnes to Tobias: "We must always envy someone we should not, be jealous of those who have so much less. You and Claire make so much sense together, talk so well"). Although Agnes considers herself blessed in a qualified way ("... it is simply that I am the one member of this ... reasonably happy family blessed and burdened with the ability to view a situation objectively while I am in it," and "There are many things a woman does: she bears the children - if there is that blessing...), she also jokingly calls herself a "harridan,u e.g., a hag ("... rid yourself of the harridan. Then you can run your mission and take out sainthood papers"). Ironically this last is addressed to Tobias, the only member of her family who is foolish enough to attempt the impossible. Instead of having a blind father as in the apocrypha, this Tobias has a blind wife. Agnes is not the one member of her family who can view a situation objectively while in it. Claire does this much better: "Harry wants to tell you, Sis." If Agnes weren't so afraid of silence, Harry would have explained his presence sooner. Moreover Agnes' remark to Julia, " ... nobody .. .really wants to talk about your latest ... marital disorder... ," is simply untrue. Claire does: "I have been trying, without very much success, to find out why Miss Julie here is come home." Agnes can't even see herself properly: A DELICA TE BALANCE REVISITED AGNES. There was a stranger in my room last night. TOBIAS. Who? AGNES. You. TOBIAS. Ah. 201 It doesn't occur to Agnes, as Tobias' "Who?" suggests it does to him, that she herself is the stranger. , Even Harry and Edna are sufficiently self-aware to recognize that in a similar situation they would not grant sanctuary to Tobias and Agnes. Julia also questions her mother with new insight: "I must discover, sometime, who you think you are." Agnes' "icy" reply is significant: "You will learn ... one day." We all learn by the end of the play: Agnes thinks ofherself as guardian, but she is in fact mad. So she does "lose her head" because she refuses to be burned, one method of inoculation against the plague, the play's chief metaphor. Although Tobias begins drinking anisette, he switches to brandy Claire 's drink. Brandy bums. It is brandy that Tobias later offers to Harry at the end of Act III, but he refuses: "No, oh, God, no." Harry has been burned enough for one week-end. Like Tobias, he was foolish enough to attempt the impossible and failed. That's why he leaves. Tobias has no place else to go. Although his house is not a home as Agnes uncomfortably reminds him: "Well, my darling, ... you do not live at home," it is his: "I have built this house!" He is therefore free to exclaim to Harry: "I want your plague! ... Bring it in!" But Agnes does not want it, and because she is nanny and drill sergeant (her drink is cognac: "It is suppose to be healthy") and not saint and martyr, Harry and Edna leave. Tobias remains to join Claire and Julia, "the walking wounded" (a deft description of sanity - and sainthood?), in another drink, while Agnes, the "steady wife," plans for them another day. Harry and Edna return to their house where Harry can again be the ruler. The terror is still there, but they don't seem so overwhelmed by it. Their support of one another which at their entrance comes across as awkward and impersonal has mellowed. A tenderness has entered their relationship - Edna: "I let him think I ... wanted to make love" - which coupled with the quiet acceptance of their failure - Edna: "We shouldn't have come ... For our own sake; our own ... lack" - lends a grace to their endurance which is not available to Tobias and Agnes who are locked in their separate worlds. Their lives may be the same, as Edna observes, but their responses are not. Harry and Edna at least have the vitality to feel, act, and see. Therefore the ramifications of their departure, which is fmal, EDNA. I'm going into town on Thursday, Agnes. Would you like to come? [A longer pause than necessary, CLAIRE and JULIA look at AGNES] AGNES. [Just a trifle awkward] Well ... no, I don't think so, Edna; I've ... I've so much to do ... 202 E. G. BIERHAUS JR. is less severe for them than for Tobias because they have each other. Tobias is left with two resigned drinking companions and a house manager nattering away about millenniums. Immunity to the plague is acquired through testing, which leaves one burned or isolated "unless we are saints" (Agnes' sarcastic alternative): CLAIRE. So on~ night ... I'd had one martini - as a Test to see if I could - which, given my ... stunning self-discipline, had become three; EDNA. We mustn't press our luck, must we: test. The char~<;ters' immunity, Claire and Agnes excepted, exists in various stages: Tobias' is beginning; Harry and Edna's is advancing, though they resist it; Julia's is progressing nicely. Although she endured as a young girl a "two-year burn at suddenly having a brother" and subsequently has known four husbands (know in the biblical sense is sexual), Julia is still not sufficiently "wide awake" for the "great big world." She needs to return home to Tobias and Agnes. Claire is the only character who believes her immunity to be complete: "I've had it. I'm still alive, I think." Without Claire who feels "a little bigger than life" and who is the real nexus of the household, we would have no way to identify the degree of Julia's immunity, or her ambivalence to it. Nor could we see by the end pf the play that Agnes who is "neither less nor more than human" is also immune. For her inoculation is different from the others. They resign themselves to reality whereas Agnes creates her own - "I'm as young as the day I married you." They confront their demons in the daylight, but Agnes - "well, you know how little I