Beyond the Waste Land: An Interpretation of John Whiting's Saints Day

BEYOND THE WASTE LAND: AN INTERPRETATION OF JOHN WHITINGfS SAINT'S DAY FROM ITS FIRST PERFORMANCE IN 1951 the obscurity of John Whiting's Saint's Day has caused anger. It was Whiting's first major work and he did not know how much to expect from his audience. I believe he was so at home in its world of mysterious coincidences and symbolic acts that he saw no need for detailed explanation; and since the play is highly original the spectators were bound to be baffled. But then Whiting kept telling us not to worry about analysing symbols but to allow the playas a whole to work on our senses. And in that area at least one cannot deny its force. Moreover Whiting deliberately uses ambiguity with the purpose of upsetting our expectations and involving us immediately in the chaotic world of his play. Yet part of the obscurity can be illuminated by careful examination and with the help of the manuscripts,! which tend to be more explicit than the final text. Whiting begins the first handwritten manuscript of 1946 with two quotations. One of them is taken from Lewis Mumford's The Condition of Man (1944). Since this book furnishes important clues to the meaning of Saint's Day it will be discussed in some detail later in this article. Mumford tries to identify the forces of destruction which threaten our age; he presents a frightening picture of the "barbarism and dissolution" of our world. Whiting tried to capture by means of theater and poetry what Mumford analysed discursively, this sense of the immanent threat of chaos; and although, obviously, Whiting did not merely dramatise Mumford's ideas, the book deserves notice in this article since it does throw light on the dark world of Saint's Day. The second motto is a quotation from T. H. Huxley's "Descartes' Discourse on Method": As the record of his progress tells us, he (Descartes) was obliged to confess that life is full of delusions; ... that reason lands us in endless fallacies; ... that the evidence of the very senses may be misunderstood; that dreams are real as long as they last, and that what we call reality may be a long and restless dream. Nay, it is conceivable that some powerful and malicious being may find his pleasure in deluding us ... every moment of our lives. ! I gratefully acknowledge Mrs. Whiting's permission to quote from her husband 's manuscripts. 46.3 464 MODERN DRAMA February What, then, is certain? . . . Why, the fact that the thought, the present consciousness, exists. Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them otherwise.2 Whiting shows his characters struggling in just such a world of illusion. The action of Saint's Day is obscure. Paill Southman, octogenarian poet and revolutionary, has been living for the last twenty-five years, an exile from society, in a dilapidated house in the woods. During his exile he has been waging a substitute war on the nearby village. On his eighty-sixth birthday, however, RobertProcathren, a fashionable poet, comes to convey him to London to a dinner party in his honour. Robert is a typical emissary of society, impeccable in manners but shallow and conformist. When he arrives he informs Paul that there is a dead dog on the doorstep. Convinced that the villagers have killed his dog Paul decides to revenge himself. In the following confusion Robert accidentally shoots Paul's granddaughter Stella, using the very pistol with which Paul intended to take his revenge. At this point there arrive three soldiers who have escaped from a detention camp. We have already heard their trumpet blasts from the woods and we know that their demonstrated hostility to the villagers has endeared them to Paul. But now they find only Robert in the room and he, surprisingly, joins them. Together they go to the village, persuade the Reverend Aldus to burn his religious books-a conflagration which destroys the entire village including the church itself-and return to execute Paul and Charles, Stella's husband. The play ends with a child dancing...