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THE FATHER CHRISTMAS PASSAGE IN upAID ON BOTH SIDES" As HIS FIRST A'ITEMPT AT DRAMA W. H. Auden wrote a "charade" entitled "Paid on Both Sides." Like the rest of his 1930 volume of Poems~ in which it was published, it contains many obscurities. One of the most puzzling passages is the six-page episode that opens with the sudden appearance of Father Christmas.1 Though one critic has pointed out some of the similarities between this passage and the English mummers' play/.! no one has clarified the dramatic function Auden intended the passage to serve or the reasons for the changes he made in the mummers' play once he took it as his model. This paper therefore will attempt to show (1) that the passage is a warning dream constituting that element of the traditional quest pattern often referred to as the call and (2) that Auden reworked the mummers~ playas he did so as to underline the relevance of its theme to modern times. In the quest pattern the call is the voice of God, destiny, the life force, or the unconscious (depending on the interpretation one prefers ) which urges the hero to go out and find the cure when his homeland is wasted or his psyche deeply troubled.3 "Paid on Both Sides" describes a world gravely in need of such redemption. When the play opens, the hero's father has just been mortally wounded in a feud that began generations ago; and the hero, John Nower, who is to follow in his footsteps, is being born with great difficulty. The physician attending Nower's mother-unlike the doctor in the dream passage , who can raise the dead-has a "hard fight" merely to keep life going and must get his "spirit" from a bottle. The birth over which he presides ushers Nower into a world about which, as his mother predicts, "There'll be some crying out when he's come there." (pp. 11, 12) And the seasons no longer hold any spiritual significance: instead of brotherly love and forgiveness Christmas brings sports~ trifling conversations, "mechanical" toys for the children, and new autbreaks of the feud. (p. 16) 1 "Paid on Both Sides: A Charade," Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 1933), pp. 21-27; subsequent references in my text are to this edition. . 2 F. W. Cook, "Primordial Auden," Essays in Criticism, XII, No. 4 (October 1962), 402-412. 3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series VII (New York, 1949), pp. 30 .4°, 114, 115. 147, 218. 155 156 MODERN DRAMA September If the traditional hero does not heed the call when it comes, it may be repeated until it is followed or conclusively rejected.4 To Nower it comes four times, and four times he turns it down. He hears it first when one of his clan who is preparing to emigrate for a fresh start in life invites him to go along. (pp. 13, 14) Between the first call and the second, Nower kills one of the enemy in a night raid (p. 14) and shortly thereafter orders a spy shot in cold blood. (p. 19) These events bring on a spiritual crisis. Like the traditional hero who has rejected the first calI,5 he finds the duties imposed on him by his way of life so repellent that death seems attractive: "Could I have been some simpleton that lived/Before disaster sent his runners here;/Vounger than worms, worms have too much to bear./Yes, mineral were best. . . ." (p. 20) Then, more elaborate and more forceful than the others, comes the second call in the form of a dream. The call occurs the third time when the emigrating clansman stops in to say goodbye (p. 27), the fourth when Nower is urged by his fiancee just after their engagement "to join Dick before the boat sails." (p. 33) The fact that Nower refuses to go does not make it doubtful that Auden meant these appeals to serve as calls. For not all men respond heroically when the time for action is ripe. "Paid on Both Sides" can be read as a quest which is not undertaken because the central...

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