Jean Tardieu and Comedy: So Frolic Music Wards Off the Gathering Dark

Jean Tardieu and Comedy: So Frolic Music Wards Off the Gathering Dark COLIN DUCKWORTH THE OFFICIAL Have you tried despair? THE CLIENT Tried ... what? THE OFFICIAL (as 11to someone who is deaf) Metaphysical despair! Yes, or if you like, the anguish of despair. Or communing with your unconscious, with "subterranean Man",? THE CLIENT Goodness me, I know quite enough about "subterranean Man," thank you very much! Especially on the Hammersmith to Barking line.... [Wlhen I see Hell described, it brings me back to my own daily Hell, so thatI get stuck in it abit deeper every day. ... As I was saying to my boss only yesterday. Tennyson wrote: If only birds could fly I'd follow them into the sky ... or something like that. THE OFFICIAL ... Excuse me mentioning this, but ... they can. THE CLIENT What? THE OFFICIAL Fly. THE CLIENT Who? THE OFFICIAL Birds. THE CLIENT (disappointed) That's true. That rather messes things up, doesn't it? The Enquiry Office (Le Guichet)' A glance at a bibliography of critical works devoted to Jean Tardieu would not allow one to guess that he is graced with an everpresent sense of humour and a comic touch that constantly erodes despair and gloom. The four monographs, fourteen theses and fifty-five articles' - plus the ultinnate accolade for a French writer, a Cerisy colloquium - bring out many different qualities of his writing, certainly: the lyrical poet, the avant-garde experimenter, the verbal magician, the synaesthetic transposer of music and painting into words, the creator of a strange world full ofanguish and menaCe ... but a comic touch? The most recent Tardieu and Comedy 515 major study of his drama, Paul Vernois's La dramaturgie poetique de Jean Tardieu, is profoundly sympathetic, sensitive, and impeccably analytical, but makes only the briefest allusion to comedy or humour. One of the reasons for this omission may be that a good deal of the comedy in Tardieu's plays is physical, gestural, and appears only in perfonnance (this is a quality his plays share with Beckett's). In this article, therefore, I shall concentrate on Tardieu plays which I have directed; I can vouch for their comic qualities on the basis of audience reactions. Another reason is connected with neglect of Tardieu outside France. Let us first review a few key facts about him. He was born in 1903; his first volume of poems, Le Fleuve cache, appearedjust fifty years ago (1933); he has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and prose since then, and thirty-two plays, several ofwhich have had productions in Paris at the Huchette, Mouffetard, and Luceroaire. From the end of the second World War until 1969, Tardieu was director ofFrench radio drama (the "Club d'essai" and the "Centre d'etudes" of the O.R.T.F.), a post which enabled him to encourage a whole generation of young avant-garde writers. It was at the end of the war that he became increasingly interested in the theatre as a medium of expression, at about the age offorty-one - that is, just four years beforeBeckett also turned to theatre, at a similar age. But neither of them has ever ceased to be fundamentally a poet, revelling in the power of language and treating it with reverence, precision and innovative magic. The esteem and affection in which Tardieu is held was clear at the Cerisy colloque of July 1981, at which lovers (of all ages) of his poetry and theatre showed by their fonnal contributions and discussions that a veritable Tardieu industry may well spring up to rival the Beckett-Ionesco industries. But this recent tribute leads one to wonder why such an enterprise has not happened already. Ten years ago, Claude Mauriac referred to Tardieu as "incomparable ," ranking him with Beckett and Ionesco,3 but Tardieu has never had the vast following he deserves. According to Rene de Obaldia, this neglect occurs because critics are too often taken in by apparently "serious" works which are fundamentally frivolous, and they undervalue humour such as Tardieu's which is truly serious.4 This 'pataphysical reversal of the nonns of frivolity and seriousness may help to explain not only why Tardieu has been relatively neglected...