A Hermit Dramatized

A Hermit Dramatized KATHY 1. GENTILE "[IJf a man chooses to live out four decades immured in a hut, in a state of poverty, filth, and isolation, he is in a sense not alone; for we are all that man. Examine him and we shall see ourselves - .'" James Saunders in Next Time /' II Sing to You and Edward Bond in The Pope's Wedding do examine this pitiful specimen of humankind and, by implication, his relation to the rest of us, though their focus on a hermit as a central dramatic character is almost unprecedented in the history of English drama. Hermits have cropped up ·in major works ofEnglish poetry and fiction, such as the Solitary in Wordsworth's The Excursion and the hermit in Rasselas, but until 1962, no important dramatic work took as a theme the life of a hermit.2 Even Shakespeare, writing soon after the medieval age of hermits, saw little potential for them as dramatic characters, his one acting hermit working offstage inAs You Like It to convert the remorseful Duke Frederick to a solitary religious life.3 In the 1950S and early 1960S, however, the existentialist emphasis on the individual and his chronic alienation created a climate which engendered scruffy, downtrodden characters such as Beckett's tramps and Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker (1960). Such estranged eccentrics were natural precursors of a character who voluntarily exiles and sequesters himself away from the demands and harassments of society. For Saunders and Bond the hermit was a striking symbol of the times, yet their different treatments of the hermit reflect two diverging major trends in contemporary drama and two diverging perceptions of the world. Cowinner of the 1963 Evening Standard Award and hailed by John Russell Taylor as "one ofthe most accomplished and individual works of the new drama in Britain,'''' Saunders's Next Time represents the hennit as a symbol of man's tenuous situation in an absurd universe and established the playwright as a leading British exponent of absurdist drama. Bond, in his fIrSt produced play, reacted against the absurdists with his examination of the social significance of the hermit and laid the foundation for his growing corpus of disquietingly powerful moral dramas . A Hermit Dramatized 491 Taylor connected the appearance of these two hermit dramas, as well as Henry Livings's television play Jim All Alone, to the publication in 1960 of A Hermit Disclosed by Raleigh Trevelyan, an editor and translator.5 This "meticulous and absorbing" book is the biography of an actual English hermit, Alexander James Mason of Great Canfield, Essex.6 Having lived in Mason's house as a boy, Trevelyan had come across the hermit's diary, which recorded events in his life before his forty-two-year retirement to a barricaded hut. Because the diary afforded him insight into an otherwise unknown life, Trevelyan terms it "unique in Hermitry.,,7 The diary begins provocatively:"IfI should be poisoned at last, and this book is found, it will explain everything" (p. 9). The curiously objective and unanalytical diary, however, does not "explain everything," and the intriguing information that the hermit set down over two years piqued Trevelyan's interest and spurred his search for Mason's true motivations for becoming a recluse. As Trevelyan notes, hermits tend to attract the "Nosy Parker" like himself (p. 286) - or like Saunders and Bond. Trevelyan's interviews with people connected with Mason and his consultations with a psychoanalyst, a graphologist, a medium, and an astrologer do not provide a consistent picture of the hermit. According to the rector who once visited Mason, the hermit was gentle, lovable, and very shy, but the psychoanalyst labeled him "a paranoid schizophrenic" with "homosexual tendencies" (p. 179), and the graphologist and the medium discerned homicidal inclinations and believed Jimmy capable ofventing those feelings on his father, whose death he blamed on poisoning by the hermit's younger brother. Though Trevelyan does not accept any of these opinions as definitive, he does venture that Mason had an obvious persecution complex (p. 26), and despite all the evidence he gathers on the hermit's life, he admittedly fails to disclose the essential mystery ofthe recluse - why he...