A Private Mythology: The Manuscripts and Plays of John Whiting

A PRIVATE MYTHOLOGY: THE MANUSCRIPTS ANDPLAYS OF JOHN WHITING* AT FIRST SIGHT ONE MIGHT SUPPOSE that the major plays of John \Vhiting (1917-1963) were not written by the same man. A Penny for a Song, Saint's Day, Marching Song, and The Devils are bewildering not only for their occasional obscurities but also for the disparity in their content and execution.Abrief summary will make the poinL A Penny for a Song (1951, revised 1962) is an ironic but gentle comedy which, as Whiting says in his introduction to The Plays of John lVhiting (1957), pokes fun at "the finer lunacies of the English at war." Despite the many farcical misfortunes which befall its squire hero, Sir Timothy Bellboys, A Penny for a Song is a delicate, even nostalgic fantasy about the ideals and illusions which life destroys. Saint's Day, written immediately before A Penny tor a Song but produced half a year after it in September, 1951 is a precursor of the absurdist plays. Its irrational nightmarish action is played out among obsessed self-destructive characters amid an atmosphere of mystery and doom. The play ends with the execution of the main characters at'the hands of some absurd but apocalyptic force in the shape of three marauding trumpet-blowing soldiers. In contrast to Saint's Day Whiting's next play, Marching Song (1954), is clear and unemotional . But despite its coldness Marching Song is an intense play since Whiting focusses on the inevitable suicide of its hero, the defeated general. Again, The Devils, written in 1960 after a break with the theater of six years, differs from all of the previous plays. A diffuse historical drama based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, it is a clever, well-written but somewhat unsatisfactory play mainly because the characters are seen too much from the outside. In contrast to the straightforward story line of Marching Song, The Devils· has an intricate network of plots and subplots, twenty-four characters and over sixty scene changes. yet there are elements common to all these plays; Whiting's sensitive and original language, his preoccupation .with ideas rather than characters, and his predeliction for rebel heroes who tend to be·1 should like to express my gratitude to Mrs. Whiting for her permission to examine her husband's manuscripts and to quote from ~hcm in this article. My thanks are also due to Mrs. M. Thompson of the University of London for her valuable advice and criticism. 23 ' 24 MODERN DRAMA May symbols rather than individuals, lacking as they do the emotions and concerns of ordinary mortals. But despite his concern for ideas Whiting never loses his sense of theater, which makes his plays immediately effective as visual and theatrical experiences. Here I wish to discuss Whiting's manuscripts including his unpublished and unfinished works because they reveal a continuity and coherency which his printed works lack and help to illuminate the dark corners of Whiting's private world, his "private mythology"! as he liked to call it. The weird world of Saint's Day, which in 1951 hit the public like a thunderclap, is foreshadowed in Whiting's only novel, a two hundred page manuscript completed in 1945 called "Not a Foot of Land." The novel, a kind of mosaic of dreamlike episodes, describes a world of war, confusion, and unreason which Whiting establishes through a painstaking accumulation of horrible details of violence. A group of five persons led by Timothy Crashaw sets out to destroy the relics of a revered leader. For reasons which are not made clear they are determined to annihilate this ideal in which, as it sometimes appears, they themselves believe. Although they have no other aim but destruction, the five are seen as pure and idealistic. Whiting makes no great effort to help hii reader understand the characters and their action; on the contrary, he is deliberately mystifying and neither the five idealists nor the ideal which they destroy are Clarified . Yet despite this the novel is not meaningless as one might suppose .Whiting does manage to create an atmosphere of mystery and fear in which the characters act out their fate like puppets...