vary" - quarantines hers in the unknown chambers of her heart. Thus the plague (and the play) becomes less mysterious when associations with the characters' names are permitted to illuminate it. II One of the consummate strengths of A Delicate Balance is its univ~rsality. It speaks not only to its time, but out of it. Every year is a plagu~ year somewhere, and no one is immune. As Hamm remarks in Endgame (a play with which A Delicate Balance has close affinities): " ... you're on earth, there's no cure for that!,,6 A major technique Albee employs to create this universality is characterization. This is partially achieved by the resonances, associations, and echoes the names of the characters have with life external to the play which fixes it in an historical - and literary continuum . It is also partially achieved by the permutations of the characters themselves. Just as Albee clues us in to the significance of names through Claire, so he clm~s us in to the significance of permutations by describing Harry and Edna as "very much like Agnes and Tobias." These internal resonances are as A DELICATE BALANCE REVISITED 203 numerous and complex as the external ones. Furthermore, they determine the play's action and generate its vision, foci which are not coterminous. When Claire declares to Tobias that" 'Love' is not the problem. You love Agnes and Agnes loves Julia and Julia loves me and I love you. We all love each other; yes we do," she acknowledges that the boundaries of love in their household are set though circuitous. Trouble arises when these boundaries are challenged, e.g. , by Harry and Edna: TOBIAS. I almost went in my room ... by habit ... but then I realized that your room is my room because my room is Julia's because Julia's room is ... But while the boundaries are openly agreed upon by Agnes, Tobias, Claire, and Julia, they are constantly being unconsciously crossed: Claire, "like sister like sister"; Tobias, "My name is Claire"; Tobias calls Claire Agnes; Agnes becomes Julia's father, Tobias her mother; Claire calls Julia "daughter"; Harry becomes Tobias; Edna becomes Agnes. What this means is, as Claire points out, that like Tobias' friends they are all "indistinguishable if not necessarily similar...." They share a common environment. "When one does nothing, one is threatened by the question) is one nothing?'" It is a question which threatens them all. It is in fact the terror. Tobias' despairing "Doesn't friendship grow to [love]?" is rhetorical for everyone except himself. Claire had already answered it: "We're not a communal nation... ; giving, but not sharing, outgoing, but not friendly." An earlier assessment by Claire had driven Tobias to examine his boundaries: TOBIAS. We'll do neither, I'd imagine. Take in; throw out. CLAIRE. Dh? TOBIAS. Well, yes, they're just ... passing through. CLAIRE. As they have been ... all these years. A later claim by Edna pushes his examination further: "We are not ... transients ... like some." But they are transients. All of them. They each try the other's roles in an effort to belong, and although they meld perfectly (Julia talks like Claire, Tobias repeats Agnes, Harry mixes drinks like Tobias) they find that the new skin is just like their old one: "dry ... and not warm." As Tobias eventually discovers, boundaries bind (blind?) more often than they enclose. A Delicate Balance is neatly constructed. Agnes both opens and closes the play. Her opening speech is seemingly a descant on whether or not she will go mad, but upon closer examination we find that what really astonishes her most "is Claire." This of course italicizes Claire's enlightenment and establishes straight away the conflict between the two. It is the major conflict of the play with Tobias as the stake. Each wants to persuade him to embrace her vision of the world: Agnes, instinctively selfish, demands order; Claire, instinctively generous, accepts the absurd. Agnes wants "peace," Claire 204 E. G. BIERHAUS JR. "merely relief." The appearance of Harry and Edna forces Tobias either to choose between these opposing visions or to adopt one of his own. He opts for the latter, and it becomes a last, desperate effort to inject meaning into his life ("God is good,,).8 Harry and Edna are thus pivotal because they upset the delicate balance of this trio. (The play is full of delicate balances: one exists between each of the characters, between appearance and reality, between the play and its reader or spectator.) But Harry and Edna are like Tobias and Agnes, Tobias is like Claire and Julia is like Agnes. Thus all the characters are pivotal, although each is "moving through his own jungle." "All happy families are alike," Claire tells Tobias, Agnes and Julia, quoting the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. And so are unhappy strangers. III As with Jerry's parable of the dog in Zoo Story, Tobias' parable of the cat is an analogue of the whole play. The parable contains eleven salient points: (1) the cat existed before Tobias met Agnes; (2) the cat was feminine; (3) she didn't like people; (4) but she was contented with Tobias; (5) one day he noticed that she no longer liked him; (6) he shook her; (7) she bit him; (8) he slapped her; (9) she judged him, accused him of failing; (10) he felt betrayed; (11) he had her killed. Agnes is the obvious analogue to the cat: she is feminine, she replaces the cat in Tobias' affection, she does not like people ("You would not have a woman left about you - only Claire and Julia ... not even people"), and she is contented with Tobias ("... I have reached an age, Tobias, when I wish we were always alone, you and I, without ... hangers-on ... or anyoneH ). Tobias noticed that Agnes no longer liked him after the death of Teddy, "god's gift," Tobias' "ward" and "guardian" (his archangel?), whose death that hot, wet summer permanently altered the balance of all their lives. (AGNES. "Ah, the things I doubted then: that I was loved - that I loved, for that matter!") Tobias then "shook" Agnes by being unfaithful; she "bit" him by "trying to hold [him] in." He "slapped" her by sleeping alone. She then judged him, accused him of failing ("Did my husband ... cheat on me?" and "You could have pushed her back ... if you'd wanted to"). Since married to Agnes, Tobias has felt betrayed by Teddy's death, Agnes' failure as a mother, Claire's infidelity with Harry, Julia's failure as an adult, and fmally by Harry's refusal to "stay." The analogue seemingly breaks down with point eleven: Tobias does not kill Agnes. Nor does Anges kill Tobias. She does, however, see to it (Agnes is never blind to her own needs) that he is "put to sleep," her euphemism for killing, by injecting him with the plague, e.g., by thwarting his vision which is to make Harry and Edna stay, by withholding her succor from him and them. And her injection, like the vet's, succeeds where his fails. Albee carefully prepares us for this reversal in two ways. First he A DELICATE BALANCE REVISITED 205 identifies Tobias with Claire (this identification began when Tobias switched to Claire's drink, brandy). Immediately before the parable, Agnes "decides Claire is not in the room," which is the reaction of the cat in the parable. During the parable Agnes again identifies herself with the cat when she wants to know if Tobias hurt her when he slapped her, while Claire identifies herself again with Tobias by asking what did he do, e.g., with the cat. Thus we intuitively feel that Tobias, like Claire, will succumb to Agnes' authoritarianism . Second, Albee places the following exchange immediately after Tobias' "I had her killed!" which tenninates the parable: AGNES. Well, what else could you have done? There was nothing to be done; there was no ... meeting between you. TOBIAS. I might have tried longer ... I might have worn a hair shirt, locked myself in the house with her, done penance. CLAIRE. You probably did the right thing. Distasteful alternative; the less ... ugly choice. TOBIAS. Was it? [A silence from them aU] AGNES. [Noticing the window] Was that a car in the drive? TOBIAS. "If we do not love someone ... never have loved someone..." Each of these speeches foreshadows the end of Act III: Agnes' "... what else could you have done?" is precisely her response to the departure of Harry and Edna, as is Tobias' "I might have tried longer." Claire's "distasteful alternative" is comforting and pragmatic, while Agnes' nervous remark about the "car in the drive" parallels her breaking the silence with her - and the play's - concluding speech. But it is Tobias' quiet "Was it?" that is the most revealing, for he is suggesting that "the less ugly choice" might have been his own death. This is reinforced by his quoting Anges' "If we do not love someone ... never have loved someone" which was originally her reply to Claire's "Or! Agnes; why don't you die?" The implication is that if one does not love someone, the generous "reflex" is to sacrifice oneself. This is what Tobias should have done with the cat; this is what he tried to do with Harry and Edna: "I DON'T WANT YOU HERE! I DON'T LOVE YOU! BUT BY GOD ... YOU STAY!!" The reversal is complete: Tobias is ultimately the cat as he is the saint. But because God is dead - "The bastard! He doesn't exist! ," to quote Hamm once again - sainthood is dead as well. As Julia explains, she first thought of her father as a saint, then as a cipher, and finally as a "Nasty, violent, absolutely human man." This is what we are left with at the end of A Delicate Balance: three absolutely human beings - Tobias, Claire, Julia - seeking alcoholic "relief" from the disorder and "debris" of their stultifying existence, while the fourth member of their household, Agnes, speaking "To fill the silence," remarks upon "the wonder of daylight" before blithely welcoming the new day. The 206 E. G. BIERHAUS JR. conflict is over. Agnes has won. The price? Three early morning drinkers and that "living room of a large and well-appointed suburban house" thoroughly infected with the plague. Since 1966 when A Delicate Balance was first produced, the environment of America has become increasingly disordered and dirty. Mr. Nixon is a permutation of Mr. Johnson who was "very much like" Mr. Goldwater; Democrats become Republicans, Republicans Democrats: "everyone [is] moving through his own jungle." We are all "players," strangers in a room; our endings, like Agnes' (and like that unfinished sentence ending Finnegans Wake which continues on the first page of the book), are reminiscent of our beginnings, dependents seeking "relief." And this brings me back to W. H. Auden, whose sixth function of a critic is to "Throw light upon the relation of art to life...." NOTES 1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand, New York, 1968, p. 8. 2. Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee, Minneapolis, 1969, pp. 9,25,29. 3. The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 2nd edition, London, 1950, p. 139. This dictionary is the main source for information about each name. 4. The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James A. H. Murray, Vol. III, London, 1897,p.629. 5. Quotations from A Delicate Balance are from the Pocket Book edition, New York, 1967. 6. Quotations from Samuel Beckett's Endgame are from the Grove Press edition, New York, 1958. 7. Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd, New York, 1956, p. 41. 8. For a different identification of the central conflict, see Cohn, pp. 38-39. ...

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