The Unhappy Mean in Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged

The Unhappy Mean in Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged BYRON NELSON OTHERWISE ENGAGED SPEAKS to a particularly middle-aged fear: the fear that in protecting oneself from the shocks of life, the spirit will ultimately wither, and that what had been adopted as an insulating device will eventually corrupt and kill the soul. An earlier Simon Gray hero, Ben Butley, largely succeeded when he aggressively tried to alienate those around him. The hero of Otherwise Engaged, Simon Hench, has succeeded in insulating himself from the shocks of life, from any emotional involvement that will force him to behave humanly. Because he is averse to suffering, he is willing to rule out large areas of potential human pleasure. Simon's wife, Beth, probably gives the key speech of the play in quoting her lover's description of Hench's passivity: "He says you're one of those men who only give permission to little bits of life to get through to you. He says that while we may envy you your serenity, we should be revolted by the rot from which it stems. Your sanity is of the kind that causes people to go quietly mad around you." I While throughout the play Hench's temperance seems to make him a model of Aristotle's continent man, who is tempted to be ruled by extremes but never gives into them,' the play finally - but ambiguously , equivocally- shows the emotional emptiness of a life of moderation . Moderation, it seems, is purchasable only at the expense of other people's emotional well-being. Into Hench's life come a succession of people demanding emotional involvement: his student boarder, his brother, a literary critic, the critic's girlfriend, an old schoolmate, and finally his wife. Otherwise Engaged has, in fact, the structure of a morality play. This is no 365 366 BYRON NELSON absurdist drama about random comings and goings, but a "well-made play" in the sense that it is filled with balances, anticipations, and echoes. Nor is it an avant-garde play: Gray is clearly more interested in forcing a confrontation upon his hero than in rendering life as the absurd jumble it has appeared to most playwrights in the twentieth century. Gray, in fact, seems determined to force responsibilities upon his hero, to insist upon his moral accountability. Into Hench's life, then, come a succession of people who demand to be loved or reviled and who refuse to be ignored. Like the morality play, Otherwise Engaged depicts this procession of characters as tempters , like the Sloth, Gluttony, Lechery, or simple Vice of medieval morality drama. There are no random entrances here; Gray usually allows one character to exit before bringing in another, and no character ever has an eloquent speech interrupted by the rude entrance of another. What is interrupted is the smooth, dearly bought complacency of Hench and his listening to Wagner's Parsifal. So the audience of the play can have only equivocal admiration for Simon Hench. At the beginning of the play, he seems sensibly isolated from the stings of the rude world. In the first act alone, he turns away his obnoxious student boarder, Dave, his drunken friend the literary critic, Jeff, and the sexually pragmatic Davina. The only tempter he is unable to cope with or rout is the madly jealous Bernard Wood, the erstwhile "Wanker" Strapley, whose anger elicits from Hench the surprising confession about Hench's sexual involvement with Strapley's girlfriend, Joanna. Gray ends the first act at the moment of Hench's confession. Dramatically, it is a striking moment, since it reveals that Hench is not nearly as detached from the things of this world as he would have his assailants (and audience) believe, and since it casts a pall on the apparent virtue of Hench's alleged selfdenial . Strapley, like the guests in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, has momentarily succeeded in humiliating the host, by causing Hench to heap further shame on himself. By the end of the second act, any admiration for Hench's way of life is further qualified and severely eroded. The critic alone of the characters is momentarily chastened by what he...